Expanded Bio:
Rebecca Warner lives in Boston and teaches at the University of Massachusetts. She was recently awarded the Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University, where starting in the fall she'll teach creative writing and assist in editing West Branch. Her poems have appeared or will appear in Graham House Review, Poet Lore, Paterson Literary Review, Ararat, Minnesota Review and Puerto del Sol. Her essay "Imp of Verbal Darkness: Poetry Hoaxes and the Postmodern Politic" is forthcoming in the AWP Writer's Chronicle. Her first collection of poems, Northwest Passage, will be published by Orchises Press in January 2005.
 

Commentary on Poems:
I wrote "The Meadow" after a student lecture at Bennington College which focused on the way art is characterized by an sense of terror and violence in relation to beauty. The lecturer, Kathy Nilsson, showed a clip from Tarkovsky's The Mirror of soldiers marching through shallow water, some carrying remains of the dead. The camera's gaze is relentless; one half-naked soldier is ruthlessly exposed. My friend Mike said about the clip and about the subject of Nilsson's lecture, "You can't look away."

"Freefall" was inspired by the poetry of Joe Bolton, who committed suicide and offers hints of it throughout his work. I'd  characterize my piece as a "pseudocidal" poem--that is, I was not considering suicide myself but was interested in the human desire for oblivion. The "poet waving from the brink" refers to John Berryman who, according to a witness, waved at a passerby as he leapt to his death from a bridge. In subsequent revisions of the poem, I substituted the word "brink" for "bridge."