Post by shayepoet on Aug 30, 2008 16:52:34 GMT 2
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Rare Momentum
Athena Kildegaard
For three years we lived in Guanajuato, Mexico, and in order to get our mail, we'd drive down the road to San Miguel de Allende. Many times on those trips, I'd stop in at the Centro Cultural Bellas Artes, a former convent, where I could enjoy excellent coffee under the porticoes. Here in the Bellas Artes, one of the three great Mexican muralists, David Alfaro Siqueiros, began but did not finish a mural. The light in the room where the mural begins to cover one enormously long wall is dim, probably to protect the mural, but there's enough to make out Siqueiros' method. Lines dissect the wall at a variety of angles--a pattern that meant nothing to me the first time I saw it. But I found myself growing interested in his method and so did a little research. Siqueiros, like many artists, composers, and architects before him, was using the fibonacci sequence and the golden mean as a foundation for his mural.
And so I became interested in the possibility of using the fibonacci as the formal structure of a poem. Little did I know that many had come before me in this project! Pretty soon I found myself obsessed with the form and this book is the result: 62 seven-line fibs that draw their inspiration from the natural world, the spiral of time, and love.
Sample poem:
One
thing
I hid
(fake gold ring)
because I wasn’t
allowed a boyfriend, not friend but
boy who wrote “my true love witch is you.” I hid my broom.
Praise and reviews for Rare Momentum:
“In the manner of a nautilus shell or a galaxy that spirals larger and larger, [Kildegaard] tends to start small, as with a single object, and sweep ever wider in a way that flows naturally, inevitably, and conversationally.”
--Nancy Connolly, Borderlands, Fall/Winter 2007
"Athena Kildegaard's collection carries us into a series of enfoldings and unfoldings, working through a spiral of memory and language. In Rare Momentum, we are delighted to find ourselves inside a shape that can hold everything from a sparrow's nest to the planets beyond the sun. This series of poems questions and recommends perfection; it invites us into a long contemplation of how both darkness and light forward us on our way."
--Joyce Sutphen, author of Naming the Stars
"In her hands, the Fibonacci series is neither a formal stunt, nor stunted by formality, but is an opportunity to present vitally compressed feeling within a formal structure which is at once constrained and expansive.
--John Calvin Rezmerski, from the preface
About the author:
Athena Kildegaard was born in Wyoming, grew up in Minnesota, and has lived in Sydney, Australia; Chicago, Illinois; Austin, Texas; Oxford, Mississippi; New Orleans, Louisiana; Roskilde, Denmark; and Guanajuato, Mexico. She now lives in Morris, prairie pothole country, in Minnesota where she directs a non-profit cultural organization, is a roster artist with COMPAS/Writers and Artists in the Schools, and occasionally teaches at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Her book of fibonaccis, Rare Momentum, was published by Red Dragonfly Press (2006), a lively independent press in southeastern Minnesota. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and a few anthologies including Letters to the World for which she is an Associate Editor, published by Red Hen Press.
More of Athena's work can be found here:
Artful Dodge: tinyurl.com/68xdd6
Messo Cammin: tinyurl.com/6rbmcw
For Poetry: tinyurl.com/6zo6ae (translations)
ISBN: 978-1-890193-65-2, 71 pages,
$15 at Amazon; $10 from the publisher
Red Dragonfly Press, 2006
[glow=teal,2,300]BUY HERE, BUY NOW:[/glow]
Red Dragonfly Press: tinyurl.com/6gw5md
Amazon: tinyurl.com/62gnvw