Steve Mentz

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Three Poems in Blood & Bourbon #8 “Grace”

June 4, 2021 by Steve Mentz

My sourdough has been writing poems. Over the 400+ days of pandemic mostly-isolation out of which we’re just now emerging, I’ve neither learned to bake bread nor, despite downloading an app, to identify the songs of my local birds. But I have written somewhere north of 200 new poems.

This week I’ve had the a trio of those poems published in the Toronto-based literary magazine Blood & Bourbon. I’m especially pleased because when I submitted I didn’t mention my half-shelf of academic and para-academic books, but instead described myself as a writer who lives on the Connecticut Shoreline. Will I develop a new literary persona as coastal poet? Hard to say – the poems are about swimming, living with the nonhuman, and environmental connections. I’m not sure it’s all that different from my other writing! Fewer footnotes, I suppose.

But it’s fun to have a new creative outlet and to practice something creative on an almost-daily basis. I hope, over time, try to publish some more of these many poems, or maybe new ones, or maybe I’ll figure out a new way to cross-involve my critical and poetic voices.

Thanks to Raya Morrison, the editor of Blood & Bourbon, and to the members of the Sonnet Corona group on Facebook, especially Shannon Garner , Art Zilleruelo, and Maureen Daniels, for the encouragement.

The three poems in the current issue of Blood & Bourbon are “Of Thirteen Minds,” about swimming past a flght of cormorants sunning themselves on Whale Rock last summer; “Sea Music,” about an especially noisy corner of the surf in Negril, Jamaica; and “Soiled Poem,” which is mostly about the garden and my back yard. Here’s a image of the last one. You should buy a copy of the issue!

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About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
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