Your first and failed exile in New York?”īy honoring origins & saving their teachings, Hopes, & questions through poetry. Julia’s last poem begins with a question for her parents: “Hold on tight! could be the first commandmentįor this life, and the second, Let it go!Īlvarez with lessons & Alighieri with “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”ĭante’s last 33rd canto starts by speaking to the “Virgin mother, daughter of your Son.” The people you love, the places you love, De nada, folks.īecome the one you have been waiting for.” There were just too many quotable lines, so here’s a new poem made from different quotes in part dos. Julia’s second section is the largest with the most reflections on her life. On who we are - that much I’ve learned from trees.” “We have to live our natures out, the seed Roots are honored through every chapter of being re-rooted The middle of life divides time into seven trees: To honor Julia’s collection, here is a poem within poems, cause we are so meta like that at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Each of Julia’s poems contains three sections with ten lines, but each poem reads like free verse. Julia also puts her own spin on her poetry’s structure. Dante organizes his cantos with the poetic form he invented, terza rima. The Divine Comedy has “Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” and “Paradiso.” The Woman I Kept to Myself has “Seven Trees,” “The Woman I Kept to Myself,” and “Keeping Watch.” Dante has 33 cantos in each section (with the exception of the first with 34, but who’s counting?). Julia and Dante both wrote their poetry collection “in the middle of the journey of our life” where they found themselves “in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.” The first line of Dante’s Divine Comedy is referenced in the first section of Julia’s collection, fittingly called “Seven Trees,” with “Dante’s dark wood closing in on all sides, my last moments filled with a fear that takes my breath away.” Our breath is also taken away with Julia’s collection as readers will laugh and ugly-snail-trail-cry with these themes on the human condition, language, and the need to tell our stories as a way to understand our lives that can be felt no matter if one is a Dominican-American woman in the 21st century or a 13th-century, exiled Florentine man. Julia Alvarez’s line “our art can right what happens in the world” can be felt throughout her poetry collection, The Woman I Kept to Myself, particularly as the structure and themes mirror Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy with her own personal twist. Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity, and Access (EDIA). A co-founder of Border of Lights, she is the emeritus writer-in-residence at Middlebury College and lives on a farm in Vermont with her husband. She illustrates the complexity of navigating two worlds and reveals the human capacity for strength in the face of oppression."Īlvarez currently serves as one of the judges for the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize, alongside Bill McKibben. Alvarez explores themes of identity, family, and cultural divides. Of her work, her National Endowment for the Arts award citation says, "In poetry and in prose, Ms. She has also received grants from the the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She is the author of the poetry collections The Woman I Kept to Myself (Shannon Ravenel, 2011), Homecoming: New and Collected Poems (Plume, 1996), and The Other Side ( El Otro Lado) (Dutton, 1995), as well as six novels and three books of nonfiction.Īlvarez is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2013 National Medal of Arts, a Latina Leader Award in Literature from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, and a National Medal of the Arts, awarded by President Barack Obama. A poet, novelist, activist, and essayist, Alvarez holds a BA from Middlebury College and an MFA from Syracuse University. Julia Alvarez was born in New York City, and was raised between the Dominican Republic and New York.
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