Kathryn Cowles was born in Provo, Utah, and lived there for much of her childhood, aside from a few years in Chicago and a stint in London. She studied at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, earning her BA in English and Print Journalism, MA in British and American Literature, and PhD in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry. She edited RED Magazine and co-edited the poetry section of Quarterly West while in Salt Lake City and co-chaired the Working Dog Reading Series.
Cowles’s first book of poetry, Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name (Bear Star Press 2009), won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Book Prize, the City Weekly Poetry Book Prize for 2009, and the University of Utah’s Graduate Research Award. Poems from her newest book, Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World (Milkweed Editions 2020), won the Larry Levis Academy of American Poets Prize, selected by Cole Swensen. The book investigates ways to transcribe the stuff of the ordinary world into language on the page—to transfigure mountains or bird sounds into words—and it splices words with photographs to make poems in which language and image are co-equal, wrestling forces. Her poems, poem-photographs, and collages have been published in such places as Best American Experimental Writing, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Diagram, Free Verse, Georgia Review, New American Writing, Verse, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-day.
Cowles is an associate professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and she was an assistant professor at Ohio Northern University from 2009-11. She co-edits the poetry and multi-media Beyond Category sections of Seneca Review and serves as rotating director of the Trias Residency for Writers.
Work
Hymn
Hymn
with 8 birds on a wire
or rather on 3 wires . . .
4 birds on 3 wires, one bird on one . . .
5 of ’em now on 2;
on 3; 7 on 4
Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos
1
all is well, I sang, little
learning how to do the harmony parts,
Saturday church choir, all is well
the blue sparrow babies have hatched
and we have kept the cats
away thus far
and one day everyone decides
to bale their hay
every single field down
all at once everyone
all at once
my friend is sick
sick and far away and I hear
will die and I
can’t get my head
to think it through
all is well, I sang, all is well
tho hard to you
2
so I wrote another friend
a goat on a spit for you, Brenda
we took a photo, I said, transcribed,
put it down, list, list,
sent a postcard
is it getting hot in here
3
I am cycling in the mountains
here is what I see
my arms stretched out in my shadow
three horses facing away
the cows have got out, one white
excuse me while I take this hill
4
don’t you call coward on me
I put the knife through the fish’s skull
once caught, all alone,
into its hot, hot brain, again, again
to be sure it’s just
here lies / the Idaho kid
the only time / he ever did
he transcribed bird bird bird bird in Pisa
counted them for comfort
because everyone needs a latch
comfort, comfort
knife caught hold
in a cliff
and if I die, I sang, and if I die
5
the spit is picking up, Brenda
I have a bug in my eye
I can ride a hill down w/ no breaks now
my one eye is streaming from the bug
the spit is turning fast, Brenda
a knife to the brain is quicker
than a whack, whack, more humane
I cannot get it in my head
I see a blue bird, a bale,
a white cow
every single field down
happy day, I sang, all is well
every single thing down, picking up
From Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World (Milkweed Editions 2020)
A completely different alphabet
A completely different alphabet
Transcript. A printed version of a recorded version of a sound. A written version of an audio version of a person talking. A mountain taken down. A printed version of a mountain, printing pressed. A copy. A copy of a copy. The letters pressed into paper resemble the tree’s branches. From the Chinese character. A tree. From which issues a bird sound. A printed version of the bird sound, representing the sound a mama bird makes as it feeds its baby birds. A black bird with orange parts. A chicken and an egg. Transliteration. Using the closest corresponding letters or sounds of a completely different alphabet. Shorthand into full sentences. A new arrangement with an entirely other instrument. Transcribed for cello. For piano. For a choir. A bird sound rendered in hyphenated lettering. A mountain. A mountain.
From Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World (Milkweed Editions 2020)
Transcript of birds
Transcript of birds
The two birds on the left
sit and the third bird says
[third bird:] ---------
---------
---------
[shakes its wings]
---------
---------
[second bird flies off, back again, off]
---------
---------
[--------- is the bird sound]
[second bird:] [makes the bird sound]
[second bird opens its mouth, shakes
its wings:] ---------
[bug falls on page]
[dead bug]
[from above]
[tree]
From Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World (Milkweed Editions 2020)
Map
Bibliography
Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name (Bear Star Press, 2009)
Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World (Milkweed Editions, 2021)
Links
Into the Aethernet: Reading with Shira Dentz and Dexter Booth
Gotham Writers "Inside Writing" Interview
