Diann Blakely
Diann Blakely was born in Anniston, Alabama, and while she and her parents soon moved to the much larger city of Birmingham, she returned to her birthplace for school holidays and most of each summer well into her teens. Her maternal grandparents, whose forebears had migrated southwest from Virginia and "the low country" near Charleston after the Civil War, shared their large home not only with the infant Blakely and her parents before their move, but also with her great-grandmother. Like most middle-class Southerners of their generation, Blakely’s grandparents also housed—in the backyard—a black couple who performed various domestic tasks, the wife acting as Blakely’s nanny. The intricately schizoid relationship, at once intimate and taboo-ridden, loving and exploitative, between such blacks and such whites was probably no more mind-boggling to Blakely than to other children; nonetheless, the South and its racial divide, which became cruelly and explosively obvious in Birmingham during the early '60s, recurs as one of the central urgencies of her work.
Birmingham's political disquiet increasingly found a mirror in Blakely’s domestic environment, one troubled by alcoholism and depression. The nearby suburban public library provided not only shelter in the literal sense, but also a metaphoric wealth of alternate existences. In particular, novels and historical nonfiction gave the young Blakely license to escape her own present tense for a parallel time in which she could take on the personae of various characters, dressing, speaking, and even eating what they might have if alive and ten years old in Alabama. Perhaps it's no wonder that over half of Hurricane Walk, Blakely’s first book, is comprised of dramatic monologues.
One of the twentieth century's best-known persona poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," brought various tensions and yearnings to focus within the sixteen-year-old Blakely, whose first reading of the poem resulted in a "nearly-miraculous" sense of vocation. While she continued to study classical ballet and to paint during her high school years, the poetry- and story-writing she had practiced from childhood took on a new aura of fervor and commitment, which influenced her decision to attend Sewanee for her undergraduate education. Once a student there, however, Blakely found the English department's conservatism less congenial than the Fine Arts department's greater openness and pedagogical flexibility; thus, she majored in art history and was actually able to take more English courses than a declared major would have been allowed. Sewanee offered no classes in creative writing and, having never heard of Iowa or Columbia or any of the other graduate programs in writing, Blakely decided in her senior year to apply for various Ph.D. programs in literature.
Though she completed the M.A. degree at Vanderbilt in 1980 as a Harold Stirling Vanderbilt fellow and transferred in 1981 to NYU with another full scholarship, Blakely soon began to chafe at the relentless emphasis on literary criticism, rather than on poems and fiction themselves, in graduate school. Having naively assumed that her classmates shared her secret longing to be the next Eliot or Yeats or Stevens, she was disturbed and disgruntled to find that they yearned instead to be the next Harold Bloom. The increasingly dull drudge-work required of Ph.D. students began to erode the love of reading and writing that had brought Blakely to graduate school in the first place, so in the middle of 1981's fall semester, she dropped out and began a daily routine of writing and reading, re-writing and re-reading.
It was during this time that the work of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, and other female poets began to receive an increasing amount of attention, and Blakely devoured not only the complete or collected editions of their poems that were published then—Bishop's in 1980, Plath’s and Sexton's in 1981—but also the books of letters and journals that appeared concurrently. How does one live as a writer? How does one shape the life that produces the work? Is there any difference between a woman's writing life and a man's?—albeit unconsciously, these were the questions whose answers Blakely sought during the early '80s.
Blakely’s then-marriage took her from New York to Boston, where she came under the beneficent wing of Seamus Heaney. A secretarial job at Warren House, Harvard's graduate offices, led to Heaney’s admitting her as a special student to his workshop and lecture classes, which she continued to attend after he helped her secure the position of Steward for Harvard's illustrious Signet Society. This literary luncheon and social club, to which Eliot and Stevens had belonged, included among its membership at the time Alec Keshishian, who directed Truth or Dare, the documentary about Madonna's "Blond Ambition" tour, Conan O'Brien, and Andrew Sullivan, currently editor-in-chief of The New Republic. Blakely lived in a small apartment on the Signet's second floor, and the lack of privacy began to outweigh the job's major perk: free rent in the middle of Harvard Square. Thus she was greatly excited when Heaney hired her as a teaching assistant for his lecture course in British, Irish, and American poetry since 1950, which led to the English department's offering a concurrent position as Junior Tutor, one usually, like teaching assistantships, reserved for Harvard's graduate students. Heaney also introduced her to Helen Vendler, whose Lowell seminar Blakely attended, and to Derek Walcott, who invited Blakely to become one of the "windowsill auditors" in that semi-circular, smoke-filled Boston University classroom where Lowell and Sexton, among others, had taught.
In 1987, Blakely returned south to take a teaching job at the Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, Tennessee, and while she was glad to leave behind Boston's weather and certain aspects of its latter-day puritanism, she missed greatly the network of poet-friends she had developed during her years there. She continued to return to New England for two weeks each summer, having attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 1983 and been awarded an administrative scholarship to return the next year, a scholarship that was renewed for the next decade. Studying at Bread Loaf under the tutelage of William Matthews, Donald Justice, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Mark Jarman, and Carol Frost helped her shape the manuscript that became Hurricane Walk, which was accepted by BOA Editions, Ltd. and published in 1992. Blakely also enrolled in Vermont College's low-residency MFA program, working with Susan Mitchell, Leslie Ullman, and David Wojahn and graduating in 1989.
During the 1990's, Blakely held a number of overlapping and/or concurrent positions: teaching at Harpeth Hall, Belmont University, Watkins Institute, the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference, and as a temporary adjunct in the Vermont College program; serving as assistant editor for The Antioch Review; writing book reviews for The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Parnassus, and other publications; and finally, working as a dance critic and as a freelance editor and proofreader. In 1996, she finished her second book, Farewell, My Lovelies, which will appear from Story Line Press in the fall of 1999; halfway through the collection, she began work on a series of love poems, mostly in syllabics or sonnet sequences, for various cities in America and in Europe. The increasing interest in traditional forms demonstrated by Farewell, My Lovelies assumes an even greater importance in this third collection, which Blakely has recently completed and titled Cities of Flesh and the Dead. Through finishing this pair of books, Blakely has finally discovered the two-part answer to a question she, like many others, has been asked again and again: "Do you consider yourself a Southern Writer?" Thinking of what category one belongs to—Woman Writer, Southern Writer, Divorced Writer, Teacher/Writer, Lapsed Episcopalian Writer, Semi-Formalist Writer—seems deadly indeed when sitting down at the computer; nonetheless, Farewell, My Lovelies and Cities of Flesh and the Dead have at their respective cores a traditional Southern obsession: original sin, otherwise known as desire; and the sense of place.
A health crisis in the fall of 1997 forced Blakely to examine her priorities, and she decided to leave her new position as Harpeth Hall's writer-in-residence to devote herself full time to a fourth collection, currently titled Love in Vain: Duets with Robert Johnson. She traveled extensively in the Mississippi Delta last spring and plans to return this fall to research aspects of the blues for the new book, though she will continue to serve as Antioch’s assistant poetry editor and as co-editor of Each Fugitive Moment, a collection of essays on the life and work of Lynda Hull, whom Blakely met at Vermont College and still regards as one of her greatest friends and influences despite Hull's tragic and untimely death in 1994. Poems dedicated to Hull, "Jehovah Jiveh" and "New York Stories," appear in both Farewell, My Lovelies and Cities of Flesh and the Dead, as do poems for William Matthews, another close friend and mentor, who died suddenly in November, 1997. Other work from Blakely’s new books have recently appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and in The Pushcart Prize Anthologies XIX and XX, among many others.