Contributor Spotlight: Marjorie Becker
Marjorie Becker’s poem, “To Stitch the Myrtle World, that Crepe,” is part of Issue 79 of Bellingham Review. Subscribe or purchase a single issue through our Submittable page here.
What would you like to share with our readers about the work you contributed to Bellingham Review?
This poem is one of the poems I wrote for my The Macon Sex School collection. All of these poems are poems reflecting a depth of tenderness and resistance to misogyny, racism, cruelties. All of them are set in the fictional and musical realm of Macon, Georgia’s Sex School, a female inflected institution I was fortunate enough to develop within the remarkable Los Angeles poetry communities in which I participate.
Tell us about your writing life.
I have been writing all my life. An array of commitments, particularly to the unvoiced and unheard, to an empassioned musical approach to language, to specific remarkable fellow writers, artists, relatives, and friends, have kept me writing. My writing is informed by a politics of tenderness. My poems, fiction, and historical work often are set in Latin America, in the US Deep South, in Spain. Sensual and highly colored images recur in my work as does an underground flood of music and light.
Which non-writing aspect(s) of your life most influences your writing?
An array of courageous individuals who have often gone unnoted consistently inspire my writing. So too does the subconscious strategy I long ago was encouraged to utilize to reflect my perceptions.
What writing advice has stayed with you?
The advice to write daily has enabled me to develop a kind of muscle, according to a fellow poet. I also have been told that my poetic characters speak with one another and with me.
What is your favorite book (or essay, poem, short story)?
Adrienne Rich, David St. John and the Monday night poetry posse, Yeats, Octavio Paz, Dorothy Barresi and the Barresians, Marsha de la O, I can go on and on.
What are you reading right now?
I am re-reading Lorca and Tagore.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I just completed a book that I have been told marries innovative writing with historical assessment. It is entitled Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz. I also just completed the poetry collection The Macon Sex School.
Anything else our readers might want to know about you?
A Macon, Georgia native, I served in the Peace Corps in rural Paraguay as a nutritionist devoted to changing the world. As a Macon Georgia native from a remarkable family, I learned very early how to pick mushrooms. Somehow, perhaps because my late paternal grandmother was a pianist, my earlier narrative approach to poetry changed into lyric poems revealing the inner music I hear each morning.
Where can our readers connect with you online?
My web page is marjoriebecker.com. As a professor at USC, I also have a webpage.
A Macon, Georgia native, MARJORIE BECKER holds a Yale doctorate in Latin American History and is Associate Professor in History and English at USC. She is the author of the prize-winning Setting the Virgin on Fire (California, 1996), the poetry collections Body Bach (2005) and Piano Glass/Glass Piano (2010.) She has received an array of awards including a Faculty Fulbright Research Fellowship for Mexico and awards from the AAUW, the NEH, and the ACLS. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies including Pratik, Peacock Journal, Crossroads Poetry Journal, Spillway, Pink Panther Magazine, Angle of Reflection, Beyond the Lyric Moment, Askew, Levure Litteraire, Ginosko Literary Journal, Desde Hong Kong: Poets in Conversation with Octavio Paz, and the Southern Poetry Anthology (Vol. V: Georgia.) She has recently completed a new poetry manuscript entitled The Macon Sex School.
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