I heard the wings beat on the streets tonight

[sovay]

I went to Porter Square Books and bought the recent Penguin collection of Arthur Machen, The White People and Other Weird Stories. I drank herbal chai and read two stories out of S.T. Joshi's American Supernatural Tales (2013), which is for the record a beautifully designed hardcover. Tim Kendall's Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (2013) is the first such I've seen that includes female poets: Charlotte Mew, Mary Borden, Margaret Postgate Cole, May Wedderburn Cannan. I had heard of none of them beyond Mew and I wonder how many more I don't know about.

I walked home with my book when I ran out of chai. I met derspatchel for dinner at Hana Sushi and ate slightly more fish than I was expecting. (No regrets. More sushi should include both spicy salmon and chopped apple.) I want to watch Mark Gatiss' The Tractate Middoth (2013), but I can't find it anywhere online.

Frances Hardinge writes what she calls "Lovecraftian culinary fiction" (I thought it was more like ecology by Mervyn Peake). Daniel José Older writes about Lovecraft.

I want to know why I become ambitious only when I am too stupid to get anything done.

Comments

[alankria.livejournal.com]

...I was never told at school, at my all-girls school, that women wrote WW1 poetry too.

[sovay]

...I was never told at school, at my all-girls school, that women wrote WW1 poetry too.

I didn't think of war poets when I thought of Charlotte Mew. And yet she wrote poems like "The Cenotaph" and "May, 1915." There's nothing else to call that. Mary Borden was a nurse with the French Red Cross—excuse me, I mean she established and ran her own hospital on the Belgian front and then moved to follow the worst of the fighting, so that in 1916 she was running a hospital on the Somme. She wrote "At the Somme" there, as well as a semi-memoir called The Forbidden Zone that she couldn't publish until 1929 for censorship. (She also served in World War II.) Margaret Postgate Cole was a political activist—socialist, feminist—who wrote novels with her husband and taught Classics on her own. "The Falling Leaves" seems to be her most famous poem, but I was very struck by "Afterwards." May Wedderburn Cannan worked for the Red Cross and the War Office and lost her fiancé not in the fighting, but in the flu pandemic; she wrote "Lamplight." If you were a poet and lived through those times, I don't think you could not write about it. But women writing about war, of course, must be different.