F L O W E R   C A R T

Lisa Fishman

An extended bio from the author

 

May 11, 2010. Orfordville, Wisconsin, population 1072, is where I live in a small farmhouse built by Swedish immigrants in about 1890. Two weeks ago we released 4,000 bees into the orchard; two hives and the honey will be tended by a friend. A gigantic workhorse, a Percheron, just moved into the neighbor’s field (not sure whose horse it is), twelve chicks moved from the basement into the coop, and the stray barn cat—whom we tried to get spayed last year—just had five kittens the second spring in a row. We have a child named James who will be six very soon.

And I live in Madison, Wisconsin, where James goes to kindergarten and where our friends live.

It turns out that the friends are important to the poetry, especially in Current (Parlor Press 2010), which was written after F L O W E R C A R T but came out before.

I teach in Chicago at Columbia College. So I ride a double-decker regional bus from Madison to Chicago, stay in Chicago for two nights in the middle of the week and return to Madison in time to pick up my son from school. Summers are in Orfordville; fall is apples and cider-pressing.

These are some of the things that live around the writing but there are others, good and bad. Lots of poets who live at different times, both now and then—influences—and novelists. But the novels I love (especially Lawrence, Bowen, George Eliot) are mostly from one period; they span less time than the poetry, which goes everywhere and encompasses many many. I guess it doesn’t matter who wrote them, to paraphrase someone. I’m in sympathy with Shelley’s view that it’s all part of one giant poem being written over time, a chain of “effluence.”

Born mid-December 1966 in Michigan, childhood in Clarkston, Mt. Clemens, Pontiac, Leelanau County. Then Michigan State University, Twin Cities, Western Michigan University, Emigration Canyon in Salt Lake City, New York City. The land was fallow when Henry and I moved to Orfordville from New York in 1998—we planted everything starting with garlic; now there are a few thousand fruit trees on about ten acres as well as berries and vegetables.

It’s not likely the oil spewing from BP will be contained, right at the beginning of nesting season. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations are “like people” and so can donate any amount of money to a candidate. Barak Obama said the war in Afghanistan is a smart war. These are some things also now, not separate from a sketch of the self at one moment in time. But not integrated here: the jarring is how it feels, and there are different ways into the multiplicities.

My father is from Montreal, born 1930. I’m in the process of securing Canadian citizenship by virtue of his status as one of the “Lost Canadians.” My mother taught second grade, her mother taught kindergarten and fourth grade, my grandfather sold “business machines,” meaning typewriters. My paternal grandparents emigrated from Odessa and Bucovina; my grandfather worked in a hat factory in Montreal. My sister is a dancer and pianist, my stepmother a modern dance accompanist in New York City. I worked for several summers as a staff writer for a daily paper, the Traverse City Record Eagle. I wrote a doctoral dissertation on Shelley and Mercury. Jobs in restaurants, bookstores, the flea market at 26th St. (now in Hell’s Kitchen), the library archives at Union Theological Seminary. A Hasidic café in St. Paul. Not in order.

I like being surrounded by languages other than English and find it very difficult—everything feels false—to write autobiographical information. The books are where the self is, utterly, whether or not the poems are about the self. I haven’t been to New Haven but love the name Elizabeth Park, where Stevens sat.