Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Sister Chronicles and Other Poems
    The Sister Chronicles and Other Poems
    The Sister Chronicles and Other Poems
    Ebook175 pages1 hour

    The Sister Chronicles and Other Poems

    By Joyce Nower

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    I arrived at San Diego State University (then State College ) in 1969 and so was present at the creation and watched the events described in Joyce Nowers The Sister Chronicles unfold. Nower examines and evokes the creation of the first Womens Studies program in the nation with a remarkable intertextual weaving of prose and rather formal verse And so the reconstruction of history to include her story began, and you will find the triumphs and setbacks, the exhilaration and disappointment, the hope and the struggle of those days powerfully recalled on these pages. Nower even has the audacity to turn bureaucratic academic procedures into poetry.

    Fred Moramarco, poet and editor of Poetry International

    [The] Sister Chronicles (sharp title) about the formation of the first womens studies in the USA is entirely original. The prose is nicely paced, but its the poetry that charms this reader, with its lyrical, musical voice, its mix of sassy, down home, traditional and erudite, witty and playful voices (Dido Did It), the somber beauty of On the Path to Athena Proneia, The Danaids . The poems connect smoothly to the narration. The poems that reflect the physical world in San Diego, birds, flora, the back country of the hunterthose Sloan Canyon Songsare strong I like the witty rhymes The Meditation on the Maelstrom seems an excellent last poem and lands on an affirming note .I am grateful to know about the mystic, pagan, fourth-century BC mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria. These sonnets, with their no-nonsense earthy language delighted me. Jericho Again and Again sets a philosophical mode into motion. After the fires, the blood of Hypatia, it offers a quieter tone. I especially like #7 Childhoods Globe of Light, the pleasure of the rhymed couplets.

    Colette Inez, poet (The Woman Who Loved Worms, Alive and Taking Names)

    Writing in the tradition of the Iliad and Odyssey , Joyce Nower charts the stormy waters of the Sixties. Her luminous poetry breaks over the shoals of the past, bringing calm at last. The Sister Chronicles is a tour de force of history and literature.

    Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, historian
    (All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the 1960s)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateFeb 17, 2012
    ISBN9781469738734
    The Sister Chronicles and Other Poems
    Author

    Joyce Nower

    Joyce Nower (1932-2010) received a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College, an MA from Harvard University and a PhD from the Union Institute in the sociology of art. She is the author of three other volumes of poetry and of numerous poems and articles published in a variety of journals. She had retired from teaching literature and writing at San Diego State University and had made her home with a husband and children in La Mesa, California.

    Related to The Sister Chronicles and Other Poems

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Refracting History | Stories In Digital And Print

      Mar 4, 2021

      British Columbia’s history is told through multiple lenses. We must seek out diverse perspectives, continually reframe the ways in which we understand the past, and carefully choose formats for sharing stories. Should a particular story be told in pr

      6 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Jul 15, 2021

      Reviews
      6 min read

    • Article

      Testaments Of Youth

      Mar 9, 2022

      The majority of adults believe they become better people as they grow older. So said the Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter, in his excellent study The Seven Sins of Memory (2001). But that process, he adds, requires us to mark down our younger sel

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Allure of Messy Reddit Stories

      Mar 19, 2023

      Jerusalem Demsas’s culture and entertainment picks include Children of Time, Vampire Weekend, and chasing down stories people tell—or make up—on Reddit.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Books With The Most Impact

      Dec 4, 2021

      Books With The Most Impact
      7 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Day, Würger, Owuor, and More

      Mar 12, 2019

      Hot off the presses this week, three debuts, two much-welcomed sophomore efforts, and a memoir drawing comparisons to 'H Is for Hawk.' The post Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Day, Würger, Owuor, and More appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      On Travel Writing

      May 26, 2020

      On Travel Writing
      7 min read

    • Article

      New Titles

      Dec 12, 2018

      By George Keithley George Braziller, Inc. “The Donner Party is one of the three or four finest book-length American poems ever written.”—Poetry. “Out of the western migration of the 1840s…Keithley has made a lean, taut narrative poem that moves with

      6 min read

    • Article

      Body Language

      Aug 14, 2019

      Body Language
      5 min read

    • Article

      Lives Of The Great Occultists

      Sep 10, 2020

      Personally, I blame that Aleister Crowley. If my memory serves me well (which, these days, it seldom does), Hunt Emerson and I more or less drifted into creating ‘Lives of the Great Occultists’ after I told him a couple of my favourite yarns about th

      7 min read

    • Article

      What’s the Story?

      Mar 27, 2018

      OF THE MORE THAN one dozen books I have researched and written, the project that made the biggest impact on me, personally, took place over a six-year period beginning in the mid-1980s, during which I immersed myself in the world’s largest organ tran

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Sister Chronicles and Other Poems

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Sister Chronicles and Other Poems - Joyce Nower

      FORWARD

      The nineteen-sixties and-seventies were years of great turmoil andchange in our country. Behind the purple haze of loosening lifestyles,great political and personal struggles were being waged. Dominantamong them was the anti-war movement and what one might callthe empowerment struggles, including the quest for civil and humanrights—spanning the spectrum from Martin Luther King, Jr. andCesar Chavez to Malcolm X and the Black Panthers—educationalreform, and the all-encompassing Women’s Movement.

      Joyce Nower (1932-2010) was a passionate participant and leader inmost of these outcries for a better world. Most importantly, she wasa co-founder of the first Women’s Studies Department in the UnitedStates, and perhaps the world, at San Diego State University in1970. Sister Chronicles, the title poem which constitutes Part IV ofthis book, is actually a series of poems that deal with this momentousevent in the history of women’s struggles for equal rights.

      The sailing, however, was anything but smooth. One would haveexpected the tragi-comic opposition by the older conservativefaculty—thankfully, two vice-presidents and two deans provedsympathetic and helpful—but what hurt were the strident attacksand accusations (a friend referred to them as intra-movementcannibalism) by sisters from the left, whoyelled sellouts,cooptation, elitism, and so on, their rhetoric sadly similar to thatof the Reign of Terror which accompanied the French Revolution.At one point they even succeeded in taking over the department andalmost ran it into the ground before a competent scholar was hired tochair and rebuild the department.

      It all started when Joyce, a San Diego State instructor, met a studentactivist, Carol Rowell (now Council). They had both been engagedin a variety of activities but realized after a few conversations that,somehow, feminism had always been kept in the background. Theyconvened a consciousness-raising rap group composed of students

      plus Joyce. After much painful sharing of personal experienceswith sexism—at home, at school, in society in general, and evenwithin the progressive movements they were a part of—someonesaid, OK, my consciousness has been raised enough for now, andI am tired of belly-aching! What do we do? They proceeded togive substance to the feminist dictum: The Personal Is Political.

      They came up with the then novel idea of a women’s center thatwould meet the personal, educational, cultural and employmentneeds of women that were not adequately, if at all, provided for byour patriarchal society. Being part of the academy, they conceivedof a center that would straddle the campus and the community.They named it the Center for Women’s Studies and Services(CWSS) and used their contacts, on and off campus, to procureseed funds for the project. They divided the Center into functionalunits they called components: a Storefront in downtown SanDiego to help women with employment and training; a CulturalComponent that, among other things, mounted an annualWomen’s Arts Festival across five floors of the Love libraryand brought in artists from around the country; a PublicationsComponent that published a nationally distributed newspaper,The Longest Revolution, as well as, under Joyce’s editorship,one of the first anthologies of women’s poetry; a CounselingComponent that developed innovative feminist counseling andprovided an Underground Railroad for women who neededto get away from violent husbands or boyfriends, and set upSisterhood Chapters in women’s correctional institutions and onother campuses; and finally, the Education Component dedicated,among other educational endeavors, to establishing a Women’sStudies department at SDSU (see pp 75-115, esp. pp 103 on).

      When asked to describe her poetic voice, Joyce said that in eachpoem she strove to find the voice and technique appropriate tothe poem, thus giving the subject matter primacy over form. Shewas fond of the comment by George Bernard Shaw that art forart’s sake was a luxury of the privileged. Thus, you will find inthis volume couplets as well as free verse, sonnets as well as a mixof prose and poetry, as is the case in Part IV. The latter technique

      — although it seemed strange to some early readers of the poem

      — goes at least as far back as Dante’s La Vita Nuova and, morerecently, the work of the poet H.D.

      Part IV is clearly the heart of the book. Parts I, II, and III giveus the social, political, historic and personal background that ledto Joyce’s passionate commitment to progressive change in thesefour dimensions of the human saga. They reveal without anyself-consciousness her deep scholarship as well as her talent forbringing together effortlessly relevant insights from antiquity tothe present age.

      The final two parts are a deep sigh after a great effort, a GoodBye to All That. They are a return to her other passions: nature,family, beauty, writing, teaching, and martial arts. They speak forthemselves.

      Image347.JPG

      JERICHO AGAIN

      AND AGAIN

      The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water; and breeds reptiles of the mind. -Blake

      1. The Psychic Status Quo

      Go to any city and you’ll find

      the conquered, immigrants, the down and outs,

      the poor, the rich, the homeless on the ramps,

      in fact, the way it is, and in the mind,

      its rough draft, a way to feel, to see,

      to be, a psychic status quo set up

      by border streets and chain link fence, a free-

      way cutting through, a railroad track—

      fixed mind unable to shake loose of it,

      even if it sees its opposite,

      hard put to shift gears in one short life,

      where justice isn’t often politic,

      where justice never is just at the start,

      but, if at all, at the end, quixotic

      bursts of splendid snatches of song at least,

      the piper weaving in and out among

      the clink of glasses, raucous laughter, chat,

      the notes hard to hear above the feast.

      2. The Gold Spoon, the Taste of Dust

      Or say a town springs up close by a stream

      bending seaward, or on land once dense

      with oak or birch or elm. If it becomes

      a traveled crossroads and then is fenced

      off in sections based on this trade, that skill,

      the flats and hills where haves and have-nots live

      (often the gold spoon, the taste of dust,

      no matter character or wit or will)

      will stand as right in unreflective mind.

      That’s the way it is. After all,

      CEO’s, judges, kings, presidents,

      signal for day to start, for night to fall,

      for tanks to roll, and guns be raised, to tout

      the panoplies of power, the rest of us

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1