Writers' Corner  Rebecca Lindenberg  2011 Poetry  Author's
Statement  "To the hands come many things.  In a time of trouble
a wild exultation."  -- Robert Creeley, "For W.C.W."  The
manuscript-in-progress, gloss, from which I culled my NEA
application, comprises a collection of poems from which a
fragmentary narrative emerges about my partner Craig and his
death in 2009. Most of these poems arise out of the whole
troubling idea of "getting it right"--loving, grieving, and
writing about it. Some of the poems in the collection employ
various species of gloss--footnote, index, definition--as a kind
of formal metaphor for the relationship between word and world.
So the central poem, "Love, an Index," admits to certain
difficulties in writing about memory and experience, while
bearing witness to the necessity of writing even with that
awareness. In another poem, marginalia collaborates with the
text to question its accuracy by adding to it. These poems let
me address my uncertainties about storytelling as an addi