Monday, 11:00 a.m.
Susan McLean teaches literature and composition at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall; she has won a McKnight Artist Fellowship/Loft Award in Poetry, and have twice been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. She likes to write a formal kind of poem and she has a sense of humor.
"The trick is not to say but to suggest," she read.
Speaking of a coat - "no mere comfort could prevail upon me to give it up...."
"I should have known," she read, "nothing crushes like a rolling stone...."
"I should have known that demon-loves had demons of their own."
"I'd say to Death, 'Take Shakespeare, leave my friend....'"
She spoke of someone "sick of solitaire and dying for a dance...."
"Living on cold cuts," she said, "is not a dream come true...."
Eurydice would tell us "Never love a musician," McLean thinks. "There is no art less human than music...."
She thinks Lesbia would reply to Catullus: "A married woman hopes to find a man who doesn't speak his mind...."
"Nakedness is the best disguise," she read. "Surrender can conceal betrayal...."
"For everyone who wins," McLean read, "a hundred lose, and the ones who never win are keeping score...."
"Money would rather have its artists dead," she read.
"Poetry is promiscuous," she said. "It puts out for anyone who would read."
From "Fat Sally's Blues:"
"A skinny girl's got ice cubes in her soul.
She'll give you half, never give you whole...."
"You can share my biscuits," Fat Sally sings. "Pass the honey."
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