Sharon Cumberland

When she isn’t busy practicing her flamenco dancing, Sharon Cumberland writes poetry and teaches American Literature and Poetry at Seattle University. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Sharon has had her poems published in Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Iowa Review, and Verse. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York, and she returns to New York every summer as a guest artist at Yaddo Artists Colony. Sharon vows that if she ever appears on David Letterman, she will put her cat Heidi on her head and sing a song about Davie Crockett, king of the wild frontier. (Heidi really does resemble a coon skin cap.)

The following is Sharon's poem about her frustration over
being a poet that writes clearly in a world that values obscurity.

	Lucidity Language must thicken like scabs over wounds; to obscure the conspicuous flesh under that fascinating crust we love to pick at. Cursed clarity! Who can trust a syllogism or a metaphor as clear as trees and water? I want to tattoo my words with the ballpoint of my pen, to Queequeg plain English with fantastic designs, make you push through an underbrush of verbiage, or hack at its solidity with the pick axe of your mind. Yet my veils are transparent, and all my designs like ivy on a monument: Beneath the form and filigree I weave, you know there is an angel or an obelisk underneath.

		Sharon's book of poems, The Arithmetic of Mourning, is available through the Green Rock Press at (425) 255-6252.