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Updated: June 7, 2009, 1:54 am	Share    Print    Email

Southampton - Julie Sheehan, a poet and professor of poetry at Stony Brook Southampton, has won the prestigious Whiting Writers Award, given annually to up to 10 emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.

The prize of $50,000 is awarded based on accomplishment and promise. Winners are chosen from a pool of over 100 nominations by an anonymous committee of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors, who are appointed annually by the Foundation.

Julie Sheehan of Stony Brook Southampton, winner of the prestigious Whiting Writers Award. Photo by Sheila Cosgrove Baylis

Sheehan is the author of two poetry collections, "Thaw" and "Orient Point." Her third collection, "Bar Book," is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

When did you begin writing poetry?

Julie Sheehan: I remember the first poem I ever wrote. I was 11. It started out "i am silent," with the 'I' in the lower case [laughs] like an e.e. cummings poem. I started writing sonnets in college in 1985. I wrote them privately for myself and for other people on birthdays and holidays. Over the next five years I started writing more and more.

When did you know you wanted to be a poet?

JS: I took a writing workshop in the city in 1996 or 1997, a Continuing Education class at NYU by William Packer. Then I took a class at The New School with Anna Rubinowitz, who was good for me. I sat down and decided, "I need to do something with this." I went to Columbia for the M.F.A. program, and I went in thinking "craft, craft, craft" and what I came out with was friends, friends, friends [laughs].

What was it like for you to receive this award?

JS: It's been mind-blowing. I didn't know anything about it. It comes out of the blue, you don't apply for it. You don't even know you're being discussed. The phone rang and my seven-year-old was jumping around with his friend and my cats were jumping around and it was this foundation on the phone. I thought they wanted money and I was about to tell them that I have my list of things that I donate to, when I realized they wanted to give me something - that it was going the other way. And then you start to doubt, "Is this real?" and you get on the Internet and make sure it's the real foundation with the right spelling and everything [laughs].

At the ceremony, they gave us each a library edition of someone. I got Walt Whitman. He's been a huge, well, for me, an abundant source. My lines sometimes look like Walt Whitman.

I've been told that a poem could have as much in it as a novel. Do you agree?

JS: Oh yes. You can keep unpacking and unpacking a metaphor and you still wouldn't be done.

I'm sure you've impacted your students greatly. What feedback have you gotten from them?

JS: I just told one of my students the dangers of backing out of a poem at the end, like this. [Sheehan get up and starts to bow while moving backwards]. This gesture really helped her. My student said, "I'm a visual person, so I get that."

Who has inspired you?

JS: I've been blessed with so many wonderful teachers. I studied with Harold Bloom as an undergrad. When he sat there in the seminar, he showed us reading. Reading as an action.

What are you working on now?

JS: I'm working on a manuscript called "Bar Book." I take these cocktail names and bring them to life. "Rusty Nail" is an old guy with arthritis. "Sea Breeze" is a California girl. I worked in a bar for a long time. Then I go into some prose, what goes into a "Brandy Stinger," the social system of a bar and relationships - using those stories to tell each other. I use footnotes for the more personal story, the story of a disintegrating marriage.

Will you share one of your poems with us?

JS: Sure! How about the title poem from "Orient Point"?

Ghazal: Orient Point

The right whales went wrong, from capitalism's viewpoint.
A lighthouse stands corrected, obsolete but sturdy (to a point).

Fetch me a wooden sailor perched on a whittled boat, bobbing for
Luck. Fetch a diminishment of what once rounded Orient Point.

Those old New England towns grow indigents, unoriginal trees
Living on the lyrics to old sea shanties worked in needlepoint.

I pry you like a barnacle from the hull of serenity. My stillness,
You've slept through another journey to an eastern point.

You wear your white fishing cap so low as if it had no brim. I know
It's love, that sidestepping afterthought, mislaid and always off-point.

Thoreau is shouting again: awake! To the mast! Reorient
Yourself! The hour wrecks, it sinks, for time honors no distant point.

Today I harvest. Tomato plants. String beans hidden, wishful.
My marriage, a colander. Dill, green hymn. To wash, a counterpoint.

Our towering quarrel withstands high wind, lash of couplets, broken
lines, fresh news. O the folloy of shining at starpoint or gunpoint!

Summer revives to poison itself, as if it had green to spare.
Why does the wild month of Julie dwell so long on Orient Point?

 • "Ghazal: Orient Point" can be found in "Orient Point Poems" by Julie Sheehan, published in 2006 by W.W. Norton.