Annie Stenzel
Annie Stenzel, Poems
Annie Stenzel celebrated her first birthday at sea, and in some sense very little has changed since then. She is the daughter, granddaughter, stepmother, sibling, and cousin of word people, teachers, musicians, communards, artists, gardeners, scientists, and Renaissance folk of various stripes. She is a lesbian poet of a certain age, has lived on several continents, has no partner or pet, but when she ventures onto ocean waters, she almost always sees cetaceans, whether they are supposed to be there or not.
To stay sane, she maintains a TV blackout, but she reads widely, argues, marches, and has not missed an election for many decades, even in years when she was living overseas and the absentee ballot had to travel halfway around the world to be on time. Yes, she went to college, several colleges in fact, and eventually she acquired sundry degrees, none of which was useful to anything other than her soul. Jobs as a hotel maid, flight clerk, radio operator, waitress, legal secretary, semiconductor assembler, youth hostel warden, and language lab monitor made her who she is today.
It took her forever to have a first collection published (The First Home Air After Absence, Big Table, 2017) and it is taking her another forever to assemble a second collection, as yet untitled and un-homed. Meanwhile, her poems splash their way through an unsteady stream of publications in print and online journals in the U.S. and the U.K., including but by no means limited to these: Ambit, Chestnut Review, Ekphrastic Review, Gargoyle, Gone Lawn, On the Seawall, Psaltery & Lyre, SWWIM, Stirring, One Art, The Lake, and Willawaw Journal. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she currently lives within sight of the San Francisco Bay. She makes fleeting appearances on Instagram @anniebenannie and (even more rarely) on Twitter @annie_stenzel. Find out more about her on her website.
Before we all took names
Even days free of a blanket of crumpled lists
are rare. What span of modern time escapes at least
some dim assessment, even if merely toggled
back and forth between judgments: Good day. Bad week.
Our slow steps toward knowing more are not to blame.
Pre-history told us little, even doing its best. Midden. Potsherd.
Arrowhead. Cave wall. The ancestors were all perforce
individuals, but survivors of each catastrophe leaned toward
surviving the next. If there were names early on,
we no longer know them. How much of the saga
of our success was luck; how little was merit? It serves us
nothing to stare through the strata for an explanation—
there never was a year without some reckoning.
Volcano and tsunami year. Bad maize harvest year.
Heaviest winter in memory year. The year of the plague.
A single label may not capture the characteristics
of an entire era, but ours is the age of documentation.
Evidence everywhere. Disaster practically visible from Mars.