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Dawn Michelle Baude

Dawn Michelle Baude took Robert Duncan's advice literally: learn as much as possible about language and the world, and apply that knowledge to the poem. Living mostly in France, Lebanon and Egypt, with extensive travel in

Greece and Syria, she published chapbooks and fine press editions with small European presses, including Gaffiot Exquis (Arkadin, 1997) and The Book of One Hand (Liancourt Press, 1998). She is author of The Beirut Poems (Skanky Possom, 2001) and Egypt (Post-Apollo Press, 2002) and teaches Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris. In 2005, she received a Fulbright Award in Poetry that took her to Alexandria, Egypt. Her chapbook, Through a Membrane / Clouds, is due out from G O N G Press in 2006.

"In Dawn Michelle Baude's 'egypt' the poems are glyphs in a desert ... and the shapes of the poems are tangible, as the poems say the intangible. Fragmented in the sense of seeming broken by time (not, as more commonly intended, to suggest the piece-i-ness of contemporary life) they are intensely objectified, and surprisingly mysterious."

Alice Notley

from
Through a Membrane / Clouds

Dawn Michelle Baude

"The head (mighty subject) is still"

The head (mighty subject) is still
magnificently attached, the head
of the One Master Signifier
who has a head too, but the body
missing phantom
effervescent (in) experience
longs so longs the physical
my mental he slipped
his hand between my legs
a signifier watched
the sound thundered

there were yelps
from the grand stands,
and rain—auspicious—blanched
the sky, ozone in my hair,
stars bowing as the curtain closed
canceling the apocalypse
though frogs murmur text
impossible to decipher
human nature throughout the millennia
savior our world
something we loved dearly

becomes extinct.

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