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Profile
Linda Chase grew up on Long Island in commuting distance of New York City. She has a degree in Creative Writing from Bennington College in Vermont. As a dyslexic non-academically inclined student, she later followed two quite practical careers before finally declaring poetry as her main pursuit. One career was designing and making theatre costumes which she did in San Francisco and Edinburgh. The other career was teaching tai chi and running her own tai chi school in Manchester.
At 50, Linda finally put poetry first. She completed an MA at the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, became an associate lecturer there and founded the poetry and music series, Poets and Players. In 2004 she established and continues to be the coordinator of the Poetry School Manchester. A recent thrilling moment for her was being introduced at a reading as a ‘Manchester poet'. She has a strong commitment to the city and to the performance of live poetry within Manchester.
She has won prizes, commissions and publishes with Carcanet Press. Her latest title is Extended Family.
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Creative Work
Contract for Love and Death
Fine print? There was none.
We simply said the usual “I do's'
and let our lives spin out toward
love and death in equal lots.
My mother had become a Long Island
Fuchsia, as crimson and as purple
as pixie boots with turned up toes,
but her bark then dried to paper.
Your father, by the Danube, sprouted leaves
of birch, as tender as his chalky sheath,
as light as twenty languages becoming one.
He spoke to us for Europe—all of it.
My brother was a messenger of choice.
‘Choose everything,' he said. And did.
Too soon he was an air-born echo
of activity, over spent, still whispering.
Your mother was a sporty Sunbeam
in the tropics - a convertible, bright red.
Every time she stopped, she started up
again, twice as fast - until the last.
Her husband was a map of Africa,
unstable as Uranium 235, imprisoned
with Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue,
and then set free by Bach.
My father danced his way
down Broadway, empty headed,
passing silver dollars through his heart -
dropping boutonnières like crumbs.
Your brother spun his wheels so fast
that his Ferrari heart was flung against
the dashboard of the Ivory Coast and landed
in the ocean beyond Abidjan.
Look at us, still wheeling on our
tread stripped hearts through all this life,
parked next to one another as we agreed,
near the exit from these multi-storeys.
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Reflection
This poem tells the story of a relationship that spans marriage, divorce, several countries and many deaths. I feel it is a story that many expatriates experience, though of course in quite particular ways. The world becomes smaller in some respects as we transplant ourselves, but more scattered and disconnected in other respects.
I started writing this poem in my head in the car on the way back from my brother-in-law's funeral. My former husband, and now great friend, was driving. I realised that together, over a 40-year period we had buried seven members of our immediate families— our five parents and our two brothers. It struck me that at the time we married, arranging funerals was not uppermost in our imagined future. I knew I wanted the poem to acknowledge the fact that we had carried out these grave responsibilities even though there had been quite a strain on the more traditional aspects of our marriage.
The first and last stanzas hold between them the seven deaths, each death having its own stanza. In only four lines, I tried to give some sense of each of the deceased; their nationality, their particular talent or their life's work. I chose images that might illustrate the personality of each without attempting to spell out specific facts. For instance, stanza 6 is about one of my fathers-in-law. He was a nuclear physicist who had worked on the atom bomb in Canada. As a committed communist, he'd given secret information to the Russians and later, as a convicted spy, was sent to prison. He was also a fine classical pianist. It was his music that helped him through his years of incarceration. These facts are only hinted at in the poem.
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Publications
Young Men Dancing , pamphlet with Smith/Doorstop, 1994.
These Goodbyes , full collection Fatchance Press, 1995
The Wedding Spy , full collection Carcanet Press, 2001
Extended Family , full collection Carcanet Press, 2006
Also contributions to many anthologies
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Contact & Links
email Linda
http://www.lindachase.co.uk
http://www.poetryschool.com
http://www.poetsandplayers.co.uk
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