PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Jan Beatty

PoetryMagazine.com

Jan Beatty
USA

Jan Beatty’s books include The Switching Yard (2013), Red Sugar (2008, Finalist, Paterson Prize), Boneshaker (2002, Finalist, Milton Kessler Award), and Mad River (1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her limited edition chapbooks include Ravage, published by Lefty Blondie Press in 2012, and Ravenous, winner of the 1995 State Street Prize. For the past twenty years, Beatty has hosted and produced Prosody, a public radio show on NPR affiliate WESA-FM featuring national writers. She worked as a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, in maximum security prisons, and as a waitress for fifteen years. Awards include publication in Best American Poetry 2013, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, two PCA fellowships, and the Creative Achievement Award from the Heinz Foundation. Beatty has read her work widely, at venues such as the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival, Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and Split This Rock. She is a professor of English at Carlow University, where she directs the creative writing program, runs the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops, and teaches in the MFA program. www.janbeatty.com

Visitation at Gogama
No shirt, was drying his long hair

with a towel and staring at the train,

he looked about 30.

I saw my birth father young and alive,

he stepped out of a brown house with a white

sign on the side: wild bill (his nickname)

in big block letters. I saw him the way he was

before he made me—

beautiful and astonishing in his maleness.

I tell you this is my family tree—no

noble phrases, no graveyards on the hill,

just visitations. Now pieces of discarded track,

explosion of purple wildflowers along the side,

solid wall of rock 5 ft from the train,

then a river/bridge/floating leaves

that look like giant lily pads—is that possible?

We’re approaching the town of Gogama,

Ontario—small railroad town erased

by the diesel engine. There’s a bar called

“Restaurant/Tavern” and a meat market

called “Meat Market” and a motel called

“Motel”—no other names.

In this place of no-naming or maybe

first-naming, I decide I’ll call myself “bastard”—

it’s plain and accurate, you can count on it.

We approach a signal, a woman in a

black tank top with killer arms slouches

in a grey Buick Century at the crossing

in a modified gangster lean. I decide

I love her, call her free.

—Jan Beatty, The Switching/Yard, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013

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