Month: May 2010

Robin Morgan’s “Monster”

I have been struggling to find all of Robin Morgan’s poem “Monster” since I read an excerpt of it on Feminist SF – The Blog.

It’s an angry poem and I adore it. I would love to quote you the entirety of the piece, all 6 pages of its glory, but I would also like to respect Morgan‘s creative ownership of the piece.

I admire its bravery, I admire the descent to violence but not the submission to violence. I need it because it reminds me that there are ways of writing that align with my ways of being and that most of the written word and the spoken word are not written and spoken in those ways. It reminds me that there is nothing wrong or despicable about who I am.

Here is an excerpt:

And you, men. Lovers, brothers, fathers, sons.
I have loved you and love you still, if for no other reason
than that you came wailing from the monster
while the monster hunched in pain to give you the power
to break her spell.
Well, we must break it ourselves, at last.
And I will speak less and less and less to you
and more and more in crazy gibberish you cannot understand:
witches’ incantations, poetry, old women’s mutterings,
schizophrenic code, accents, keening, firebombs,
poison, knives, bullets, and whatever else will invent
this freedom.

This is adult, end-of-the-day Poetry Friday.

“pouring your light into their mouths”

Hullo-ullo-ullo!

It’s been (and remains) somewhat messy in the county where I (and Joanne) reside. I’m itchy, itchy, itchy, both literally (water shortage) and figuratively (time shortage vs. things I want to write), but very grateful to have escaped the worst. (The baseball field seven blocks from my house was underwater before the Cumberland had even crested.)

Since I last posted here, some new poems of mine have been published:

“dozing April fool…” at 7×20

“She’s building…”, “Here, I’m able…”, and “That giant glass slipper…”, all at microcosms

“The Wailing Well” (text and audio) at Goblin Fruit

Also, two reviews at Galatea Resurrects, issue 14.

Reading has been even more piecemeal and snatched-moment than usual, so not much to say. At the moment, I’m mulling over today’s feature at Poetry Daily, Aliki Barnstone’s With God in the Morning. Some of the language is too prosaic for my taste (and the ending perhaps too abrupt — something about the “dear God” doesn’t work for me, even though I recognize the clever double meaning in its placement there) — but I’m intrigued by the connections the poem wants to trouble me with.

Oh! I must not neglect to mention, there have been poems written for me as well. Molly Gaudry’s Fingertips riffs on some lines from my Sonic Crochet Hook, and for my birthday, a fellow Taurus sent me a verse portrait of a bull. 🙂

And on that note, I’m going to go intimidate another 100 endnotes into submission, and then maybe I can treat myself to revising something or other into a submission.