ICONIC WOMEN POETS by Janet Cameron

Ebook (free with Kindle unlimited, or 99p) or paperback, £3.99.

Women's poetry is also the story of feminism with all its historical baggage and angst. The women in this book include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Mary Borden, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich and Eavan Boland, all of them committed, passionate and even a little eccentric! And why shouldn't they be?

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Iconic Women Poets: Their Trials - Their Triumphs - Their Pain

One of the aims of the feminists during the 1960s was to challenge the accepted concepts of masculinity and femininity and to eradicate the cultural disadvantages suffered by women. They asked why the traditional tendency of the male poet in pursuing the abstract was more highly regarded than the more personal, emotional approach preferred by women poets, and which suited their psychological inclinations.

It was argued that to favour the idea that elevating the feminine tradition of personal and emotional discourse would be to accept that women were incapable of a more masculine and formalised writing, and therefore to devalue them as poets. This was a dilemma for the feminists, perceived as a choice between competition and diversification.

Read about how iconic women helped to address these difficulties for future generations. Women's poetry is also the story of feminism with all its historical baggage and angst . The women in this book include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Mary Borden, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich and Eavan Boland - each one of them committed, passionate and also more than a little eccentric. I have chosen them because they are not only courageous but immensely interesting women.

My Favourite Piece of Prose Ever - by Adrienne Rich from "What is Found There."

I pulled from the bookcase a guide to Pacific Coast ecology…. As I sat there, my eye began to travel the margins of the book, along the names and habitats of creatures and plants of the 4,000-mile Pacific coastline of North America…. I found myself pulled by names: Dire Whelk, Dusky Tegula, Fingered Limpet, Hooded Puncturella, Veiled Chiton, Bat Star, By-the-Wind Sailor, Crumb-of-Bread Sponge, Eye Fringed Worm, Sugar Wrack, Frilled Anemone, Bull Kelp, Ghost Shrimp, Sanderling, Walleye Surfperch, Volcano Barnacle, Stiff-footed Sea Cucumber, Leather Star, Innkeeper Worm, Lug Worm. And I felt the names drawing me into a state of piercing awareness, a state I associate with reading and writing poems. These names – by whom given and agreed on? – these names work as poetry works, enlivening a sensuous reality through recognition or through the play of sounds (the short i’s of Fingered Limpet, the open vowels of Bull Kelp, Hooded Puncturella, Bat Star); the poising of heterogeneous images (volcano and barnacle, leather and star, sugar and wrack) to evoke other worlds of meaning. Sugar wrack: a foundered ship in the Triangle Trade? Volcano Barnacle: tiny unnoticed undergrowth with explosive potential? Who saw the bird named Sanderling and gave it that caressive, diminutive name?... These names work as poetry works in another sense as well: they make something unforgettable. You will remember the pictorial names as you won’t the Latin… Human eyes gazed at each of all these forms of life and saw resemblance in difference – the core of metaphor, that which lies close to the core of poetry itself, the only hope for a humane civil life. The eye for likeness in the midst of contrast, the appeal to recognition, the association of thing to thing, spiritual fact with embodied form, begins here. And so begins the suggestion of multiple, many-layered, rather than singular, meanings, wherever we look, in the ordinary world.

I began to think about the names, beginning with the sound and image delivered by the name “Great Blue Heron,” as tokens of a time when meaning was poetry, when connections between things and living beings, or living things and human beings, were instinctively apprehended. By “a time” I don’t mean any one historical or linguistic moment or period, I mean all the times when people have summoned language into the activity of plotting connections between, and marking distinctions among, the elements presented to our senses. This impulse to enter, with other humans, through language, into the order and disorder of the world, is poetic at its root as surely as it is political at its root. Poetry and politics both have to do with description and with power. And so, of course, does science. We might hope to find the three activities – poetry, science, politics – triangulated, with extraordinary electrical exchanges moving from each to each and through our lives.

Cellar Arts Poets - An Anthology of Unique and Inspiring Poems by Members

Cellar Arts Poets 

This delightful little poetry book was published just prior to the onset of the pandemic, and although we have sold quite a few, it obviously didn't get the attention it deserved. It's £3.20 to buy the paperback (and I think they add delivery if you don't have Prime).  So it's not too late to get your copy. No profit accrues to the poets or the editor, we did it for love of poetry. We just want to be read. 💓💓

Thank you. 

You Are Just Too Kind, by Len A. Hynds

Today I discovered this special poem written for me by a student from many years ago, Len A. Hynds, who was a much respected war veteran who wrote movingly about his experiences. He died last August 23, 2017.

I dedicate this poem to Janet Cameron MA., noted Author and Poet, and who was the editor of a writer's magazine that first published my work. When I attended University Janet was my tutor and lecturer on Creative Writing and Poetry, and we became good friends.
During one of her courses I received valuable advice from fellow students at a workshop, who were all ladies on that occasion, and I was mischievously unkind later in writing a series of Haikus making oblique references to a witches coven and whiskers sprouting out of chins, as they laughed gleefully with shrieks of delight, I wrote this poem to make amends.....
Written in three line Stanzas with a repetition rhyme pattern of A - B - A

YOU ARE JUST TOO KIND

By Len A.Hynds

Caress me not, for you are just too kind,
with flattering words, to brighten-up my eyes,
I'm beyond redemption, how can you find,

such lovely words, to ease my troubled mind,
like honeyed balm, soothing my restless sighs,
caress me not, for you are just too kind.

Our writings caused a friendship so entwined,
in syllables and stresses, lows and highs,
as I strive to be writing so refined.

I value those words, which are enshrined,
in my heart and mind, I tell you no lies,
caress me not, for you are just too kind.

Will you please forgive me, what I wrote so blind,
such as the eye of toad, the squash of flies,
a poem that I should never have signed.

That last tercet, oh so carefully timed,
came to the rescue, like a well earned prize,
caress me not, for you are just too kind.

"I Am" by John Clare - to Mark his Birthday Today, Born 13 July 1793

Wikimedia, Public Domain

Today, 13th July, is the birthday of Romantic poet John Clare, who was born in Helpston, Northamptonshire, in 1793 and died in 1864. He was the son of a farm labourer and his poems were generally rural.

He was a depressed, impoverished, insane and, sadly for him, unrecognised for his poetry in his lifetime.

Here's his most famous poem I Am, written when he was confined in the General Lunative Asylum in Northampton.











I am: yet what I am, none cares or knows
My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
I am the self-consumer of my woes -
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied, stifled throes -
And yet I am, and live - like vapours tossed.

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems
Even the dearest, that I love the best,
And strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept -
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below - above the vaulted sky.

Percy Bysshe Shelley - This Day in 1822, on the 8 July, the Much-Loved Poet Died in Italy

Dover, (c) Janet Cameron

Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley had a short, but intense life. Shelley was a rebel and an eccentric, whose outrageous behaviour shocked society.

    

When the Dover steam packet was introduced and crossed regularly from Dover to Calais in the 1780s, it proved a great success with the aristocracy, who began writing about their travels, describing them as "Grand Tours."

Soon the Dover cutters were so highly regarded that they were patronised by bankers, politicians, merchants and lawyers, as well as a love-struck poet. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) who had good reason to be glad of Dover's efficient port. The great poet, who is famous for such sublime poetry as "To a Skylark," was already married when he fell in love with sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin, daughter of publisher, William Godwin and women's rights champion, Mary Wollstonecroft.

Born in Horsham in Sussex, Shelley was a rebel and a rabble-rouser, intense, imaginative and unconventional. At school he was known as "Mad Shelley" or the "Eton Atheist."

Percy Shelley's First Elopement – Harriet Westbrook

Harriet was the daughter of the proprietor of a coffee-house, and when she was sixteen, she and Shelley eloped to Scotland and were married in Edinburgh in August 1811. For three years, the two young people led a nomadic existence. Their relationship was far from conventional, as apparently Shelley tried to share her with his friend T.J. Hogg. It's not too clear from literary references whether he was successful in persuading Harriet to comply.

By 1814, the marriage collapsed – which is unsurprising since Shelley disapproved of marriage, along with eating meat, religion and royalty. The couple had two children and the effect of Shelley's abandonment of them had dire effects on the whole family. Harriet became suicidal, making distressing scenes to try to get her husband to remain with her.

Ménage à Trois with Mary Godwin and Jane Clairmont

In 1814, when he was twenty-two, Shelley and Mary decided to elope. But first, Shelley invited along Mary's stepsister, Jane (Claire) Clairmont, who was just fifteen years old. The three of them made for Dover, boarding the first steam packet they could find. The carefree threesome travelled through France to Switzerland, where Shelley wrote to his wife, Harriet Westbrook, naively suggesting she should join them.

Instead, in 1816, Harriet threw herself into the Serpentine in London, leaving her unfaithful husband free to indulge his scandalous ménage à trois. His second wife, Mary Shelley, was the author of Frankenstein, and she began to write her great work in the summer of 1816, by Lake Geneva, where she spent her time with her husband and the poet, Lord Byron. Their ménage à trois continued until Percy Shelley's death in 1822 aged thirty-years.

In his essay "On Love," composed in July, 1818, Shelley says: "What is love? Ask him who lives, what is life; ask him who adores, what is God? The poet concludes: "So soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was."

Sources:

• "On Love," Percy Bysshe Shelley, Romanticism An Anthology, Ed. Duncan Wu, Blackwell, 1994.

A Poem for When Everything Changes and Does Your Head In!

Copyright Janet Cameron

One thing is for sure, everything changes. Shelley knew this and right now, I need this poem!


MUTABILITY by Percy Bysshe Shelley

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost forever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest.--A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.--One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.