A Poem on Verse Daily – I Can’t Stop, Birds and Blooms, and Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion

A Poem Featured on Verse Daily Today

Thanks to Verse Daily for featuring my poem today, “I Can’t Stop,” from the latest issue of Sugar House Review. Check it out! A great post-birthday birthday present!

A sneak peek below. It seems to fit the anxious mood right now…

Bi-color lilacs

Birds and Blooms

We had mostly beautiful weather this week, and everything has started blooming, but I was down with a cold so I didn’t get out as much as I wanted to. However, I did manage to snap some pics of birds and blooms around my neighborhood. If you are feeling too closed-in, I recommend taking a stroll around some Woodinville wineries – even the small ones – some of them have surprisingly great landscaping and birdwatching. I mean, come for the wine, stay for the flowers!

Purple Iris

Reading Joan Didion, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath

So I spent some time this week reading Joan Didion’s new collection of as-yet uncollected essays from the 1960’s – 2000s, What I Mean – a great book to dip in and out of on the weekends. Standout essays include “Why I Write” and “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice,” as well as some of her asides about her early days working as a copywriter at Vogue.

Here is a picture of my kitten Sylvia cuddling Joan Didion.

I also finished Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz, about the friendship and relationships between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. There were two fun chapters – on how they met in a workshop with Robert Lowell, their meetups, and on their writing habits – and about four excruciating chapters on how both women suffered in their marriages, their poor treatment at the hands of psychiatrists, Anne’s abuse of her daughter, and their eventual suicides. I know it’s hard to get around those subjects in any kind of biography about either poet but it just – oof – made for tough going. It’s well-researched and the author makes useful notes and asides for context, but I was glad to have Joan Didion to go back to – she seemed so solidly upbeat in comparison!

I was also interested to find out for which book and when Anne Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize – click the link for more detailed info from a Poetry Foundation blog post – and how she negotiated for equal pay for readings, appearances, and publications. When reading about successful female authors of the past for inspiration, I often wonder how they would fare now. How much more equitable is our current system – health system, and the poetry system? How can we make it even better? How can we find successful women writers who had more stable, less abusive relationships, better help and more success in life who can be role models? There’s always Margaret Atwood, who remains bracingly cheerful in the face of a long, happy marriage and a lot of late-in-life success, I guess…Suggestions welcome in the comments!