Christine Hume

Christine Hume (born 1968) is an American poet. Christine Hume is the author of three books of poetry, Musca Domestica (2000), Alaskaphrenia (2004), Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (2007) and is currently the coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.

Life

Hume received her BA, MFA, and PhD from Penn State University, Columbia University, and University of Denver, respectively. She has taught at Illinois Wesleyan University, The School of the Art Institute in Chicago and is currently a Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University,.^[1] From 2006-2010 she hosted an internet radio program called Poetry Radio. The internet radio program "Poetry Radio" features contemporary and historic performance arts, sound poetry, audio narratives and collaborations between writers and musicians. The themes of most episodes on the radio show dwell on traditions of cross-pollination between poetry and the musical. For instance, the first show, aired on February 2010 and titled “Music Inspired Poetry” dealt with the genre of blues poems.

In 2002, she was one of two Americans invited to an international festival, “Days of Poetry and Wine” in Slovenia; in 2006, she taught a poetry workshop in St. Petersburg for Summer Literary Seminars, and in 2012 she taught a writing workshop on the walk in Lisbon for Disquiet: Dzanc Books International Literary Program.

Musca Domestica, Hume's first book of poetry and winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, was published in 2000 by Beacon Press. Her second book, Alaskaphrenia, winner of the Green Rose Award and Small Press Traffic's Best Book of 2004 Award, was published in 2004 by New Issues. Her most recent book, Shot, was published in 2010 by Counterpath Press. Her three chapbooks include Lullaby: Speculations of the First Active Sense (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008), Ventifacts(Omnidawn Books, 2012), and Hum (Dikembe, 2013).

Her prose and criticism have appeared in Harper's, Denver Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, Rain Taxi, Chicago Review, How2, Afgabe, Constant Critic, Womens Studies Quarterly as well as three volumes of a series by Wesleyan University Press, Poets in the 21st Century.

Critical Reception

In an interview published in the Seneca Review^[2] Christine Hume in conversation with Blake Bartlett in relation to language and poetry mentions that, “When I am talking to my pre-verbal baby, I lend her a language that I can understand – I provide both sides of the conversation. This is not only a falsification of her voice but it’s a failure to recognize her language and her inclination towards imitation of nonspeech, onomatopoeia and non English sounds, sounds that have no representative function, but are not meaningless. Think of Jacobson’s “apex of babble,” an infant’s vast capacity of sound that must be partially lost to learn a single language. The loss of limitless phonetic arsenals is the price my child must pay for the papers that grant her citizenship in the community of English-speakers.”

Mathias Svalina's "All Eyes Begin in the Night" a review of Christine Hume's collection "Shot" (2010), expresses that, in an innovative and experimental way Hume’s book, approaches the physical and psychological transformations of becoming a new mother as “one both individual and one always in-relation” to the Other.^[3] The poetic voice in the book works her way through a transforming maternal body using recurring themes of darkness and insomnia. Insomnia is represented as a bodily malfunction where sleeplessness evokes the opening up of a dark interiority within the maternal body drawing attention to the speaker alternating the range between “pregnancy” and “motherhood” as being one with the “enshrouded body of the fetus and then the darkness of relation to a suddenly separate entity.”^[4] Svalina also situates Hume’s poetics within the Romantic tradition as “Hume works through the Romantic elements of transformation without relying on cliché structural elements of reflection and epiphany.”^[5]

Awards

• Barnard Women Poets Prize 1999
• Green Rose Award
• 2005 Best Book of the Year Award, Small Press Traffic
• Fine Arts Work Center Fellow 1998-99
• Wurlitzer Foundation 2000
• Fund For Poetry 2002
• MacDowell Colony residency 2003

Works

• "LUNAR HALO", Typo 6
• "Noctilucent Elegy"; "Ward"; "Her Night Lamb", Cocoanut 7
• Various Readings of an Illegible Postcard
• Musca Domestica. Beacon Press. 2000. ISBN 978-0-8070-6859-5. 
• Alaskaphrenia. Western Michigan University. 2004. ISBN 978-1-930974-40-1. 
• Lullaby, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007 (a chapbook)

Anthologies

• James Tate, David Lehman, ed. (1997). "Helicopter on a Hill". Best American Poetry 1997. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-81452-0. 
• Gerald Costanzo, Jim Daniels, ed. (2000). American Poetry: the Next Generation. Carnegie Mellon University Press. ISBN 978-0-88748-343-1. 
• No Crossing Guards (University of Iowa 2004)
• Brett Fletcher Lauer, Aimee Kelley, ed. (November 1, 2004). Isn't It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets. Wave Books. ISBN 978-0-9746353-1-6. 
• Brian Henry, Andrew Zawacki, ed. (2005). The Verse Book of Interviews: 27 Poets on Language, Craft & Culture. Wave Books. ISBN 978-0-9746353-5-4. 
• Michael Dumanis, Cate Marvin, ed. (2006). Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Sarabande. ISBN 978-1-932511-29-1. 
• Catherine Wagner, Rebecca Wolff, ed. (2007). Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing. Fence. ISBN 978-0-9771064-8-6. 
• Christina Mengert, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, ed. (2008). 12x12. University of Iowa Press. ISBN 978-1-58729-791-5. 

Reviews

Christine Hume’s first collection, Musca Domestica, presented a remarkably coherent set of motifs and themes that articulate a governing aesthetic. Her second book Alaskaphrenia offers readers another ambitious articulation of philosophical insight and rich meditation on human consciousness.^[6]

References

External links

• "Christine Hume", Elective Affinities, October 5, 2010
• "Christine Hume", Here Comes Everybody, June 25, 2005