JoAnn Anglin

JoAnn Anglin grew up in South Sacramento, attended local schools, then worked for the State of California, writing copy for exhibits, newsletters and brochures. JoAnn has written poetry her whole life, and she has also written numerous articles on the arts and poetry. JoAnn coaches students in the national Poetry Out Loud program, and when she works with students, she encourages poetry writing as an accessible art and a tool for personal expression.

Active with Los Escritores del Nuevo Sol (Writers of the New Sun) Ms. Anglin has been published on-line and in a number of anthologies including The Sacramento Anthology, The Pagan Muse, and in Voces del Nuevo Sol. Rattlesnake Press published her chapbook, Words Like Knives, Like Feathers. She has been a featured poet in many venues. For 6 years, along with Tom Goff and Nora Staklis, she co-hosted the PoemSpirits series at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Sacramento.

JoAnn Anglin’s poetry deals in what might be – she seems to find a wealth of possibilities as she writes. It’s as if she finds stories in everything, as her imagination takes charge, transforming simple objects and experiences. In her poem “The Problem with Waiting,” we sense an intellect that refuses to be still: “The mind leaps out, crazed as / a jackal-chased springbok.” Jose Montoya, writing about Anglin’s book Words Like Knives, Like Feathers, said “It is a blessing to have in our midst a poet who can discern and imbue grandeur to the mundane. JoAnn does this with grace and finesse.” JoAnn writes of her own work “In my poetry, I hope to find the telling detail that will make images and experiences vibrant, to evoke feelings in the reader that they recognize and have yearned to express.”

I hope you enjoy these poems from the work of JoAnn Anglin

I-5, Blue Elephant

Later, at the flaked motel, the child’s hand
will open and close futilely for the soft
comfort, sobs will dampen the mother’s shoulder.

Near the guardrail, the toy still looks clean,
head and trunk leaning at traffic’s edge. Its
stitched eyes peer at the flowing river.

As the mother puts the child to bed, she says,
Don’t be a baby. Says he must learn to live
with loss. Wave after wave rolls on.

Dreaming Water

The dream would be about going into the river
whether to be drowned or swept away was unclear.
Everything in the dream was vibrant – terra cotta
banks on either side, river of ceramic blue, trees
like Christmas green velvet, overhanging.
The dream was the red car leaving the dun levee road.
The dream was the leaping, then gliding off the road.
The welcoming water.
In soft lapping waves, it washed over the bank, the
tree roots, washed over itself like a beauty bathing,
ready to welcome a lover.

Unnoticed

They move through us, daily,
the swarms of saints, and we are
ignorant of their sizes and shapes.

They may be clad as birds, as
dump trucks, or beggars, may not be
kind; it’s part of the disguise.

They are not noted for long suffering,
mildness, miracles, patience, or
even for being generous.

Define them more by tiny traces
they leave: the growing, the change
required to take place in us.

The Problem With Waiting

Hope for something clean and imperative to knife
through the mottled grayness. Meanwhile, check

the watch, the rear view mirror, the breath – is it
stopped or ragged? For the mind, of course, doesn’t wait.

Into it pour the sighs and anxious looks that rat-a-tat-tat
into the waiting space. The mind leaps out, crazed as

a jackal-chased springbok, and eyes dart toward fellow
waiters, listening for the called number, the door knob’s

turning, the reassurance of nothing serious. Asymmetry
unbalances the worried now with the later day, unknown but

feared, like the inoculation, or the bill, or even death’s certainty,
feared less than the tickings that make up the waiting.