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“If Madonna and Magritte had a baby. Or, if Warhol’s Marilyn swallowed Munch’s screamer.”
That’s L.J. Sysko ‘elevator pitching’ her work, which she describes as “imagistically punchy – cultural criticism dressed up in pop-culture fluorescence.” In fact, in the preface to Sysko’s debut full-length poetry collection The Daughter of Man, which was selected for the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Series by Pulitzer Prize Finalist poet Patricia Smith, Smith describes Sysko as “the risk-taker, the unveiler, the irreverent namer of things.”
It wasn’t always this way. Sysko’s path to granting herself full poetic permission began with tepid exposure in high school English class. “Lots of dead men’s formal embroidery about war and mortality.” But then came the class when the first poem “that ever struck [her] as ‘cool’ surfaced”: Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Shampoo” followed by Richard Wilbur’s “Playboy,” about a stock boy looking at a Playboy magazine centerfold. The poems’ divergent styles yet unabashed embrace of iconoclastic subject matter made her realize that “the form didn’t absolutely have to be runic and elevated; humor, voice, and quotidian imagery belonged, too.” She never forgot the lesson: “jolt your reader, if you can.”
Self-Portrait as Molly Pitcher
L.J. Sysko. Daughter of Man. Copyright © 2024 by The University of Arkansas Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, www.uapress.com.
I wore a Diana Virgin Goddess mask
despite my contrary status, pouring
pitcher after pitcher for Revolutionary
soldiers. O, how I wanted to scrabble
over their terrain—rough and
uneven—alongside the wagon train,
doubling back and over, scouting for
the best brook from which to collect,
trekking upstream of their latrine, and,
with each tipple and ladle into a patriot
mouth smoked and pursed, I lost a
little of my name. Over here morphed
from a whistle into Pitcher then
someone added Molly, and I guess I
could’ve put the bucket down,
subordinated myself a little less like a
spaniel than a swatch of fodder for the
cannon, but at the time, they seemed
basically the same. Betsy Ross, you know
her? As though hookers working the
same corner are necessarily friends? I
never met her until they locked us both
up in an inset box. There in the
basement of a history textbook page,
we didn’t even speak. My role was only
pathetic volunteer, keeping parched
heroes hydrated, but Betsy, she
stitched and sewed their symbols
together. After that, all we saw were
stars.
Raised in Yardley, Pennsylvania in a family of four, Sysko received her English degree from Lafayette College and an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from New England College. In 2000, Sysko joined her native-Delawarean boyfriend (now husband) in Wilmington, where they have raised their children and where Sysko taught high school English for 14 years. Now, in addition to her poetic practice, she serves as Director of Executive Communications for the president of Delaware State University, Dr. Tony Allen.
Sysko’s poems have been published widely in over 30 publications, including Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, and Best New Poets, among others, and she has published two books of poetry. Her latest, The Daughter of Man, praised by Publisher’s Weekly as “a whip smart … playful celebration of feminine power,” “traces the Heroine Archetype through the American suburban battleground from the 1980s to today.”
“Pugnacious as it seems on the cover, the book is actually humbly mulling this question: how does Woman—swimming within the endemic circumstances set forth by patriarchy—create a good life? Are there workable philosophical paradigms to help her accommodate misogyny—violence, oppression, erasure, and internalized invalidation?” And while this may not sound particularly light-hearted, she believes that “the elision of comedy and tragedy—akin to the rub of tectonic plates—is fertile poetic territory.”
During the pandemic, Sysko found that her artistic practice “accelerated, deepened, and became more committed,” and she has begun to work “more concertedly with ‘music’ and sonic effects . . . deploying rhyme, syntax, and alliteration, especially.” She plans to use her Division award to continue on a new work-in-progress.
Her father was raised in Levittown, Pennsylvania, a famous planned community that is “a very specific 20th century built environment predicated on post-war notions of social mobility, material culture, and the good life.” The building of those suburbs and their developers’ infamous exclusion of Black buyers are the subjects of her current project. “Levittown is an American crucible, and I’m interested in seeing if I can materialize it in poems.”
Related Topics: 2024 Artist Fellow, delaware division of the arts, Delaware Individual Artist Fellowship, L.J. Sysko