The Sister Chronicles and Other Poems
By Joyce Nower
()
About this ebook
I arrived at San Diego State University (then State College ) in 1969 and so was present at the creation and watched the events described in Joyce Nowers The Sister Chronicles unfold. Nower examines and evokes the creation of the first Womens Studies program in the nation with a remarkable intertextual weaving of prose and rather formal verse And so the reconstruction of history to include her story began, and you will find the triumphs and setbacks, the exhilaration and disappointment, the hope and the struggle of those days powerfully recalled on these pages. Nower even has the audacity to turn bureaucratic academic procedures into poetry.
Fred Moramarco, poet and editor of Poetry International[The] Sister Chronicles (sharp title) about the formation of the first womens studies in the USA is entirely original. The prose is nicely paced, but its the poetry that charms this reader, with its lyrical, musical voice, its mix of sassy, down home, traditional and erudite, witty and playful voices (Dido Did It), the somber beauty of On the Path to Athena Proneia, The Danaids . The poems connect smoothly to the narration. The poems that reflect the physical world in San Diego, birds, flora, the back country of the hunterthose Sloan Canyon Songsare strong I like the witty rhymes The Meditation on the Maelstrom seems an excellent last poem and lands on an affirming note .I am grateful to know about the mystic, pagan, fourth-century BC mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria. These sonnets, with their no-nonsense earthy language delighted me. Jericho Again and Again sets a philosophical mode into motion. After the fires, the blood of Hypatia, it offers a quieter tone. I especially like #7 Childhoods Globe of Light, the pleasure of the rhymed couplets.
Colette Inez, poet (The Woman Who Loved Worms, Alive and Taking Names)Writing in the tradition of the Iliad and Odyssey , Joyce Nower charts the stormy waters of the Sixties. Her luminous poetry breaks over the shoals of the past, bringing calm at last. The Sister Chronicles is a tour de force of history and literature.
Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, historian(All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the 1960s)
Joyce Nower
Joyce Nower (1932-2010) received a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College, an MA from Harvard University and a PhD from the Union Institute in the sociology of art. She is the author of three other volumes of poetry and of numerous poems and articles published in a variety of journals. She had retired from teaching literature and writing at San Diego State University and had made her home with a husband and children in La Mesa, California.
Related to The Sister Chronicles and Other Poems
Related ebooks
The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Awakening and Selected Short Fiction (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lost Civilizations: The Secret Histories and Suppressed Technologies of the Ancients Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSemi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAuthors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Spirits of Crossbones Graveyard: Time, Ritual, and Sexual Commerce in London Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Celebrated Elizabeth Smith: Crafting Genius and Transatlantic Fame in the Romantic Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSpirit Winds of Peace: The Epoch of the Peace Makers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn American Tune Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAbortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAll That Matters Is a Thought Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBefore Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2017 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Serpent and the Rainbow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays, Reviews, and Reportage Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEnchanted Ground: The Spirit Room of Jonathan Koons Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Identity Thief Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFirst Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport & Coney Island Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ladies Night at the Dreamland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Forever: A legal sci-fi story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFollies in America: A History of Garden and Park Architecture Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFigures in a Landscape Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Lay of the Land: Metaphor As Experience and History in American Life and Letters Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIntersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLittle Black Box: Speculative Poetry from Ohio Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Poetry For You
The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Letters to a Young Poet (Rediscovered Books): With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dream Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of John Keats (with an Introduction by Robert Bridges) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (ReadOn Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Sister Chronicles and Other Poems
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Sister Chronicles and Other Poems - Joyce Nower
FORWARD
The nineteen-sixties and-seventies were years of great turmoil andchange in our country. Behind the purple haze of loosening lifestyles,great political and personal struggles were being waged. Dominantamong them was the anti-war movement and what one might callthe empowerment struggles, including the quest for civil and humanrights—spanning the spectrum from Martin Luther King, Jr. andCesar Chavez to Malcolm X and the Black Panthers—educationalreform, and the all-encompassing Women’s Movement.
Joyce Nower (1932-2010) was a passionate participant and leader inmost of these outcries for a better world. Most importantly, she wasa co-founder of the first Women’s Studies Department in the UnitedStates, and perhaps the world, at San Diego State University in1970. Sister Chronicles,
the title poem which constitutes Part IV ofthis book, is actually a series of poems that deal with this momentousevent in the history of women’s struggles for equal rights.
The sailing, however, was anything but smooth. One would haveexpected the tragi-comic opposition by the older conservativefaculty—thankfully, two vice-presidents and two deans provedsympathetic and helpful—but what hurt were the strident attacksand accusations (a friend referred to them as intra-movementcannibalism) by sisters
from the left, whoyelled sellouts,
cooptation,
elitism,
and so on, their rhetoric sadly similar to thatof the Reign of Terror which accompanied the French Revolution.At one point they even succeeded in taking over the department andalmost ran it into the ground before a competent scholar was hired tochair and rebuild the department.
It all started when Joyce, a San Diego State instructor, met a studentactivist, Carol Rowell (now Council). They had both been engagedin a variety of activities but realized after a few conversations that,somehow, feminism had always been kept in the background. Theyconvened a consciousness-raising rap group
composed of students
plus Joyce. After much painful sharing of personal experienceswith sexism—at home, at school, in society in general, and evenwithin the progressive movements they were a part of—someonesaid, OK, my consciousness has been raised enough for now, andI am tired of belly-aching! What do we do?
They proceeded togive substance to the feminist dictum: The Personal Is Political.
They came up with the then novel idea of a women’s center thatwould meet the personal, educational, cultural and employmentneeds of women that were not adequately, if at all, provided for byour patriarchal society. Being part of the academy, they conceivedof a center that would straddle the campus and the community.They named it the Center for Women’s Studies and Services(CWSS) and used their contacts, on and off campus, to procureseed funds for the project. They divided the Center into functionalunits they called components
: a Storefront in downtown SanDiego to help women with employment and training; a CulturalComponent that, among other things, mounted an annualWomen’s Arts Festival across five floors of the Love libraryand brought in artists from around the country; a PublicationsComponent that published a nationally distributed newspaper,The Longest Revolution,
as well as, under Joyce’s editorship,one of the first anthologies of women’s poetry; a CounselingComponent that developed innovative feminist counseling andprovided an Underground Railroad
for women who neededto get away from violent husbands or boyfriends, and set upSisterhood Chapters in women’s correctional institutions and onother campuses; and finally, the Education Component dedicated,among other educational endeavors, to establishing a Women’sStudies department at SDSU (see pp 75-115, esp. pp 103 on).
When asked to describe her poetic voice,
Joyce said that in eachpoem she strove to find the voice and technique appropriate tothe poem, thus giving the subject matter primacy over form. Shewas fond of the comment by George Bernard Shaw that art forart’s sake
was a luxury of the privileged. Thus, you will find inthis volume couplets as well as free verse, sonnets as well as a mixof prose and poetry, as is the case in Part IV. The latter technique
— although it seemed strange to some early readers of the poem
— goes at least as far back as Dante’s La Vita Nuova
and, morerecently, the work of the poet H.D.
Part IV is clearly the heart of the book. Parts I, II, and III giveus the social, political, historic and personal background that ledto Joyce’s passionate commitment to progressive change in thesefour dimensions of the human saga. They reveal without anyself-consciousness her deep scholarship as well as her talent forbringing together effortlessly relevant insights from antiquity tothe present age.
The final two parts are a deep sigh after a great effort, a GoodBye to All That.
They are a return to her other passions: nature,family, beauty, writing, teaching, and martial arts. They speak forthemselves.
JERICHO AGAIN
AND AGAIN
The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water; and breeds reptiles of the mind.
-Blake
1. The Psychic Status Quo
Go to any city and you’ll find
the conquered, immigrants, the down and outs,
the poor, the rich, the homeless on the ramps,
in fact, the way it is, and in the mind,
its rough draft, a way to feel, to see,
to be, a psychic status quo set up
by border streets and chain link fence, a free-
way cutting through, a railroad track—
fixed mind unable to shake loose of it,
even if it sees its opposite,
hard put to shift gears in one short life,
where justice isn’t often politic,
where justice never is just at the start,
but, if at all, at the end, quixotic
bursts of splendid snatches of song at least,
the piper weaving in and out among
the clink of glasses, raucous laughter, chat,
the notes hard to hear above the feast.
2. The Gold Spoon, the Taste of Dust
Or say a town springs up close by a stream
bending seaward, or on land once dense
with oak or birch or elm. If it becomes
a traveled crossroads and then is fenced
off in sections based on this trade, that skill,
the flats and hills where haves and have-nots live
(often the gold spoon, the taste of dust,
no matter character or wit or will)
will stand as right in unreflective mind.
That’s the way it is. After all,
CEO’s, judges, kings, presidents,
signal for day to start, for night to fall,
for tanks to roll, and guns be raised, to tout
the panoplies of power, the rest of us