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Muse of poetry6/21/2023 ![]() ![]() His first collection, The Madeleine Poems, was the winner of the 2009 Omnidawn Poetry Prize his second, The Other Poems, was published in 2011. Poet Paul Legault (Grad '09) has come to know the writer's life quite well since graduating from UVA's MFA program. "Put simply, attending UVA helped me claim the writer's life as my own." "To receive those few words of validation-to say nothing of the opportunities Echols presented-meant a lot to a 17-year-old Star Trek geek," she recalls. She can still remember receiving her acceptance letter into the Echols program, on which the late professor Charles Vandersee had handwritten a personal message: Your poems do you great credit. As a Jerome Holland Scholar and an Echols Scholar, she took classes with professors Gregory Orr and Jerome McGann. Now an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Louisville, Petrosino credits her years at UVA with setting her on the path to a career in poetry. In this case, I wanted to 'invent' my own muse." I enjoy imposing constraints on my writing, just to see how far I can go. "As I worked through the series, the Hollywood familiarity of 'Redford' became a kind of formal constraint-something to work against. "The speaker is the real star of the poems," Petrosino says. But Redford's fame is not the subject here. In these sometimes tender, sometimes funny poems, the beloved washes the speaker's hair, splits a serving of pommes frites with her and shares a series of domestic moments so comfortingly commonplace that the iconic name "Redford" creates a jarring juxtaposition. Just as Dante knows Virgil only through his own poetic creation, so does the speaker of Fort Red Border know the actor Robert Redford: "The 'Redford' persona that I invent for the series is completely imaginary, and that project of imagination is essential to understanding the series," Petrosino says. "It was in this course that I first read the beautiful language that Dante uses to describe the bond that exists between the two figures," she says. She first studied The Inferno as an undergraduate at UVA. Petrosino's appreciation of Dante and the relationship he shares with Virgil figured largely into this creative endeavor. "My Redford represents a cure for loneliness," she says. She realized she could explore certain elements of the speaker's emotions by putting the Redford muse in her poems. It was more like Redford wandered into some of my poems and seemed to want to stay," she explains. "It was not really a conscious decision on my part. Petrosino is quick to clarify that the Redford in her poems is a muse and not the living Hollywood celebrity. Poet Kiki Petrosino (Col '01) uses Robert Redford as an inspiration in her book of poems, Fort Red Border (which is an anagram of "Robert Redford"). Two alumni are following in Dante's footsteps by taking as their muses people who exist (or once did) in the real world. The artist draws inspiration from the muse, while the muse achieves fame, or even a kind of immortality, through the artist's works. Though Dante barely knew Beatrice in the actual world, she became "the glorious lady of mind." From Dante and Beatrice to Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick, artists and muses have maintained a mysteriously symbiotic relationship for nearly as long as art itself has been around. Both appear in literary form in The Divine Comedy to lead Dante through hell, purgatory and heaven.ĭante was one of the first poets to invoke real people rather than mythical figures as muses. ![]() But he also found new muses in Virgil as well as Beatrice Portinari, a childhood acquaintance. Dante called on the Classical muses-the nine goddesses of artistic inspiration. Invoking the muses at the start of a poem dates back to Homer and the Roman poet Virgil. "O Muses, O high genius, aid me now!" writes Dante Alighieri in The Inferno, the first section of his epic poem, The Divine Comedy. ![]()
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