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Meena Alexander, Mary Jo Bang, and Monica de la Torre Read Their Poems for Women Poets and Writers at Barnard
2.5.09
New York – Tuesday evening marked the first spring semester event of the Women Poets and Writers at Barnard series. Poets Meena Alexander, Mary Jo Bang, and Mónica de la Torre were introduced
by Barnard student writers and poets before reading a selection of poems.
Mary Jo Bang is the author of five books of poems, the most recent of which, Elegy, received
the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her sixth collection, The Bride of E, is forthcoming
from Graywolf Press. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Mónica De La Torre is author of three books of poetry, Talk Shows, Ac?fenos, and Public
Domain. She co-wrote the artist book Appendices, Illustrations & Notes, and co-edited
Reversible Monuments: Mexican Contemporary Poetry. She is senior editor at BOMB Magazine.
Meena Alexander, the author of several books of poetry, including Illiterate Heart, which
won the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk, and Quickly Changing River, opened the reading with a
poem about a dream her daughter, Barnard alumna Svati Mariam Lelyveld '08, had as a young
girl. She also read a poem reflecting on living in New York City, titled Cosmopolitan:
COSMOPOLITAN
You want a poem on being cosmopolitan.
Dear friend, what can I say?
Sometimes I cannot tell mulberry skin
From blood on the hands of children.
Nor stop myself from tugging a cloth
Where ghostly knives, cups, forks flutter,
Where stones surrender to the hunger of exiles.
Yesterday I jumped the metal door confusing D train for A,
Doors clashed, I tore a sleeve, saved my arm.
Pacing the ill-lit platform
I heard the bird of heaven call.
A cry huge, indigo,
Bursting the underground tunnel.
A simple enough bird
Whose voice alone forces it apart.
A dun-colored thing, feathers moist
It likes best to perch on green tamarind
Or on a bamboo branch.
The kind of bird you see painted
On palmyra fans
Or at the rim of raw silk
Furnishing a woman's garment.
As the A train spun in, I saw claws
Scoring a stubble field,
Rails melting into bamboo hit by a lightning storm.
Ill suited for that train
And wherever in the world it might take me,
I set both hands to the tunnel wall.
In cracks of the broken wall I touched dirt, moist, reddening.
It came to me foolish perhaps,
Yet insistent as night wind after a storm has passed.
Slow, sweet tapping on the tympanum:
This is where your home is laid,
Scales unsung and secret geography.
Odd questions massed in me.
Who knows my name or where my skin was torn?
If I could would I return to Kashi?
And might the queen of trumps intercede for me?
On an island, in a high room,
On a kitchen table, by a chopping board
I set book you once gave me, The Travels of Mingliaotse.
That ancient sage whispers in my ear:
I have seen the sea changed three times
into a mulberry field and back again into the sea.
--Meena Alexander
Quickly Changing River
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