She's one of the super-stars, influential to both men and women. Today I want to highlight poems that respond to Emily Dickinson because my first poetry teacher, Carol Ann Davis, has a poem up at APR.
But because I am also trying to find a Rita Dove poem for my website's discussion of women and the body (which still evades me) I also came across this poem by Dove.
There, that's two awesome poems responding to an amazing poet.
"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock, " Jayme Ringleb, Puerto Del Sol Online, is such a lovely and challenging ekphrasis. I won't quote any of it, because there is this seductive kind of movement in the poem, like very classy striptease, a dance of veils, or the pulsing of a jellyfish, that when relaxed, its nearly transparent arms floating away from the body, allows you to see more clearly through what when held tightly concealed those mysterious internal structures. The layers of ekphrasis in this poem are constructed like a nesting doll, each stanza with a lovely similarity, a theme, but each leading more intimately to the interior. The poem begins in the natural world of the jellyfish, which is written over by classical myth that shares the creature's name, which in turn is compared to Biblical stories of resurrection, before the poem finally turns toward memoir. There the poem compares this idea of the classical Medusa, being confronted by her own fatal image t...
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