(reposted in honor of Women’s History Month)

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Ask two hundred people on the main streets across America to name American women poets — if they came up with anyone, almost certainly it would be Emily Dickinson, and most would stop there, though  a few might know Maya Angelou’s name. Emily Dickinson is certainly one of the Great Names in English-language poetry from any country, but so many other wonderful women poets languish little known or long forgotten.

Women in all branches of the Arts are still playing catch-up with their male counterparts, since opportunities for women outside the narrow world of “Kinder, Küche, und Kirche” (kids, kitchen, and kirk, which is another word for church) were so very rare before the mid-19th century.

Marge Piercy (1936 — ) was born in Detroit, Michigan, on March 31st. Her working-class parents were Jewish, and they lived in a…