Craft: Mary Leader
Due to a Substack glitch, yesterday’s post and today’s post were not sent out at the scheduled times. My apologies!
Mary Leader (b. 1948) is a poet a lawyer. She was the Assistant Attorney General for Oklahoma. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College and her first book, Red Signature, was picked by Deborah Digges for the National Poetry Series in 1997. Subsequent books are: The Penultimate Suitor, She Lives There Still, Beyond the Fire, and The Distaff Side.
Her poems excel in inventive forms that expand both narrative and lyric modes of poetry, emphasize the purposefulness of what Coleridge called “organic form” and her forms themselves are sites for self-inquiry (not unlike poems by Elizabeth Bishop).
Leader is especially attuned to a poem’s vision, and her language seems to serve as a medium for something ancient, lost in voices of women in particular, of ritual, and of making art. In poem after poem there is a restless, endlessly creative mind.
Leader’s poems use all the typographical information and space available to her, in addition to language:
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