Living & Arts

Fisher returns on 'frail craft'

In print | April 17, 2008

Drawing inspiration from art history, literature and semiotics, Swarthmore alumna and poet Jessica Fisher ‘98 read from her first book, “Frail-Craft,” to an intimate group of friends and fans in the Scheur Room in Kohlberg Hall earlier this week. Fisher’s first book, selected by renowned poet Louise Gluck for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, explores Fisher’s interest in psychoanalytic theory, open field poetics, memory, oral tradition, perception and the relationship between the roles of the dreamer and the writer. “I wanted to see what it would mean for philosophical ideas to acquire the trappings of bodies and stories,” Fisher said.

Beginning with a reading of “Journey,” a poem that describes movement without determination, and following immediately with “Spiral Jetty,” a piece about absence that was inspired by Robert Smithson’s earthwork sculpture by the same name, Fisher then went on to read a series of poems that portray actual dreams and that probe the relationship between the experience of dreaming and the act of writing before moving on to read some of her newer work.

“‘Frail-Craft’ explores desire that is always a step ahead and the necessary vision that is imposed between subject and object,” Fisher said. Her newer work, by contrast, marks a turn in a somewhat different direction: “The overarching question became how to locate lyric perception and lyric experience in a time of war,” Fisher noted about her more recent poems, whose subjects include the Iraq War, vigilance and passive resistance.

Once Fisher finished her reading, she went on to announce the winners of the John Russell Hayes poetry contest, a prize Fisher won during her time at Swarthmore. Lamenting over the difficulty of choosing winners amongst a group of exceptional submissions, Fisher gave an honorable mention to Nina Pelaez ’11 before she awarded third place to Michael Duffy ’11 and second place to Uma Nagendra ’09. Fisher chose “Marine Wedding (From a photograph by Nina Berman),” a poem by Nick Forrest ’08 that describes the desire of the observed and the writer imagining the scene, to receive the first place prize.

The following is an excerpt from “Marine Wedding (From a photograph by Nina Berman),” the poem by Nick Forrest that won first place in the 2008 John Russell Hayes poetry competition.

Before the ricochet, before
The shrapnel bomb
Let go its
Hungry fingers

And your truck burned
Away its gasoline.
Before the medallions
Were cast from silver

Pinned to your
Chest, Before your
War paint,
Your war face."