Rachel DeWoskin
- Georgetown University - USA, United States of America -
Rachel DeWoskin is the award-winning poet and author of two poetry collections, absolute animal and Two Menus (The University of Chicago Press); five novels, Someday We Will Fly (PRH), Banshee (Dottir), Blind (PRH), Big Girl Small (FSG), Repeat After Me (Overlook); and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing (W.W. Norton).
Her awards include an Academy of American Poets Award, a National Jewish Book Award, a Sydney Taylor Book Award, an American Library Association Alex Award, and the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Prize.
DeWoskin’s poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Ploughshares, The Baffler, Seneca Review, The New Delta Review, New Orleans Review, and New Voices from the Academy of American Poets.
She is a curator of Poetry for One, a Goodman Theater poet, and the creator and director of the Illinois 900 Million Poem Project. She also serves on the national steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action (WDA).
Rachel DeWoskin (Georgetown University - USA) participates in the Versopolis USA mobility project, a collaborative initiative between Versopolis and the Formal Consortium of U.S. Universities and Institutions Dedicated to Poetry.
A Dark Constant: Wonder
I’ve kept a “wonder book” since I was three, the goal of which was never to answer, but to build and deepen a constellation of questions. Early on, this included concerns about turkeys: “How do those birds get to the supermarket anyway?” And then hoses: “Do they come with water in them?” And death: “Why can I only understand forever when it’s dark?”
I knew early, instinctively, as small humans can, that poetry was the most precise way to examine the world and to find in it a tiny, maybe secure place for myself. Nothing comforts me the way a good rhyme can, or the way iambic pentameter mimics the cadence of natural speech. When encountering chaos, I take an antique container like a sonnet and organize into it as much of the fear and joy of the contemporary world as I can. Poetry out loud is a transcendent bedtime story, a way we can wonder, understand, and hope together. This is why people scratch poems into the walls of concentration camps, tattoo lines on our bodies, and repeat the phrases that are most true and beautiful to one another and ourselves until those lines become parts of us.
In my poems, I ask about wildness and politeness, about what language is dazzling or stark enough to say what we want to say, and to ask what we need to ask. I am interested in the rules we’ve articulated in our cultures for communication; I examine, with curiosity and often delight, what is taboo. Formal verse allows me to find and articulate patterns in lived, dreamed, read, and imagined experience—to give shape to what is terrifyingly or alluringly shapeless.
This includes the natural world, animal and human behavior, our bodies and hearts, and a literal map of places. My poems traverse China and America, cities and countrysides, as well as the machines that keep us and our minds in motion. I write about racing and slowing to stillness; the expansion and contraction of time; the liminal spaces between youth and adulthood, safety and danger, humor and sorrow. I like to build boundaries and binaries in order to demolish them, sliding between their edges—moving from the familiar to the strange, placing us face-to-face with our assumptions and confusions.
We are all composed of shifting—and sometimes colliding—parts, and poetry is uniquely designed to allow for irreconcilable ambiguities. This is among its great powers: to be fueled by wonder, while achieving nuance even as it distills experience and complexity into readable lines.
My poems ask how we communicate across the boundaries that threaten to divide us—how to measure and close the distance between who we are, were, and want to be. I am concerned with the natural world and our place in it, including borders both natural and man-made. How do we cross linguistic, cultural, and physical boundaries in order to communicate? Another way to ask this is: what makes us human?
If language is the answer, poetry pulls us closer—often by way of another of its most powerful possibilities: translation. I work on Tang translations, placing them at the centers of my collections. Tang poems do the best work of asking because they are ancient, combustible Chinese poems which, in their originals, thread epic humanity up from centuries ago and somehow make brilliant sense in this moment too. Translating Tang poems requires training our alphabet to honor the varied and condensed work of Chinese characters—a thrilling endeavor.
Among the reasons I would be overjoyed to be a Versopolis poet is how much translation matters to me. Translation is at the core of my practice and my worldview, since it is essential not only to the work of poets, but also to the essential project of being human. My favorite Chinese expression is jing di zhi wa, the frog in a well, who looks up and thinks it can see all of heaven, but can actually see only a single circle of the sky. The frog is a useful symbol of the perils of limited perspective; poetry and translation help us escape the well, allowing us to see beyond ourselves and our contexts.
Even the content of my original poems is, in a deep sense, about translation—asking what is translatable, and how we connect across languages. The hearts on the cover of my most recent collection, absolute animal, are jittering, wondering, worrying, slightly arrhythmic and out of sync. This is because the poems ask, in difficult times, how we love, betray, forgive, and understand one another and our planet. At the center of the book is a suite of Tang poems, translated to express the connection between another time and this one.
Together with the original poems, they reveal two elemental and shared parts of all of us who have ever lived: our vivid, irrational hearts—and our wonder.
Written by Rachel DeWoskin.
Poetry
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attention /
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Love Poem from South China /
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anthrosphere /
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taxidermy /
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arrhythmia /
