“Finally Going to Tell You about the Staircase Ghost” was published today by editor Lisa M. Hase-Jackson at Zingara Poetry Review. This poem relates a couple of the “super”natural experiences I have had.
As befitting Mother’s Day, one of them occurred when I was a new mom. The other is a ghost story.
I closed comments over here, but comments are allowed at Zingara.
Filed under #AmWriting, #writerlife, #writerslife, Inspiration, Literary Journals, Poetry
Superstition Review is a literary journal from Arizona State University, and I am so tickled that they published two of my poems. Also, they posted an audio clip of my reading of both poems. Follow this link:
So you don’t even have to read them yourself, just put up your feet and listen for two minutes.
The first poem is called “One of Her Parents was a Float.” It’s a poem inspired by adoption. Until the poem I published with Plath Poetry Project a few months ago and this one I hadn’t written an adoption poem in a long time. I feel really pleased with the originality of this way of looking at the subject.
The second poem was inspired by seeing a photo online of a little girl named Minnie Rae PREGNANT in 1871 San Francisco.
In those days, there weren’t any services to help girls like this. Charity and all the baggage that came with it was all anyone could hope for. What baggage? Demands about doctrine, religion, and lifestyle, all the while not providing enough to live on.
But if you think nothing like this has happened in a long time, I’ll give you an anecdote from the late 70s. That is a long time ago now, but it has teemed in my head since then. The gardener’s cousin was married to a wonderful man who taught in an inner city school in a very poor area of NYC. One of his students was 8 years old and pregnant. He struggled with how to deal with the horrors he faced every day in the classroom.
Is stuff like this still going on today? Let me know what you think!
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Editor Lisa M. Hase-Jackson has published my poem “Maybe It was Spring” at Zingara Poetry Review. This poem is very different from the one also published a few hours ago at North of Oxford. That one is a dark story, a poem that reveals the real Medusa and what happened to her. You can find “Medusa’s #Metoo” in my previous post.
But “Maybe It was Spring” is a “risen” poem. It’s about all the possibilities of rebirth, renewal, and the hope of a miracle. It’s also a true story.
Click the image below to get to “Maybe It was Spring”:
If you have a WordPress blog, try following Zingara Poetry Review so you can be first to read the Zingara Poetry Picks!
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So thrilled that my poem “Medusa’s #Metoo” has been published at North of Oxford. Most of my life, I took the myth of Medusa as I had been fed it: that she was a monster who turned men into stone when they looked at her. Perseus was the hero of the story for cutting off her head. But look further. Medusa was a beautiful woman who was raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. For Poseidon’s crime, Athena blamed Medusa and turned her into the deathly face framed by serpents instead of hair that we know her by. Surely Medusa’s #metoo story is an important one.
Filed under Poetry, Publishing, Reading, Writing
I am tickled that my poem “Noah and the Middle School Marching Band” has been published by the wonderful journal Entropy for their BIRDS series, and it’s accompanied by art by my friend Mary Stebbins Taitt, artist and naturalist. Mary and I met through Cowbird, a site where we both used to publish stories.
UPDATE: Entropy appears to be closed, and the poem is no longer available online. Here is the poem:
Noah and the Middle School Marching Band
It is green and blue and yellow where
I can see out the window
instead of concentrating on the page.
That famous poet chastised me
for putting birds in poems
as if he released them from
their lined and stanzaed cages when
he grew bored with their singing.
But you know what? I’m alone
with my paper and who will care
if I lure them in with my baton-
like pen, parading them into place
two by two like Noah and the
middle school marching band.
It’s not just robins and wrens.
Look at them come. Godwits
and bushtits, catbirds and black-
crested titmice, I tickle their feet
to move them along a little faster.
Come on, coots and loons with
the juncos and cuckoos, the dippers,
the pink-footed shearwaters.
Watch for the yellow legs,
the redstarts, bespeckled ovenbirds.
Quails and rails, pintails and pewees.
Now watch my favorites, most social
of them all, chattery magpies.
Inside my shabby bars, they wobble
on perches I improvise as they arrive.
When I asked Mary if she would like to have one of her pieces accompany my poem, I was amazed at how many birds she had worked on.
###
Noah is my favorite Bible character.
“Noah and the Dove” by Judith Klausner
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MY GOODREADS REVIEW OF A NEW POETRY COLLECTION, Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful by Matthew Lippman:
I am writing my feelings and thoughts about Lippman’s new collection while they are still fresh, but when I don’t have time to write a thorough review that does it justice. This is a mesmerizing (and sadly) beautiful book. These poems are the epitome of Lippman’s big-hearted writing. I could imagine him with his big aching heart carried outside his body while he wrote these poems. Nobody creates FEELING from a poem like he does. Feelings of love and sadness are all intertwined here. You can’t have love without sadness and you can’t have sadness without love. Read this book, everyone! This is a book that can save us from our over-thinking and our despair.
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I will be taking a blog break for a week or so (therefore, I closed comments here). See you when I return and stay safe, healthy, and calm in the meantime!
Filed under #amwriting, #AmWriting, #writerslife, Art and Music, Cats and Other Animals, Poetry, Publishing
Founder and co-editor Christine Butterworth-McDermott really knows her way around a fairy tale. She understands their flexibility, responsibilities, and opportunities. So it was thrilling that she took one of my Red Riding Hood poems for the new issue of Gingerbread House Literary Magazine.
You can read it here and see the beautiful artwork that was paired with the poem: Interrogation
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The Plath Poetry Project is one of the most unique poetry projects around. The central event involves writing poems that are inspired by Plath poetry. The poems are accompanied by explanations of the inspiration. PPP published a poem I wrote once before, and now they have published one I wrote based on Plath’s “For a Fatherless Son.”
by Sylvia Plath
You will be aware of an absence, presently,
Growing beside you, like a tree,
A death tree, color gone, an Australian gum tree —-
Balding, gelded by lightning—an illusion,
And a sky like a pig’s backside, an utter lack of attention.
But right now you are dumb.
And I love your stupidity,
The blind mirror of it. I look in
And find no face but my own, and you think that’s funny.
It is good for me
To have you grab my nose, a ladder rung.
One day you may touch what’s wrong —-
The small skulls, the smashed blue hills, the godawful hush.
Till then your smiles are found money.
My poem is “For an Adopted Child.”
My children were adopted by the gardener and me as babies. My brother was also adopted by my parents as a baby. Although my kids are vocal about the positive side of adoption, that does not mean that they haven’t been scarred by the process of adoption. Adoptees aren’t born when they join their adoptive families. They have lives before that–perhaps a week, three months, or six years. They know loss before most other people. In the case of my kids, they are transracial adoptees, so that brings some more baggage along with it.
We’ve come a long way from the days when even educated people told adoptees they are lucky they were adopted, but there are still plenty of unenlightened people out there saying stupid stuff, never fear. It’s not lucky to lose your birth family, no matter what the circumstances. It’s not lucky to know loss so young.
I hope you appreciate “For an Adopted Child”; it’s one of my favorites.
Filed under #AmWriting, #writerlife, Poetry, Publishing, Writing
I’m still trying to stay on top of everything, but last week kicked me in the behind. If only I could clone myself. I used to like that movie Multiplicity where the man is cloned several times. Remember that? It wasn’t a great movie or a popular one, but Michael Keaton is one of my favorite actors. I am always hoping to clone myself, but that unlike the Keaton character in the movie, I can control the clones–perhaps even operate their brains ;).
Not only did I have a jam-packed week, but a lot of little stuff went wrong. My anxiety level increased as the stress did. I’m wondering if this anxiety is a byproduct of The Artist’s Way program. So far I’ve gotten some advice from a TAW Facebook group. We’ll see how it goes.
But I am happy to report that I snagged a 2020 publication this week.
Still, if only I could learn from my cats that time pools up between our paws when we let it do so. If we’re chasing after it, we’ll never catch it.
How’s about this Marge Piercy cat poem?
THE CAT’S SONG
Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, saysthe cat making on your chest his gesture of drawingmilk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.*Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.*You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,says the cat, although I am more equal than you.Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?*Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the morningswalking round and round your bed and into your face.*Come I will teach you to dance as naturallyas falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word*of fur. I will teach you to be still as an eggand to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.
Filed under #amrevising, #amwriting, #writerslife, Cats and Other Animals, Poetry, Writing
This very sweet fairly new literary journal Dovecote has published one of my poems in their 3rd issue. Don’t you think the journal name is beautiful? A dovecote is a house for doves. I found this photo of a very old dovecote in the Utrecht province of the Netherlands on my old friend Wikipedia.
A place to house birds. A bird is often a metaphor for a poet. Because of the singing, ya know?
Well, oddly, my poem is not a singing sort of poem, but more of a shouting one. Here’s a different look at poetry than many people, especially people who don’t read a lot of poetry, hold.
Filed under #AmWriting, #writerlife, #writerslife, Arizona, Inspiration, Literary Journals, Poetry
My third fall publication is in Wilderness House Literary Review. Thanks so much to Poetry Editor Kate Hanson Foster. No relation, although Hanson is my surname of birth.
Do you know the work of poet Adrienne Rich? One of my favorites. My poem originated as I meditated upon the opening line of a Rich poem. It is the 7th in a modern version of a sonnet sequence called Twenty-One Love Poems.
THE RICH POEM:
VII
What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
–and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living.
Is all this close to the wolverines’ howled signals,
that modulated cantata of the wild?
or, when away from you I try to create you in words,
am I simply using you, like a river or a war?
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing of the worst thing of all—
not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
Notice how the second line says, “What atonement is this all about?” Is writing a form of atonement? This is a good time to ponder that question because Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement begins at sundown today and lasts until sundown tomorrow.
Filed under #AmWriting, #writerlife, #writerslife, Arizona, Inspiration, Literary Journals, Poetry
