Lisa Russ Spaar
Beginning July 1, you can find the new Poet of the Month at poetrynet.org. (Use the current site for the
complete archives for the next few weeks.)
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of Blue Venus: Poems (Persea Books, 2004) and Glass
Town: Poems (Red Hen Press, 1999), for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for
Emerging Women Writers in 2000. She is also the author of two chapbooks of poems, Blind
Boy on Skates (Trilobite/University of North Texas Press, 1988) and Cellar (Alderman
Press/University of Virginia, 1983), and is the editor of Acquainted With the Night:
Insomnia Poems (Columbia UP, 1999). Her work has appeared in a great many literary
quarterlies and journals, including Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review,
Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Image, Shenandoah, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Virginia Commission for
the Arts, Spaar is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of
Virginia, where she is an Associate Professor of English.
Statement
A glacial flinch of winter sun on an asbestos shingle, a fuck-scribbled bridge piling
– how to bear these ecstasies? Words mediate for me between my desire –
Keats’s "feel of not to feel it" – and this divinely physical world. I
am a reading poet, always looking for the radiant, potent word (Dickinson: "my
Lexicon – was my only companion"), the phrase, the self-excavating sentence of
inspiration. I’m drawn to this passionate paradox: the erotic dimension of the
devotional, the spiritual heft of eros. Charlie Parker, the be-bop saxophonist, defined
his solos not by reorganizing the existing melody but by plundering its secrets and
embroidering all around the head of the song, defining the center by its absence. Even as
I dare to attempt making music from will, memory, yearning – even as I try to
mesmerize time and to explore and transgress the borders of love and the soul – I
remain in awe of the sumptuous mystery of the space that will not let itself be worded.