MITCHELL, Susan

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Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 1944. Education: Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Career: Has held teaching positions at Middlebury College, Vermont, and Northeastern Illinois University. Holds the Mary Blossom Lee Endowed Chair in Creative Writing, Florida Atlantic University. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; grants from the state arts councils of Massachusetts, Illinois, Vermont, and Florida; Claire Hagler fellow, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; Hoyns fellow, University of Virginia; Guggenheim Foundation fellow, 1992; Lannan Foundation fellow, 1992; Kingsley Tufts poetry award, 1993. Address: c/o Harper Collins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, New York 10022–5299, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Water inside the Water. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1983.

Rapture. New York, Harper Perennial, 1992.

Erotikon: Poems. New York, Harper Collins, 2000.

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Critical Studies: "Underwater Pavilions" by Tam Lin Neville, in American Poetry Review (Philadelphia), 23, January/February 1994; "On Disproportion" by Tony Hoagland, in Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, edited by Gregory Orr and Ellen Bryant Voigt, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1996.

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Susan Mitchell's poems, and the numerous honors they have garnered for their author, embody and reflect the world of mainstream American poetry. Her period style often begins with the pentameter line, which she expands or contracts from poem to poem, frequently transforming it into a unit that is closer to prose than to poetry. She is fond of repetition. She presents layers of detail yet leaves most connections between details largely up to the reader. On many occasions it appears that her poems have an almost aimless quality. They can seem laborious, elaborate, and self-conscious in expression: "… I'm devoted / to an enormous expanse of violet / which is how the Atlantic wants to be today." Time and again Mitchell burrows back to the familiar business of analyzing personal experience rather than of allowing the artful presentation of experience itself to reveal the truth. What is most often lacking in this style is a fully formed individual point of view. Without one, writers who may feel deeply cannot sufficiently sort out their feelings to present them in the context that poetry requires. Thus, they have difficulty following where poetry would lead them.

For example, in "The Child Bride," from Rapture, Mitchell's release from a hospital occasions free association that brings up the woman that Poe almost married, Poe's wife, Dante's Beatrice, and Dante's intention in writing The Divine Comedy ("Paradise is what Dante did with loss"), all of which comes in the first twelve lines. The method continues with a catalog of images found in the hospital and in those things in life that are a mystery to the author: pain, pleasure, water, Poe, and, most important, the self. The poem's long middle offers extended clinical speculation on death and loss. Then, suddenly, poetry happens:

		...Poe's child 
bride was singing when she had her first hemorrhage,
as if music and blood flow from the same vein and the
heart
can pump only so much. The song split, traveling
in two directions, and one was a foreign
country always out of reach, a bird singing
   in a forest she could not enter, though Poe
described it for her, a place where strange brilliant
flowers, star-shaped, burst out upon the trees
where no flowers had been known before.

For a shining moment the writer disappears in poetry itself, devoid of strategies and agendas. But the moment ends, followed by another thick passage speculating on the nature and endurance of pain. This passage maneuvers the writer back to center stage, in control once more:

	 ...I forget
the name of my own country, forget
which language is which.

Mitchell certainly is not alone in writing in such a period style, and on occasion there are indications that she is capable of greater artistry. "Bus Trip," also from Rapture, is one of her better poems:

All across America children are learning to fly.
On a bus leaving New Hampshire, on a bus
leaving Colorado, I sat next to a child
 
who had learned how to fly
and she carried her flying clenched
inside both fists. She carried her flying
 
in a suitcase and in a stuffed dog
made of dirt and the places where she had stood
all night listening to the rain...

The simplicity here rings true. It is evocative and tender. It is enough.

—Robert McDowell