March is Women’s History month. As a tribute, I would like to share one of my favorite poets of all time, Alice Notley. She may resist categorization, but she has done more for women’s poetics than possibly any other poet alive. If you don’t believe me, please read, The Descent of Alette. Who is a woman who has inspired you?

THAT I MAY LIVE

I step across and can no longer make myself understood.
Listen to Torna a Sorrento concentratedly
I don’t understand Italian I understand the song.

I’m here. You can’t return because
a former life is not available; they read dis-
sertations there now. The clean glass of sparkling
water is for my mother.

                                     Who will I write
for, alive? Into the air of you. This sadness,
rather than gotten rid of, is become another;
a quality both thicker and lighter

You still don’t understand that you too must
change; you value phantoms: I’m talking
to you — but my phantoms are real. You all
value material comfort over knowing a thing–

who is speaking?
I have none; the counterclock stops; though
it’s late where you are.

Alice Notley is the author of over twenty-five books of poetry, including 165 Meeting House Lane (1971), Phoebe Light (1973), Incidentals in the Day World (1973), For Frank O’Hara’s Birthday (1976), Alice Ordered Me to Be Made: Poems 1975 (1976), Dr. Williams’ Heiresses (1980), How Spring Comes (1981), which received the San Francisco Poetry Award, Waltzing Matilda (1981), Margaret & Dusty (1985), From a Work in Progress (1988), Homer’s Art (1990), To Say You (1993), Selected Poems of Alice Notley (1993), The Descent of Alette (1996), among many others. Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and her collection Disobedience (2001) was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Notley’s recent work includes From the Beginning (2004), Alma, or the Dead Women (2006), Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, In the Pines (2007), Culture of One (2011), and Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011).

originally published in Ping-Pong 2014.

Thank you to editor Jillian Mukavetz and womens quarterly conversation for asking me really smart and fun questions.

Here’s the introduction to the interview, for the full text please click here:

womens quarterly conversation profile in poetics with Maria Garcia Teutsch

You are sitting beneath the shade of a coral curtain. The curtain was created by ‘we’ hand-strung ornaments, balanced from sandy trees in the Far East. In the Western hemisphere of the world ‘I’ stretch out my legs on a plush Ikea perch, making sure to check if ‘I’ have enough. Carbon dioxide cartridges for my home made sparkling mineral beverage, for example. Take a step away from the romanticization of these images and ask yourself the following. Does patriarchal structure and commodification depend on its cultural configuration? How does self and subjugation interplay in the conversation? Does identity depend on its soil? We converse today with Maria Garcia Teutsch: a writer whose journey in this interview begins as a young girl planter of wishes. Read More >

I would like to thank Heather McHugh and the editors at Minerva Rising journal for selecting my collection of poems, The Revolution Will Have its Sky, which will be published this year:

Thoughts on The Revolution Will Have Its Sky by Emily Shearer

The personal is political, and politics are everywhere: the courtroom, the throne room, the confessional (real or fake), the brothel, the gallows, and the street corners. Here in The Revolution Will Have Its Sky, Maria Garcia Teutsch presents a manifesto for an ageless cause. By turning her poetic tricks, she conflates image and casts aspersions–we see shadow and reflection, we see queen as whore and judge as prophet as well as thief.
Read More >