Ursula Le Guin for International Women’s Day

Liz Brownlee ♦ March 8, 2019 ♦ Leave a comment

This is a copy of a post form my 2018 A-Z of Extraordinary Women, in celebration of JanDean, whose poem this is, and who is retiring this year.

Ursula Le Guin image by Gorthian, by CC Licence.

This special entry is again by one of my fellow authors of my new book Reaching the Stars, Poems about Extraordinary Women and Girls – the wonderful and talented Jan Dean! The Wizard of Earthsea was one of my favourite books.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, and lives in Portland, Oregon. As of 2015, she has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many honours and awards including Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, and the National Book Foundation Medal. In 2003 she was made a Grandmaster of Science Fiction, one of only a handful of women writers to take the top honour in a genre that has come to be dominated by male writers.

This poem springs from UKL’s ideas in her book ‘The Wave In the Mind’. Its title refers to her famous children’s trilogy ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ where magic works through the power of understanding the real names of things and speaking them purposefully.

Wizard

she makes worlds

from words and mindspit

knows that what she speaks

first rises in the soft machinery

of brain cells

flows through rivers of nerves

to become clicks sighs of speech

understands the science of sound

the bash of air molecules

thumping against an eardrum

the pulse of eardrum

flicking noise back up

into another brain

which reads those quick electric ticks

as words

as meaning

all that stuff – the way sound moves

the way it is one thing

that joins the speaker to the listener –

she knows that

and so she makes worlds

with words and the sudden explosions

of ideas in her head

(let’s call it mindspit)

she does it because it matters

that we join together

it matters that together we imagine

how things could be

if we were kinder

if we were more human

more like family ought to be

Ursula Le Guin is extraordinary. So is Jan Dean.
If you’d like to read about more extraordinary women, why not buy the book Reaching the Stars, Poems about Extraordinary Women and Girls, by me, Jan Dean and Michaela Morgan – link below, press on book!