In Julia Kasdorf's poem "What I Learned From My Mother," she does just what her title sets us up to expect. The first time I read the poem, I knew nothing about her life. When I read her biography and found that she was raised as a Mennonite, I had to reread the poem through that lens. That is not a required lens to read the poem but it did change my reading.
For example, she talks about her mother's practice of canning fruits. That seems like a nice, old-fashioned activity. But through the Mennonite lens, I read the lines:
to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point
in a different way.
Most of the things she learned are not specific to her upbringing. They are more universal.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came.
Our call for submissions this summer month is straightforward. Write a poem about what you learned from your mother, father, sister, brother, cousin, neighbor, kindergarten teacher...
Choose someone that you had a real relationship with and who really did teach you a lesson of some kind. Must it be a good, positive lesson? Not necessarily.
In Kasdorf's poem, I feel like as the poem progresses, the lessons she learned were not directly from her mother but were extensions of the larger lessons her mother intentionally wanted to pass on. That seems to be a very natural progression.
Either your title or a line in the poem should include "what I learned from."
Submission Deadline: July 31, 2023
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