Allow me to share with you some of the words that have congregated around The Minuses during the intervening months since my last post.
Some of those words took air in interviews; interviews, those blessed conversations—
February 13: With Susan Gillis on her blogspot, Concrete & River, Susan and I talk about the forces that bring us to poetry and the movement that combines ecological and feminist concerns—ecofeminism.
Of the ignitions to poetry, I talk about a begining bird, the color yellow, and the first formerly memorized poem of my life, which is from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Here’s an excerpt of “Time to Rise”:
A birdie with a yellow bill
Hopped upon the window sill.
Cocked his shiny eye and said :
‘Ain’t you ’shamed, you sleepy-head ?’
Birds Don’t Shame is the title of Susan’s and my conversation; visit Concrete & River to read more about why I don’t think so.
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February 20: With Jess Turner, Managing Editor of Colorado Review, at the Center for Literary Publishing blog, where Jess casts expansive inquiry, and I make my answers in the now of our conversation.
Perhaps because my logic is circular, Jess gave our conversation the title: “She acknowledges the circle. / There is no obvious beginning,” taking two lines from the poem,”The Calling” in The Minuses. Here’s the poem in its entirety:
The Calling
of something within
Rather than investigate meaning
or make a world of thought
she acknowledges the tendency
of a broken line to curve.
She acknowledges the circle.
There is no obvious beginning.
The circle navigated by coordinates
polar, parametric, Cartesian.
Each point a locus of all points
holds to itself.
She edges the circumference
leans far out from the edge
to fulfill her attraction
to what withdraws.
The height a bird flies depends on the bird.
A conversation is circular; take in Jess’s and mine: “She acknowledges the circle. / There is no obvious beginning,”
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Thank you bows to Susan Gillis and Jess Turner for the gift of conversation!
Thank you bows to you, dear reader, for the gift of your attention!
Jami Macarty 