SALLY VAN DOREN [20.189]

Photo: Star Black

SALLY VAN DOREN

Sally Van Doren (nació y creció en St. Louis, Missouri, EE.UU.). Estudió en la Academia Phillips y en la Universidad de Princeton, además de recibir el MFA de la Universidad de St. Louis Missouri. Van Doren mereció en 2007 el Premio Walt Whitman por su primer libro titulado Sex at Noon Taxes. Su tercer libro de poemas, Promise, será lanzado en agosto de 2017. Sally enseña en la calle 92 en Nueva York.

Premios 

Van Doren recibió el Premio Walt Whitman 2007 de la Academia de Poetas Americanos por su primera colección de poemas, "Sex at Noon Taxes", que fue publicado en la primavera de 2008 por LSU Press.

Fue semifinalista en el 2006 "Discovery" / The Nation Poetry Contest.

Van Doren recibió el Premio Kenneth O. Hanson en 2013 de la revista Hubbub por su poema, “Color Theory.”.  Es ganadora del Premio Loy Ledbetter del Centro de Poesía de San Luis. También fue finalista en el Premio Poets Out Loud en 2012-2013. 

Obras 

"Roadside Condo Unit # 4; On Belay" . Homestead Review . Hartnell College. 18 (1). Fall–Winter 2001.

"Bagged; Girlhood" . 2river review . 11.2 . Winter 2007.

"All, Free, Clear; Fight" . 2river review . 11.4 . Summer 2007.

"Metronome", Verse Daily

Van Doren's poetry has also been published in several magazines and journals, including American Letters and Commentary, Cimarron Review, 5AM, Hubbub, Lumina, Mudlark, The New Republic, The Normal School, poets.org, Rhino, South Carolina Review, Tinge, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Western Humanities Review. 

Libros de poesía 

Sex at Noon Taxes . Louisiana State University Press. March 2008. ISBN 978-0-8071-3311-8 .

Possessive . Louisiana State University Press. December 2012. ISBN 978-0-8071-4488-6 .

La traducción de los poemas es de Adalberto García López.

http://circulodepoesia.com/2017/06/american-poetry-sally-van-doren/

Thief

I remember the hour

you stole time from me

and here in these late pages

I try to collect back

the kisses in the parking lot

that erased my history

next to that green F-150

when you became my future.

Ladrón

Me acuerdo del momento

en que robaste mi tiempo

y en estas páginas ulteriores

trato de recuperar

los besos del estacionamiento

que borraron mi historia,

al lado de aquel F-50 verde,

cuando te convertiste en mi futuro.

Anxiety of Influence

My friend, Wendy, no,

she’s not anyone you might

have heard of, at least not

a famous poet whose name

I drop all the time (I would

never stoop to such a blatant

expression of insecurity, constantly

projecting through my writing

and art that I run with the right crowd,

all of us desperate for attention,

all of us trying to close off access

to our inner circle)…Wendy says

the trick to moving forward is not

to look back.

Ansiedad de la influencia

Mi amiga, Wendy, no,

ella no es nadie que podrías

haber escuchado, al menos no es

una famosa poeta cuyo nombre

menciono todo el tiempo (nunca

me inclinaría a tan descarada

expresión de inseguridad, constantemente

la proyecto a través de mi escritura

y de mi arte que corro con el público correcto,

todos nosotros desesperados por atención,

todos nosotros tratando de cerrar el acceso

a nuestro círculo cercano)… Wendy dice

que el truco para salir adelante es

no voltear atrás.

Sally Van Doren

Sally Van Doren was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. Her most recent book is Possessive (LSU Press, 2012). Her first poetry collection, Sex at Noon Taxes, won the 2007 Walt Whitman Award, and the title’s palindrome hints at the generous and witty wordplay the volume contains. About her work, August Kleinzahler has said, “There are no dead moments, no fill: even the conjunctions, prepositions and assorted connectives carry a charge. The language is alive. The movement of language is alive.” Van Doren’s poem “Preposition” twists and revises grammatical roles as it earnestly addresses a relationship, demonstrating that, as Sabne Raznik wrote in a review, “This is a poetry of deep emotional substance even in the midst of play.” 

Van Doren teaches at the 92nd St Y in New York City and has taught in the past at Washington University in St. Louis, the St. Louis Poetry Center, and in the St. Louis Public Schools. She divides her time between Connecticut and New York.

“Sally Van Doren’s poetry is everywhere alive. There are no dead moments, no fill: Even the conjunctions, prepositions, and assorted connectives carry a charge. The language is alive. The movement of language is alive. The mind at work here is all points quick, full of play and bite.”   - August Kleinzahler

Call Us

Let’s use our nicknames

When we apply for this next job

Even though it’s past our bedtime

And our current paycheck

Can’t shut up the muse

Who mewls at the dinner table

Begging for a crust of bread

To sate the nightly terrors.

For they come, don’t they,

Leaving empty spaces numbers

Are supposed to fill. Buddy

And Chip loaded their coffers

Before the hard freeze.

The ice burns our tongues

As we swallow prosperity

One parched drop at a time.

April

I chart the psyche,

observing how I 

force myself to speak

to you, imagining that

together we might

transform a life.  

Why this need

to document change,

to reverse a mood, 

to carry forward the time

when magnolias bloom?

Let’s follow the itinerant we

up and over the jonquil’s back,

treading on its spilled bullion.

HARP

For Phyllis Diebenkorn

When you pasted paper on paper

did your blue tattoo conclude

the hunt for melody?  I was

engendered by your dominant

crayon.   Rusty themes in

diagonals cut through all my

misnomers for composition.

I cried and cried with the bassoons.

Yellow greens on linen pulled

my ears from piccolo to constellation.

In the acrylic encore, I pushed

colleagues off the stage to condemn

the single chime.  But the percussion’s

flesh tones revived me after each one

of your solos.  The arrow pinned

my gauze to your gouache.  

Why are we prey to ether’s whims?

Draw me a triangle from your 

blurred crescendo to my cobalt spill.

My accidental diva, my acoustic

untitled hypnotic premier.

Possessive

SEX AT NOON TAXES

From the ghost town’s

fencepost, my lariat ropes

your palindromic peak

and hauls it to our bedroom,

where the timbers arch to hold off

the mountain’s hooves --- no 

avalanche turns snowfall into

uncorraled horseshoes.

The steeds bear us upslope.

We reach the muddy cleft

between Maroon Bells

and Crested Butte, gnawing 

on caribou and warmed

liver of once noble elk.

Sex At Noon Taxes

UNTITLED LANDSCAPE

We have been there before,

but one orange line can’t 

keep us from breaking through

the silver popple hovering

over some kind of hour

we tell to stay put,

to glimmer only when we

wait for it, there, where

blue rests on the bottom 

of the page, where

discoveries choose to find us.

Then and there we skim

through every inch.

Is it stillness? The yellow mt.

leaks through grey sky.

The monster leads us.

BACK TO WENDY

Now that we have established

who she’s not, what I really 

meant to paraphrase was

her assertion that you, we, one

must not expect to reclaim

a happy past that sits beyond

redemption there over my right

shoulder.  Wendy’s not

an apologist either.  Charge

ahead, she says, with back numbing

syringes that ease the pain

toward an improved

prognosis.  We can’t say we

know for sure what we will

reproduce.  Our systems

falter, our peccadilloes loom

large, our enemies flout

their phonic dominance from

the tops of this megalopolis

built on macadam and market

appeal.  Can you recognize

my wrinkled face peering down

at you from the parapet?

I hope so.  I’ve just been

crowned the crone queen.

I'M BEAT

  

When Wendy and I find ten minutes

to write a poem, we do, because we

both know all too well that life

is short when it comes to responding

to cues from the universe.  We felt

a rhythm under the pads of our

fingertips on top of the page.

We could have checked on the laundry 

or called our accountant, but instead

we bit off more than we can chew,

graphite, ink, erasers, not to mention

lactating and perimenopause and

everything in between.  How do 

we account for all of this?  We can

pause and look back but we can’t

really remember what it was like and

tomorrow’s demanding in its own way,

even to someone in their fifties, a woman

no less, who has raised a few children. 

(When will we be done with that?) Not

yet, we surmise, our own mothers

in their 80s, asking us to get their wool

sweaters from the plastic box under the bed

because they can’t get down there themselves. 

We bend over. We straighten up. We howl.

DOGS

Wendy is not the person to call

when you are considering 

whether or not to put your dog

down.  She adores her Havanese

Belle and thinks dogs are a central

component to any effort to achieve

domestic bliss.  But our twelve-year-old

Labradoodle Bert has two incurable tumors

and a urinary tract infection. God, he’s

a handsome dog, and fit for his years.

But he strains and strains every time

he goes number two which he’s

trying to do with increasing frequency.

He’s lying on the floor next to me in the sun

quite contentedly now, but we wonder

every morning when we wake up if he

will wake up. Our son lies down on the floor

next to his best friend and I take a picture

of this time of our lives coming to an end.

A WOMAN'S TOUCH

If you don’t mind, I would

like to invite Wendy into the

conversation one more time

mostly since we appear to be

sitting on a fulcrum between

the before and the after and I

don’t want to be accused of

kvetching all by my lonesome.

Wendy’s moniker is a mono-

chromatic needlepoint crest

symptomatic of an only

child who is unknowingly linked

genetically to my anthems.

She takes one stitch at a time

and calibrates the threat of

tomorrow next to today’s

disappointment.  You’ll find

the difference incremental, 

but the pigments she chooses

to depict the morning light

in late May…these are unsurpassed.

So we sit in our comfy chair

and ransom ourselves to the future.

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