Sherry Chandler

Mixing history, feminism, and poetry

A delight in yesterday’s mailbox: my copy of Joanie DiMartino’s Finishing Line Chapbook Licking the Spoon.

It’s a lovely book, as are all the Finishing Line products, and it’s filled with poems that I consider old friends.

I can make no pretense of giving an objective review of this chapbook, because, as members of the poetry collective Mosaic, Joanie and I have had a seven-year working relationship. I’ve known many of these poems from their birth, and Joanie’s intelligence and craft have been a constant inspiration and challenge.

In her professional life, Joanie is a public historian. As director of adult programs at the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History, she created many opportunities for Kentuckians to explore their cultural heritage. It is her interest in women’s history — herstory — that informs most of the 21 poems in Licking the Spoon.

As you might infer from the title, Joanie is particularly interested in the way women have defined themselves through food and food preparation. To quote James Baker Hall in his cover blurb: The intelligence at work in this perfectly-titled volume opens domesticity out into history, lifts facts up into music.

A year or so ago, Joanie grabbed an opportunity to “go home” to Mystic Seaport Connecticut. She’s hit the ground running in this place where her career began and a few weeks ago was the subject of a great profile in the Mystic River Press. Here is an excerpt, with a little commercial for Mosaic:

GROTON - Appearances can be deceptive. That’s cer­tainly the case with Joanie Di Martino. For beneath that conservative black-suit exte­rior is a highly creative, imaginative and sensuous woman.

While a historian and museum professional by training, Di Martino is a poet by nature.

…

Relocating to Groton this past June along with her family, Di Martino is current­ly a supervisor of interpreta­tion at Mystic Seaport Museum. In this role, she oversees the Seaport’s open­hearth cooking program, and interprets coastal family life and saltwater food tradi­tions.

She also has been tasked with overseeing the Seaport’s annual Sea Music Festival, a good fit for a lover of music and poetry.

The festival, according to Di Martino, “celebrates the music and spoken word arts of coastal regions.” Due to her involvement, the June festival will showcase fisher poets from the West Coast. These poets are real-life fish­ermen (and women) who recount their experiences at sea through poetry.

…

It was while in Kentucky that she began to truly establish herself as a poet. She studied with James Baker Hall, poet laureate of Kentucky, and formed ­along with several other women - a poetry group known as Mosaic.

Now in its seventh year, Mosaic “has evolved from a local critique group into a small network of women writers in several states through the magic of cyber­space,” says Di Martino.

We keep our connection. I’m eager to see what all our members accomplish in the future.

Possibly related posts:

Poetry and History

It’s OK to Love the 60s

New Publications

Joanie DiMartino

Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize

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