Interviewer: Steven Barfield
Lisa Russ Spaar teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia, where she is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Area Program in Poetry Writing. She has received several awards, including the Academy of American Poets Prize at the University of Virginia in when she was a young poet and was then a finalist, in the National Poetry Series, , as a more established practitioner. Her latest book of poems, Satin Cash: Poems, is available from Persea Books, and her anthology All That Mighty Heart: London Poems was published by University of Virginia Press in as well. Blue Venus: Poems, Persea Books, Other works includes the anthology, Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems, Columbia University Press, and three further collections of poems: Glass Town, poems, Red Hen Press, ; Blind Boy on Skates, Trilobite Chapbooks of the University of Northern Texas Press, ; Cellar, Alderman Press, Her poetry has regularly appeared in a prominent national and international journals, including Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She has r
A Trip to the Country
When I returned to Lana’s room, she was still on the bed. Should I climb back up? I wondered. I must have made a gesture of doing so, but Lana held up her hand, stopping me.
“Now we wait.” She dabbed at some tobacco on her bedspread with a wet finger, put the threads on her tongue, and swallowed. On each cheek, a flush of pink. Her eyes were bright. They were brown again. She winked. “Let’s split up for now.”
I joined June and the little girls in the barn, my mouth and tongue still raw with their secret. June was back on the trampoline, somersaulting, cartwheeling, doing flips. The other three were seeing who could hold their breath the longest. From the loft’s high window, I saw the sludgy pond, dimpled with insects. No boys in sight. Maybe they were inside watching television; it had become a torrid afternoon.
Behind me, the little girls were now singing the ABC song, slurring through the letters, seeing who could finish first. A hot breeze from the window lifted the white hairs on my arms. Off to the left, at a distance, I saw the adults, my father holding the baby on his shoulders, making their way back down to the house from the road. I watched my
LISA RUSS SPAAR
“GEM TACTICS”: DEPLOYING ECSTATIC RUSES IN POEMS OF ARDOR with LISA RUSS SPAAR
Paul Valéry once pointed out that “A poet’s function . . . is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.” How can we create for our reader, in poems, an experience of our “private,” subjective ardor, be it erotic, ecstatic, melancholy, religious, political, quotidian, cosmic, or other? Metaphor, elision, syntax, juxtaposition, Heaney’s “binding secret” of sound textures, sampling, inter-textuality, varied registers of diction—what Dickinson called her “gem tactics” and Anne Carson: ruses. We will look at how a discerning use of these and other poetic devices help us to say the unsayable, deepen and open our poems to what is at stake in them, as language acts, as testimony, as witness, as play. Workshop will involve constructive critique of student poems and generation of new material. Participants will send poems in advance of the workshop.
LISA RUSS SPAAR is the author of several poetry collections, including Satin Cash, Blue Venus, and Glass Town, for which she rece
“Lisa Russ Spaar sounds like no other poet living today.”—Jennifer Chang, The Believer
“If this is what happens when poets write novels, they should all write them."
― Eleanor Henderson, author of The Twelve-Mile Straight and Everything I Have Is Yours
Part Beauty and the Beast, part monk meditation, part pulse-galloping thriller, part Salingeresque coming-of-age with an untamable femme lead, part intoxicated art school sex party, part goldenrod glow the morning after a storm—this novel illuminates how we can rescue others by allowing our own rescue. — Aimee Seu, Southeast Review
“Paradise Close is breathtaking novel—from one of the most exquisite poets of our day—has the dark power of a fairy tale. I read it all in one sitting, in thrall to the spell Lisa Russ Spaar casts.”—Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year and A Fortunate Age
“Urgent, hungry, and unabashedly sensual, Spaar arrives time and again at visceral and eviscerating epiphanies.”— Andy Nicole Bowers, Boston Review
“The poems are often erotic, but their sexiness is transformed by the greater questions and wonderment Spaar reaches tow
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