POETREE

Michelle found this poem, too, something from her own heritage.

Love Poem
Audre Lorde

( Speak earth and bless me with what is richest )

Audre Lorde self-described as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," and was the New York State Poet Laureate at her death.

Bless me with what is richest, Lorde wrote. Love is sweet as honey. Lien said, yes.


Source: The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde

Lien found the next poem, too.

Just once before I die I want someone to make love to me in Cantonese
Indigo Chih-Lien Som

( my mother )

Indigo Chih-Lien Som is an American-born Chinese woman describing herself as "garlic-throwing, book-binding, shuttle-throwing cancer and fire horse".

Just once I want to remember, Som wrote. Just once I want. I want with you, said Lien; do you want with me?

Michelle bought a learn-to-speak-Cantonese set.


Source: The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writing by Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women, edited by Sharon Lim-Hing

Michelle couldn't let Lien's invitation pass, of course. She tracked down and gave to Lien a poem expressing exactly how she'd felt the moment she met Lien.

distractions
Vanessa Marzan Deza

( oh excuse me i'm sorry )

Vanessa Marzan Deza is Pinay—Filipina—and writes, according to her bio, "grounded in her particular context as colored and female. It is a conscious act of resistance and creative envisioning."

Let me look away, Deza wrote. I didn't mean to stare, and there is work to do. But I don't want, Michelle told Lien, to look away.


Source: The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writing by Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women, edited by Sharon Lim-Hing

I owe jjhunter a lot for how this poem turned out in the end. My initial idea for remixing Sappho Fragment 16 was to translate (more in the sense of 'moving sideways' than in the sense involving multiple languages) the concepts into a poetic form to which English is better suited. In a way, that's what I did in the end. The images of armies and Helen are Sappho's, but Sappho was writing about her conception of beauty, speaking as a queer woman of Lesbos millennia ago, and I am here writing of mine, speaking as a queer woman of today's USA.

The meter is not Sapphic, more's the pity, but, uh, Wiki 'Sapphic stanza' and scroll down to the poems by Lee and Tranter. Someday I'll write a true Sapphic poem in English; this is not that day. Anyway, English iambic pentameter is eminently suited to describing beauty, as any student of Shakespeare knows.

I present:

( Anaktoria )

intersectional
feminist author poet
social justice bard

meet alexconall
poetree host for this week


Today I'd like to talk about how my pod_together project, "The Fairest Of Them All", came to be.

I don't remember when I got the idea to write a collection of princess-focused fairy tales retold in a feminist fashion. I didn't mention it in the bio included in A Dinner of Herbs in late March; the first instance of the title Self-Rescuing Princess in my email history was in mid-May, the first instance of the previous title at the end of April, so it must have been sometime in April.

It's coincidence, I swear, that I registered for a women's studies course on Disney for summer of 2013.

I saw the pod_together signups when poetree first mentioned them, I think. I didn't sign up, because pod_together is a fannish challenge and I haven't been feeling very fannish since I began my slow slide out of Supernatural fandom sometime circa the airing of the first episode of season eight, last fall. Then poetree started hosting the pod_together-affiliated icebreaker week, for participants and nonparticipants alike. I commented explaining in tanka why I didn't sign up. jjhunter reminded me, also in tanka, that transformative work of public domain materials counted and expressed an interest in reading my work. It so happened that that was the first week of class, and one of the assigned viewings was Disney's Snow White.

Hexameter seemed to fit my reply, I was already thinking about writing a feminist retelling of Snow White, and I needed a rhyme for 'readers'. I said, "No, brain, I will not write Snow White in hexameter."

Under three hours later, I had a third of what became "The Fairest Of Them All". And it was too late to sign up for pod_together.

Story of my life, y'all.

During the week I'll be posting short reflections on the process of the project, and on Saturday, I'll post the poem in its entirety.