Draft:Angela Patten

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Angela Patten (1952 - ) is an Irish poet, writer, and teacher. She has authored four collections of poetry and a prose memoir. The inclusion of her poetry in major anthologies recognizes her place as a notable Irish woman poet of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Also notable is her writing about the diasporas experience, which is a major category of Irish writing. Patton is among the poets and writers who have gendered this category.

Early life and education

Patten was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. She immigrated to the United States in 1977, settling in rural Vermont. While raising her son, she enrolled at the University of Vermont, earning a Bachelor's degree in Writing. She then earned a Master's in Fine Arts degree from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. After working for various nonprofit arts groups, she returned to the University of Vermont as a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer. In 2012, she received the university's Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award.[1] She lives in Burlington, Vermont, with her husband the poet Daniel Lusk.

Literary work and honors

Patten is the author of the 2013 prose memoir, High Tea at a Low Table: Stories From An Irish Childhood (Wind Ridge Books). This memoir, Patten writes in Poets & Writers, "combines my recollections of growing up in Ireland with some unexpectedly traumatic events I experienced as a young adult in America."[2] The memoir provides evidence of the importance of Irish language and culture in Patten's development as a writer. Patten's work is part of what by literary scholar Patricia Boyle Haberstroh calls the "female" voices revising the Irish masculine poetic tradition.[3]

In 2021, Patten's most recent poetry collection, The Oriole & the Ovenbird, was published by Kelsay Books. In Poets & Writers, Patton describes the focus of these poems as a "primal interplay between humans and avian species in our lives and imaginations."[4] In Sequestrum, Patton states that she had become "fascinated by the huge gatherings of crows in my neighborhood during the winter months and this led me to think about collaboration versus individualism. I thought about my father who was an Irish fiddle-player.... I was struck by how the musicians worked to fit in rather than stand out. When two disparate things come together, as they did in this case, there is the possibility for a poem."[5]

Patten's earlier poetry collections are In Praise of Usefulness (Wind Ridge Books, 2014), Reliquaries (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2007) and Still Listening (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 1999). Writers who have influenced Patten include the Irish poet Eavan Boland, whose epigraph to her poetry collection A Woman Without a Country is: “This sequence is dedicated to those who lost a country, not by history or inheritance, but through a series of questions to which they could find no answer.”[6] Patten has stated that this epigraph speaks to her experience.[7] Scholar Lucy Collins writes that for Irish women poets, "past and present exist in thematic and aesthetic alignment, making their treatment of memory of enduring importance to readers."[8] The themes of belonging and estrangement, which literary scholars locate as central to the contemporary evolution of Irish women's poetry, are present in Patten's memoir and poetry. Recognition of Patten's importance as an Irish woman poet can be seen in her inclusion in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volume V, Irish Women's Writing and Traditions, an expansive anthology compiled in response to the absence of women in earlier volumes.[9]

Patten's poems have been published in literary journals, including Calyx, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women; Hunger Mountain; Michigan Quarterly Review; Oberon; Off the Coast; Poetry Ireland Review; Prairie Schooner; Sequestrum; Voices International; and the Waterford Review. In addition to The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, her poems have been included in The White Page/An Bhileog Bhan; Onion River: Six Vermont Poets; Cudovista Usta (Marvelous Mouth), Drustvo Apokalipsa (Slovenia); Birchsong I and II: Poetry Centered in Vermont; Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry; Even The Daybreak: 35 Years of Salmon Poetry; and The Breath of Parted Lips II: Voices from the Robert Frost Place, edited by Sydney Lea.[10] The Breath of Parted Lips II was a finalist for the 2004 ForeWord Book of the Year and the 2005 Independent Publisher Book Award for Anthologies.[11]

In 2016, Patten received the Cultural Center of Cape Cod National Poetry Prize for her poem "Tracks." In 2022, she received the Anthony Cronin International Short Poem Award for her poem "Shine," which was published in the Wexford Bohemian, Issue #4. Like many of her poems, "Shine" is explores a daughter's memory of earlier family life. Patten's other honors include artist grants from the University of Vermont Retired Scholars Award Program, the Vermont Arts Council, and the Vermont Community Foundation.

Patten has been an invited participant and faculty member at literary festivals, writers' centers, bookstores, and teaching institutions around the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. Among these are Stonecoast in Ireland (University of Southern Maine), Dingle, County Kerry, Ireland; Harlow Gallery, Hallowell, Maine; The Frost Place, Franconia, New Hampshire; Irish Writers' Centre, Dublin, Ireland; Eigse Carlow Arts Festival, Ireland; Stranmillis University College/Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland; National Baha'i Center, Dublin, Ireland; Plattsburgh State University, Plattsburgh, New York; University of Osnabruck, Germany; and the Wexford Art Centre, Wexford, Ireland.

Patten has discussed her poems and her background in interviews, including a 2010 television interview with Fran Stoddard on Vermont Public Television, where she was interviewed alongside her husband the poet Daniel Lusk.[12] In 2018, she was interviewed by Margaret Harrington as part of the Burlington (VT) Irish Heritage Festival.[13] As the guest editor of Live Encounters: Poetry and Writing, a free nonprofit online magazine, Patten wrote that during the Covid-19 shutdown she joined "Healing Words," an Irish Zoom meeting for the sharing of song, poetry, and storytelling. The experience confirmed her belief that "Irish love of language, wit and wordplay has not died out completely."[14]

References

  1. ^ "University of Vermont, Announcement of Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award Winners".
  2. ^ "Poets & Writers". 22 February 2002.
  3. ^ Haberstroh, Patricia Boyle (1995). Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets. New York: Syracuse University Press.
  4. ^ "Poets & Writers". 22 February 2002.
  5. ^ "Sequestrum Issue, 13". 2017.
  6. ^ Boland, Eavan (2016). Woman Without a Country. New York: W. W. Norton.
  7. ^ "Sequestrum, Issue 13". 2017.
  8. ^ Collins, Lucy (2015). Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. p. 1.
  9. ^ Bourke, Angela (2002). Irish Women's Writings and Traditions, Volume 5 of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. New York University Press; Cork University Press.
  10. ^ Lea, Sydney (2004). The Breath of Parted Lips II: Voice from the Robert Frost Place. CavenKerry Press.
  11. ^ "Independent Publisher 2005 Awards".
  12. ^ Stoddard, Fran (2010). "Vermont Public Television Interview". YouTube.
  13. ^ Harrington, Margaret (2018). "Interview with Angela Patton, Channel 17, FOCUS Series".
  14. ^ Patten, Angela (August 2021). ""Gob Music: The Marriage of Memory and Poetry"". Live Encounters.
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