BIOGRAPHY

SUSAN VARON is a poet and artist living in New York City. She received her BA in Humanities from the University of Chicago in 1967, and began writing poetry in 1992, after suffering a severe stroke. She studied for five years with Donna Masini, and was accepted into workshops with Marie Howe, Galway Kinnell, Phillis Levin, and Jean Valentine. Her early poems were published in South Coast Poetry Journal, Outerbridge, Passager, The Snail's Pace Review, and Coffeehouse Poets' Quarterly.

In 1998 she organized an on-going workshop of peer poets taught by Rita Gabis, which is still continuing. Her work has appeared in The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Defined Providence, Amaranth, Rattle, Whiskey Island Magazine, Passages North, Third Coast, Green Mountains Review, Slant, Mangrove,The Midwestern Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Ledge and Painted Bride Quarterly.

In 1999 she won the New Voice Poetry Award of the Writer’s Voice, and was awarded a residency at The MacDowell Colony. She has since received fellowships at Hedgebrook, The Blue Mountain Center and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation.

She teaches writing at Marymount College, and facilitates Survivor Writer’s Workshops, for survivors of physical or emotional trauma, at her home in Manhattan.

"Mezzanine" and "Untitled, 1979", the poems which appear in this issue, represent two strains of her work—the autobiographical narrative ("Mezzanine") and the lyric of pure invention ("Untitled, 1979").

Three additional poetry selections follow, along with attributions for the journals in which they were first published.
 

If Only I Could Have Adventures

like he does, imagining a brick
to be a fortress, imagining fluted summer
spilling out of an old schoolhouse and turning

into a flock of starlings.
Here am I,
racking my brain over how to get

a dairy farm into a thimble,
or my battered life
on to a dairy farm.

I would watch the cows,
their sagging udders like old bagpipes,
remember hearing their scrawling cry,

their strangled music, on mornings
of weddings and funerals,
birth cry and death wheeze, the sack

filling and emptying as the fingers press into it,
press hard and release, the teats begging
for the music of the pail,

the tinny ping and rattle,
the hail of rice falling milky
around the startled bride.

 Third Coast, fall 1999
 
 

History

The English boarded their ships
in seventeen something, the sea
was glass for them, they flew right over.
This is the condensation
of history, all we have time for
now that the country is done for,
but out here on 76th Street
it's hard to see that the brave sapling

just planted and the channel
of morning sun flowing up
from the East River are not believable.
The young tree stands firm,
fresh earth spills over the sidewalk,
and I begin the mantra for walking uphill,
the mantra for turning the corner

at Park Avenue. The people I see
every day walking  in one direction
would be startled to hear
gold has been discovered in the Rockies,
even now in North Carolina
the slaves are crawling out of bed
with the conviction
that nothing will ever change.

While I feel in my pocket for a tissue,
World War II  may break out,
across the ocean mothers
may send their sons off to school
or to war feeling the sorrow and fear
in their bones I feel
when I watch for my daughter
from a dark window.

We say, time stands still,
it can also rush headlong
down the thruway, down
the Autobahn, or twirl
like a gum wrapper caught
in an updraft.
We make it all up,
we make it all up bravely,

I admire us setting out every day determined
to love the world.
 
Green Mountains Review, spring/summer 2000
 
 

This Pond Can Fly

I've seen its wayward glitter overhead, merging
     into cloud.
          Looking down from that height,
it might see trees
taken down at the knees,
their curly heads
crashing softly into silt
and shale,

a piece
     of sky opening
 
          for the first time,

the snakes shuddering
at the fall, their cold hearts
telling them to learn
another language.

But the future might dip and turn, drop
     down again into the pond's
          braided radiance.

The goldfish
might waver in the water
          like good and bad children,
deciding which god
     to serve, not understanding
the pond itself
is god.

The Midwest Quarterly,spring 2001