Poets and Poems: Marjorie Maddox and "Hover Here"

Watching kites in the sky. Bounding on a bed. A boy goes fishing. Washing clothes. A housemaid makes beds at a motel. Mowing a lawn. Adopting kittens. Veterans march in a Memorial Day parade.  

Common, familiar activities and events. These are the kinds of things we do in our lives and work that become part of the background of daily life. We take them for granted. We smile at the memory. But politics and foreign policy and newspaper headlines and online viral sensations soon crowd them out. We pay more attention to our smart phones than to the real life happening around us. If we happen to look up and notice, we immediately start to think about new content for Instagram or TikTok. 

 

In a very quiet and gentle way, poet Marjorie Maddox says look around. Her latest collection, Hover Here: Poems, should probably bear that as a subtitle. She doesn’t speak with loud or demanding images and words. That’s not her style, not to mention that loud and demanding soon crowds out understanding and reflection. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

Uninhabited – poem by Emily Patterson at Every Day Poems.

 

“Dear March – Come in,” poem by Emily Dickinson – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Three Lenten Sonnets – Andrew Peterson at The Rabbit Room.

Poets and Poems: Marjorie Maddox and “Seeing Things”

I try to avoid reading blurbs before I start reading a poetry collection. And I did that, successfully, with Seeing Things: Poems, the latest collection by Marjorie Maddox. This is a case of realizing I should have read the blurb first, to prepare for what I was about to read.

Maddox tells a story with the 61 poems she’s included in the collection. It’s not a narrative or told like a story. Rather, collectively the poems themselves present a story that is as hard to read as it is too gripping not to. It is a story of three generations of women, a story of depression, abuse, and dementia. If I gave the story a title, it might be “Broken Things, Mending.” 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

You Probably Won’t Get a Book Deal. We Still Need You to Write – Darryl Dash at Dashhouse.

I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry – Rachel Donahue at Story Warren.

“Winter-Time,” poem by Robert Louis Stevenson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

The Well – David Whyte.

Let the Heavens Turn Around – poem by Elise Meredith Jimison at Rabbit Room Poetry.

Marjorie Maddox Writes Poems about Reading and Writing Poems

Marjorie Maddox has done something rather creative and clever in her new poetry collection. She’s written poems about reading and writing poems. Inside Out is not so much a book that tells how to read a poem or how to write a poem; instead, it shows you. 

And that’s the key – it’s a book that shows rather than tells. This isn’t the teacher standing at the front of the classroom, giving us one more lecture on how to write a poem. This is us, sitting on the floor and surrounding the teacher, as we all add the wings to the airplane while it’s flying.

It’s downright fun, in fact. I can’t remember a time when an instruction manual made me smile, over and over again.  

To continue reading, pelase see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Marjorie Maddox and “Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation”

A friend I first met in college lived not away, and two years ago we finally got together when a third friend came from out of town. We hadn’t seen each other in more than 40 years, and it was as if college had just happened yesterday. We looked older and more life-marked, but the same personalities sat around a table, eating flatbread and drinking wine. Some months before, my in-town friend had had a heart transplant. He described what it was like not to have a pulse, something you don’t think about unless there isn’t one.

A year later, we had scheduled another lunch, with another out-of-town college friend, when I opened the newspaper a few weeks before and saw his obituary. He had had a stroke, a not uncommon complication, even well after the operation. The transplant had given him almost two more years. 

Marjorie Maddox’s father had far less time than that after his heart transplant. The transplant went well; the unexpected blood infection was fatal. Maddox tells the story in a series of poems in Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poetic Voices: Teow Lim Goh and Marjorie Maddox

Teow Lim Goh seeks meaning in an immigration detention center, while Marjorie Maddox seeks spiritual understanding in the the study of literature. Both poets have striking new collections that linger in the mind longer after the last pages are read.

From the 1860s until well into the 20^th century, Chinese workers were brought to the United States as a source of cheap labor to help build, among a lot of other things, the Transcontinental Railroad. They experienced discrimination, hostility, and racism. Not surprisingly, many would send back to China for wives and families, as well as would-be wives.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.