Endicott Redux

The Sunday Poem

Our Sunday Poem today is "Babylon," a melancholy piece by British poet and mythologist Robert Graves (1895-1985) in which the poet laments the loss of enchantment in our lives as we move from childhood to adulthood.

And yet, though such a loss is common, it is by no means inevitable--as fans of mythic arts can attest. As proof, I'm pairing Grave's poem with a link to "All Things Froud and Wonderful" (on the Green Man Review website), celebrating two artists whose lives and work become ever more magical year by year.

(You'll find more articles on Brian Froud and Wendy Froud in the Endicott archives and on The World of Froud website. The sculpture above is by Wendy.)

Sunday Poem

Our Sunday poem this week is "It's Not a Just Situation: Though We Just Can't Keep Crying About It (For the Hip Hop Nation That Brings Us Such Exciting Art)" by Nikki Giovanni. The poem is written on the wall of a gallery at the National Portrait Museum as part of the exhibition 'Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture'. An audio loop of the poem serves as the background to Shinique Smith's mixed media installation.

Says Nikki Giovanni "This is the first generation to have everything yet to also have had everything taken away. They went to school with no books, no gym, no school play, no school newspaper, no band, no clean toilets, no grass on the playground, no hope in the eyes of their teachers.

"Yet they created. They created art, music, textiles, and technology and made their world the world the world comes to."

Nikki Giovanni is a poet, activist, and educator who has been an outspoken voice within the African American community for thirty years. Her book Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry's Rhymes and Rhythms will be available next October.

The art above is "No Thief to Blame" by Shinique Smith, 2007-08, and is a mixed media installation (fabric, cardboard, carpet, paper, ink, spray paint, used clothing, found objects, and collage). You can see details of the installation here.

Sunday Poem

The Sunday Poem today is "Myth" by Natasha Trethewey, which is read by the poet herself in an audio recording on the Poetry Foundation website.  As Trethewey explains in her introduction, this astonishing poem, written as a palindrome, combines the myth of Orpheus' journey to the underworld in search of Eurydice with the poet's own vital dreams about her deceased mother.

Trethewey's 2000 collection, Domestic Work, won the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for best first book of poetry by an African American poet, the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her 2006 collection, Native Guard, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, and The Southern Review. Trethewey is currently a Professor of English at Emory University, where she holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry.

You can hear and see more of Trethewey discussing and reading her work here and here (scroll down to see the many options).

*The art above is "Orpheus and Eurydice" by George Frederick Watts.

Sunday Poem

Today's poem is "Eve's Design" by Moira Linehan, which goes out to all you knitters. Spindle, thread, and yarn have been the tools of myth-making since the first woman twirled a thread on a spindle and figured out what to do with it. I love this little poem -- Eve, knitting a serpent's pattern and quietly reflecting on "what's infinitely possible with a few stitches."

The art is "Peasant Girl Knitting" by Frans Pieter Lodewyk van Kuyck (1852–1915).

And here's another suggestion for National Poetry Month: stop by the Poetry Foundation and check out their terrific collection of poetry videos, some brilliantly animated and others read by poets and celebrities. Favorites are Jazz musician and composer Wynton Marsalis performing William Butler Yeats' romping poem "The Wild, Wicked Old Man," Sharon Olds reading her poem "I Go Back to May, 1937," a heart-breaking poem about abuse, and an animated version of Robert Creeley's gorgeous love poem "The Language," read by Carl Hancock Rux.

The Sunday Poems

   

In honor of National Poetry Month, we've got not one but six poems for you today -- all inspired by the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale.

1. First we have a classic: Anne Sexton's "Red Riding Hood" (from her famous fairy tale poetry collection, Transformations):

Long ago
there was a strange deception:
a wolf dressed in frills,
a kind of transvestite.
But I get ahead of my story.....

2. The wolf defends himself in Agha Shahid Ali's "The Wolf''s Postscript to 'Little Red Riding Hood'" (from A Walk Through the Yellow Pages and The Poets' Grimm):

First, grant me my sense of history:
I did it for posterity,
for kindergarten teachers
and a clear moral....

3. Angela Omulepu uses Red Riding Hood imagery to powerful effect in her short poem "Self-Portrait" (which was part of the Poetry on the Buses program in Washington State):

I'm no Red Riding Hood, lost in the woods,
More gap-toothed and leaping, evergreen
To evergreen, more hermit than hobbit....

4. Jeannine Hall Gailey gives us a different take on Red Riding Hood's character in "When Red Becomes the Wolf" (from her terrific collection Becoming the Villainess):

In the forest by your house,

I met someone gathering wood. "Nice axe,"
I said before wandering further.
I was obtaining samples for my botany class....

5. The heroine of Carol Ann Duffy's "Little Red-Cap" (from her brilliant collection The World's Wife) deliberately seeks the wolf's attention:

You might ask why. Here's why. Poetry.
The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,
away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
lit by the eyes of owls....

6. Sonia Murphy, too, explores the allure of the wild in her poem "Marrying the Wolf" (scroll down to the March 31 entry on Murphy's blog, Igneous Paramour):

my sugar bowl of eggs
for his lacy underbelly
of wet fur.

my wooden spoons
for his thick honest
mud-thorn kisses....

More Red Riding Hood poems can be found in the Journal of Mythic Arts archives. Follow these links to delightful pieces by Holly Black, Johnny Clewell, Karen Daly, Theodora Goss, Carrie Miner, and Jane Yolen; and a Sunday Poem feature on Jennifer Chang.

Lawrence Schimel's fabulous poem "Journeybread Recipe" inspired the e-postcard above, with art by Walter Crane. You'll find this and many other free e-postcards over on our Mythic Poetry e-Postcard page.

The art below below is a Red Riding Hood narrative sculpture by midwestern artist John T. Unger, working in collaboration with his daughter Mya Smith. Go here to learn more about the piece, and about Unger's work.

   

For more about the fairy tale itself: here's my article on the history of Little Red Riding Hood; you'll find an annotated version of the story over on Surlalune; and I recommend Catherine Orenstein's entertaining book Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale.

Sunday Poem

The Sunday poem is "Bardic Symbols" by the great Walt Whitman. Like all of Whitman's work, this poem sings -- with both joy and anguish -- the thrill of being human in the presence of  Nature's powerful and spiritual forces.

"Sea-raff!  Torn leaves!
Oh, I sing, some day, what you have certainly said to me!"

Need a daily dose of poems to celebrate the month? Stop by Random House's Borzoi Reader to read a new poem every day throughout the month of April (and you can subscribe to have them emailed to you every morning!).

The photograph above is "Seaweed Spiral" by Stu Jenks and you can see more of his beautiful and very mythic photographs here and here.

      

Our Sunday Poem today is "How to Change a Frog Into a Prince" by Anna Denise, from the Poetry 180 website.

Anna Denise was born in Livermore, California, and now lives in Davis. She received her MLS from San Jose State and currently works as a children's librarian. She is also a storyteller and is at work on a collection of fairy-tales poems.

The painting above is "The Frog Prince" by Maxfield Parrish.

The Sunday Poem

This winter we've been looking at the varied ways in which contemporary poets address the Persephone/Demeter myth.* Today we have a fresh new take on the theme: "Demeter in Winter" by Celia Bland...followed by an equally gorgeous mythic poem, "Zeus' First Wife," further down the same web page.

Celia Bland is the author of Soft Box (CavanKerry Press) and a member of the Albany Poets group. Her work has appeared in Natural Bridge, Bard Papers, Sui Generis, Prima Matera, Heliotrope, Chain, The Alembic, The Mystic River Review and other journals. (I particularly recommend her delightful piece Captions for Cartoons Not Yet Drawn, on the Entelechy Journal site.) For more information on the author, please visit her website.

The art above is by Jacqueline Morreau.

* See the previous Persephone/Demeter posts: November 18th, December 2nd and March 5th. And going even further back: June 3rd and January 14, 2007 and October 29, 2006.

The Sunday Poem

      

Our Sunday Poem today is "Faun" by the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963). Fauns were wild, licentious, goat-footed creatures in Roman myth (comparable to Greek satyrs), companions to Faunus and Fauna, the god and goddess of the forest depths.   

The art above comes from the Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones.

The Sunday Poem

The Sunday Poem today is "The Maiden Without Hands" by Martha Carlson-Bradley, based on the fairy tale of the same name. It comes from The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales, a wonderful (and wonder filled) anthology edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson. You can read nine other poems from the book on The Poets' Grimm website.

Don't miss Midori's insightful article on the Maiden Without Hands fairy tale (a.k.a. The Armless Maiden), or poems based on the tale by Margaret Atwood, Nan Fry, Rigoberto González, and Elline Lipkin, all published in past issues of JoMA. To read the fairy tale itself, you'll find an annotated version on the Surlalune Fairy Tales site.

The painting above is by one of JoMA's favorite artists, Jeanie Tomanek. Visit her website to see more of her stunning work. The illustration to the left is by H.J. Ford, from Andrew Lang's Lilac Fairy Book, 1910.

The Sunday Poem

Our Sunday Poem today is a classic: "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" by Anne Sexton. It comes from her ground-breaking book of fairy tale poetry Transformations.

The art above is "The Golden Wood" from Ruth Sanderson's picture book retelling of the same fairy tale. "To me," says Ruth, "the image embodies the world of the fairy tale in all its magical richness, reflecting back to us the truth of our inner landscapes. It depicts a journey, a rite-of-passage into adulthood." Visit Ruth's newly-redesigned Golden Wood Studio site to see more of her gorgeous work. (Be sure to check out the Artist at Work section, where she shows the process behind creating a children's book.)

Sunday and Monday on Tuesday

With Midori and I both down with winter illnesses (*cough* *cough*), we owe you a belated Sunday Poem, and a Monday Video too. Both are from poet, fiction writer, and musician Joy Harjo.

The poem is "A Map to the Next World," a deeply mythic piece which draws on the sacred stories of Harjo's Muskogee Creek heritage.

The video is of Harjo reading her work as part of An Evening with Native American Women Writers in Berkeley back in 1997.

Joy was born in Oklahoma, earned an MFA at the University of Iowa, and has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Arizona State University, the University of Colorado, and the University of New Mexico. She currently lives in Hawaii. She has published many collections (How We Became Human, A Map to the Next World, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, etc.), won numerous awards, and performs with the band Poetic Justice. Visit Joy's website & blog for a list of her books, her CDs, and the films she is in. She also has a MySpace page where you can hear some of her music.

"I agree with Gide," Joy says, "that most of what is created is beyond us, is from that source of utter creation, the Creator, or God. We are technicians here on Earth, but also co-creators. I'm still amazed. And I still say, after writing poetry for all this time, and now music, that ultimately humans have a small hand in it. We serve it. We have to put ourselves in the way of it, and get out of the way of ourselves. And we have to hone our craft so that the form in which we hold our poems, our songs in attracts the best."

The Sunday Poem

Our Sunday Poem today, "Ondine" by Mary Barnard, is drawn from legends about German water spirits. Ondine (or undine) lore has inspired a great many works of art over the years --from a famous German story by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (an influence on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid") to an opera by E.T.A. Hoffman, a prelude for piano by Claude Debussey, and a ballet by Hans Werner Henz.

Mary Barnard (1909-2001) was born in Vancouver, Washington and received a bachelor's degree from Reed College. She is the author of A Few Poems, The Mythmakers, Three Fables, and Time and the White Tigress, among other works.

The art above in "Undine" by Arthur Rackham.

The Sunday Poem

 

Our Sunday Poem today is "Dragging Canoe Vanishes from the Bear Pit into the Endless Clucking of the Gods," an astonishingly powerful piece by Brian Barker, from the current issue of storySouth.

“Some of this poem’s imagery," says Barker, "originates from my childhood memories of visiting the bear pits in Cherokee, North Carolina—homemade attractions created as a source of tourist income by members of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation. These pits were essentially holding areas where captured ‘problem’ black bears that ventured down out of the mountains to raid dumpsters were placed for viewing."

Barker is the author of The Animal Gospels (which I highly recommend), winner of the Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Agni, Quarterly West, American Book Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Indiana Review, Blackbird, Sou’wester and River Styx, among other journals. He is an Assistant Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Murray State University in Kentucky.

The art above is part of the 2005 Bears Project in Cherokee, North Carolina. Visit the town's website to learn more.

The Sunday Poem

As we close the door on another year, and cross over the threshold towards a new one, my New Year's resolution is to live life more mindfully. Mary Oliver shows us how.

Oliver is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of American Primitive, Twelve Moons, Dream Work, House of Light, and other gorgeous collections of poetry and prose. "Mindful" comes from her 2005 collection, Why I Wake Early. The painting above is "Pennsylvania Landscape" by Andrew Wyeth.

The Sunday Poem

Our Sunday Poem -- in honor of Winter Solstice (and of the 16th century cottage discussed in the post below) -- is "Now Winter Nights Enlarge" by the 16th century English poet and composer Thomas Campion.

The art is "Christmas Evening" by the 19th/early-20th century Swedish painter Carl Larsson. 

Sunday Poem

As I have recently mentioned the Ruskin Library exhibit on Persephone, I thought it was a perfect time to spot-light Gabriel Fried's spare, anguished poem "Demeter After" at From the Fishouse -- a terrific site to discover and hear new, emerging voices in poetry. In addition to listening to Fried read his poem, you can also hear him discuss its genesis, and how the other poems on the web page loosely echo the Persephone and Demeter myth. (A second favorite for me is The Places We Knew Not to Go to as Children.)

Born in New York, Gabriel Fried's poetry has been published in The American Scholar, Drunken Boat, The Gettysburg Review, The Great River Review, and The Paris Review. He currently lives in New York City, where he is the poetry editor for Persea Books. His collection Making the New Lamb Take (Sarabande Books 2007) won the 2006 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.

*The art above is "Demeter" by Jean-Francois Millet.

Sunday Poem

For our Sunday Poems today I have a pair of poems about feasting and family -- both before and after the meal. Both poems describe magical moments of transition in the process of turning food into feasts and feasts into loving rituals that celebrate family, the harvest, and the turn of the seasons.

The first poem, The Invention of Cuisine by Carol Muske-Dukes, reveals the moment when a woman discovers herself a creature in-between feral and domestic -- a cook before she knew what it was to cook, a hawk before it learned to hunt for the table:

"Imagine a thin woman
before bread was invented,
playing a harp of wheat in the field.
There is a stone, and behind her
the bones of the last killed,
the black bird on her shoulder
that a century later
will fly with trained and murderous intent."

With an almost prophetic vision, the woman senses the idea of food as charged with something more than sustenance.

The second piece is an audio clip of poet Sandra Gilbert reading After Thanksgiving. It is a lovely poem concerning the quiet aftermath of Thanksgiving: the food-stuffed children flying home, and the beautiful slow turning of fall into winter. To find this featured audio on Poetry Foundation's homepage, check the middle column, opposite the search function for the section: featured audio.

The Sunday Poem

Our Sunday Poem today is from one of my favorite poets, Eavan Boland, using the myth of Persephone and Ceres (Demeter) to address the age-old theme of mothers and daughters in her poem "The Pomegranate."

Eavan Boland was born in Ireland, educated in London, New York, and Dublin, and has taught at Trinity College, University College, Bowdoin College, and Stanford. She has published many fine collections, such as: Against Love Poetry, Domestic Violence, An Origin Like Water, and Outside History.

The Persephone myth has provided inspiration for quite a number of contemporary women poets. A few others you'll find online: "A Myth of Devotion" by Louise Gluck, Hades' Pitch by Rita Dove, Letter by Rachel Zucker, From Persephone's Letters to Demeter by Nan Fry, Kore by Faye George, A Daughter's Tale by Wendy McVicker, Persephone, or Why the Winters Seem to be Getting Longer, a prose poem by Wendy Froud, and Mother Winter by Jeannie Tomanek -- whose beautiful painting of the same title graces the top of this post.

To learn more about the Persephone myth, read "Like Wheat that Springeth Green": Death and Return in the Myth of Demeter and Persephone by Kathie Carlson (in the JoMA archives). I also recommend the book Orpheus and Company edited by Deborah De Nicola, containing a selection of contemporary poems inspired by Greek mythology.

The Sunday Poem

Our Sunday Poem today is "Surprising the Gods" by Dan Albergotti, based on the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. There are many ways to interpret the poem, of course, but in my reading it provides a perfect metaphor for those times as a writer when characters and plots surprise you, behaving in ways you hadn't intended, sending a story or novel into new directions you hadn't forseen....

Dan Albergotti teaches at Coastal Carolina University and is the poetry editor of storySouth. His work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Virginia Review Quarterly and many other journals. His first collection, The Boatloads, recently won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize.

The art above is "Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld" by Camille Corot.   

The Sunday Poem

    

Our Sunday Poem today is "Heart's Needle" by W.D. Snodgrass, which is based on the Irish epic story The Madness of Suibhne. The drawing above is by Alan Lee. You'll find more on the Irish epic here, and a version from the French here.

Sunday Poem

Did you put on a mask and party this weekend? If so, the Sunday poem, All Souls by Michael Collier, is for you. This poem is so full of humor and energy: masked revelers, raccoons feasting on party snacks, and dance music turned up loud enough so that "the house becomes a drum."

The image above is from a wonderful show, "Halloween in Harlem," by photographer Amy Stein. Stop in to her website and view the whole exhibition. While you're there, I recommend also having a look at Domesticated -- another fabulous collection of photographs, exploring the mythic relationship between humans and animals.

The Sunday Poem

Following on from Midori's posts on Le Danse Macabre (as we draw closer to Hallowe'en, Samhain, and the Days of the Dead), our Sunday Poem today is "Gacela of the Dark Death," a gorgeously evocative piece by the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, translated by Robert Bly. "I want to sleep the sleep of the apples," the poem begins, and the painting above, appropriately enough, is "A Dream of Apples" by Charles Vess.

The Sunday Poem

Our Sunday poem today,  "Atlas," comes from Shapeshift, a recent collection by Diné (Navajo) poet Sherwin Bitsui. Bitsui's work is powerful and deeply mythic, seeking to articulate the challenges of maintaining a Diné perspective and identity in a world that all too often marginalizes traditional cultures. Spiritual and cultural identity collide in the poems as mythic images are combined with those of modern technology -- creating a tense, interstitial space where they briefly coexist. In "Atlas," a man struggles to hold together two halves of a contradictory universe:

"Tonight, I draw a raven's wing inside a circle
        measured a half second
               before it expands into a hand.
       I wrap its worn grip over our feet
        As we thrash against pine needles inside the earthen pot.

He sings an elegy for handcuffs
      whispers its moment of silence
at the crunch of rush hour traffic
and speaks the dialect of a fork lift,
       lifting like cedar smoke over the mesas
            sacred to the furthest block. "

Sherwin Bitsui, a member of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), is originally from White Cone, Arizona, where he was born on the Navajo Reservation. Fluent in Diné, he has remained committed toan active participation in the ceremonial life of his tribe. He graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program in 1999, and is currently living in Tucson, completing his studies at the University of Arizona. Bitsui is the recipient of numerous grants and scholarships, Bitsui including the 2006 Whiting Writers Award. He has published poems in  American Poet, The Iowa Review, Red Ink, and elsewhere. His poems have also been anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Shapeshift , published in 2003, is his first collection.

Poet Arthur Sze says of Bistui's poetry that the "images oftentimes depict a world-out-of-balance. Indeed, his work struggles with the tension between Diné and English, between the desire to restore a balance with the natural world and the recognition of how ineluctable the forces of twentieth century technology are. In struggling to reconcile these opposing forces, his poems and prose poems enact a personal ceremony."

A final note: "Atlas" is available online at From the Fishouse, a site for emerging poets. This is a terrific site, by the way, for in addition to the texts there are audio recordings of poets reading and discussing their work. Stop by and listen to Bistui read "Atlas" -- and if that whets your appetite, more of his work is available online here.

The art above is "The Lens of Perception" by Mark Wagner, a long-time friend of Endicott. Visit the Hearts and Bones Studio to see more of his work.

Sunday Poem...on Wednesday

Due to being out of the office, Terri and I missed posting a Sunday poem, and that's been bothering me for the last couple of days. So I wanted to make up for it by recommending Windigo, a splendid poem from Louise Erdrich. The Windigo is a frightening creature from Chippewa myths -- a flesh-eating demon lost in the northern woods who stalks his prey on burning feet. Yet, buried deep within the monster is a man trapped by his fate. In some Chippewa stories a young woman tricks the Windigo into consuming hot lard which melts his cold exterior and frees the man inside. Erdrich's poem focuses not on the terror of the Windigo as a monster, but the beauty of his transformation.

The art is "Indian People" (from Leech Lake Indian Reservation by Cameron Booth, 1923) and is currently housed in the Minnesota Historical Society collection.

The Sunday Poem

Our Sunday Poem today is "The Last Wolf" by Mary TallMountain, from her collection Light on a Tent Wall, reprinted on the Poetry 180 website. TallMountain, a Native Alaskan writer who lived for many years in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, was the author of A Quick Rush of Wings, Matrilineal Cycle and other wonderful collections of poetry and prose. I particularly recommend Listen to the Night, a gorgeous volume containing forty poems on animal themes.

According to the Freedom Voices website, TallMountain "was born in 1918 in Nulato, a village along the Yukon River in Alaska, to a Koyukon/ Athabaskan mother and a Scots/Irish father. When her mother became terminally ill, Mary was adopted by a non-Native couple and taken away from her village. Traumatized first by losing her family and homeland, then by the harshness of mainstream American culture, she felt like an angry outsider for many years. Writing was a way of going home, of reclaiming her ancestry, her family and her homeland, and a way of claiming her own proud native voice. Her stories and poems portray life along the Yukon River and her removal from that land. Her work also captures tender images of street life in inner city San Francisco." Visit the website for information on the TallMountain Circle, and on the annual TallMountain Creative Writing and Community Service Award.

The art in this post is by Mark Wagner, who lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area. More of his paintings can be seen in the Endicott gallery ("Mythic Art" and "The Spirit of the Land"), and on his Hearts and Bones Studio website.   

The Sunday Poem

Today's Sunday Poem is "Cinderella" by Art Goodtimes, which draws upon the fascinating history of this classic fairy tale. It comes from the archives (Issue #13) of Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.

Art Goodtimes is a poet, essayist, and the organizer of the Talking Gourds Poetry Festival in Telluride, Colorado. His books and chapbooks include Embracing the Earth, Kehoe Beach, Rising Smoke, Mushroom Cloud Redeye, and Alter of the Ordinary (with Judyth Hill). The art in this post is "Cinderella" by Sir Edward Burne-Jones.

Sunday Poem

Today's Sunday Poem,  "Moon Gathering" by Eleanor Wilner, is a beautiful and haunting piece reflecting on dreams and creativity. Wilner, a social activist in civil rights and peace movements, avoids the personal voice in her poetry, preferring instead to focus her attention on what she calls "cultural memory."

In an interview with Rebecca Seiferle of The Drunken Boat, Wilner explained her use of myth in her work: "In order to validate my experience of poetic vision, I studied comparative mythology and anthropology, looking at new visions to understand their source, and saw the ways in which collective vision always began with a communal crisis and an individual who, in essence, dreamed for the community. This is what I think a poet does, and I think our culture has made us shallow and dreamless by inculcating the myth that the individual is defined and set apart by his or her own personal experience."

Wilner's poems have been collected in The Girl With Bees in her Hair (2004), Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 1998), Otherwise (1993), and Sarah's Choice (1989), and have appeared in journals such as The New Republic, The New Yorker, and the Southern Review. She has received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Juniper Prize, and the Pushcart Prize. She is currently on the faculty of the MFA Program in Writing, Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. For more information about Wilner and her work, have a look at this fascinating interview and article by Rachael Aviv on the Poetry Foundation website.

The painting above, "Moonlight's Children," is by the sublime Jeanie Tomanek, featured here in the Journal of Mythic Arts. Please visit Jeanie's website to see more of her mythic art.

The Sunday Poem

"Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I'll tell you who you are." -- José Ortega y Gasset

Our Sunday Poem today, Amina Saïd's "Introduce Myself to the World," is a gorgeously resonant piece about the ways we are formed, body and soul, by the landscape of our birth. In Saïd's case, that land is Tunisia, where "earth and stone are remembrance / the saints rest in a half-light / propitious to magic spells." The poem comes from the September 2007 issue of Words Without Borders, and is translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker.

Amina Saïd was born in Tunisia in 1953, and now lives in Paris. She is the author of eleven poetry collections and two books of Tunisian folktales, among other works. Saïd has won the Prix Jean Malrieu, the Prix Charles Vildrac, and the Antonio Viccaro Prix International for her poetry.

To sleep, perchance to dream...

I wasn't able to post a Sunday Poem last week, and I've been surprised by the number of people who have written to Endicott to ask us not to discontinue this feature. Don't worry, we have no plans to! The Sunday Poem will be back this weekend -- and here's a magical piece to tide you over until then: "Dream Fox" by Jack Roberts, which first appeared in Tar River Poetry and can now be found on the Verse Daily website.

Speaking of dreams, the Czech duo Tara Fuki has released a CD of alternative music inspired by dreams, night travel, the unconscious, and the poetry of the dark. Tara Fuki consists of violoncellists and vocalists Dorata Barova and Andrea Konstankiewicz, performing with guest musicians on tabla, kanjira, and other instruments. Visit the Calabash Music blog, Tune Your World, to hear music from the new CD, titled "Auris."

The pictures here are "Foxes" and "Blue Fox," painted early in the 20th century by the German Expressionist artist Franz Marc.

The Sunday Poem

I've been thinking lately about how much advertising we're exposed to every day -- online, in print, over the airwaves; on buses, billboards, the sides of buildings -- only rarely are we completely free of it. And the goal of most advertising is, basically, to make us feel dissatisfied. There is something lacking in our lives, we're told over and over again -- a lack that can only be cured, of course, by buying the advertised product. Compared to the sparkly models in the ads, we mere mortals are inadequate beings ---  unless we buy _________________. (Fill in the blank: A new shampoo or the right brand of shoes...a bigger SUV or a firmer pair of boobs....) Underneath runs the message that we're unacceptable the way we are. How on earth, I've been wondering, does anyone manage to feel good about themselves when we live our lives against a media soundtrack that constantly seeks to undermine us?

While this affects all of us -- men, women, and children, the problem is particularly insidious for women, bombarded everywhere by imagery measuring a woman's worth by how she looks, and holding us all to standards of beauty that are as artificial as they are narrowly defined. (For an example of just how artificial, go to the Jezebel website to see Redbook Magazine's cover photograph of country singer Faith Hill, and then the actual photograph of Ms. Hill before she was turned, through the standard practice of photo re-touching, from a human being into a media construct.)

Today's Sunday Poem is in honor of all the brave girls and boys who dare to define beauty for themselves, Madison Avenue be damned. It's called "Fat is Not a Fairy Tale" by Jane Yolen, from the Poetry I80 website. Jane, as most Endicott readers know, is the multi-award winning author of nearly three hundred books (and counting), many of them rooted in myth and folklore. For more information on her upcoming books and wide-ranging work, visit her website.

The drawing above is by Rubens.

The Sunday Poems

We have three mythic poems for you today: "Agatha, Pin Oak," "Alphabet Rising," and "The Cerne Giant" by Kelly Lenox Allan. The poems come from Margins, a web journal devoted to modern magical realism. The journal has discontinued publication but the archives (from 2000 - 2006) can be perused here.

Kelly Lenox Allan received a BA from the University of Virginia and an MFA in writing from Vermont College. Her poems and translations have been published in numerous print and online journals. Her chapbook Chasms, translations of the Slovene poet Barbara Korun, was published in 2003; other translations appear in Voice in the Body and Six Slovenian Poets. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

The Cerne Giant (also known as the Rude Man or Rude Giant) is a chalk figure cut into a hillside near the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, England. Though commonly believed to be prehistoric, the earliest written reference to the giant dates back only to the 17th century. According to legends, a real giant was killed on the hillside, its body marked by local villagers where it fell. The site has long been a popular spot for fertility rites and folklore.

Sunday Poem

Today's poem is "Troll" by Nathalie F. Anderson from the Journal of Mythic Arts, Winter 2007. "Troll" explores the emotion of rage -- liberated from the usual constraints of shame and guilt. It is a fun and cheeky poem, as the Troll throughly enjoys her garrulous nature.

The Journal of Mythic Arts has been fortunate to publish a number of Nathalie's mythic and fairytale poems -- including Tell, which was reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow, Gavin Grant, and Kelly Link. Stop by The Mad Poets Blog to read a terrific recent interview with Nathalie (in which she discusses this poem among others).

The art above is from the great Scandinavian painter of trolls, John Bauer.

The Sunday Poem

Our Sunday Poem today is "Pan" by Stuart Dybek (from the Poetry Daily website), in which the author examines mythic archetypes in modern American life. (For another take on this theme, see Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods.)

Stuart Dybek was born in Chicago in 1943, studied at Loyola University Chicago and the University of Iowa, and currently teaches at Northwestern University. He is best known for his masterful short stories (which sometimes draw on surrealistic and fantastical themes), but he is also a widely published poet, with works collected in Streets in Their Own Ink and other volumes.

The art above is a sculpture of the Greek god Pan by Wendy Froud. The image comes from her enchanting new book: The Art of Wendy Froud.

The Sunday Poem

with the fox's mask in my hands, now
I see the price you've paid for
gramarie...

Today's Sunday Poem is "Seducing the Crone" by Katherine Mills, from Goblin Fruit's brand new Summer 2007 issue. (You'll find a link to it at the bottom of the issue's Table of Contents.)

Goblin Fruit is is a webzine for mythic and fantastical poetry, produced by Amal El-Mohtar, Jessica P. Wick, and Oliver Hunter. It's a magical little 'zine, which does a particularly good job supporting the work of emerging poets such as Ms. Mills.  There are many delights in the Summer issue, including Oliver's illustrations and audio links that allow you to hear the poets read their work. (I also recommend Oliver's own website, a cupfull of oliver.)

The illustration above is not by Oliver, however -- it's by Susan Seddon Boulet, a mythic artist who was raised in Brazil and eventually settled in California until her death in 1997. I couldn't resist posting this particular painting here, for the fox with a human mask is an interesting mirror image to the lines from Mills' poem.

The Sunday Poems