Sidney Wade
Sidney Wade is the author of four collections of poetry: Celestial Bodies
(2002), Empty Sleeves (1990); Green (1998); and Istanbul’dan/From
Istanbul (1998), which was published in Turkish and English, by Yapi Kredi Yayinlari,
Istanbul.
She was Senior Lecturer on a Fulbright Fellowship at Istanbul University in 1989–90.
She was awarded the Stanley P. Young Fellowship to the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference
in 1994.
She has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Houston (1994), an M.Ed. in Counseling
from the University of Vermont (1978), and a B.A. in Philosophy, University of Vermont
(1974). She has been teaching at the University of Florida since 1993.
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At a poetry reading, when that involuntary appreciative sound is elicited from the
audience—that small, vocal assent, almost a sigh, a conflation of an "ahh"
and a "mmm," it is clear that the poet has taken the listeners by surprise and
for a brief moment, filled their bodies with delight. It may be delight in the sound, in
the sense, in a certain recognition of the essential humanity of the whole endeavor, but
it is fundamentally a physical delight.
Poetry is an affair of the body. Its predominant rhythm, in English, is the iamb, the beat
of the heart. One reads a poem with one’s nerves, says Wallace Stevens. As I
write my poems, I read them aloud, to engage the language with the senses, to assess what
works and what doesn’t, on the physical level.
The body is the great poem. (Wallace Stevens)
I try, in my poems, to write a surprise into every line. I don’t always succeed, but
that is the ideal. A surprise can be of many different persuasions: an unexpected
modifier, an odd turn in the argument, a rhetorical flourish, a fresh image, a good new
metaphor (a good new metaphor is always a surprise—it teaches us something we
didn’t know about the world and its endless possibility), a bold rhyme, a change of
rhythm.
I love best to read those poets who surprise me again and again—those whose words
make the eyes widen, the vocal chords give up their involuntary assent, and, best of all,
the hair on the back of the neck and arms to rise. Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, Anne
Carson, Sylvia Plath, Less Murray, Wallace Stevens.
A few aphorisms, à la Adagia:
Poetry is the gaiety (joy) of language. (Wallace Stevens)
A poem is the membrane through which language passes on its way to illumination.
A poem is a celebration of the body, all feeling, and the intelligence.
A poem is a metaphor for a certain experience—some are limited, some are grand. The
greater the human dimension of the experience, the greater the poem.
A poem is a pheasant disappearing in the grass. (again, and always, Wallace
Stevens)