Professor of Poetry Candidate Statement
I studied Classics at the University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia, and later at Oxford. This was how I trained to be a poet, as many of my favorite poets had studied Classics. Many of my early poems were informed by Greek mythology, but my relationship to Greece has deepened and changed since I moved in 1999 to Athens, Greece, where I am a writer, wife of a journalist, and mother of two bilingual children.
I admire free verse and prose poems, but I write what I love, received forms, in rhyme and meter. When asked whether form somehow limits the poet, I reply that form is freeing, it is about giving up control to something outside the self (call it the subconscious, call it the Muse). Rhyme schemes. It is not ornament, but a method of composition, a kind of echolocation. Form frees you from what you want to say. While I write mostly short lyrics, my translation of didactic and narrative poems (Lucretius, Kornaros, Hesiod), has taught me something about the building of long poems. And I agree with Kenneth Rexroth that translation saves us from our contemporaries.
It is not only the making of poems that interests me, but memorizing and speaking them. Being active in the spoken-word scene in the States in the 1990s confirmed to me that audiences enjoy listening to rhyme and rhythm as much as I enjoy working in them. Performance also taught me about revision, to cut anything that goes slack in utterance. Learning poetry by heart is, as the phrase suggests, an embodiment. Poetry lives for as long as it flies living through the mouths of men (and women).
If elected, I would speak on a variety of topics, including the problems and possibilities of translation, poets in other languages (such as modern Greek), the Classical tradition, the gears and springs of technique, the resonance between poems, and on new poets and poets fallen out of fashion. I love teaching and mentoring, and have extensive experience with leading workshops (I have co-taught with Mark Strand), craft lectures, and close reading. When in Oxford, I would keep an open door, and generally make myself available for discussion and debate, and for those who would like advice on their poetry writing, to offer it. It would be an honor to profess poetry.
