A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Poetry

"Aqua"

By Linda Parsons Marion

May 13, 2010 Linda Parsons Marion is the author of two poetry collections, Home Fires and Mother Land. For fourteen years she served as poetry editor of Now & Then magazine and has received literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission and Associated Writing Programs, and her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals and anthologies. She is an editor at the University of Tennessee and lives in Knoxville with her husband, poet Jeff Daniel Marion.

In the Zone

By Margaret Renkl

April 28, 2010 In 1985 at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, professors David Till and Malcolm Glass founded a literary magazine which they called Zone 3, in honor of the temperate growing zone of middle Tennessee. This was a staggeringly hopeful endeavor. Even twenty-five years ago, it was not clear that poetry itself—let alone literary magazines devoted to it—would survive the twentieth century. If cable television hadn’t swamped the little boat of lyric poetry, the coming tsunami not yet known as the Internet surely would.

Writing the Body

By Maria Browning

April 28, 2010 In her first collection, Temper, poet Beth Bachmann grapples with the horror and mystery of violent death. The book’s powerful, carefully crafted poems earned her critical raves and the 2008 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. This spring, Bachmann also won the prestigious Kate Tufts Discovery Award, given each year to “a first book by a poet of genuine promise.” Bachmann answered questions from Chapter 16 in anticipation of the award ceremony in Pasadena on April 28.

Writing the Body

Beyond the Powwow

By Serenity Gerbman

April 22, 2010 Although best known for the poems that first introduced her to the creative world, Joy Harjo is an artist in diverse media: music, screenwriting, children’s literature, and poetry. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, Harjo offers a powerful voice for the disenfranchised. Rather than seeming pigeonholed by her Native American background, however, Harjo draws upon archetypal myths and legends as tools to demonstrate the individual’s connection with the land and with other humans. She answered questions from Chapter 16 prior to two Nashville appearances on April 23.

Beyond the Powwow

At Last!

By Margaret Renkl

April 15, 2010 The Poetry Foundation has announced the 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the winner of the award, which carries a stipend of $100,000, is Eleanor Ross Taylor. The widow of acclaimed novelist Peter Taylor, Eleanor Ross Taylor made no apologies in her youth for downplaying her own artistic dreams to support her husband’s stratospheric literary career. Nevertheless, with his encouragement, she wrote steadily during the years of their marriage, publishing her first book at age 40 and following it with a book, on average, every decade.

Entranced

By Maria Browning

Chattanooga native Coleman Barks has devoted more than three decades to translating the poems of Rumi, and in the process has turned the thirteenth-century mystic into one of the most popular poets in America. Prior to his visit to Austin Peay State University on March 4, Barks spoke with Chapter 16 about why so many contemporary American readers are entranced with an ancient Persian poet.

Entranced

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