Jenny Kander move from South Africa to Bloomington, Indiana in 1992. She began writing poetry later in life and became a prominent member of the local poetry scene. Of her many contributions, Jenny created two radio programs, one of which is the Poets Weave, which she began at WFIU in 1999. Her poetry has appeared in Flying Island, California Quarterly, Bathtub Gin, Wind, Southern Indiana Review, and Shiver. She published two chapbooks: Taboo and The Altering Air. Jenny passed away on October 8, 2024 at the age of 91.
Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. In her memory, we're reaching back to 2009 for an episode of Jenny reading her own work.
This is the Poets Weave, and I'm Jenny Kander, guest on my own program. With days becoming more fraught with economic woes. I thought some irrelevant humour might be well timed. These poems are from my Ditzy Dee series.
Life Happens
Ditzy Dee thinks leaving ribbons lying about the living room demonstrates her femininity. She props feathered hats on lamp shades, is sure a risk is a thin rusk, imagines choking on the crumbs.
On borrowed canvas, she paints trees resembling welks, and her hens are pickling onions lost in gravel. She's given most of her one jigsaw away and uses the box lid for her unanswered mail.
Still shopping for a black veil like Jackie Kennedy's, she misses both funeral and wake when her granddad, that nay-saying bassoonest dies. Her friend, the undertaker, a man given to descriptive phrases, calls her the slip between cup and lip. A coffee bean that just won't grind.
Worried about dying, she begs for a battery of tests. Believes that she'll be recharged. At the clinic they call her Ms. fit. For her, the whole world's a corner she can't see around, and she can't play the piano either.
Careering Through a Haze of Words, Ditzy Dee Plans to Write Copy for a Food Magazine
Intrigued by gastronomic vocabulary, unaware it's scrambling her mind, she points out "tapioca's a drum roll and couscous is a hush hush, non deplume." The editor stares, then shrugs when Ditsy says, "a mohair tofu is worn casually over the shoulders and candelabra stand handsome upon a cheddar of solid oak." Nectarine, she's privately told the undertaker Mike, is delicious love making, though at the drive-in the steering wheel gets in the way.
To Ditzy, [several arts?] are salmons. Feta is karma. And she feels florid-faced men are turmeric. How hummus the Midwest summers are, I'm sweating like pork.
Failing to land the job, she grumbles, "the editor's a half-baked Alaska."
Jelly Donuts
Because her holyroller mother always admonishes her to choose only healthful options in this world, where temptation is rife. Ditzy, who sees her paths paved with hot dogs, fries, and frozen desserts, is torn between obedience and self realization.
Casing Anna's fast foods, the dividing line blurring between appetite and gluttony, Ditsy's troubled by framed, backlit enticements to sin. Some slathered with cheese.
Further down the road, Nick's ice cream kiosk presents a splendid orgy, but she hesitates. An earful of her mother's chiding insists "yummy is damned."
Acknowledging health stores like Sunday sermons are safely stocked with cleansing, oughts, and shoulds, Ditsy reluctantly choose as a pound of Eden's best prunes and dried figs, plump with goodness. But finds maternal sermons have less to do with righteousness than proving the unrelenting nature of her God's laws.
You've been listening to poems by the late Jenny Kander recorded in 2009 on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.
