Elise Paschen
Elise Paschen (born January 1959) is an American poet. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Poetry in Motion, a program which places poetry posters in subways and buses across the country.
The daughter of renowned prima ballerina Maria Tallchief and Chicago contractor Henry D. Paschen, she was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, where she attended the Francis W. Parker School. A graduate of Harvard University, she holds M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees in 20th Century British and American Literature from Oxford University. Paschen is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation.
Her books of poetry include, most recently, Bestiary as well as Houses: Coasts and Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Ploughshares and Shenandoah.
Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America from 1988 until 2001, she has edited numerous anthologies, including the New York Times bestsellers Poetry Speaks and Poetry Speaks Who I Am. She was the featured Illinois poet at the National Book Festival in September 2006 and is the former Poet Laureate of Three Oaks, Michigan. Dr. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Chicago with her husband, Stuart Brainerd, and their two children.
Awards
Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, for Infidelities
Works
Houses: Coasts (Sycamore Press, Oxford, 1985)
Infidelities (Story Line Press, 1996)
Bestiary (Red Hen Press, 2009)
Anthologies featuring her poems
Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America (1997)
Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (2000)
The POETRY Anthology, 1912—2002 (2002)
A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (2007)
Editor or co-editor
Poetry in Motion (1996)
Poetry Speaks (2001)
Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast (2002)
Poetry Speaks to Children (2005)
Poetry Speaks Expanded (2007)
Poetry Speaks Who I Am (2010)*
POET ELISE PASCHEN ’81 certainly grew up in an artistic home. Her mother, Maria Tallchief, was the first American prima ballerina: from 1947 to 1960 the beautiful daughter of an Osage Indian father and a Scots-Irish mother was the star of the New York City Ballet. Tallchief and principal choreographer George Balanchine were married from 1946 to 1952, but Paschen is the only child of Tallchief and her second husband, Chicago contractor Henry “Buzz” Paschen. As a girl, Paschen did try ballet, briefly, but “knew at a young age that I wanted to be a writer,” she says. She recalls reciting Blake’s “The Tiger” for her mother at the age of eight. “I lived in my imagination,” she says, “and loved writing poems, short stories, plays.”
As author of the collections Infidelities (1996) and Bestiary (2009), Paschen has evoked poignant moments, feelings, and ideas in lines crafted with lapidary care, working in traditional meters and forms and often using rhyme. Among poets she admires is Richard Wilbur, A.M. ’47, JF ’50 (see “Poetic Patriarch,” November-December 2008, page 36); he returns the regard, writing that Paschen’s poems “draw upon a dream life which can deeply tincture the waking world.” He observed of “Oklahoma Home”—a quiet, haunting verse that draws on the poet’s Osage ancestry—that it “magically and movingly enters the consciousness of another person in another time and place.”
Paschen also helped bring the poetic art to millions of listeners and readers through her work as executive director of the New York-based Poetry Society of America (PSA) from 1988 until 2001. In 1991 she secured an international grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to send two poets, both Native American women, to England on a reading tour, and went with them. While traveling by Tube in London, Paschen looked up to see a seventeenth-century sonnet by Michael Drayton—“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part”—displayed in the car, and imagined something similar in New York City subways and buses. She dismissed the idea as unrealistic, but several months after her return to New York, got a call from New York City Transit: its president had been traveling in London, seen the Poems on the Underground displays, and wondered if the PSA might help start an analogous initiative. Poetry in Motion, launched in New York in 1992, went national in 1996, spreading to more than 20 cities. By 2001, Paschen says, “We were reaching more than 13 million people a day with poetry in subways and buses across the country.”
When she ran the PSA, Paschen’s ambition was “to put poetry at the crossroads of American life, to make poetry visible, to make poetry accessible.” Since then, she has edited a series of print anthologies: Poetry Speaks, Poetry Speaks to Children, and the most recent, Poetry Speaks Who I Am; all three include CDs of poets reading their works, as well. The first two made the New York Times bestseller list, “which is unheard-of for poetry,” she says, and each sold more than 100,000 copies. Since 1999, she has continued her poetry-fostering mission by teaching in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Paschen was fortunate in her mentors. At Harvard she studied with Seamus Heaney and Robert Fitzgerald, and was poetry editor of the Harvard Advocate. “You should go to Houghton [Library] and look up Yeats’s manuscripts,” Heaney told Paschen at one point. She did. “I discovered how extensively Yeats revised his work,” she recalls. “At the time, as a sophomore, I would write a poem and I thought I was finished with it—that was it! Seamus very gently nudged me to realize that I had to work on my poem and craft it. That moment influenced the rest of my life as a writer—I revise copiously. But it also awakened in me a passion for William Butler Yeats. I went to Oxford after Harvard and did an M.Phil. degree in twentieth-century literature and wrote my D.Phil. dissertation on Yeats’s revisions.” With Fitzgerald, she studied versification, which she compares to a pianist practicing scales. “Everything I write is in some form, or meter, or rhythm, like iambic tetrameter,” she says. “I’m now experimenting with prose poems, but it is challenging; I enjoy writing in a set form because it allows me to work in a confined space—knowing where I have to break my line.”
Those lines tend to be few in number. Paschen’s poems are sharp arrows piercing some target in her personal landscape. Infidelities explores both the pleasures and hazards of eros, while the poems in Bestiary take animal life as both their ruling metaphor and, quite often, subject. In traditional forms like the sonnet, villanelle, and even the ancient Eastern ghazal, she plumbs primal themes: birth, death, sex, parenthood, aging. At times the poet’s Osage heritage shines through the words, and one finds in her language the kind of hard-won grace her mother achieved in dance.*
*https://harvardmagazine.com/2011/05/poetic-paschen
CHUEN
Kin 171: Blue Lunar Monkey
I polarize in order to play
Stabilizing illusion
I seal the process of magic
With the lunar tone of challenge
I am guided by the power of abundance.
Spiritual self-sufficiency is a function of discipline which is a continuing spiritual sacrifice of the lower self for the higher self.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2017-2018.
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Ajna Chakra (Gamma Plasma)
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