Welcome to my Poet Lady Chat Room. I would like to invite you to click on the chat box and type in a question, a suggestion, submit a poem, in other words – “chat with me.” I may, if you submit a poem, decide to feature it in my Poem of the Week section or, we may simply exchange ideas and suggestions about your poem.
This is a place to “talk” poetry with someone who has loved it all her life. I have a true passion for the possibilities of poetry and would love to hear your thoughts and/or read your poem. I will be happy to offer my reaction to your work and, based on over 40 years of teaching poetry, organizing, and conducting poetry workshops, working as a book review editor for an international poetry magazine, authoring five books of poetry and two textbooks on teaching poetry, send along my thoughts on ways to make your poem stronger and more impactful.
If you’re on my site, you have a connection to poetry. Feel free to connect with me – right here -right now, by typing your message into the “chat box” and clicking send. I’m waiting…
Your friend in poetry, Susan
FEATURED POEM
It's honestly unfair, to let the scholars
With all their ranks and distinctions and degrees,
Reserve their,
Platinum thrones,
Wield the right to weave and set fire,
To art.
I met a girl who had lost all her life,
Poured all of her into
Glasses full of holes.
And she was an artist.
She used to paint in mud with streamlined
Kanji Brush strokes,
Carve out cryptic genius
Through discarded, spat on oak,
Her lead lined eyeballs,
Provoked
The most guttural dissimulations
They made my creativity quiver and tremble,
Shatter records and surpass boundaries, they all assembled,
On summer nights and the winter dawn lights
My feet dipped in the cold moist grass.
So many of them had turned a deplorable amber,
Encased in hickory brown borders.
Her rapidly flaking skin,
Burnt in napalm hues
Of anarchy and subservience simultaneously
What a miracle it was
Watching her dismantle herself
Into infinity all at once
And yet accept incapacitation in a mere vessel
Of blood bones and flesh.
She was an artist
And her art was never certified
And yet the only difference
Between her art and those accepted
Was that, her art explained you
And you explained the others,
And your explaination of the others
Were never yours, but consensus.
Consensus of limited
Ignorant
Complacent
Minds.
She brought dead butterflies back to life
With her chameleon water colours
And her fingers were the closest something
Would ever get to perfect.
I often asked her to unscrew jars,
Just to stare at the galaxies of brilliance in them.
Her voice sprouted life,
And was what kept the grasses alive
From the shadow cast over them by,
A very capitalist concept of success.
Her voice was what kept the clocks ticking in our realities,
They commanded everything that knew what to look up to.
But like I said, she wasted all her life
Poured all her colours into a plastic monochrome
Expectation of art.
You can reduce a spectrum to black and white,
But there's no going back from there.
Once the colours are lost, sacrificed, they're gone for good.
She lives on in moth eaten, yellowed books
And in the airspace between two teeth flanking a missing one in between.
She lives on in crooked smiles
And painters and poets and singers and
Innovation, inchoate.
She lives on in the locket locking us,
Into the future and branding us into the past.
She was an artist.
She healed the dying one in me,
She was an artist.