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

Founder & Editor, Issues 1-15
Kim Bridgford, (1959-2020)

Staff
Anna M. Evans, Design & Technical    Editor

NEWS

This issue of Mezzo Cammin is dedicated to its Founder and Managing Editor for 15 years, Dr. Kim Bridgford (1959-2020). [Photo: Marion Ettinger].

The 2020 Poetry by the Sea conference was canceled due to COVID-19. The next conference is planned for May 25-28 2021.

FEATURED ARTIST
MaryAnn Miller: And now we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic, everything I’ve done seems small compared to the suffering happening in our country. Artists have been jammed up by these hard, hard times, unable to work, unable to think or write. Part of the creative life is getting used to fallow periods, expecting them to happen after I have given everything to a project, and the empty time when it’s over. After a terrifying period of fallowness, deeper than I had ever experienced, finally, I had a response to the unbearable sadness. We who remain live through these sad times and say our goodbyes so unwillingly. To those we know, like Kim Bridgford, to those we don’t know, like the millions of Covid-19 patients. I remain terribly sad, but I continue to work.

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