[the story] "Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds" is a tribute to Amy Lowell, I've done a lot of what you might call metaliterature; that is, literature that's saying, "Isn't Amy Lowell wonderful? This is sort of like what she did." (Q: Lowell's underrated now, isn't she?) A: She was a wonderful narrative poet, but narrative verse is totally out of fashion now. I think it was one of her reactions to being a woman and a lesbian. An outsider has to write outsider verse. She's one of those people who wrote so prolifically that a lot of it is not good, but some of it is absolutely superb. She has a collection that attracted me called Down East, which is poems in New England dialect, and she has written stories of the supernatural in verse that I absolutely love.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "[the story] "Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds" is a tribute to Amy Lowell, I've done a lot of what you might call metaliterature; that is, literature that's saying, "Isn't Amy Lowell wonderful? This is sort of like what she did." (Q: Lowell's underrated now, isn't she?) A: She was a wonderful narrative poet, but narrative verse is totally out of fashion now. I think it was one of her reactions to being a woman and a lesbian. An outsider has to write outsider verse. She's one of those people who wrote so prolifically that a lot of it is not good, but some of it is absolutely superb. She has a collection that attracted me called Down East, which is poems in New England dialect, and she has written stories of the supernatural in verse that I absolutely love." in the context of "Joanna Russ, interview in Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out edited by Donna Perry (1993)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.