I am no good at love My heart should be wise and free I kill the unfortunate golden goose Whoever it may be With over-articulate tenderness And too much intensity.
I am no good at love I batter it out of shape Suspicion tears at my sleepless mind And, gibbering like an ape, I lie alone in the endless dark Knowing there’s no escape.
I am no good at love When my easy heart I yield Wild words come tumbling from my mouth Which should have stayed concealed; And my jealousy turns a bed of bliss Into a battlefield.
I am no good at love I betray it with little sins For I feel the misery of the end In the moment that it begins And the bitterness of the last good-bye Is the bitterness that wins.
Noël Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer. What some might not realize is that he was also a poet. He was known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called “a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise.”
Coward was gay but, following the convention of his times, this was never publicly mentioned. Coward firmly believed his private business was not for public discussion, considering “any sexual activities when over-advertised” to be tasteless. Even in the 1960s, Coward refused to acknowledge his sexual orientation publicly, wryly observing, “There are still a few old ladies in Worthing who don’t know.” Despite this reticence, he encouraged his secretary Cole Lesley to write a frank biography once Coward was safely dead.
Coward’s most important relationship, which began in the mid-1940s and lasted until his death, was with the South African stage and film actor Graham Payn. Coward featured Payn in several of his London productions. Payn later co-edited with Sheridan Morley a collection of Coward’s diaries, published in 1982. Coward’s other relationships included the playwright Keith Winter, actors Louis Hayward and Alan Webb, his manager Jack Wilson and the composer Ned Rorem, who published details of their relationship in his diaries. Coward had a 19-year friendship with Prince George, Duke of Kent, but biographers differ on whether it was platonic. Payn believed that it was, although Coward reportedly admitted to the historian Michael Thornton that there had been “a little dalliance.” Coward said, on the duke’s death, “I suddenly find that I loved him more than I knew.”
When in the morning’s misty hour, When the sun beams gently o’er each flower; When thou dost cease to smile benign, And think each heart responds with thine, When seeking rest among divine, Forget me not.
When the last rays of twilight fall, And thou art pacing yonder hall; When mists are gathering on the hill, Nor sound is heard save mountain rill, When all around bids peace be still, Forget me not.
When the first star with brilliance bright, Gleams lonely o’er the arch of night; When the bright moon dispels the gloom, And various are the stars that bloom, And brighten as the sun at noon, Forget me not.
When solemn sighs the hollow wind, And deepen’d thought enraps the mind; If e’er thou doest in mournful tone, E’er sigh because thou feel alone, Or wrapt in melancholy prone, Forget me not.
When bird does wait thy absence long, Nor tend unto its morning song; While thou art searching stoic page, Or listening to an ancient sage, Whose spirit curbs a mournful rage, Forget me not.
Then when in silence thou doest walk, Nor being round with whom to talk; When thou art on the mighty deep, And do in quiet action sleep; If we no more on earth do meet, Forget me not.
When brightness round thee long shall bloom, And knelt remembering those in gloom; And when in deep oblivion’s shade, This breathless, mouldering form is laid, And thy terrestrial body staid, Forget me not.
“Should sorrow cloud thy coming years, And bathe thy happiness in tears, Remember, though we’re doom’d to part, There lives one fond and faithful heart, That will forget thee not.”
Little is known about the life of Ann Plato. Apparently, she was a free black in Hartford, Connecticut, at a time when the city’s free black residents outnumbered the town’s slave population. She was also a member of Hartford’s Colored Congregational Church. Knowledge about her is limited to the one book that she published, most likely when she was 16. Entitled Essays: Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces of Prose and Poetry (1841), it contains four biographical compositions, sixteen very short essays, and twenty poems. She was one of the earliest African American women to publish a collection of poems and essays.
Not a lot is known about Ann Plato. Her minister, the Reverend James W. C. Pennington, wrote an introductory notice, “To the Reader.” After identifying Ann Plato as one of his parishioners, he repeatedly says she is young but does not make clear exactly how old she is. He says nothing about her family except to indicate that she is “of modest worth.” Neither does he tell how long she had been a member of his church, but he does record she is “of pleasing piety.”
We get even less information from her. There is some evidence that she was either a young teacher or preparing to be one. Her essays are conventional. Designed as instructive interpretations of issues she found important, they focus primarily on religious and educational matters. Her attitude toward Africa appears in an essay entitled “Education,” in which she commends those Christian missionaries who were willing to forsake the comforts of home in order to take “a message of love to the burning clime of Africa.” In keeping with an eighteenth-century tendency to eulogize one’s friends, Plato mourns—in the four biographies—the early deaths of some friends, one of whom was apparently a slave.
Although Plato’s poetry seldom deals with racial issues, she apparently was not totally oblivious to the concerns of her day. She occasionally emphasized the equality of people, regardless of race, a few times in the Essays. One of her poems, “To the First of August,” celebrates the ending of slavery in the British West Indies and may have been written shortly after that law went into effect on 1 August 1838. At the time, there were a number of poems written by a variety of poets on the subject, and she presumably joined this contemporaneous group. “The Natives of America” is a dramatic poem that relates her consideration of the plight of Native Americans in the United States. But for the most part, her subjects seem to have little to do with the specific problems faced by African Americans in everyday life.
Some scholars might dismiss her merely as a link between Phillis Wheatley (the first African-American author of a published book of poetry), whose work she apparently knew, and later women writers. On the other hand, Plato shows in Essays some tendencies toward a lyricism not associated with Phillis Wheatley. For example, her “Reflections, Written on Visiting the Grave of a Venerated Friend” goes beyond the expected neoclassical tradition and shows real feelings about death. Her love poem “Forget Me Not” is another example of a stylized lyric that conveys a sense of emotion. In the essay “Benevolence,” Plato wrote, “Although there are many nations, and many stations in life, yet He watches over us, He has given us immortal souls. Some have white complexions, some are red, like our wandering natives, others have sable or olive complexions. But God hath made of one blood all who dwell upon the face of the earth.”
Following neoclassical conventions, she did not write about herself. As a result, much about Ann Plato has—so far—been lost to history. Though her poems “On Examination for a Teacher,” “I Have No Brother,” or “The Residence of My Fathers” may be autobiographical. Nothing is known about Plato’s life after her book was published in 1841.
I was looking for a poem about nostalgia, which is what the picture above brought to mind when I saw it. I can see the man at the window thinking, “Forget Me Not,” as he watches a lover walk away. This poem touched my heart. Most of us will not leave a great legacy after we are gone. We will not be written in history books. We will only be remembered by those who knew us, and that may not last past their lifetime. Our gravestones will tell when we were born when we died, and may even give a clue about our family. The poem above is sentimental and, while long, is also simple. Its style, rhyming scheme, and lack of cynical sarcasm are out of fashion with most modern poetry as I said last week is “mostly nonsense, the type of poems that the title claims are about one thing, and while it may start out following what you expect from the title, it just goes off into leftfield.” Often there is no “rhyme or (apparent) reason,” nor does it have any structure or lyricism to it.
Near Middlebury in the town of Ripton, in Addison Country, Vermont, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forestry Service maintains the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail. This National Recreation Trail commemorates Robert Frost’s poetry, and several of his poems are mounted along the trail in the woods and fields. The trail is said to be an easy walk along the Middlebury. I had considered going this last weekend, but I wasn’t feeling great mentally, just a case of the blahs, nothing major. Also, Addison County is not the easiest place to get to from where I live. At best, it’s an hour and a half away, even if you brave going over the mountain pass, which I have done before, and it scared the ever-loving hell out of me. The road is basically a somewhat maintained dirt path with just enough width for two cars to pass, with the mountain on one side and a drop-off of trees on the other. My point is I was not up for it last weekend. Maybe this weekend will be different. Saturday is looking like nice weather.
I got a little sidetracked. I was thinking of poems that fit the bill of the type I like, and Robert Frost’s poems usually do. In turn, that had me thinking of the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail, how I’d like to visit it, and how far away and inconvenient it is. There are several places in that part of the state I like to visit, Manchester and Middlebury being two of them. I’d also like to see Bennington. I’m getting off track and babbling again, so let’s just leave it there….
An average joe comes in and orders thirty cheeseburgers and thirty fries.
I wait for him to pay before I start cooking. He pays. He ain’t no average joe.
The grill is just big enough for ten rows of three. I slap the burgers down throw two buckets of fries in the deep frier and they pop pop, spit spit. . . pssss. . . The counter girls laugh. I concentrate. It is the crucial point– they are ready for the cheese: my fingers shake as I tear off slices toss them on the burgers/fries done/dump/ refill buckets/burgers ready/flip into buns/ beat that melting cheese/wrap burgers in plastic/ into paper bags/fries done/dump/fill thirty bags/ bring them to the counter/wipe sweat on sleeve and smile at the counter girls. I puff my chest out and bellow: Thirty cheeseburgers! Thirty fries! I grab a handful of ice, toss it in my mouth do a little dance and walk back to the grill. Pressure, responsibility, success. Thirty cheeseburgers, thirty fries.
About the Poem
This poem is pretty straightforward. I was trying to come up with something to post and thought I’d check out poems about cooking. Most of the poems I read were mostly nonsense, the type of poems that the title claims are about one thing, and while it may start out following what you expect from the title, it just goes off into leftfield. This was not that type of poem. “Short-Order Cook” is a pretty straightforward poem. There may be a deeper meaning, but sometimes, I just enjoy a poem for what it actually says instead of trying to figure out all of the subtext, metaphors, form, cadence, etc. This one, I just liked it for its simplicity.
Poetry can mean so much, but at the heart of it, the question is: do you like it? If the answer is no, then it’s the wrong poem for you. If the answer is yes, then savor the words, just as you’d savor one of these burgers made by a short-order cook. We all know the greasy spoons have the best hamburgers, and if you don’t, go out and find one. If you don’t know what a greasy spoon is, it’s a small, cheap restaurant – either an American diner or coffee shop – typically specializing in fried foods.
About the Poet
Jim Daniels is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently The Middle Ages (Red Mountain Press, 2018) and Street Calligraphy (Steel Toe Books, 2017). His third collection, Places/Everyone (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1985. He lives in Pittsburgh and is the Thomas Stockham University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.
Promise you wont forget each time we met we kept our clothes on despite obvious intentions to take them off, seldom kissed or even slept, talked to spend desire, worn exhausted from regret.
Continue our relationship apart under surveillance, torture, persecuted confinement’s theft; no must or sudden blows when embodied spirits mingled despite fall’s knock we rode the great divide of falsehood, hunger and last year
About the Poem
Reading this poem, I think we all know what John Wieners is talking about: gay sex in public. When the poem was written in 1968, Wieners had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. In the 1960s, homosexuality was still illegal and considered a mental illness. Wieners was institutionalized again in 1969, and at least once more in 1972. Massachusetts law justified involuntary hospitalization for those who conducted themselves “in a manner which clearly violates the established laws, ordinances, conventions, or morals of the community.” Gay men became a scapegoat for mental health experimentation. The torture and persecution he alludes to in the poem included insulin coma therapy, electroshock treatment, and the experimental use of barbiturates and sedatives.
Living with his parents in Massachusetts in the later 1960s, Wieners had no access to private property where he could engage in sex. His only recourse was to have sex in public places and try not to get caught. In Michael Rumaker’s memoir of his time in San Francisco with a literary crowd which included Wieners, he makes clear the dangers in 1958–1959:
…the Morals Squad was everywhere, and the entrapment of gay males in the streets, the parks, and in numerous public places was a constant fear and common occurrence. Often the most handsome, hung, desirable-looking cops were used for the plainclothes operations. I often wondered who did the selecting.
While the above passage is about San Francisco, life for gay men was not much different in New York City or Boston in the late 1960s.
About the Poet
John Wieners was born on January 6, 1934, in Milton, Massachusetts. After graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners heard Charles Olson give a reading at the Charles Street Meeting House in Boston. Inspired by Olson’s work, Wieners spent a year at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he studied with Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan.
After the closing of Black Mountain College in 1956, Wieners briefly returned to Boston and founded the small magazine Measure (published from 1957–62) before relocating to San Francisco in 1958. It was there that he published his first book, The Hotel Wentley Poems (Auerhahn Press, 1958). The book became known for its frankness, as it openly addressed homosexuality and drug use, subjects Wieners became known for writing about in his later works as well.
Wieners, who worked at City Lights and became acquainted with poets as diverse as Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara, lived on the periphery of several movements from the 1950s—the Beat Generation, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, and the San Francisco Renaissance—and would be granted cult status in the poetry community.
In 1960, Wieners returned to the East Coast, and for the next few years he spent time in both Boston and New York City, where he shared an apartment with Beat poet Herbert Huncke and managed and acted in the production of three of his plays at the Judson Poets Theater. At the invitation of Olson, then the Chair of Poetics at SUNY Buffalo, Wieners enrolled in the school’s graduate program before eventually returning to Boston.
In the 1970s, Wieners continued to write, despite periods of institutionalization. Throughout his life, Wieners was in and out of institutions due to his drug abuse. His 1969 collection, Asylum Poems (Angel Hair Books), was written while he was in an institution. Wieners lived and wrote in Boston’s Beacon Hill for over thirty years, until his death on March 1, 2002.
Lying, thinking Last night How to find my soul a home Where water is not thirsty And bread loaf is not stone I came up with one thing And I don’t believe I’m wrong That nobody, But nobody Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone Nobody, but nobody Can make it out here alone.
There are some millionaires With money they can’t use Their wives run round like banshees Their children sing the blues They’ve got expensive doctors To cure their hearts of stone. But nobody No, nobody Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone Nobody, but nobody Can make it out here alone.
Now if you listen closely I’ll tell you what I know Storm clouds are gathering The wind is gonna blow The race of man is suffering And I can hear the moan, ‘Cause nobody, But nobody Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone Nobody, but nobody Can make it out here alone.
About the Poet
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. She grew up in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. She was an author, poet, historian, songwriter, playwright, dancer, stage and screen producer, director, performer, singer, and civil rights activist. She was best known for her seven autobiographical books: Mom & Me & Mom (Random House, 2013); Letter to My Daughter (Random House, 2008); All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (Random House, 1986); The Heart of a Woman (Random House, 1981); Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (Random House, 1976); Gather Together in My Name (Random House, 1974); and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Random House, 1969), which was nominated for the National Book Award.
Among her volumes of poetry are A Brave and Startling Truth (Random House, 1995); The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (Random House, 1994); Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (Random House, 1993); I Shall Not Be Moved (Random House, 1990); Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (Random House, 1983); Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (Random House, 1975); and Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie (Random House, 1971), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
In 1959, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Angelou became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. From 1961 to 1962 she was associate editor of The Arab Observer in Cairo, Egypt, the only English-language news weekly in the Middle East, and from 1964 to 1966 she was feature editor of the African Review in Accra, Ghana. She returned to the United States in 1974 and was appointed by Gerald Ford to the Bicentennial Commission and later by Jimmy Carter to the Commission for International Woman of the Year. She accepted a lifetime appointment in 1982 as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1993, Angelou wrote and delivered a poem, “On The Pulse of the Morning,” at the inauguration for President Bill Clinton at his request. In 2000, she received the National Medal of Arts, and in 2010 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
The first black woman director in Hollywood, Angelou wrote, produced, directed, and starred in productions for stage, film, and television. In 1971, she wrote the original screenplay and musical score for the film Georgia, Georgia, and was both author and executive producer of a five-part television miniseries “Three Way Choice.” She also wrote and produced several prize-winning documentaries, including “Afro-Americans in the Arts,” a PBS special for which she received the Golden Eagle Award. Angelou was twice nominated for a Tony award for acting: once for her Broadway debut in Look Away (1973), and again for her performance in Roots (1977).
Angelou died on May 28, 2014, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she had served as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University since 1982. She was eighty-six.
I like being with you all night with closed eyes. What luck—here you are coming along the stars! I did a road trip all over my mind and heart and there you were kneeling by the roadside with your little toolkit fixing something.
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
About This Poem
“I have not much to say. It’s one of my more self-evident works, and I don’t like covering things with a lot of exegesis. Although I do enjoy using the word exegesis. Thank you and goodnight.”—Anne Carson
About This Poet
Anne Carson is the author of several poetry collections, including Float(Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) and Antigonick (New Directions, 2015). She currently teaches in New York University’s creative writing program.
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.
About the Poem
“Invictus” by William Ernest Henley is an inspirational poem. It depicts the poet’s attempt to motivate himself when there is no hope at all. When the poet wrote this poem, he had already lost one of his legs. So, in such a situation of mental and physical agony, the poet tried to lift up his courage.
In the very beginning of the poem, the poet says that he wants to thank God. In fact, he admits that his life has no ray of hope. Rather his future seems to be as dark as a pit. But then also he is grateful to God for his ‘unconquerable soul.’ He says that no pain can be able to curve his soul. In the next stanza, he claims that whenever he fell into some difficulty, he always remained unbeatable. However, situations have tried to destroy him, but he always fights back with courage. In fact, he agrees that sometimes difficulties have made him bleed and suffer. But he never let himself bow before them and cry out of fear.
In the third stanza, the poet says that horror has always lurked behind him. But it always finds him unafraid. Whenever menace or trouble has come into his life, he has faced it bravely. Finally, in the last stanza, Henley says that though the gate of life is narrow, he will definitely pass it with vigor. Moreover, he declares that he is the master of his fate, meaning his fortune. Also, he claims that he is the captain of his soul. Hence, this poem motivates the readers to understand the fact that nobody can control our lives. It only depends on us how we choose to live our lives. Henley ends his poem with a note that one should become the friend, philosopher, and guide of one’s own soul.
My friend Susan sent me this poem. It is one I needed to read yesterday. It spoke to me in the way some poems do when we read them at just the right moment. I had a rough day at work.
About the Poet
Born in Gloucester, England, poet, editor, and critic William Ernest Henley was educated at Crypt Grammar School, where he studied with the poet T.E. Brown and the University of St. Andrews. His father was a struggling bookseller who died when Henley was a teenager. At age twelve, Henley was diagnosed with tubercular arthritis that necessitated the amputation of one of his legs just below the knee; the other foot was saved only through a radical surgery performed by Joseph Lister.
As he healed in the infirmary, Henley began to write poems, including “Invictus,” which concludes with the oft-referenced lines “I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul.” Henley’s poems often engage themes of inner strength and perseverance. His numerous collections of poetry include A Book of Verses (1888), London Voluntaries (1893), and Hawthorn and Lavender (1899).
Henley edited the Scots Observer (which later became the National Observer), through which he befriended writer Rudyard Kipling, and the Magazine of Art, in which he lauded the work of emerging artists James McNeill Whistler and Auguste Rodin. Henley was a close friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, who reportedly based his Long John Silver character in Treasure Island in part on Henley.
This Is Just To Say By William Carlos Williams – 1883-1963
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox
and which you were probably saving for breakfast
Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
About the Poem
“This Is Just to Say” (1934) is an imagist poem by William Carlos Williams. The three-versed, 28-word poem is an apology about eating the reader’s plums. The poem was written as if it was a note left on a kitchen table. It has been widely parodied.
The poem appears to the reader like a piece of found poetry and has an odd structure. The poem’s meter or rhythm exhibits no regularity of stress or syllable count. Except for lines two and five and lines eight and nine, no two lines have the same metrical form. The consonance of the letters “Th” in lines two, three, and four, as well the consonance of the letter “F” in lines eight and nine, and the letter ‘S’ in lines eleven and twelve give rise to a natural rhythm when the poem is read aloud.
A conspicuous lack of punctuation contributes to the poem’s tonal ambiguity. While the second stanza begins with a conjunction, implying a connection to the first stanza, the third stanza is separated from the first two by the capitalized “Forgive.” In a 1950 interview, John W. Gerber asked the poet what it is that makes “This Is Just to Say,” a poem; Williams replied, “In the first place, it’s metrically absolutely regular… So, dogmatically speaking, it has to be a poem because it goes that way, don’t you see!” Critic Marjorie Perloff writes, “on the page, the three little quatrains look alike; they have roughly the same physical shape. It is typography rather than any kind of phonemic recurrence that provides directions for the speaking voice (or for the eye that reads the lines silently) and that teases out the poem’s meanings.” Additionally, this typographical structure influences any subsequent interpretation on the part of the reader.
Florence Williams’s (Williams’s wife) ”reply” to This Is Just to Say is included as a ‘Detail’ in the partially published Detail & Parody for the poem Paterson (a manuscript at SUNY Buffalo) first appearing in 1982. Since Williams chose to include the ”reply” in his own sequence, it seems likely that he took a note left by his wife and turned it into a ”poem.”
About the Poet
William Carlos Williams was born on September 17, 1883, in Rutherford, New Jersey. He began writing poetry while a student at Horace Mann High School, at which time he made the decision to become both a writer and a doctor. He received his MD from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound.
Pound became a great influence on Williams’s writing and, in 1913, arranged for the London publication of Williams’s second collection, The Tempers. Returning to Rutherford, where Williams sustained a medical practice throughout his life, he began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright.
Following Pound, Williams was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement; though, as time went on, he began to increasingly disagree with the values put forth in the work of Pound and especially T. S. Eliot, both of whom he felt were too attached to European culture and traditions. Continuing to experiment with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh—and singularly American—poetic form whose subject matter was centered on the everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people.
Williams’s influence as a poet spread slowly during the 1920s and 1930s, overshadowed, he felt, by the immense popularity of Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” His work received increasing attention in the 1950s and 1960s as younger poets, including Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, were impressed by the accessibility of his language and his openness as a mentor. His major works include Imaginations (New Directions, 1970); the five-volume epic Paterson, first published by New Directions in 1963 and rereleased in 1992; and Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (New Directions, 1962), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Williams’s health began to decline after a heart attack in 1948 and a series of strokes, but he continued writing up until his death in New Jersey on March 4, 1963.
I can’t remember my dad calling me a sissy, but he definitely told me not to be a sissy. I secretly (or not so secretly) liked all the sissy things. We had a hunting dog named Sissy. Really: Sissy. My father nicknamed my sister: Sissy. Still, he says, “How’s Sissy?” and calls her Sissy when she goes home to visit him. Belinda (Sissy) is one of the toughest people I know. My sissy (sister) has kicked someone’s ass, which isn’t sissy- ish, I guess, though I want to redefine sissy into something fabulous, tough, tender, “sissy- tough.” Drag queens are damn tough and sissies. I’m pretty fucking tough and a big, big sissy, too. And kind. Tough and kind and happy: a sissy.
About This Poem
Aaron Smith explains his poem: “As a queer person, I’ve had the word ‘sissy’ leveled against me as an insult. In this sonnet, I challenged myself to use the word ‘sissy’ as the ending word for each line in an attempt to reclaim the word, celebrate it, redefine it—as I say in the poem—as something ‘fabulous, tough, tender.’ I also wanted to celebrate drag queens. RuPaul [Andre Charles] is a national treasure.”
I came across this poem the other day, and it was one of those poems that really spoke to me. Like Smith, my dad never called me a sissy, but I heard more than once, “Don’t be a sissy.” I remember when I was in grammar school, all the boys played flag football at recess. I had no interest in playing football, so I spent recess with my friends, all the girls. My dad came to pick me up from school one day (recess was at the end of the day), and he noticed that I was not playing football with the rest of the boys. He told me that I had to play with the boys and “not be such a sissy.” So, from then on, when he would pick me up at school, I’d have to play flag football.
Years ago, I read a book, Mississippi Sissy. The book is a memoir by Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who as the Amazon description says, “grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South.” As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word “sissy” on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brutally murdered in his antebellum mansion, Kevin’s long road north towards celebrity begins. In his memoir, Kevin Sessums brings to life the pungent American south of the 1960s and the world of the strange little boy who grew there.
There are words that haunt me because of the pain they caused me growing up: sissy, queer, faggot (fag), etc. I know many gay men use these as empowering words, such as Sessum and Smith do in their writing. Others celebrate their sexuality and gender non-conformity. As the poem says, “Drag queens are damn tough and sissies.” But it’s not just drag queens that are celebrating gender non-conformity. Many of us live our lives these days without the fear of being called a “sissy.” Though, there are still many like me who continue to care what others think. It’s difficult for us to break free from the traditional gender roles that were forced on us when we were young. Maybe more of us should realize that we are “pretty fucking tough and a big, big sissy, too. And kind. Tough and kind and happy: a sissy.”
About the Poet
Aaron Smith has an MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh.
Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Primer (University of Pittsburgh Press); Appetite (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); and Blue on Blue Ground (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His other awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Mass Cultural Council.
Smith is an associate professor of creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
There’s an Isle, a green Isle, set in the sea, Here’s to the Saint that blessed it! And here’s to the billows wild and free That for centuries have caressed it!
Here’s to the day when the men that roam Send longing eyes o’er the water! Here’s to the land that still spells home To each loyal son and daughter!
Here’s to old Ireland—fair, I ween, With the blue skies stretched above her! Here’s to her shamrock warm and green, And here’s to the hearts that love her!
With St. Patrick’s Day Friday, I thought I’d post a poem about Ireland.
About the Poet
Canadian poet and writer Jean Blewett was born in Scotia, Lake Erie, Ontario, in 1872. She began writing at a young age and gained recognition for her poems, short stories, and articles while still a teenager. The author of two popular collections of poetry, Heart Songs (1897) and The Cornflower and Other Poems (1906), she also wrote a novel, Out of the Depths (1890).
Globe Magazine described Blewett as a “woman’s poet” while calling her the “most conspicuous example in Canada of the class of writers who try to bring the plain people into touch with the highest ideals that are frequently most effectively taught in verse. Her lessons are of self-denial, and of the power of love to mold men and women.” She was popular in the United States as well as Canada, and the Chicago Times-Herald awarded her a $600 prize for her poem “Spring.”
Joe
The Closet Professor 