Page 53 - Savoring

Heather Banks, Born in Nebraska, Heather moved to the Boston area at age 11. Her first published poem appeared soon after. At Oberlin College, she majored in English and Art; she also holds Master’s degrees in each. She taught high school English in Massachusetts and college English in Taiwan, in Maryland and at Howard University. “The other half” of her career was writing/editing for non-profits, professional societies, the Smithsonian, National Institutes of Health, and government contractors, primarily in education and health fields. Her poems have appeared in small magazines such as Burnt Star, Dryad, and Sun & Moon as well as two DC area anthologies. A featured regional poet at the South Central Modern Language Association in 1999, she has read at many venues in DC, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Her work is published in a chapbook, Still Life without Pomegranite. She lives in Fredericksburg, MD.
Darla Biel teaches writing at South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD. She enjoys and seeks cross-artistic collaboration, and has worked with dancers, artists, and musicians to create new works, including a modern dance performance piece titled “Harvey Dunn Collaborative Project: Feminine Images” which was inspired by her ekphrastic poetry. Biel also wrote the libretto for chamber opera adapted from Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s The Trickster and the Troll, and was the script polisher for a 24-episode TV series entitled Return of the the Pearl Princess. Biel has also recently completed a poetry manuscript titled Sparkler Bomb.
“I am interested in poetry’s ability to express images and tensions underneath the surface. In these poems, for example, I explore the inner experience of an objectified mannequin, the desire of a prim woman to have her ‘tight life unfurled’, and the memories of an undivided, pre-conscious self.”
David Allan Evans, Poet Laureate of South Dakota, Sioux Falls, SD, “Here’s a comment on my poem, ‘The Bull Rider’s Advice,’ one of my most popular poems over the years:
“I had a knee operation in the early 70s from an old college football injury. I was in the Brookings Hospital and the day after the surgery, hobbling down the hall on crutches, I met a guy who was in the hospital after he’d taken a pretty bad fall off a bull in an SDSU rodeo. I think he’d broken his leg from the fall. I struck up a conversation and we talked about bull riding, which has always intrigued me--especially guys who have the guts to get up on one of those humped-backed beasts. He was a small guy but looked tough. I noticed that he was what you might call an either- or kind of person, unlike myself, who thinks and talks with a lot of shades in between the either and the or. He said that when you get up on the back of a bull, you’d better have made up your mind to ride that animal all the way to the buzzer. Without that thought, that determination, you’ve already got dust between your teeth.
I don’t know how soon after that brief talk I began to make my poem, but the conversation is something I had in my head as a possibility for a poem. Sometimes these things take weeks or months or even years to work themselves out into a poem. I think this poem came rather fast once I got it started, and I don’t remember a lot of revising.
But it’s the either-or notion that I was after, mainly--which, as I said, I am intrigued by mainly because I’m not a bull-rider type guy by nature--I tend to be more tentative, too much of a thinker I suppose; and also the digging in with one’s ‘whole soul’ once you decide to do it--and in fact, once you decide to do anything: a job, a way of life, a relationship, even making a poem (which
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ABOUT THE POETS