So throughout a career spanning seven books of poetry to date,
Eleanor Wilner makes a tacit argument for the necessary work
poetry can do in our difficult world.
She puts it this way in a poem titled,
"Never Apologize for Poetry."
"In this union with the word, the long reach
of our little minds that compass galaxies and quail
before the corners of a room at night
can still ignite what otherwise might just go darkly on."
Igniting is a key metaphor for understanding
what Wilner does in her poems as she considers history,
the natural world, mythology, scripture,
visual art, and the effects of war and violence.
Wilner constantly shifts the expected perspective,
setting familiar scenes ablaze with light
that reveals them anew.
In her most recent book, Tourists in Hell,
published in 2010, she engages most deeply
with the ever present specter of war and violence.
A topic to which she has born unwavering witness since Maya,
her first collection of poetry published in 1979.
In Wilner's poetry, we find our way to, quote,
"mourners, weeping at the cemetery we have made
of what was once their home."
We find the work of poetry enacted by a girl
in the rubble, quote, "who will never understand.
Who, nevertheless, is picking up stone after stone,
trying to piece it together again."
Poetry, in the hands of Eleanor Wilner,
not only confronts the violence that we perpetuate,
but also transforms it.
In the blaze of the poet's eye, pain
can be transfigured into renewal.
In "Up Against It," for instance,
the crack of the bullets which ended the life of poet Federico
García Lorca during the Spanish Civil War,
can be replaced with, quote, "the shift and seethe
of the sap forcing its slow way toward the branching twigs.
The ear splitting crack as the end is riven by budding.
A salt breeze in the orchard, the small
leaves trembling with light."
Wilner trains her attention on heartbreaking moments.
On narratives that feel inevitable.
And she transforms them with a vision
that dares to imagine something better.
Eleanor Wilner is the author of seven books of poetry,
including Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems.
She is also the author of Gathering the Winds:
Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation
of Self and Society.
And co-editor of The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry.
A faculty member of the MFA program at Warren Wilson
College and former editor of the American Poetry Review, Wilner
has been recognized with fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation.
In her poetry we encounter the life
of a rigorous, capacious, and fiercely imaginative mind.
Please join me in welcoming Eleanor Wilner.