Hello again, for the first time!
A (re)introduction to the 26th Avenue poet and her poems
Over the past couple of months there’s been a delightfully startling number of new folks who’ve signed up for this Substack. First, thank you! Next, are you sure you know what you’ve gotten yourselves into?
In case you were wondering, and in case you haven’t yet gone exploring on the ‘stack's Archives tab (where you’re welcome to dig around and everything is free), here is the very first post I published, back in mid-April 2023. I think it holds up well, as an introduction to my sort of poem and as an outline of what I hope to do here. And hey, now I know how to add a pretty picture and audio for the poems.
P.S. to the 40 or so of you who signed up during my first week on Substack, right after I published this post to a list of one (me) and then emailed the link to very nearly all my friends and relations: Thank you for giving me a reason to post again, and then again. I hope you don’t mind the re-run.
Okay, so we’re doing this! Here are a couple of poems to start us off; I’ll talk more below, once you’ve had a chance to read them.
Three Weeks Into the War
On a late-winter afternoon,
as fumes of strongmen's threats attempt once more
to block the distant sun, as a captured soldier
weeps while his enemies give him tea
and a telephone to call his mother, as a woman
in a battered city leans from her kitchen window
to fling a jar of pickles at a combat drone,
on this late-winter afternoon, in another part
of the same world, I am pruning the rosemary bush
tough-rooted in a corner of the garden. With every snip
of the shears its voice grows louder, the oratory
of its fierce green smell claiming the sun-chill air,
astringent, undeniable, alive; with every snip its needles
bleed their loud voice onto my hands, send them stained
and shouting fierce green truths into the world
outside this late-winter garden.First Quarter
Half-dark on an early November evening,
shivering at a stop along a main bus line, while cars
flash past, sleek and impatient, intent as their drivers
on getting there from here; while a few feet away
a clutch of millennials in button-downs are sleek
and intent and loud as the traffic as they brainstorm strategy
for a startup, or maybe tactics for a cyber coup;
while all the time, above us and a little south, tissues of mist
flutter across tonight's half-moon, ripple its borrowed light
as if the stolid sky-stone pulsed and glimmered
with its own fire - but no, the mist is borrowing
what the moon took on before. And now a bus
wheezes up, already full, and now the button-down millennials,
still sleek, still loud, intent on strategy and destination,
shoulder their way on board, and one green light later
it is quiet at the bus stop despite the traffic, quiet
as ripples of mist across a half-seen moon.[You can listen to an audio version of the poems using the little widget above the photograph.]
I picked these two to start with because they have some important things in common with most of the poems I write. For example:
They’re rooted in the sensory detail of a specific moment. I hardly ever start writing with an Issue at the front of my mind; I write because the scent of a rosemary bush starts shouting at me, or I get captivated by what the moon looks like right now. If a larger theme makes its way from the back of my mind into the poem (slava Ukraini!), it’s welcome; often enough, though, what I end up with is simply a picture of a moment — which, it turns out, is plenty for a poem to be about.
Related: there’s nearly always a weather report of some kind, however brief — some reference to the season, the temperature, what the sky is up to. Here’s my one stab (I promise) at literary analysis: poets can be roughly sorted into those who can’t wait to tell you about the weather each time they pick up their pens, and those whose minds and words are directed to higher, more interior truths. All the best to the Higher/Interior folks, but I belong to the other tribe. I write poems from my body, and my body lives on the earth, under the sky; so I write about what the sky is up to, and how the earth receives it. Not only that — but that, nearly always.
Another frequent feature: urban landscapes, city life. Apartment living, sidewalks and crosswalks, bus stops and buses (so many buses), neighborhood markets and coffee shops, parks and street-gardens and the life of plants and animals carrying on wherever it can, around the edges of all the concrete. Turns, out, a city is as good a place as any to have a moment tap you on the shoulder.
If we keep in touch (let’s!), you’ll find more of my preoccupations showing up in my writing: city neighbors (two-legged, four-legged, occasionally feathered), stories about a little girl who didn’t grow up in the city, the powers and joys and discomforts of living in a woman’s body, the powers and joys and discomforts of writing poems. Oh, and: Bible stories, and the vocabulary of Christian practice — one of my love languages, used maybe not in the way you’d think.
See, aren’t you glad you came? I hope you’ll stay. New posts every Wednesday, and subscription is free! See you next week.
I loved the rerun! How could I forget that woman flinging that jar of pickles at the
combat drone?
Just getting to this post now, Elizabeth, and you've already shared another! It's not you, it's my inbox. Haha! This was delightful, inspiring (might need to do a re-intro of my own sometime soon), and so...you. Thank you.