OctPoWriMo's (and Your) Poetic Family Tree

For those who have been around my blog for a while, you know I have a passion for “literary grannies” – the women writers who went before us who may or may not have gotten noticed for the words they have written. I try to get the word out about them so women who write today may have a sense of literary lineage.

Then along came a prompt from BlogHer.

This leaf of one family tree is courtesy of Happy Via on Flickr  via Creative Commons License

It wanted to know about my family tree!


Naturally this makes me want to make a literary family tree.

Perhaps now, I will. 

Who would I count in my direct line?

I would certainly memoirists, poets, activists and letter writers.

I would count Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writer of the paradigm shifting The Yellow Wallpaper among other poems, essays, speeches and other things. She was also mother to a Katharine.

I would count Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Diarist, Novelist, early Aviator, Poet and Mother who lived through a lot of her very public life in a very veiled fashion. Her words are absolutely beautiful and she was perpetually standing up for women having the space to write, not unlike another in my direct line: Virginia Woolf.

Somewhere out there is Laura Ingalls Wilder, a childhood favorite and well known Granny, and also Margaret Fuller, whose home I visited not long ago. A couple other Massachusetts literary Aunties: Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson come to mind.

I absolutely must have Edna St. Vincent Millay in my lineage. Yesterday a friend of mine quoted her to me - without even knowing she was quoting her - and it was as if Vincent herself was speaking with me.

There was a time when I wasn't familiar at all with many past poets. I was not an English major and I wrote poetry but didn't spend much time reading poetry anthologies or collections.

What I will tell you is this: going to my local bookstore (and later, the library) and thumbing through unknown to me anthologies and then purchasing them and reading them changed my life as a poet and as a person.

My poetry improved, my life improved, and I felt forever connected to a world I

Writing on the steps of poet Gertrude Stein

didn't even know existed until then. If you don't have the resources to get to a bookstore or library, a visit to Poetry Magazine's website will suffice quite nicely.

Poetry Magazine is over 100 years old and was founded by Literary Granny Harriet Monroe, a woman who singlehandedly made the career of many once-unknown poets. She put her own taste aside to be present to the "happenings" in the world of poetry within that particular generation.

On the Poetry Foundation website is the entire archive of Poetry Magazine. Go there, now, even if you can get to a bookstore or a library. Read at least one poem a day there before OctPoWriMo. Read the poem several times a day and allow its language and style to sink into you. This WILL change your poetry and your life for the better.

Who is in your poetic family tree?

-- Julie Jordan Scott 


 

Poetry: A Must-See Film for Poets (and the people who love them.)

I first heard about “Poetry” written and directed by Lee Chong Dong and simply had to see it. I sought a venue within a reasonable driving distance from Bakersfield.  A movie house specializing in art and foreign film in Santa Monica became my poetic and cinematic mecca on that day in 2010. Emma, who was twelve-years-old at the time didn't want to go because she thought subtitles would be "boring." Within moments of the film beginning, she discovered the joy of foreign film. It was through experiencing this captivating stories she learned subtitles do indeed disappear within a well-hued story.

I have linked to a video which includes snippets from the movie and a gloriously written review from the New York Times as a melodic counterpoint. It is only five minutes long.

Please take a moment to visit YouTube to watch the video (The owner does not allow me to embed it here) and consider how movies about poets, poetry and leading a poetic life may make your experience of any writing challenge more rich and rewarding.)

Because I also wanted to include some video from Poetry you could see here on the blog, here is the trailer:

 

What movies inspire you as a poet?

-- Julie Jordan Scott

OctPoWriMo and Growing as a Poet - A Profile of Sara Teasdale

Sara Teasdale, Award Winning Lyrical Poet

When I first started writing poetry, I didn't read much poetry at all. It wasn't until I began maturing as a poet that I gained the confidence to not only read the work of past poets, but to study them in order to come to know more about poetry as an art form.

Discovering the lives of women poets who have lived before me has been particularly inspiring to me, so much so I started a series of profiles of women in literary history.

I like to call them our Literary Grannies. 

Today let's meet Sara Teasdale, a Pulitzer prize winning lyrical poet who lived from 1884 - 1933.
 
I don’t remember when exactly I fell in love with Sara

I love how mysterious she looks here. 

Teasdale. I think it was during the era when I was being haunted by Edna St. Vincent Millay.  (A brief aside: Later in September, I will write of recent visit to her home in Austerlitz, New York.)

For now, we will focus on Millay's lyrical contemporary, Miss Sara Teasdale.

She was born in 1884 in St. Louis, Missouri. She was unhealthy as a child so she didn’t start school until she was nine-years-old. She came from a wealthy family who was able to both provide for her and take care of all her needs. She went to the prestigious Hosmer Hall, an all girls school in St. Louis. 

Zoe Akins, celebrated playwright, also attended Hosmer Hall at this time.

Teasdale created a women’s literary society with some of her teen friends which they called “The Potters.” They even published their own literary journal The Potters Wheel where Sara received her first publishing credits.

She looked to several different poets as well as actress Eleanora Duse as role models and inspiration for her writing. Among her favorites were Christina Rossetti, Mary Robinson and Emily Dickinson.

She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1918 (which was then called Columbia University Poetry Prize). Today’s readers might find her early twentieth century style out of flavor. I ask you read it as if it was just written today.

Hold the words lightly and see what these words written one-hundred years ago by a young, inspired poet may teach you now.

It is Not a Word

It is not a word spoken,
Few words are said;
Nor even a look of the eyes
Nor a bend of the head,
But only a hush of the heart
That has too much to keep,
Only memories waking
That sleep so light a sleep.

Faults

They came to tell your faults to me,

They named them over one by one;

I laughed aloud when they were done,

I knew them all so well before,—

Oh, they were blind, too blind to see

Your faults had made me love you more.

                To E.

I have remembered beauty in the night,

     Against black silences I waked to see

     A shower of sunlight over Italy

And green Ravello dreaming on her height;

I have remembered music in the dark,

     The clean swift brightness of a fugue of Bach's,

     And running water singing on the rocks

When once in English woods I heard a lark.

But all remembered beauty is no more

     Than a vague prelude to the thought of you --

     You are the rarest soul I ever knew,

          Lover of beauty, knightliest and best;

My thoughts seek you as waves that seek the shore,

           And when I think of you, I am at rest.

Many of her lyrics are love poems inspired by two men: one she married (Ernst Filsinger) and one who adored her and ended his life with suicide in 1931 (Vaclev Lindsay).She divorced Filsinger, who offered financial stability in addition to her wealthy family, in 1929. Some sources say it is her seven year friendship with young poet Margaret Conklin that caused the marital split. 

On January 29, 1933, Sara Teasdale followed other creative people including her one-time love, Vaclev Lindsay, into suicide. She overdosed on barbiturates and climbed into the bathtub, yet another tragedy upon yet another creative woman.

* Parts of this blog post were originally published as a part of the Literary Women from A to Z series in 2012.

-- Julie Jordan Scott is a creative life coach, award-winning story teller, actor, director and Mommy extraordinaire. Read more of her inspirational writings at her blog, Julie Unplugged, and watch for the grand opening of her new blog in Mid-September. 

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