Commonplacing

Some links for reading and a poem for the week:

This winter has had daily visits from flocks of redpolls and crossbills—birds that are both ‘common’ and yet their arrival depends upon the cycles of birch and spruce—interspecies relationships happening all around us.

A new book explores the women writers of Shakespeare’s time, which I devoured. Woolf could not have known of these women’s work when she wrote about the fictional sister of Shakespeare in A Room of One’s Own—because the works were never reprinted from their original publication until the twentieth century.

Aphra Behn, believed to be the first woman to make a living from her writing in early modern England—was also, like Christopher Marlowe before her, a spy.

A heartbreaking story of Victoria Benedictsson, a writer who found, after breaking free of an oppressive marriage, some success in gender-bending and living a more bohemian life in fin-de-siècle Scandinavia—and yet is now most known for becoming a character in a man’s story.

Another example of how epistolary friendships among women writers supported their creative work.

The very complicated history of Meyer lemons (including the history of ‘plant explorers,’ disease, and culinary influencing).

And more poems from Edith Södergran:

Vierge Moderne
I am no woman. I am a neuter.
I am a child, a page-boy, and a bold decision,
I am a laughing streak of scarlet sun...
I am a net for all voracious fish,
I am a toast to every woman's honor,
I am a step toward luck and toward ruin,
I am a leap in freedom and the self...
I am the whisper of desire in a man's ear,
I am the soul's shivering, the slesh's longing
                                                  and denial,
I am an entry sign to new paradises.
I am a flame, searching and brave,
I am water, deep yet bold only to the knees,
I am fire and water, honestly combined,
                                                  on free terms...

The Bride
My circle is narrow and the ring of my thoughts
goes round my finger.
There lies something warm at the base of all
                                           strangeness around me,
like the vague scent in the water lily's cup.
Thousands of apples hang in my father's garden,
round and completed in themselves—
my uncertain life turned out this way too,
shaped, rounded, buldging and smooth and 
                                                 —simple.
Narrow is my circle and the ring of my thoughts
goes round my finger.

(translated by Stina Katchadourian)

the jaunty redpoll….