Thérèse Bachand (USA)
1953
1953
Born in Oakland, California, Bachand grew up in a large family of seven children. Her father, of French-Canadian extraction, was an attorney and later a municipal judge. Her mother, a school teacher, kept close ties with friends living in a nearby convent.
Bachand attended Cowell College in Santa Cruz, California, where she studied with Norman O. Brown and was awarded a Bachelor’s degree with honors. She moved to Marin in 1975, where she worked first as a housecleaner, before working as continuity and camera reports technician on the film Black Stallion.
In 1983 Bachand and her family moved to the Los Angeles area, where her primary focus was raising her two girls. As her daughters matriculated through school, Bachand worked in various volunteer positions at both the Seeds University Elementary School and Marlborough High School. In 1996 she also worked as a volunteer at the Venice, California-based literary arts center, Beyond Baroque. Bachand was an intern copyeditor and proofreader from 1996-2000 at Sun & Moon Press and, later, at Green Integer.
Throughout these years, she wrote poetry and involved herself in the local poetry scenes. But only after her involvement with publishing did she begin, reluctantly, to show her writing to others. luce a cavallo received Green Integer’s Gertrude Stein Book Award for 2005, selected by Luigi Ballerini. In this work, which characterizes much of her writing to date, the structure is determined, in part, by various movies from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, a period which the author describes as creating exciting director-oriented works that, ironically, have been credited with saving the studio system. Her unpublished work includes a project using the daily newspaper as a means to create a common palette of words. In 2004 Bachand moved to northern California, returning recently to Los Angeles.
BOOKS OF POETRY
luce a cavallo (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009); Mercury in Retrograde (Los Angeles: Mindmade Books, 2012); A440: a fairy tale (Los Angeles: Domain 22, 2014); being a very small place (Los Angeles: Make Now Books and Domain 22, 2020) 175+ poems on boxed index cards
╬Winner of the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English
2005-2006
notarized assignation (from Accattone)
what is the epitaph
for both
martyr and pimp?
a congregation
of a thousand pharaohs
arguing
about the gentle sex
could not demean
such a free citizen
in God’s hands
playing cards
becomes a honeymoon
for the lucky
a bashful reminder
that there is larceny
in heaven
the ravines
of the forgotten
brim
with working delinquents
petty crooks
who recognize
deceit begins
in hunger
let the countess
despise the grocer
robbed
of his false teeth
in this category
a holy medal
is but a necklace
of a monument
in the shining roof
over the would-be
canonized-
those orphaned
by absent charity
PERMISSIONS
____
Reprinted from The PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20th Century, Volume 5: Intersections—Innovative Poetry in Southern California (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005). Copyright ©2005 by Thérèse Bachand.
Go here for a selection of other poems: https://www.makhzin.org/issues/dictationship/the-pantone-series-select