Corrinne Clegg Hales
Corrinne Clegg Hales grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, earned her BA and MA at the
University of Utah and her PhD at SUNY-Binghamton in New York State. Among other jobs, she
has worked as a motel clerk and housekeeper, a political pollster, a Polaroid camera
demonstrator, and has taught at various colleges and universities including the University
of Utah, SUNY-Binghamton, Ithaca College, and the University of Oregon. She is the author
of two books, Separate Escapes, winner of the Richard Snyder Poetry Prize, Ashland
Poetry Press, 2002, and Underground, Ahsahta Press, 1986; and two chapbooks, Out
of This Place, March Street Press, 2001, and January Fire, Devil’s
Millhopper Press. Awards include two NEA Fellowship Grants and the River Styx
International Poetry Prize for 2000. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, The
North American Review, The Southern Review, Mississippi Review, Ploughshares, Notre Dame
Review, River Styx, The Hudson Review, and elsewhere, and she currently lives in
Fresno, CA, where she teaches creative writing and American literature and coordinates the
MFA program at California State University, Fresno.
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I think of a poem as a light in the hand, a full
spectrum light that pokes into corners and ceilings, and noses into tight cracks and under
the furniture, even under the boards of the floor, and the best poems are the most
relentless lamps, both wide angle and focused, unlimited in their ability to foster
examination, to help us see.
It also seems to me that poetry is one of the ways—perhaps even the most effective
way—that humans can talk deeply and honestly with each other. It’s a way of
seeking knowledge, meaning, truth; a way of discovering what it might mean to live in the
world together as human creatures, and maybe even a way of discovering how to do it a
little better. So, at risk of sounding unfashionable, I will say that I believe a
poem’s first errand is communication. I don’t mean simple verbal clarity or
accessibility, though I value those qualities highly; I mean an attempt to connect with
others in a complex and significant way. The reader must be respected, and the reader must
be invited in—though not necessarily through the most obvious doorway.
Certainly one of the most difficult and urgent things about being human is the need to
communicate accurately and profoundly with one another, and poetry is where we often come
closest to accomplishing that. The poems I find most powerful are those that push language
and imagination to the point where they simultaneously access the trinity of intellect,
emotion and sensuality, creating something like an intersection of revelation.
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