This year during April (designated by the Library of Congress Poetry Month), I've been offering us all a break from prose, instead devoting the blog to some of my older poems—specifically poems about the making of poetry itself, even though these two below diverge slightly from that theme. The first, a light verse (growing darker) piece titled, "On the Watergate Women," was written in the 1970s but seemed ripe for revisiting this particular week, although some younger readers may want to look up now forgotten names that are indelible for those of us who survived this kind of national trauma before. The second, "Lithographers," does return to the theme of creating art but the metaphor is visual: print-making. The arduous process of "making" is the same, however, and "Lithographers" is about the forging of art and, not incidentally, the forging of love. ON THE WATERGATE WOMEN Maureen Dean, wearing persimmon summer silk, sits...
PIECING (for Lois Sasson) “Sometimes you don’t have no control over the way things are. Hail ruins the crops, or fire burns you out. And then you’re just given so much to work with in a life and you have to do the best you can with what you got. That’s what piecing is. The materials is passed on to you, or is all you can afford. But the way you put them together is your business. You can put them in any order you like. Piecing is orderly.” – An anonymous woman quoted in The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art Frugality is not the point. Nor waste. It’s just that very little is discarded in any honest spending of the self, and what remains is used and used again, worn thin by use, softened to the pliancy and the translucence of old linen, patched, mended, reinforced, and saved. So I discover how I am rejoicing slowly...
During April, Poetry Month, each week this blog will offer one of my poems about poetry and art. "I believe that in this physical, space-time world of our experience there are things which do not fit the grammatical scheme of expression. But they are not necessarily blind, inconceivable, mystical affairs; they are simply matters which require to be conceived through some symbolistic schema other than discursive language." —Susanne K. Langer Why, caring as I do for trees, am I condemned to poetry? why compelled to serve a life sentence stuttering this syntax of...
For the record, let me be clear. I would give up my US citizenship if it meant I ever had to vote for Donald J. Trump. If the only opposition to Donald J. Trump from the Democratic Party or any other political party was a platypus, I would be among the first to wear buttons proclaiming Duck Billed Platypus for President! Who can better bring us together? An egg-laying mammal! An amphibian! An ancient, fuzzy, refuse-to-go-extinct creature with a duckbill that’s a study in uniting contrasts? You get the point. That said, I’m in need of a vent about the would-be Democratic candidates, more of whom pile on each day. Let me specify. I’m in need to vent about the boys. Oh. I should also say upfront that I believe strongly in the right of any American citizen to run for any office, including the presidency, law permitting. This is not about...
I’ve been so historical and serious in these posts recently that I thought it was time to move into the present—but only after this quick postscript to my previous three-part meditation on Suffrage(s): Check out MonumentalWomen.org to learn about the women—a diverse group—who have already committed themselves to creating a Women’s Rights Trail in New York, building (literally) on the completion of their previous campaign for the Stanton-Anthony monument in Central Park. Now back to the present—and while this isn’t quite about What I Did Over Spring Break, it could be subtitled What I Learned Over Spring Break. Or relearned. It all started with an email out of the blue, from someone at the great haute couture institution of fashion, the legendary House of Dior in Paris. I am not generally your haute couture fashion type—although I clean up pretty good and can be presentable if required. But then this email...
In last week’s blog post, I tried, albeit superficially, to show that the century-long movement for women's suffrage, which finally won the vote for (some) women in 1920, took place in a context and country where originally only white, Christian, property-owning, land-holding males possessed the franchise—and they weren't particularly eager to share it with anybody who didn't meet those identifying qualifications. The ignorance all of us—female and male, people of color and white people—have been infected with is painful and poisonous, but lancing and draining it will also hurt, as that requires an honesty to which we apparently as yet only aspire. Honesty means I have to start this week with two corrections. First: last week I ended with a quote from Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, who said she wore white to the State of The Union speech in honor of Alice Paul and the suffrage movement but also carried a kente...
As you probably know, we’re approaching the 100 birthday of the 19thAmendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920, which proclaims, The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Well, that seems simple enough, and a damned good thing, too, hard-won through more than a previous century of organizing, picketing, divorces and child custody losses and job firings, arrests and beatings and jails and rapes and hunger strikes! What’s not to celebrate? Historical illiteracy, that’s what. It’s not your fault if you don’t know something, but it’s somebody’s fault if you’ve been kept from knowing something. This subject sure as hell is going to come up a lot in the next months, and it would be nice if we were equipped with some real facts. Historians, alert! Please don't have conniptions! Please keep in mind...
