Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  When Pete Dolack invited me to read at the 26th Annual Alternative NYD Spoken-Word/ Performance Extravaganza, I jumped at the chance to see and hear some of my downtown poet friends again. What better way to start the year than with poetry? As expected, the gathering at St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Village was vastly and variously entertaining. A woman dedicated her three-minute reading to the animals killed by the Australian fires. A man punished his hand drum as he read in a monotone. Another read from behind a dwarf fir tree that she carried in above her head. Many poems read that afternoon could be charged with the lack of artfulness, but in their earnestness, their directness, their presence, they were more enjoyable than any verbal tricksiness of more accomplished readings. Against the frenzy of new year resolutions, which by definition looked to the future, the afternoon focused ...

Eighteenth-century Women Poets , edited by Roger Lonsdale, is an eye-opener. Julia Briggs described it in The Times as "a brilliant and original anthology." Both epithets are just. It is original for no one before Lonsdale thought to look at eighteenth-century poetry by women for anything more than historical interest. The anthology is also brilliant because the discriminating taste of its editor ensured a selection of the liveliest and wittiest poetry of the time. The poetry becomes its own argument for its continued relevance and strength. The voices, from a cross-section of classes, are varied and individual, particularly those of Annie Finch (Countess of Winchilsea), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Jones, Mary Leapor, Susanna Blamire, Anna Lestitia Barbauld, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, Ann Yearsley, Elizabeth Hands. Even lesser talents are represented by one or two of their most distinctive contributions.  Lonsdale's informative introduction gives the hist...