Jean LeBlanc
Jean LeBlanc teaches at Sussex County Community College in Newton, New Jersey. Her course load includes English Composition I and II, American Literature, Creative Writing, and Modern Poetry. She is a past Director of the Betty June Silconas Poetry Center at the college; she is currently on the editorial board of the BJSPC’s journal, The Stillwater Review, and serves on the Poetry Center’s advisory board. Her work has been published in numerous journals, as well as in ten collections (most recently Ancient Songs of Us, Aqueduct Press, 2020). She has also edited several poetry anthologies. In the pre-pandemic world, she participated in poetry readings, writing groups, lectures, workshops, and expert seminars, and is looking forward to the revival of these in-person poetry connections.
Letter to Monsieur Daguerre
Dear Sir—Do you have a sister? A sister who likes to have her hair just so, but will insist (if you comment on it) that her hairstyle matters not? A sister who waves her odd hands in front of you like a flock of wounded birds? A sister who will be something someday, partly by her own efforts, but mostly by yours? I have such a sister. She has had her likeness taken, and now professes to like it not. “The likeless,” or “the lifeless,” she calls it, calling of course all attention to herself. I admit, it is a flat, prim, unsubtle, unyielding, wooden thing, except for a trace of her humor, playing about her lips that don’t quite smile. Neither does my mother smile, and she has had her likeness made, as well. I trust you have a mother, and will be able to imagine how tenderness is not the camera’s gift. But a sister! You would have done sisters everywhere a favor had you kept your invention under wraps. I now have two sisters: the one who poses forever a martyr to the one who posed.
Astronomy Notes
Our text begins with Adam, amazed at the setting sun. We learn the rules that bind the planets to their planes, and how, despite attractions, order is maintained. All the great names are here: Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton. My head aches with law after law, the men who make them. Oh that there was such a thing as retrograde. We do not occupy the center—Hipparchus taught us that. What we call “irregularities” are just our deficient points of view. Observatories cannot disperse the clouds.