Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Lady of the Beasts: Poems
    Lady of the Beasts: Poems
    Lady of the Beasts: Poems
    Ebook158 pages1 hour

    Lady of the Beasts: Poems

    By Robin Morgan

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Robin Morgan’s second collection of poems is a rich tapestry of female experience, both literal and mythic

    Daughter, wife, mother, lover, artist, and even priestess are all here in shorter lyrics that cluster around four subjects: blood ties, activism and art, love between women, and archetypes. But Morgan surpasses the political grief and rage she delineated in Monster, her acclaimed first book of poems—especially in the four major metaphysical poems here: “The City of God,” balancing grace and despair; “Easter Island,” on the ironies of transcendence in embattled love; “The Network of the Imaginary Mother,” which became a virtual anthem of the women’s movement; and “Voices from Six Tapestries,” inspired by the famous Lady and theUnicorn weavings that hang in the Musée de Cluny in Paris.
     
    Themes of familial love and hurt, mortality, survival, and transformation inform the poems collected here as the author weaves a wise and powerful self into being. Lady of the Beasts is Robin Morgan at her most lyrical yet.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMar 24, 2015
    ISBN9781504006460
    Lady of the Beasts: Poems
    Author

    Robin Morgan

    Award-winning poet, novelist, journalist, and feminist leader Robin Morgan has published more than twenty books, including the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful and Sisterhood Is Global and the bestselling The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages, among them Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Persian. A recipient of honors including a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and former editor in chief of Ms., Morgan founded the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, and with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem, cofounded the Women’s Media Center. She writes and hosts Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan, a weekly program with a global audience on iTunes and WMCLive.com—her commentaries legendary, her guests ranging from grassroots activists to Christiane Amanpour, Anita Hill, and President Jimmy Carter.

    Read more from Robin Morgan

    Related to Lady of the Beasts

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Devil Asks Why You Would Mouth The Word Pity

      Jul 1, 2022

      even in this abundance of dark? Even in this abundance of dark you have totake the stars on faith. Look: Under today’s dim sky there is a basket.In that basket there is a fish. Come night, you are the animal that will eat the best parts of it. And ye

      1 min read

    • Article

      Fifteen Poets on Revision

      Feb 27, 2018

      After 17 drafts over two weeks, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” was completed on November 4, 1975. The poem began as notes, and evolved into a villanelle. She changed the title. She deleted words. She reached for possible rhymes. Brett Candlish Mil

      4 min read

    • Article

      Clarice Lispector’s Children’s Story Taught Me to Read Her Like An Adult

      Mar 17, 2017

      Filmmaker Pedro Almodovar was asked to write an introduction to the translated edition of Clarice Lispector’s final novel Breath of Life. Instead of a formal introduction, his refusal letter was published and said this of Lispector’s work: “Each phra

      7 min read

    • Article

      On Louise Glück

      Dec 1, 2021

      I WAS LYING in bed late at night, woeful, confused by another death, this one the death of a close friend; the losses had been mounting steadily, a bewildering number of losses, each one specific, difficult to accept, hard to overcome, and I must hav

      12 min read

    • Article

      Six Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2021

      Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbu

      3 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2021

      I have an endless appetite for starfruit,for biting my teeth into the universe and spitting outthe space junk, for licking the rings of my favorite planetsand never slicing my tongue. There’s a story I shareabout my birth where angels circle my dead

      2 min read

    • Article

      All The Gay Saints

      May 1, 2020

      All The Gay Saints
      4 min read

    • Article

      Inhabiting A Moment

      Mar 13, 2022

      In Actions and Travels you include about 100 of the “poems I love and what it is I love about them” along with a broad range of poets from around the world, younger local ones such as Hera Lindsay Bird and Tayi Tibble, and plenty of dead ones such as

      7 min read

    • Article

      Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

      May 6, 2021

      Say Hello, Wave Goodbye
      4 min read

    • Article

      A History And Theory Of The Line In English Language Poetry

      Jul 1, 2022

      For me, and for generations of US readers before me, poetry has been defined by the appearance of the line break on the page, that ragged righthand margin signaling that something is at work in the arrangement of the words on paper beyond mere transc

      59 min read

    • Article

      A Poet’s Craft

      Jan 1, 2020

      To begin with a definition: A poem is a text structurally constrained by the repetition of any language element(s). The continuum of poetic constraint is extensive, stretching from operations that a reader will find completely imperceptible to overwh

      9 min read

    • Article

      Lingering Memories

      Aug 5, 2021

      Lingering Memories
      4 min read

    • Article

      Wide Open Wordsmiths

      May 5, 2022

      Wide Open Wordsmiths
      5 min read

    • Article

      TIME & PLACE

      Mar 5, 2020

      TIME & PLACE
      4 min read

    • Article

      Dark Material

      Jan 5, 2023

      Dark Material
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Lady of the Beasts

    4/5

    2 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Lady of the Beasts - Robin Morgan

      EARLY BIRD BOOKS

      FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

      LOVE TO READ?

      LOVE GREAT SALES?

      GET FANTASTIC DEALS ON BESTSELLING EBOOKS

      DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX EVERY DAY!

      Lady of the Beasts

      Poems

      Robin Morgan

      CONTENTS

      Publisher’s Note

      I BLOOD TIES

      Loyalty Oath

      The Father

      The Voyeur

      The Covenant

      Love Poem of the Calendar Alphabet

      II THE CITY OF GOD

      III THE SHUTTLE

      Jottings of a Feminist Activist

      On The Watergate Women

      Portrait of the Artist as Two Young Women

      Frames

      Kings’ Gambit

      IV EASTER ISLAND

      V THE OTHER STRAND

      The Two Gretels

      The Pedestrian Woman

      To A Widow

      Survival

      A Ceremony

      VI THE NETWORK OF THE IMAGINARY MOTHER

      VII NORNS

      The Dance of the Seven Veils

      The Spider Woman

      The Mermaid

      The Beggar Woman

      La Doña Sebastiana

      VIII VOICES FROM SIX TAPESTRIES

      About the Author

      Publisher’s Note

      Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

      But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page. Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?

      In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.

      But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.

      Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s Disclaimer as it appears in two different type sizes.

      Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of Disclaimer, you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading Disclaimer on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead is a complete line, while the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn is not.

      Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.

      Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.

      Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1