ELEANOR SWANSON
Tuesday, December 15, 2015 at 2:13PM
By her own account, St. Joan’s present passion is writing poetry. She has studied with eminent poets such as W.S. Merwin, Marilyn Krysl, Alicia Ostriker, and Billy Collins, and has had four residencies at the Vermont Studio Center. She has also had residences at Breadloaf, the David White Artists’ Colony (Costa Rica), and many other places. Among her awards are the Morrow Lectureship at Metropolitan State University, Finalist for the Colorado Book award in Literary Fiction, and the Solas Silver Award for Women’s Travel Writing.
A number of St. Joan’s poems deal with nature and place, such as “Ten Ways of Looking at the West” (The Colorado Lawyer). Here is the evocative fourth way to look at the west: “Was it in the West that I loved you?/Pre-Cambrian? Or before that?/Tonight I sleep at the edge of your canyon./I listen to your starry wind. And the eighth: “Sweetwater,/Deer Lodge./Steamboat Springs./My tongue plays/The words of the West.
Lovely.
“Choreography” even more clearly shows us the self-in-nature, dance being an important metaphor here: “Life is not a dance exactly; what I am trying to say that both are an/outside movement from and inside moment that will not stay put.” Several more poems in the selection I was able to read also invoke the natural world. Many have an engaging erotic subtext. St. Joan’s most recently published poem, “Letter to Muriel Rukeyser at the End of the Twentieth Century” (Chokecherries Anthology, SOMOS, Taos) is a blockbuster of a poem—about justice and peace and war, wealth and power, the class wars, “the sweating fragile planet.” I wish I could quote the whole of this poem, so readers might have a sense of its breadth, its richness, its cries for less violence and chaos, less “stone insanity.” And, finally, perhaps its implicit hope that we might all strive to be “made of light.” However, here is the final stanza:
A voice flew out of the river
smoke of the poems we still try to write.
We too are more or less insane
as even now through time
we witness the buried life.
At the end of the millennium,
we are still writing our poems,
born as we were
in the first century
of the aftermath
of world wars.
I will look forward to hearing more from Jacqueline St. Joan and reading more of her work.
EXCERPTS FROM HER POETRY:
Books
What Remains: Poems, Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016
Restitching the Sky, a poem book, 2016. (letterpress and hand-stitched by Tom Parsons, currently of Letterpress Depot)
Just Ice poetry chapbook, 1997. (limited edition, designed by Caroline Hinkley and Alex Horstman- out of print)
Journals
“Ten Ways of Looking at the West, Mountains Talking, Summer 2016; and SageGreen Journal, 2015.
Restraining Order,” “A Mother’s Advice to her Children,” and “Ten Ways of Looking at the West,” The Colorado Lawyer, Fall 2008.
Becoming E-mail,” Mountains Talking, 2015
“Letter to Muriel Rukeyser at the end of the Twentieth Century,” Chokecherries Anthology, Society of the Muse in the Southwest SOMOS, 2012.
“Cold Water Wash,” -- Texas Journal on Women and the Law, Texas Journal on Women and the Law, Spring 1994
“Letter to Muriel Rukeyser at the End of the Twentieth Century -- Denver Press Club Poetry Award, published in Chokecherries, SOMOS, Taos, N.M., 2012.
“Virginia, 1957-1977-1997” and “The Drama of the Long Distance Runners,” Ms. Magazine, Nov./Dec. 1997.
"Just Ice," and "Cold Water Wash," Texas Journal on Women and the Law, Spring 1994
"Harmless Winter," Denver Post, April 1992.