Ellen Bass

“Ellen Bass is a poet who writes out of an exuberant love of life and of language. She is no stranger to either pain or joy, and is unafraid of either.” —Alicia Ostriker

“Good poets help us to see the world in a new way; great ones open the mind to new ways of conceiving that world and our connections to it. Ellen Bass does this for me.” —Toi Derricotte

“Bass’s deftness as a poet is breathtaking.” —The Rumpus

Bestselling writer, poet, and educator Ellen Bass is the author of ten poetry collections and three nonfiction books. Her poetry collections include Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), which was a finalist for the The Paterson Poetry Prize, The Publishers Triangle Award, and The Northern California Book Award; Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), which was a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize, The Publishers Triangle Award, The Milt Kessler Poetry Award, The Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award; The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), which was named a Notable Book by the San Francisco Chronicle; and Mules of Love (BOA Editions, 2002), which won The Lambda Literary Award. In 1973, Bass co-edited with Florence Howe the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!.

The New York Times describes Like a Beggar as a collection that “pulses with sex, humor and compassion.” And poet Marie Howe’s praise elaborates further: “Ellen Bass has written these poems in service and celebration of Eros, the life force that can wake us, the weary citizens of this all too broken world. The poems know what they contend with; they don’t flinch. Then they sing their joy.”

Bass’s works of nonfiction include the bestselling The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, co-authored with Laura Davis (HarperCollins 1988, 20th anniversary edition 2008). The book has sold over a million copies and been translated into twelve languages. As a pioneer in the field of healing from child sexual abuse, Bass has given countless keynotes at conferences and other gatherings in support of survivors and to help educate professionals. Her other nonfiction titles include Beginning to Heal: A First Book for Men and Women Who Were Sexually Abused as Children (2003, revised edition 2008) and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Youth—and Their Allies (HarperCollins, 1996), which she wrote with Kate Kaufman.

A beloved teacher, Bass leads poetry writing workshops across the country. In her poetry writing and teaching, Bass’s style is direct; she says, “I work to speak in a voice that is meaningful communication. Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. When I write, first I am talking to myself. I’m grappling with something, trying to understand or discover something, trying to find a way to hold my experience within the human experience. And then I hope that I’m talking to the reader, meeting them across time and distance in a way that matters in their life.” A recent student, Pamela Davis, author of Lunette (which won the ABZ Prize for Poetry), praised Bass’s teaching: “The greatest strides I’ve made in my creative journey have been the direct result of studying with Ellen. She brings every aspect of craft to the table and has an astute understanding of what makes a poem work, with attention to word, line, tone, and shape. She listens with mind and heart, and responds with precision. Ellen takes the work seriously, but keeps the mood fun and light. If you’re just beginning, blocked, or an advanced poet seeking to stretch in new directions, I recommend you get to know Ellen Bass.”

The New Yorker has published thirteen of Bass’s poems throughout the years, and three have been chosen for The New Yorker podcast. Her poems have frequently appeared in numerous other journals including The American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and The Sun, as well as being widely anthologized. She has received Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. She received the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati, Nimrod/Hardman’s Pablo Neruda Prize, The Missouri Review’s Larry Levis Award, the Greensboro Poetry Prize, the New Letters Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Poetry Prize, and four Pushcart Prizes. In 2021, Bass was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.

Bass earned an MA in creative writing from Boston University, where she studied with Anne Sexton. She founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, CA jails. She currently teaches in the low residency MFA writing program at Pacific University. She is a Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets.

Bass grew up in New Jersey and lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Short Bio

Poet and educator Ellen Bass is a Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book of poetry, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Previous books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Bass was co-editor with Florence Howe of the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and has also written works of nonfiction, including, with Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, four Pushcart Prizes and the Lambda Literary Award. She teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University and lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Read What’s In Print

• Weekly Poem: Ellen Bass wants you to eat that strawberry — PBS News Hour Poetry Series

• The Artistic Reckoning of Poet Ellen Bass – GoodTimes

• No More Masks!: Advice From a Master Poet — Psychology Today

• Praise Poems: Ellen Bass Talks About Like A Beggar — NY Times

• In Plain Sight: The Vanishing of Ellen Bass — The Rumpus

• Conversation Between Ellen Bass and Alan Fox — Rattle

Listen to Audio

• Kevin Young discusses Ellen Bass’ poem “Because” – The New Yorker

• Paul Muldoon and Ellen Bass discuss a poem by Adam Zagajewski – The New Yorker

• Philip Levine discusses a poem by Ellen Bass with Paul Muldoon — The New Yorker

• Nicole Sealey discusses Ellen Bass’s poem, “Indigo,” with Kevin Young — The New Yorker

• Listen to Ellen read her poem, “Indigo” — The New Yorker

• Listen to Ellen read her poem, “Failure” — The New Yorker

• Listen to Ellen read her poem, “After Long Illness” — The New Yorker

• Podcast Interview with Carrie Fountain — KUT’s This Is Just to Say

• Read “Because” — The New Yorker

RELAX
Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she’s a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat—
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours. Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you’ll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn’t plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you’ll come home to find your son has emptied
the refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.
There’s a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs half way down. But there’s also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.

ANY COMMON DESOLATION
can be enough to make you look up
at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few
that survived the rains and frost, shot
with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep
orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird
would rip it like silk. You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive. The sound
of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant
animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.
The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.
Warm socks. You remember your mother,
her precision a ceremony, as she gathered
the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,
drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath
can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,
the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything
you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves
and, like a needle slipped into your vein—
that sudden rush of the world.

INDIGO
As I’m walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs
toward me pushing one of those jogging strollers
with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping,
which this baby is. I can just get a glimpse
of its almost translucent eyelids. The father is young,
a jungle of indigo and carnelian tattooed
from knuckle to jaw, leafy vines and blossoms,
saints and symbols. Thick wooden plugs pierce
his lobes and his sunglasses testify
to the radiance haloed around him. I’m so jealous.
As I often am. It’s a kind of obsession.
I want him to have been my child’s father.
I want to have married a man who wanted
to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much
that he marked it up like a book, underlining,
highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.
Not like my dead ex-husband, who was always
fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours
on his zafu chanting om and then went out
and broke his hand punching the car.
I imagine when this galloping man gets home
he’s going to want to have sex with his wife,
who slept in late, and then he’ll eat
barbecued ribs and let the baby teethe on a bone
while he drinks a dark beer. I can’t stop
wishing my daughter had had a father like that.
I can’t stop wishing I’d had that life. Oh, I know
it’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.
It took eight years for my parents to conceive me.
First there was the war and then just waiting.
And my mother’s bones so narrow, she had to be slit
and I airlifted. That anyone is born,
each precarious success from sperm and egg
to zygote, embryo, infant, is a wonder.
And here I am, alive.
Almost seventy years and nothing has killed me.
Not the car I totaled running a stop sign
or the spirochete that screwed into my blood.
Not the tree that fell in the forest exactly
where I was standing—my best friend shoving me
backward so I fell on my ass as it crashed.
I’m alive.
And I gave birth to a child.
So she didn’t get a father who’d sling her
onto his shoulder. And so much else she didn’t get.
I’ve cried most of my life over that.
And now there’s everything that we can’t talk about.
We love—but cannot take
too much of each other.
Yet she is the one who, when I asked her to kill me
if I no longer had my mind—
we were on our way into Ross,
shopping for dresses. That’s something
she likes and they all look adorable on her—
she’s the only one
who didn’t hesitate or refuse
or waver or flinch.
As we strode across the parking lot
she said, O.K., but when’s the cutoff?
That’s what I need to know.

Book Covers

Download Now

Download Now

Download Now

Download Now

Artist Photos

Download Now

Download Now

Download Now