Eleanor Stanford
Photo by Avi Loren Fox
Bio
Eleanor Stanford is the author of three books of poetry, The Imaginal Marriage, Bartram's Garden, and The Book of Sleep, all from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, the Kenyon Review, and many others. She was a 2014/2016 Fulbright fellow to Brazil, where she researched and wrote about traditional midwifery. She lives in the Philadelphia area.
I received the call from the National Endowment for the Arts towards the end of an emotionally difficult fall. I was in Trader Joe’s. I put down my basket and called my best poet friend and cried beside the frozen peas.
I wish I had a different story to tell here that weren’t so personal. Which is to say, so female. But the truth is, my work comes out of a female life and mind and body. The poems for which I won this award are about traditional midwives—about labor and birth, sex and babies and blood and milk and caregiving.
In many ways, I try to emulate the midwives’ grit and purpose and lack of pretension.
My oldest two children are teenagers. I live in an old house in the suburbs a mile and a million years from where my parents raised me and still live.
I think often about what it means to be beholden, and the ways in which it is a privilege and a joy. In beholden are both hold and behold—awe and tenderness, obligation and support. I am beholden, and grateful, to the NEA for this enormous gift: equally for the money’s practical assistance and for the recognition and vote of confidence that inspire me to continue to create.
"Sequelae"
What follows from love
is grief. Do you think
you’ve found another way?
Look at the young man
in the corner, his face
twisted, his voice
the bark of a dog.
Do you think
his mother conceived,
in any green shudder
of the Atlantic forest,
such rocky scarps?
Do you think she doesn’t
long still, every day,
to be delivered?
(from The Imaginal Marriage, copyright 2018 by Eleanor Stanford. Reprinted with the permission of Carnegie Mellon Press)