Ty Bouldin has been writing poetry and fiction since he graduated from high school in Charleston, West Virginia in 1965. He taught college-level English and humanities for 31 years before retiring in 2003. He and his wife live on a wooded 25 acre farm in West Virginia. The present book is his second to be published by Outskirts Press, the first a novel entitled Montani Semper... Snapshots from an Appalachian Family Album.
Miss Liberty's Monologue and Meditations
by Ty Bouldin
Miss Liberty's Monologue and Meditations
by Ty Bouldin
Published Dec 24, 2022
59 Pages
Genre: POETRY / American / General
Book Details
A message for 2022 from 1980....
Miss Liberty’s Monologue and Meditations presents seven poems from Miss Liberty’s Dreams, the second section of a longer poem entitled Carbuncle Resurrectrix: Antar, Miss Liberty, and the Prince of Pigs.
Miss Liberty is a long-term patient in a mental facility whose dreams and reflections are recorded by the book’s narrator, Artz Carbuncle. Through her vivid account of her life’s oppression, and the images of the world that nourish her determination to resist, the reader is provided a focus of reflection on some enduring issues of American social values. The poems excerpted here were originally drafted during the energy crisis of the late 1970's, when President Carter installed solar panels at the White House (later removed by President Reagan), calling the energy crisis 'the moral equivalent of war'. Carter thus became one of the first American politicians to urge the nation to begin serious efforts to conserve energy and assert some control over our extravagant consumer culture. The issues and images central to these poems illuminate certain aspects of our current situation and our nation's indulgent and abusive conception of Liberty. The longer narrative poems in the collection portray some of Miss Liberty's dreams, which recast in narrative terms her experience of the nation's history of male domination, misogyny, racism, intellectual vanity, and alienation from the natural world. However, one central sequence of the book provides Miss Liberty's 12 "images of meditation", short poems that are built up from sensory images; these are printed over full-color reproductions of watercolor paintings. The paintings in their forms and colors extend the ideas and feelings of the poems themselves, inviting the reader to reflect on the full implications of the words. Responsive readers will find themselves contemplating a wide range of concerns, engaging some of the most basic elements of our experience of the natural world and the troubled realm of human relations.
Book Excerpt
from Miss Liberty's Monologue
"Ah, Lump," she sighs, "Good old Lump,
Thicker than a toadfrog's wart."
She holds the popcan like a teacup
The easy grace of her arm
Falling away from a plump but delicate hand.
They play cards at a broken folding table
As attendants come and go through sunlight.
"We were not always so," she says in a distant voice,
Laying down an ace.
"How were we always?" he asks, a child again,
Begging the familiar story.
"In a rat's ass!" she snaps, spying suspected mockery.
"No. Really, Lib. You remember: I forget.
Forget, forgot, forgotten," and his crooked finger
Wipes his broad red nose.
She reaches, pats his arm, forgiving.
"Well..." and she gathers the cards to her:
I was Queen of the May
Before there were Queens, or Kings, or May:
Just flowers, muck, and beasties
Sweet with sweat and blood
And some strange salt-fragrance
Musty, warm, and un-named.
I was Queen of the May
And George and Ben and Tommy
Ran me up the pole like a flag with their names on it
And left me hanging there from the top of the pole
Kicking and laughing and crying and Queen.
They had their favorite toys, too:
Obedient lead soldiers, fire, pen-feathers…
But most of all they had me
Still proud, rowdy, and strong,
Still Queen after all those years.
They were shifty little bastards, too:
Changed the rules, roles at will.
Like once our Fierce Dog (I'd followed him, so still)
Was snuffling the mud at the cattle trough;
I sneaked – and when I pushed him in
He had to pretend to save his pride
He was in the water hunting – frogs, maybe?
Damn quick little things, snuff, snuff.
They were just like that dog
And switched the rules just that quick
But always seemed to come out on top, ya know?
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