Co-Presented by Seattle Times
"In its first blush, a new poem is not cold at all—in fact, whatever has troubled that poem into mind has come straight from the warm-blooded, mammalian heart. The steely, more ruthless self is the Editorial Self, the self that seizes back the excesses and the wildernesses and the confections of the earliest drafts." ----Lucie Brock-Boido
Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of three collections of poetry. Her many honors include the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her book Stay, Illusion (2013) was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. She has taught at Bennington College, Princeton, and Harvard. She is currently Director of Poetry in the Writing Division at Columbia University School of the Arts in New York City.
A Girl Ago
No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing
In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no
Buttering. No making small contusions on the page
But saying nothing no one has not said before.
No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs.
No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush
Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish.
Extinguish me from this.
I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost
And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia,
Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above
And on a bare branch in a shepherd's sky. No Dove.
There is no thou to speak of.
----Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay Illusion
More
Less
