Photo by George Krause

Issue: Summer 2005

Alumni Profile - Corinne Lee

A Poet Who Didn’t Know It

Corinne Lee ’83 grew up with dreams of writing great works of fiction. She took several creative writing courses at USC and graduated as a Thematic Option scholar with a concentration in English. She then set forth into the world figuring she would publish her first book – a collection of short stories, she hoped – by the age of 25.

But life, as she learned, rarely goes as planned. During her second semester at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she had a fellowship in fiction, she began to lose the use of her hands; the pain soon became unbearable. Her condition baffled doctors, some of whom suggested it was a psychological reaction to a suppressed fear of writing.

“I really believed the doctors when they said it was psychological. I was young, naïve and frightened,” she recalls. “It took a long time for me to really own my pain.”

Lee continued to write, though she physically toiled over every word. Just before her 30th birthday, however, her medical mystery was solved. A doctor discovered large processes, bone birth defects, just above the elbows in each of her arms. After a half-dozen surgeries over 10 years’ time, she had new arms and felt as if her life was finally beginning.

As time wore on, Lee picked up her pen again and tried her hand at poetry. She composed nearly 200 poems, most of which she claims were lousy.

It was during the 2003 holiday season that her poetry finally began to flow forth with fervor. The abandoned tone of her work, however, really caught Lee off-guard.

“I never would have imagined my voice to be so bizarre and almost uncontrollable,” she says. “It’s not a voice I would have anticipated for myself.”

With a hefty stack of poems in hand, Lee compiled them into a manuscript and, at her husband’s urging, submitted it to the National Poetry Series, which selects five contemporary collections each year for publication and a $1,000 award. She was stunned to learn she was named one of the 2004 winners, and that Penguin Books would publish her collection, PYX, in May 2005.

With its rich vocabulary and colorful imagery, Lee’s poetry feels like the product of intense, sustained writing sessions; readers would never guess that much of it was composed on scraps of paper while the poet was standing in line at the grocery store or sitting in a parking lot. As a mother of two pre-school aged children, Lee has a limited window of time each day to focus on her work.

“It’s difficult to have any kind of sustained hobby when someone’s constantly asking you for apple juice,” she says.

As both a busy mom and a relatively inexperienced poet, Lee understands the magnitude of the opportunity the National Poetry Series provided her. She is returning the gift: She now owns her own small publishing company, Winnow Press, the aim of which is to publish writers who would be overlooked by mainstream publishers.

“A lot of contemporary poetry is sliding under the public’s radar because people aren’t being educated in it,” she says. “I believe there is a renaissance going on in American poetry, and I wanted to be a part of that,” she says.