“Binary,” “Several Months Before You Were Born, I Married a Man Who Wasn’t Your Father,” and “Woman Finds Her Face” by Lois Marie Harrod, appeared in Issue 30 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about “… I Married a Man Who Wasn’t Your Father.”
As the epigraph says, the title of this poem is the title of Lynden Cline’s sculpture which is located at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ. The sculpture itself is a bird cage. Inside there is a solitary lightbulb on a cord, a little table and three chairs, one of them overturned. I fell in love with the title of this sculpture and imagined a woman telling her daughter about the child’s preacher father whom the mother didn’t marry. Religion is a great seducer, but though my Dad was a preacher, this poem is not autobiographical.
What was the most difficult in writing that poem?
Bits of this poem had been around for some time, and Lynden Cline’s sculpture provided a voice to talk about what was orginally a poem about my father’s Rube Goldberg fixes and those bits.
Recommend a book for us?
I enjoyed Salman Rushdie’s Quixotte, which is a father-son road trip as well as a satire of our druggie high-tech culture. My reading group, though, hated it.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
In this case, Salman Rushdie. I’d ask him to compare his exile in Great Britain to the isolation of us all by the Covid Pandemic.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I write just about every morning, so I am working poem by poem. My latest book Spat appears in May 2021, so I imagine I will discover what I am working on next.
Our thanks to Lois for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “Binary,” “Several Months Before You Were Born, I Married a Man Who Wasn’t Your Father,” and “Woman Finds Her Face” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/three-poems-by-lois-marie-harrod.
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Lois Marie Harrod’s Spat was published in May 2021. Her 17th collection Woman won the 2020 Blue Lyra Blue Lyra Prize. Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 (Five Oaks); her chapbook And She Took the Heart, in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemeis and How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. A Dodge poet, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. Online link: www.loismarieharrod.org