Maureen Alsop

Maureen Alsop
Nelly Bay, Queensland, Australia

STATEMENT

These visual poems are crafted under the mechanics of Écriture Feminine, an increasing interest of mine that arises from a resistance to traditional constructions and a personal understanding of writing through intuitive procedures, sublimation and surrender. This work arrived as a trajectory while writing a larger work-in progress. The original text draws upon ghosts in the hall of battles. It is a brief travel through a series of overlapping epochs: the Snake River Crossing, the battle of Somme, Singapore during World War II, the Crusades. It is a glittering solar analemma; an unattested revolution, an infinity reflected in ellipses, omissions, and disintegration. I write from parallels, cyclical slips through stream of conscious and fragmentary processes. The writing exists as rough erotic. As talisman. Interpersonal in their ruptures and syntax, soft in their discomforts; a splintered narrative. Through writing, I can go anywhere and never be found.

I go seeking, not through experiment, but through somatic integrity, a kind of surge through the body that I may land upon, live within, elaborate. The collages allow the imagination to stay open and simultaneously suture the language into a new arrangement. Conventional narratives rely on plot, character, linearity, but these prescriptions avoid conjuration. I live with the illegible, the lawless. I wade through the brittle grass at midsummer. I divert from the line. I come seeking.

BIO

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of Tender to Empress, a collection of visual poetry; and five additional collections of poetry: Pyre; Later, Knives & Trees; Mirror Inside Coffin; Mantic; Apparition Wren (also a Spanish Edition, Reyezuelo Aparición, translated by Mario Domínguez Parra); and several chapbooks. She is a recent finalist for the Montreal Poetry Prize, the winner of the Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award through the Hawaii Council for the Humanities, Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for
Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in various journals including AGNI, Blackbird, Tampa Review, DIAGRAM, Memorious, The Kenyon Review, and featured on Verse Daily. Her translations of the poetry of Juana de Ibarbourou (Uruguay, 1892-1979) and Mario Domínguez Parra are available through Poetry Salzburg Review. She teaches online with the Poetry Barn. She is a board member for the organisation AIM Higher which promotes mentorship for women in the arts. Her visual poetry and art have appeared at the Riverside Arts Museum in Riverside, California, The Umbrella Studio in Townsville, The Louver Gallery, Drunken Boat, Superstition Review, filling Station Magazine, and others. She is a Book Review Editor and Associate Poetry Editor at Poemeleon. She holds a MFA from Vermont College.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
www.maureenalsop.com

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