Mary Jo Bang

Worse

Idioma: inglés

Traducciones: alemán (Schlimmer)

Worse

You are in the zebra crossing,
Moving into the tornado green morning,
The shabby irradiation
Of sunlight seen through the hint
Of rain about to be. Death is
A jerky reversal of forward momentum.
Back into memory, Into a cereal bowl
On the table decades ago, the colour of an orange
Aspirin for a fever at age four
That produced a heat-filled forehead hallucination.
Think of a hive made of glass, all the bees,
Theoretically at least, describable but not all at once.
That's my mind and you
Are doing all the things you ever did all at once.
There are so many
Of you. Many more than several. Thirty-seven
Years of behaviour. Nothing terrible
Has happened as yet except the uneven drone
Inside is an announcement that there will be something
Like a sting only much much worse.

Mary Jo Bang

* 22.10.1946, Ferguson, Estados Unidos
Vive en: St. Louis, Estados Unidos

The poet Mary Jo Bang grew up in Ferguson, Missouri. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri where she is working at Washington University as a professor of English and as the director of the Creative Writing Program. She was awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, such as a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Fellowship in 1997, a Yaddo Fellowship in 1998 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. Her poems got published in various magazines like the New York Times, the Harvard Review, the New American Writing and in several anthologies like Best American Poetry. She is the recipient of various awards, including a Pushcart Prize. In 2007 she received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her book Elegy, which was estimated by the New York Times to be one of the most important books of the year. She was the poetry co-editor of the Boston Review from 1995 to 2005.

Bang contrasts in her poems a glamorous, American world with the dark regions of human existence, full of existential threat, emotional uncertainty and insatiable longing. She questions for instance the complex relation of modern media and human perception.

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