Here's the text from the entire interview I was talking about:
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DePaul Magazine
Winter, 2005
Prize-winning Poet Wields ‘Wicked Pen’
The words come in snippets, images glimpsed out a window or triggered by a book, jotted down on a notebook for further pondering. Unlit rooms will ruin us,
a squall of glass slippers,
conjugation, mimesis obscured.
--from “Narrowing”
Sometimes, they come in a torrent, falling fully formed onto the page. What woman’s body
doesn’t start and hum
with the moon, tiny
wildness beating inside
like a drum.
--from “Witchcraft”
Then the real work begins, says poet Kristy Bowen (LAS ‘99) who recently won first place in the Poetry Center of Chicago’s 10th Annual Juried Reading.
She pours over the words, tweaking and pushing, seeking the right rhythm and sound. She returns to the poem again and again, even after it’s been published.
“I don’t think I ever know it’s done. I’ll publish something and then put it together for something else, a chapbook or online journal, and it’s a different version,” she says.
By day, Bowen is a mild-mannered library assistant at Columbia College Chicago, helping faculty and students find the information they need.
But at night, she becomes Wicked Pen, weaving feminism, folklore, and erotica into “muscular lyric poems” that are “sculptural, opaque, and suggestive as beach glass,” according to the Poetry Center of Chicago’s website. Knows that only some return
home safely, the others
lost to kitchens and wind.
--from “Sweet”
Bowen was nearly lost to poetry, enrolling at DePaul to earn a masters degree in English as preparation to teach it in high school or college. Instead, she discovered the poetry of William Butler Yeats and, through it, her own voice.
“I started writing short stories in college and discovered that I could translate the same things into poems, and they were better,” she says.
She now writes daily, submitting her work to online and print journals. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, an award given only to small press authors.
She also founded and edits her own online journal, Wicked Alice, sifting and formatting the submissions of other poets she likes. She’s published two chapbooks, Bloody Mary and The Archaeologist’s Daughter,” as well as a print version of Wicked Alice.
“The more I have things accepted, the more I publish, the more I am inspired to write,” she says, “It strengthens your belief that you can do it.”
To read more of Bowen’s work or for a schedule of her poetry readings, visit:
www.angelfire.com/poetry/wickedpen.
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