Good Natured Poet

Debra Nystrom

Debra Nystrom who is teaching as Associate Professor, Poetry Writing has the following degrees
MFA, Goddard/Warren Wilson, 1980B.A., University of South Dakota, 1976 ; The books following have earned a reputation for her

Bad River Road (forthcoming, Sarabande Books, 2009)
Torn Sky, Sarabande Books, 2003
A Quarter Turn , Sheep Meadow Press, 1991

Her poems were published In
Agni Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, Lyric, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, Seneca Review, Slate, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere.

And her works were anthologized in

Best American Poetry 2008, Scribner, 2008
When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poems by American Women, Autumn House Press, 2008
Red, White and Blues: Poetic Vistas on the Promise of America, University of Iowa Press, 2004
Strongly Spent: Fifty Years of Shenandoah, Shenandoah, 2004
Common Wealth, University of Virginia Press, 2003
Birthday Poems, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002
Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America, University of Iowa Press, 2002
Acquainted With the Night, Columbia University Press, 1999
The Sheep Meadow Anthology, Sheep Meadow Press, 1999
More Light, National Writer’s Voice Project, Harcourt Brace Publishers, 1994

Current Projects

On the Bluff: Land, Family, Race and Law (memoir)
The Capacity to be Alone: the Lyric Poem (essays)

Honors and Awards

Virginia Commonwealth University, Cabell Memorial Reading and Panel, 2008
James Dickey Prize in Poetry, Five Points Magazine, 2007
University of Virginia Arts Research Grant, 2006
“American Life in Poetry” feature, Poetry Foundation, October 2005
Library of Virginia Poetry Prize, 2004
Writers’ Almanac feature, A Prairie Home Companion, September 2004; May 2004
PoetryNet Poet of the Month, April 2004
Shepard Memorial Visiting Writer, University of Wyoming Conference on Social Justice, 2004
Heart/Borders Poetry Prize, 2002
Lantern Society Award for Women’s Education, 2002
James Boatwright Prize for Poetry, Shenandoah Magazine: 2000 and 1994
Pushcart Prize nominations: 2004, 2003, 1990, 1988, 1985, 1984
Virginia Commission for the Arts Individual Fellowships in Poetry: 1997 and 1987
Balch Prize for Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, 1991
Debra Nystrom was born in Pierre, South Dakota. She is the author of Torn Sky, published in 2003 by Sarabande Books, and an earlier volume, A Quarter Turn, from Sheep Meadow Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, Slate and The Threepenny Review. She has received the James Boatwright prize from Shenandoah, the Balch Prize from The Virginia Quarterly Review, and has been awarded two individual artist’s grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, as well as the HeArt/Borders Books Prize for Poetry. She teaches in the University of Virginia Creative Writing Program, and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband and daughter.

Statement of Poetics

I grew up in South Dakota, among reserved farming and ranching people. The sense of the unspoken was always palpable there, amid the homesteaders’ descendants, the native Lakota, and in the landscape itself.

I think that my curiosity about what language can do comes from a wish to grasp— through patternings of sound, rhythm, syntax and image— the kind of meaning that is experienced physically: that can't be easily paraphrased, but attests to the inner self which hasn't many opportunities for expression in our culture.

Yeats said that "we believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body." When a poem communicates to us in that way, it's possible to feel for a moment less essentially alone. A poem like Robert Frost's "Mowing" or Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" touches that most isolated, inarticulate part of me that had despaired of intimacy.

I write in an effort to bring forward into clarity and drama (though not into explanation) that part of life which is usually kept back.

Window

by

Debra Nystrom

The window of her last room,

in the subacute ward, building

next door to death,

was lovely in the evenings, after visitors

had come and gone, after Dad

had taken Brad back to the farm

and made his last stop in, and

all the machines and tile faded

as snow outside grew violet, then

white against the dark, a steady

glow beneath us. I could leave

the curtains apart while she slept

more heavily with the bigger night

dose of morphine, and I gave up

reading my Chekhov story.

After the first days she hardly

opened her eyes, and the sky

had clouded over, so I left it there

all the time, that square of world

we seemed to have known before,

though we'd never been there.

Now I picture snow, stark, definite

against the trees, then realize, no:

it was just September; even in

South Dakota an early snow

wouldn't stay on the ground

that long. Maybe there wasn't

any snow, only the pale light,

and her window altering

the way light passed through it.


Floater

by Debra Nystrom

—to Dan

Maddening shadow across your line of vision—

what might be there, then isn't, making it

hard to be on the lookout, concentrate, even

hear—well, enough of the story I've

given you, at least—you've had your fill,

never asked for this, though you were the one

to put a hand out, catch hold, not about to let me

vanish the way of the two you lost already

to grief's lure. I'm here; close your eyes,

listen to our daughter practicing, going over and over

the Bach, getting the mordents right, to make the lovely

Invention definite. What does mordent mean,

her piano teacher asked—I was waiting in the kitchen

and overheard—I don't know, something about dying?

No; morire means to die, mordere means to take

a bite out of something—good mistake, she said.

Not to die, to take a bite—what you asked

of me—and then pleasure

in the taking. Close your eyes now,

listen. No one is leaving.