Thursday Mar 28

EleniSikelianos.jpg Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Body Clock and The California Poem, as well as a hybrid memoir, The Book of Jon.  Her translation of Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges on Light appeared in 2009.   She has been the happy recipient of a number of awards, from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Fellowships, The National Poetry Series, New York Foundation for the Arts, Princeton University’s Seeger Fellowship, and the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, among others.  She has collaborated with musicians, visual artists, and performs a leading role in two films by Ed Bowes.  Her work has been translated into a dozen languages, and she has participated in a number of international poetry festivals, including the Centre National du Livre’s Belles Etrangères two-week reading tour of France, the Days of Poetry and Wine in Slovenia, the Barcelona Poetry Festival, and Metropole Bleu in Montreal.  At present, Sikelianos teaches in the Naropa Summer Writing Program as well as the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver, which she also directs.  She shares her days with the novelist Laird Hunt and their daughter Eva Grace.
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Verb / Verbatim (Eva’s first told dream)
 
 
What’s mamma do
you’re back, you came back from the snow
 
Did you been in the snow
   when I was dreaming about you?
         You carried the horses
            on your back, you held them
tight all the way from Denver, you carried
            the snow on your back
 
What’s mamma do —
I’m sleeping and I’m dying