Photo by Joe Watts
I’m pleased to share that my poem “I Unstop Myself”is now live at Monstering Magazine. Thank you to editor Kristen Tollan for selecting my little tribute to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself for publication alongside so many other inspiring women/women identifying voices.
SLHARPERPOETRY 
So very lovely, this poem, Stephanie! I adore the vivid language and detail and that last line! And I like the heft of the phrase – I unstop myself – I could apply it to anything! Congrats!
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Dearest Lynne, you have no idea how much you’ve made my day/year/decade with your validating words. Thank you!
❄️🎶☀️❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
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Oh you’re so welcome, Stephanie and so deserving, both of my words and publication!😘
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A beauty, Steph! So evocative. I especially like “the sun’s six-degree tincture,” which surprised me with its fluid yet angular juxtaposition of light and heat. Congratulations on publication!
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Thanks so much, Cate! Yes, my actual experience of the bright winter sun on the six-degree day in question definitely informed that juxtaposition, and also the notion that adding snow into the mix would provide warmth… I didn’t necessarily know what these unexpected parallels “meant,” I only perceived them myself as compelling. We poets don’t gain anything by arguing with the raw material nature supplies us…
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Melodic, calls for multiple repeats – glint, tincture, lenticular teasing my imagination. A little puzzled by “my white-banded blaze” … and are you singing back to the mockingbird? Wonderful close – winter embedding in all [absolutely, even in milder winters down South – the perpetual chill that keeps me in my down vest is a seasonal shift both outer and inner.]
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I was being a transcendentalist a la Whitman, I suppose — an embedding of everything in everything else as much as I identified myself as both winter and its vessel (in other words, I have no idea who was doing what beyond the general ecstatic sense of communion with nature and its compelling paradoxes…). The mockingbird, aside from just being a brilliant creature that inspires awe, was a convenient symbol for my imitative exercise, too. Thanks for trying to make sense of that which at some level indeed defies it.
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Being a bit puzzling just makes a poem more intriguing – this one merits multiple excursions through your “encounter” with winter. Or was it winter’s encounter with you? Did the mockingbird compose this?
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I’m grateful, Jazz, for your openness to being intrigued. People seem to have less and less tolerance these days (in the culture of instant gratification) for sitting with the unknown or unknowable, the “holy mystery” of a thing being worthy of attention and even reverence for its opacity. Of course, one person’s opaque beauty is another’s tiresome nonsense, and it’s certainly not mine to say which way of seeing is right — I only hope that my impulses to share what I see sometimes resonate…
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“You might not think my pale trills bear repeating,
But I will foster your purest tenors regardless,
And steel and sanctify your voice.”
All we can do is respond to a call that arouses us and hope it is found worthy.
Congratulations, and well done.
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Yes, that’s it, exactly, Ken. Thank you! 😊
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