Fleda Brown
Fleda Brown's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, and many other journals, and they have been used as texts for several prizewinning musical compositions which have been performed at Eastman School of Music and at Yale University.
Her first collection of poems, Fishing With Blood (Purdue University Press), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in 1988. In 1993, Do Not Peel the Birches (Purdue University Press) was chosen by Gerald Stern as winner of the Verna Emery Prize. Her third collection, The Devil's Child, was published in 1999 by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She also has a limited edition book of poems and images, The Eleusinian Mysteries MS, with Norman Sasowsky (Moment Press, 1992) and a chapbook, The Earliest House (Yarrow, 1993).
Brown grew up in Arkansas, and in 2001 she was awarded that state's premier poetry prize, The Porter Fund Prize for Literary Excellence. She is now professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she directs the Graduate Student Poets in the Schools program. She and her husband, Jerry Beasley, live in Newark, Delaware. She is poet laureate of Delaware.
BREATHING IN, BREATHING OUT
BY FLEDA BROWN
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Levine Prize in Poetry 2001
Fleda Brown brings brilliance and craft to the inexplicable narratives of lived memory. In poem after poem her omnivorous intelligence, driven to understand, stands poised beautifully on the moment between breaths. -- Marilyn Nelson
In Breathing In, Breathing Out, Fleda Brown tells us, "One day Adam said 'Adam'/and found out he was standing/across the field from everything/else." Brown deftly explores the otherness that language both gives us and inflicts on us. Nothing is changed and everything is, once words separate us from nature. Fleda Brown's great skill with that alienating and communicating tool, language, is to show us how dazzlingly strange the familiar world is. -- Andrew Hudgins
Fleda Brown has such a wide ranging intelligence, such a large and quirky variety of subjects, and such facility with language that you come away from her poems amazed at the emotional impact under the entertaining and colloquial surfaces. This is a fine and original book. -- Linda Pastan
Buying The King-Sized Bed
I'm already thinking of rolling around that expanse,
tossing a leg without entangling. The way I am,
though, I see all the possibilities for loss. I see us
pillowed and billowed, supported in exactly the right
hollows by ergonomically designed, pocketed coils,
while beneath it all -- the pea under a royal height --
the oppressed, the downsmashed, sleep in despoiled
cardboard boxes, or three on one frayed blanket.
Think of us, spread out, tongues on the rampage,
marking where we'll kiss. Oh wild God, how can
you permit this excess? How could any of us gauge
the exact distance at which people turn strangers
to each other? In our double bed -- called double,
but we have been bumper-cars and cliff hangers
on it for years, our shorter ancestors troubling
us still -- I can't even raise my knee
without poking my dear love in the groin.
We have been close, we have understood each other
the way people in tight houses start growing
together -- at a molecular level, absorbing
each other's pheromones. Yelling and slamming doors,
too, or else they are lost inside each other! They would
have grand houses, if they could. They would forge
on like jet-skis through the foyer and out to the good
sea. They would send a wire to say, "I still
love you." The sweet old world is longing to be
loose and light. All night long it stares up at the chilled
stars. This is a sticky business, finding the peak
distance for love, knowing our bodies will be nothing,
someday, wanting to hear them make their delicious,
reassuring sounds, bobbing against each other.
Fourth of July Parade, Albion, WA.
Everyone's happy, catching candy.
There's an army truck; one fire truck
screaming; a blue Olds about 1975;
two police cars side by side,
everything huzza-huzza,
the band playing "From the Halls of Montezuma"
from a flatbed truck; eight kids on bikes,
with balloons; a dozen 4-H kids in clover-shirts;
a bulldog with a bow;
two hefty rodeo girls on horses,
a small tractor pulling prizewinning chickens
in their two festooned cages.
I can't help it, I get sentimental tears.
Damn, I say to myself. Chickens.
A prize for being chickens.
Then, amazingly, here they all come again,
back up the street, chickens
from the other side,
fiddle-players instead of horns showing,
candy flying again like stars.
Everything a copy of itself, another chance.
Quantum physics says it's true,
particles coming and going.
The road not taken may be taken.
Meanwhile, the chickens move forward
again in our eyes, the Declaration of Independence
gets signed. We need custom,
return. We like to sit sandal-footed in the grass,
happily surrendered to either side.
Past or future, it's no wonder
the chickens win, the way they keep
their artist's eyes cocked, lost in the work
of being chickens
again and again.