ALL KINDS OF FUR
Erasure Poems & New Translation of a tale from the Brothers Grimm
by Margaret Yocom
ISBN: 978-0-9991062-5-9
62 pages; 6 x 9in. $17.50
Available now once again
An interview with Margaret Yocom on Through The Twisted Woods
The cover features a painting by Anne Siems
Review of KIN S FUR in Through The Twisted Woods
Description
In these poems, Margaret Yocom offers a new vision of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm’s controversial “Allerleirauh” (“All Kinds Of Fur”), a lesser-known version of “Cinderella” that opens with incest. Erasing the Grimms’ words to reveal a young woman’s story of her journey to a new, full life, Yocom asks, "What would All Kinds Of Fur say if she could tell her own tale?" In ALL KINDS OF FUR, the heroine’s words rise.
About the Author
Margaret Yocom grew up in the Pennsylvania German farmland listening to her grandparents’ stories. Her poetry has appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, the anthology The Folklore Muse: Poetry, Fiction, and Other Reflections by Folklorists, and elsewhere. She founded the Folklore Studies Program of George Mason University where she taught for 36 years; among her many courses, she offered “Living Words: Folklore and Creative Writing.”
She has published on the Brothers Grimm, on the folk arts of political protest, on Inuit storytelling in northwest Alaska, on family folklore, and on the folk arts of Maine logging communities. Co-founder of the American Folklore Society’s Creative Writing and Storytelling Section, she holds a Ph.D. in English and folklore from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A founding member of Western Maine Storytelling, she tells legendary tales of the seen—and the unseen. She makes her home with her geologist husband, John Slack, in the western mountains of Maine. https://margaretyocom.com
Erasure is a contemporary poetry-writing practice. Poets begin with a source text of any kind and then “erase” selected words and letters—by completely erasing them or by “ghosting” them with a gray font. What appears in black font on the pages are erasure poems.
In ALL KINDS OF FUR, the source text is shaded gray to reveal the poems in black. See the preview link to the left.
Margaret Yocom
Praise for ALL KINDS OF FUR
Endorsed by Susan Tichy
Open this book and enter a world of danger, transformation, and tactical survival—a multi-layered, multi-voiced telling of “Allerleirauh” / “All Kinds Of Fur,” a Brothers Grimm tale you most likely have not met, is a “Cinderella” version with incest. In a new translation, Margaret Yocom first brings us this forgotten tale, stocked, as we’d expect, with kings, rings, beasts, and betrayals. She then, through erasure, lures out of its darkness another voice—the voice of All Kinds Of Fur herself, lying hidden within its words. In keeping with traditions of wonder tales, erasure practice poses riddles and embodies paradoxes— adding by subtracting, listening by looking, redrawing the boundaries of author and reader, teller and told. Enter this forest. Voice what you see. Is it sunlight in shadow, or a sudden shadow cutting through light?
—Susan Tichy
Endorsed by Dan Beachy-Quick
Some tales—the old ones, the magical ones—wander the borderlands between our inchoate unconscious and the day-lit logic of our lives, not to keep those realms separate, but to insure something of our dark interiors leaks up into the measured day and, by the trespass, keeps the fathomless open.
Margaret Yocom’s book gives us a new translation of one such tale, demonstrating beautifully how it is desire and fear, care and threat, humility and humiliation, love and grief, are entangled in such ways they might be the source of that knot we call mind. But Yocom does more than give us a tale we’ve always known even if now we’re reading it for the first time. In her erasure of the tale, she shows us that a text, just like our own minds, has its own hidden inner life, and its own unconscious depths, a mind within the mind, a heart within the heart, a hearth within a hearth. It is a magical and necessary vision, one our culture now, in its incessant surfacing, deeply needs—this reminder, that beneath every depth, there is a deeper deep; and beneath every dark, a darker dark. It is in this dark that ALL KINDS OF FUR teaches us to see.
—Dan Beachy-Quick
Endorsed by Katharine Young
These poems are haunted by what Yocom makes invisible by her erasures, so what she makes visible has different bones. The incest in the fairy tale variously translated as “All Fur” or “Donkeyskin” shows through the skin without the “s”: kin. I have used these poems in my fairy tale course to introduce students to a tradition whose dark side has been erased, in other ways, by numerous editors and publishers—and which ALL KINDS OF FUR restores. Are we not all, like these fairy tale beings, humanimals?
—Katharine Young