SWWIM sustains and celebrates women poets by connecting creatives across generations and by curating a living archive of contemporary poetry, while solidifying Miami as a nexus for the literary arts.
Life is brief, as Hippocrates wrote, and art is long, yet Parra lived to one-hundred-&-four after writing
I take back everything I ever said at fifty-five. But I differ with him and sought out his ghost. Found him sitting cross-legged on nothing—electric
white hair crackling, unshaven, and in pajamas— as he held an unlit Cuban cigar and tried to con me to talk about Newtonian physics and how miserably
King Lear had aged. Impatient with his faint feints, I interrupted his interruptions trying to explain that even my feeble early poems, some existing in
perpetuity on the internet, when next to my newer ones, show I may have improved over time. No whine from me about the old old ones written in blood.
As I was explaining I'd told my children it was all right to fail, Nicky—as he said he wished to be called— interrupted again, shaking his cigar at me, said he was
sure that my words were all caca, and I was bat-shit crazy if I didn't want to take them back. Then, instead of tossing out a quote from Lear bewailing fate, he chose
Stephen Hawking: Look up at the stars, he advised me, fading slowly from view, not down at your feet.
Susan Terris is a freelance editor and the author of 7 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, and 2 plays. Journals include The Southern Review, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, and Ploughshares. Poems of hers have appeared in Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. Her newest book is DREAM FRAGMENTS, which won the Swan Scythe Press Award. Ms. Terris is editor emerita of Spillway Magazine and a poetry editor at Pedestal. See susanterris.com.
