Private Mentorship with Maureen Alsop

BIO

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag, 2007), Later, Knives & Trees (Negative Capability Press, 2014), Mantic (Augury Books, 2013), Mirror Inside Coffin (WordTech Editions, 2015) and several chapbooks including Luminal Equation in the collection Narwhal (Cannibal Press), the dream and the dream you spoke, and 12 Greatest Hits, Nightingale Habit and Origin of Stone. She is the winner of Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including AGNI, Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, Berkeley Poetry Review, Bitter Oleander, Blackbird, Diode, Drunken Boat, Kenyon Review Online, Pank, Spinning Jenny, Baltimore Review, Pinch, Versaland Verse Daily, among others.

ARTIST & TEACHING STATEMENT

The woman memorizes the rows of seagrass, shallow whips in the mirror low and far behind her reflection. Into the sea’s sound she leans. Motes of her sister’s ash double in shallow grove behind her, a buried room in which the doors prop open.

Suppose it was necessary, what I never wanted to tell you.

The work is over.   

Into a thousand bolts, wheels etched a feldspar petroglyph, new pollens signaled colonist’s arrival, trains advanced. 

Behind me the lighthouse disappears into the horizon’s withered thicket.

The truth begins without a masterpiece. You don’t believe in the reversal of words, violence as a rehearsal. At my last death, earlier placed among the aquatic fears in the ledgers, I lay down deep beneath the sea. How unfaithful I was to the water spaced over sternum, cartilage in stretches of clay. Every small decision led me, in unrelenting obedience, to repatriation, like a gambler’s evolution, the whack of it, a work unseen. It was my choosing. Speak to me. I’ve no sense of completion.

ON MY READING SHELF

Seven images of the real Madonna, a one-inch by two-inch black and white profile of Ery Bos, a box of rusted bottle caps, Irish coins, plastic soldiers.  I read fortunes for spectres, concede to blackouts, obsess on endangered species. I work from a seaweed-scented carriage house. I wait for your Morse code transcriptions. I wait for Morgan horses to carry me to the water’s surface. I remember near death experiences in Maya Deren film clips.

I wish I lived next door to Mrs Caliban, could drink coffee with a Clarice Lispector character.

Why hesitate. What more do you need.