Deborah Warren was born in 1946 and educated at Harvard, where she received her BA in English. She spent fifteen years as a teacher of Latin and English, and ten years as a software engineer, but she and her husband, who have nine children, now raise heifers on a farm in Vermont, while living across the border in Massachusetts.

Warren’s poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Yale Review. Her poetry collections are: THE SIZE OF HAPPINESS (2003, Waywiser, London), runner-up for the 2000 T. S. Eliot Prize; ZERO MERIDIAN, which received the 2003 New Criterion Poetry Prize (2004, Ivan R. Dee); AND the forthcoming:

DREAM WITH FLOWERS AND BOWL OF FRUIT, which received the Richard Wilbur Award, and is due in December of 2008 (University of Evansville).


A mini-interview with Deborah:

HOW WOULD YOU CHARACTERIZE YOUR CHILDHOOD? (Were you a tomboy? Were you mischievous? Were you studious? Did you come from a strict home? Did you have music lessons? Etc.)

Reading! My best memory is walking home from the library with a stack of books. The best place to read was a tree up to even 12th grade. (I was pretty immature—my sister and I played dolls until we were about fifteen. I went to a girls’ school and had no interest in boys until college.)
Maybe my favorite thing was playing cowboys. My bike was usually a horse. I had one piano lesson, but it didn’t take. Ballet was my thing (team sports were an abomination).
Parents today would blanch. From eight or nine years old, I was skittering and swimming and diving all over the rocks and seaweed, getting marooned—the parents never knew where I was or worried. They didn’t care about our schoolwork (home-lessons, as my mother called them). I never really studied till 11th grade, then maybe because college was impending.
In my case mischievous meant bratty or stupid. The head of the New England Mafia lived a few doors down, and we used to play this game of sneaking through the security fence, ringing his doorbell and running away. And I was really mean to my teachers, horrible.


DID POETRY HAVE A PRESENCE in your home when you were growing up? What first awakened you to it?

Not at home, though I did go down in family annals for my first effort:
‘Twas early morning, the sky was blank, and I was about to walk the plank.
At school we had to memorize a lot of English and French poetry, but it was Shakespeare, Keats, and Coleridge that hooked me. I once had to write a “Metrical Analysis of a Sonnet”—the only interesting part was that at the time there was a big dieting product called Metrical.


IS THERE ANYTHING YOU FIND particularly useful as a means to refresh your unique view of the world and your place in it, and, perhaps, trick yourself into making a poem?

When I started out it was often music. These days a phrase or a word is the usual ignition: then, while I’m gassing on about nothing, I try to winkle an idea out of the mess. Speaking of usefulness, I fret mildly about justifying the usefulness of poetry itself—such a self-indulgent pursuit.


WHAT DO YOU LOVE MOST about your part of the world?

The sea, where I lived as a child. I never saw the real country until I was overseas, and now I love rural New England more than anything, especially in autumn.


WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS about Tim Murphy’s claim that there is an “extraordinary efflorescence of terrific poetry by women going on, unprecedented in human history?”

Women have more education, more leisure, and more confidence, so there’s probably more poetry written by women today than ever. Maybe today among poets the proportion of women is larger than ever. But that doesn’t mean women’s poetry is a lot better than it’s ever been or that it’s better than men’s poetry.
Breathtaking as contemporary women poets can be (and I mean especially my colleagues in this discussion), are we a lot better than Millay or H.D. or Dorothy Parker?
I’m not being a sourpuss! But I’m a lawyer’s daughter. Take the ‘unprecedented’ out of Tim’s claim, and maybe I’ll sign it.


A selection of poems:

(Wow, does this one resonate!)
TO A FREQUENT BUSINESS TRAVELLER

Home so seldom, please just stay away
on your important islands. Let the deep
moan round you with its voices. Here, I play
my music, eat my kind of food, and sleep

my own sleep. The entire quiet bed,
bit by small bit, I’ve occupied, until
I own it. Imperceptibly I’ve spread,
Possessing rooms, and house, and barns, to fill

not only space, but time, and there’s no room
to spare for you (where did I put you when
you did come home?). No room for other men
either, so, please, although you don’t come home,

be there, officially. But don’t be here,
in bed and house and barnyard—Best if you’d
leave me entirely abandoned, where
I’ve been so well seduced by solitude.

From London Magazine, April-May, 2004: “(Warren's) best poems, rural, domestic or both, give evidence of a sharp, observant mind. ‘Elizabeth’s Dress’ is a good example of this poet’s varied, conversational, ready-to-be-amused, and always womanly tone.”

ELIZABETH'S DRESS

Elizabeth’s dress was not the red of claret,
not maroon or amethyst or rose.
Vermillion? Not exactly. Was it scarlet?
Ruby? Poppy? Crimson? None of those.
I can have you read the way the velvet
Poured itself around her narrow ankles—
tell you how it showed her shoulders: What
I can’t describe (except by saying not
and cataloguing everything it wasn’t)
would make it flesh and blood and living—but
a thing like color? Dim description doesn’t
splash you with the dye that dyed the dress
or turn your head or make you catch your breath—
and if I could make you see its shade of red,
I still could not describe Elizabeth.


An aside from Leslie: A neighbor's abandoned border collie came to live with us and became our most beloved pet for many years until his death last year at age 14. He was a gloriously beautiful animal, but here in Los Angeles, he was reduced to chasing tennis balls instead of pursuing his true calling. Mick--the name he came to us with--figures prominently in my poem, "Lauren Canyon," which is forthcoming in the next issue of MEASURE. For this reason, I am especially crazy about Deborah's poem,

SHEEPDOG TRIALS AT BLEINAU FFESTINIOG

At the bottom of the field, like woolly boats,
three sheep appear. They’re unaware, of course,
that this is a race, and the first one’s gently drifting
off to the left, and another bobbles and floats
the other way, when something—a gale? a force—
tears at them—veers—its direction shifting, shifting—

a black and white Hermes, fur and motion spurred
by a single message, a single mission: To herd.
A centrifugal ewe like a prodigal yacht
sails out in a stately and leisured trot
but huffily reconsiders, deterred
by the scouring dog; and the second and third

who are heading off—confronted, stop:
he’s there; and the trio slews around,
jibing in unison, parallel. Then,
in a climax of ecstasy—he drops
suddenly, puddle-flat, onto the ground
and sends the flotilla of sheep to the pen.

And the lumbering trainer, rubber-shod,
closes the gate with his crook and slogs
across to the dog who, you could say, ran
because he was told to. You could say the man
created the dog. But no—the dog,
who was made by the wind, is a little god.


The New Yorker, Oct. 1, 2007:
DREAM WITH FLOWERS AND BOWL OF FRUIT

Too many of my dreams these days are boring.
I expect to drop into the pillow
and see the kind of action night is for—
a psychic workout, romance, close escapes:
Not much gets accomplished in a still-life;

nobody looks at asters as a way
to get a taste of life. I want to happen,
not to slightly rearrange my day
nightly in a recurring tablescape.
Dreams! However beautiful the apples,

fruit is low on drama, and I miss
passion, flying, falling, being chased,
crashing, panic—trauma—and I miss,
small and quick, a movement in the grapes,
and the shiver of a petal in the vase.



DIDO, IT WOULD HAVE ENDED ANYWAY


Dido, it would have ended anyway.

Command the sun to linger at its crest

in hot abeyance--order noon to stand

stopped, as if there isn’t any west--

maybe you can get it to obey.

Not love. There’s never been an almanac

that tells when an Aeneas (overdue

in Latium) will leave. No, faithfulness

is for Achates: Love? It barely tops

its hottest summer height before it drops--

as your desire--burnt out--would have, too.

Try something easier, for practice; try

to anchor the daylight and hold the bright ship back

that carries the sun across the windy sky.

SWIMMER

He pauses where the oaks beside the street
grow down into a puddle, with the trees
towering so far below him that—
half-immersed in the landscape at his feet,
leaning over the surface-sheen—he sees
evidence that the earth is far from flat

and, diving into the two dimensions, swims
down, deeper, toward whatever breeze
stirs the branches and ruffles the buried sky,
flutter-kicking his way among the limbs
below—but the water won’t give up the trees,
and he shakes himself and returns to the surface, dry.


REFLECTION

The spoon gives me my face to swallow,
making my facsimile
an upside-down, elastic, hollow
monster of concavity;

or turn it over and—convex—
the features slide away from me,
unhuman—wrong: The spoon reflects
a pinheaded grotesquerie.

Find a mirror, for a candid
likeness: I’m familiar—right—
human. Find an evenhanded
judge of beauty to invite

from elsewhere in the universe—
the stars beyond the spotted moon,
and ask which image he prefers:
Even odds he’ll choose the spoon.


SONG OF THE EGG

If, when he looked, a prophet saw
inside the egg’s imperfect O
a bantam little shadow—death
already curled in the heart of the embryo—

it would be too small a flaw
to brood on, if he heard as well,
clearer than light, a brilliant crowing
shatter the brittle confines of the shell.

Metrical, I remember the ads for that stuff! I guess it went out of fashion. Today's popular dieting is mostly done in free verse. Gads, Deborah, you had me on the floor laughing.

Ok. Perhaps Dorothy Parker, Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, and Elizabeth Bishop were as good as our current crop of woman poets. I don't think so.

I have to agree with Tim on this. Taken in totality -- for clarity, nuance, thought, technical execution, and sheer feeling, I believe our "current crop" is superior to all these above.

There's a line in that "Sheepdog" poem that always makes me laugh as if I had never read it before: "a centrifugal ewe like a prodigal yacht..." and then the relentless dog, "scouring" the cows into order. The distinctive thing about Deborah's poetry is that she is both the ewe and the dog: in the Powow River Poets workshop we know Deborah as the one most likely to come in with an outrageous comparison, a rhyme just on the edge of the permissible, a substitution that will make the sticklers among us roll their eyes.

She's a wild one! But she's also, finally, the "little god" who's always herding. Her poems are invariably alive and compelling, almost dangerous, "prodigal," because of that tension, that desire to get away from home, from her own vigilance.

"Dream with Fruit and Flowers" is just wonderful--and the line "fruit is low on drama" cracks me up every time I read it.

[Note to mods: would you, could you, fix the numerous question marks below--sometimes they should be spaces or other punctuation, as they appear in the "Edit" version of this. It's happening on other threads in DG as well.]

Here's my review of Deborah Warren's The Size of Happiness, written in 2003 and published at The Alsop Review:

The Size of Happiness puts the universe on trial, but Deborah Warren’s poems let it off easy, and with musicality and ironic good sense. She questions the sublime and the enigmatic, the profitable and the futile, and accords equal acceptance to both. Her curiosity is applied to reason, ephemerality, our origins, the varieties of shades of a color, the solitude of the Queen of Spades, whether the Jerusalem artichoke is an artichoke, cancer and its repercussions, why the Trojans opened the gate for the “Trojan” horse, Greek myth, and all manner of unruliness (especially that of love)—and more.

She looks for reason in unusual, as well as in the usual, places. Weightiness morphs into any one of a number of surprises, and her metaphysics is elemental and tentatively instructive. On the subject of love—all-encompassing, glorious and distressing love—she is both analytical and reasonably flippant, as in “Why?”

You want some reason I can cite
for loving him? Go ask the sea
about its bondage to the moody
crooked moon. But don’t ask me.

In “Bargain,” Warren examines how we bargain with God, and turns the profit motive inside-out. What does it mean to make a deal with oneself and then break it? She taps underground resources of maverick wisdom, some of which she seems to have learned from her farmer’s communions with the world of the four-legged. “Sheepdog Trials at Bleinau Ffestiniog” is destined to become a popular favorite, with its close, even preternatural, observation of sheepdogs’ choreography for a “flotilla of sheep.” Her joy in this is contagious.

Sheepdog Trials at Bleinau Ffestiniog

At the bottom of the field, like wooly boats,
three sheep appear. They’re unaware, of course,
that this is a race, and the first one’s gently drifting
off to the left, and another bobbles and floats
the other way, when something—a gale? a force—
tears at them—veers—its direction shifting, shifting—

a black and white Hermes, fur and motion spurred
by a single message, a single mission: To herd.
A centrifugal ewe like a prodigal yacht
sails out in a stately and leisured trot
but huffily reconsiders, deterred
by the scouring dog; and the second and third

who are heading off—confronted, stop:
he’s there; and the trio slews around,
jibing in unison, parallel. Then,
in a climax of ecstasy—he drops
suddenly, puddle-flat, onto the ground
and sends the flotilla of sheep to the pen.

And the lumbering trainer, rubber-shod,
closes the gate with his crook and slogs
across to the dog who, you could say, ran
because he was told to. You could say the man
created the dog. But no—the dog,
who was finally made by the wind, is a little god.


Joy is the coin of the kingdom in many of her poems. In “Landscape in March,” it is translated into the aphoristic remnants of peak experience: hypnotic, matriarchal perhaps, determined, with traces of an ecstasy that comes, with luck, from preoccupation with the natural world.

A number of Warren’s poems show a solemn concern with management. “Managing the Planets” is the title of one section in this collection: the “planets” may be one’s own teenagers, an ailing tree, a herd of ruminants, or a figure in the Bayeux tapestry. Warren holds them up to scrutiny from this angle and that; she will either make sense of them or she will make sense of not making sense. She continually reflects on uncertainty and the tiny handholds it gives up to the seeker. In “Grand Larcener,” she describes the theft of a heart: “although there’s nothing there,/ it’s heavier than the heavy thing that’s gone.” “Hill Start,” about a 17-year-old learning to work a clutch on a hill, asks “How/convince the sweating Sisyphus it will/ (after he tops this stretch) be all downhill?”

She is tantalized by a quote about the Bayeux tapestry (1070-1080) which says “where a certain cleric and Aelfgyva…” but abruptly ends. In “Aelfgyva,” Warren writes:

“We’ve all had an Aelfgyva-at-the-palace.
In she jumps unushered some dull Monday
Abrupt as luck—no thread of exposition
Offered in advance—and disappears
Before her sentence even gets its verb;
And yet we’re stuck with her.

A few lines later, she goes on, at first amusingly:

And pricks you to embroider her an ending,
Marry or kill her off—or anything
But keep her, flanked by dragon-headed pillars,
Scarlet-wimpled, maddening and hanging
There, beside her cleric, as a question
You can neither sew up or unsew.
But keep her. She’s the thing you need the most—
More than the things you can completely know.

This is classic Warren. She toys with her own curiosity, and the reader’s, to amuse or investigate, and finally finds her level with a conclusion at once matter-of-fact, wise and dazzling. At times, she sounds impatient, as if she protested being put on the adviser’s hotseat once again—impatient, but game. She has no compunctions about applying the distinct impracticality of studying the quadratic formula to her poem’s concern with managing “the problem of desire.”

In “Destination,” she gives a tacit response to Gertrude Stein. The question becomes, Is there ever there?

It doesn’t so much disappear as change
Into a thing that isn’t what you thought
And cackles down the road to rearrange
Itself a little further on—alive
And kicking—yes. But it’s a different spot.

Deborah Warren’s work is New England: ruggedly individualistic, dedicated to her husband and children but hardly in a conventional manner, and dedicated to the earth and things of the earth. She is at home in a cow pasture or a myth, a sonnet or a shrug. Unsurprisingly, her work has received the recognition of the Robert Penn Warren Prize (2000), the Nemerov Sonnet Award (2001), and the Robert Frost Award (2002).

Warren’s work shows that, in the very act of deploying rhyme and meter, weightiness is countered and transformed—into pleasure. If at times that pleasure is quirky, so much the better. She finds music everywhere, and makes myth and legend not only accessible but intimately known and knowable. Coming upon her personal ordering of the universe is refreshing, one of the finer rewards that can be had today.




[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited November 15, 2008).]

I first encountered Deborah's work many years ago, when we both had poems published in a little magazine which was either Britain's theological Hrafnhoh, or the journal of the Southern California C.S. Lewis Society -- I've since forgotten which.

Elizabeth's Dress has ever been a favorite, and I love the New Yorker title bit from her new book.

It's always her lean, bladelike gaze that gets me, and -- as Rhina elucidated -- her outrageousness. Deborah demands your unflinching concentration.

I've been thinking about Tim's thesis statement and my Jesuitical (sorry, Tim!)response. I want to take most of it back.

First, thinking of my half-dozen colleagues here in this discussion, I think he's right: there's such a big a bulge RIGHT NOW of superb women poets that it probably IS unprecedented.

Also, this collection of poets write about contemporary life
in a way that makes them kind of 'necesary' for today. Who can possibly describe like Catherine the wonder and humor of infertility travails? And we need a Rhina to reflect on mammograms or to 'weigh in' on bathroom scales and mortality.

I stand by my argument, am happy to see it supported by Jennifer, and now by Deborah. I just have never seen anything like this. I've hosted seven sonnet bake-offs here, and our material is every bit as good as the Nemerov poems. And the women have simply blown the men out of the water. And think of the men, Williamson, Lake, Sullivan, Rosenthal, Gwynn, Murphy, Crawford, Anthony--not exactly a bunch of lightweights. Furthermore, most of the judges were men, traitors to their sex! I think Crawford was the only outright winner, though some of us showed honorably.

I have probably come to this realization from an extreme perspective, XXX chromosome homosexual who decided to master poetry rather than mass murder. Ninety percent of my stuff is sailing, hunting, farming, trekking. No domestic life whatsoever in my work. I grant that isn't the case with many fine male poets. But I stand by my assertion that women are bringing a new sensibility into formal verse. Elizabeth's Red Dress or Jennifer's Dark Lady Sonnets or Rachel Hadas' little masterpiece about sending her little boy off to school in his red hat could not have been written by men. Again, our poetry is richer for it.

[This message has been edited by Tim Murphy (edited November 17, 2008).]

There's also gloom and doom in the fifties generation I don't see in the current crop of women poets. Post WWII perhaps
women felt they needed to sound a note of post-Hiroshima gravitas. I prefer our current ladies' agile ability to take on all the personae.

An amusing anecdote with only slight relation to Tim's digression here...

I know the Russian language, am a translator of the Russian poets (mostly Anna Akhmatova), and several years ago, was invited by Dana Gioia and Michael Peich to participate in a West Chester critical seminar which brought together a panel of about seven translator/poets from Moscow, to discourse with an American group including such translators as F.D. (Frank) Reeve -- Frost's translator in Russia -- as well as Jim Kates, Russian translator and co-director of Zephyr Press, with a number of professors, etc., from across the United States.

Len Krisak moderated our group, and made me the "sacrificial lamb" of sorts, throwing a few of my translations first thing out on the table, to get our discussions going. One of those was the translation of a poem originally by the Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva. We discussed my attempt at length; then, when our allotted time was up, one of the Moscow gentlemen approached me, to continue giving a few insights into some of the peculiarites of Marina's work in general, and mine in particular. I have largely forgotten the conversation, though one thing remains. Just before we separated, he concluded his observations to me with a passionate insistence that Tsvetaeva "must only be translated by a woman"!

This forum was my introduction to Deborah's work. (OK, so I live under a rock.) While I admire all the poems quoted here, I have to acknowledge the genius at work in "SHEEPDOG TRIALS AT BLEINAU FFESTINIOG." I've never read a more accurate description of these dogs. And while I'm not a advocate of imitative form (you know, the poem about angels typed into the shape of wings on a page), the way that Deborah handles these lines and the language so that you have a sense that at any moment both are just going to rip out of her control and go careening down page, is exactly the feeling you have when you see these dogs at work. With long, hard training, they will go from zero to a hundred mph and then a dead stop in seconds, leaving you breathless with admiration, as I am of Deborah.

I bought Deborah's first book, The Size of Happiness, at the West Chester Poetry Conference and read it while flying home. Since I was bumped from a flight, I had lots of time to read and therefore finished it on the trip. As soon as I got home, I had to write Deborah a fan letter. I had enjoyed the book so thoroughly that it was hard even to tell her my favorite poems, there were so many.

Though I hear her referred to as a New England poet (and there are some poems that could justify that designation) she strikes me as being much more cosmopolitan than that term implies. There is an enormous range to her subjects, in time, space, and literatures. She has a questing and questioning spirit that refuses to accept the easy answers, even from herself. Some of her poems are wry, some moving. I feel a sense of Virgil's "the tears of things" behind some of her poems, but faced in a tough-minded rather than sentimental way. The poems are clearly worded, but without sacrificing depth.

Susan

I love these--and Deborah's way with myth here (the Odyssean business traveller, the wonderful Dido song...) But one of the niftiest things about Deborah's work to me is the way there is often a line or rhyme or lack of rhyme that subverts the form. You could read Elizabeth's Dress and think that it was written in cross-rhymed quatrains, but it isn't--there is, wonderfully, no rhyme for "ankles". Take also the penultimate stanza of the business traveller poem, where we go for a moment from cross-rhyme to envelope rhyme, so that room and home are suddenly kept at arm's length. It's like a magician showing you how the trick works, over and over again, and yet still pulling off the illusion right before your eyes.

[This message has been edited by A. E. Stallings (edited November 20, 2008).]