Tag: poetry

Review Of My Book On Savvy Verse and Wit

Thank you so much Serena Agusto-Cox for this amazing review of my book! It really captures what the book is about. I wanted to pull one bit to quote here and it was really hard to do because every word is so spot on. I’ll just quote this:

“Inheritance of Aging Self by Lucinda Marshall is about the universal, solitary journey we all travel on. Don’t be mistaken, we are journeying with our past, present, and future side-by-side and no one can reconcile those facets of our selves but us. We must come to terms with all that we are and what remains, what we leave behind, how others will know us and remember us, and what pursuits will be of greatest importance in our waning years. That “Unicorn” is in the surf, it’s just out of reach unless we’re willing to believe and lunge forth toward it.”

As Serena notes, we workshop together, and have worked together in the poetry community in a number of ways. I’m proud to know her, and if you haven’t checked out her poetry as well as her book reviews and poetic book tours, you definitely should at savvyverseandwit.com.

I’ll be reading at Wilde Readings November 9th with Kristin Kowalski Ferragut

I am thrilled to be reading in person with the amazing Kristin Kowalski Ferragut at the November 9th Wilde Readings at the Columbia, MD Arts Center (6100 Foreland Garth, Columbia, MD 21045) at 7 pm, hosted by Ann Bracken.

Please note that,

“Registration for the in person event will be limited. All attendees must follow Columbia Art Center Covid protocols. We encourage attendees to participate in the open mic. Please prepare up to five minutes of performance time/two poems. Sign up when you arrive. Books by featured authors and open mic readers will be available for sale in person and via buying links posted online.”

To register or sign up for the open mic, please email WildeReadingsHoCo at gmail.com.

Poets vs The Pandemic Reading July 21rst

I will be reading along with Miles David Moore and Ann Bracken at the July 21rst Poets vs The Pandemic reading sponsored by Cafe Muse. The reading begins at 7 pm and will last for an hour. I’ll be sharing several poems from Inheritance Of Aging Self as well as a pandemic poem or 2 and some new work.

The readers were chosen based on all of us being poetry reading organizers, Ann is one of the organizers of the Wilde Readings in Columbia, MD and Miles was the force behind the long-running Iota readings in Arlington, VA, and I founded the DiVerse Gaithersburg (MD) reading. As I’m sure they will both agree, it is always fun to be the reader and not the organizer every now and again. Many thanks to Henry Crawford for all the work he has done to organize this series. Read more about MIles and Ann here.

The reading will be on zoom and you can register here for the link. It will also be available later on You Tube because as Henry pointed out in an email, one of the purposes of the series is to “document DC area poetry during the pandemic.” As a huge fan of documenting things, I’m so glad that they are doing this because our poetic voices during the pandemic are an important part of helping us to make sense of what we’ve all been through.

Come join us for a wonderful evening of poetry!

How I Chose the Title Of My Book

As I believe is the tradition, I chose “Inheritance Of Aging Self” as the title of my book through a process that involved auditioning 556 different options (by auditioning I mean throwing darts at them and playing eenie meenie miney mo), meditated, consuming substances that I shouldn’t have, and enduring months of angst and sleepless nights.

Despite that unfortunate process, I think the title of this volume is a good descriptor of what’s inside the cover. It is also the title of one of the poems which is based on a conversation that I had with my mother a few years before she passed. I was visiting with her and we were getting ready to go out. She was taking awhile and I went to check on her and found her in front of her vanity brushing her hair and staring at the mirror. I asked her if everything was okay and she threw down the brush and angrily told me, “I do not know this old lady”.

She had developed some memory issues over the years and when she said that, I was badly panicked that she had just taken some precipitous leap further down that path. Cautiously I asked her what she meant. Her reply was one of the most righteous rants ever about how she still expected to see her sixteen year old self when she looked in the mirror. When she saw her elder self instead, it was like seeing her grandmother and that pissed her off! So we spent a few minutes shouting out all the things that pissed us off about growing older and we both felt much better and went on about our day. That conversation inspired the title poem as well as another poem in the collection, “Mirror Image”.

Here is the title poem as it was displayed recently in the Maryland State Arts Council’s “Identity” exhibition.