Sandra Alcosser was born in Washington D.C. and grew up in South Bend, Indiana. She graduated from Purdue University in 1972 and received her MFA from the University of Montana in 1982. She directed Central Park's Poets in the Park program in Manhattan, worked as a Mademoiselle Magazine editor, and taught in rehabilitation communities for drug addicts and emotionally disturbed patients. Alcosser, over the years, has traveled some 50,000 miles teaching poetry workshops to about 50,000 people for National Endowment for the Arts and state arts councils. She has taught at the University of Michigan, University of Montana, and Louisiana State University. She initiated and directed the MFA graduate writing program at San Diego State University, where she currently is a professor.

Alcosser has received numerous honors, including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships; her poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize Series. She is author of A Fish to Feed All Hunger and Sleeping Inside the Glacier, a collaboration between herself and artist Michele Burgess. She divides her time between homes in San Diego and Florence, Montana.

And this, in a prose poem from her newest collection, is what Alcosser has to say about herself:

Charles Olson's "I, Maximus/ a metal hot from boiling water" might have been the lyric sung on the backlot of the body shop where I grew up — paint fumes, grease pans, sparks flying — surrounded by Serbs, Germans, Hungarians returned from the Second World War, men who saw themselves, no matter how confusing, in direct lineage from the gods. Oh there were the fallen — Dale, for instance, who lived on a houseboat in the middle of a cornfield, drove an ancient Cadillac convertible, and stole women's girdles from clotheslines — but mostly these were supermen. I studied their calendars of women with bombshell breasts and skirts always given to the wind, and when I could get my hands on them, I read their nude sunbathing magazines. These were men unlike those I would meet in college, love or marry, but I studied them as we ate at my grandmother's table, the sounds they made so different from mine.

I grew up on an acre between Dixie Highway and the Illinois Central tracks where trains raced hourly through fields of wild asparagus. In the dream space between two lines of speeding technology was a grape arbor; a fish pond; a house full of women sunk to their elbows in bread dough; fields of geese, goats, sugar pear trees; the graves of bloody cars and grass grown crystalline through cracked windshields. I baked with the aunts and fished silently with the uncles and felt at home on the periphery of both worlds surrounded by action and accompanying sound. My grandfather whittled, sanded, banged, and snored. My grandmother — on a tonic of garlic and wine — fried, kneaded, waltzed. Together each day they spoke raucous Platt und Hochdeutsch. I did not participate in their conversation, nor the bodymen's jokes, the spray painting, the bumping and welding, the straightening of steel, though those too are dialects I know.

And when I went off to college I lied. I denied that I had won blue ribbons for butterscotch bars and tight little stitches in skirts, because that was female, and I denied I'd grown up in a body shop, because that was laughable, lower class, and not female. So began a dance, of learning then denying experience. Not exactly the way to build intelligence, though silence sharpens the senses, creates an oily, pungent memory.

Except by Nature was selected by Eamon Grennan for the 1997 National Poetry Series. The book has also received the prestigious 1998 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. A lot of fancy poetry people have been saying a lot of fancy things about the book. David St. John, for instance, writes that the collection "is filled with both an ecstatic wonder and a dark sense of wisdom concerning the unpredictable ways of both the natural world and the realm of human experience. She [Alcosser] is an exciting and gracious storyteller whose contemporary fables are filled with the hard desires and wild disappointments of her speakers. Always, there is a lyric urgency and rhythmic power that reminds us that the spirited music of the human voice is often the most intimate and compelling music of all." What St. John and the other fancy names have said certainly is accurate, but, it's fancy poetry talk about poetry, the kind of talk that gets printed on book jackets. It doesn't tell you how frankly sexy some of these poems are or that other of the poems serve as tiny museums to store domestic details that otherwise might be lost to us. No one says anything about how good an eye Alcosser has for the botanical and for the trim on women's underwear and the varying surfaces of satin, silk and gauze and the feel of those fabrics against flesh on hot humid nights. No one says anything about Alcosser's great titles — "Burying the Carnival," "Dancing the Tarentella at the County Farm." Everybody is busy being profound and I guess, really, that's their job. But it's not my job; my job is to encourage you to read Alcosser's poems. Sometimes I wish that people responsible for the blurbs on poetry collections would just write things like, "Knows about beets" (which Alcosser does); "writes as accurately about Louisiana as James Lee Burke" (which she does), "will make words taste different in your mouth than they tasted before you read her" and so on. Poetry book jackets could also use some leg art. The decorous cover for Except by Nature doesn't even begin to hint at the book's contents.

On the afternoon we talked Alcosser was in her Florence, Montana, home where, she said, "we have bear and elk and moose and so forth, in the back yard, the front yard, every place."

Alcosser, as a girl, wrote poems. "A few awful things. About boys."

I asked if the poems were the usual "I love him, he is so cute."

"No," she laughed. "It was an epic. About this Polish lifeguard."

We talked about the numerous prose poems, each poem a short, short story, in Alcosser's new collection. She explained that she began as a fiction writer. "At Purdue I was writing fiction and I got one of those Mademoiselle summer editorships, like the one that Sylvia Plath had. I'd just started writing and had received a lot of attention for this novel that I was working on. After the summer editorship ended, I went to work as an editor at Mademoiselle. I was editing there, during the day, and nights and weekends was trying to write this novel by putting down one perfect word after another. And finally, I just had to stop. When, eventually, I came back to writing, it was poetry."

Many poems in Except by Nature have their place in Louisiana. Alcosser taught at LSU from 1982 to 1985. "I only lived there for three years, but I saw these things that deeply troubled me. It was for me, a very troubling place. I felt really uncomfortable, almost ashamed, that I had that information, that I witnessed that. And all of that experience was stored. I had this feeling that either I would write about it now or it would be lost."

We talked for a long, long time about how long it takes women to gain confidence in their ideas and words, to not be embarrassed about the voices in which they write their "letter to the world." We talked about how difficult it is for women to do what Alcosser describes as joining, or, interrupting the "privilege of the discourse," by which she means, and I mean, the acceptable and accepted poems, novels, essays written for the most part, by men. Except by Nature's title, Alcosser explained, "is in the poem 'Skiing by Moonlight.' 'Except by nature — as a woman, I will be ungovernable.' In the poem this refers to Eros, but the line came from my response to the last presidential campaign. Commentators kept talking about the importance of the female vote, and I kept thinking, 'I refuse to be governed by any of these men.'"

After she'd fed the workers in my father's garage, my grandmother sank in her rocker to watch her soap opera, As the World Turns, and when it finished she'd take off her glasses, dab her eyes with Murine, and sleep, her garnet earrings picking up glints of sun that darted under the carriage port and into the living room. Everyone in the house breathed with her, even the parlor relaxed in the deep warmwater sleep of afternoon. I'd honey and bend a slice of bread into a satchel, then sneak out through the summer kitchen, past the chicken coops, the buglevine where the workers came to urinate and smoke cigarettes, past the wide rows of broccoli, eggplant, oysterplant, to the orchard, where I'd curl in the crotch of a sugar pear and dream. The memory of the exact location and the hour of the nectar — birds came draped in cobwebs, butterflies wore pollinia like slippers on their feet. A body grows from its erotic entanglement and then is reprimanded, as if nature and culture were opposed. Sleeping inside buttery flesh within a dark basement, even a Seckel pip knows the phases of the moon. One could spend a lifetime learning the way a petal grows to accommodate the strength of another body. We were given to ecstasy, my grandmother and I — as she rested from heart failure, she said if you'd slip your arm under me, I think I could dance. We were just the right distance from civilization to be invisible, capable of undergoing transformation. Budded and grafted my sunny side reddened. Happiness lit up the left side of the brain.

Because the Body Is Not a Weapon

In this town of date palms
and expensive pastry
everyone wears pastels.
Everyone owns a sports car
and speeds. I leap with blondes
in a gymnasium of steely leotards.
No one speaks to me.
No one catches my eye.
I eat ill-conceived
Mexican takeout —
pasty beans with
chopped beef.
In my dreams
all the creeps of my life
call me. I swear the only person
who spoke last week
had three-inch toenails
curled over his sandals.
Oh yes, and at the grocery
a little girl in coveralls
studies me when I smile.
You're not my mother,
she kicks her thick legs
through the cart rails.
You're    not    my    mother.
Still I pass lightly
as a dust diamond
through my pink sea cottage.
And how should I take this omen:
stalled in traffic, a van of boys
barks at me. Twelve years old,
they lick the windows.
They moon their half-formed buttocks.
They wiggle their shell-like genitals.
Do I laugh?
Have I become a foreign country?

Dancing the Tarantella at the County Farm

Our teachers prepared us years ahead
so that when I laze in bed past noon
twenty years later, ignoring my late father's
imperative-voice command —
get up and blow the stink off —
the poorhouse floats back to me
through its allée of hardwood trees.
It resembles a Georgian estate
surrounded by plate-flat farmland
and rumor that the basement
housed a torture chamber.
Our dogpatch class of nine-year-olds
grows suddenly grave as we approach.
Inside brick walls and flowered wallpaper
inmates have just finished lunch,
something like dried oatmeal
pasted to their trays, something difficult
to scrape away. Their faces have that same texture.
Our caretakers resemble each other —
same desire for order, same steel-arched shoes.
Each year they march us to the community room
to share each other's shame. My invitation —
to dance for the lady in a wheelchair, to display
long muscular legs. You're all she has, says the teacher
as she straightens my homemade costume.
But I am third grade. A nothing. I think
I'll never escape. Stronger than a father's voice,
the whisper of my teacher. Bow deeply
from stage left, her breath fused with the face
of the paralyzed woman, and when the music begins
get out there fast. I spin, I split, I do back flips.
I become St. Vitus again. I dance the spider bite
as hard as I can. See, I smile. Good girl.
My body becomes a wet rag. I wring it tighter and tighter.
Like a dervish. Like a top. It wants to fall over.
It wants to give up. If love were water
not a drop would be left.

Poems by Sandra Alcosser, from Except By Nature; Graywolf Press, 1998

Copyright © 1998 by Judith Moore.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.