The Academy of American Poets
Home | View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dana Levin
Dana Levin

Dana Levin's first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was awarded the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive many honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. A 2004 recipient of both a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress and an Emerging Woman Writer's Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Levin teaches in the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College and directs the Creative Writing Program at College of Santa Fe. Her latest book, Wedding Day, was published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2005.

FURTHER READING
Poems by Dana Levin
Styx
Essays by Dana Levin
Make It New: Originality and the Younger Poet
Transcript: Q&A on Ars Poetica (cocoons)
Related Prose
From the Fishouse
Ars Poetica
Epistles, Book II, Ars Poetica
by Horace
A Book Of Music
by Jack Spicer
A True Poem
by Lloyd Schwartz
All Their Stanzas Look Alike
by Thomas Sayers Ellis
Always on the Train
by Ruth Stone
And It Came to Pass
by C. D. Wright
Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish
Ars Poetica
by Eleanor Wilner
Art Class
by James Galvin
Arthur's Anthology of English Poetry
by Laurence Lerner
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov
Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
by Jane Kenyon
Broadway
by Mark Doty
Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich
Endnote
by Hayden Carruth
Envoi
by William Meredith
Ground Swell
by Mark Jarman
Instructions to Be Left Behind
by Marvin Bell
Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins
O Black and Unknown Bards
by James Weldon Johnson
On the Subject of Poetry
by W. S. Merwin
Poet's Work
by Lorine Niedecker
Poetry
by Marianne Moore
Prefix: Finding the measure
by Robert Kelly
Some Part of the Lyric
by Gregory Orr
Speech Alone
by Jean Follain
Strawberry on the Drawbridge
by Matthea Harvey
Take the I Out
by Sharon Olds
The Allure of Forms
by Coral Bracho
The Bargain
by Cyrus Cassells
The Bear
by Galway Kinnell
The Poem as Mask
by Muriel Rukeyser
The Poems I Have Not Written
by John Brehm
The Snow and the Plum — II
by Lu Mei-P'o
The Uses of Poetry
by William Carlos Williams
What He Thought
by Heather McHugh
Workshop
by Billy Collins
Adopt a Poet | Add to Notebook | E-mail to Friend | Print
Ars Poetica (cocoons)  
by Dana Levin
Get Flash Player

Six monarch butterfly cocoons
      clinging to the back of your throat—

      you could feel their gold wings trembling.

You were alarmed. You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
      gagging to spit them out—
and a voice saying Don’t, don’t—



Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.


Audio Clip
from From the Fishouse
Larger TypeLarger Type | Home | Help | Contact Us | Privacy Policy Copyright © 1997 - 2008 by The Academy of American Poets.