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.
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Threaded Mode
