POETRY FEATURED POET FEATURED ARTIST CONTRIBUTORS GUIDELINES ABOUT TIMELINE

elcome to Mezzo Cammin, a web journal devoted to formal poetry by women. Publishing twice a year, Mezzo Cammin features poems in form by contemporary women writers; reviews of new books by and about women poets who work in form; and essays that explore a variety of topics, ranging from the accomplishments of a particular poet, to the possibilities of a particular form and the history and politics of canonization. Our journal aims not only to promote the work of contemporary women poets, but also to expose readers to formal poetry by women poets who may once have been well-known, but whose writing may now be difficult to find due to its lack of inclusion in anthologies, books falling out of print, and the tendency that still persists in academia of choosing the work of male poets to define a given era or literary style.
Our journal aims not only to promote the work of contemporary women poets, but also to expose readers to formal poetry by women poets who may once have been well-known, but whose writing may now be difficult to find.
We will therefore devote the essays section once a year to celebrating the achievement of a woman poet whose work deserves wider recognition. We are also starting a women poets timeline, known as "The Timeline Project," which will eventually be the largest database devoted to women's poetry in the world. We welcome suggestions concerning this timeline as well as contributions to it.

     Our journal's title, Mezzo Cammin, derives most recognizably from the opening line of Dante's Inferno; more immediately, however, we borrow it from "Mezzo Cammin" by Judith Moffett (who, in turn, derived her title and theme from Longfellow as well as from Dante). Moffett's satirical, twenty-three stanza poem about reaching middle age inspires not only through her dexterity in working with rhyme and meter, but leads us to hope, as well, that controversies about how to define "form" have, at last, ripened to middle age. We at Mezzo Cammin therefore expect to take a middle path in our understanding of form by not limiting our definition to "poems written in rhyme, traditional stanza forms, and conventional rhyme and meter." Although such poems will likely predominate in the journal, especially in its early issues, we encourage submissions of poetry, essays, and reviews in which form is understood more liberally, as encompassing a repeatable pattern, of any sort, within a poem. In particular, we believe that women poets, as literary outsiders, have through the centuries been adept at playing with form; a tendency which, as in the case of Emily Dickinson, has sometimes led their work to be viewed skeptically, if at all, by the literary mainstream. At Mezzo Cammin, we hope to explore the variety of formal approaches taken by women writers and to recognize that "experimentation" in poetry is not limited to free verse, but flourishes equally well through poets' innovative handling of forms of repetition.


































ADVISORY BOARD & STAFF

Advisory Board
Debra Bruce
Annie Finch
Allison Joseph
Marilyn Nelson
Molly Peacock
Kathrine Varnes

Staff
Kim Bridgford, Editor
Anna M. Evans, Design & Technical    Editor

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