Mezzo Cammin: An Online Journal of Formalist Poetry by Women

Terese Coe's poems and translations have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Agenda, The Cincinnati Review, Metamorphoses, Mezzo Cammin, The Moth, New American Writing, New Scotland Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, Threepenny Review, and the TLS, among other international journals. Her collection Shot Silk was short-listed for the 2017 Poets Prize, and she has received several grants from Giorno Poetry Systems. Copies of her poem "More" were heli-dropped across London as part of the 2012 Olympics Rain of Poems. Her most recent collection of poems is Why You Can’t Go Home Again from Kelsay Books, 2018.

Mary DeCoste is an associate professor of Italian Studies at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. She has published a book on Boiardo and Ariosto (Hopeless Love, University of Toronto Press, 2009), and articles and book chapters on Dante, Boccaccio, and other topics in Italian studies. Her poems "The Bathroom Door" and "The Stingy Carver" appeared in the Fall 2014 and Summer 2016 issues, respectively, of The Lyric. In 2016, she was a General Contributor in Poetry at The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

Julia Griffin Julia Griffin teaches Renaissance English literature at Georgia Southern University. Together with her family, partner, and dog, poetry is the love of her life.

Kathryn Jacobs is poet, professor, medievalist, and editor of The Road Not Taken. Her fifth volume of poetry, Wedged Elephant, was published by Kelsay Books. In between that and sundry publications in Mezzo Cammin and Measure (among others), the University Press of Florida published Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage. She sometimes appears in The Chaucer Review.

Lucy Mihajlich lives in Portland, Oregon. Her first book, Interface, was chosen for the Multnomah County Library Writers Project, where it appeared on the list for Best of the Library Writer’s Project 2017. Her website is lmihajlich.wixsite.com/lucymihajlich.

Sally Nacker resides in Connecticut with her husband and their two cats, and works at the library. She has her MFA in Poetry from Fairfield University (2013). Her two collections—Vireo (2015), and Night Snow (2017)—were both published by Kelsay Books. Journal publications include Mezzo Cammin, The Orchards, The Fourth River, Grey Sparrow Journal, Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine, and The Wayfarer. Amherst, MA may well be her most favorite place on earth.

Theresa Rodriguez is the author of six books, including Jesus and Eros: Sonnets, Poems and Songs (Bardsinger Books, 2015) and Longer Thoughts (Shanti Arts, 2020). Her work has appeared in the Midwest Poetry Review, The Journal of Religion and Intellectual Life, The Leaf (an Anabaptist journal), The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, and the Society of Classical Poets. Theresa is a retired classical singer who has been a contributing writer for Classical Singer magazine. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in vocal music performance from Skidmore College and a Master of Music from Westminster Choir College. She is also a retired therapeutic musician who provided musical services to institutionalized and senior citizen populations. She founded the Christian Poetry Fellowship of Bethel, Pennsylvania and is a contributing member of the Society of Classical Poets. A native Manhattanite, she lived among the Amish and Mennonites for twenty-five years in rural Pennsylvania but now makes her home outside of Philadelphia. Her website is www.bardsinger.com.

Jane Satterfield is the author of five books, most recently Apocalypse Mix, winner of the 2016 Autumn House Poetry Prize selected by David St. John. Her previous books include Her Familiars (finalist for the 2013 Julie Suk Award for best poetry book on an independent press); Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir Press Book Award), and Shepherdess with an Automatic (Towson University Prize). Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond featured selections that received Florida Review’s Editors’ Prize, the Faulkner Society/Pirate’s Alley Essay Award, and more. With Laurie Kruk, she co-edited the multi-genre anthology Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland. An Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, Satterfield has received a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship, the 49th Parallel Poetry Prize from Bellingham Review, the Ledbury Festival Poetry Prize, the Mslexia women’s poetry prize, and more. She has been a Walter E. Dakin fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and received residency fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Leslie Schultz (Northfield, Minnesota) is the author of three collections of poetry, Still Life with Poppies: Elegies (Kelsay Books, 2016), Cloud Song (Kelsay Books, 2018)., and Concertina (Kelsay Books, 2019) Her poetry has appeared most recently in Able Muse, Blue Unicorn Journal, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Swamp Lily Review, Poetic Strokes Anthology, Third Wednesday, The Madison Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and The Wayfarer; in the sidewalks of Northfield; and in a chapbook, Living Room (Midwestern Writers’ Publishing House). She received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2017 and has had three winning poems in the Maria W. Faust sonnet contest (2013, 2016, 2019). Schultz posts poems, photographs, and essays on her website: www.winonamedia.net.

Janice D. Soderling is a previous contributor to Mezzo Cammin. She is the author of four chapbooks, one in Swedish and three in English. Recent translations of Folke Isaksson's poetry were published by Better than Starbucks and several poems poems recently appeared in New Verse News.

NEWS

The most recent addition to The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline is Aemilia Lanyer by Maryann Corbett.

Eileen Kinch is the recipient of the 2020 Mezzo Cammin Scholarship to the Poetry by the Sea conference.

FEATURED ARTIST

After my mother died in December, 2014, I and my sister-in-law cleaned out the family home, one day a week for seven months. On the last visit, we found my childhood art. As my folks were packrats, I was not surprised. I didn’t remember that I had made maps from ages 9-11 as subjects for social studies classes, but I recalled loving geography and history. (Coincidentally, for the last 25 years, most of my art has involved cartography.) These map drawings were in organized folders with other assignments inside a rusty filing cabinet lying on its side under the eaves of the dark, unlit attic.

Some months after gathering them up, I gingerly brought them out to study. There was much I recognized about myself: a compulsive attention to detail; fascination with strange, inexplicable images; and experiments with different kinds of representation. Back then, I appropriated meticulously from books, as I still do today from the Internet. This led to a visual dialogue between my childhood and adulthood.

I began to incorporate these schoolroom exercises into paintings. At first, the correspondences were obvious – both the new, painted ground maps and the old, collaged drawings represented New York and New Jersey, for instance. But then, I moved further afield, as my childhood charts covered the globe. I chose antique maps that are geographically incorrect to contemporary eyes for my backgrounds, as I had done on a much smaller scale in a 1998-1999 series of frescoes, Knowledge. Their “wrongness” gave them a childish quality that complemented my elementary school hand.

From our different stages of life, the young girl and the adult woman began to shift back and forth within the pictorial space. I’d also retrieved my childhood doll collection, and some of those toys found their way into the work, parading along shallow stage-like platforms.

I then began to appropriate my other (non-map) childhood drawings, originally book reports or science assignments. Sometimes I arranged them in a row across the top or bottom of the painting, like the predellas in Renaissance art, stories within stories.

I copied tiny animals and sea creatures from my girlhood studies onto the dominant maps; they are visible to the viewer if he/she moves up close. Later, I started to copy entire childhood drawings - which were by then attached to the paintings - directly onto smaller canvases, creating enclosed, subsidiary works excerpted and reinterpreted from the first series. Paint did not capture the nubby, grainy look of the sources, so I bought children’s art supplies – crayons, chalk, cray-pas - and invented for myself a hybrid art-making process.

The worldview of my naïve public school pictures is that of early 1950s America – cowboys at their bonfires in the wide-open west; factories and smokestacks in small town settings; Eskimo girls and Alpine girls and Brazilian girls in their native costumes. The mindset is further away from me today than the places were then. These false scenarios have unraveled for many in my generation, although not everywhere nor for all Americans. And that’s why my conventional grammar school innocence felt weirdly relevant - within our polarized society, where so many people hold onto fantasies about recovering an imaginary past.