Mara Jebsen is a poet who is deeply marked by oral traditions, and interested in the staging, singing and storytelling of poetry. She studied public policy and African and African-American studies at Duke University, and holds an MFA in creative writing from NYU. Mara teaches the craft of essay-writing at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and at some point during her years of teaching began to learn to write an essay, herself. She was raised in Philadelphia and Lome, and now lives in Brooklyn, where she is a consummate bruncher. Email: [email protected]
by Mara Jebsen “Its disgusterous!”the BFG gurgled. “It's sickable. It's rotsome! It's maggotwise! Try it yourself, this foulsome snozzcumber!” 'No thank you' Sophie said, backing away.—Roald Dahl Readers of contemporary fiction might do well, from time to time, to dip back through the bookshelves of their childhoods to see what un-boring and un-foolish stuff is…
by Mara Jebsen The idea of civilization, bit by bit, helps holds together opposites, whose only former identity existed in the opposition to the Other.–Edouard Glissant No one has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.–Zelda Fitzgerald America is always far away, particularly in November. In November in New York, the…
On Celebrity, New York, and the Movie in Your Mind. by Mara Jebsen I am looking at Jackie Onassis, young, wide-eyed and beast-like in one of the iconic photographs we’d all recognize. She has those startling beetle brows, and her little hat and big collar are so cute and polished that she seems somehow a…
by Mara Jebsen These are the first two entries of a book of poem-essays inspired by the Oxford English Dictionary. A is for Ardor Ardor is life. The zeal in a line down the centre of the body. The wick. I ascend, with burning eye. Ascend: to rise over mountain and lesser; to take on,…
Or, What is the Point of Writers' Desks? by Mara Jebsen I once had a friend who owned a studio in the city. It was angular and modern and comprised of all of about 350 square feet. Nevertheless, my friend, author of over a dozen books, managed to squeeze no fewer than four desks and…
by Mara Jebsen The photograph on the right was taken when I was six, on a boat speeding through Lake Ontario, in Henderson Harbor, New York. It was in the village of Henderson, a good six hours north of New York City, that an ancestor of mine (one more interested in fishing than fashion) built…
by Mara Jebsen What has happened before can happen again– and so can what hasn’t. — Bertolt Brecht When I was in college, I wrote angry letters to the controversial and often political poet, Amiri Baraka. The letters were neither kept nor sent, but I remember what it was like to write them. I remember…
by Mara Jebsen I met a tipsy older lady in a place; She said, “Honey, it doesn't really come clear 'til you're sixty.” But she wouldn't say what. The television was blaring about chimpanzees. Some journalist had likened our president to a chimp. Meanwhile, a chimp named Travis was reported to have sipped wine; and…
by Mara Jebsen F. Scott Fitzgerald and Love in A Time of Supermen Where does all this yearning come from? —Pina Bausch, choreographer A set of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels has come out from Penguin classics, and they look exactly as they ought. They are small, hard-backed volumes in thick cream paper lined with flashy…
Or, Reading is Bad Or, A Tale of Two Storytellers. My Philadelphia childhood was marked by the image of my mother under lamplight, bent over a book, studying to become a folklorist. She was always studying children's games and rhymes and reading weighty, scary, assigned-tomes like “The Sex Lives of Savages”. She came to folklore…
Two summers ago, when there was the big oil spill, the images of birds showed up first on the internet and newspapers, and then increasingly in my head unbidden, and in the dreams of my friends, and my own. What a terrible thing–birds like zombies risen from death to make us pay for sins. Can’t live, can’t fly. To me, the birds all looked like herons, because herons already look like a thing returned from the otherworld to give us one last chance to repent.
by Mara Jebson My stepfather had always wanted twins. In his culture, having twins was lucky, and a sign of more luck to come. In parts of Togo it is customary to give both twins names beginning with the same letter. One would hear about Afi and Abla, Joseph and Jonathan, or Elise and Esmee.…
by Mara Jebsen I have a good friend in the East, who comes to my shows and says, you sing a lot about the past, you can't live in the past, you know. I say to him, I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know, and…
Or: How Brett Ratner, Slajov Zizek, and Shane Battier Can Make a Poet Wish She’d Taken that Stats Class by Mara Jebsen Part I. To Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too “Lets go see the dumbest movie we can find,” I said to a friend of mine, an actor. I’d had a personal disappointment.…
by Mara Jebsen …But really, since I exist at all, I believe that it is possible for people to…I've lived through impossible situations. So I believe in it. I just believe, and that's the magic…That's the whole thing, you talk about magic that's there to believe in, and it is there. But most people don't…
by Mara Jebsen There was a special skull in Paris in the late 1800s. Like all skulls, it once belonged to a larger structure–a display at the Ecole des Beaux Arts offered to young artists studying anatomy. Amongst these is the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke, though struck by the “manifold interlacing of the…
by Mara Jebsen At the Highline on a schizophrenic New York morning: It was a misty grey day, and I walked under a short underpass, and when I came out on the other side– it was a hot, sunny day. Then it rained again. “Welcome to New York” I said to myself, though I’ve lived…
morning. please don't slide again. nothing truly happened yet. shocking. its shocking, the rate so much nothing happens at. now through the window, two pigeons flash the full wing-work; the span of what god gave them; circling, they switch positions mid-air, my new favourite band hits its drum and flute solo : a bubbling like…
by Mara Jebsen All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. —Raymond Chandler Last month I was a tourist for the first time in my life. I went to Athens and two islands in the Aegean sea. On the tiny island of AntiParos I felt a curious emptiness I…
by Mara Jebsen “Peoples bore me, literature bores me. Especially great literature” -–John Berryman It is Thursday and I am in the café in which the ceiling fan and rock’n’roll seem to make a gentle pact to keep rhythm. To the left of me lies one Brooklyn neighborhood, and to the right, another. Above these…