Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 20, 2007|Volume 35, Number 26

UC-Berkeley student is named
the new Yale Younger Poet

Jessica Fisher, a doctoral candidate in English at the University of California at Berkeley, has been selected as the new Yale Younger Poet.

Fisher's book of poems, "Frail-Craft," was selected by Louise Glück, a former poet laureate of the United States who has been judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for four years. A writer-in-residence at Yale, Glück has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award, among others.

In her foreword to "Frail-Craft," which was just published by Yale University Press, Glück describes Fisher's poems as "analytic mediations." Says Glück, "Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, Fisher meditates on the problems and possibilities -- the frail craft -- of perception for the reader, the dreamer, maintaining that 'if the eye can love -- and it can, it does -- then I held you and was held.'"

Glück adds that Fisher's poetry is "haunting, elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery is how plain-spoken it is. Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior. Fisher uses the sense this way, to observe how being is converted into thinking."

Fisher is the co-editor, with Robert Hass, of "The Addison Street Anthology."

The Yale Series of Younger Poets is the longest-running poetry prize in America and is widely considered one of the most prestigious. The contest is open to any American under age 40 who has not yet published a book of poetry. Yale University Press publishes the winning manuscript in the year following its selection. Every year, Yale University Press receives more than 600 manuscripts from young poets competing for the honor.

Since its inception in 1919, the Yale Series of Younger Poets has published the first books of poetry by such writers as Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass. The book that won the 2004 prize, "Crush" by Richard Siken, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

The following is a poem called "The Right to Pleasure," from "Frail-Craft."

You would think that I go mad with grief
when the white sails fill and the keel cuts
the waters like a knife honed on whetstone:
that's the way you're taught to interpret these signs --
matted hair, the salt-dirt lines where sweat has run,
hands that feed the mouth but will not wipe it.
But when my love decides to go and then is gone,
I can still taste him, bitter in the throat; I still
feel the weight of his body as he fights sleep.
I do not fight it: on the contrary, I live there,
and what you see in me that you think grief
is the refusal to wake, that is to say, is pleasure:
qui donne du plaisir en a, and so if
when he couldn't sleep in that long still night
you sense it and woke to show him how
to unfasten each and every button, then it is
promised you, even when he goes --

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