PVCC Puma Press: November 2004

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	Photo by Irene Harkleroad
	Cynthia Hogue, Contemporary and Experimental Poet is this semester’s Visiting Writer and Scholar. Reading and Master Class scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 2, from 2 p.m. to 4:40 p.m. in the Founders Room of the Kranitz Student Center.
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There is seriousness about her as she smiles, sitting in the mottled light of the mid-afternoon sun. The slightest edge of sadness appears to keep her from attaining a coveted sense of contentment. Patterned shadows play across the back of her hand as she reads aloud Carl Rukosi’s “Aubade.”

Cynthia Hogue, the Jonathan and Maxine Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, reads, writes and teaches poetry with intensity. She is a sensitive woman in an insensitive world, a mediator in a world rippled with an undercurrent of aggression.

Hogue’s sensitivity brings her an uncanny perception. It flavors both her poetry and her speech. Her writing reveals intimate stories of human searching as it speaks of gender, sexuality, vulnerability and collective loss.

Heavily influenced by the works of Emily Dickinson and Hilda Doolittle, known commonly to poets as H.D., Hogue was mentored by poets Robert Creeley and Norman Dubie. Her sensibilities drew her to Modernism through H.D.’s work.

“I go back again and again to the fact that this is the generation that lived through both world wars. They were born into an America that was insulated and very provincial and very secure and lived into the middle part of the 20th century and saw such horrors,” she says. “They lost a lot of their friends, family and loved ones in the First World War and saw the world turn around and do it again. We now live with a kind of violence, that feels to me, that humans just don’t get it. In H.D.’s Trilogy, her great WWII long poem, I saw a forcefulness to this woman’s vision in old age. It is the idea that humans can step into a place of articulation and power and refuse to subordinate an alternative vision of the world … to a masculine vision which gets us into war or violence again and again.”

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Hogue’s sensitivity leads to uncanny perception.
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Hogue is pleased to say that humans are stepping into that place of articulation. Fascinated with the poetic response to 9/11 (“Poets Against the War” project has published over 15,000 poems on their website), she says many are from people who had never written a poem.

Hogue earned her Ph.D. from The University of Arizona and has published four collections of poetry, including “Where the Parallels Cross” (1984), “The Women in Red” (1989), “The Never Wife” (1999), and “Flux” (2002).

Hogue has co-edited “We Who Love To Be Astonished: Experimental Women‘s Writing and Performance Poetics” (2001), and has written a critical study of American women poets, “Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity” (1995).

A trained mediator specializing in diversity issues in education, Hogue has lived and taught in New York, Arizona, New Orleans, Iceland and Pennsylvania.
The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship, Hogue is PVCC’s Visiting Writer and Scholar this semester. She will conduct a Reading and Master Class on Tuesday, Nov. 2, from 2 p.m. to 4:40 p.m. in the Founders Room of the Kranitz Student Center. All are welcome.