BROUMAS, Olga

Born 6 May 1949, Syros, Greece

Daughter of Nicholas and Claire Pendeli Broumas; married Stephen E. Bangs, 1973 (divorced)

Olga Broumas' poems are voluptuous, exuberant, lyrical, rooted in history, and charged with political meaning. Poetry is for her both socially meaningful and a source of deep personal pleasure. Even when the poems concern pain and suffering, they take pleasure in their own sounds, shapes, and rhythms. Because of this play in language, there is more joy in Broumas' poetic world than sorrow.

Born in Greece in 1949, Broumas lived briefly in the U.S. as a child and returned in 1967 to attend college. She earned her B.A. in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania (1970) and a M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Oregon (1973). She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and has taught widely—at the University of Oregon, the University of Idaho, Goddard College, Boston University, and Brandeis University. In 1982 she helped found Freehand, a learning community of women artists and writers, in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Broumas is currently the Fanny Hurst poet-in-residence at Brandeis and the director of creative writing.

In "Demeter," Broumas honors her poetic maternity—Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Adrienne Rich—but she has forged her own feminist, poetic idiom that is neither despairing nor homiletic. Rejecting the poetry of the crazy lady, the "Classic, almost Plathian stance that I'd been taught," she seeks instead to affirm women's power and health. In pursuit of the "adequate myth" to accomplish this affirmation, she reinscribes Greek myths in terms of ordinary women's lives in the opening sequence, "Twelve Aspects of God," of Beginning with O (1977) and reclaims god as a feminine principle.

Broumas is a bodywork therapist who has practiced in Provincetown since 1983, and her aesthetic is intertwined with this work; the human body has a mythic, immediate presence in her poems. In "The Moon of Mind against the Wooden Louver" she writes to and honors a dying friend: "the pluck and humor of the song /your bones thrum while the blood still leaves /their broadside and their flank. /I kiss your bones." The female body is powerfully and vitally erotic. In Caritas (chapbook, 1976), she regrets the lack of language for female sexuality: "A woman-made language would /have as many synonyms for pink /light-filled /holy as /the Eskimo does /for snow." She seeks free and joyful language and imagery for lesbian love poems, in which the woman is both beloved and lover, giver and recipient.

Since Beginning with O, she has published eight volumes of poetry, Soie Sauvage (1979), Pastoral Jazz (1983), Black Holes, Black Stockings (1985), Perpetua (1989), Sappho's Gymnasium (1994), Helen Groves (1994), Unfolding the Tablecloth of God (1995), and Ithaca: Little Summer in Winter (1996). Black Holes, Black Stockings is a collection of prose poems written with poet Jane Miller. The last four volumes of Broumas' poetry were written with poet T. Begley, with whom she also translated three books of Odysseas Elytis' Greek poems, the last of which is Open Papers (1994).

Broumas' approach to poetry is expansive and syncretic. Her formal considerations derive from architecture and music, as well as from literary sources: she conceives of stanzas as spatial forms, words on the page "as notation for the voice." To create her art, Broumas draws on the many parts of her life: her Greek and European background; her experiences as a woman; her feminist and liberation politics; her massage work. Her poems take daring leaps, almost greedily appropriating and juxtaposing disparate images, words, and experiences.