Cynthia Hogue on Poets Cafe
The following interview of Cynthia Hogue by Lois P. Jones originally aired on KPFK Los Angeles (reproduced with permission).
[download audio]
Biographical Information—Cynthia Hogue
Cynthia Hogue has published 14 books and chapbooks, including Revenance (2014), Or Consequence (2010), and The Incognito Body (2006), all with Red Hen Press, and the co-translated Fortino Sámano (The Overflowing of the Poem), by Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc Nancy (Omnidawn 2012), winner of the 2013 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is a 2015 NEA Fellow in Translation, and teaches in the MFA program at Arizona State University.
__________
Elegy with Boulder
No trees. At dusk, seven deer caught in silhouette. Beside them, the boulder that was my father, large as a town, discrete, a hillock, grass-mired, granite shoved through basalt. I stood in its shadow, nearing it then stopping. My hands felt along a surface I couldn’t see, as if glass barred me from touching it. Above me, a vaulting midnight space struck with feathers of clouds. They’d dynamited the boulder the week before. Nothing moved it. Equipment broke. Eventually, they built the road around the boulder. I thought I’d find a door if I tarried. My hands moved in circles wider and wider seeking sides like walls in a room. No sides or entrance. Certainly, no way.
Excerpt from Revenance © Cynthia Hogue (2014). “Elegy with Boulder” was first published in “A Poetry Congeries,” curated by John Hoppenthaler for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact (June 2013). Reprinted with permission.