Girl Power, Wordsworthian

I’m on the right, my best friend on the left. (Not “Helen,” who appears in the poem below!) We’re in junior high in Alberta in the 1970s.

I’m delighted to share my new poem, “O Cache Luxurious.” This poem got its start this summer at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Shout-out to teacher Gaby Calvocoressi for having us read an excerpt from Wordsworth’s “The Prelude!” Bold move! Of course, I loved it. My Wordsworth wrote a lesbian sonnet, after all. (If you want the full PDF of this article, just DM me and I’ll send it to you.)

But I first learned about blank verse not from Shakespeare, Milton, or Wordsworth, but from the Canadian author of Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery. I love Anne as much as the next woman writer, but my true Montgomery love is Emily of New Moon. Emily Starr is “a poet to her finger tips” from childhood, and is often in trouble at school because she’s always scribbling. Here’s the blank verse primal scene, in which orphaned, misunderstood Emily writes one of her diary-like letters to her kind, dead father:

Oh, Father dear, I have made a great diskoverry. I wish I had made it when you were alive for I think you’d have liked to know. I can write poetry. Perhaps I could have written it long ago if I&’d tried. But after that first day in school I felt I was bound in honnour to try and it is so easy. There is a little curly black-covered book in Aunt Elizabeth’s bookcase called Thompson’s Seasons and I decided Iwould write a poem on a season and the first three lines are,

Now Autumn comes ripe with the peech and pear,
The sportsman’s horn is heard throughout the land,
And the poor partridge fluttering falls dead.

Of course there are no peeches in P. E. Island and I never heard a sportsman’s horn here either, but you don’t have to stick too close to facts in poetry. I filled a whole letter-bill with it and then I ran and read it to Aunt Laura. I thought she would be overjoyed to find she had a niece who could write poetry but she took it very coolly and said it didn’t sound much like poetry. It’s blank verse I cryed. Very blank said Aunt Elizabeth sarkastically though I hadn’t asked her opinion. But I think I will write ryming poetry after this so that there will be no mistake about it and I intend to be a poetess when I grow up and become famus. I hope also that I will be silph-like. A poetess should be silph-like. 

And here’s my new poem, with the (I now realize) Emily-like title, “O Cache Luxurious.” Thanks to Corey Cook at Red Eft Review for selecting it. It’s in blank verse. Very blank.