Motherhood is a great leveler--a cause for fear, for joy, for ambivalence.
Join poets Katherine Hagopian Berry, Sonia Greenfield, Abby Murray and Meghan Sterling as they look closely at the role of mother, reading their poems that celebrate, and reveal, the complex experience of motherhood.
The Poetry Foundation editors write “Poems that represented the real, lived experiences of mothers remained hard to find until the 1970s, the time of the second-wave feminist movement. Poets who are also mothers use their work to attack the sexist assumptions that motherhood is not an appropriate (or appropriately sublime) subject for poetry and that talk of motherhood should remain in a compartmentalized, domestic sphere.” They go on to quote Sharon Olds… “in our A Change of World documentary about the role of poetry in second-wave feminism, the poet Sharon Olds recalls the response to submitting motherhood poems in the 1970s: ‘The editor would say, if you wish to write about your children may we suggest the Ladies Home Journal. We are a literary magazine.’”
On May 7 four talented poets will openly share their thoughts on motherhood on The Poets Corner. These poets and others are published in literary magazines thanks to the paths laid by earlier “feminist” poets like Sharon Olds whose poem My First Weeks concludes with the lines used in the title of this year’s event:
And it would always be there, behind those nights /
of tap water, the whole way back /
that fortnight of unlimited ration /
every four hours – clock of cream /
and flame, I have known heaven.