Nature Morte au Plat et Pommes Still life by Cézanne (literally, “Dead Nature”)

These apples fill the silver bowl
with their roundness, plump globes
of red, yellow, green; you can feel them
fit in the palm of your hand, even though
they’re huile sur toile, oil on canvas,
imagination, pigment, and air. But
think about apples themselves, all that juice
and sweet flesh, springing from black seeds,
rain and dirt, the first transubstantiation, stemming
from Eden. Who was the first gardener, the one
before Adam, who planted winesap pips
and waited, then pruned suckers and water shoots,
thinned the blossoms, defruited and deadheaded,
hoping for a good harvest? No wonder Eve was bedazzled;
they shone like jewels on a velvet tray. The rosy skin,
the satisfying crunch, each succulent bite. And then she cut
slices, fed them to her lover, wedge by dripping wedge,
licked the sugar from his fingers. It wasn’t the knowledge
of good and evil after all that opened their eyes, but the hunger
of the body that argues against still life, that says, “I am alive
on this green earth, and I want more.”

Artist’s Statement

I n the fall of 2003, I had a writing residency at the VCCA (Virginia Center for the Creative Arts), and went with a project in mind, which was to write two poems based on paintings (ekphrastic work) to add to some I’d already written so that I had enough to enter the group in a chapbook contest with a December deadline. I’d always been resistant to the idea of writing to a specific assignment, such as the calls in Poets & Writers for poems on particular themes, even though a number of my friends worked this way. I’d also been resistant to writing poems to fill out a book; my previous method of manuscript construction was to lay out what I’d already written, like a giant paper puzzle, and see what the relationships were. So I went with some baggage, and a small voice that said, “You don’t write this way, so you won’t be able to do this.” But not only did I write the two I’d hoped for, I went on to write three or four more.

Of course, there was some irony—I went home, it was the holidays, and I missed the deadline for the contest. But later that spring, I saw a call for another one, and so those poems became Impressionism, which won the Grayson Chapbook Contest in 2004. Still later, many of them made their way into Radiance, my first full-length book. But more importantly, I’d broken with my own past habits, and in the mysterious ways that poems happen, this freed me to start writing to my own prompts when I was teaching, and also led me to take part in some peer prompt retreats, where 6-8 women gathered for several days, each taking a turn directing a prompt, suggesting materials for a new poem. My preference is still to write from my own ideas, so I find that I like the poems better that come out of my own prompt suggestions, but I’ve also come to see that I’m now more receptive to new ideas, new ways of getting into a poem, working it from different angles, tones, subjects. Let the poems come, how they will. It is almost as if before, I was heading down a straight and narrow highway, but now I’m meandering on the back roads, allowing myself to get lost, stop at a stream or a roadside dive; I’m open to all possibilities.