![]() Her various teaching jobs finally led to a tenure-track position in 1988 when Middlebury College appointed her associate professor. In addition, she was visiting writer and the Jenny McKean Moore Fellow at George Washington University in 1984, where she wrote and published her first book of poems, The Housekeeping Book. She was a professor of creative writing and English at her alma mater, Phillips Andover Academy (1979-81), at the University of Vermont (1981-83), and at the University of Illinois (1985-88). From 1975 to 1978 she served as Poet-in-the-Schools in Kentucky, Delaware, and North Carolina. The CLIC created an intimate and engaged community.Although more widely known for her prose, Julia Alvarez began her literary career as a poet. Another poem in our great Catholic tradition: “Tony, Tony, please come down / something’s lost that must be found.” In addition to rich literary discussions, I had the opportunity to chase after Alvarez: “Julia, are these your glasses?” It was a thrill to encounter a literary great of our time in an everyday moment that made tangible the tree branches connecting community. Writing, for Alvarez, is her vocation and she encouraged the audience to “find your calling.” It is, therefore, her responsibility to “be the best writer can be” in order to answer the call. “It seeps into the story,” Alvarez explains of her roots. Likewise, a writer raised with or converted to Catholicism is enriched by the worldview. “I couldn’t keep the southern continent out of / the northern vista of my eyes, or cut my cara / off to spite my face.” In “All American Girl,” read by Alvarez, the speaker discusses the inescapable fact of her Dominican origins. The Mass, Catholic prayer, song and the sacraments are the initial and formative experiences of poets raised Catholic, a fact shared and celebrated throughout the conference by today’s great contemporary Catholic poets, including Alvarez, Gioia, Paul Mariana and Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. It strives to say the unsayable in its incantation,” Alvarez explains. “Poetry is about what you can’t put into words. “We have to live our natures out, the seed / we call our soul unfolds over the course / of a lifetime and there’s no going back / on who we are,” the speaker states in Alvarez’s poem, “Locust.” In another poem in the collection, a military airstrip is described “as if to clear a pathway up to God.” The book begins with seven tree poems, originally published in the limited edition art book, “Seven Tree: Poems by Julia Alvarez and Lithographs by Sara Eichner.” “When I was born, my mother wrote me down / on the family tree, a second bough / dangling from her branch which was attached / to a great trunk which sunk down into roots / sprung from the seeds of Spain and Africa,” the speaker begins in the opening poem, “Family Tree,” collected in “The Woman I Kept To Myself.” The earthly echo of the Communion of Saints is recognition of our place in a family tree. The importance of one’s place among the family’s generations is the foundational participation in community to which Christ calls. Body parts belong to the chain of relatives. Your eyes are an aunt’s, your feet a great-grandfather’s. In a large family, Alvarez remarked, you don’t belong to yourself. In her poem “Who To Ask,” the children in the extended family consider who to ask for candy or permission or notice “Not La La, with her movie star smile” or the aunt with “hair like frothy frosting.” But “he never rang / except in church bells.”Īlvarez describes herself as a bead amongst the people in her family. ![]() 19-21 through the Institute of Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California.ĭana Gioia, public intellectual and former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, describes Julia Alvarez as having a profoundly Catholic imagination.Īlvarez wrote a poem for the conference in which the speaker says, “I used to ask for signs / a great flashlight from the skies,” and “on more ambitious days / the stigmata.” The young teenage speaker talks of Jesus’ dreamy eyes, wishing he would call. Julia Alvarez read new poetry to a captivated audience at the Catholic Literary Imagination Conference (CLIC), held Feb.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |