Judith Vollmer

Judith Vollmer Poems

Judith Vollmer Biography

Judith Vollmer (b. 1951 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an American poet and editor. She is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and she also serves on the graduate faculty of The Drew University Master of Fine Arts in Poetry Program. Vollmer is co-editor of 5 AM, a national poetry journal. She has won Literature Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, as well as residencies at the American Academy in Rome, Yaddo, Centrum Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, and Vermont Studio Colony. In 1990 she won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.)

The Best Poem Of Judith Vollmer

House Spiders

Streetlights out again I'm walking in the dark
lugging groceries up the steps to the porch
whose yellow bulb is about to go too, when a single
familiar strand intersects my face,
the filament slides across my glasses which seem suddenly
perfectly clean, fresh, and my whole tired day slows down
walking into such a giant thread
is a surprise every time,
though I never kill them, I carry them outside
on plastic lids or open books, they live
so plainly and eat the mosquitoes.
Distant cousins
to the scorpion, mine are pale & small,
dark & discreet. More like the one
who lived in the corner of the old farm kitchen
under the ivy vase and behind the single
candle-pot- black with curved
crotchety legs.
Maya, weaver of illusions,
how is it we trust the web, the nest,
the roof over our heads, we trust the stars
our guardians who gave us our alphabet?
We trust the turtle's shell because
it, too, says house and how can we read
the footprints of birds on shoreline sand,
& October twigs that fall to the ground
in patterns that match the shell & stars?


I feel less and less like
a single self, more like
a weaver, myself, spelling out
formulae from what's given
and from words.

Judith Vollmer Comments