Pattiann Rogers

Pattiann Rogers Poems

Pattiann Rogers Biography

Pattiann Rogers (born 1940) is an American poet, and is on the faculty of the low residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Pacific University. She was born in Joplin, Missouri, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's degree from the University of Missouri in 1961. She received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Houston in 1981. She taught at the University of Texas, the University of Montana, and at Washington University in St. Louis. She was the Ferrol Sams Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Mercer University. She was Associate professor, and taught in the MFA Creative Writing Program during the spring semesters, 1993 to 1997, at the University of Arkansas. In May 2000, she was in residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy She is a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review. She lives in Colorado with her husband and has two sons. Firekeeper was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Books Published in 1994, was one of five finalists for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (given by the Academy of American Poets) in 1994, and received the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Song of the New World Becoming contains all of Rogers' poems in previously published books, 40 new poems, and line and title indexes. It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and was named an Editor's Choice, Top of the List by Booklist. Rogers has received two NEA Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2005 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and a 1993 Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her poems have been awarded the Tietjens Prize for Poetry, the Hokin Prize, and the Bock Prize for Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, the Strousse Award from Prairie Schooner, in 1993 and 1996, five Pushcart Prizes, and an appearance in The Best American Poetry of 1996, edited by Adrienne Rich. She was the 1987 poet in residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH, and in 2004 she was judge for the National Poetry Series.)

The Best Poem Of Pattiann Rogers

Nearing Autobiography

Those are my bones rifted
and curled, knees to chin,
among the rocks on the beach,
my hands splayed beneath my skull
in the mud. Those are my rib
bones resting like white sticks
wracked on the bank, laid down,
delivered, rubbed clean
by river and snow.

Ethereal as seedless weeds
in dim sun and frost, I see
my own bones translucent as locust
husks, light as spider bones,
as filled with light as lantern
bones when the candle flames.
And I see my bones, facile,
willing, rolling and clacking,
reveling like broken shells
among themselves in a tumbling surf.

I recognize them, no other's,
raggedly patterned and wrought,
peeled as a skeleton of sycamore
against gray skies, stiff as a fallen
spruce. I watch them floating
at night, identical lake slivers
flush against the same star bones
drifting in scattered pieces above.

Everything I assemble, all
the constructions I have rendered
are the metal and dust of my locked
and storied bones. My bald cranium
shines blind as the moon.

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