| Arielle Greenberg is the author of Given (Verse, 2002), and the chapbook Fa(r)ther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003). Current projects include co-editing, with Rachel Zucker, an anthology of essays on women poets and mentorship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the anthologies Best American Poetry 2004 and 2005, Legitimate Danger: American Poets of the New Century, and Isn't It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets and in journals including Conjunctions, the Denver Quarterly, and the American Poetry Review. She teaches in the graduate and graduate poetry programs at Columbia College Chicago, where she is a co-editor of the poetry journal Court Green. She lives in Evanston, IL with her family. |
Author photo © Rachel Zucker |
I aim to “tell all the truth but tell it slant. ” (Emily Dickinson)
Through references across cultures, personal biography and experience, and internalized mythic vocabulary, I strive to create a code that could crack a safe: something honest, something pure. As in dreams, I trust that the codes reveal more expansively and richly than a linear narrative could. But my goal is not to let myself or my ideas hide behind code, but rather to let code open up possibilities that memory or a more straightforward rhetoric would close down. To better replicate the scattershot, the haunted houses and dollhouses, the little boxes of thought.
I'm interested in playfulness, in pleasure, in music, and in the dark edges of these things. The way the black velvet is always attached to something silky and pink. And I want my poems to connect with communities, to exist in our historic moment. My stars are Dickinson and Hopkins, Nabakov and Joyce, Jean Valentine and C.D. Wright, Joseph Cornell and Henry Darger, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette: artists who make things that are beautiful, direct, full of good humor, full of danger.
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