Women Are: Everyday
Poetic, Phenomenal, Mysteries, Powerful, Artistic.
Happy belated Women’s Day, but I believe such a day is everyday. Read and listen to and poems about the wonder, grace and beauty of women.
Maya Angelou’s Phenomenal Woman makes for a beautiful song. A perfect example of lyric poetry in the modern world. Listen to Ruthie Foster’s rendition.
One of the key poets of the 2010s self-love, tumblr and blogging era poetry boom Nayyirah Waheed penned this perfect aphorism-like poem for women about self-esteem.
Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet: Audre Lorde writes about black womanhood often and was an intersectional feminist. I read Sister Outsider in 2020 and it is among the list of books that changed my life. I look forward to reading The Cancer Journals in the coming weeks as I do my own research on healthcare humanities and literature’s role in understanding the body and the psyche.
Activist and poet Nikki Giovanni has the wonderful ability, I believe, to write imageries into her poems that somewhat fade off of the page, deep into the reader’s imagination and leaves us to wonder what exactly is the message about family history, womanhood, race, class, or politics, only to find that Giovanni’s point is to highlight all of these things at once.
The iconic She Walks In Beauty written in iambic tetrameter by Lord Byron aka the original lothario and noted Romantic Era poet. I highly recommend anything by the Don Juan poet.
Poetry Pages I Love
More of these poetry recommendations to come as I sort through stacks of my recent favourites. For an online archive of poems on your feeds I recommend
the following Instagram pages: poetryisnotaluxury, poetrywillchangeyou, blackliturgies, poemsforthesehours, and tomsnarsky.