Nan Lundeen may be best known for her widely admired handbook, Moo of Writing which was a finalist in the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards and was based on her article, Find Your Moos, appeared in a 2013 issue of Britain’s Writing Magazine, and her article, Relax and Renew with Moo/Mu of Writing in The Paddock Review.
Lundeen’s poems have been published online by The Iowa Review’s Iowa Writes, and the University of South Carolina Poetry Initiative; she was a finalist in the Yemassee Literary Journal’s 2010 Pocataligo poetry contest. The Catawba was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2014. She has been widely published and admired in numerous literary journals.
Her poetry books include Gaia’s Cry, Black Dirt Days: Poems as Memoir, which was a finalist in the 2016 National Indie Excellence Awards, poetry and The Pantyhose Declarations.
Her journalism has been published in the Detroit News, the Grand Rapids Press, the Connecticut Post, The Greenville News, and elsewhere.
Lundeen holds a master of arts in communications and a bachelor of arts in English from Western Michigan University at Kalamazoo. She is married to freelance photographer Ron DeKett. They live in rural southwestern Michigan among deer, wild turkey, hummingbirds, and wildflowers.
What is intriguing about Lundeen’s The Pantyhose Declarations is its organization into three sections. Each one is a layer of the poet’s identity. The first section The Declarations is her defiant but playful avowal of her feminism which is rooted in her refusal to be bound by either convention or expectation.
Do I Have to Wear Pantyhose?
They look down their noses and ask if I will
sit on the committee,
make a presentation,
take a job with the corporation.
And I want to know—
do I have to wear pantyhose?
They ask if I will teach a class,
speak to the congregation,
accept the most officious task,
and sit on yet another committee.
And I want to know—
do I have to wear pantyhose?
They ask if I will host the symposium,
teach the workshop,
sing for disadvantaged tots,
and sit on yet another committee.
And I want to know—
do I have to wear pantyhose?
They ask if I will witness the execution,
provide them with locution,
marry the candlestick maker in the finest of clothes,
and listen while many unburden their woes.
And I want to know—
do I have to wear pantyhose?
Oh give me your bare legged,
your grandmother in tennis shoes,
your gardener in old boots
your hikers
your wanderers
your dreamers
the barefooted—
grass and chicken shit
between their toes—
but do not,
oh, do not
give me panty hose.
—Nan Lundeen
That poem and the handful that follow it hint at Lundeen’s spiritual connection with Gaia having shaken off the Lutheranism of her youth and young adulthood which she expands on in the next section, Earth.
If I Could Be
anywhere at all
I would be outside
to see how
monarchs migrate
and frog skin breathes,
how birds’ feet shape
to grip trees, shrubs, or weeds,
how milkweed seeds fly
and what kind of cactus turtles munch,
I’d see how spikers hinge trapdoors
and how many rooms a chipmunk bores,
how a big, bumbling bear
suddenly adept, snatch lunch,
how a spider lives beneath the sea
in her very own bubble home.
I’d discover all that
and wonder why a cricket chirps.
Does he chirp to cheer the hearth
or for some other reason?
—Nan Lundeen
But what are the roots of her feminism, her defiance, her connection to the earth around her? The secret is revealed in the lives of grandmothers and aunts, of immigrants and Midwest prairie earth in Goddesses.
Mathilda Lundeen
The wintergreen she rubbed into her knee
mingled
with roses.
I still see her
at age eighty, picking up skirts
and wading through the creek
to search out
shy ferns hidden in the bluffs.
Or gathering the eggs
Scratching chicken dirt with her fingernail,
Bosh, a little manure can’t hurt you.
She argued with her children
walked upstairs, blue eyes
ablaze,
insisted in molasses in the rye.
Her mother died
when she was eight
and Gram saw her
one night on the stairs.
In her rocking chair, stitching
quilt blocks,
That was Judith’s party dress
and that Aunt Clara’s apron,
she wove
long stories
about Cynthia’s cow, goblins, and British generals—a
Snuggled close in bed
we whispered late at night
about romance, boyfriends.
I don’t trust that one.
Eyes too close together.
She was right.
—Nan Lundeen
For more information on The Pantyhose Declarations © 2009 by Nan Lundeen and her other work visit NanLundeen.com .
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