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Stephanie Strickland: “Do I contradict myself?”

QUOTE: 

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

                                                 Song of Myself, 51 

 

INTRODUCTION:

 

In 9th grade I sat in a hospital room, waiting for surgery, browsing a small paperback.
Two lines from The Whitman Reader

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,

Enough to send me spinning, exhilarated . . .

I would no longer . . . justify . . . anything! Gender norms, or science and poetry
swirling together in my head, or being illogical or illegitimate or whatever they thought
I was—

 

Very well then

. . . now, it’s Your problem.

 

And the kicker, the parenthetic kicker  :  (I am LARGE, I contain MULTITUDES).

 

As do we all!

 

(I still have that 50¢ Reader, edited by Maxwell Geismar.)

 

Not isolates or linears or logics – time and again, and in so many ways, we proudly
contradict ourselves and keep moving!

 

Marsh Hawk Press Artistic Advisory Board

Sandy McIntosh, Publisher

Toi Derricotte
Denise Duhamel
Marilyn Hacker
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
David Lehman
Alicia Ostriker
David Shapiro
Anne Waldman
John Yau

In Memory of Marie Ponsot, Robert Creeley, Paul Pines, Allan Kornblum, Rochelle Ratner, Corinne Robins, Claudia Carlson and Harriet Zinnes. 

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Praise for Books

PAUL PINES: Charlotte Songs

The great themes—like Love, Death and Family— have inspired masterpieces and, alas, Hallmark Cards. In Charlotte Songs, Paul Pines celebrates his daughter. But, if you want the Hallmark Card version of fatherhood, you’ve come to the wrong place. Pines gives us the full paradox of living with his child as she grows from toddler to young woman. Inventive, humorous, baffling and poignant.

— Dalt Wonk
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