Draft:Angela Patten

• Comment: Not enough WP:RS or WP:SIGCOV, that demonstrates that the subject is notable. Jamiebuba (talk) 19:32, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

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Angela Patten (1952 - ) is an Irish poet who has lived in the United States since 1977. She has authored four collections of poetry and a prose memoir. Her poetry has been included in major anthologies. She is notable as a poet who writes about Irish families, Irish women, and the diaspora experience. She lives in Burlington, Vermont, with her husband the poet Daniel Lusk.

Early life and education

Patten was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. She immigrated to the United States in 1977, settling in rural Vermont. While raising her son, she enrolled at the University of Vermont, earning a Bachelor's degree in Writing. She then earned a Master's in Fine Arts degree from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. After working for various nonprofit arts groups, she returned to the University of Vermont as a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer. In 2012, she received the university's Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award.

Literary work and honors

Patten's work is part of what literary scholar Patricia Boyle Haberstroh calls the "female" voices revising the Irish masculine poetic tradition. Recognition of Patten's importance as an Irish woman poet can be seen in her inclusion in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volume V, Irish Women's Writing and Traditions, an expansive anthology compiled in response to the absence of women in earlier volumes.

In 2021, Patten's poetry collection, The Oriole & the Ovenbird, was published by Kelsay Books. Poets & Writers, describes these poems as a "primal interplay between humans and avian species in our lives and imaginations." In Sequestrum, Patton wrote that she had become "fascinated by the huge gatherings of crows in my neighborhood during the winter months and this led me to think about collaboration versus individualism. I thought about my father who was an Irish fiddle-player.... I was struck by how the musicians worked to fit in rather than stand out. When two disparate things come together, as they did in this case, there is the possibility for a poem."

Scholar Lucy Collins writes that for Irish women poets, "past and present exist in thematic and aesthetic alignment, making their treatment of memory of enduring importance to readers." The themes of belonging and estrangement, which literary scholars locate as central to the contemporary evolution of Irish women's poetry, are present in Patten's poetry.

Patten's earlier poetry collections are In Praise of Usefulness (Wind Ridge Books, 2014), Reliquaries (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2007) and Still Listening (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 1999). Writers who have influenced Patten include the Irish poet Eavan Boland, whose epigraph to her poetry collection A Woman Without a Country is: “This sequence is dedicated to those who lost a country, not by history or inheritance, but through a series of questions to which they could find no answer.” Patten has stated that this epigraph speaks to her experience.

Patten's poems have been published in literary journals, including Calyx, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women; Hunger Mountain; Michigan Quarterly Review; Oberon; Off the Coast; Poetry Ireland Review; Prairie Schooner; Sequestrum; Voices International; and the Waterford Review. In addition to The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, her poems have been included in The White Page/An Bhileog Bhan; Onion River: Six Vermont Poets; Cudovista Usta (Marvelous Mouth), Drustvo Apokalipsa (Slovenia); Birchsong I and II: Poetry Centered in Vermont; Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry; Even The Daybreak: 35 Years of Salmon Poetry; and The Breath of Parted Lips II: Voices from the Robert Frost Place, edited by Sydney Lea. The Breath of Parted Lips II was a finalist for the 2004 ForeWord Book of the Year and the 2005 Independent Publisher Book Award for Anthologies.

In 2016, Patten received the Cultural Center of Cape Cod National Poetry Prize for her poem "Tracks." In 2022, she received the Anthony Cronin International Short Poem Award for her poem "Shine," which was published in the Wexford Bohemian, Issue #4. Like many of her poems, "Shine" is explores a daughter's memory of earlier family life. Patten's other honors include artist grants from the University of Vermont Retired Scholars Award Program, the Vermont Arts Council, and the Vermont Community Foundation.

Patten has been an invited participant and faculty member at literary festivals, writers' centers, bookstores, and teaching institutions around the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. Among these are Stonecoast in Ireland (University of Southern Maine), Dingle, County Kerry, Ireland; Harlow Gallery, Hallowell, Maine; The Frost Place, Franconia, New Hampshire; Irish Writers' Centre, Dublin, Ireland; Eigse Carlow Arts Festival, Ireland; Stranmillis University College/Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland; National Baha'i Center, Dublin, Ireland; Plattsburgh State University, Plattsburgh, New York; University of Osnabruck, Germany; and the Wexford Art Centre, Wexford, Ireland.

Patten has discussed her poems and her background in interviews, including a 2010 television interview with Fran Stoddard on Vermont Public Television, where she was interviewed alongside her husband the poet Daniel Lusk. In 2018, she was interviewed by Margaret Harrington as part of the Burlington (VT) Irish Heritage Festival. As the guest editor of Live Encounters: Poetry and Writing, a free nonprofit online magazine, Patten wrote that during the Covid-19 shutdown she joined "Healing Words," an Irish Zoom meeting for the sharing of song, poetry, and storytelling. The experience confirmed her belief that "Irish love of language, wit and wordplay has not died out completely."

Patten is the author of the 2013 prose memoir, High Tea at a Low Table: Stories From An Irish Childhood (Wind Ridge Books). This memoir, Patten writes in Poets & Writers, "combines my recollections of growing up in Ireland with some unexpectedly traumatic events I experienced as a young adult in America." The memoir provides evidence of the importance of Irish language and culture in Patten's development as a writer.