for edna st. vincent millay (9)

for edna st. vincent millay

"[…a friend ]told me of seeing her years ago in
Greenwich Village running around the corner of
Macdougal Street, flushed & laughing 'like a
nymph,' with her hair swinging…"
Edmund Wilson

yrs was a true voice of yr generation,
vincent, spoken with feeling rising up
from yr toes, transgressive & traditional,
yet patently postmodern, not unlike the
conflicted contradictions in yr own life.
an anchor for bohemian identity &
unrepentant feminist compass pointing to
emancipated love, u slept with women &
men, a sappho for those wide-eyed girls
at vassar who came joyeously to yr bed.
but then u parked & abandoned yr
lesbianism at graduation to pursue multiple
male sex partners, often several in a day for
the rest of yr life. never truly a lesbian,
but always a thespian, u showed us how
to fling pretty follies aside, how to repel
or embrace murderous emotion, how to
repel or embrace interloping death in
traditional tetrameter, in simple minimalist
couplets containing the profound & the
mystical, in concussive sonnets bursting
with images descriptive of rapture, of
powerful forces, cosmic & soular,
within & without & in collision.
© Joseph McNair; 2009

for sara teasdale (8)

for sara teasdale

for i shall learn from flower and leaf…
to change the lifeless wine of grief
to living gold.
from “alchemy”

odd how yr lyric seasoned, sara, revealed
itself & its subtly supple growth in the way
u venerated love & beauty, but did surely cling
to oh so lonely, having lived, unlike the dead.
odd how u decorated the grave of buried love,
put flowers at its head, stones at its shriveled
feet beneath a sentry tree in a primeval forest,
standing stoutly, black & tall.
yr poems pierced my armored heart, sara, like
the terrified sounds that same tree made when it
came crashing down with no man nor animal
nearby to hear or mourn it or see its white flame.

©Joseph McNair;2009

for gloria douglass johnson (6)

for gloria douglass johnson

her life was dwarfed, and wed to blight,
her very days were shades of night,
her every dream was born entombed,
her soul, a bud,--that never bloomed.
from "foredoomed….”

so sad so many of yr poems,
but u reaped no fell felicity in
sadness, nor in stifled creative
spirit or in a woman’s perennial
subservience. u bore the double
cross bravely, its transverse
pieces -- the personal modesty of
wifedom & gravely maudlin
motherhood -- its upright piece --
yr calling as a teacher -- made
fitful furrows in the ground as it
drug through yr shadow behind
u. yet dared u sneak away from
yr safe narrow nest:

to write rhapsodically
lyrical verse, in quatrains,
sonnets, iambic heptameter,
with an unpretentious spirit;
to nurture harlem’s luminous
lights in yr poetic halfway
house; yr “s” street salon.

langston hughes, alain locke,
angelina weld grimké, jean
toomer & countee cullen, yr
regular saturday nighters, as
were louis alexander, gwen
bennett, marita bonner, jessie
redmon fauset & zora neale
hurston – yr great heart san-
daled their feet & sent them
forth, yr sons full of bronze
& brawn & potency; yr daughters,
haloed & honored. u did not
die while u loved them, but
loved them until u died, giving
so much of yrself & so much
more than cadenced words.

Joseph McNair;2009

for emily dickinson (5)

for emily dickinson

exultation is the going
of an inland soul to sea,—
past the houses, past the headlands,
into deep eternity!

sung silently with tuneless eyes yr somber lyrics,
revised hymn quatrains, solidly packed & compressed with
austere metonymy, agnostic inward looking,
& fascination with death, tragic love & loss, are
not even parodic with the christian song of praise.
coolly feminine & intimate, yr prosody
whose wide interstices left by the god u excised –
in spite of yr sojourn at mt holyoke & long-term
affair with a married preacher – were so deftly filled
with oh so delicate clitoral imagery
& such selected homoerotic devices
that continue thus over linebreak after linebreak
to further feminize/immortalize yr discourse.

©Joseph McNair;2009

for christina rossetti (4)

for christina rossetti

"we must not look at goblin men,
we must not buy their fruits:
who knows upon what soil they fed..."
from ‘the goblin market’

slightly touched by madness eerily
early, stretched out taut by torrid
tensions native to an artistic family,

u lived, ironically, with grave’s disease,
& under death’s shroud, to sweetly rave,
& quietly storm with low bending trees,

against feckless, faithless goblin men
who’d pity & love u more after u die,
who’d proffer plump prurient fruit in

goblin markets, like luscious cherries with
freeborn cranberries, down-cheeked
peaches & other pregnant emblems of pith --

the choicest & most vital parts of yr
longing. u tore yrself in twain, spoke
with cloven, conflicting tongues for

the fair fruit globes of sweet desire;
for the golden locks & tears u paid for
these delights; against the raging fire

that charmed u or the tempting gifts
that harmed u, bade u suck yr twin
soul’s lips white, like dover’s cliffs,

to clean away the stains, the lurid signs
of love’s urgent & unspeakable yearnings.
in short, simple, irregularly rhymed lines.

© Joseph McNair;2009

for francis ellen watkins harper (3)

for u there need be no monument

for francis ellen watkins harper

i ask no monument, proud and high,
to arrest the gaze of passers-by;
all that my yearning spirit craves,
is bury me not in a land of slaves…

for u there need be no monument, born free in a
slave state, yr father’s name lost to history – yr
poetry was always free.

for u there need be no monument, who grew up
among frederick douglass’ friends, living at one
time in an underground railroad station;

who became john brown’s fervent friend,
recognizing his white gift to yr people, long
before his body lay a molderin’ in his grave.

for u there need be no monument, yr poems,
reeking of longfellow & greenleaf whittier,
preached moral uplift; rebuked peculiar slavery &

counseled the oppressed to free themselves from
demoralized condition. perhaps yr domestic work
in that quaker household – whose library was

sanctuary for a precocious teen & brief respite –
was enough to let the flame of moral courage burn,
grow strong, bade u speak, oracular & oratorically,

in poetic voice, in vernacular speech, long before
the impassioned lines of james edwin campbell,
long before the brilliant paul lawrence dunbar,

for the young anonymous black slave girl,
snatched & sold from a mother’s warm &
comforting arms to the licentious clutches
of libertine or preying profligates –

for the black slave mother, whose chained
heart was ripped & shredded by mournful
separations –

for the enlightened consciousness of a
woman who once believed that romance &
married love was the only goal & center of
her life.

for u there need be no monument, who lived to see
slavery fall & turned the sharpened edge of yr
verse to a woman’s true freedom;

to emancipation from alcohol; to a life of joy &
trust in the divine, of forgiveness & self-surrender.
for u there need be no monument.

© Joseph McNair;2009

for elizabeth barrett browning (2)

for elizabeth barrett browning

love me pure, as muses do,
up the woodlands shady:
love me gaily, fast and true,
as a winsome lady.

writing poetry in a darkened
room confined to recumbent
position by a fall, not from grace,
but from a spirited stallion, yr
adversity combined with moral
strength, made u champion of the
suffering; combined with
intellectual acuity, made u
nonpareil defender of the
oppressed wherever u found
them. made u meld the epic
poem with the novel to write
eleven thousand lines of blank
verse, of aurora leigh, that
climbed & breached the
unscalable oak & ivy walls of
domestic english fiction &
sentimental verse, that excoriated
the conventional; that repudiated
patronizing patriarchy in good
queen vicky’s gardens. resisting
the complacently conventional
values imposed by yr despotic
father, much like yr heroine
aurora, u eloped with yr
poetlover robert after seducing
him with a poem, to birth a new
genre for the female writer; to
make a living as a poet; to write
some of the most beautiful lyrics
in english literature which
ruthlessly sacrificed some clarity
of expression to unconventional
rhymes & loose diction; to spew
forth passionate emotion. “how
do i love thee? let me count the
ways…” & u showed him, yr
adoring robert, who loved u in
spite of yr persistent infirmity,
by emerging healthy from yr
darkened room, by giving him a
son & after showering him with
all the love u had to give, dying
sweetly in his arms.

© Joseph McNair; 2009