Thursday, February 4th: Poetry Flash presents Mary Jo Bang and Lyn Hejinian

Mary Jo Bang is an acclaimed poet whose first collection, Apology for Want, received the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize for first book of poetry in 1996. Her other works include Louise in Love and The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans.

"There is a quiet anarchy in the spare poems" of Apology for Want, wrote Susan Conley in Ploughshares. Conley noted that the subject matter of the work is culturally American, "one of shopping malls and consumption. . . . But the voice is subversive and unsettling, the syntax wholly unique and invented for the dark ephemeral region of longing this book inhabits." "Her poems are a route to a new way of looking at what we've grown into," argued Frank Allen in the American Book Review, "'the longing' that restores us to what we once 'hoped' to be."

Many critics were enthusiastic in their response to the collection. Allen found Bang's imagery "filled with beautiful, difficult thought." Ellen Kaufman in Library Journal called the collection "difficult, [and] allusive," arguing that Apology for Want is "interesting, with occasional flashes of brilliance." A Publishers Weekly critic lauded the "nice tension between the clarity of form and the open-endedness of Bang's articulated emotion." Conley concluded that the poems leave the reader "slightly stunned each time by their impact and exactitude—daring to ask the very largest of questions." (from the Poetry Foundation)

Listen to Mary Jo Bang...

Lyn Hejinian was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1941. Poet, essayist, and translator, she is also the author or co-author of several books of poetry, including The Fatalist (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003), My Life in the Nineties (Shark, 2003), and A Border Comedy (2001).

Other collections include The Beginner (2000), Happily (2000), Sight (with Leslie Scalapino, 1999), The Cold of Poetry (1994), The Cell (1992), My Life (1980), Writing Is an Aid to Memory (1978), and A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking (1976). She is also the author of The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000), a collection of essays.

From 1976 to 1984, Hejinian was editor of Tuumba Press, and since 1981 she has been the co-editor of Poetics Journal. She is also the co-director of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets. (from Poets.org)

Listen to Lyn Hejinian...