Fleda Brown

Poet Fleda Brown is curious about language—in particular, about the slippery exchange between words and the things they stand for. Some writers of the last century had given up on the association between signifier and signified as arbitrary and no longer worthy of serious thought—but Brown is more circumspect, and more interested, with a great capacity to let herself be fascinated and bring us along for the ride. In her approach to the strange intersection between words and things, she leaves room for mystery. Though they consider language as language, her poems are by no means dry or cerebral. Approachable and seemingly effortless, they read at first like larks and only reveal their headiness as they unfold. Chipmunks, geese, snippets of dialogue, the mysteries of atomic and subatomic physics, American history—these are the things that make up her landscape, the keyboard on which she works out her problems. Her voice is graceful, agile, and assured, with a reverence for words that doesn’t prevent her from being playful and experimental. Her reverence also extends to human beings; her work is informed by a sturdy sense of the moral life, and an understanding that language problems are also ethical ones.

Read Fleda Brown's poem Note to My Sister from Notre Dame in Issue 66 here.

Current Projects

I have a new book, Loon Cry: Selected and New Poems, that I’ve given to The Watershed Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to monitoring and advocating for the Grand Traverse Bay area of Lake Michigan, which includes its 1,000 mile watershed area where “my” lake is located. All of the $15 cost of the book will be given directly to the Center (contact dbaker@gtbay.org). The cover and interior art, also donated work, are by recognized artist Glenn Wolff. The book launch will be in late September.

The project I’m deeply involved in right now is writing a book of individual essays about homeless people in the Traverse City area. I’m interviewing them one-by-one and giving them each a separate essay. This has been a difficult project, to carry it beyond reportage into the area of the personal, lyric essay that I’m so fond of. I’m hoping each one will stand alone, but that they’ll build toward something. They are personal essays—I’m in them, have a stake in them, but only as I stand alongside the homeless subject. I also have a book of poems just put together, about ready to go.

Biography

Fleda Brown’s new book is Driving With Dvorak, released in March by the University of Nebraska Press. Her most recent collection of poems, Reunion (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), won the Felix Pollak Prize. The author of five previous collections of poems, she has won numerous prizes, among them a Pushcart Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and her work has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she taught for 27 years and directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She now lives in Traverse City, Michigan, and is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.