Margaret Menamin: Blue Collar Sonnets and other poetry

Being fond of formal poetry, I was naturally drawn to Margaret Menamin's sonnet collection Blue Collar Sonnets. Somewhat like the Spoon River Anthology, Blue Collar Sonnets draws a series of character portraits of people living in, if not the same town, at least the same milieu: small towns, working-class neighborhoods. Truck stops and coal mines, construction sites and mechanic's garages, frame these small stories.

Most of all, Blue Collar Sonnets is about work. Of the thirty titled poems in this collection (some are actually sonnet sequences), nearly all revolve around the working conditions and lives of, for example, "The High Wire Lineman", "Jackhammer Man", or "The Well Driller". Death and injury are frequent companions in these professions, as is alcohol. But though the Blue Collar Sonnets contain their share of gritty realism, they also capture moments of surreal beauty that grow like strange flowers out of the clay of everyday life.

The ghosts of coal miners "with opaque lungs as dense as anthracite" haunt subdivisions built over old mines, while a fireman compares the flames that surround him to "licking kisses" and "arms inviting him to dance". A mechanic's body is unusually resistant to electric current; the Jackhammer Man pictures himself transformed at death into an earthquake. Blue-collar men and women, in Menamin's world, work hard and dream hard.

Blue Collar Sonnets and some of Menamin's other work can be read at Margaret Menamin Online

shout out from poetry hut blog

hi, everyone. those of you who know both susan and myself know the last couple of months have been full of change, positive and negative. i just spent a few days in maine with my parents (my mother's been sick), and when i returned, i saw a recent edition of the poetry hut news contained a link here. thanks, guys!

it was a few days ago, but if anyone's still finding us via that link, hello! i have a few collections to recommend to you and i've heard from a few others, as well, so perhaps in the coming days, we'll have some updates!

--Carolee

"plainwater"

I just bought this one but it's not new. It's Anne Carson's "Plainwater" (1995, Vintage Books / a division of Random House).

I was drawn to it because it blurs the lines between poetry and prose. The collection includes poems in free verse and it also includes poetic prose in many forms: paragraphs, dialogs and lists. No matter what style/form she uses, who can resist wanting to read more of pieces that include:

We live by tunneling because we are people buried alive. (from "On Orchids")

My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. "Listen," he said. "life and no escape." (from "The Wishing Jewel: Introduction to Water Margins")

Hills continue to pale and scarify. They look shaved, like old heads of women in an asylum. (from "Kinds of Water: An Essay on the Road to Compostela")

I am also drawn to this collection because it calls upon a diverse set of images, myths, philosophers and locations that I don't often encounter in my real life or my reading life.

Click here for the Random House web page about the book and also be sure to check out the readers' guide the publisher has assembled. It's very interesting!

"Talking to my body"

At the end of last year, I read "Talking to my body" by the Polish poet Anna Swir. It is available on Amazon and also its publisher (see below).

I was intrigued by many things about her work, one of which is something that I worry about in my own writing. We are drawn to certain images and stories. How do we revisit them again and again without wearing them out? Anna's collection contains some repeating elements, but instead of seeming redundant, they seem familiar and intimate. Like we know something.

Many of her pieces are short. Many of her pieces lack sentimentality or even emotion. She connects by setting up the scene or the relationship. There's an interesting conversation between the translators about that in the back of the book. For example, she starts the poem "I Look with my Eyes Flooded by Tears" with this:

I gave him pain,
though I wanted so much
to give him happiness.

She's stating a fact, cleverly burdened.

One of the best examples of how powerful her work can be is found in a piece from which the collection's title is derived, "I talk to my body." She describes her body as:

A plumb line to the center of the earth
and a cosmic ship to Jupiter.

Here's the info: Talking to my body, poems by Anna Swir, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan, 1996, Copper Canyon Press

Lists, lists, lists of women poets

PCBW isn't going to try to list every female poet we can brainstorm. PCBW is going to tell you about the collections of poetry being enjoyed by our readers so that you, too, can make a connection with that poet and her work if you want. We hope we end up with a long list of collections, but it's doubtful -- extremely doubtful -- that we'll cover work by every female poet.

If you're itching for a place to get started, however, here are some lists of female poets that are maintained out there in cyberland:

Wikipedia's list of women poets

Famous poets and poems' list of women poets

Academic Kids "encyclopedia" list of women poets

Female poets at Amazaon

Know of another great list? email carolee -- art [at] polkadotwitch [dot] com