Joan Gelfand
USA

An award winning poet, Joan was the recipient of the Chaffin Fiction Award for 2005. Her letters, articles, reviews and poetry have appeared in numerous national magazines including The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair and Poets & Writers. Widely anthologized, Joan’s poetry has appeared in over twenty journals including: Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Jewish Women’s Literary Annual and “If Women Ruled the World,” an international anthology. “Seeking Center – A Collection of Poetry” was published by Two Bridges Press in 2006.
In her professional life Joan is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at Level Playing Field Institute, a non-profit organization providing scholarships to under represented UC Berkeley students.
Currently serving as Vice President of the Women’s National Book Association, Joan founded Salon CIEL, an interdisciplinary group of artists. Her weblog may be found at: http://jg.typepad.com/ciel/
Joan received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Mills College.

Torqued – for Richard Serra

The artist designed a change in the atmosphere
Went above our heads where
Towering shapes are safe harbor, a cave
Or, depending on your worldview,
The looming giant spaces skew
Too close, not enough air, or space.

Who dares the first step inside
To walk the barren landscape?
Who skirts the edge,
Afraid to enter emptiness?

You explore, a subtle curve,
A tour of everything that is -
A veritable carnival ride through history
From labyrinths to freeway cloverleafs,
Torqued torus: British mazes overlaid
By Zen sensibility.
Metal torqued as elegantly, effortlessly
As clay from potter’s wheel, or glass blower’s tube.

Shapes add up - become new – the sum of parts
Greater than the whole.
That something brushes your skin
Kisses your flank, an arm bending to hold.
Torqued torus is yoga, prayer, meditation.
Empty forms embrace, become community,
A chessboard of life
A biosphere, archetypal and primary,
Perched on the edge of what is and what is yet to come.

Torqued torus is the soft shoulder we crave,
The hard edge we protect against.
It is metaphor and the thing itself
The mother the father and the child; beauty and terror.

The hard power of steel against the softness of the heart

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