Tesseract Publications

Publisher of books by regional authors

RED HAT SOCIETY

You never know when you read a poem where it is going to go.  When I read “Warning” by Jenny Joseph, at a poetry reading at the VAMC in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, during the summer of 1989, it was just a very charming and fun expression of aging that I included in a reading of poems about aging in the retirement home there.  I had just received it in a newsletter from Astra of the Older Feminists Network in London, UK.  I have never included this in my biography because I did not feel that the readings were particularly well received, almost like the staff was doing me a favor to allow me to read, and the husband of an acquaintance who I found to be sinister was always at them (I gave three readings) and I knew he had little interest in poetry but was just keeping track of me which I found offensive. 

A few years go, I was startled to see a TV news item about a poet giving a reading at the same institution, and the poem that the news story covered was extremely close to the one I had read, and the woman was not from the UK but was from someplace in the Western US. 

I dug around in my files and found the original and include the poem on the next page, also a scan of the postmark on the verso of the poem,

This is for Jenny Joseph, thanks for a fantastic poem.

To contact us:

A story of how a poem can change the world

Or

Never underestimate the power of a poet