About
Hermine Meinhard’s book Bright Turquoise Umbrella, published by Tupelo Press, was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. And now, in the works is her new book of poems.
Hermine’s poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Drunken Boat, Verse Daily, How2, and many other publications. Meinhard conceived, curates and hosts the reading series Nights of the Fireflies (virtual and in-person).
Since the mid-90s she has performed her work throughout New York City and the U.S. at such venues as Live from Prairie Lights Book Store, The Kitchen, Cornelia Street Cafe, the Bowery Poetry Club and Hudson Valley Writers Center, to name a few. She has an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. A founding member of New York Writers Workshop, she teaches at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan and is a professor of writing in the School of Professional Studies at NYU. Meinhard encourages her students to read widely and teaches informative, persuasive and creative writing. Her playful, improvisational teaching methods help her students to bring the depth and vitality of their lives to their work.
Photo by Tim Tomlinson
Listen to Hermine read some of her poems.
“The Wind” and “Here he is” are prose poems.
The Wind
Why the leaves were in her head just then, their subtle movements made
by wind. And what was the wind? Something in the heat and stillness that
comes effortlessly, then goes away, leaving something, you don’t know
what that is.
She thinks then of sleep and that the wind was like that strong and strange
receptivity, like the stimulation of sleep. You walk through the heaviness
of the room seeing in the distance an opening in the trees, a milky white
opening you walk towards. The leaves move as if on their own, and the tree
fades against the milky white backdrop, no longer recognizable as the tree,
but as the dark shape of something she once knew.
Shore
wind blew black farm
wanting moon little secrets
fly said it was a good wind
and the wind was lonely
and wanted you
oh, come down, true wind
little shining apple,
sang to its baby:
the body is sweet
trusts you will be
kind to it
and was lonely and waited for you,
where everything was dark
in the winter when
nothing grew and to be patient
And in the spring,
the simple pleasure of the water
you found your voice there
while the wind was asleep
outside dreaming
Poems from My Forthcoming Book
Poem for My Mother
You rinsed your hair
water ran
through the pipes
we slept
everything stayed hidden
I’m sleeping now
because I want to
I am thinking of cooking
a plump chicken with
lemon
dreaming about it I like
the word succulent
in my home
in the round frame
the photo of you
in the arms of your mother
holding her head back to look at you
I lie in an emptiness
a clarity
caring for my house
grateful
this morning I was sketching
the window
then soaping my body
with pale soap
kindness and humor
I smell of the pink soap
I sit up in bed
in the morning
and talk to you
Here he is
I thought I saw my father on a city street. He was standing at the curb
holding an umbrella waiting for the light to change. This was in the gray
of rain on a block of tall buildings that I find beautiful because I was
born in a city and have a feeling for the streets and the half-light.
I was alone, a little way back and what I felt was affection and distance.
I hadn’t seen him in many years.
“In Hermine Meinhard’s poems, everything is, as the French poet Robert Desnos once said, ‘as in a child’s picture.’ Naive and wise at the same time, and also terrible and disturbing. They are delicate necklaces of gestures, imaginative spaces where bodies and fables get grafted onto and grow into each other. I love the gentle waywardness of Meinhard’s story telling, her habitual methodology ‘agitating and seeking’ to find the self. This is remarkable work that startles as much as it soothes.”
— Elaine Equi, poet, author of The Intangibles