Woman Writer: Susan Rich

Some lovely poems by Susan Rich:

"Cloud Pharmacy," "The Invention of Everything Else" Susan Rich

What I most love about these poems is their complicated relationship with desire. Resistance and fascination tangle in these poems about female speakers and their desire for their male beloveds--and yet the discourse of romance isn't untroubled, easy, taken for granted. Instead there are complications, threats, perhaps even structural ones bigger than individuals: "an all-embracing/ ocean view" and "The pharmacist’s paper cone/ parsing out a quarter cup." Agency is complicated in these lyrics, and so, somehow, more accurate to the language of desire.

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Armantrout's Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity

Because it doesn't seem to exist in digital form AT ALL, here's my annotation for this totally foundation feminist poetics essay. Rae Armantrout’s foundational essay “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity,” offers a way of understanding the social in experimental poetry that is critical of a particular type of lyric subjectivity, described as univocal, closed, Romantic, imperial, and appropriative. For Armantrout, the stable poetic subject is inherently appropriative, serving epiphany demanded by mainstream form, constructed by metaphor’s appropriative nature. Armantrout specifically calls out the type of poems that most agree constitute conventional poetry of witness: “The conventional or mainstream poem today is univocal, more or less plainspoken, short narrative, often culminating in a sort of epiphany” (Armantrout 288). Elaborating, Armantrout argues that “such a form must convey an impression of closure, and wholeness, no matter what it says” (288). Closure an...

"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock" Jayme Ringleb

"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...

I'm officially over 12x12

Deciding which poetry books to take with me to Charleston for 6 months while I pack up the rest for storage. I think I'm going to skip at least a few 12x12 months, and those books I'd planned to read and give away are stored to donate another day. On the bright side I think I've got enough to read, and maybe I'll even write :) Trying to find one last book, a chapbook by my friend Charlie about distance between lovers, the physical kind, to read when I'm lonely.

Medusa's Head

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