Poet and critic Susan Stewart was born in 1952. She received a B.A. in English and anthropology from Dickinson College, an M.A. in poetics from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania.

She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Columbarium (University of Chicago Press, 2003) which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Forest (1995), which received the Literary Award of the Philadelphia Atheneum; The Hive (1987); and Yellow Stars and Ice (1981).

Her collected essays on art, The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004. Her other books of criticism include Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), which received both the 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta Kappa and the 2004 Truman Capote Award in Literary Criticism; as well as Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (1991); Nonsense (1989); and On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984).

She also co-translated Euripides’ Andromache with Wesley Smith, and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini, and collaborated with composer James Primosch on a song cycle commissioned by the Chicago Symphony.

Her honors include a Lila Wallace Individual Writer’s Award, two grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pew Fellowship for the Arts, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.

Stewart was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2005. She taught at Temple University in Philadelphia from 1978 to 1997. She is currently Professor of English at Princeton University where she teaches the history of poetry and aesthetics.

This Spring Susan Stewart is teaching Modern American Poetry, English 364 and Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Poetics, English 563. In the Autumn, she will be teaching a course in Contemporary Poetry.

The Owl

I thought somehow a piece of cloth was tossed
into the night, a piece of cloth that flew

up, then across, beyond the window.
A tablecloth or handkerchief, a knot

somehow unfolding, folded, pushing through
the thickness of the dark. I thought somehow

a piece of cloth was lost beyond the line -
released, although it seemed as if a knot

still hung, unfolding. Some human hand could not
have thrown that high, or lent such force to cloth,

and yet I knew no god would mind a square
of air so small. And still it moved and still

it swooped and disappeared beyond the pane.
The after-image went, a blot beyond

the icy glass. And, closer, there stood winter
grass so black it had no substance

until I looked again and saw it tipped
with brittle frost. An acre there (a common-

place), a line of trees, a line of stars.

So look it up: you’ll find that you could lose
your sense of depth,

a leaf, a sheaf
of paper, pillow-

case, or heart-
shaped face,

a shrieking hiss,
like winds, like

death, all tangled
there in branches.

I called this poem “the owl,”
the name that, like a key, locked out the dark

and later let me close my book and sleep
a winter dream. And yet the truth remains

that I can’t know just what I saw, and if
it comes each night, each dream, each star, or not

at all. It’s not, it’s never, evident
that waiting has no reason. The circuit of the world

belies the chaos of its forms - (the kind
of thing astronomers

look down to write
in books).

And, still, I thought a piece of cloth
had flown outside my window, or human hands

had freed a wing, or churning gods revealed
themselves, or, greater news, a northern owl,

a snowy owl descended.

 

Other recent poems:

“The Lost Colony”(also click here for audio of this poem)
“Day-lily”

translations:
From “Theme of Farewell” by Milo De Angelis
other poems by Milo De Angelis

and “A list of poems that should be required reading”

Photo and (adapted) bio reprinted with permission from The Academy of American Poets.