One of Ithaca's leading ladies among local writing circles, Joyce McAllister writes poems that send audiences into gales of laughter with delight and self-recognition.
On Sunday she read to an overflow crowd at the Ulysses Philomathic Library in Trumansburg with Mary Beth O'Connor, another wonderful poet and Ithaca College professor.
If you don't think you like poetry, just try Joyce. She writes on many topics and most hilariously about food -- from eating cauliflower in the dead of winter and cooking oversized zucchini in summer's heat to dining in and dining out. Joyce takes on mature romance with wry wit. She pokes fun at our human fashions. Our pretensions. Our presumptions. The preciousness of things. And caught unguarded and unsuspecting, we laugh from the belly.
But here's the thing. Deliberately and with a cat's cunning, Joyce writes in forms that are quite out of fashion. Many of her poems rhyme. They have meter. We come face to face again with sonnets, rhythm, and poetic forms from childhood that may have delighted us or chained us furiously to our desks. Joyce repacks those structures -- poking fun at the seriousness of poetry itself -- and returns them to us fresh, funny, and with attitude.
Garrison Keillor would be enchanted. And Joyce? She would arch her brow and go toe-to-toe in a smackdown.
Listen to a one-minute clip of Joyce reading "Lament" (with permission from the author)
Read "Lament"
Read more of Joyce's poems at gratefulness.org and The Healing Muse. In addition to writing poetry for the past seven decades, Joyce McAllister served as registrar at Cornell University's College of Human Ecology for thirty years.
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