Preparing to Teach Poetic Forms
Nine more days before the start of my New York Writers Workshop class, and I have four sign-ups. The class needs six to run, so I'm casting around for ways to make the numbers. I've sent out pest emails, posted on craigslist, blanketed Cornelia Street Cafe with homemade flyers for three Fridays, recruited friends to spread the word, and left a flyer with the neighborhood falafel shop. Preparing for the first class on sonnets, I remembered Molly Peacock's lovely poem about the shoulders of women, a sonnet as it turned out. I read it first in Raw Heaven , and liked it still more when I read it again in her Cornucopia: New and selected poems. The Shoulders of Women The shoulders of women are shallow, narrow, and thin compared to the shoulders of men, surprisingly thin, like the young pharaohs whose shoulders in stick figures are written on stones, or bony as the short gold wings of cranes on oriental screens. Lord, how surprising to embrace the shortened stirrings of many bone...