Alison Townsend: “This poem arrived for me in almost exactly the way it is described in the piece. I was on my way home from work, in pain from the effects of a long commute on a healing broken back. I was stopped at a light in my small, Midwest town, when I happened to hear a clip on NPR about the only recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice that has survived. Woolf’s writing has always been important to me, and I was stunned by the sound of her living voice. That set off a stream of associations and I made the leap from Woolf ’s voice to that of my own mother, who died when I was a young girl and whose voice I have forgotten. When I got home, I listened to the clip again, sat down, and wrote the poem. Knowing more than I did (as our poems always do), the poem made the connections and circled back to Woolf ’s concept of the ‘lamp in the spine’ of female intelligence. I felt lucky to have had that moment, where something that felt so difficult in the moment was transformed. All the italicized words are from the recording, except for the phrase, ‘the lamp in the spine,’ which appears, famously, in her writing.”
2020 Rattle Poetry Prize winner Alison Townsend is the guest on tonight’s Rattlecast! Click here to watch live …
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