Stoic Kindness

Yesterday my mom brought the new issue of Poetry East to our Sunday afternoon poetry workshop. It's the Fall 2011 issue, Numbers 71, 72, & 73, containing art by Odilon Redon, and writing by George Herbert and Nathaniel Hawthorne, along with a whole bunch of contemporary poets, including my mom!

Her poem, "Tact," by Margaret Kirk, is on page 103. It was inspired by an incident in the McLean Museum of History, but it is the kind of thing any of us might have witnessed somewhere or had to handle ourselves, which, as my mom puts it, takes "stoic kindness."

She is my poetry "student" now, but I first learned about poetry from her, not to mention everything I know about stoic kindness. Thanks, Mom! And congratulations!

An extra delight is that a poem by Patricia McMillen, "Running Wild," is a couple pages away, and there's this poetry friend from Chicago running wild as a child (and a horse) in her front yard and in her imagination, becoming "a whole herd."

Further on, the poignant "Too Late," by Barry Silesky, a poetry friend and mentor. I learned about prose poetry from Barry. Favorites Michael Hettich and Lee Rossi are in there. Oh, and many more. I've only had the issue a few hours! There's a lot in it.

And my mom!

And that's my mom at Heartland Theatre, looking stoically kind in the play Eleemosynary, which means benevolence.