Peggy Shumaker Surprise!

I'm a member of a women's poetry listserv called Wompo, which is sometimes amazing, sometimes really not. One of the plus's is that some really cool people, and some kind of famous people are on it.

A few months ago Peggy Shumaker posted something to the list and noted that she would be going to her favorite bookstore in Phoenix. I saw Peggy read at Desert Nights, Rising Stars while I was an MFA student at ASU, I had bought her book and pretty much thought she was awesome. Two days before her post, I'd been cleaning out my garage and found a Changing Hands book club coupon. I'd already mailed off a couple other ones I found to my friend who had since moved, so I had stuck it on my fridge to think about who was still in Arizona to send it to. It seemed like quite a coincidence so I emailed Peggy and asked if she wanted it. She said sure and I thought, hey that's cool, and that would be the end of a cool story.

In the mail today I found a package from Peggy with two of her books, Just Breathe Normally and Gnawed Bones and a little note! I know it's only January, but this made my 2010 so far. I can't wait to read my new books!!

Poetry in the mail is the best surprise ever. If you have a poet friend, just buy her something off the bargain books at Amazon or your local store, or a journal back issue and send it to her without telling her first. You don't have to be a famous poet to make someone's day!

Comments

"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock" Jayme Ringleb

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The Imaginary Poet

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Poem on Poem Ekphrasis: Brian McHale's Feminist Reading of Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

In Brian McHale's The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems , he starts his chapter on Susan Howe's The Europe of Trusts with a short introduction to the idea of silence of women and the canon, describing "Berryman's 'Homage'...as a kind of parable" of "the received version of literary historiography" in which women are silent or overwritten (205). McHale argues that Berryman's "poetic 'homage' to the precursor-poet consists in silencing her." (205) Anne Bradstreet , in "Upon a Fit of Sickness" writes, 'Bestow much cost there's nothing lost,/ to make salvation sure,/ O great's the gain, though got with pain, / comes by profession pure." In "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" , Berryman says as Bradstreet's persona "Hard and divided heaven! creases me. Shame /is failing. My breath is scented, and I throw / hostile glances towards God. " You mig...

Medusa's Head

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