Endicott Redux

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.