Josephine Clare / Some Journal Poems: An Easter / Spring Offering

Josephine Clare / Some Journal Poems: An Easter / Spring Offering / Wry n.17 / 2024

Josephine Clare was born in Gammertingen, Germany (Swabia) in 1933, where she grew up under Nazi rule. After WWll, she studied acting, first attending the Academy of Music & Drama in Stuttgart in 1954-1956 and later Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna in 1957-1958. She became a member of the Austrian Actors’ Guild in 1958, but her marriage to poet and translator Anselm Hollo and subsequent move to London later that year interrupted her stage career. In London, she gave birth to three children, Hannes, Kaarina and Tamsin, and translated British poets into German for the BBC, occasionally performing in BBC radio plays. In 1969 the family moved to Iowa City, Iowa. In 1974, she published her first book of poems in two iterations: ''Deutschland'' (Morgan Press) and ''Deutschland and Other Places'' (with introduction by Fielding Dawson, North Atlantic Books). In 1976, her work was included in a ''Just Buffalo'' volume alongside Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Fielding Dawson and Bobbie Louise Hawkins. In 1977, Ocotillo Press published ''Mammatocumulus'', which she completed with the aid of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, at a residency in Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. There she met her lifelong friend and fellow poet, Hilda Morley. ''Twelve'' (Potato Clock Signatures), which she dedicated to her son after his death in 1999, was published in 2002.

“Some Journal Poems: An Easter / Spring Offering” is a series of ten poetic miniatures written over a handful of days in late March & early April, 2009. Both playful & wry while being cooly philosophical, these small poems have been neatly shorn of any superfluous or extraneous words. Concerns are both domestic (radiators & cats), or wildly expansive (the Big Bang, “our fantastic economic order/gone to seed/ our hypertrophic brain).

Wry Press thanks Tamsin Hollo for assistance with this volume.

6x8” / Cardstock Covers / Wire spiral binding / 10 Pages / First edition of 100 copies