Maurya Simon’s poetry explores the mysterious, elusive intersection where the sacred and profane meet. It’s a difficult place to render truthfully, but by paying meticulous attention to the tangible world of small gestures and fleeting experiences, she is somehow able to capture grace—or at least register its passage. Like the deep underground tanks of liquid that scientists build to learn more about the massless, tiny neutrino, Simon’s poems give us the sense that we’ve glimpsed a trace of transcendence. Whether she is writing about fourth century saints or men fishing at a lake while their wives prepare a picnic, Simon invests the world with meaning. Her poetry exemplifies what the critic George Steiner has said is the goal of all art—the ability to convey a sense of “real presence.”
Some of Simon’s work is featured in Image issue 37.
Biography
Maurya Simon is the author of The Enchanted Room and Days of Awe (Copper Canyon Press, 1986, 1989), Speaking in Tongues (Gibbs Smith, 1990), and The Golden Labyrinth (Univ. of Missouri Press, 1995). Her fifth volume, A Brief History of Punctuation, was published in a fine letter-press, limited edition by Sutton Hoo Press in 2002, and her sixth volume, Ghost Orchid, is due from Red Hen Press in March 2004. Simon is the recipient of a 2002 Visiting Artist Residency from the American Academy in Rome, a 1999-2000 NEA Fellowship in poetry, a University Award from the Academy of American Poets , the Celia B. Wagner and Lucille Medwick Memorial Awards from the Poetry Society of America, and a Fulbright/Indo-American Fellowship in Bangalore, South India. Simon has been a fellow at Hawthornden Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, and at the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden, as well as a lecturer at Lund University in Sweden. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, Agni, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, New England Review, and in more than thirty anthologies. Simon teaches in and Chairs the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside and lives in the Angeles National Forest of the San Gabriel Mountains, in Southern California.
The paintings that grace the cover of Maurya’s books of poems, The Enchanted Room and Days of Awe were painted by her mother, L.A. artist Baila Goldenthal.
Current Projects
April 2004
For the past several years I’ve been visiting and photographing ancient rock art, including dolmens, burial sites, cave paintings, and petroglyphs, created by a number of early cultures—from the Paleolithic (in Europe) to those tough and inventive peoples inhabiting the Americas—in order to write a book-length sequence of poems that explores the interstices of the spirit world with our waking world, both in the past and present. This book continues and extends my earlier poetic investigations into how the realms of the sacred and profane interact to deepen and enrich our lives.
I have recently completed my seventh volume of poems, a novel in verse entitled The Raindrop’s Gospel: The Trials of St. Jerome & St. Paula. This books dramatizes the lives, work, and relationship of these two 4-5th century saints. I am also working on an anthology of ekphrastic poetry, that is, poetry based directly upon visual works of art.