“Family” Featured Artist Rachel A. Levine

Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome poet and writer Rachel A. Levine from New York with “The Soprano Listener,” a poem about her mother growing up in the early Twentieth century. One World War was over and another soon to start, the US in the midst of the Great Depression–it was a time of discipline and doing what you were told for the greater good. “When she was eight and cross-eyed her teacher stood her against/ the enormous auditorium wall with several others like herself./ She stood behind her glasses while everyone sang around her,/ proud of her new title, ‘Soprano Listener.’ Winnie had enough chutzpah to not be offended or belittled by her title, but the admonishment to be silent and take pride in that silence set a pattern for her, one that many women of her generation followed. They were tough, they did what needed to be done and sacrificed quietly for their children, but one wonders what they might have experienced and how they might have changed the world had they been allowed more autonomy. Perhaps they prepared their children to do so in times that were less precarious. Each stanza is an episode that ends with a theatrical beat or emotional punch. Rachel paints an eloquent picture, full of heartfelt emotion and humor, of a woman who persisted and succeeded not by performing, but by tending, by being present and able to listen and adapt. 

Read “The Soprano Listener” in Synkroniciti’s “Family” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.

The year Rachel A. Levine was born Albert Einstein died and Disneyland opened. This might be coincidence or, it might explain why the silly and serious have always collided in her work.

Rachel began her creative writing career as a poet at age 11. Over the years she had some poems in various little and literary magazines. She attended the MFA program at Brooklyn College so that she could learn to write fiction. Studying with Jonathan Baumbach and Peter Spielberg (who created the original Fiction Collective, now “FC2.”) jump-started her writing and motivated her to continue to struggle with fiction. (As a poet, she did not think in terms of plot.) Creativity in general is a mystery which is why she often protests when anyone tries to assign rules to it.