[Julie Steiner]

It's wonderful that so many are helping to keep interest in Maz's work alive as the third anniversary of her funeral approaches.

One of the silver linings of the family medical situation that's kept me off Eratosphere for the past year is this: I've been able to redirect my obsessive energy away from the hospital by focusing on Maz's work.

I've been organizing this chronologically within major topics (Ars Poetica, War, et al.). When a particular poem was posted on several different poetry forums, I've made editorial choices from among all the variant versions. I've added the textual changes that Margaret indicated farther down in discussion threads; she often didn't go back to amend the original post, and these were missed in the first edition. I've also wrestled with what to do with certain context-dependent poems--silly contributions to poetic potlucks, irreverent zingers to lighten the mood of arguments, even a few tongue-in-cheek examples of What Not To Do in a Poem--which suffer badly when presented side-by-side with her serious work...but which also show an important part of her personality, which should surely be represented in some way. As she once said:

-----
Date: Sun, 19 May 2002 20:36:21 +0100
From: grasshopper
To: The Pennine Poetry Works

I don't think poetry is always ‘the expression of real and powerful emotions’, by the way. That seems like stereotyping poetry to me. A poem can be, for instance, an epigram, a jeu, a joyful playing with words. I think those are equally valid forms of poetry.
Kind regards,
grasshopper

-----

On the other hand, she also said:

-----
Eratosphere: The Discerning Eye -- Opinions & Criticism
Post by grasshopper, 05-07-2008, 09:34 PM

[Discussing "Breakfast Song," which Lloyd Schwartz furtively copied from Elizabeth Bishop's (now-missing) notebook in 1978, and published in 2002 when he co-edited Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters.]

This reads to me like a little ditty, the type that poets produce like doodles. I think she'd be embarrassed to know it had been published.
Regards, Maz

-----

I agree that a slimmer "selected poems" from a mainstream publisher is needed to promote Margaret's work beyond her existing fans. Personally, I am only interested in revising the collected works (first refusal of which I will offer gratis to Arrowhead Press, subject to the approval of Maz's estate, of course). But I fervently hope that any selection of Margaret's work will take advantage of these newly-edited versions of the poems, and especially of several new poems--some of them published in UK magazines (print and online)--which have turned up since the January 2011 publication of Grasshopper.

In short, reprint permissions for Maz's poems are still secured through Arrowhead Press, but anyone interested in doing a selected might also want to check with Rose Kelleher or me. (I've been backing up my work in a private part of her archives in case I'm unavailable for an extended period.)

I've also been compiling Margaret's extant prose, which I hope Margaret's estate will grant permission to publish either as magazine articles, or in book format, or both. The wit and wisdom of her ars poetica statements and views of life in general, as expressed in critiques of others' poems and in topical musings (particularly about war and sexuality), have the potential to be enormously influential.

And wonderfully entertaining at times. Which is why I kept returning to this project during some of the darkest days of my life. One example:

-----
Eratosphere: General Talk
Post by grasshopper, 10-14-2006, 05:38 PM

[Responding to banter, debating whether a temporarily banned Eratosphere member was in Limbo or Purgatory]

The only kind of Limbo that I've experienced is a dance that involves bending over backwards and trying to keep going as the bar is progressively lowered--I think it's a pretty good metaphor for trying to maintain one's equilibrium in a workshop.
Regards, Maz

-----

Gotta love that Maz....

Cheers,
Julie Stoner