Work by Joan Kane
To Live Beyond
She is said to carry a wooden box
instead of a basket, the one who appears
when you lay to waste
Self-Interview
Nakedness is a metaphor for openness. It is what poets must be if they are to guide and lead. We are the feelings for those who have lost theirs; the inspiration for the uninspired. I suppose there are distinctions between nakedness and nudity, but who cares. The words take on different meanings according to context. It is indeed clothinglessness; openness, exposure‚ and at its heart honesty. Truth. Which is the soul of poetry. The words of poetry are merely the artifice; the clothes.
Polynya
It is disproven to me in a dream, the mountain
as weight fixed in place. The lapse of a seal-as-such
Joan Kane is the author of The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife and Hyperboreal. She has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry from AWP, the USA Projects Creative Vision Award, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation, Alaska State Council on the Arts, Alaska Arts and Cultures Foundation, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and the School for Advanced Research.
Kane graduated from Harvard College, where she was a Harvard National Scholar, and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she was the recipient of a graduate Writing Fellowship. Inupiaq with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, she raises her children in Anchorage, Alaska, and is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.