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“Censoring books that deal with difficult,
adolescent issues does not protect anybody.
Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness
and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the
child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our
children cannot afford to have the truth of
the world withheld from them.”
– Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Shout,
Catalyst, and The Impossible Knife of Memory
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March is Women’s History Month,
so this week, which straddles the
middle of the month, I am
showcasing 13 women poets
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March 10
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1842 – Ina Donna Coolbrith born in Nauvoo, Illinois; American poet, author, and city librarian of Oakland (1874-1892); California’s inaugural Poet Laureate (1915-1928), the first state-appointed poet laureate. Her poetry collections include A Perfect Day and Wings of Sunset. Coolbrith’s health was in decline before the 1906 earthquake. She escaped from her house carrying her cat, but the fire burned it to the ground. She lost over 3,000 books, many were first editions signed by their authors, and the manuscript of her history of the California literary scene, which she never completed. She lived in temporary quarters until her friends raised the money to build a new house for her. Ina Coolbrith died in 1928 at age 86.
A Memory
by Ina Donna Coolbrith
.
Through rifts of cloud the moon's soft silver slips;
A little rain has fallen with the night,
Which from the emerald under-sky still drips
Where the magnolias open, broad and white.
.
So near my window I might reach my hand
And touch these milky stars, that to and fro
Wave, odorous. ... Yet 't was in another land —
How long ago, my love, how long ago!
.
“A Memory” from Songs from the Golden Gate, by Ina Donna Coolbrith – published by Houghton Mifflin in 1907
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1900 – Margaret Fishback born in Washington DC; American poet, prose author, and advertising copywriter, rumored to be the highest-paid woman copywriter in the world in the 1930s. After earning a degree from Goucher College, she joined Macy’s as a divisional advertising copywriter – later promoted to chief copywriter. In 1936, she married Alberto Gatone Antolini, chief rug buyer for Macy’s. She left Macy’s in 1951 to work for ad agencies, and contributed to ad campaigns for Arrow Shirts, Borden's, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, Clairol, DuPont, Hanes Hosiery, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Seagram's, Simmons Beautyrest, Wrigley, and many others before her 1963 retirement. Her poems and short stories appeared in magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker and The New York Times. Five collections of her poems originally printed in magazines and papers were published, including: I Feel Better Now; I Take It Back; One to a Customer; and Time for a Quick One. Margaret Fishback died at age 85 in September 1985.
Busy Day at the Office
by Margaret Fishback
.
This is a day when I covered no ground.
Just pushed and shuffled my papers around,
Nudged at letters and winced at bills,
Sorting them out into different hills,
Hunted fretfully for a ruler,
Worried the overworked water cooler,
Sharpened pencils and filled my pen,
Then shuffled my papers around again.
.
"Busy Day at the Office" from Poems Made Up to Take Out, © 1963 by Margaret Fishback – D. McKay Company
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1979 – Ama Codjoe born “with roots in Memphis and Accra,” raised in Youngstown, Ohio; African American poet, social justice activist, and dancer. She received the Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellowship from New York University, and earned an MFA in Dance Performance from Ohio State University. Codjoe was a Cave Canem fellow, a Black Bottom Tuesday Poet, and Associate Director of Professional Development for the DreamYard Art Center. Her poetry collection, Blood of the Air, won the 2019 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and Bluest Nude: Poems won the 2023 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
Diamondback
by Ama Codjoe
.
Like an organ coiled
deep inside or a lasso
of lightning and high
noon, the rattlesnake
traveled the length
of my spine, sunning itself
inside me. Then death—some
call it god—drew a diamond
on the snake’s back,
and marked my chest
with feeling. How godly
the two of us were, shaking
what was hollow.
Dirt stained
the front of my blouse.
I felt venom
rise in my ears. I heard
the snake molting,
turning my skin bronze
and flawless. This is how
I became a woman,
sun rattling
across my back,
dust glittering my tongue,
the snake’s tail whirring.
.
“Diamondback” from Bluest Nude: Poems, © 2022 by Ama Codjoe – Milkweed Editions
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March 11
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1955 – Myriam Moscona born in Mexico City, of Bulgarian Sephardic descent, Mexican poet and journalist; author of nine books, two of them available in bilingual editions, translated by Jen Hofer: Tela de sevoya /Onioncloth, about a journey to Bulgaria in search of her Sephardic heritage, and Negro marfil / Ivory Black, winner of the Academy of American Poets 2012 Harold Morton Landon Award. Negro marfil / Ivory Black is an experiment in inversions: some text can be read either left to right or right to left.
Ivory Black [Not to speak]
by Myrian Moscona
.
Not to speak
To see and to translate into moans It's not pain
To moan from birth
Only the eye and the conquering of a tongue
(that you wanted to say that for the slit?)
To return toward hearing (to touch oneself) via the
heart is heard slowly
Is guarded like a black poem as if it were an eye
who might rain
.
“Ivory Black [Not to speak]” from Negro marfil / Ivory Black, © 2011 by Myriam Moscona – translation, © 2011 by Jen Hofer – Les Figues Press
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March 12
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1951 – Susan Musgrave born in Santa Cruz, California to Canadian parents; prolific Canadian poet, children’s author, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and anthologist. She left school at 14, running away to Berkeley, California. Her first poems were published when she was 16. Her collection, Songs of the Sea-Witch, appeared in 1970. Her first husband was a lawyer, her second husband was an accused drug smuggler, and she married her third husband in the prison where he was serving a sentence for bank robbing, after reading the manuscript of his novel. Though granted full parole in 1987, he was convicted again for bank robbery in 1999. Her first novel, The Charcoal Burners, reflected her interest in West Coast mythologies and feminism. Musgrave now lives in Haida Gwaii, an archipelago in British Columbia. She was nominated four times for the Governor-General’s Literary Award. Her 20 poetry collections include: Entrance of the Celebrant; The Impstone; Kiskatinaw Songs; A Man to Marry, A Man to Bury; Right through the Heart; What the Small Day Cannot Hold; Origami Dove; and Exculpatory Lilies.
Things that Keep and Do Not Change
by Susan Musgrave
.
Out on the windy gulf, breakers
like bouldery sheets of laundry
tumble and spin towards the horizon
in my sleep. We've been fogbound for three days
and I've learned the difference between bad
ice and good, how to travel in a blizzard
using the wind to set your course.
.
One night I woke and a white shadow
was trying to get into bed with me.
My tongue went numb and the only words
I could remember came out cold. I used to think
white was no colour at all, only your absence
making itself known, your ghost
doubling back to pull down my stiff
winter underwear from our drooping clothesline -
little thief! When they found you
the foam on the beach after the north wind
blew all night was white and deep.
We've been fogbound for days
and I've learned to set my course on the wind.
.
“Things that Keep and Do Not Change” from Things that Keep and Do Not Change, © 1999 by Susan Musgrave – McClelland & Stewart
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1952 – Naomi Shihab Nye born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother; poet, songwriter, children’s author, novelist, teacher, and editor. In 1966, her family moved to the West Bank because her paternal grandmother was sick. They returned to the U.S. in 1967, just before the Six-Day War broke out, settling in San Antonio, Texas. She earned a BA in English and world religions from Trinity University in 1974. Nye teaches creative writing at Texas State University, and runs writing workshops for children and teens. Honored for her body of work with the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Poetry Foundation chose her as the Young People’s Poet Laureate for the 2019-2021 term. In addition to editing anthologies of verse by contemporary poets, she’s published over two dozen collections of her own poetry. Her debut young adult novel Habibi was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and honored with a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award.
Shoulders
by Naomi Shihab Nye
.
A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
.
No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.
.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
.
His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.
.
We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.
.
The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.
.
“Shoulders” from Red Suitcase, © 1994 by Naomi Shihab Nye – BOA Editions Ltd.
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1976 – Jessica Fisher born in Claremont, California, daughter of poet and academic Ann Fisher-Wirth; American poet, translator, critic, and co-editor with Robert Haas of the Addison Street Anthology. She earned a PhD in English literature from UC Berkeley, and was the Holloway Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetry and Poetics (2009-2011). Her first book, Frail-Craft, won the 2006 Yale series of Younger Poets Competition, and her second, Inmost, won the 2011 Nightboat Poetry Prize. In 2012, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature. She has translated poetry by Hans Aro and Czelaw Milosz.
Daywork
by Jessica Fisher
.
Close your eyes he said and took my hand.
There was something he wanted to show me,
something I couldn’t see. Raised like a scar,
a seam running through the body, here
where the day went dark. I’d wanted to see
the limits of sight, to know where the painter
had found an edge, and stopped,
the day done and the brushes washed,
the figure left to dry, in the dark room
someone half made would try to close his open eye
and find that eye will stay open and never see,
never see the rearing of the horse he rides
you know the posture you’ve leant back in the saddle
the beast beneath, you pulled at its reins and told it to quit
it can’t quit it’s trying to stop
the bit in the mouth and no sight in its eyes
seen and yet blind this was the drama
he wanted to show don’t you think or think
of the woman holding the room on her shoulders
have you ever felt like that like you are to keep
very still while others move around you
in birth I remember the midwife took my reins
is that right she held me here and there
and reached inside she was touching my baby
I had nothing to do but let it happen
I let it happen so well trained really a vehicle
you ride me or drive me oh but if you are the head
I am the neck I will turn you to my advantage
will you make me see what is wrought through me
.
“Daywork” from Daywork, © 2024 by Jessica Fisher – Milkweed Editions
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March 13
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1742 – Anne Hunter born in Waterford, Ireland as Anne Home, a military surgeon’s daughter; English Romantic lyricist and poet. She married London surgeon John Hunter, and hosted many gatherings of London’s literary and intellectual figures, including the Bluestockings, proto-feminist intellectuals. Hunter originally published her poetry anonymously, but later published Poems and The Sports of the Genii as Mrs. John Hunter. She contributed lyrics to works by composer Franz Joseph Haydn, and published two song books, The Lark and The Charmer. Anne Hunter died at age 78 in January 1821.
To My Daughter On Being Separated from Her
on Her Marriage
by Anne Hunter
.
Dear to my heart as life’s warm stream
Which animates this mortal clay,
For thee I court the waking dream,
And deck with smiles the future day;
And thus beguile the present pain
With hopes that we shall meet again.
.
Yet, will it be as when the past
Twined every joy, and care, and thought,
And o’er our minds one mantle cast
Of kind affections finely wrought?
Ah no! the groundless hope were vain,
For so we ne’er can meet again!
.
May he who claims thy tender heart
Deserve its love, as I have done!
For, kind and gentle as thou art,
If so beloved, thou art fairly won.
Bright may the sacred torch remain,
And cheer thee till we meet again!.
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1920 – Ann Darr born as Lois Ann Russell in Bagley, Iowa; American poet, teacher, pilot, and WWII WASP (Women's Airforce Service Pilot). “I was one of the lucky women who were part of the experiment that proved women could fly as well as men.” She published eight poetry collections, including Riding with the Fireworks; St. Ann's Gut; Do You Take This Woman; The Myth of a Woman's Fist; and Confessions of a Skewed Romantic. She recorded some of her poems for the Library of Congress Contemporary Poets Series, and many were published in over 70 journals and 30 anthologies. She was featured in the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City, where she wrote and performed radio scripts for NBC and ABC before moving to the Washington, D.C. area. She taught at The American University in Washington, D.C. and at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Late in life, Ann Darr was stricken with Alzheimers, and died at age 87 in December 2007.
Flight over the Zuni Mountains
by Ann Darr
.
Hold death by the heels
And tickle his nose with a feather,
For the wind is our blood
It will blow itself away.
Never a dark red rivulet trickling through the grass
Beside the bolts and the pressed wood props made in
Camden, New Jersey
.
Let the engines drone a funeral dirge,
The sharp staccato when one cylinder plays alone.
The quiet…just the wind.
No sound when the ribs crumple,
Like the old tree falling in the forest
With no one to hear,
For we are not there.
We stand and lean on a cloud
And call for another beer.
.
This we know:
We are the wind.
We will come back gently over the lake,
We will lash the waves and bend the trees;
We will lie side by side on the high mountains,
Drinking martinis and telling the old jokes over.
Never our wings will melt or crumple with heat
or hardness.
This we know.
For the man who draws the blueprint, shapes
the wings,
Threads the bolts and pulls the props
Is not our faith.
Ours is the wind and the wind is us
And no one shall bury us ever.
We have known space not surrounded by
closets and cabbages cooking
We have whirled rainbows over our heads;
We have owned the earth by rising from it;
Never again shall we walk with ordinary feet.
.
The wings were shaped from a woman’s weeping…
No other tears shall fall.
.
“Flight over the Zuni Mountains” from Flying the Zuni Mountains, © 1994 by Ann Darr – Forest Woods media Productions
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March 14
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1949 – Lynn Emanuel born in Mount Kisco, New York; American poet and academic. She earned an MA from City College of New York, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. She lived, worked, and traveled in North Africa, Europe, and the Near East. Emanuel is Director of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series, and a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her husband, anthropologist Jeffrey H. Schwartz, named the early primate Microadapis lynnae after her. Her poetry collections include: Oblique Light; Hotel Fiesta; The Dig; Noose and Hook; and The Nerve of It, which won the 2016 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
Seizure
by Lynn Emanuel
.
This was the winter mother told time by my heart
ticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest.
This was the fifties & we were living on nothing
& what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse,
what of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart
of so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists
& each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass,
what of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her
own bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed
with rope, in the grip of a rage she came, a black woman,
into our white lives, like a splinter, & stayed. Charming
& brilliantly condescending, she leaned down to kiss “the baby,”
& hissed my little princess & hushed the Jordan & set the chariots
on the golden streets & Mother, I cried to her, & went out like a light.
.
“Seizure,” from The Dig, © 1984, 1992, 1995 by Lynn Emanuel – University of Illinois Press
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March 15
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1907 – Elma Stuckey born in Memphis, Tennessee, granddaughter of former slaves; African American poet and schoolteacher. She earned a teaching certificate from Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, and ran a nursery school in rural Tennessee until she moved to Chicago in 1945. She became a supervisor for the Illinois Department of Labor. At age 69, she published her first poetry collection, The Big Gate. Her poetry initially got attention when she read her poems on Stud Terkel’s Chicago radio program. Her second collection, The Collected Poems of Elma Stuckey, was published the year before her death. She died at age 81 in September 1988 while in Washington DC to record readings of her poetry for the Smithsonian Institution.
Humanity
by Elma Stuckey
.
If I am blind and need someone
To keep me safe from harm,
It matters not the race to me
Of the one who takes my arm.
If I am saved from drowning
As I grasp and grope,
I will not stop to see the face
Of the one who throws the rope.
Or if out on some battlefield
I’m falling faint and weak,
The one who gently lifts me up
May any language speak.
We sip the water clear and cool,
No matter the hand that gives it.
A life that’s lived worthwhile and fine
What matters the one who lives it?
“Humanity” from The Collected Poems of Elma Stuckey, © 1987 by Elma Stuckey – Precedent Publications
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1952 – Susan Stewart born in York, Pennsylvania; American poet, academic, and literary critic, with a PhD in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. Her 2002 book, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, won the Truman Capote award for literary criticism. She is a professor in the Humanities and English Departments at Princeton, a member of the Associated Faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology, and editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. Stewart was Director of Princeton’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (2009-2017). She teaches history of poetry, literary criticism, and aesthetics. Her poetry collections include: Yellow Stars and Ice; The Hive; The Forest; Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award; and Cinder. She was a co-translator with Wesley Smith of Andromache by Euripides, and collaborated with composer James Primosch on A Sybyl, a song cycle for the Chicago Symphony.
A Language
by Susan Stewart
.
I had heard the story before
about the two prisoners, alone
in the same cell, and one
gives the other lessons in a language.
Day after day, the pupil studies hard—
what else does he have to do?—and year
after year they practice,
waiting for the hour of release.
They tackle the nouns, the cases, and genders,
the rules for imperatives and conjugations,
but near the end of his sentence, the teacher
suddenly dies and only the pupil
goes back through the gate and into the open
world. He travels to the country of his new
language, fluent, and full of hope.
Yet when he arrives he finds
that the language he speaks is not
the language that is spoken. He has learned
a language one other person knew—its inventor,
his cell-mate and teacher.
And then the other
evening, I heard the story again.
This time the teacher was Gombrowicz, the pupil
was his wife. She had dreamed of learning
Polish and, hour after hour, for years
on end, Gombrowicz had been willing to teach
her a Polish that does not and never
did exist. The man who told
the story would like to marry his girlfriend.
They love to read in bed and between
them speak three languages.
They laughed—at the wife, at Gombrowicz, it
wasn’t clear, and I wasn’t sure that they
themselves knew what was funny.
I wondered why the man had told
the story, and thought of the tricks
enclosure can play. A nod, or silence,
another nod, consent—or not, as a cloud
drifts beyond the scene and the two
stand pointing in different directions
at the very same empty sky.
Even so, there was something
else about the story, like teaching
a stunt to an animal—a four-legged
creature might prance on two legs
or a two-legged creature might
fall onto four.
I remembered,
then, the miscarriage, and before that
the months of waiting: like baskets filled
with bright shapes, the imagination
run wild. And then what arrived:
the event that was nothing, a mistaken idea,
a scrap of charred cloth, the enormous
present folding over the future,
like a wave overtaking
a grain of sand.
There was a myth
I once knew about twins who spoke
a private language, though one
spoke only the truth and the other
only lies. The savior gets mixed
up with the traitor, but the traitor
stays as true to himself as a god.
.
All night the rain falls here, falls there,
and the creatures dream, or drown, in the lair.
“A Language” © Susan Stewart, appeared in Poetry magazine’s July/August 2011 issue
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March 16
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1951 – Deborah Tall born in New York City but grew up in a middle class Jewish family in Philadelphia’s suburbs; American poet, non-fiction writer, academic, and editor of the literary journal The Seneca Review. She lived on the Irish island of Inishbofin for five years in the 1970s, chronicled in her book, Island of the White Cow. She met husband and fellow poet, David Weiss, after returning to New York City. In 2004, Tall was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. Her four poetry collections are: Eight Colours Wide; Ninth Life; Come Wind, Come Weather; and Summons. Her non-fiction book, A Family of Strangers, published shortly before her death, records her search for the family her parents never spoke of. After uncovering her father’s original last name prior to immigrating just before WWII, she then traced what happened to the family members who had stayed in Ukraine. Tall died at age 55 in September 2006.
Interlude
by Deborah Tall
.
This autumn you take me for walks.
We’ve thought it out.
The little we know
repeats itself;
.
a rain of leaves.
We brush against trunks
to loosen bark.
We’ve thought it out
.
but instead
we name the weeds,
invent a cause for the path’s
peculiar twist.
.
In the middle we turn back,
walk it over.
It’s no more reasonable
from this side.
.
A few hundred feet
and we’re back in public
adjusting our sweaters,
stilling our avid eyes.
.
“Interlude,” © by Deborah Tall, appeared in Poetry magazine’s October 1979 issue
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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Image: Not falling, flying 4 - by Karen Bloomfield