House Lions is Wesleyan’s resident poetry podcast. To hear fresh featured poets read their poems live and talk about their work check out the House Lions weekly featured reader. Look for information about live recording sessions in the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, and a new featured poet each Monday. For more information, or to express interest in being on the show, shoot an email to sknittle@wesleyan.edu.

This week’s featured poet: Chiara Di Lello ’10

Chiara Di Lello’s poetry reads like a map of viable evacuation routes within a municipality of underground tunnels. Her clear and practiced usage of linked images creates poems that have the spatial character of an imprint (more like a handprint than a footprint) of their founding texts, senses and locations. This, in turn, yields a poetics that is as ready for dialogue with, for example, a Lee Krasner painting, as it is to stand, proudly, on its own.

Bio: Chiara grew up in New York, a city she loves for its density, museums, and public transportation. She is a French Studies and Muslim Studies major, and produces student theater through Second Stage.  In her junior year she co-founded the Wesleyan Poetic Census as a way to encourage the growth of a collective poetic voice on campus. Last fall, she helped to plan programming for the residents of Writing Hall (Clark 4) during its debut semester. Her work has appeared in Euphony, CT Review, and Best New Poets 2009.

Audio and print poems after the jump

Center

gone turned off cut out the stars on the ends of their arms

women driven into hills

the viceroys’ hair is the smoke of severed limbs,

they write treaties with the spill.

inland maps in the mud prints, weavers walking

stands of palms, lost bracelets
brute instrument breaks five point loom

star goes out // goes out

wind maps grow from their wails.

this is not a world that is coming

– salt, foam, fire –

spinning gone dark

the pipes in the palace burst.

they reach to pull their own hair, paint sea maps

gone dark the out the star // the star

bone shuttles heaped

the flow washes the street clean of streets,

with spinning gone dark

the kingdom flows out through the city wall,

from their feet comes current, underground creek

find the channel below the breakwater drawn in henna and spit

a road outside the village, the inside of their ears

women of the next world, hold out your hearts

and not your hands, not your hands

[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/center.mp3″] Center

[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/block.mp3″] Block

[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/chiarafull.mp3″] Full Interview