Poetry. Martine Bellen's TALES OF MURASAKI uses the pillow book of Lady Murasaki as a starting point for a lyrical and narrative series of poems that explore language as they unearth the core of story. Rosmarie Waldrop, who selected this collection for the 1997 National Poetry Series awards, writes of Bellen's poetry: "A multivalent, multidirectional logic dances across categories to a space where we cannot tell if a lover 'is parting or a part of mist and memory, the path is endless.' It takes our breath away as it leaps across continents and centuries, from Precolumbian Mexico to Japan, from myth to biology." Publishers weekly observes, "Bellen is a sensualist with a taste for vernacular as refined as C.D. Wright's; and a historian as steeped in the montage of character and setting as Susan Howe or Guy Davenport... Bellen's giddy, insouciant renderings of our thickly mythic polish seem fresh." Martine Bellen lives in New York, where she works in the publishing industry.
Martine Bellen is the author of six collections of poetry including THE VULNERABILITY OF ORDER (Copper Canyon Press); TALES OF MURASAKI AND OTHER POEMS (Sun & Moon Press), which won the National Poetry Series Award; and GHOSTS! (Spuyten Dyvil Press). A bilingual collection of her poetry has been published in Germany by Verlag im Waldgut (translator, Hans Jürgen Balmes). She has written the libretto for OVIDIANA, an opera based on Ovid's METAMORPHOSES (composer, Matthew Greenbaum) that has been performed in New York City and Philadelphia. She has collaborated with David Rosenboom on AH! OPERA NO-OPERA, a pioneering collective work, that's been co-composed and performed by creators from around the globe. Its world premiere was in September 2009 (for more information, visit www.ah-opera.org) at REDCAT in L.A. Her novella 2X(SQUARED) has just been published by BlazeVOX [books].
Ms. Bellen's poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, including SAINTS OF HYSTERIA: A HALF CENTURY OF COLLABORATIVE POETRY (Soft Skull Press), IN OUR OWN WORDS: A GENERATION DEFINING ITSELF (MWE), THE CONVERGENCE OF BIRDS: WRITING INSPIRED BY JOSEPH CORNELL (DAP) and THIS ART (Copper Canyon Press). She has been a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the American Academy of Poets Award and has been awarded a residency by the Rockefeller Foundation at the Bellagio Center in Italy. Bellen is a contributing editor of the literary journal CONJUNCTIONS and is on the Belladonna* Collaborative.
