Volume 107, Number 3/4
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I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand because life is short and you too are thirsty. —Adrienne Rich Cover Caption: Suffrage parade, New York City, May 4, 1912. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. |
Editors’ Page
In 1912, the women in our cover photo marched through Manhattan to demand voting rights, an image that reminds us how slowly notions of equality have evolved, even in America. For another eight years, half of this nation’s adults would have no voice in a government purporting to be of and by and for the people.
A century later, women’s issues that have drawn broad support in our time are again under fire—reproductive choice and pay equity among them. “Who has a voice in what?” is a question that continues to challenge us, despite growing public approval for expanding freedoms rather than curtailing them.
When suffragettes were filling city streets with prams and placards in 1912, Poet Lore was well into its 24th year of publication. Founded by two visionary women, Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, the journal was already a leading forum for world drama, poetry, and criticism. According to Dr. Melvin Bernstein of Alfred University, in a definite article about their work, Porter and Clarke were “indefatigable literary people…. Both wrote literary essays, book reviews, study programs, anthologies, original plays, fiction, poetry, and translations.” They created Poet Lore “to fill a void”—opening its pages to world writers (Ibsen, Chekhov, Tagore, Mistral, Rilke, Verlaine, to name a few) and “disseminating in America that shock of recognition we call genius.”
As editors, they regarded literature as a form of action—as we do now. Poets need not be “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as Shelley claimed, to make enduring arguments on a vast range of issues, from the intimate to the global (see Jeffrey Harrison’s essay on this subject, page 118). A poet’s authority proves itself within the context of the poem, or it does not prove itself at all.
Among the many persuasive and provocative authorities in this volume are Marge Piercy on the lost force of old love letters; Jennifer Case on the closeness and estrangements of the classroom; Joanna Chen and Brittney Scott on the brother-sister bond; Carol Moldaw and Gardner McFall on the bewilderment of grief; and Samiya Bashir on “the legendary black man.” Conjuring a dialogue between John Henry, steel-driving hero of song and story, and his wife Polly Ann, Bashir’s blues-inspired sonnet sequence enacts an argument in which the woman, not her famed husband, has the last word.
“Who we gon’ be?” she asks—as if of us all.
Poetry
Aimee R. Cervenka Spill
Mike White Vigil
Marge Piercy Hindsight
Marge Piercy Death on the kitchen counter
Kurt Olsson Afterwards
Lillo Way Marquez Night
Sally Lipton Derringer The Wrong House
Clara Changxin Fang Election Day
David Harris Ebenbach High Street
David Harris Ebenbach Yom Kippur
Linda Dyer Junkyard Art
Brandon Krieg Atlas Industries
Gary Fincke The Irreplaceable
Teri Ellen Cross After Earl Came Home
Kate Sweeney Totem
Gary Lark The Swayback Church
Gary Lark The Bean Man’s Daughter
Christine Poreba A Short Treatise on Loss
Carol Moldaw Varanasi
Derek N. Otsuji A Sight at the Village of the Shibaozhai Shrine Over Which We Wept in Convenient Paper Bills
Mark Belair Bird Boy
Elizabeth Miranda The Instrument
Elizabeth Miranda Not the Fish
Marta Ferguson Quantum Reality #378
Jocko Benoit The Forest of Shhh!
Robin Davidson Braiding
Shelley Girdner Learning to Read
Jennifer Case Why Write of the Students?
Jennifer Case Recognition
José Angel Araguz Jodido
David Bart Ten
Robert Brickhouse Jump
Joanna Chen I Will Always Go Back
Brittney Scott Wearing My Brother’s Boxers
Gary Fincke Fourth of July, the Bomb Shelter
Lowell Jaeger Film
Gardner McFall Veterans Day
Gardner McFall Elegy for a Horse
Julia Wendell 18 Hands
Henry J. Morro The Boxing Shrine
Javy Awan Bell
Sid Gold Bells
Amy Schulz The Phantom Weight of Fire
Tony Gloeggler Mime
Gerry LaFemina The Despair Artist
Julie Dunlop The Plant Waterer Who Speaks Six Languages
Mark Wagenaar Three-Card Monte
Marilyn Chin Costume Drama
Kristin Robertson Mercury
David Salner The Heartbeat
Laurie Sewall Twilight Game, Fenway Park
Andrew Jamison Finish Line
Jason Tandon Later Poem
Mark Sullivan Homage to Ni Zan
William Snyder, Jr. Unidentified Woman from New Jersey
Joseph Ross Confederate Flag Dream #2
Kwame Dawes Cross Burning
Kwame Dawes Roses
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Négresse de qualité de L’île St. Louis dans le Sénégal, accompagnée de son esclave, c. 1788
Coronagraphy: a sonnet sequence by Samiya Bashir
John Henry opens his mouth
Polly Ann jumps her broom
John Henry’s first real swing
Polly Ann has an ordinary day
John Henry feels fate
Polly Ann fears her future
John Henry tests his hammer’s weight
Polly Ann cuts quick the breeze
John Henry stakes his claim
Polly Ann claims her stake
John Henry crosses the threshold
Polly Ann tastes victory
John Henry gets his big break
Haunting Polly Ann
Polly Ann haunts back
Essay & Reviews
Michael Milburn “Seen Sideways”
Jeffrey Harrison “The Poem’s Argument”
“One Weighty Grain at a Time”
Zara Raab reviews White Papers by Martha Collins, The Undertaker’s Daughter by Toi Derricotte, Honeycomb: Poems by Carol Frost, and Little Boy Blue: A Memoir in Verse by Gray Jacobik.
“Take Five: New Collections from Poet Lore Authors”
Debra Wierenga reviews At Work in the Bridal Industry by Nadell Fishman, Early/Late: New & Selected Poems by Philip Fried, Mechanical Fireflies by Doug Ramspeck, Hemingway: A Desperate Life by David Ray, and What Focus Is by Matthew J. Spireng.