As you may already know, March has been designated National Women’s History Month. We’d like to take this opportunity to tip our DSM hats to all the great female authors, from Dickinson to Leslie Marmon Silko to Edwidge Danticat, all of whom have added to the richness and diversity that is the human experience through the conduit of words. This week’s picks include various female authors, each of them shining examples of that creative spirit we pay homage to this day.

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A Conversation with Stephen Sturgeon

I recently had the chance to talk with Stephen Sturgeon, a poet whose debut collection, Trees of the Twentieth Century, is primed and ready to leave its footprint all over independent literature. We discuss poetry, the internet, perspective, pronouns, accidents, and what part of a giraffe is good to eat. He is a man with a lot to say.

Ted Powers: You are a hard man to track down via the internet. Tell us a bit about yourself. From where do you hail? Is your lack of an online persona a conscious decision?

Stephen Sturgeon: I grew up outside of Albany, New York, in a place called Cohoes. For the past twelve years I’ve lived around Boston, until one year and a few months ago, when I moved to Buffalo, New York, where I am now. I don’t know how much longer I will be in Buffalo. During the years I lived around Boston, there was a stretch of a year and a few months that I lived in London.

About the internet, it is odd and unfortunate to me that maintaining an “online persona” is the normal state of affairs—odd and unfortunate because not doing so has come to seem odd and deliberate. Staying away from Facebook and Twitter isn’t something I strive to do. Participating takes time, and I just find myself doing other things, participating in other things. For a little while I sent in comments to the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, back when they accepted comments there, and that did not go well. Sometimes I’ll write an e-mail to someone I know who has a blog, and my e-mail will become a blog post. I’m not completely absent. I tried running a tumblr account for a couple of months, but fell away from it, it didn’t keep my attention. It’s still up: http://beauxarts.tumblr.com/

More generally, it’s true that I am uninterested in what social networking sites and blogs have to offer. That’s not to say that I don’t value friendship and keeping up with current events and improving my awareness of social and political and artistic issues, the things those sites are advertised as facilitating. It’s to say that I don’t think they facilitate them. I see people I know dealing with their accounts and profiles and sorting through messages and I know it would drive me out of my mind.

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St. Patrick, my friend, you’ve got a great big heart and are a legend in the bar. But I’ve never celebrated you, nor looked for excuses to get obliterated, and honestly I don’t know how many Irish people really want to be known for a holiday that stereotypes them as drunks. But a theme is needed, and March Madness isn’t going to be it. So let’s go green with a refresher course on the top Irish writers of all time. Yes, yes, go ahead and make a bracket if you can’t resist. Next check out some more recent examples of Irish fiction, and save money with one book – Joseph O’Connor has the latest Irish short story collection. Save even more money by swinging through DC and grabbing some of the 20,000 Irish books that are being given away. Last, a debate: should language be taught as literature? The Irish weigh in.

A little horse never killed anyone. A Clydesdale might kill if you get between him and his Budweiser, but a little horse never killed anyone.

Sometimes these horses, big or small (regardless of how much they have had to drink), find themselves in a little bag on a market shelf in northern Italy. And, as it turns out, they taste like beef jerky.

“A little lemon juice and some black pepper and buon appetito,” says Federico the farmer as he puts the stringy meat on my plate.

Farms are just as consumed with death as they are with life. Bags of horses in the refrigerator keep cool while the farmer breathes life into the soil and utters a prayer of sweat from his worn brow. No pity for the equine on ice, ready when you are to serve up the secondi.

Here is a poem I didn’t write. I wish I could tell Giovanni Pascoli that a bag of horse meat made me think about his poem.

Last Dream

By GIOVANNI PASCOLI

Out of a motionless infernal
shudder and clang of steel on steel
as wagons moved toward the eternal,
a sudden silence: I was healed.

The stormcloud of my sickness fled
on a breath. A flickering of eyes,
and I saw my mother by my bed
and gazed at her without surprise.

Free! Helpless, yes, to move the hands
clasped on my chest — but I had no
desire to move. The rustling sounds
(like cypress trees, like streams that flow

across vast prairies seeking seas
that don’t exist) were thin, insistent:
I followed after those vain sighs,
ever the same, ever more distant.