[Mary Meriam]

Have you ever spent your life out on a limb, then suddenly find your friend was there with you all along? That’s how I felt when I read the essay Rita Mae Reese contributed to my new post at Ms., on Charlotte Mew. Also in this series: t'ai freedom ford (Black-Ass Sonnets!), Vi Khi Nao, Naomi Replansky, and an interview in which R. Nemo Hill asks me questions that I answer in rhymed couplets.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Excellent, Memsy!

In the second link, I can't find the interview with Nemo and your rhyming couplets! What am I missing?!?!?!?

[Mary Meriam]

Here's the linkum, Dinkum:
https://msmagazine.com/2020/04/01/sa...gorgeous-rage/

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Utterly WOW. Gob-smacked! That is astonishing, Mems! I mean, the questions are good, and Nemo's questions are the GREATEST. But your answers???? Utterly WOW!!!!!

[Mary Meriam]

Thanks, Cally!! I loved Nemo's questions. They revved up my formal engine. It was like having prompts - I wrote all the answers so fast - seems like it took about an hour.

[Mark McDonnell]

I’ll just say what I said before. Wow.

This is really amazing. I was literally trembling, as I read the questions, in anticipation of the next response. By the end, I’d almost forgotten that you —human Mary — don’t actually speak in IP rhyming couplets as a matter of course. You became, in my imagination, this wise mythological figure who converses calmly in verse. I feel like I’ve seen your heart in these answer poems and it’s a real privilege.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Hear, hear.

Nemo

[Jim Moonan]

x
Yuppers to all that. Sublime interview.
x
x

[Mary Meriam]

You guys! Thanks. It turns out that doing these posts at Ms. can be quite moving. I was moved by the interview questions, and even more moved by Rita Mae's weaving together of the first parts of the post, with her story and Mew's story, and how it all relates to suicide and lesbian poets. Don't erase lesbian poets.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Super cool! Really.