Index of Titles and First Lines, 209
PREFACE
As long as I can remember, my life has been dedicated to poetry—to dreaming, hearing, reading, and making poems. Spells gathers the most important of this poetic work written over four decades, from 1970 to 2010. In addition to selections from my books The Encyclopedia of Scotland (1982), Eve (1997), Calendars (2003), and Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (2010), Spells collects many new and previously unpublished poems, including “The Lost Poems,” experimental, metrical poems from the 1980s that did not find their audience until the recent embrace of formal poetic strategies by avant-garde poets.
The poetry in Spells is organized into sections by decade. Rather than grouping the poems according to the books in which they first appeared, I have chosen to arrange the poetry so that readers can follow its unfolding in reverse chronological order. The two short final sections, of translations and performance work, are arranged in chronological order and will spiral you forward again. The collection includes lyric and narrative poems, performance texts, verse drama, translations, libretti, chants, rituals, elegies, sonnets, villanelles, ars poetica, epithalamia, valentines, prayers, letters, dialogues, pastiche, and other shapes. Most of the poems are spoken in ancient and contemporary rhythms: sapphics, cretics, dactyls, amphibrachs, trochees, anapests, folk stanzas, iambs, and others.
The book’s title, Spells, captures my sense of poetry as a performative art—patterned language that invites readers to experience words not just in the mind but in the body. The title also points to the spiritual foundation of my aesthetic. As a Wiccan, I write poems as incantations to strengthen our connections to each other, to the passage of time, and to the sacred cycles of nature.
Compiling this book has led me to appreciate how much I was inspired as a poet by coming of age during the feminist movement of the 1970s. Reading it has helped me understand the ways I struggled over the years to throw off the burden of misogyny on my spiritual, psychological, intellectual, political, and poetic identities. My themes are often female-centered: sexuality; friendship; childbirth, breastfeeding, mothering, and abortion; sexism and incest; women’s mythology and spirituality; and personal and cultural foremothers. I am proud to define myself as a woman poet. Women’s poetry, from the ancient Sumerian Enheduenna to Dickinson and her neglected “poetess’” sisters and daughters, including Osgood, Dunbar-Nelson, Teasdale, and Millay, and forward through Bishop, Plath, Bogan, Helen Adam, H.D., Brooks, Kizer, and Lorde, has been critically important to me (along with, of course, the work of many beloved male poets). In my current lyric, narrative, and epic poetry, as well as in my dramas and libretti, my ambition is to create a body of work for a re-emerging matriarchal culture.
Throughout my career, I have collaborated with other artists, on architectural and visual installations, musical settings and opera, drama and performance poetry, and translations. My aim as a translator is to embody the spirit of the original poems within their original formal constraints (e.g., Akhmatova’s amphibrachs, Labé’s rhyme schemes, Sappho’s sapphics), allowing the reader to experience the poetry’s original shapes. In my dramatic pieces, I am drawn to mythopoetic theater’s blending of spoken language with music, choreography and masks, to enact a ritual journey toward psychological and spiritual power.
Compiling Spells has been a transformative experience that has filled me with gratitude to the fierce and accepting Muse who has whispered poetry into my meditative darkness over the past half-century. I invite the reader to speak these poems aloud (even if only in the mind), and to be open to the spells they cast.
Portland, Maine
June 2012
New Poems
These are the hours to revel in.
BLESSING ON THE POETS
Patient earth-digger, impatient fire-maker,
Hungry word-taker and roving sound-lover,
Sharer and saver, muser and acher,
You who are open to hide or uncover,
Time-keeper and -hater, wake-sleeper, sleep-waker;
May language’s language, the silence that lies
Under each word, move you over and over,
Turning you, wondering, back to surprise.
HOMEBIRTH
Home is a birthplace since you came to me,
pouring yourself down through me like a soul,
calling the cosmos imperiously
into me so it could reach to unroll
out from the womb where the wild rushes start
in a quick, steady heartbeat not from my own heart.
This is my body, which you made to break,
which gave you to make you, till you bear its mark,
which held you till you found your body to take,
(open at home on my bed in the dark).
ABORTION SPELL
Let’s keep the world through its own balanced kiss,
the kiss come from women made of our own blood,
the holder, the cooler (redeeming the earth,
shaping the room where we give you your birth).
Hands born of woman will not stop this flood,
this generous, selfish, long-opening gift.
YOUR LAND
As I went walking in the land of our heart,
I found the animals crying.
Their mouths and warm bodies were sudden and slow
And they moved slow and hard to the edge of the woods.
Their legs and their heartbeats and skins were dying.
They curled up like snails at the end of the world.
This land is your land, this land is my land.
As I went out walking, the trees became bark.
They turned in their power and knowledge and pain.
Their arms grew wide open, their lives fell apart.
I heard them in peace and I heard them in horror,
And each leaf or hand was the eye of a world.
This land is your land, this land is my land.
As I went walking by the side of the sea,
I found the waves understanding.
They rolled out of silence and into the mist,
And into the light where it seemed they were pouring.
They roiled with pollution and anger and love,
And the currents of freedom kept rolling.
This land is your land, this land is my land.
STONE AND CLOTH AND PAPER
At every gust the dead leaves fall
—Henry Wadsworth