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Jeanne Marie collaborated with artist Judy Levine to create a broadside titled “Memorykeeper” for Art in Common Places, a program in Sarasota, FL that installs art in public places so people can encounter it in their daily lives. Visual artists work with poets to create original works that are printed on posters and postcards and placed throughout the community. Read more about the program here.
Broadside installed in a Sarasota, FL, YMCA, one of several AICP locations.
Jeanne Marie took the Millay Poetry Challenge and recited one of her favorite Millay sonnets, “And you as well must die, beloved dust.” Her recording, along with those of other participants, is available here, on the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society YouTube Channel and other platforms.
Jeanne Marie’s poem “Good Nothing and Good Night” appears in the new anthology A Constellation of Kisses, edited by Diane Lockward (Terrapin Books, 2019).
An ensemble of four playing multiple roles, along with a central, emerging puppet, move fluidly in time to depict the story of Anna K., a young Slovakian immigrant, whose fate has been kept secret by her family for eight decades. As her adult granddaughter begins to dig into historical records, she must defy the family code of silence to liberate her grandmother from obscurity and stigma and find a path toward empathic understanding. Focusing on Anna’s final days in a state mental asylum in 1927, this multi-media production presents the heartbreaking reality of being a non-English speaking woman confined to an institution after one traumatic episode. By interweaving stark clinical observations drawn from Anna’s actual case record with a poetic lyrical voice, flesh and blood are conjured back on to the family skeleton. As the mystery of Anna’s life is illuminated, the need to acknowledge sad, difficult truths is met with the capacity to finally love, mourn, and embrace her.
Jeanne Marie’s essay “The Speaker in This Case: Anne Sexton as Tale-Teller in Transformations” in This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton, edited by Amanda Golden, is now available in paperback. Read a review of This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton from American Literary History.
Jeanne Marie’s poem “Portrait with Closed Eyes” appears as a model poem in the new craft book by Diane Lockward The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics.
