Monthly Archives: June 2018

News Flash! I Have Two Poems (“The Spyder” and “A Song of Penelope”) in the Summer 2018 Issue of MEZZO CAMMIN

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Mezzo Cammin: An Online Journal of Formalist Poetry By Women, has just published its summer 2018 edition. I am so pleased that two of my own new poems are included in it. Both were inspired by the work of other poets.

“The Spyder” is an homage to William Blake‘s magnificent poem, “The Tyger,” and uses the same metrical and rhyme schemes, among other borrowings, to highlight an inversion of scale in the imagery.

“A Song of Penelope” was inspired by my recent reading of Emily Wilson’s magnificent new translation of Homer’s epic,The Odyssey. Wilson, a professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania, is (in my opinion) an able poet herself, more than equal to rendering the 12,110 lines of Homer’s Greek into an equal number of modern English lines that sing and gallop. Her one-hundred-plus pages of Translator’s Notes alone is worth the price of admission. My own villanelle (just the prescribed nineteen lines!) sprang from contemplating the inner-journey of Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, imagining that she is equally as complicated as Odysseus, and equally adept at weaving song, story, and mythic reality as is her wide-ranging husband.

This issue of Mezzo Cammin includes new work by nineteen poets, each poem thoughtful and skillful. (I was especially wowed by the clarity of voice in “At Meadowbreeze Manor” by Barbara Lydecker Crane.)

My own poems appear HERE.

(My new author photo was taken by my friend, Mattie Lufkin, at the Minneapolis Institute for Art early this year, when we toured with our friend, Allison Schmitt, the MIA exhibit “Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty.”)

Wishing you a pleasant summer of reading and dreaming!

(This image was taken last summer near Grand Marais, Minnesota; the one above, of bloodroot blossoms, was taken in my garden.)

THE ORCHARDS POETRY JOURNAL Has Published Its June 2018 Issue: My Poems, “Watercolor” and “Medusa,” Are Included

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The June issue of the semi-annual online publication, The Orchards Poetry Journal, has just been published.  It is a work of beauty and heart. I am so pleased to have my own work included, and I am enjoying the work of other poets, most of them previously unknown to me.

When I was in college, I had the starring role in a short student film about a poet–an introvert!–who had to escape from daily stresses to the quiet of a park at sunset. The title? “The Little Tippler” (for E.D.) That was the same year I first encountered the poems of Emily Dickinson which have influenced me ever since. Given that, I was impressed by the technically adept and humorous riff on Emily Dickinson’s original poem (“I taste a liquor never brewed” #214) in this issue of The Orchards, called “Getting High with Emily Dickinson” by Chris Carrol. (Click HERE to find the text of the original poem by Dickinson as printed by the enclyopedic site www.poets.org hosted by the American Academy of Poets–sponsor of National Poetry Month and inventor of Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day. Please note, as with many of Dickinson’s poems, variants abound. The version I memorized years ago had a different third line: “Not all the Vats along the Rhine”!)

Other favorites of mine in this issue include Susan McLean’s devastating villanelle “What You Need to Know;” Ted Charnley’s trenchant “Lady MacBeth in the 21st Century;” and Katherine Barrett Swift’s wry homage to John Donne in “Busy Old Fool.”

Of my own poems, “Watercolor” came to be written when friend and poet Sally Nacker and I engaged in an exercise drawn from a book called The Crafty Poet, by Diane Lockward, the poet laureate of the New Jersey town of West Caldwell. Her monthly blog is well worth investigating (I have subscribed for some years) on her website.

“Medusa,” my sonnet, is dedicated to the poet and former US Poet Laureate Louise Bogan (1897-1970). I first encountered Bogan’s work in high school by chance, on the shelves of the Appleton Public Library, through her final collection, The Blue Esturaries. (I remember, vividly, looking up the word “estuaries.”) For thirty-eight years, Bogan also reviewed poetry for The New Yorker. In my opinion, she is too little read today.

Unlike Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, also high school discoveries for me, Bogan was a very private person on the page–cool, cerebral, a master of technique, too. Her form of emotional intensity comes not from the confessional mode but from restraint and precision of diction and musicality–more Bach than Beethoven. Both Plath and Bogan employed the mythology of Medusa in their own distinct ways. Many years after encountering their poems, I wrote my own poem.

Hoping you enjoy this issue of The Orchards Poetry Review! Let me know which poems arrest your attention!