Chelsea Rathburn
Chelsea Rathburn was born in 1975 in Jacksonville, Florida, and grew up in Miami, the
daughter of an air traffic controller and a preschool teacher. Raised on a diet of little
television but a steady stream of library books, she developed an early love of literature
and began writing little poems at age six. She attended Florida State University,
graduating summa cum laude, then moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to pursue an MFA in
poetry at the University of Arkansas. She currently works as a writer and editor for a
nonprofit organization in Atlanta, where she lives with her husband, Brandon Arnold, dog
Heika, cat Mingus, and a number of fish.
Chelsea’s poems have appeared in The New Criterion, Sewanee Theological
Review, The Formalist, Pleiades, The Able Muse, and other
journals. A two-time finalist in the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Competition, her work is
forthcoming in the anthology Rising Phoenix, and a limited edition chapbook from
Aralia Press will be available this spring.
Statement of Poetics
In school, I loved algebra and loathed geometry. I was attracted to proofs and theorems
and being able to wiggle around the equations to solve for the unknown. Geometry, oddly
enough, struck me as shapeless; I knew the answers were out there but I couldn’t work
them out. I suspect that the part of my brain that loved algebra is what draws me to
formal poetry. Though I’ve heard others complain that working in form is
constricting, I find the opposite is true. I have more fun with rhyme and meter, am forced
to focus on the ways structure and content play against one another. I like knowing I must
come up with multiple solutions. And I love how changing one word can shake an entire
poem.
In poetry and in life, I’m drawn to irony, the pull of opposing forces, the
discrepancies between who we are and who we think we are, what we want and what we get.
Form in poetry is itself a kind of irony – the preposterous suggestion that we can
control the universe of a poem by imposing regularity. There’s so little we can
control, yet we keep trying. For me, formal verse has an elegance that both disguises and
highlights the chaos that lies within.
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