TWICHELL, Chase

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Nationality: American. Born: New Haven, Connecticut, 20 August 1950. Education: Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, 1970–73,B.A. 1973; University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1974–76, M.F.A. 1976. Family: Married Russell Banks in 1989. Career: Editor, Pennyroyal Press, West Hatfield, Massachusetts, 1976–85; visiting assistant professor, Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1983–85; associate professor, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, 1985–88; lecturer, Princeton University, New Jersey, 1989–2000; instructor, M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing, Goddard College, 1997–99. Since 1999 faculty member, M.F.A. Program for Writers, Warren Wilson College. Founder, Ausable Press, 1999. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1987, 1993; Guggenheim fellowship, 1990; literature award, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1994; Alice Fay Di Castagnola award, Poetry Society of America, 1997, for The Snow Watcher.Member: Academy of American Poets. Agent: Ellen Levine, Suite 1801, 15 East 26th Street, New York, New York 10010, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Northern Spy. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.

The Odds. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986.

Perdido. New York, Farrar Straus, 1991; London, Faber, 1992.

The Ghost of Eden. Princeton, New Jersey, Ontario Review Press, and London, Faber, 1995.

The Snow Watcher. Princeton, New Jersey, Ontario Review Press, 1998; London, Bloodaxe, 1999.

Other

Editor, with Robin Behn, The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach. New York, Harper Collins, 1992.

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Critical Studies: "The One Clear Unspoken Sign: Four Young Poets" by Louie Skipper, in Black Warrior Review (Tuscaloosa, Alabama), 12(2), spring 1986; "About Chase Twichell" by David Daniel, in Ploughshares (Boston), 19(4), winter 1993–94.

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Chase Twichell's poems move through the natural world much as a biologist moves over the landscape collecting and cataloging specimens. Their chronicle of personal experience is similarly meticulous and edgy with the tone of the tough, unsentimental conclusions for which the author is noted.

In The Odds (1986) Twichell embellishes the crisp style of her debut volume, Northern Spy (1981), by opening herself to the first-person narrative. Central to the collection are two longer poems, "My Ruby of Lasting Sadness," which looks back on youthful romance, and "A Suckling Pig," a relentless depiction of psychological and physical excesses among a privileged set of New England friends. "Her agony," Gerald Stern has said, "is the certain delicate moment where the mind realizes its isolation, its loneliness and its longing."

Twichell's most intense encounters with her agony may be found in the poems of her third volume, Perdido (1991). Much of this book dwells on the subject of love, springing from love's occasions to full awareness of that "certain delicate moment." Sex is an especially vibrant bridge from the mundane to revelation. In "Remember Death," for example, the narrator looks past the shoulder of her lover "up into the high vaults /of the Church of the Falling Leaf." She notes but chooses to endure the sticks hurting her back and the wasps departing and returning to their nest above. She observes and does her best to give in to the conflicting energies of the moment and let life happen.

In "The Condom Tree" this impulse triggers a reevaluation of a childhood memory. Again the door opens on the occasion of sex. During lovemaking the narrator closes her eyes and travels back to her tenth year, when, one day by the river, she came on a young maple tree the older children of the neighborhood had adorned with condoms: "… was it beautiful," the poet asks, "caught in that dirty floral light, /or was it an ugly thing?" Such basic questions of value and certainty always emerge from the core of this poet's explorations. "Her poems," C.K. Williams has written, "manifest a sharp ironic awareness of what's expected of a woman's sensitivity, and a gratifying willingness to play off these expectations in illuminating ways." The observation seems accurate. In "The Condom Tree" the poet recalls that the tree was "beautiful first, and ugly afterward":

That must be right,
though in the remembering
its value has been changed again,
and now that flowering
dapples the two of us
with its tendered shadows,
dapples the rumpled bed as it slips
out of the damp present
into our separate pasts.

In memory and experience value is always changing. Twichell's clearest message is to accept responsibility and to remain open to, and aware of, the world's ever changing pulse.

—Robert McDowell