Fleda Brown
Dandelions
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
I've written many poems about wildflowers. I am interested in the ones no one notices, maybe exactly for that reason--dandelions, bladder campion, cornflower, star anemone, etc.--the ones by the side of the road. I guess this is because in the summer I'm at the lake and walking along the road almost every day. My father used to take my sister and me on many walks in the woods, along streams. It's still one of my favorite things to do. When we say the "natural world," we need to include ourselves. The minute we separate ourselves from the rest, we're in trouble, aren't we? And when we don't look closely at their tiny lives, we miss our own life.
Fleda Brown’s tenth collection of poems, Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (2021) won the Hollis Summers Prize from Ohio University Press and is an Indie finalist. Her work has appeared three times in Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her new memoir is Mortality, with Friends (Wayne State University Press, an MIPA Winner and Midwest Book Award winner in memoir). She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07.