Gjertrud Schnackenberg

 

Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2011

Reading: 7PM,

The Scandinavian Cultural Center

 

 

Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in Tacoma, Washington and earned her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College.  Schnackenberg has published five collections of poetry: Portraits and Elegies (1982); The Lamplit Answer (1985); A Gilded Lapse of Time  (1992); The Throne of Labdacus (2000), and Heavenly Questions (2010). Supernatural Love: Poems 1976–1992, a volume of her collected poems, was published in 2000.  Among her many honors, Schnackenberg has received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim grant.  She has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1996.  She won an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998, and in 2001 she won the LA Times Book Prize in Poetry for The Throne of Labdacus.  Her most recent book, Heavenly Questions, received the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2011.

 

On Heavenly Questions:

Heavenly Questions, the first new collection of poems from Gjertrud Schnackenberg since her critically acclaimed The Throne of Labdacus, finds her at the height of her talents and showcases her continued growth as an artist.  In six long poems, Schnackenberg’s rhyme-rich blank verse, with its densely packed images, shifts effortlessly between the lyric and the epic, setting passion to a verbal music that is recognizably her own.  An exceptional and moving new collection from one of the most talented American poets of our time, Heavenly Questions is a work of intellectual, aesthetic, and technical innovation—and, more than that, a deeply compassionate and strikingly personal work.

 

Praise for Gjertrud Schnackenberg:

“What a superb poet she is, and what a range of original sensibility, what private music, in the less well-worn emotions.”

    —Nadine Gordimer

 

“Heavenly Questions [is Schnackenberg’s] best book and one of the most interesting books in recent American poetry. It is a book about its own failures to conjure the lost beloved, and about its own temptation to offer, and to accept, false consolation . . . Part of Schnackenberg’s power, and part of her appeal, is to found her own language on literary terra firma even as she explores the shifting sands of mortal life . . . This is powerful writing.”

   —Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books

 

“Schnackenberg’s new book, Heavenly Questions, is a collection of lullabies and lamentations … these new poems are marvels, and they are intimate songs about putting a beloved to sleep after a long and losing battle with a fatal illness. Yet they also continue a conversation between the poet and her brilliant, missing partner, a conversation that ranges between philosophy, history, intellect, and illness … Her dream songs remain both impossibly intimate and formally perfect: a double monument to love and to grief.”             

   —Eliza Griswold, The American Prospect

 

Work excerpt:

THE LIGHT-GRAY SOIL

 

Shambles of grief in daylight under heaven.

I sit among the living, in a park,

Three miles from where he's laid to rest, three months.

Foot traffic dimly swirls around me, throngs

Of the unbidden pass me, the unburied.

I sit inside a coat he gave me once.

Systole and diastole.  Not knowing when

I halted at this bench, not knowing when

I ceased to stalk the sidewalk, came to rest,

Not knowing, since it doesn't matter when.

My heart-walls moving of their own accord.

A helpless deed, systole and diastole,

Two halves carved from a pre-existing whole.

Contracting, and the chambers fill with blood.

Dilating, and the blood is surging through.

Five heaps of being, five, the beggar said.

O beggar, I have seen the mound of earth

When all the rivers call their fountains back.

I wore my shoes away, I wore away

The stockings from my feet, seeking the house

Where no beloved person ever died,

No father, mother, husband, wife, or child.

Earth's crust diminishing beneath my feet.

The mantle glimpsed.  The churning, iron core.

My hand lies next to me, begging, unheld:

Another earth.  Give me another earth.

Then hide my hand, ashamed I couldn't help.