The online journal of formalist poetry by women, Mezzo Cammin, was founded by the late Kim Bridgford and is now under the editorship of poet Anna Evans. The first issue under new leadership has just been published! It contains twenty-six well-crafted poems on a variety of themes by a baker’s dozen of skilled poets, arranged in alphabetical order by the poet’s last name: Kris Beaver, Catherine Chandler, Mary Cresswell, Catherine Fitzpatrick, Nicole Caruso Garcia, Katie Hartsock, Jean L. Kreiling, Diane Lee Moomey, T.R. Poulson, Catherine Esposito Prescott, Carolyn Raphael, Claudia Schatz, and Leslie Schultz.
To read the issue for yourself, and see the work of featured painter, Holly Trostle Brigham, whose newest work on Pre-Raphaelite muse Elizabeth Siddal is paired with poems by Kim Bridgford in the artist book I Wake Again, here is the link. Red hair is one focus of the collection. (If you are near Delaware, you can see the life-sized paintings from February 26 to May 29, 2022 at the Delaware Art Museum.)
I was especially taken with the understated and highly relatable humor in “Uxorious Sonnet #4 by Catherine Fitzpatrick; the timely updating of a poem Julia and I used to recite all the time (Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody!–Who Are You?”) in “After the Associate Poetry Editor Tweets That Submissions Are Still Open” by Nicole Caruso Garcia; the trick-taking, stunning final line in the skillful poem, “Dealing”, by Jean L. Kreiling; and the startling imagery of Catherine Esposito Prescott’s “The World”. You will have your own favorites.
My own poems are both recent work that draw on reading and traveling and thinking done over the past decade. The sonnet, “Goddess of Forgetting”, showed up as a surprise during the April 2021 challenge of writing a new poem each day. It was inspired by a book that my Book Group chose to read together some years ago called In the Garden of Evening Mists by Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng, specifically by the epigraph from Richard Holmes. The sestina, “A Song for Sarah Winchester”, is a poem I have been working on for some years and finally completed in 2020. It had as its catalyst a visit in 2012 to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California.
Finally, the Mezzo Cammin website also offers the deep pleasures of a video celebrating the life and work of Kim Bridgford at the 2021 Poetry by the Sea Conference and the Women Poets Timeline Project with essays on dozens of women poets in many traditions from and essay by Pat Valdata on Sumerian poet Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE) to Kim Bridgford’s essay on contemporary poet A.E. Stallings (1968- )
Happy reading and writing! LESLIE
