Le Bel's poetry received high laurels
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| Le Bel '98 |
Natasha Le Bel, SM '98, learned to play piano the same way she writes poetry: intuitively. "When I started playing," Le Bel said, "I used to compose. Not formally, but by repeating notes and phrases I liked until I built a song. But then I had teachers who tried to tell me how to play, what notes, and where, and it was just so restrictive that I stopped."
Though Le Bel's piano playing met an early end, her poetry--which Le Bel similarly composes with repeated phrases and rhythms that occur to her naturally--has fared a good deal better. Le Bel is one of 72 poets featured in The Best American Poetry of 1996 (Scribner Paperbacks, $13.00), an anthology of poems selected from various magazines and poetry journals by a different guest editor each year.
Le Bel's achievement is striking, but even more so considering that the poems were written when Le Bel was sixteen years old. Both "Foot Fire Burn Dance" and "Boxing the Female" were written in a poetry class taken at her high school, Saint Ann's in Brooklyn, New York. "The class," Le Bel related, "was amazing. We had to hand in a portfolio of 100 pages of poetry." After handing in her portfolio, Le Bel sent three of those poems to Hanging Loose, a magazine devoted to the work of high school students. "It wasn't a big deal," Le Bel explained. "It was the first time I ever submitted anything but I knew a number of other writers from St. Ann's who had been published there." Hanging Loose published three of her poems, which were later seen by this year's Best American Poetry guest editor Adrienne Rich, who chose two.
Rich, a poet well-known for her feminist politics, came to the series with a new approach, writing series editor David Lehman, "The quality of the work in the series thus far is very high, and the poems diverse in many ways...but they don't as yet, to my sense of it, reflect the richness and range of the best American poetry." As editor, Rich pored through sundry journals--Hanging Loose among them--finding poems that reflected her commitment "to social justice, human community, and the voices of poets outside the literary mainstream." Le Bel, who wasn't familiar Rich's poetry before she learned of her selection, admitted that Rich's editorship had a lot to do with her selection. "Both these poems are very feminine," she explained, "Which probably attracted Rich to them."
Le Bel hasn't taken any poetry classes at Yale--"For a long while, I felt that eveything I had to say in poetry I had said at Saint Ann's."--though she's ready to write poetry again. In the meantime, she's been focusing on non-fiction writing, taking several classes at Yale. "But I'm not an English major," she confessed, "because they make you read all those big, stuffy ancient books." Instead, she majors in art history, having spent many years drawing female nudes; one summer she spent drawing female nudes at Rhode Island School of Design. Nevertheless, it's clear Le Bel doesn't take poetry lightly: her favorite poets are T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, though she has been most influenced by Beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. "I learned so much about inner rhythm from his poetry. That's how I write: certain phrases and rhythms just tumble around until finally they come out as a poem."
Le Bel lives with her mother and sister in Brooklyn Heights, New York, and though her mother works as a teacher of English as a Second Language, it is her sister Melissa who Le Bel credits as her greatest teacher. "Melissa is neurologically handicapped, which means that it takes a great deal of effort for her to learn simple things like tying her shoes. She has taught me to look at things very closely, to focus on the details." That focus has paid off very well, indeed.
Boxing the Female
Natasha Le Bel