POETRY FEATURED POET FEATURED ARTIST CONTRIBUTORS GUIDELINES ABOUT TIMELINE
Kathryn Jacobs


Sweet Dreams

Young rubber bodies fling themselves at sleep
like crashes couldn't happen, as if sleep
was one big easy unified collapse
into a long-loved safe spot. Sleep for them

is not negotiation, not detente
with strings attached, a guarded truce at best
with sentries posted; they don't fear it. Young,

they've never had to weigh the counter-claims
of back or ankle, and then arbitrate
which need is greater. And of course, being young,
they don't regard it as an entryway

into the great beyond. For them at least
it's only sleep, and we should leave them that,
while they can still enjoy it—


Butterfly Elegy

They trust us, and they shouldn’t: wobble-wings
intoxicated in a world of scents,
So sugar-drunk that one inebriate
just topples over sideways. Even creams
confuse them; monarchs taste us with their feet,
naive and hopeful as most children are
until we disappoint—

                     As usual.
Not that they notice: they're just butterflies,
delirious on three week sugar-highs
they won't bounce back from, every accident
accumulating—and no learning curve,
no rehabilitation. Babies drugged,
dilapitated children tattering
with each collision—yet they try so hard

to serve the many flowers unbutterflied.

































AUTHOR BIO

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.

POETRY CONTRIBUTORS

Terese Coe
Mary DeCoste
Julia Griffin
Kathryn Jacobs
Lucy Rose Mihajlich
Sally Nacker
Theresa Rodriguez
Jane Satterfield (Featured Poet)
Leslie Schultz
Janice Soderling

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.

ARCHIVES
LINKS
POETRY
32 Poems
The Academy of American Poets
The Atlantic
The Christian Science Monitor
The Cortland Review
Favorite Poem Project
The Frost Place
The Iowa Review
Light Quarterly
Modern American Poetry
Measure
The Poem Tree
Poetry
Poetry Daily
Poetry Society of America
Poets House
Raintown Review
Slate
String Poet
Valparaiso Poetry Review
Verse Daily
Women's Poetry Listserv
The Yale Review

CONFERENCES
AWP
Bread Loaf
Poetry by the Sea
Sewanee


PUBLISHERS

Barefoot Muse Press
David Robert Books
David R. Godine Press
Graywolf Press
Headmistress Press
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Louisiana State University Press
Northwestern Univ Press
Ohio Univ Press
Persea Books
Red Hen Press
Texas Tech Univ Press
Tupelo Press
Univ of Akron Press
Univ of Arkansas Press
Univ of Illinois Press
Univ of Iowa Press
Waywiser Press
White Violet Press

BOOKS
Alibris
City Lights
Grolier Poetry Bookshop
Joseph Fox Bookshop
Prairie Lights
Tattered Cover Bookstore

OTHER RESOURCES
92nd Street Y
Literary Mothers
NewPages.com
Poets & Writers
10X10