SONNETS for MICHELANGELO
Anna Key's current poetic project is a “recomposition” of the 16th-century poet Vittoria Colonna's Sonnets for Michelangelo, a sequence of intensely searching religious sonnets written for her friend and poetic student, Michelangelo Buonarroti, the famous Renaissance artist. Not straightforward translations, they take a central poetic movement and attempt to render it in a contemporary idiom, though they preserve the Petrarchan sonnet form.
Introduction & Sonnets 1 and 2
Sonnets 4, 19, 31, and 41
Convivium 6
Dappled Things 16, No. 2
Sonnets 21 and 35
forthcoming in The Windhover 26.1
Sonnets 51 and 58
Evangelization & Culture No. 9
NOTEBOOK of FORGETTING
NOTEBOOK of FORGETTING
Like Wittgenstein’s ladder in the Tractatus that must be kicked away or Wallace Stevens’ supreme fiction, Notebook of Forgetting belongs to a tradition of negative poetic and philosophical projects—projects that, in their attempts to say the unsayable, are doomed to failure from the start. Even so, the attempt to say is revealing: marking out, as it does, the territory of the sayable. Searching out words to say the thing that is really at stake, but that cannot be said—cannot be said because it misses what it means in the saying, cannot be said because the words have somehow lost the ability to say, cannot be said unless it is immediately forgotten—Notebook of Forgetting asserts the primacy of what is beyond language in the only way writing can: through the language which fails to reach it.
"I found the diaristic, inner conversational elements of the poems engaging, as well as the cumulative interrogations that drive the poems along. Formally, the crossings-out are intriguing, hard to pull off (typically), but here put to the service of a kind of honesty born in doubt, sincere then to the purpose of the poems. I'm glad to have read the book."
- Peter O'Leary, author of Thick and Dazzling Darkness:
Religious Poetry in a Secular Age
Chapbooks
VIDEO Preview of Iterations
A poem from Anna's forthcoming chapbook, Iterations, won First Prize in the 2022 New York Encounter Poetry Contest. Because she couldn't attend the event to read the poem, the organizers asked her to create a video reading, which is available here.
Leaf-Scraps
Leaf-Scraps, Anna Key’s second chapbook of poetry, is composed of highly condensed lyric fragments, or scraps, ranging from philosophico-poetic reflections on Derrida and Socrates to laments from the suburbs to songs for love and death. Gathered together, they evoke a vision, through small apertures, of some deeper reality we seem determined to obscure.
Ave Maria
The nine parts of Ave Maria are each titled with one of the nine clauses that make up the traditional Catholic prayer, so reading the work is praying the Ave Maria. The poetry flows out of that experience, that act, poetically exploring the resonances of each highly-charged phrase and pondering how, in this time and in this place, with our history and our possibilities, we might be able to hear these words again.
Essays & Video
SAILING Blowin' in the Wind
Anna is a principal creator of SAILING Blowin' in the Wind, a documentary miniseries about living aboard a small boat with a large family, searching for a way to live so as to be able to feel poetry.
Poetry Beyond the Closed Room
An essay for Dappled Things about the importance of a poetry that throws open the windows.
Poetry of the New World
An essay for Dappled Things about the poetry of Nicholas Black Elk and Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, and what they mean for a poetry of the new world.
BIO
Anna Key studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2006, she converted to Catholicism and spent the next decade writing her way toward Notebook of Forgetting, which attempts in language as philosophical as it is poetic to chart the territory of her conversion. Anna's poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Dappled Things, Convivium, Amethyst Review, Evangelization & Culture, The Windhover and Catholic Poetry Room. She is co-founder of In the Wind Projects and lives aboard a small sailboat with her husband and four children.
CONTACT
anna [at] inthewindprojects [dot] org
