Ok – since y’all don’t keep me informed on such cultural news, I must make the point to share awareness of a treasurable literary pearl our current society offers up from the deep mysterious waters of poetry — her name is Mary Szybist.
I inadvertently met this gal in a most unsuspecting way, a couple of years ago at Warren Wilson College. It was the winter session of their open-to-the-public lecture series. Sitting on a cold metal folding chair, she was in the row in front of me before that day’s lectures commenced, the room abuzz with everyone meeting and greeting with saccharin smiles, weird glasses, and bad hair; getting themselves all situated around with coffee, notebooks, while wrangling tacky fleece wraps off over cable knit sweaters and hipster jeans. You got the scene, right?
Somehow, I’m not sure how, but introductory chit chat sparked up between Szybist and me. I thought she was just a nice polite unassuming grad student. She looked that age, and very much that type. Except she was modest, plain, unpretentious, and so not snobby in the least, like other socially dictated eccentric fogies that seem to get teacher jobs in college. I didn’t behave too flabbergasted when she told me she was in fact a member of the faculty at Warren Wilson. Meaning she was a professor! And not a mere student trudging dauntingly hopeful through the program.
Her work appears to soar and plummet the very breadth and depth of how we yearn for the elusive meaning of love. But hey, that’s just my initial take…. I know, it might seem all too common, can’t we say such of any poet? But Szybist’s work communicates that total, yet vast unspoken realness of open but forested cloudy space that only a real soul can ask or dare journey.
Later, somehow, somewhere, I copped her poem about a firefly in Tennessee, from her first book of poetry, Granted (Alice James Books 2003). Loved it!
~ Dale Bowen
In Tennessee I Found a Firefly
Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung
to the dark of it: the legs of the spider
held the tucked wings close,
held the abdomen still in the midst of calling
with thrusts of phosphorescent light—
When I am tired of being human, I try to remember
the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them
central in my mind where everything else must
surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them.
There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose
there are grips from which even angels cannot fly.
Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase.
When I am tired of only touching,
I have my mouth to try to tell you
what, in your arms, is not erased.
by Mary Szybist, from “Granted”
Incarnadine Wins 2013 National Book Award
I just found out that Mary Szybist won the 2103 National Book Award for Poetry for her second book, Incarnadine (Graywolf Press 2013). So very well deserved. And it couldn’t happen to a more humble human.
An invitation to you all, dear friends: Expose yourself to Mary’s poetry the first chance you get.
Happy Ideas
I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel
to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.
~ duchamp
I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air
and watch them pop.
I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we could stare at each
other
all evening.
I had the happy idea to create a void in myself.
Then to call it natural.
Then to call it supernatural.
I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin.
I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was nothing like
Helen or
Jesus except in the sense of changing everything.
I had the happy idea that someday I would find both pleasure and punishment, that I
would
know them and feel them,
and that, until I did, it would be almost as good to pretend.
I had the happy idea to call myself happy.
I had the happy idea that the dog digging a hole in the yard in the twilight had his nose
deep in
mold-life.
I had the happy idea that what I do not
understand is more real than what I do,
and then the happier idea to buckle myself
into two blue velvet shoes.
I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say
hello to my own blue soul. Hello, blue soul. Hello.
It was my happiest idea.
by Mary Szybist, from “Incarnadine”
Videos of poet Mary Szybist
Visit the National Book Award website, www.nationalbook.org, and search for the 2013 winner for poetry.
• Mary Szybist Accepts the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry; introduction by poet Nikky Finney (Vimeo)
• Mary Szybist reads from Incarnadine: Poems, 2013 NBA Finalists Reading (YouTube)