COMPLIMENTS OF FAMOUSPOETSANDPOEMS.COM Cecilia Woloch was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up there and in rural Kentucky, one of seven children of a homemaker and an airplane mechanic. She attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, earning degrees in English and Theater Arts, before moving to Los Angeles in 1979. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University L.A. in 1999. A celebrated teacher, Ms. Woloch has conducted poetry workshops for thousands of children and young people throughout the United States and around the world, as well as workshops for professional writers, educators, participants in Elderhostel programs for senior citizens, and inmates at a prison for the criminally insane. She has served on the creative writing faculties at the University of Redlands, California State University at Northridge, The New England College MFA Program in Poetry, Emory University in Atlanta, and she is currently a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California as well as a member of the core faculty of the low-residency MFA Program in Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.She is the founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and of The Paris Poetry Workshop. Her books of poems are Sacrifice (Cahuenga Press, 1997), a BookSense 76 selection in 2001; Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem; (Cahuenga Press, 2002) and Late (BOA Editions, 2003) for which she was named Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry in 2004. Her poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2005, Billy Collins 180 More (Extraordinary Poems for Every Day), Garrison Keillors Good Poems for Hard Times, among others, and have also appeared in such journals and magazines as The Antioch Review, Nimrod, New Letters, The Chattahoochee Review, Zyzzyva, Natural Bridge, and on Minnesota Public Radios The Writers Almanac. Her prose, essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in Quick Fiction, The New Southerner, The Cider Press Review, The Poetry Flash, Sentence and other publications. Her poems have been translated into French, German and Polish, and she spends part of each year on the road in the U.S. and Europe. Publications. Late is driven by the alternating energies of prose poems and free verse. Woloch understands a person’s true relationships with family, friends and lovers arrive late—if at all. The exquisite pathos in these poems disclose Woloch’s abiding empathy for family, children, ex-lovers, and strangers. To write movingly about love in an era infused with hate requires a special gift: nostalgia hard-edged with realism. She has that gift. -- Maxine Kumin Tsigan is a book-length poetic meditation that intertwines the authors personal journey of identity with the larger forces in the world that have shaped the Roma peoples fate and fortunes. Upon the blank page of her grandmothers, and every gypsys, death, Cecilia Woloch writes her own story. Haunted. Unsettled. Gorgeously so. -- Ralph Angel Sacrifice is hailed by poet-critic David St. John as an extraordinary debut . . . The exquisite sensuality of these poems is matched only by [their] heart-breaking delicacy . . . Cecilia Wolochs poems unveil the wreckage of love after what has been sacramental turns sacrificial . . . they are prayers spoken to, and on behalf of, a difficult world. On Faith by Cecilia Woloch How do people stay true to each other? When I think of my parents all those years in the unmade bed of their marriage, not ever longing for anything else — or: no, they must have longed; there must have been flickerings, stray desires, nights she turned from him, sleepless, and wept, nights he rose silently, smoked in the dark, nights that nest of breath and tangled limbs must have seemed not enough. But it was. Or they just held on. A gift, perhaps, Ive tossed out, having been always too willing to fly to the next love, the next and the next, certain nothing was really mine, certain nothing would ever last. So faith hits me late, if at all; faith that this latest love wont end, or ends in the shapeless sleep of death. But faith is hard. When he turns his back to me now, I think: disappear. I think: not what I want. I think of my mother lying awake in those arms that could crush her. That could have. Did not. (from the collection Late) Burning the Doll by Cecilia Woloch I am the girl who burned her doll, who gave her father the doll to burn the bride doll I had been given at six, as a Christmas gift, by the same great uncle who once introduced me at my blind second cousins wedding to a man who winced, A future Miss America, Im sure while I stood there, sweating in a prickly flowered dress, ugly, wanting to cry. I loved the uncle but I wanted that doll to burn because I loved my father best and the doll was a lie. I hated her white gown stitched with pearls, her blinking, mocking blue glass eyes that closed and opened, opened and closed when I stood her up, when I laid her down. Her stiff, hinged body was not like mine, which was wild and brown, and there was no groom stupid doll, who smiled and smiled, even when I flung her to the ground, even when I struck her, naked, against the pink walls of my room. I was not sorry, then, I would never be sorry not even when I was a bride, myself, and swung down the aisle on my fathers arm toward a marriage that wouldnt last in a heavy dress that was cut to fit, a satin dress I didnt want, but that my mother insisted upon Who gives this woman? wondering, Who takes the witchy child? And that day, my father was cleaning the basement; hed built a fire in the black can in the back of our backyard, and I was seven, I wanted to help, so I offered him the doll. I remember he looked at me, once, hard, asked, Are you sure? I nodded my head. Father, this was our deepest confession of love. I didnt watch the plastic body melt to soft flesh in the flames I watched you move from the house to the fire. I would have given you anything. (from the collection Sacrifice) The Pick by Cecilia Woloch I watched him swinging the pick in the sun, breaking the concrete steps into chunks of rock, and the rocks into dust, and the dust into earth again. I must have sat for a very long time on the split rail fence, just watching him. My fathers body glistened with sweat, his arms flew like dark wings over his head. He was turning the backyard into terraces, breaking the hill into two flat plains. I took for granted the power of him, though it frightened me, too. I watched as he swung the pick into the air and brought it down hard and changed the shape of the world, and changed the shape of the world again. (from the collection Sacrifice) from Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem by Cecilia Woloch In Warsaw, blackbird girls swoop down in flocks the old town square a swirl of dark-eyed dark-haired girls in brilliant skirts who circle laughing at my waist throw up their arms to beg for sweets who know among the tourists whom to choose (how do they know?) so being chosen, being glad in any language (tak means yes) I let them pick from sticky cakes behind the glass, the old proprietress glares back at me and thinks, Amerykanka, idiotka but cannot refuse my cash (how far in zlotys dollars go!) so I buy cake for every girl then watch them fly away again their small hands sugared, glittering as if Id given jewels to them the sky above the bitter city sharp as diamonds then NOTE: Gypsies were incarcerated with Jews in the ghettoes of Bialystok, Krakow, Lodz, Lviv, Radom and Warsaw. … The total number of gypsies brought into [one] ghetto was eleven dead and 4,996 living. Of those, 2,686 were children. -- Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 14:44:59 +0000
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