Concerns of My Work

The space of my work: a concavity; a “from the other side;” the length of hearts, like a bone; the place of fissure; a testimony; a burning; a sundering place; what the soul says; an ellipsis that preys. The material of my work: words. A word is a leading. Stile & gate, a foot-path. Let me mow the grass. Turn its surge, make yet again press-money for the crow-keeper, or a clothier’s yard. My particular kind of making is a breaking of the self, a room of solitude where the soul seeks acquittal. My making is lying. My making is truth-telling. My making is rude mouth music.

Imagination is my office, my work, my ordering, my something done for another. For this, there are office hours, postings outside my door, strophes for gathering.

I am a lyric poet. I write two very distinct kinds of poems. Some poems are plain and in the voice of ordinary folk, including myself. Some poems are in a more elaborate vocabulary and syntax, the voices of persons from the past, including sometimes myself. The landscape of Minnesota and of the Apostle Islands has influenced my poetry profoundly; so has the emotive landscape of the 16^th century English poets whom I teach. My thematic concerns are with the interior rooms and furniture of the self. I want to say what happens there. Until what happens there is made, it is an unstruck bell. It lacks figuration. It lacks domestic detail. It has no resting place. It is no-thing. I want to make that place, a privacy trained to fold like an envelope, hold still.

I write and I teach. This requires balance, discipline, husbandry of time and creative energy. I write or tend to the work of editing my work every other morning September through May and everyday in the summer. My process is generally one of combing, musing, vexing an image into a sentence and then into form. Last, but not least, is the process of revision. Only in the summer have I regularly had the benefit of face to face critique from others.

My head is full; my sentence is ripe. Form seems to arrive as the sentences do. This is a blessing and a gift. The un-made within me is like a possum which hides under a house waiting for the green apples to fall. It is a keen yearning. I yearn to tend, even eat the green apple: my words and my craft. I need to live inside my own poetic house, practice my own husbandry of muse. I yearn, need to make, to crawl within the sentence to the sharp, hard light (light can peel your eyes) of my poem. I need to make those sentences now. I need to work in my poetic house sooner than later. I have written two books in a little over than a year. The clock is mine now; I am tending its tick.

Hooker, Eva M.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND ELIGIBILITY

“Work,” in Claiming the Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women’s Poetry, edited by Marilyn Sewell. Beacon Press, 1996.

“So Unlike Any Simple Thing I know,” “Lascia ch’io pianga,” “Location-Notes,” “Waiting Room in P-Town,” Vermont Literary Review, Spring/Summer 1997.

“Mrs. Johnson’s Barn,” CrossCurrents, Spring 1998.

“There are no tears here, no mizzle, no ash,” North Dakota Quarterly, Spring 1998.

“Dragonfly,” Orion, Summer 1999.

“That Bode Weeping,” Salmagundi, forthcoming, fall or winter 2000. (Also in Winter Keeper).

The Winter Keeper. Chapiteau Press, 2000. (book of poetry)

“The Clothier’s Yard: Church and the Imagination. An Essay in Prose Strophes.” In a book as yet untitled on the Church and the intellectual life. Edited by Tom Landy. Paulist Press, Spring or Fall 2001.

I have published essays on 16^th century literature and on the nature of the liberal arts over the last twenty years. They do not seem relevant to this application, so I have not listed them.

I have taught English literature and creative writing for many years. I was vice president for academic affairs at Saint John’s University, Collegeville for nine years.

In the course of my academic career, I have had several fellowships: an NEH summer stipend, an ACE fellowship in academic administration, NEH summer seminars (2), a year long NEH fellowship for participation in a Shakespeare seminar at the Folger Library. All of the fellowships I have had previously have been for my work in 16^th century studies. I have also had several grants from Saint John’s for participation in Frank Bidart’s master class at the New York State Writers’ Institute (3 times). The shift from 16^th century studies to the writing of poetry has been supported solely by faculty development grants from Saint John’s or from my own funds. My decision to commit myself to writing as close to full time as my finances would permit has been a good one; my first book was published this year. The consequences have been fiscally tough.