Poet Spotlight: Anne Winters

August 15th's Rush Hour Concert features poems inspired by Bach's Two-Part Inventions. As a special treat, we are posting some of the poems that will be read during the concert. For insight into the process that led to this groundbreaking concert in partnership with The Poetry Foundation, please read our Artistic Director's earlier post.

Anne Winters is on the faculty at UIC. Her books include The Displaced of Capital, The Key to City, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, and Salamander: Selected Poetry of Robert Marteau, winner of Poetry magazine’s Jacob Glatstein Translation Award. She has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, Wellesley College’s Poetry Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts grant, among others, and has been a Fellow of the Carmargo and Karolyi Foundations in southern France.

Invention 11

Like Eleven (the double of one, yet not two),
Two caterpillars are marching, the one
precisely beneath the other, toe-tip to toe-tip,
close-clinging, rising and falling and mirrored:

One looks down and locks the other's horns,
or its own; the two could be said to be linked
like the locked yet endlessly out-spiraling
sindled ribbons of DNA. Yet there's something

scary, like Cicero's dizzying concept
of momentum animi, hurtling mind unstoppably inventing.
figures on figures, yet with no vanishing point,
like a world of ladders or stairwells

where space keeps revolving, welling up into space
endless, unfree, unfolding like stairs in a case.