Tuesday poem #20 : Rosmarie Waldrop : EARLY STUDIES IN RESPIRATION

           you sit you              
           stand fill               
           you                      
           the room you             
           sound an opinion         
           violent you because              
           and you draw             
           attention tied under               
           your breasts
           you confidently you as in
           and don't you defend                   
           an absent-minded gesture 
           you wish you had         
           you had ideals but       
           if asked strangers you
           left you in fear and you wonder                   
           a pronoun stopped
           in the young day

Rosmarie Waldrop's recent poetry books are Driven to Abstraction, Curves to the Apple, Blindsight (New Directions), Splitting Images (Zasterle), and Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn). Her Collected Essays, Dissonance (if you are interested), was published by University of Alabama Press in 2005. A small chapbook of prose poems, OTHERWISE SMOOTH, appeared recently with above/ground press.
     Two novels, The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter and A Form/of Taking/It All are available in one paperback (Northwestern UP, 2001).   
     She has translated 14 volumes of Edmond Jabés's work (her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabés, is out from Wesleyan UP) as well as books by Emmanuel Hocquard, Jacques Roubaud, and, from the German, Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Oskar Pastior, Gerhard Rühm, Ulf Stolterfoht.
     She lives in Providence, RI. where she co-edits Burning Deck books with Keith Waldrop.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan