From First Impressions to a Relationship

First impressions rarely have to deal with the first physical encounter one has with an individual, but can come in the form of stories that have been told by a mutual friend.

Anthologies are like those stories, brief glimpses of what an author offers their audience, but is still a framework that the editor places around them.


This framework is often used to appeal to those that are interested in that specific framework.

First impression of Mary Jo Salter: empathetic towards those that had experienced major catastrophes, ie Hiroshima and Chernobyl.

This directed my research towards understanding how accurately this framework that had been placed around her was.

Salter's work isn't necessarily bleak, but to describe her as a poet who regularly explores the beauty in the world would also be inaccurate.

Capable of drawing the mortality out of any situation, such as reading on a porch on a summer afternoon.

It is rare that her more optimistic poetry makes its way into anthologies, but when it does it generally deals with motherhood.

Her collections of poetry explore a great deal more positive issues, but on the whole she continuously explores mortality, loss, the commonalities in all people, and issues of different sorts of injustice.

Though her work in poetry is hardly comical, the articles that she has written for magazines and the interviews she has offered provide a completely different picture of the person. Her writing displays an excellent sense of humor that one wouldn't believe that she had if they were to have only experienced her anthologized poetry.

While I was kind of hoping that the first impression I gained in regards to Salter's poetry would be disproved, I found that the framework is relatively accurate with some deviations in her collections.