An award-winning California poet, writer, and public school principal, Dr. Mary Langer Thompson was born in Illinois. She is active in the California Writer’s Club, High Desert Branch, and was California’s Senior Poet Laureate. She has given poetry and writing workshops and has authored poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. Her books can be found on Amazon.
Your recent book, The Gull Who Thought He Was Dull, is a beautifully color-illustrated book for young children about the adventures of Gus on the theme of self-worth. Your engaging word choices echo your background as a poet. How did you come to write it?
Thank you. Back in the ’90s, my husband and I were on a road trip, and we do a lot of word play all the time. We came up with a title, Gull Ibble, theGullible Gull, and for years I mulled over trouble a seagull could get into.…
The night I
decided I wanted to make America more dangerous started safely enough.
My mom and I were
standing under Restaurant Hoity-Toity’s awnings, hiding from the drizzle, when
my late-arriving dad sprang upon the scene.
“Seriously,
someone’s going to think you’re the valet! What’re you wearing?” The amused
lilt in my mom’s voice cut the legs out from under her scold. My handsome dad,
usually a dapper dresser, had donned a puffed-up rain jacket that made him look
like a pencil jammed into a large beach ball, with only its tip and eraser
protruding.
“Chill,
Stink Pot,” he parried back, dipping into their pool of edgy nicknames. “It’s
much more embarrassing to spend $3,000 on a thin, plaid, non-functional piece
of cloth. If we’re worrying about appearances, people might think you’re
superficial!”…
I wailed at the cruelty when the bi-planes felled him. Learning then that man, malarial man, buzzing round the wonder of the great ape like mosquitoes, would kill us all.
I was Faye, entombed in the leathery digits of Kong, a font of youth and tears and love, and I was also Kong, the humanity in his gentled placid eyes when he clutches her, his brackish rage; part righteous part misguided. …
Who can guess
which poems become yours? You can be
taught to read poetry and you can be taught to analyze – but only some poems
place you on the stage of your life, in front of your own footlights. And what is it? – Aesthetic reaction, emotive
creation, a phrase or a word that triggers neural firing across your mind as
intense as a lightning storm and as subdued as moth’s wings that brush at the
edges of consciousness. Don’t analyze,
don’t read: listen to the poem, listen
deeper into yourself.
Pam Uschuk’s piece
“Who Today Needs Poetry” comes dense and roiling in image, chattering with
ambiguity, rife with sensory ties to the reader. She starts …
“Who Today Needs Poetry” Not the California quail clucking for millet or gold finches glutting on thistle seed, not last night’s bats jittering between the end of desert heat and Cygnus rising … …
When Leslie Bobeck was in fifth grade, a boy everyone called J.B. nicknamed her “Lezbo,”an obvious combination of her first and last names. Now a junior, sixteen years old, she occasionally heard “Lezbo” mumbled nastily in gym class or behind her in the cafeteria’s cashier line, but Leslie was relatively sure that J.B. and his friend, Bodie, were the only ones who used it. Her best friend, Larissa, tried to address it once with Bodie on Leslie’s behalf, but when Larissa approached him, Bodie spit his gum onto her shoe, and she backed away without saying a word. Leslie told the bawling Larissa that she was sorry Bodie had been such an asshole to her, but that the Lezbo thing was old and stupid, not worth their time.…
I roll the last three peaches beneath my hands, testing them for water. Watercolor fuzz tickles, curls away beneath the paring knife. Here
I find the peach pit clinging like an unready soul to its flesh, wishing to bring along riches stored in fibers.
There is another, floating free within its body. A curve of steel reaches the center and the pit rolls out, cordial and without complaint. It is ready.
My hand curls around the very last, blade easing through softness. My fingers find— when the fruit is cut away—a third stone cleaved in two. I think it saw the world from within its cocoon.
William Frank and DW Stojek are the authors of nearly 10 books of poetry between them, and they’ve been creative partners and performers (at readings and presentations around New York City) for over twenty-five years. When not writing poetry, Stojek is an avid photographer, while Frank enjoys long hours of chess, bingeing on 1950’s Japanese Cinema, taking naps with Scrambles (his cat), arguing with the Devil, press-ganging the elderly and Sadism.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Frank and Stojek about their collections (The Purgatory Elm and The Foreign Excellent Rainbow Company, Inc. 1920, respectively), as well as popular culture, outrage culture, being tongue-in-cheek about poetry, and much more!
