Brenda Coultas

Brenda Coultas Poems

Brenda Coultas Biography

Brenda Coultas is an American poet. She was raised in Indiana, often working odd jobs such as welding. She graduated from Naropa University, studying with Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg. Coultas also taught at Naropa University. She moved to New York City in 1994. With Eleni Sikelianos, she worked at the Poetry Project in NYC, edited the Poetry Project Newsletter In 2003, she was a visiting poet at Long Island University. She lives in the Bowery. Her work has also been published Brooklyn Rail, Trickhouse, the Denver Review, and in two collections: An Anthology of New (American) Poets (Talisman 1996), and conjunctions 35 "American Poetry: States of the Art" (Fall 2000).)

The Best Poem Of Brenda Coultas

from "The Tatters"

I can get at the drawings or language of making things: instruction manuals for building fires or cookbooks for explosives or poisons. I have found out why we stand tall and who the commanders of the great ships are. I have learned the story of the microscope and of birds which dress in blue and purple, of how to read a sea shell. I have read of Monsters of the Land and Sky, from the crumbles of a 19th century text. I commit to memory views from penny postcards of sights I've never seen and actions I never witnessed; like the great swans of Long Island in the wild, or the skyline of Manhattan as seen from the deck of a paddlewheel steamer. I am impressed by cancelled postcards from the plains of a sod house or from a museum of corn.

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