Maureen Owen
Maureen Owen's latest title is HEARTS IN SPACE from Kulchur Press in NYC. She edits TELEPHONE BOOKS PRESS and TELEPHONE Magazine (19th issue now available), & is presently on the Advisory Board of the St. Mark's Poetry Project where she has been Co-director, Workshop Instructor, Mimeo Operator, & general student.
Working Notes from Maureen Owen:
Flat geographies can be invented w/ intersecting plains & meandering waters that are little stories merging from different sources & what happens is Writing where the process of the poem being written becomes the actual poem & the actual poem becomes the process of the poem being written. All the wrong words are part of it too then & the spaces between the words breathe because there is no finished poem just all that goes into it.
[postscript, from letter accompanying formal "Working Notes"]
"My oldest son goes off to college this week and my youngest goes to first grade. & I feel like I've gone off the side of the world. What I was getting at in my Working Notes was how the constant interruptions of the kids have a lot to do with shaping my poems. I don't know if I said it quite clearly because they all kept coming into my study w/ something for me to do and I fell asleep at my typewriter again after all that. Now it's midnight & I'm awake tho I sometimes wonder if I'm ever really awake these days! Fanny (Howe) was saying to me last week as we cooked dinner for our ravenous brood, that she saw constant masks over Void in my poems. But the masks or disguises are not so conscious really, so tho what excites me is the mystery in my poems, I can't say that's 'consciously' part of my working plan."