353 Grand ave, Oakland
An Irish artist I once knew told me that, to her, people in Ireland were born straddling the grave while people in California never aged. It is a statement I have returned to over the years. It begs the question: what happens as women leave youth and middle age in California? The state has long been a place of change, counterculture, and discovery, both internal and external.
Women in a Golden State, an anthology from Gunpowder Press, gathers female poets over 60 to write of their lives in past, present, and future. Anthropologist Cari Borja led a conversation between Lucille Lang Day, Maw Shein Win, and Susan Cohen, three of the poets included, last month at Clio’s Books.
Borja, whose questions were nearly as poetic as the works read, guided the discussion through the personal experiences that shaped each writer’s world. What emerged was a sense that simply living and aging in California becomes a kind of alchemy. Lucille Lang Day, a poet, writer, and science and health educator, described how she has taken her lived experience, from being married at age 14 to the study of snails and her advocacy to make biomedical science more accessible to underrepresented communities, and distilled it into her work.
Maw Shein Win brought humor and warmth to the evening with her account of California as a place to dream about when she was young, a destination to hope for, and eventually a place where she could weave those dreams into reality. Her “thought logs” or “small thinking jars” offered a running stream of consciousness, punctuated with phrases like “Scout locations for a punk rock retirement home.”
Susan Cohen, a journalist with a long and varied career, spoke of a lifelong commitment to learning new things. She studied poetry and bioethics at Stanford, and her work considers aging from a place of acceptance and confidence. She recently decided to learn Yiddish in order to translate the poems of Rajzel Zychlinsky. “No matter how old we are, things are still possible,” she said of her current work and study.
Each poem read was a revelation of wisdom, sometimes wrapped in whimsy, other times melancholy. They covered subjects far and wide, from the stars and fires to death and to-do lists, but all shared a depth of thought from wealthy minds.
Women in a Golden State, in many ways, is a roadmap for how to be both an elder and a trailblazer. In a state where growing old can feel forbidden, these poets draw on lives shaped by revolutions and times of outrage to show that, through action, intention, and language, collective consciousness can be shifted at any moment. Edited by Diana Raab and Chryss Yost, this finely curated collection of poems by Poet Laureates and emerging writers alike offers the idea that growing older provides a powerful lens through which to see the world differently, and the confidence to change the narrative.
