Observable ReadingsPoets Bridget Lowe and Katy Didden, Consummate Explorers, Report Their Findings to Observable Readings on Feb. 6 at the Schlafly Bottleworks
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 10:12 PM
"Tell me," pleads the speaker in the opening lines of "Poem for Virginia in Ecstasy" by Bridget Lowe. "Tell me all about it."
That consuming curiosity is emblematic of Lowe's poetry, which investigates, interrogates, and animates its subjects with a strong mix of empathy and imagination. Those subjects range widely, from the brilliant but unstable Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky to troubled 1980s actress Sean Young to the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who emerged from the French woods that were his home in January of 1800. They are objects of curiosity, estranged, misunderstood, sometimes reviled--as Lowe puts it in an interview with The Collagist, "those who are rejected by the same social groups for which they're expected to perform." Whether depicting Nijinsky's autopsy (his feet are opened in search of a mechanism that would explain his genius) or Sean Young's turn as Isadora Duncan in a Russian ballet (she is adored), Lowe's poems want to know more, to see beneath the costume to the essence of the individual. They celebrate their subjects' differences--which is to say their genius--by laying them bare.
A Kansas City native and current resident, Bridget Lowe earned her MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her poem "The Pilgrim is Bridled and Bespectacled," originally published in Ploughshares, has been included in 2011's Best American Poetry. She won a "Discovery"/Boston Review Prize and the 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellowship to McDowell Colony. Her first book of poems, At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2013. Click here to read an interview with Lowe and here to read a sample of her work.
In her work, Katy Didden explores the world--longingly, and like a pro. Her poems describe microsized vineyards, the sculptures of Chartres Cathedral, a nest within arm's reach at Iguazu Falls bridge, a Vermont fair transformed by fog. Where Didden the poet has or hasn't literally been is impossible to tell, as the details in her work are exceptionally convincing. But it is where the mind goes in these poems that is so engaging, honest, and enlightening. In fact, in the poem "Mind's-Eyed Island," the poet explores a place no human can visit, the new and protected volcanic island of Surtsey: "a where we can't wreck." The reflection on this place says so much about our sometimes well-meaning inability to "leave be" the unknown, and it exemplifies the compassionate and critical, fun and serious perspective of the poet, who has said about writing ...
If you peer into a post-poem brain (after the top of the head has lifted off),
you might see synapses trailblazing faster routes to delight or compassion
(or occasionally to the brink of existential abyss).
Didden's poetry has appeared in The Best New Poets 2009, Crazyhorse, Hayden's Ferry Review, Image, The Journal, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, Smartish Pace, and Witness. She is the recipient of the John Ciardi Scholarship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and an Academy of Americans Poets Prize. Her manuscript Avalanche has been a finalist for six national book contests, including the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and the National Poetry Series. She earned her PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri, where she served as poetry editor for The Missouri Review. Now in St. Louis, Didden is a postdoctoral fellow in the Micah Program at St. Louis University.
To read a sample of her poetry, click here. Two additional poems, including "Mind's-Eyed Island," can be found here.