Lyrae
Van Clief-Stefanon Open Interval University of Pittsburgh
Press
Video from the 2009 National
Book Awards Finalist Reading
CITATION
Passionate and personal, innovative
and elegant, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open
Interval marries a wildness of vision with a lens-maker’s
precision. The book takes on the actual astronomical
phenomenon of “RR Lyrae” stars not only
to form a metaphor for the self, but to reveal a constellation
of lyric impulses. In exploded sonnets, taut syllabics,
Dickinsonian dashes, or that new poetic invention, the
bop, Van Clief-Stefanon writes of science, rock-n-roll,
and the history of a heart that could be hers, but speaks
to all of ours.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Open interval is a
mathematical term referring to a line that has no endpoints.
Drawing upon intersections of astronomy and mathematics,
history, literature, and lived experience, the poems
in Open Interval locate the self in the interval
between body and name. Like the Romare Bearden paintings
she writes about in Open Interval, Van Clief-Stefanon’s
work is colorful, sometimes playful, grounded in reality,
yet other-worldly at the same time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Van Clief-Stefanon is assistant
professor of English at Cornell University. She is the
author of ]Open Interval[, and Black Swan,
winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and coauthor,
with Elizabeth Alexander, of the chapbook Poems
in Conversation and a Conversation. Her poems have
appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, Crab
Orchard Review, Rattapallax, Shenandoah, and in
several anthologies, including Bum Rush the Page
and Role Call.
Polaris sits still in the
sky and if I knew
which one it was I could follow it all the way
to Auburn. Oh, Harriet, who did not need the poise
of freedom knocked into your head like sense, who
found it more
than possible to sleep, pistol shoved deep into your
pocket
along this route, I cannot tell a dipper from Orion.
Yes, the springtime needed
you. Many a star was waiting
for your eyes only.
The university twinkles on
the hill above my house.
The fat moon rises and a girl holds out her arms.
She twirls
in a blue Polly Flinders dress. Mama's precious
cameo—a white woman's silhouette on black satin
ribbon
choker tied around her neck. Poise begins here:
in cinders, in rhyme, in splintering beauty into this
and this—: the image at my throat: the summer's
pitching
constellations: the ten o'clock scholar's midnight
lesson.
Yes, the springtime needed
you. Many a star was waiting
for your eyes only.
At the prison at Auburn I
cross the yard. Inmates whet tongues against
my body: cement—sculpted—: poised for
hate—: pitch
compliments like coins: —(wade)—
their silver slickening —(in the water)—:
uncollected change. A guard asks, Think they're
beautiful? Just wait
til they're out here stabbing each other. Oh,
Harriet, the stars
throw down shanks—: teach the sonnet's a cell—:
now try to escape—
Yes, the springtime needed
you. Many a star was waiting
for your eyes only.
Transit of Venus
The actors mill about the
party saying rhubarb
because other words do not sound like conversation.
In the kitchen, always, one who's just discovered
beauty, his mouth full of whiskey and strawberries.
He practices the texture of her hair with his tongue;
in her, five billion electrons pop their atoms. Rhubarb
in electromagnetic loops, rhubarb, rhubarb,
the din increases.
