Marcia Southwick: a poet on life in the fast lane

Field Poetry prize winner reads from latest collection

On Monday, poet Marcia Southwick read from her third book, A Night at the Flying Dog, and other selections. Southwick, who lives and teaches in Sante Fe, was the recipient of the 1998 Field Poetry prize. Field is a literary magazine published by the Oberlin Press to which Southwick has been submitting material since 1973. Field sponsored the publication of her latest book.

Southwick's poems make use of vivid images, humor, and a tone that she jokingly categorized as "annoying." The assembled listeners spent a good portion of the hour laughing. Many of the poems are inspired by articles in newspapers or magazines. Some of her other poems are interpretations of modern culture and a few deal with herself as a poet.

"Poetry is really a different way of thinking that can lead you to think differently about a lot of things in your life," said Southwick. She has found an alternative way to think about society. Her poems enable the reader to laugh at the world around us.

Longman Professor of English David Young said, "Southwick shows us how hilarious our dilemmas can be and how here, at the end of the century, we flail around attempting to deal with them."

The first poem she read was "Augury," which is the ancient practice of predicting the future from bird droppings. She brings the practice to a modern time period and attempts to derive things from Nikes and tire marks. The poem, which contains strong images of materialistic society, is an unabashed attack on modern life.

Many of her poems come directly from newspaper headlines. Some of these have such eccentric titles as "The Amish on Rollerblades" or "The World's Greatest Electrician. In these, Southwick uses subjects that come straight from real life to create a critique of contemporary society. Containing such hilarious images as the Amish with "their beards flying," and the born-again Christians of the Texas Rangers, her poems make it hard not to laugh at the society of which you are a part.

Poems like "A Vacation in Boca isn't Rilke" and "Why I Hang Out With Nerds" deal more with society in general. The former commented on the "homogenization of the world," as Southwick called it.

Other poems, such as the title poem, "A Night at the Flying Dog," have a personal course to them. Here Southwick deals with her feelings for her husband, Nobel prize winner Murray Gell-Mann, and their place in the society she was attempting to understand. Another very personal poem is "Poets Anonymous."

This poem is about the effects of a condition unlike writer's block. This condition is for those who cannot stop writing. "Poets Anonymous" deals comically with people who are in a self-help group for writing poetry.

"I'm trying to process the information in popular culture because there is a huge barrage of information coming from there," said Southwick. "I think it is important to sort it out for what it is, total bologna." Her book, Saturday Night at the Flying Dog, is conscious of the world which it attempts to describe, and her reading was a true pleasure.