A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings

by Eloise Klein Healy

Overview

A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings is Eloise Klein Healy’s seventh book of poetry and the first that includes an audio component. Included are poems from all her previous collections, including her award-winning first collection, Building Some Changes, as well as Artemis In Echo Park and The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho. Healy’s work is immediately recognizable as poetry written by a woman under the influence of feminism, freeway traffic, wilderness (especially in the city), and a uniquely tuned sense of craft. Her work travels easily across time zones, mythologies, the politics of love, and the inevitable loss of family and friends. She searches for a lesbian tradition in literature, lamenting the erasure of lesbian writers and the fragmented history of their work. But Healy’s poetry is not without humor, nor does it shy away from such topics as baseball and the companionship of canines. Like life, poetry to her is “a wild surmise”—never totally translatable, but always worth the attempt.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597097598
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	03/01/2013
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	248
Sales rank:	323,445
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Eloise Klein Healy is the author of six previous books of poetry and three spoken word recordings. She was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles where she is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita. Healy directed the Women’s Studies Program at California State University Northridge and taught in the Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. She is the founding editor of Arktoi Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press specializing in the work of lesbian authors. A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings is her seventh book of poems.

Table of Contents

Foreword Alicia Ostriker 19

from Building Some Changes 1976

Furnishing 27

Storing Things 31

Minor Leagues 32

Los Angeles 33

The Pope at 7:00 P.M. 34

Please Forgive Me 36

Reading While Having a Sprained Back 37

Snow Pack Café 38

My Knees in a Love Poem 39

What Is Being Forgotten 40

from A Packet Beating Like a Heart 1981

After the Last Call Home 43

I Live in the City of Los Angeles 46

Dark 48

A Mile Out of Town 49

This Darknight Speed 52

A Packet Beating Like a Heart 54

Wisdom or the Hungry Thing 56

My Love Wants to Park 59

Driven to Meet You in Rainy Weather 60

Entries: L.A. Log 62

I Spent the Day with You 64

The Words "Begin Again" 66

Oh My Emotions These Days 68

from Ordinary Wisdom 1981

Dividing the Fields 71

Exhalation 72

Standing Up, Looking In 73

Water 74

To Speak for Human Feelings 75

from Artemis in Echo Park 1991

Artemis in Echo Park 79

The Real Bears Have Gone North 80

The Valley of the Amazons 81

I Live Where I Live 82

Toltecs 83

The City Beneath the City 84

The Peahens 86

Artemis 87

This Place Named for Califia 88

Up to Topanga 89

Another Poet Writes About Love 90

Cactus 91

What It Was Like the Night Cary Grant Died 92

Changing the Oil 94

Moon on the Porch 95

The Concepts of Integrity and Closure in Poetry as I Believe They Relate to Sappho 96

Wild Mothers 99

This Art, Your Life 100

from Women's Studies Chronicles 1998

Intro to Women's Studies 105

Student Evaluation of Intro to Women's Studies 107

The Test 108

Asking for an Incomplete 110

To Peter in Germany 111

from Passing 2002

Living Here Now 117

Los Angeles Is a Virgo 118

Latin from the Mass 121

The Beach at Sunset 124

Postcard 126

Asking About You 129

Louganis 130

Torn Open 132

Suite for Young Man Dying 136

Where I Come From 141

Changing What We Mean 142

From Los Angeles Looking South 144

Passing 146

from The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho 2007

Audacious 149

Hardscape 150

The Grackle on the Lawn 151

Wind in Mytilene 152

The Living Fragments 153

The Singing School 154

Tutelage 156

Why I Call on Artemis, Not Aphrodite 157

My Mothers 158

The Day After Meeting Her 160

Sappho, You Must Have Had a Mother 162

If There Were No Books 163

Love Poem from Afar 164

So the Teacher Jumped Up on the Desk 166

Working Towards Sappho 168

Not Disappearing 172

When Did a Self Begin? 174

New Poems: A Wild Surmise

A Wild Surmise 187

Fragments of a Grecian Urn 189

Big Dog Photo 190

Calling Upon the Saints Including Titanium 192

At the Altar of the Peregrine 194

Persephone and Demeter 195

Mr. Twister 196

Memorize This 197

The Summer She Died 198

Oh, Dr. Surgeon 199

Looking Up at the Ceiling 200

The Arborist 202

After Seeing the Hockney Retrospective 203

It Didn't Seem Dangerous 204

Redeemed 206

The Warring States Period 209

Selling My Mother's House 212

The Last Breakup 214

Since You Asked 217

Shrine and Ashes 218

Wáng Wéi Did Not Paint a Fire 220

The Motion Picture Retirement Home, Two East: What Is She Reading? 222

La Brea 223

What Marries You 224

Escucha, Mi Vida 226

This Next Attempt Will Be Meta-poetical 228

What Does Death Want from Me? 231

American Jisei 232

Spitball 234

And Having Broken into Blossom 235

True Love 236

Index of Poems 239

Editorial Reviews

 “What a delight it is to have gathered here these poems from previous collections—as well as new poems—from a poet I have admired for years. Eloise Klein Healy’s straightforward and wry wit underscores her wisdom and the peacefulness that comes from a deeply humane emotional and intellectual knowledge. A Wild Surmise touches on so many things with such clarity and precision it’s like having a handbook to guide us through the world.”
—Natasha Trethewey

 “Why do I love Eloise’s poetry? Because it is so rooted in her love of LA, and other sacred places only Eloise would know. She celebrates so lovingly the sensual bodies of neighborhood, cars, beach, freeway, lover, creature—she places us all the way into the life cycles of reality. This collection is witty, sensual, full of sagacity and surprise, exquisitely beautiful. Fine poetry to be read again and again.”
—Judy Grahn

 “I first read Eloise Klein Healy’s wonderful and deceptively simple poem ‘What Is Being Forgotten’ sometime in the seventies, and I am happy to say that I never forgot. That unassuming lyric built on itself over the years—as did its speaker, living and forging this beguiling collection of poems as lyrics that still work with simple but which turn simplicity around in the hand, showing us the intimacy of all its sides, wild included. ‘I didn’t need saving,/just revising,’ says the speaker in one poem. This is sacred, discovered ground, and I am happy to share in the hold of what is being remembered.”      
—Alberto Ríos

 “A Wild Surmise is full of appreciation for the physical—from the freeways of LA and ball bearings pouring into a pan to the sun smell of her dog’s fur. From chili-flakes in a shaker to Greek scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. And through these vivid moments we are given glimpses into the life of a lesbian poet and the culture in which she wrote beginning in the 70s and continuing to the present. Reading Eloise Klein Healy’s New & Selected Poems is like sitting down with a dear friend with a strong cup of tea or a glass of wine and being given the gift of a deep and generous sharing.”
—Ellen Bass

“A Wild Surmise shows Healy to be a disciplined, polished poet with a vision that's unfailingly open and generous. As Healy cares for the people close to her, or mourns them, her emotions take residence in the city's natural and built environments, landscapes that feel at once exotic and familiar, cruel and welcoming.”
—The Los Angeles Times

“How to let a reader know the way Healy can, in one volume, capture the verve and essence of Los Angeles, the history and cultural legacy of Sappho, and the vital dichotomy of love and mortality, while still leaving room to write about her dogs? Like this, I suppose: read this book. It’s worth it.”
—Lambda Literary Review

From the Publisher