In her poem “Parsonage with Two Maples” (published in Image #60), Terri Witek renews Emily Dickinson’s call to “tell it slant.” We sense that it is an autobiographical poem, yet it quickly becomes clear that this is not a work in the confessional mode: there is no “I” calling attention to itself on center stage. Instead, we encounter something like a Hopper painting: a large, open space with distant figures and only the ghosts of narratives past. There is a cat, one or more children, a woman arranging flowers in the church sanctuary, large fields that need to be mowed, and an express train that hurtles onward toward the big city. The poem’s second part demonstrates that this seemingly impersonal approach is anything but indifferent: in it, the speaker offers praise, a form of utterance one might hear in a church or a parsonage. “Praise to the scratch of the past / on the future, praise to the vegetables / someone’s blanching for dinner….” The world Witek depicts forms something like a mould; the space to be filled in is her. As one reviewer on Amazon.com said, apropos of Witek’s latest collection: “The poems in The Shipwreck Dress are mysterious and irresistible, like a beautiful, ghostly figure beckoning, teasing desire while remaining somehow just out of reach.” As we read Witek’s poems, our own ghostly selves step out to meet hers in the open space of the poem. Together, we dance.
Some of Witek’s work is featured in Image issue 60. Read a poem by Witek here.
Biography
I grew up in Sandusky, Ohio, the product of lake effect and a very Catholic upbringing. Daily Mass taught me to sit still, to consider, in my lap, words I didn’t understand (Latin) and, on the opposite page, Mannerist paintings, pastel and agonistic— my missal kept producing a changeable small diptych. And the situation apparently was imprinted—many of my poems reproduce the situation of reading art books, of moving from word to picture, picture to word. My first attempts were pretty direct–I try to find my way into Renaissance paintings and engravings in my first book of poems, Fools and Crows. Then, after sitting for oil painter Gary Bolding for 18 months, I began to think about being both in the painting and correspondingly in the artist—the canvas has taken the place of the spine of the book, the interior frame of the diptych, in Carnal World. Perhaps I’m beginning to slip away from this in The Shipwreck Dress. In that book the pictures, the colors, are on or in her—writing “about” clothing helped me get closer to the condition my poems seem to aspire to.
Beyond writing, I would say that my life has featured both disasters and great luck. On the luck side, I was plucked from my small Ohio town and sent to Brazil for a year by my high school’s AFS group. And in one of luck’s greatest long lightning bolts, I went back to college one course at a time as a mom with three little children, expecting nothing, only to have my teachers engineer a free 14-year ride all the way through Vanderbilt’s PhD program. I am happy to have washed up in Florida, where I live with my husband, comics scholar Joseph Witek, and direct the Sullivan Creative Writing Program at Stetson University. I am also happy that words and pictures no longer seem like two things, which suggests that body and soul may not be either.
Current Projects
June 2009
Since 2005 I have been collaborating with Brazilian new media artist Cyriaco Lopes—here are some of our “contraptions” so far. We have two gallery shows forthcoming—one at Grinnell’s Faulconer Gallery will feature a performance. When I read from within a moving, projected image, my long-held habits seem to have received an amazing new life. I’m also working on my fourth book, which features a sequence about James I and Anne of Denmark–it operates both by word and symbol, as a little “legend” runs down one side of he page and gradually expands its place on the page.