Who Knew It Could Be So Easy?

How cool is this, your own blog in a matter of minutes? I am still working out what goes where here, and I think there's a profile section somewhere, but just the same I'll do some introduction. I'm MJ and this is a blog that will have much to do with poetry; mine, the work of fine poets I know and "famous" poets I love (hence the title of this blog.) It will also have to do with my day to day, although I will refrain from detailing what I ate for dinner (unless it was something fabulous undoubtedly cooked by someone else) or how I need to color my hair.
I'm a single mother of two, a freelance writer and currently a preschool teacher. I recently broke up with my fiancee, a Brit from Brighton who is mending his oh so broken heart by dating one month after ending our year long love affair (he would tell you this was all my fault and he would be wrong.) While the new honey underscores how right our ending really was, there's still an element of "ouch" reading about my replacement. But life goes on and so will this blog. Below is a poem I recently had published in a new UK magazine called "Parameter"

Tale of Two Sisters

My past is not getting on a bus.
She is not digging a hole to China.
She is not a red balloon
Disappearing inside of a minute
In the sky over a zoo.

My past will not put on
Traditional pilgrim dress.
She will not creep around
On her belly under cover of night
Or be bricked over like the north door
Of an old Sussex church.

If you are climbing a teetering tower
To fetch one of us, then you fetch two
Because the girl in the window
Won’t be parted
From her pug ugly sister;
Not for strong arms,
Not for love or money,
Not for the world.


I have begun work on a manuscript that I plan to send to a real publisher, get some real recognition, and some stellar feature gigs. I do have a chapbook, put out by a nice guy who ran it out at a Kinko's in New Jersey, so I'm not certain it counts as a real book. As features dates come up I will post them here for anybody who is interested in coming (mostly in the NYC area).

I'll end this post with a poem I love by Mary Oliver:

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shoutingtheir bad advice-though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles."Mend my life!"each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
but little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do
determined to save
the only life you could save

from Dreamwork in: New and Selected Poems. Beacon Press, Boston, 1992