Mara Jebsen is a poet who is deeply marked by oral traditions, and interested in the staging, singing and storytelling of poetry. She studied public policy and African and African-American studies at Duke University, and holds an MFA in creative writing from NYU. Mara teaches the craft of essay-writing at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and at some point during her years of teaching began to learn to write an essay, herself. She was raised in Philadelphia and Lome, and now lives in Brooklyn, where she is a consummate bruncher. Email: marajebsen@yahoo.com
by Mara Jebsen “This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.” —James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village” Two years ago this summer, Miley Cyrus 'twerked' against a backdrop of several bent-over black women, Trayvon Martin’s death created a nightmare vision of hoodies and skittles, and Kanye West marketed Confederate flag…
by Mara Jebsen I cross the country. Beneath me Towns crackle, bullet holes bleeding light. Yellow, hard, a bright-mustard honey.There are bees and bees in the skull in the sky.Amnesia, I think, is the white air inside an airplane. And fears, I expect, are bizarre infant-plants that grow without sunin the very wee hours. To…
by Mara Jebsen After Edward Hopper's Two On the Aisle, 1927 A dark theatre can curve round you like a snakeif you show early and the theatre’s sunkin that deep-hush velvet, against whicha body feels bony, wrong. Fold your coat squarely on the back of your chair; un-crease a programme, don’t fret about the vague…
by Mara Jebsen Woke up this morning, the moon wasn't right. Woke up this morning, the moon wasn't right. Sharp as a blade, and she slung to the right. Woke up this morning, the moon wasn't right. Carolina, I miss you, miss your crackle-whipped pines; Miss your bread-rising breath, thick-sweet like old times; And I…
by Mara Jebsen Good morning, Calamity Jane –plenty disaster for breakfast again. Staunching of blood. Stemming of tide. Not enough Dutchboys with fingers in the dam. . . Do Wake Up Calamity Jane. We are killing even our favorites, again. Soldiers & small flash-mouth boys. Pedestrian death.—Plenty of martyr for our coffers. or Coffins. Plenty…fodder…
by Mara Jebsen One of my favorite memories is also a mysterious one.It is 2006, and I am in Togo. The first goal struck for the continent of Africa has just been shot by Mohamed Kader. He’s representing the Togolese team, who are making their first and only World Cup appearance. A near-hysterical roar goes…
by Mara Jebsen In this iteration of this poem-essay on Brooklyn, Gentrification, Love, Baseball, Ghosts, and Gardens, I am heavy on instinct and making sense with the senses– in terms of my approach to the way these things connect. In another iteration I may add more of what I am slowly learning about the fascinating…
by Mara Jebsen In 2006, when I had finished my MFA; when I had completed a poetry class with a famous professor I worshipped; when I had absorbed the fact that despite my increasingly panicky efforts to write a true good poem I had not only not been anointed but had not even been remarkable…
by Mara Jebsen Rodin was famous for his fragments, and, in his era, hotly defended the choice to sculpt just a hand, or a torso, or a foot melting back into its original rock. The character Bernard, in Virginia Woolf's experimental “The Waves” seems to have revealed something about Woolf's thoughts on the unfinished, as…
by Mara Jebsen While I do not like the phrase, “at the height of her powers,” it comes to mind when I think of Taymor directing this comedy. I don't like the phrase because it seems to anoint the critic with a false sense of her own fortune-telling powers, and has an undue emphasis on…
by Mara Jebsen Every once in a while, a book comes out about the Dulles family. It is in the interests of the writers, of course, to remind the world who the Dulles’ were, because the world has mostly forgotten. There’s the airport, but not that many people know the fellow it is named after.…
Startling, the morning and startling, the noon. Mist, and we didn’t understand it. There was a message coming from unimaginable mountains and we breathed dumbly inside it. Some of us had our ears to the angels, to the windows in the basins of whiskey glasses; measured ourselves against different sticks and stretched our shadows. There…
by Mara Jebsen I met a woman the other day; she told me she was writing a book on luck.“Luck!” I said, “that’s an excellent topic.”And someone else drank some beer and said: “Luck, I’ve heard. . .is just statistics taken personally.” And the woman laughed, agreeing, I think. But I must confess I’m superstitious;…
by Mara Jebsen First day of May, and the roses on my block all boiled into bloom, as if following a summons– water-logged and lewd they nodded as I passed and I wanted to touch them, but didn't have time– Then I watched a rat pull an entire poppy-seed bagel along subway tracks. He kept…
by Mara Jebsen The play I am writing has its own totem animal, an elephant. The characters in this play, who are the inmates of my imagination, do not know what to make of this elephant, and neither do I, their god. For months, it did little more than lift and drop its trunk. It…
by Mara Jebsen One of Claire Messud's interviews for “The Woman Upstairs” has got a lot of people talking about literature and likeability, and about whether a book’s protagonist ought to be warm, and about whether expectations about that warmth are gendered. Messud, in a tone and with a vividness that ultimately pleased even the…
by Mara Jebsen Should poetry be whispered in the dark? Should it be a communion with the dead, transacted silently through the media of paper and lamplight? Ought it to roll out of the whale-mouths of men on stages (maybe grumpy orators in black fedoras?) Should it arrive from the mouths of girls in sequins…
I do not work as these ladies do. My body is indolent. I should lift things, Sash things, Cook. Should have a child on my back. A basket on my head. When I leave my book to make more coco, I wash a dish in the sink, I waste the soap. Modesta catches me. “I…
by Mara Jebsen Or, I Did AWP All Wrong, And This Is What I Learned: Every year, thousands of writers collect at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs convention. In some great origami-like structure, panels and panels unfold in every direction, and lovers, rivals, business partners and strangers rub shoulders (and egos) in a…
by Mara Jebsen In August in Philadelphia, the sun leaks across red bricks and washes them down in foamy hot colors like a peach set on fire. Grown-ups sit barefoot on stoops and kids skip under rainbows of fire hydrant spray, which veil their bare arms in incandescent mist. This happened in 1985, perhaps it…