Medusa's Head

I love to garden. Seeing things grow you understand things about how this world works, where beauty comes from, and what life is. Here is a beautiful essay by a gardener who explains how gardening forced her to confront the reality that fruits and vegetables need animal remains--and how she accepted mortality as a part of her diet and how this gorgeous world consumes everything in order to make any other lovely thing.

from,  "To C"  by Forrest Gander "Inside, inside the return, inside, the hero diminishes./ Over her vessel they place a veil" What a difference a pronoun makes...

E tu, Wikipedia? Thanks to Amanda Filipat cchi, for noticing "something strange on Wikipedia. It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. " "Men" isn't subcategories, it is THE category. "I am the universal standard," dudes of the internet whisper, one woman-obscuring edit at a time.

Circe, by Wright Baker "One day you simply appeared in your stupid boat," "Circe/ Mud Poems," Margaret Atwood, from You Are Happy I was alerted to this poem series by Estella Lauter's great chapter, "Margaret Atwood: Remythologizing Circe" from Women as Mythmakers . If you have the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, there is an excerpt in Vol. 2. And here is some interesting discussion of the text as well.

Margaret Atwood confronts the male gaze directly in her poem, "Manet's Olympia."

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.

The piece about the British mother who publically admits to regretting ever giving birth to her children came to me via a second blogger, this one a single woman who is grateful for the validation that she may never in fact want to have children. The British mother always knew that she didn't want children, but married her high school sweetheart who wanted a large family. They both thought the other would change. Within a few years, the woman decided she couldn't deprive her husband of children and bore him two. The people who told her that once she became a mother, she would be happy she did were wrong. She loves her children and raised them, but regrets ever having them. The second woman also knows that she has never wanted children. She isn't married, but expresses the input she receives from society and family that she is wrong in her evaluation of her own feelings. She is told that she will change her mind about children, that she is a bad person for not wanting ...