Karen chase poet biography

They are visceral. They are stand-alone. They are intertwined. At the core of these stories is the endless possibility of love, language, and the power of the human heart. Karen Chase is a troubadour of wind, sound, space, time, memory, and desire. It is a book-length poem called Jamali-Kamalian erotic love story between two men that takes place in sixteenth-century Delhi, India.

And I karen chase poet biography as if I am a man in love with another man. Everything was far from me. Maybe letting my mind go that far afield opened something up in me and made it possible for me to look directly at my past. Karen Chase : No. Not when I started. Once the book was done, and particularly after it was published, those feelings came to the fore, but not at the start.

Robin Lindley: You mention that you found a hospital bed at an antique store that reminded you of your illness. Was that a trigger for the book also? Karen Chase : The bed definitely sparked something. But something had to be opening up in me to even notice it. When I saw this hospital bed, it was really old, maybe a hundred years old, and my reaction was intense.

I fell in love with the bed and started t write about it. Robin Lindley: You were only ten when you were diagnosed. What happened when you first experienced polio? Karen Chase : I was completely healthy. One day, I came home from school for lunch, and my leg started to hurt. I remember going upstairs and laying on the bed and raising my leg and looking at it.

I was thinking does my leg really hurt because I had to do a book report that afternoon. I did stay home from school and it hurt more. I remember distinctly that he did a spinal tap and took fluid from my spine. That was horrendously painful. I remember that moment vividly because I registered that something was really, really wrong. Later that day or the next morning an ambulance came and I was rushed to the hospital and put in an iron lung for a few days.

After a few days and the fever had subsided, I asked the doctor what was wrong, and he said I had a cold. It was something that made absolutely no sense. I was on the ICU unit for ten days to two weeks. Then I was taken to the polio ward. At that point, the virus was out of my system, and the damage was done. Robin Lindley: You describe that hospital experience vividly.

You had been healthy and then you were immobilized. How did your imagination help you with the experience? Karen Chase : My father gave me a camera when I was in the hospital and I took lots of pictures, and that was a nourishing thing to do. It was a little Brownie Hawkeye. I can feel it in my hands as I think about it. And when I first got sick I was a little girl.

I was ten. The whole ordeal lasted until I was So I went from being a little girl to a teenager during that period. I really had fun in the hospital. I remember really crying the day I left the hospital. I was leaving my friends, and we were a close-knit bunch of kids. Robin Lindley: You eventually regained normal function. Can you talk more about your treatment for polio and how the spinal fusion came about?

Karen Chase : Yes. During that period, they wrapped me in hot packs, these steaming blankets.

Karen chase poet biography: Karen Chase is the

A machine lowered me on a stretcher into a big whirlpool bath, whirling waters. Then a physical therapist came all the time and had me do exercises. That was the treatment right after I had polio. A physical therapist came and did exercises, and I eventually could walk in a few more months. This was all when I was in fifth grade. By the time sixth grade began, I went back to school for half a day, every day, wearing a back brace.

During this period, the stronger side of my back became stronger faster, and I became hunchbacked. And that was seventh grade. I was there a few months when they straightened my back with turnbuckles.

Karen chase poet biography: Karen Chase (born ) is an

Then they operated. They made a groove down 13 vertebrae and put in bone from a bone bank. Her student is a young man, sealed in a cocoon of silence by a series of traumas. In a psychiatric ward, they wrote poetry together, poet and patient, alternating with each other, one line at a time. This simple story is told with such honesty and force, chances are you will not put the book down until the last poem.

Land of Stone is also a story of the many intimate roles that language plays in our lives, in the sounds and images it evokes. Wang, research professor of language engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Karen chase poet biography: Karen A. Chase is an author,

The effectiveness of the quiet, elegant way, respectful of privacy, in which she invites interest and response makes the diagnostic interrogations and urgings to expression common in clinical work seem heavy-handed and primitive by comparison. In character, she does not presume to teach a lesson to clinicians, but there is one to be learned here nevertheless.

I will hand-sell it until the cows come home! All is held together by her skill and intensity. No line sleeps in these poems in which moments of real experience are isolated and made incandescent.