Author's Statement

I suppose there's no bad time to get a fellowship like this. For me, though, the timing feels especially good. I'd been working on a manuscript about the crossing between being a girl and being a woman, a crossing full of danger but wrapped in silence. I was excited about the book -- I believe in the material -- but I hadn't had much luck publishing the individual poems. I was beginning to think of them as little bombs, vicious explosives that no one wanted to touch. And then the phone rang. For me, the NEA fellowship came as a great vote of confidence, one of those affirmations we're all told we shouldn't need or expect but that are oh so wonderful when they come. Getting this fellowship reminds me that I should spread the feeling -- by telling other writers when I like their poetry, by encouraging promising or hard-working students.

Ralph Ellison ends his novel Invisible Man with the words "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" In part, this is a threat to the reader, a reminder that the reader is complicit in all that's gone before. But it is also a promise to the reader: "I speak for you." In the midst of our days, there's a lot we can't say, whole levels of our lives that lie unspoken. Art, to me, speaks for us on those frequencies, shows and articulates what we can't. Sometimes this is unpleasant: we don't want to know or remember some things about ourselves. Sometimes it's a relief: what we thought was ours only is shared. Sometimes it's magic: a feeling we didn't even know we had, set forward as if it were our own hearts speaking. But whatever else it is, it is essential. You can get in trouble with the word truth, because to some degree we all have our own truths. But I have to admit that's what I seek in poetry: some truth, some true way of saying what lies below the surface in my and I hope in others' lives.