Dorianne Laux

1952- , Augusta , ME

Photo credit: John Campbell

Related Schools & Movements: 

Contemporary

On January 10, 1952, Dorianne Laux was born in Augusta, Maine. She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a BA in English from Mills College in 1988.
Laux is the author of several collections of poetry, The Book of Women (Red Dragonfly Press, 2012); The Book of Men (W.W. Norton, 2011), which won The Paterson Prize and The Roanoke-Chowan Award; Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton, 2005), which was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, chosen by Ai, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Smoke (BOA Editions, 2000); What We Carry (BOA Editions, 1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Awake (BOA Editions, 1990), which was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry. Her poems have been translated into French, Italian, Korean, Romanian, Afrikaans, Dutch, and Brazilian Portuguese.
About Laux’s work, the poet Tony Hoagland has said, “Her poems are those of a grown American woman, one who looks clearly, passionately, and affectionately at rites of passage, motherhood, the life of work, sisterhood, and especially sexual love, in a celebratory fashion.”
Laux is also coauthor (with Kim Addonizio) of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997). Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize, an Editor’s Choice III Award, The Best American Poetry in 1999, 2006 and 2013, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Laux has taught at the University of Oregon’s Program in Creative Writing. She now lives with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she teachings in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

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Bibliography

Poetry

The Book of Women (Red Dragonfly Press, 2012)
The Book of Men (W.W. Norton, 2011)
Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton, 2005)
Smoke (BOA Editions, 2000)
What We Carry (BOA Editions, 1994)
Awake (BOA Editions, 1990)

Prose

The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, coauthored with Kim Addonizio (W.W. Norton, 1997)

Only as the Day Is Long

Dorianne Laux, 1952

Soon she will be no more than a passing thought,
a pang, a timpani of wind in the chimes, bent spoons
hung from the eaves on a first night in a new house
on a street where no dog sings, no cat visits
a neighbor cat in the middle of the street, winding
and rubbing fur against fur, throwing sparks.

Her atoms are out there, circling the earth, minus
her happiness, minus her grief, only her body’s
water atoms, her hair and bone and teeth atoms,
her fleshy atoms, her boozy atoms, her saltines
and cheese and tea, but not her piano concerto
atoms, her atoms of laughter and cruelty, her atoms
of lies and lilies along the driveway and her slippers,
Lord her slippers, where are they now?

Copyright © 2015 by Dorianne Laux. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 4, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.

More Stones

Andrea Cohen

for Philip Levine
Donald Justice has died twice:
once in Miami, in the sun, on a Sunday,
and once in Iowa City, on a Friday
in August, which was not without
its own sun—if not bright spot.
The first time he died, he was thinking
of Vallejo, who died in Paris, maybe
on a Thursday, surely in rain.
Vallejo died again in Paris,
in April, of an unknown illness
which may have been malaria,
as fictionalized in Bolaño’s
Monsieur Pain. “There is, brothers,
very much to do,” Vallejo said
between his deaths, and Phil,
you must have died once
in Seville, in the land of Machado,
before going again last Saturday
in Fresno, so you no longer write
to us or bring in trash bins filled
with light. Phil, I will die, maybe
on a Sunday in Wellfleet, because
today it is Sunday, and ice
is jamming the eaves, and there
is nowhere to put the snow
that keeps recalling all
those other snows—
or the stones on more stones.
 

Copyright © 2015 by Andrea Cohen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 28, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.

Olulu, the King not from Zulu, doing a Spoken Word Poetry piece at WORD UP Volume 4 which held on May 18, 2013 in Lagos, Nigeria. WORD UP is the biggest Spoken Word Poetry event in Nigeria. It features A-list Spoken Word Poets on the same stage.

Joseph Fasano

Joseph Fasano is the author of three collections of poems, Inheritance (Cider Press Review, 2014); Fugue for Other Hands (Cider Press Review, 2013), winner of the Cider Press Review Book Award; and Vincent, forthcoming in 2015 from Cider Press. His honors include two Pushcart Prize nominations, the RATTLE Poetry Prize, and a finalist nomination for the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize.
He teaches at Manhattanville College and in the graduate and undergraduate writing programs at Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

Phil Kaye performs "Repetition"

speakeasynyc

Uploaded on 22 Sep 2011

Phil Kaye, part of Team Providence 2011, and Project Voice performs "Repetition" at New York's Bowery Poetry Club. Aug 2011

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Hermitage

Joseph Fasano

It’s true there were times when it was too much
and I slipped off in the first light or its last hour
and drove up through the crooked way of the valley
and swam out to those ruins on an island.
Blackbirds were the only music in the spruces,
and the stars, as they faded out, offered themselves to me
like glasses of water ringing by the empty linens of the dead.
When Delilah watched the dark hair of her lover
tumble, she did not shatter. When Abraham
relented, he did not relent.
Still, I would tell you of the humbling and the waking.
I would tell you of the wild hours of surrender,
when the river stripped the cove’s stones
from the margin and the blackbirds built
their strict songs in the high
pines, when the great nests swayed the lattice
of the branches, the moon’s brute music
touching them with fire.
And you, there, stranger in the sway
of it, what would you have done
there, in the ruins, when they rose
from you, when the burning wings
ascended, when the old ghosts
shook the music from your branches and the great lie
of your one sweet life was lifted?

Copyright © 2015 by Joseph Fasano. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 29, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.

Non-Fiction - Word for Word

Event Type:	Creative Nonfiction Talk
Event Date and Time:	August 5, 2015 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Description:	Non-Fiction - Word for Word Terry Alford – Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth 7:00pm – 8:30pm | Bryant Park Reading Room Produced in partnership with New-York Historical Society Rain information: In case of rain, events are held under a tent at the Reading Room. In case of severe weather, please check bryantpark.org for the indoor location.
Venue: (map)	Bryant Park Reading Room 42nd Street Between 5th and 6th Avenue New York, NY 10018

Photo credit: Rachel de Cordova

Hayan Charara is the author of three poetry collections—The Alchemist’s Diary (Hanging Loose 2001); The Sadness of Others (Carnegie Mellon 2006), nominated for the National Book Award; and Something Sinister (Carnegie Mellon 2016). A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he is the editor of Inclined to Speak (University of Arkansas, 2008), an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry. He lives in Texas.

Copyright © 2015 by Hayan Charara. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 20, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.

Elegy with Apples, Pomegranates, Bees, Butterflies, Thorn Bushes, Oak, Pine, Warblers, Crows, Ants, and Worms

Hayan Charara, 1972

The trees alongside the fence
bear fruit, the limbs and leaves speeches
to you and me. They promise to give the world
back to itself. The apple apologizes
for those whose hearts bear too much zest
for heaven, the pomegranate
for the change that did not come
soon enough. Every seed is a heart, every heart
a minefield, and the bees and butterflies
swarm the flowers on its grave.
The thorn bushes instruct us
to tell our sons and daughters
who carry sticks and stones
to mend their ways.
The oak tree says to eat
only fruits and vegetables;
the pine says to eat all the stirring things.
My neighbor left long ago and did not hear
any of this. In a big country
the leader warns the leader of a small country
there must be change or else.
Birds are the same way, coming and going,
wobbling thin branches.
The warblers express pain, the crows regret,
or is it the other way around?
The mantra today is the same as yesterday.
We must become different.
The plants must, the animals,
and the ants and worms, just like the carmakers,
the soap makers before them,
and the manufacturers of rubber
and the sellers of tea, tobacco, and salt.
Such an ancient habit, making ourselves new.
My neighbor looks like my mother
who left a long time ago
and did not hear any of this.
Just for a minute, give her back to me,
before she died, kneeling
in the dirt under the sun, calling me darling
in Arabic, which no one has since.

Copyright © 2015 by Hayan Charara. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 20, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.

Sarah Kay & Phil Kaye "An Origin Story"