Women Poets ROCK, ahem.

I've just been told I'm going to be on a panel in a couple of weeks. Our topic is women & poetry, subtitled Women Poets Rock! (which they/we do.) Driving home today, thinking of Sapphics, I thought:




I thought two lines, each with eleven syllables, and now, five minutes later, they are gone. Rock on.

Something like:

I want to say something that's brilliant and true

but truer and more brilliant and with sensory details that made it occur to me that I am a poet.

Then I thought how cool it would be to rewrite "A Supermarket in California" but for girls, and to do it in Sapphics and use the notes I wrote a few years ago which I thought was a poem because I loved my accuracy, but the notes were a list of things in a grocery store, and everyone I read it to guessed which grocery store, which was Bert's, which is my grocery store and which has orchids in pots in the baking aisle, a sommalier and only organic meats though it is roughly the size of a seven eleven. My poem would begin with meeting Emily Dickinson rather than Walt Whitman, something along the lines of:
I converse with the Belle of Amhearst ...

I really want it to be by the Grape Nuts, but that goes over the eleven syllables and I don't know why I think Grape Nuts are so funny in that line in the first place.

I was also trying out the idea of a directions poem, since I was coming home from the eastside where I grew up to Seattle where I was born and lordy the possibilities for resonance really pulsated there for about five seconds. Here is what I wrote on the back of my two week teaching schedule, just ended:

Through the Portal to the Pacific
North on Rainier,
Mount Rainier in the rear view
cloud over its eyes
past Seattle Medium
to Martin Luther King
Catfish Corner facing the Facts

and then I ran a red light and felt humiliated and lucky not to have hit or been hit by anyone, car or frail human, and that is probably when I lost those two perfect Sapphic lines, which is appropriate penance. I'm not Catholic, but I was teaching at a Catholic school for two weeks and you know who works you know how.

Now I have to fill out a graduate school application's worth of information on my dog who we are leaving with a new in home dog care person for three nights while we watch our daughter and the rest of her team row at WIRA's (something something Rowing Association) near Folsum, not the home of the prison.

Women Poets ROCK. though I want to write wymen poets from a piece by a Scottish poet I picked up at the Perth, Scotland-not-Australia Museum a few years ago. Screw or eschew quotation marks, italics, underlining, they're sort of phallic. But so are dashes, Emily. (you rock secret girl.)