I have been blessed to know a good many Susans in my life. One, a fuel truck driver, hiked Havasupai with me. One, a six-foot lawyer, had the assertiveness of a runaway locomotive. One, a sculptor, sold over ten grand’s worth of her wares in a single day. One, a department chair, decided to explore reducing the toxicity of the hydrocarbon-laden printing medium Intaglio. There are others, but we have a lot to cover here, because while there’s not a lazy Susan in the bunch, I bring to your attention Susan Vespoli, the unlaziest Susan of them all.

Susan is a poet. She’s also a teacher. She’s lived in Guam and in a cabin in the woods in Arizona. She’s loved and lost and lost and won and fought cancer and won some more and fixed up a house and sold a school. She has a website with the unforgettable domain name susanvespoli.com, where you will find out much more about her in her remarkable essay “Autobiography in Eight Hairstyles.” She has a Taylor Swiftian propensity for going into detail about past relationships, but in this hairstyle odyssey she nails down the best reason possible for doing so: “More lethal than bad food, bad drink, and bad exercise habits, more toxic than chemical exposure, is the act of not owning your thoughts or speaking your mind.”

And that is what makes her writings so valuable. She is showing you cinéma vérité with her poetry. You must believe it because it is immediate and it is real. Pardon the bluntness, but she’s not fucking around. She has been there and now you are going to be there too, no euphemism, no denial. No dancing. (She has said “I can’t dance.”)

So it was she who reawakened my desire to resume my “Eminent Poets of Greater Phoenix” project. Volume I was published in 2010. I did about two dozen poet/acrostic/portrait pages since then but never lashed them together into Volume II. Now I want to.

So, to rewet my feet, I have done the first one in over a year, thus:

Susan Vespoli

Sure as RSTUV
She knows what it is to Be
Undeterred. The Truth she grasps
Speaks and makes her readers gasp
And Writes of Wildness gallop so
A hoofbeat rhythm helps her go
Now a Captain, now a Stray, she’ll
Nestle Life-blooms like a Lei

One more thing: She recently trounced me in Words With Friends, not for the first time, nor the fifth. Then in the next game she lobbed me a watermelon-sized Home Run pitch, using the word INNER so that I could make WINNER or DINNER or TINNER or some other, and get a triple-word score. I suspect she’s trying to let me win one. Hey, she’s an all-caps POET; she knows what she’s doing.

Not to be falsely modest; so am I. I flirt with her a little sometimes with some of the words I use–why not? It’s fun, and I’m harmless. In the game I show below, the one she got me good in, she played DUEL and I crossed it with LUV. If you’re going to Duel, do it with Luv. 🙂