I'm sorry to have missed November altogether, but our computer died, and my husband wanted to wait until Windows 8 came out, only to be disappointed.  We bought a new desktop on Black Friday, with Windows 7, tried and true.  Our daughter helped to get us established this weekend.  (I didn't make the October meetings, sorry to say.)
    Now, what comes by snail mail that keeps me going.  I've sung the praises of Poetry at 100 years and also Blue Unicorn.  That California journal continues to include traditional verse, which pleases me still.  The current issue has a poem by B. E. Stock, who studied with Murieol Rukeyser.  It's entitled "These Things Happen" and the poem gives a new twist to Emily Dickinson's "I'm Nobody."  It's lovely.
   But I really want to talk about the American Poetry Review.  Even as I lifted it out of the mailbox, newspaper format that it is, I wondered why I still subscribe, when Poetry and Blue Unicorn are more to my taste.  But by the time I reached the front door, I had my answer.  There are two prose pieces I'm glad I didn't miss.
   The first is a copy of a memorial to Anne Sexton by Adrienne Rich, written upon her death, the copy cherished and shared now by Rich's student, Lynn Emanuel, who also has poems in the issue.
   The second is an article by David Wajahn entitled, "Bishop, Reagan and the Making of North and South."  His thesis is intriguing---a contrast between the political Reagan and the poet Bishop.  Wajahn finds the conservative Reagan superficial and shallow, compared to the depths plumbed by Elizabeth Bishop, whose poetry he discusses with great admiration.
Over the course of the article, he brings in poets of her generation--Randall Jarrell, Swartz, Robdert Lowell, and John Berryman, lamenting the suicides.This reminds me of a book he does not mention, written by John Berryman's divorced wife, Poets in their Youth  Eileen Simpson divorced Berryman in 1956, pursuing then her own career.  Her thesis for the poets is this: it is not their poetry that killed them; instead, it kept them alive.  Hers is an insightful analysis, with fascinating details of the lives of the poets.  It complements Wajohn's contrast between poetry and politics quite well.
   Yes, I'm glad I renewed my subscription of American Poetry Review.

Let me sing the praises of Ted Kooser, poet laureate 2004-2006.  You don't have to find his comumn in a newspaper.  You can visit his website and check the archives.  Go to http://www.tedkooser.net.  He teaches at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.  How I morphed from Ted Kooser to Hooser to Hughes I'll never know, but I apologize for my senior moment.
     Meanwhile I'll miss the Lost State meeting in Bristol tonight, but I hope to make two meetings next week--the Poetry Society and the Night Writers, both on Saturday, October 13.

Correction, big time.  What's going on?  A senior moment.  How could i be thinking Ted Hoosier and write Ted Hughes.  Ted Hoosier is a former Poet Laureate of the United States.  Ted Hughes was a British poet, married to Sylvia Plath.  Our current Poet Laureate, appointed June 7 of this year, is Natasha Trethewey.  You can find out more about her using Google.  Sorry.

Tomorrow I'll be doing a Sunday School lesson at the First Broad Street Methodist Church in Kingsport, and in the course of my preprarations, I ran into an article that's worth sharing with poetry lovers everwhere.  On being asked to do a talk on "Poetry as Moral Compass," my first thoughts were, "How can that be when poetry now has no lay readers?"  "What about 'Howl'?  And so I was redirected.  I thought of Ezra Pound and found "New Approaches to Ezra Pound," edited by Eva Hesse, in the public library.  And in it, an essay by Leslie Fiedler, "Traitor or Laureate: The Two Trials of the Poet."  Fiedler is more widely know as the author of "Love and Death in the American Novel," very controversial when first published, but now an accepted standard.
     He too acknowledges that poetry in America lives only in the classroom or library, but he offers a valuable contrast between Pound and Robert Frost.  Robert Frost wrote and read a poem at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy; Pound wrote and read propaganda for Mussolini.  After the war, he was for a time a prisoner literally kept in a cage in Pisa, while the Allies tried to decide what to do with him.   He was allowed a typewriter, and there wrote his famous "Pisan Cantos," which were awarded a very controversial prize.  Unwilling to bring charges of treason against this famous American poet, he was committed to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital just outside Washington.  Robert Frost was instrumental in getting him released a decade or so later.   He was allowed to return to his beloved Italy to live out his life there.
     Traitor or Laureate, that is the question.  Pound held court from St. Elizabeth's, encouraging John Kasper in his seige of the first integrated high school in the south after the Supreme Court declared "separate but equal" unconstitutional.  You need to see the documentary, "The Clinton Twelve," to get a taste of that era.  But we learned to love Robert Frost's poems in high school, though his darker poems were only in college anthologies.
    What we really need, though, is to find some way to make poetry welcome to the general public once again.  Ted Hughes, former Poet Laureate, has a weekly column introducing a contemporary poem.  It runs in the Chattanooga paper.  Maybe we need a write-in campaign to the Kingsport Times-News, to subscribe to that column.  It is already to be praised for publishing local "Poems by Readers."   But it could do more.   When's the last time you subscribed to a poetry journal?
      

When I was last in Danville, Virginia, visiting my daughter, I raided the Goodwill bookstore yet again.  I came away with books on poetry, of course--Imagism and Kenneth Koch's children book, "Rose where did you get that Red."  But more to the point, I found "Woe is I" (1996) and "Feminist Critique of Language" (1990).  I couldn't resist.
    When I was in fourth grade, my grandmother taught me how to diagram sentences, since my teachers were not doing so.  This future English teacher proceeded to teach the neighborhood children.  Oh, well.  What a shock when I discovered in graduate school that I had it all wrong.  Let's see: there was Robert Hall's "Leave Your Language Alone" (later retitled "Linguistics and You") and an essay by Nelson Francis entitled "The Revolution in Grammar."  It was all very enlightening.
       English teachers, I learned, shouldn't try to be language cops, reinforcing class prejudices.  Prescriptive grammar was class warfare; descriptive grammar was the enlightened way to go.  This was in the era of Webster's Third, a dictionary that created great controversy.  That was the 1960s; the 1970s produced "The Students Right to their Own Language," from the Conference of College Composition and Communication, sanctioned by the National Council of Teachers of English. 
     So, what about "Woe is I" and "Feminist Critique of Language"?  When I was teaching grammar and English language history to undergraduates, future teachers, I spread the word.  But I'm retired now, more interested in Koch's red rose than who and whom.  "Woe is I" gets that right.  As I used to tell my students, if you don't know which to use, always use "who."  If you're wrong, nobody but an English teacher will notice.  If you use "whom" wrong, you will sound like a pompous fool.  Oh, well.  (However, I still cringe when I hear somebody say "between you and I.")  Now "they" and "their" used as singular pronouns is another story, too.  "Woe is I" still insists that they are plural.  "Everybody should mind his manners."  But you heard them used in in the singular all the time, and an essay in "Feminist Critique of Language" insists that is quite proper; to insist the masculine singular stands for women as well as men is sexist and contrary to the reality of language usage.  So there!  I've said it.  However, I'm just glad to be out of the fray.
     But that doesn't get me off the hook.  We still need to PROOFREAD, PROOFREAD, PROOFREAD.
     I didn't.  I didn't see, until I'd posted, that I said "Vision at Delphi" is not on Amazon.  IT IS.  It is NOW on Amazon.  I'll try to be more careful this time and next--to make my grandmother proud.

I first read Edith Hamilton's "Mythology" when I was a freshman in college, and I fell in love with Greek myth then and there.  So when my daughter was in seventh grade, and came saying we needed to go buy this book, i said: "I think we have a copy around here somewhere."  And indeed we did.  She looked at it and said," This can't be the right book.  It only cost fifty cents."
      It's still the best introduction to the stories.  And the more I studied poetry, the more mythology got into my blood.
      Then I discovered the novels of Mary Renault--"the Last of the Wine," "the Bull from the Sea," "The King Must Die."  She turned mythology into plausible realistic fiction.  And it was still wonderful.
     I say all this to explain why my poems took on such a mythological bent, even before I read Jean Bolen's "the Godesses in Every Woman," which gave me a structure for "Vision at Delphi."  That book was first issued in 1995 and is about to be reissued now.   Watch for it.  I went to Greece for the first time in 1977, and at Delphi, Athena spoke to me.  It just took me a few months to figure out what she said.  This was aat the height of the Women's Movement, but I don't think it's dated.  There's a new generation of young women out there who need to hear the message of the Greek goddessses. 

Vision at Delphi, published by Little Creek Books, is not on the bookshelves at Bubba's Book Swap, and on line at Amazon.  It will be available at Capo's Music Store in Abingdon at a special event, August 4, 4:00 p.m. till 7:00 p.m.    That's at 903 East Main Street (exit 19) in Abingdon.  Other authors will be there--Linda Hudson Hoagland, Kim Rohrer, Sharon Kaye, and Rebecca Williams Spindler.  Hope to see you there.
      Let me tell you about Vision at Delphi.  It was first published in 1995 by Tyro Publishers, but they no longer do books.  So this is a second edition.  It concerns women's issues, organized around the Greek goddesses, as discussed by Jean Bolen in Greek Goddesses in Everywoman.  There is first Athena, goddess of wisdom.  When I first went to Delphi, the goddess spoke to me.  It just took me a few months to figure out what she said.  But then there are Aphrodite, Hera, and Artemis, goddess of love, Zeus's wife, and Apollo's sister.  It is Artemis that Jean Bolen identifies with the Women's Movement.  Demeter and Persophne complete the group--mother and daughter.  Demeter embodies motherhood, but Persophne becomes the Queen of Hell.  I hope you'll look for it.  And come to Abingdon in August.  See you then.

Let me pay homage to Evelyn Bryant Johnson, who died May 11 at age 102.  She was flight instructor and airport manager at Morristown Airport for many years, and she taught my husband and me to fly, back in the 1960s.  She was a remarkable woman.
   She started flying in the 1940s, taking lessons at Island Airport in Knoxville.  It became her passion.  Eventually earning her flight instructor rating, she ended up at Morristown.  By the time we knew her, she was already a legend.  She was active in the 99s, the women's pilot orginization founded by Amerlia Earhart.  She flew in the Powder Puff Derby.
     Just last year she spoke at First Broad Street Methodist Church in Kingsport, sharing some of her experiences.  She was a devoutly religious woman.   She didn't remember us that Wednesday night, but we went down to visit last summer, and she finally did remember us.  She introduced us to flying, an activitity that filled much of our lives with great pleasure.
     I used to say, flying was the closest thing to poetry I found in the real world. 
    My husband would  laugh at the two of us as we climbed into the Cessna 150 for my flying lesson, loaded with pillows so we could see over the nose of the airplane.  It was over an hour's drive from Oak Ridge, where we lived at the time, but Morristown Airpport and Ms. Johnson made the trip worth while--every weekend.  Our children, five and eight at the time,  learned to ride their bicycles while we took our lessons. 
      If you want to learn more about Evelyn Johnson, there's a book, Mama Bird. 
      She will be sorely missed.  She was much loved.