{"id":826,"date":"2015-05-12T11:01:01","date_gmt":"2015-05-12T11:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/ctl\/?p=826"},"modified":"2015-05-12T11:01:01","modified_gmt":"2015-05-12T11:01:01","slug":"congratulations-to-deb-gorlin-winner-of-the-2014-may-sarton-new-hampshire-poetry-prize-for-her-poetry-collection-life-of-the-garment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/ctl\/2015\/05\/12\/congratulations-to-deb-gorlin-winner-of-the-2014-may-sarton-new-hampshire-poetry-prize-for-her-poetry-collection-life-of-the-garment\/","title":{"rendered":"Congratulations to Deb Gorlin, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize for her poetry collection, Life of the Garment."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hampshire College professor Deborah Gorlin received the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize for her poetry collection, Life of the Garment<\/em>. The award honors the poet, novelist, and essayist May Sarton (1912-1995) who has long been an inspiration to Gorlin. As winner of the prize, Gorlin\u2019s book has been published by the independent press Bauhan Publishing. Her first book, Bodily Course<\/em>, won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize in 1997.<\/p>\n

Life of the Garment <\/em>is arranged into three sections. The first third is comprised of elegies to the people and places in Gorlin\u2019s life that are now gone. \u201cIt\u2019s a monument of words to them,\u201d Gorlin says, describing how she wrote to commemorate her family. She wanted to do the same for the place where she grew up, an industrial suburb in New Jersey. She calls the poems about her hometown \u201ca belated love song to an unlikely place.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second part of the book is from the point of view of dolls from around the world. Gorlin became interested in this particular perspective when she realized how dolls can be perceived as a type of medium\u2014not just as inanimate objects, but as \u201ca bridge between the visible and the invisible.\u201d These poems allowed her to explore outside of her own experience and to imagine the lives of people living in different places, cultures, and time periods.<\/p>\n

The final section of the book addresses Gorlin\u2019s spiritual struggles. \u201cIt\u2019s about the perpetual work required to summon and to engage those divine energies and mysteries in the everyday world and within myself,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She describes how she enjoys \u201cfiguring and feeling things out\u201d for herself, so that writing rarely seems like a task or an obstacle. \u201cIt only becomes difficult when I allow those awful demons\u2014external judgment and comparisons with others\u2014to discourage me. That\u2019s the stuff that\u2019s poison.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gorlin says writing is not about measuring up to others, but about \u201cthe joy of difficulty in the act of writing itself\u201d\u2013\u2013and when you \u201cgive up the desire to compete or achieve, your work will have its own rewards.\u201d Her advice is to trust your intuition instead of trying to control where your writing goes: \u201cIn the end, there will be a poem, and it will be a discovery and a surprise.\u201d<\/p>\n

By Brigid Gorry-Hines 11F<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u00a0 Hampshire College professor Deborah Gorlin received the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize for her poetry collection, Life of the Garment. The award honors the poet, novelist, and essayist May Sarton (1912-1995) who has long been an inspiration to Gorlin. As winner of the prize, Gorlin\u2019s book has been published by the independent … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Congratulations to Deb Gorlin, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize for her poetry collection, Life of the Garment.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":796,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/796"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=826"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":827,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826\/revisions\/827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/ctl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}