Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair i, Kashiana Singh and (Nelson) Howard Miller.

In retrospect, love poems, as such, are not a form we have covered much in this series. Today’s poem is an unusual one. Like the earlier example from Ladan Osman, this is also a prose poem, though on a lighter subject. It might be more accurately classified as an infatuation poem. Maybe a serious infatuation poem. Not a serious poem, a seriously infatuated poem.

As a slight tangent, I would comment that over the past year of pandemic, where so many have been isolated in their homes, nesting tendencies have been magnified: people have obsessed over pets, plants, and all aspects of their homes and immediate surroundings. Including food, of course, but foodie culture has been on the upswing for most of the last two decades. Cable TV has popularized what was, in the past, either a highly specialized, or highly pretentious vocabulary. And speaking of tangents, yes, today’s poet takes that vocabulary, that lexicon, in a whole new direction.

One of the things I like best about doing this series, is it gives me the opportunity to learn about new poets. Or at least, new to me. I often realize, as in the case of today’s poet Yolanda Wisher, that I should have known about them already.  Born in 1976, she is a poet, educator, spoken word performer, and lead singer for the band Yolanda Wisher and the Big Fixx. She is currently the Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, and you can learn more about her, hear her singing, and listen to her performing some of her poems on her website, http://yolandawisher.com

I’m not going to read today’s poem out loud for reasons that will be obvious when you hear her. It’s far better coming from her as a performance piece. I’ll just comment for the movie aficionados out there, that if  Georgia Byrd in the remake of Last Holiday could have said what she was thinking about Sean Matthews out loud, this would be the script.

It’s called sonnet w / cooking lexicon, and while it has a few sonnet structural elements, but is essentially a prose poem in 14 lines.

So I’m going to send you to Yolanda Wisher’s website. Go to the Gallery page and hear her sing, and then tab to the right a few times in the gallery until you see her standing on a darkened stage at BIF2018. It is well worth your time to listen. There is also a link directly to her reading in the text.

http://www.yolandawisher.com/gallery/2018/10/2/yolanda-wisher-a-poet-of-people-and-place

As a treat tomorrow, if all goes well, instead of me you’ll be hearing the first of this year’s pieces from Kashiana Singh. Always a voice worth listening to. I hope you’re enjoying the series. If you are, please share the link on social media.

Thanks for Listening

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