The Thing with Feathers: Hopeful Inspiration for OctPoWriMo from Emily Dickinson

Mixed Media: Emily Dickinson portrait with book page and leaf - 2012, Julie Jordan Scott

As we get closer to the beginning of OctPoWriMo, you may consider ways to stay inspired. Some of my greatest inspiration comes from the poets who have written before me, especially the women. 

I call them "Literary Grannies" because they have a feminine legacy that isn't often touted. 

I make it a mission to elevate the stature of all women writers and poets. Along the way, I fall in love with the poems and the women.

The more I get to know Emily Dickinson, the more I love her. I have been an admirer for quite a few years now, but my word-love has flourished since I visited her home in Amherst Massachusetts. Not once, not twice, but three times so far and I think another trip there is long overdue. 

It isn’t as if travel to Western Massachusetts is convenient: I live in Bakersfield, California. Visiting her home is like visiting Mecca.

 Not only do I visit her home, I take in the stomping grounds of other literary figures.

My visit, though, does not begin until I have paid due homage to Emily.

So many people think of her as an odd recluse who had agoraphobia among other mental illnesses. Perhaps she did fight some disease but we don’t know for certain. There are so many books of research about her poems, I am sure we could find a researcher or several right now who would argue for all sorts of illnesses and quirks.

What I feel most strongly about is this: Emily Dickinson was a one of a kind. She lived with great passion, continually learning via the news of the day from both her family and newspapers and magazines. She enjoyed baking for the neighborhood children – she would lower Ginger cookies in a basket to them as they waited below her bedroom window. She was a botanist – spending hours in

"The Thing with Feathers" inspired by Emily Dickinson's poetry. Mixed Media, Julie Jordan Scott, 2013

the garden drawing flora and communing with the trees.

 Yes, she sought refuge in solitude.

She spoke to people behind a curtain.

She also corresponded with many and grew friendships via her entertaining letters.

What impresses me most about her is how the mystery surrounding her continues to invite inquiry AND the more I know of her the more I want to know. The more I know of her the more I want to create in her honor. The more I know the more I want to share with others.

I created a mixed media work of art called “The Thing with Feathers” based on this stanza of hers, one of her famous oft quoted ones:

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

She inspires me as poet, a visual artist and as a human being.

It doesn't get much better than that.

What literary granny (or any other poet) inspires you to write? If you don't know of one yet, I urge you to begin reading more poetry. We can support poets (and poetry collections) by purchasing their books. My own skill as a poet increase multi-fold when I studied poets with a lasting legacy.

Honor your poetry by honoring wise sage poets.

-- Julie Jordan Scott

* This entry is a revised blog entry from the Julie Unplugged Blog.

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Time is going by quickly, are you ready for this poetry challenge, will you be sharing your poetry on your blog? Make sure you if you are on Twitter that you share your poem posts with the hashtag #OctPoWriMo so that other participants can find you. You can also share and chat with us on Facebook in our Writing Poetry Group.

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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 


 

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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