Three Poems by Jane Cooper

Rock climbing

by Jane Cooper

Higher than gulls' nests, higher than children go,
Scrambling and dangling to survey the sea,
We crest the last outcropping strewn
East of this island.

Now pell-mell, now stopping to pinch a finger
In an open fissure down which no sun glints,
Where water gnaws and subsides, we comb
As the tide rises

Each rock that locks us in a partial vision
Of the expanding, curved and eye-reflecting blue
Which liberates but still hangs over
Our minds' breathing.

As yet the gleams are steep and unexpected:
We study lichens like a dying scale.
Silver as fishes; here crisp moss
Moist in a crevice;

Then even lichens powder, and the rocks
Give way to sunny tables, dry escarpments,
Each with its different texture, pocked
Or smoothly sloping

Down to the pitch where barnacles or stain
Dark as a rust line show the heaving power
Of water's shoulders, raised at night,
Then wrested over.

And now the last rock! piled hugely up
And shoved to end a sprinkle like a jetty
Of little boulders in the green-brown
Irregular surface

Where seaweed shaped like coral swimming, kelp,
Pebbles and broken shells of clam or crab
All shine or flicker up as down-watching
We kneel and wonder.

Now balancing, laughing, brisk as children who
Spread out their arms and toe along a pole
We skip from top to top, lift knees.
Come out at angles

Until we have scaled it! stand aloft at last
With all the ocean for our freedom and
Our meditation, all the swing
Of limbs for glitter.

Warmed by the sun, tingling, with tired calves
And eyes of exultation we address
The father of our knowledge, shrouded
Faintly beyond us

At the lost line where wind is turned to water
And all is turned to light, dissolved or rinsed
To silver where our eyes fish (gulls
Sailing and falling

Out, out. . . .) And now the seabirds call
Far off, recalled by memories like hunger,
Screech and return, flying the tides
Of pure air inwards

To where their nests are, intimate and cold;
While standing on those cliffs we slowly rest
And looking back to hillsides build
Imaginary houses.


************

The above hits a note of hope and happiness in achievement (any
achievement you want to make the climbing a metaphor for, plus
sheerly loving the world of nature) that sings to me.

I took the poem from Florence Howe and Ellen Bass's _No More
Masks_. It was published in 1973 and at the back we read

        Jane Cooper, 1924

        "Jane Cooper writes, 'In my twenties I wrote a book of poems --
perfectly serious work -- but was sufficiently torn between my concepts of 'poet' and 'woman' that I
never tried to publish. Teaching brought me back to poetry through a different door.'

        Her first published book of poems was _The Weather of Six Mornings_;
it was "the Lamont selection of American Poets;" she had grants from Ingram Merrill and
Guggenheim Foundation; taught at Sarah Lawrence [I wonder what the pay scale was] and was
said at the time to be working on collection of poems that will include 'both new poems
and some of those old, early, angry pieces.'

Hotel de Dream
 
Justice-keepers! justice-keepers!
for Muriel Rukeyser and James Wright
 
 
 
Suppose we could telephone the dead.
Muriel, I'd say, can you hear me?
Jim, can you talk again?
 
And I'd begin to tell them the stories they loved to hear:
how my father, as a young boy, watched Cora Crane
parade through the streets of Jacksonville with her girls
in an open barouche with silver fittings;
how the bay haunches gleamed as they twitched off flies,
polished hooves fetched down smartly into the dust,
ostrich feathers tickled the palates of passers-by.
 
Muriel, I'd say, shall we swing along Hudson Street
underneath the highway and walk out together on the docks?
 
.the river would be glittering, my grandmother
would be bargaining
with a black man on a dock in Jacksonville;
grapefruit and oranges would be piled up like cannonballs
at the fort in Old St. Augustine. . . .
 
I'll never put you in a nursing home, you said early that year,
I promise, Jane, I'll never put you in a nursing home.
 
Later Cora Crane showed her dogs right next to my aunt's.
They had a good conversation about bloodlines
amidst the clean smells of kennel shavings and well-brushed dog
but never, of  course, met socially
although she had dined with Henry James.
 
Jim, I'd say, remember that old poem "The Faithful"
you helped me by caring for? How what we owe to the dead
is to go on living? More than ever
I want to go on living.
 
But now you have become part of it, friends of my choosing years,
friends who magnificent voices
will reverberate always, if only through machines,
tell me how to redress the past,
how to relish yet redress
my sensuous, precious, upper-class,
unjust white child's past.
 
 
 
Being Southern
 
1
 
It's like being German.
Either you remember that yours was the defeated country
(The South breeds the finest soldiers, my uncle said,
himself a general in one of his incarnations)
or you acknowledge the guilt, not even your own guilt, but
 
Can any white person write this, whose ancestors once kept slaves?
 
2
 
Of course there were "good" Germans.
 
My father was still under 30, a passionate Wilsonian, when he was named a delegate to the 1916 Democratic Convention. By the end of the first evening he had discovered that eleven of the other Florida delegates were members of the Klan, he couldn't answer for the twelfth, he was number 13.
 
Only a few years later he argued for, and won, token black representation on the Jacksonville school board.
 
And my aunt as a girl went into the sweatshops to interview Cuban cigar workers, all women. She found the first Girl Scout troop in the South for, as she put it, colored children. True, it was segregated. But it was the first.
 
Take your guilt to school. Read your guilt in your diplomas or the lines of the marriage ceremony. Face your guilt head-on in the eyes of lover, neighbor, child. Ask to be buried in your guilt.
 
Of course they were paternalistic. I honor their accomplishments. What more have I ever done?
 
When is memory transforming? when, a form of real estate?
 
 
3
 
Transplanted "north" in 1934 I never questioned
a town that received its distinguished refugees
with a mix of pride and condescension: the specialist in Christian iconography
in her man-tailored suits, Einstein like a disembodied spirit
pacing our leafy sidewalks. Only because my best friend lived next door
would I glimpse him, sometimes at twilight, tuning his violin
as his back yard filled up with tents
 
But why can't I remember the actual men and women who slept in those tents, among patches of ragged tigerlilies? the children with skinny arms, who would soon be passed along. . . ?
 
All he could vouch for. Not famous. At their backs
the six million.

Obituary: Jane M. Cooper, Poet, 1924-2007

Jane Marvel Cooper, poet, Professor and Poet-in-Residence Emerita at
Sarah Lawrence College, died peacefully at Pennswood Village, Newtown,
PA, on October 26th from complications due to Parkinson's Disease.
Family were with her at the end.

She was the daughter of the late John C. Cooper Jr. and Martha Marvel
Cooper, and sister of the late Rachel C. Baker, all formerly of Armour
Road, Princeton. Jane Cooper was born in Atlantic City, N.J. in 1924.
She spent her early childhood in Jacksonville, Florida and then moved
with her family to Princeton in the mid-1930s. There she went to Miss
Fine's School where, in her senior year, she won the Leslie Shear Poetry
Prize for two works: "We are the Generation of War" and "I have Sung
Solitary Various Worlds", early signs of future acclaim.

She attended Vassar College 1942 to 1944 and earned a B.A. from the
University of Wisconsin in 1946. She joined the faculty of Sarah
Lawrence College in 1950, where she remained as a teacher and poet in
residence until her retirement in 1987. Over that period, together with
Grace Paley, Jean Valentine, Muriel Rukeyser and others, she helped
develop and enhance a writing program that became one of the most
distinguished in the country.

In 1953-54 she took a year off to get a M.A. at the University of Iowa,
where she studied with Robert Lowell and John Berryman. She received
much recognition in her lifetime including awards from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for
the Arts, the Bunting Institute and the American Academy of Arts and
Letters.

Jane Cooper maintained her links with Princeton over the years, but she
lived most of her adult life in New York City. She also spent several
summers at Yaddo and the McDowell Colony, working on her own poetry. Her
first book, The Weather of Six Mornings, appeared in 1969 and was
followed at intervals by four others: Maps and Windows (1974),
Scaffolding: Selected Poems (1984), Green Notebook, Winter Road (1994)
and The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed (2000). She was named
State Poet of New York for 1995-97.

She is survived by her brother, John C. Cooper III, of Tucson, AZ, five
nephews, two nieces and three grandnieces. There will be a service at
All Saints Church, Princeton on Saturday, November 3, at 1:00 p.m.  All
are welcome. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Immune
Deficiency Foundation, 40 W. Chesapeake Avenue, Suite 308, Towson, MD 21204.



(Prepared by the family of Jane M. Cooper, October 2007)

"I" brows - low and high

While I didn't completely embrace Folsom's notion that database is a new genre, I was really engaged by the ideas that he outlines and the dialogue that ensued. Two things in particular captured my imagination.

First, I think that database and poems have different levels of dimensionality. Poems have (and I hate to be reductive here) two dimensions on the page and a third dimension when read aloud. On the page, poems have only the x and y axis. The exist in time, but time really enters the equation when the poem is spoken. Certainly, it takes time to read a poem - even if it is read silently - but the dimensions of poems printed on the page seem to me to only be moving left to right across the page and from the top to the bottom. The relationship of words within a poem, while dynamic in the mind of the reader, only have a sequential relationship to one another on the page - again, left to right and then top to bottom. While some poets make moves to undo this, still by and large, these are the relationships of language in poems, bound by tradition and language conventions and apprehension. Databases, on the other hand, are designed to not have these sorts of constraints and to have a exponentially greater dimensionality. Words, or numbers, or characters, in a database are not only related to the item next to it, but are supposed to be in relationship with every other bit within the database. Folsom makes, I think, a compelling argument that Whitman's poems function as database prior to computers. He posits that the lines of Whitman can be put into a database and reshuffled and that in fact is what Whitman was doing to some degree. I'm convinced by this in part. Where I'm not convinced is that Folsom seems to suggest that still a line has integrity and I wonder why. The power of a database is in the distillation into the smallest, discrete part, which would be the word, or even perhaps the letter. Beyond this, however, there is one thing that I think is even more compelling and disturbing about Folsom's notion of the database as genre and what it might do to Whitman. That is this: writers write bound by time. Poems, lines, novels, books, works are organized by time sequentially across the lifetime of a writer. Calamus could not have been written until after Song of Myself. Something happened for Whitman in writing Song of Myself that enabled Calamus to be written later. Our sense of time as human being is only progressive. We cannot move backward in time. Database, however, are not timebound in this way unless we program them to be. So while Whitman may have reorganized his own lines, that reorganization only became possible through the progression of time. To do it otherwise, to suggest that all of Whitman's lines could be fed in and moved around is to deny that fundamental girding of time with which all of us humans must comply.

The other thing that mulls around my mind after this reading is how the "I" in Whitman poems is informed by database compilers and editors. Archives carry the ephemera of writers and the mitigation of libraries and catalogers are made visible through established behaviors and practices, but as electronic archives - or database - are now emerging, how do we establish behaviors and practices that make the mitigation of database editors visible to readers? Is that still important? I think that it is, but that it also is in a medium where identity and visibility around identity is changing and evolving. So is the "I" of Walt Whitman different in the WW archive than it is in Moon's edited volume of Leaves of Grass? How would the "I" of Walt Whitman be different if his work were reorganized, line by line, by a database? Would his "I" still exist or would it be effaced by the database programmer? Who would want to take that job of effacing that "I"? Will contemporary writers in thinking about preserving their archives include directions for electronic storage? Will they try to control their "I" on the screen?

Hart Crane's Sexual Bridge

I want to start out with the text of Hart Crane’s The Bridge. The Bridge was published in 1930 and was Crane’s most widely read and praised work. It was also his last as he committed suicide in 1932 at the age of 33. The Bridge is seen by Crane as a singular long poem that is broken into eight parts. All of the parts have strong formal elements at play and all are reaching to defining and participating in an “American” poetic aesthetic. Most of this I knew before picking up The Bridge to read last week. I didn’t know how homoerotic this text was. That’s where I’ll begin thinking about it now.

The middle two parts of this poem, “Cutty Sark” and “Cape Hatteras,” are in different ways as sexual as much of Whitman’s work. The narrative of “Cutty Sark” is meeting a man at the docks in New York City. Crane begins, “I met a man in South Street, tall--/a nervous shark tooth swung on his chain.” He then describes the man’s green eyes “forgot to look at you/or left you several blocks away--”. The next parts of this poem, Crane captures the drunken impressions of the experience in brief and fleeting song lyrics and overheard snippets of conversation. This montage is orgiastic in both it’s conception and poetic execution. Lines like, “O life’s a geyser--beautiful--my lungs--/No--I can’t live on land--!”, lead to this orgasmic conclusion,

I saw the frontiers gleaming of his mind;
or are there frontiers--running sands sometimes
running sands--somewhere--sands running. . .
Or they may start some white machine that sings.

The poets continues on through this experience at the docks leading to this final four lines

--he lunged up Bowery way while the dawn
was putting the Statue of Liberty out -- that
torch of hers you know--

I started walking home across the Bridge. . .

I am struck reading these passages how the language of the experience of public gay male sexuality from the 1920s as captured her in the poetic artifice is not so different from the language and imagery of public gay male sexuality from my own coming out in the 1980s and 1990s. The docks in New York and the Bowery both spaces where white machines continued to sing and the geyser of life sang beautifully until we walked home to Brooklyn or Jersey.

While “Cutty Sark” is a meditation on public sex (and concludes I think with the loneliness of these encounters as the sailors “turned and left us on the lee”), “Cape Hatteras” is a love poem to Walt Whitman. I read it as a sonnet sequence of sixteen sonnets, the classic cycle for love poems. Crane, however, assumes immediately an intimacy with Whitman at the end of the fir sonnet, writing, “Or to read you, Walt,--knowing us in thrall//to that deep wonderment”. The direct address of Whitman by his first name, with the easy intimacy, an intimacy that is not previously assumed in the poetic cycle, but that seems to suit both Crane and the addressee. This emotional intimacy only intensifies over the length of the poem. By the fourth sonnet, Crane writes,

Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity
Be still the same as when you walked the beach
Near Paumanok -- your long patrol -- and heard the wraith
Through surf, its bird note there a long time falling. . .

This love poem to Whitman is counterpointed with the location to which Crane has transported us. Cape Hatteras is the site of the Wright brothers’ first experimentation with flight. Thus in the center of the poem about The Bridge, a both real and mythic object that provides movement and stability, Crane recounts another real and mythic object of movement and industrialization. The poem ends with a paean to both the airplane and to Walt, “A foot again, and onward without halt,--/not soon, nor suddenly,--no, never to let go/ My hand/ in yours, Walt Whitman --/ so--”.

After reading this, I encountered Yingling with a degree of ambivalence when one of his central questions is, “What would constitute the study of homosexuality as a textual system in the current climate of theoretical concerns? How may homosexuality be organized as a system of inquiry that moves beyond the question of thematics to the problem of representation?” Part of my response to both questions is, did you read the text? I don’t read Crane as as Yingling suggest “less a matter of self-expression and more a matter of coding.” Crane - and Whitman - might have done better if they were more encoded. Though this may just be me as a reader - always looking for the sex. Beyond the flippancy, I actually found Yingling quite useful and having just read Martin’s book The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry it is interesting to think about the leaps in writing and thinking about “homosexual”/gay & lesbian/queer poetics from Martin (1979) to Yingling (1990) to this moment. Yingling goes to semiotics to examine Crane’s homosexuality in his poetics, a move that I wouldn’t make at this particular moment, he excavates the connections between Crane and Whitman in interesting ways and I was interested in how he talked about Crane’s mimesis in the opening lines. How do we read silence and heterosexual mimicry in Crane’s work?

Finally, I’m very interested in Waldo Frank’s introduction to The Bridge. I have to admit, I was laughing out loud while reading it. It is tonally different than most introductions I’m used to reading and his hagiography of both Crane and himself fascinated me.

Brilliant things I wish that I had written

A Lesbian’s Guide to Cunnilingus.

New Issue of the Lambda Book Report

The new issue of the Lambda Book Report must be wending its way through the world. I reviewed Nickole Brown’s first book, Sister, and she has a quotation from the review on her webpage here. The University of Nebraska Press added a blog mention of my review of Hilda and Aaron Raz’s fine memoir, What Becomes Her.

I can’t wait to see my copy!

Thomas Sayers Ellis at the University of Maryland

Thomas Sayers Ellis, the poet behind the most excellent book The Maverick Room, came to read at the University of Maryland this year and I had the high honor and privilege of introducing him. Here’s what I said:

We are in for a treat this evening. Thomas Sayers Ellis is a poet with language that sparkles as much as it cuts. His words “are parts of speech/with beats and breaths of their own.” Ellis uses “interjections like flams. Wham! Bam!” The vibrant world of the English language in its daily use is captured and transmogrified by Ellis in his poems. He combines language with structural elements that bow to the formalism of the poetic past but also bust out with the rhythms of funk, hip-hop, and jazz.

Ellis is a poet of place, this place, Washington, DC, and the African-American people of the District as well as the broader African Diaspora. In his poem, “View of the Library of Congress from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School,” he synthesizes many of these disparate strands of his knowledge and identity, and on the occasion of Robert Hayden’s death, tells us,

I was beginning to think
Like a poet, so in my mind
Hayden’s dying and my loafers
Were connected, but years apart.

I first heard Ellis read at Karibu Books in the Prince George’s Plaza a few years back. Having only read a few disparate poems of his prior to attending the reading, I didn’t know what to expect and was mesmerized by his performance, and indeed that is what it was. Ellis proved his linguistic mastery, both on the page and with his electric presentation. Ellis’ images are vivid and his language is both familiar and unusual. Consider these lines from A psycho-alpha-disco-beta-bio-aqua-do-loop,”

Rump-by-rump,
The strings attached
To our thangs were
Reeled into The Deep
And rhythmic as fins,
Schools of P signs
Flapped and waved
Like flags.
One nation
Under a groove.

Ellis co-founded the Dark Room Collective, a community of established and emerging writers, in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1988. Of the Collective, co-founder Sharan Strange wrote, "It was the sustaining practice of writing in community just as much as the activism of building a community-based reading series for writers of color that kept us engaged in collectivity."

Ellis attended and was graduated from Brown University with a Master’s of Fine Arts in 1995. He has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including Poetry, Tin House, and Ploughshares. He has received fellowships and grants from The Fine Arts Work Center, the Ohio Arts Council, Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony.

His first full collection, The Maverick Room, was awarded The 2006 John C. Zacharis First Book Award. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence University and a faculty member of the Lesley University low-residency MFA program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His book, Breakfast and Blackfist: Notes for Black Poets is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry Series.

I leave you with a few lines from Ellis’ poem “All Their Stanzas Look Alike,” an anaphoric litany which includes this,

All their metaphors
All their bookstores
All their plantations
All their assassinations
All their stanzas look alike

He reads it much better than I, which is why, I’ll stop, and ask you all to give a warm welcome to the electrifying, mesmerizing maverick, Thomas Sayers Ellis.

Salut au Monde! Writing Race in Poetry

In the current issue of the American Poetry Review, Major Jackson wrote about race. Titled, From a Mystifying Silence: Black and Big, Jackson takes on race as an issue in American Poetry ending with a call for more white writers to write about race. I thought about this essay again when reading Whitman’s “Salut au Monde!” There are so many wonderful things about Whitman: those huge lines that fill your lungs and bump the outer edges of your mind. The pure ambition of the poems which leave nothing as subjects that do not exist in the world of poetry. The naked sexuality of Whitman, or to say it plain, I cannot imagine a person for whom Whitman is not a hot writer - the writer who makes you race to the bedroom and drop the book for a minute or more alone. All of these things I love about Whitman, but this read I was reminded how I loved him for writing race in a meaningful and interesting way.

As a brief aside, I’ve been thinking about white writers writing race in other material in the course. It is one of the things that fascinated me about Swenson’s work as well. I felt like the absolutely most effective poem of hers in Iconographs was Black Tuesday. I was interested in her poem “The Power House” because at the end she writes, “I thought he’d be a Negro but he wasn’t. He didn’t see me. Didn’t need to see anything. He had a red face and a blue uniform.” The assumption there that he was Negro and that she wasn’t seen interests me.

Returning to Whitman and his salute to the world, I love the scope of this poem and how race and ethnicity in Whitman’s world are so different than how they are circumscribed in our world. I’m aware that Whitman writes it prior to the doctrine of manifest destiny in the United States and at the height of the British Empire. I am aware of the imperialism of Whitman’s vision, but I think that the imperialism is tempered by humanity and profound humanity. He writes,

I hear of the Italian boat-sculler the musical recitative of old poems,
I hear the locusts in Syria as they strike the grain and grass with the showers of their terrible clouds,
I hear the Coptic refrain toward sundown, pensively falling on the breast of the black venerable vast mother of the Nile,
I hear the chirp of the Mexican muleteer, and the bells of the mule,
I hear the Arab muezzin calling from the top of the mosque,
I hear the Christian priests at the altars of their churches, I hear the responsive base and soprano,

Whitman hears more in the world than I ever have. The things he hears are complicated as well. This is not just poetry of adulation. A few lines later he tells us, “I hear the wheeze of the slave-coffle as the slaves march on, as the husky gangs pass on by twos and threes, fastens together with wrist-chains and ankle-chains.” Later he writes, “I see all of the menials of the earth, laboring,/I see all the prisoners in the prisons,/I see the defective human bodies of the earth.” Whitman is intent on seeing it all.

The final strophe of the tenth part of the poem is this:

I see male and female everywhere,
I see the serene brotherhoods of philosophs,
I see the constructiveness of my race,
I see the results of the perseverance and industry of my race,
I see ranks, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, I go among them, I mix indiscriminately,
And I salute all the inhabitants of the earth.

I read this as Whitman speaking of a human race in the third and fourth lines but then realizing that there are differences and moving among them. This strophe leads into the directive of the next two sections where Whitman calls upon the people of the world through hist direct address. The eleventh section ends with this:

Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless--each of us with his or her right upon the earth,
Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

(Now Whitman wrote this in 1881 and so it seems pretty astounding that over 100 years later there are still people unable to use gender inclusive language as easily as he.)

I first read Whitman as a young child. I have in a journal from 1976, “I, six years old, the bicentennial of the States,” which I have to believe is not from reading Calamus, but rather from the Unitarian Universalist “celebration” of the troubled country; still it seems an odd Whitmanesque mark.

Yet, I digress from Whitman and race. I’m weary of reading him as having a vision of race that is not informed by the racism ripping at the soul of the United States while he is writing or by the imperialism that is shaping the world, but I’m inspired by how consistently and unabashedly Whitman writes race in his work. He has no concern of being seen in a particular way or another. I find that inspiring and I find it what Jackson was calling us to do when he wrote for APR. It also functioned to shape another generation of writers such as Langston Hughes and his poem, “I, too, Sing America.”

Do any of you write primarily for the web?

Do any of you write primarily for the web?

This approximates a query of Professor Smith to our section. The answer was, I think, confused. I’ve been returning to the question though. I write, not primarily for the web, but for an audience because to have an audience means to be less alone and I think the web, overall, is a tool that makes us less alone in the world.

In “A Hypermedia Archive of Dickinson’s Creative Work, Part II: Musings on The Screen and The Book,” Smith writes, “She [ED] emphatically declared that our standard medium of literary and intellectual exchange was not the field in which she cultivated poetic productions; in other words, our writing technology, print, was not hers (p. 19),” and later, “contemplating destabilization as an important part of Dickinson’s artistic project.” I’m very drawn to this about Dickinson and I find it so liberating to read her in a different way from the hymnal verse which was, for me, in the words of Thomas Sayers Ellis,

All their hollow haloed causes
        All their tone-deaf tercets
All their stanzas look alike
        All their tables of contents
All their Poet Laureates
        All their Ku Klux classics
All their Supreme Court justices
        Except one, except one
Exceptional one. Exceptional or not,
        One is not enough.

Encountering her as not the rhyming isolated maiden, but a whimsical and freakish woman engaging with a dear friend has been realizing that her stanzas do not look alike. She is engaged in destabilizing language - and I really like that. Even though the destabilization of language is not a primary project of the tradition of either the narrative or lyric poet, I feel the camaraderie of the destabilization with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.

This brings me, of course, to Hejinian, who was exciting and eye-opening to read. I especially want to talk about the “Who is Speaking?” essay and Hejinian’s assertion, “Invention is central to the private as well as public life of the writer.”

Being Queer Isn't a Secret Any More

Read my guest post over at Bilerico.

October 11th is the twentieth anniversary of the second March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. It’s an important anniversary to mark. The March was a significant organizing moment in the history of queer liberation—many grassroots organizations and much activism was spawned by it.

At the time of the March, there was a real and palpable fear that HIV/AIDS would decimate the gay male community forever. Lesbians, as well as gay men, were concerned that gains made by feminism were being eroded by courts and legislatures. After seven and a half years of the anti-gay, anti-woman Reagan administration, a quarter of a million (maybe even a half a million) people gathered on the mall in Washington, DC to demand queer rights. It was an incredible milestone – one worth remembering and honoring.

That said, National Coming Out Day as a celebration of the March falls flat. Coming out in 2007 just doesn’t meet the tone of courage or honesty that people who gathered on October 11, 1987 demonstrated.

Read more here.

100 words on an Emily Dickinson poem

188


Susan knows
she is a Siren --
and that at a
word from her,
Emily would
forfeit Righteousness --
Please excuse
the grossness
of this Morning --
I was for a
moment
disarmed --
This is the
World that opens
and shuts, like
the Eye of the
Wax Doll --

From Open Me Carefully edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith

Emily writes an apology to Susan who is a Siren. In her great beauty, Susan makes Emily abandon her rightness from the spat - the grossness - from this morning In her oblique apology “I was for a/moment/disarmed--”, Emily equates the argument to the world which opens and shut “like/the Eye of the/Wax Doll.” Does the world see the rightness that was Emily’s? Does the world see that if Susan would give Emily one word - a word of affection, of love - that Emily would abandon her anger? Are we the wax doll?

S as in Sam, Z as in Zebra: My Quarterly Newsletter

Dear Friends,

It's an exciting fall. I was called in August and assigned a class of undergraduate creative writers at the University of Maryland. It's my first college teaching experience, and I'm loving it. I developed my own syllabus for ARHU (the Maryland acronym for Arts and Humanities) 319 and am loving every minute of teaching it! We're reading all of the visiting poets to Maryland this fall - Martin Espada, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Carl Phillipps. It will be a stimulating few months. I couldn't be more pleased. Or busy! Between working for The New Press, my own writing, and three graduate English classes, I have plenty on my plate.

Here's a quick update of my activities over the past few months.

Two Poems in Queer Collection

Gregory Kompes published a lovely anthology of contemporary queer writers called Queer Collection 2007. I was pleased to have two poems included in it - "Black Dress" and "First Kiss." In addition, I helped Gregory with some outreach and promotion of the book. As I've spent a lot of time studying the anthologies, Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry, it is exciting to be engaged in a contemporary anthology. You can read more about Queer Collection 2007 here: http://www.queercollection.com/

And submit to next year's planned edition by following these guidelines: http://www.queercollection.com/index_files/Submissions.htm

Video and New Postcard

I spent a few days in Vermont this summer with my writing buddies, Merry Gangemi and Nicki Hastie. Nicki videotaped much of our time together including our readings. You can see video of me reading at Tea & Poetry, organized by Merry, here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=SYu8tOCB9fU

It was a glorious experience. One of the poems that I read, "At Birth," I also printed this summer as a postcard. If you'd like me to mail you one, just reply and I'll pop it in the mail as soon as possible.

Writing about Marriage

I've written a lot about marriage lately and our hopes for the possibility of being married here in Maryland were dashed on Tuesday, 18 September 2007. It was heart-breaking, but still the work continues. You can see a variety of columns that I've written about marriage at the following links

http://www.gazette.net/stories/071207/prinlet112921_32361.shtml

http://www.washingtonblade.com/2007/8-31/view/columns/11148.cfm

http://julierenszer.blogspot.com/2007/08/article-waiting-for-marriage-in.html

Be forewarned, the ideas expressed are contradictory!

CIVILesbianIZATION

I'm writing a regular column, CIVILesbianIZATION, that will be regularly featured at Edge Publications. You can read the first installment here:

http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ci=108&ch=style&sc=life&sc2=features&sc3=&id=5419&PHPSESSID=2c707172102288085c42836f195b6ffa

and check  back on the first and fifteenth of each month for the next installments.

Sinister Wisdom

The next issue of Sinister Wisdom, issue 72 on the topic of Utopia, is coming out this month and will contain an omnibus review of mine on new lesbian poetry. I write about new books by Robin Becker, Cheryl Clarke, Eloise Klein Healy, Joan Larkin, Juliet Patterson, Sina Queryas, vittoria repetto, Nathalie Stephens, and Stacey Waite. Please do check it out when it hits newsstands in your local feminist or independent bookstore - or order a subscription and support this great journal.

To order a subscription: http://www.sinisterwisdom.org/journal.html#order

Editorial Work

As I write this, I'm wrapping up my work with the special issue of off our backs. It's been a delight. We're all working hard to have it mail in early December - at the latest. I've been participating a bit in the off our backs collective which is great fun. Next I'm looking forward to editing a special issue of Sinister Wisdom. The topic is Lesbian Theories, Lesbian Controversies. I think it will be a wonderful journey. If you order a subscription today using the link above, you'll receive my special issue as a part of your regular subscription.

That's it until December when I'll write after all of my papers have been submitted!

All best,

Julie

Feminist Studies

Feminist Studies began publishing in 1972. Since volume 2 (1974-1975) the journal has included poetry, in fact in the first poems published were by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. I’m going to examine volumes 2 through 5 of the journal which will be between 1974 and 1980. I’m interested in Feminist Studies in particular because of the history of the editorial board of the journal and their engagement in poetry as well as the history of poetry in the feminist movement during this time period. Some questions that I will be asking about the issues are: How is poetry included - both poems and poetry as a critical object of study for feminist studies? How are the feminist poetics that are at work at the time among women’s communities filtering in through these pages? What function does poetry play in the journal? What function does poetry have in relation to the theory developed in the journal? What is the relationship of poetry to the editors of the journal?

I am then going to compare those with two recent volumes 31 and 32 from 2005 and 2006. I will be thinking about questions regarding the changes over the thirty year period of the journal and poetry including, Has the role of poetry in the journal changed? Has the positioning of poetry in the journal changed?

The early years of the journal are important to me because of the work of scholars in thinking about feminism and poetry. I’m interested in looking at the artifacts from this time in light of work like Kim Whitehead in The Feminist Poetry Movement and Katie King in Theory in its Feminist Travels, but I’m also interested in looking at changes in how poetry is functioning in the scholarship today.

CIVILesbianIZATION: Changing the Civil Rights Paradigm

Edge Publications, which has the greatest tagline ever (Your life. . . .with an edge), is running my new column, CIVILesbianIZATION. Their first installment started running this week. You can read it here.

I’ve always wanted my life to have an edge, and now it does!

Here’s the beginning of the column to whet your appetite:

CIVILesbianIZATION :: Changing the Civil Rights Paradigm
by Julie R. Enszer
EDGE New York City Contributor
Monday Oct 1, 2007

Sometimes there are moments of great tragedy when gay and lesbian inequality is all too visible. These moments are painful and profoundly disturbing. I think of the murder of Matthew Shepherd and the murder of Sargeant Allen Schindler; two brutal murders motivated by hatred for gay and lesbian people. There’s wide-spread agreement in the United States that murdering people because they are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender is wrong. It is a public tragedy that diminishes all of us.

Read more.

Reading Practices: Do Poets Think?

Virginia Jackson's essay, "Thinking Dickinson, Thinking Poetry," raises fascinating questions about readership and form. Jackson's argument builds along two trajectories, in one she argues that Dickinson wrote - and thought - in poetry but that poetry had a different meaning for Dickinson and for her contemporary readers than it does for readers of today. In another, she argues that scholarship about Dickinson provides a template for how we think "through lyric poetry in the last century and a half." To explain the first element of the argument Jackson mounts a close reading of Dickinson's poem which begins, '"Lethe" in my flower.' Jackson's close read of the poem in consultation with historical material demonstrates different reading experiences that Dickinson's contemporaries - and the recipients of her poem, in this case Susan, would have had, especially contrasting them with current reading traditions and assumptions.
I was intrigued because the construct of a "speaker" or "narrator" in a poem has been the subject of much conversation in an internet community that I participate in. Generally, all support the notion that there is a performed narrator that is not the poet with Sharon Olds being an extreme contemporary example of this. (Olds is known to respond to audience members who query her about her daughter by saying, I don't have a daughter, why do you assume that I do? As background, Olds' work includes many poems about her - or the speaker's/poet's children.) Jackson writes, "Once we decided (as just about everyone has decided, at least since late in the nineteenth century) to read poems as the dramatic monologues of fictional "speakers," then the drama of poetic forms struts and frets across the state of reading, which is to say that the relation between the poet and the poem is the relationship between an audience and an actor--or that would be the relation, if the actor were actually in front of us. . . . That is to say that for modern lyric reading, poetic thinking is an act of vicarious identification."
I wonder, what if we were to reject that vicarious identification and instead of seeking vicarious identification to seek through poetry an empathic understanding in which we identified the poet as not an actor but as a person making visible to others the real and understood emotions, not in a scripted drama, but in a factual and imaginative rendering?
Part of my wondering about this is the reading through of Swenson, though to be fair it isn't just Swenson for me but other poets, but I'll use Swenson as a common example. I feel like the emotional kernel of her work is too often not authentic or well-examined. I don't mean to suggest that this is intentional, always, on her part, but that without an authentic and well-examined emotional basis, her work becomes more of the work of language - as she suggests it is in her writing. This is fine, but as a reader I have greater expectations for poetry. I want not the vicarious identification, but the imaginative renderings of an authentic emotional life. I don't feel like Swenson can deliver on that. She had a secret and that secret over time turned into a lie.
I think that Mary Oliver has the same challenge in her work.* While she writes beautifully rendered poetry about nature that appears to build a metaphoric resonance for human emotional life, it too is flawed in not being honest. Over time, the function of the natural world for Oliver obscures the authentic exploration of her emotional life. We cannot vicariously identify with her work because we cannot on some basic level identify ourselves with a lie, with a half-truth, with obfuscation. I realize that the lie, half-truth, and obfuscation are three very different things, and that it is at best lazy to conflate them and at worst an intellectual sin, but for the moment, I leave it there to be explicated more fully later.
This sense of an authentic rendering, of course, is resonant with the arguments that Hart and Chung make in their article, "Hearing the Visual Lines." The work to understand the world in which Dickinson was writing and what she was doing with her manuscripts is about excavating an understanding of what Dickinson's emotional life was like. Hart and Chung and Jackson also intersect in their writing about print and manuscript-and-print culture. Now, we are in this transition where print and manuscript culture continue to exist but we add in an online-web, Internet, virtual?-culture and try to understand what the norms and expectations are there. The Dickinson Electronic Archive becomes a boundary object among these different cultures existing simultaneously in all three while also refusing in some ways each.
This question, Does literature think?, or alternately, Does poetry think?, for me begs the question, Do poets think? Reading the narratives of poets writing about their own work, I often think the answer is no. Swenson addresses this in her essay "A Poem Happens To Me." She writes, "It sometimes happens that I am unwilling to write the poem but that it forces itself from me without permission. A poem that happens in this way will often be inexplicable to myself, as to source, content, or significance." Rukeyser in A Life of Poetry describes a parallel process. In this case, each poet contends that the poet doesn't think. Yet, we know, by we, I suppose I mean we readers, we people who analyze and appreciate the art object, we know that poets must think, must have that self-reflexive process of apprehension. I would argue it is the thinking, of the poem, of the poet, separately and together, that makes the art great.

*Bishop may as well. I'm reserving comment on that, but it is keenly on my mind.

Dickinson Electronic Archives

I’ve just started reading the Dickinson Electronic Archives in a systematic way for my class next week. I’m holding back from reading more, though, at this moment because I am astounded by how personal and intimate reading the materials seems to me. I’m stepping back almost because I feel it to be an invasion of Emily and Susan’s privacy. That’s not rational, of course. They are both long dead and I think that privacy ends when one is in the ground. Still, I feel uncomfortable reading about them so intimately. Perhaps it is because I am doing it on my personal computer and I have the spectral notion of someone reading my life electronically. There are things I don’t want them to know. Emails I’d like to have erased. Letters that seemed right and honest at the time, that I’d like to redact. Like this letter from Susan sent “Pony Express” to Emily. Susan writes,
I am not suited
dear Emily with the second
verse - It is remarkable as the
chain lightening that blinds us
hot nights in the Southern sky
but it does not go with the
ghostly shimmer of the first verse
I wonder how I would feel if my email correspondences were put up on the web. I have hundreds of back and forth emails with my dear writing friend. Some written too late at night. Some that suggest another direction for a poem when I was missing her point. Would my moments of myopia come through? What about my tiredness? My temper? What I read in the Dickinson Electronic Archive is not exposing that, but the degree of intimacy is strong, even overwhelming, and I want for now to avert my eyes.
I think that it is that I am feeling too sensitive. I’ve somehow lost the scholarly veneer that I am supposed to have to read, to study, to think critically. I’m filled with this overwhelming sorrow about May Swenson and anger. I cannot seem to let it go. Last night, I sat down with all of Adrienne Rich’s prose and wanted to see what Adrienne had to tell me about Swenson. I found nothing, so far, but when I picked up my hardcover of What Is Found There and opened to the title page, I found this written in script: For Julie Enszer From Adrienne Rich. I wept. Which is too Christian really for me to write, but I did. I cried. I tried to stop it, to hold back those tears, but they just flowed and flowed down my face while I searched for Rich to tell me something about Swenson. There was nothing. So far. But the confirmation that the veneer has been lost somewhere.
So here I am, vexed by Swenson, emotional compromised by Emily and Susan and their intimacy, and wanting just to read Sarton. Her correspondences with Juliette Huxley, with whom Rachel Carson was also an avid correspondence, and from reading them she, like Sarton, was passionately in love with Huxley. What did Julian’s wife do to deserve such amorous attentions? Reading it in a book seems different, I suppose. More distance. That careful typeset. A place where my words have never been.

Blue Studies by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

I’m reading Blue Studios by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and barely can contain my excitement about this book. It thrills me on so many levels. First this is the sort of book that I want to write in twenty-five years. The prose is gorgeous and multi-layered. The analysis is deep in the world of modern and contemporary poetry and she also leaps across knowledges in ways that I envy. Lately, I realize that I have been reading books of criticism by poets that is the first book of criticism and there is a tremendous transformation between a first book and books written at the height of one’s career, which I think this book is. The breadth of knowledge combined with a longer-term, historical perspective is amazing. I’m dazzled by this book - and I’ve only completed the three essays, in part because I keep returning to reread each essay and underline new ideas and make new associations. This book speaks to me and I am trilled to be reading it.

The first section, “Attitudes and Practices,” contains three essays, “Reader, I married me: Becoming a Feminist Critic,” “f-words, An Essay on the Essay,” and “Blue Studio: Gender Arcades.” In “Reader, I married me,” DuPlessis recounts her evolution with feminism. The early years of feminism, when she was a graduate student at Columbia, have chilling stories for DuPlessis with extraordinary sexism at Columbia. How she found her voice, however, as a poet, as an essayist, and as a literary critic, is just riveting.

DuPlessis’s exploration of essays as a form and how that form relates to her political orientations are fascinating. Her earlier essay, “For the Etruscans,” has been used as an example of feminist innovations in the form. I have it and am pulling the book to sit and reread it. I remember being riveted by it when I was nineteen. I wonder how I will feel about it now.

Finally, “Blue Studio” is an essay about what it means to be a feminist poet. It is written in response to a letter that appeared in a Canadian journal, Open Letter, by Barbara Cole titled “Feminism from and to.“ As I think a central part of this essay and the apparent dialogue between the two is generational, I’m trying to get my hands on the letter by Barbara Cole. So far, no luck, but I’m hopeful and dogged in pursuing the original.

Here are a few links about Rachel Blau DuPlessis:

Rachel Blau DuPlessis CV

Review of Blue Studios by Andrew Mossin

Finally, a brief note that I had to write this blog entry just to expel some of my exuberance for the book so that I can write something more thoughtful and analytical for my class. I suppose it is somewhat gauche to just rave about a book, but I must do it somewhere and so this becomes that space.

May Swenson's Iconographs and Rachel Blau DuPlessis' meditations on feminist poetry

Absence is as powerful as presence. What is silent is as powerful as what is spoken. The white space in a poem, what printers call the negative space, is as important as the text.

In some ways I recoil from those aphorisms. There is something viscerally negative for me about absence, silence, negative space being important. I don’t want to reify that which is not included, that which is omitted, that which is written over. I don’t absence, silence, or negative space to speak for me. Perhaps because for too long it has.

I was thinking about this while reading Swenson’s poems in Iconographs because it is exactly that white space that she is using to speak for the poems. It is the white space that Swenson wants the eye to apprehend and “have material and mold evolve together and become a symbiotic whole.” One one hand, I am very sympathetic to this project. I feel like it unites the notions of form and feeling in poetry. In Iconographs, in some places Swenson’s vision works effectively and proves the truth of the aphorisms above. In particular, I find “The DNA Molecule,” “The Power House,” and “A Subject of The Waves“ to all be effective project. Yet, that doesn’t stop me from asking what are the feminist implications of that. If a poem accomplishes its meaning through what is left out - through an open space that is created, isn’t that in some ways antithetical to the sort of feminism that I believe in? The feminism that speaks (that being a significant word) truth to power? The feminism that works to make visible women’s lives and stories? The feminism that advocates equity? Is writing poems that rely on the eye noting the absence, the visual silence, and then taking meaning from that silence an effective feminist message?

I think that it is, or more accurately, I think that it was at the time that Swenson published the Iconographs. In some ways, these poems make visible the absence, which metaphorically works throughout this text as a symbol for women, and in the absence (read women) comes the meaning. Swenson is textually showing us how to apprehend her poems with a political message in the exact form and meaning.

Yet, I’m reticent to endorse this reading carte blanche because of the unresolved questions that Swenson presents us with about feminism in some of the poems. I’m cognizant in writing this that Iconographs was published in 1970 and presumably most of the poems were written during the early and mid-1960s. This timeline, read against DuPlessis’ narrative of her home feminist consciousness development in ”Reader, I Married Me“ or against any other second wave feminist narrative, means that Swenson in raising the issue of gender as a lens through which to see the world was synchronous with much of what was happening in the world around her. In spite of this, her observations, even her epiphanies, are not particularly profound from a feminist perspective - I would argue either in that historical moment or at the present.

Consider her poem, ”Women.“ This iconograph begins, ”Women should be pedestals moving pedestals moving to the motion of men.“ This poem is heavily reliant upon an ironic reading of Swenson’s assertions about women, which I think we can assume that her readers at the time understood. The physical set up of the poem on the page combined with the metaphor of women as rocking horses brings a profound physical understanding of the impact of sexism on Swenson and on her readers. Yet, despite this ironized reading of the poem and the painful reading that it requires, I wonder if it isn’t almost too precious and avoiding the real and palpable anger of women at the time. I wonder if Swenson’s treatment of women in the poem, which is directly in the text of the poem combined with the visual capturing of the rocking horse actually works to undercut the beliefs that Swenson is stating in the poem. I’m not sure. I’m not sure that I read this poem as a feminist poem. Again, the use of irony makes what is unspoken the powerful. That continues to sit in an uneasy way for me.

Another poem that I find troubling is ”Orbiter 5 shows how earth looks from the moon.“ In this poem, Swenson begins, ”There’s a woman in the earth, sitting on her heels.“ Swenson goes on to describe the earth as seen from the moon. She concludes with these to lines: ”A woman in the earth. A man in the moon.“ The woman in this line is the physical representation of a woman on the planet earth as seen from the moon. The man is an actual man visiting the moon. I think that Swenson does a brilliant critique here of the association of women with the natural world and that those final two lines just drip with irony. I also think that the arrangement of this poem as an iconograph is interesting. The seven lines face to the north east quadrant of the page as if pointing up to the sky. The seventh line separates and the eighth through twelfth lines while angled are approaching more of what we might perceive as the ”earth“ of the page. Those final two lines sit on the page as regular text as though they are grounded by some truthfulness about the earth while the others swirl in an outer orbit along with Orbiter 5. Yet something discomforts me about this poem. I guess I just don’t find the irony of the conclusion strong enough. And I think I am concerned that Swenson relies on irony to reach feminist conclusions.

This makes me in many ways more interested in Swenson. DuPlessis writes about not only the ”feminism of production“ (p. 65), but also the ”feminism of reception.“ How was Swenson received when working? How do I receive her now?

In spite of my dis-ease about some of Swenson’s work with a feminist lens, I also don’t want to paint an analysis in which Swenson is outside. I don’t want to label at this time the process of Swenson’s poetic practice as suspect - or not feminist. I don’t want to do that because I clearly thing that Swenson is an ally in all of this. A poet who is a woman, a lesbian, a feminist, in her own way. I don’t want to suggest that her work is outside of that. I am, however, strugling with it.

I return again and again to the philosophical question of what does it mean to create meaning from absence? Silence? Negative space? Can I resurrect that as a feminist possibility? I’m not sure that I can but I can understand that it is a practice emanating from patriarchy. That when presence and words and text is controlled by men, women must look to control the opposite and use that as the means to assert themselves. That perhaps is the liberatory reading of Swenson’s iconographs.

How can DuPlessis help with this? She writes,

It seemed that one needed, as a feminist, to invent an endless number of forms, structures, and linguistic ruptures that would cut way beyond lang-business-as-usual and narrative-business-as-usual, which always seemed to end up with “the same” kind of binary, “patriarchal” normalcy. Experimental writing of all sorts had always been crucial to the feminine project of cultural change: of revolution, not revision. . . . Writing cannot make these changes alone; but writing exerts a continuous destabilizing pressure and, in both analytic and formal ways, creates an arousal of desire for difference, for hope. If consciousness must change, if social forms must be reimagined, then language and textual structures must help cause and support, propel and discover these changes. So the essay aims at the decolonization of mind by the analysis of the deepest of embedded structures: gender. (Blue Studies, p. 28.)

I think that DuPlessis would read Swenson’s iconographs as a new structure and therefore feminist in its process and it’s practice. As I’ve said. I’m struggling with that.

There are a number of other elements of Duplessis that I respond to thoughtfully, but there are only two others I’ll bring up in this now long response. The first with regard to Swenson is, how do I, or perhaps do I, read Swenson as a lesbian poet? I think that much of what DuPlessis writes in “Blue Studios” could be transmogrified into a reading of a lesbian poetics. Does Swenson, who Maxine Kumin writes in the introduction to The Complete Love Poems of May Swenson, “even after the social acceptance of homosexuality, Swenson, like her friend Elizabeth Bishop, maintained her distance from woman-identified poetry,” count as a lesbian poet? Clearly from both the biographical facts of her life - and from her work (see especially Trellis for R in Iconographs) Swenson was a lesbian, but how does that relate to a lesbian poetic? This is a question I’m keenly interested in about Swenson - and Bishop for that matter.

I was also fascinated by DuPlessis’ notion of “social philology” (p. 33) and by her reference to her own intertextual relationship wtih H.D.’s Helen in Egypt and the way she presents intertextuality on page 27, “Rhetorically ”For the Etruscans“ mingles manifesto, analysis, intercuts of material from that workshop, letters to friends, the fluid form of talking and a sense of audience--the enormously excited and participatory group of women for whom, to whom, from whom I was speaking.” This fascinates me because I think it characterizes much feminist poetry from the 19790s through the mid 1980s and while it is intertextual, I also think that it is more than that - perhaps interlocutional? I think that this characterization is important in considering both the production and reception of feminist poetry.

Me on Woman-Stirred Radio

My good buddy, Merry Gangemi, hosts Woman-Stirred radio every Thursday from 4-6 p.m. EST on WGDR. I’ll be joining her for special commentaries on the following days:

Thursday, 20 September 2007 4:30 p.m.
Thursday, 4 October 2007, 4:30 p.m.
Thursday, 25 October 2007, 4:30 p.m.
Thursday, 8 November 2007, 4:30 p.m.
Thursday, 15 November 2007, 4:30 p.m.
Thursday, 6 December 2007, 4:30 p.m.
Thursday, 20 December 2007, 4:30 p.m.

Join me - it streams live online - and do call in and talk back!

Happy Birthday Donald Hall!

I think that I have now read everything that he has written.

Poem: "The judge was decent, but..." by Donald Hall, from The Old Life. © Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)


The judge was decent, but...


     The judge was decent, but

judge's chambers were judge's chambers,

     yellow and municipal

in downtown Ann Arbor. My kids

     were dear and anxious.

Jane's brother and sister-in-law, mother,

     and father stood up

with us for the rapid legality

     we followed with lobster

and champagne at the Gandy Dancer.

     Depressed the next

morning, I knew it was a mistake. I was

     wrong. We remarried

five years later in New Hampshire, joyful

     in a wooden church,

     a Saturday afternoon in April,

     only Jack Jensen our

     friend and minister with us, saying

the prayer book's words

among lilies and wine in holy shadow.


     *


     It didn't matter that

I had toasted the Queen at Oxford

     while Jane crayoned

into her Coronation Coloring Book.

     Married in the spring,

we flew to London in September, ate

     pub lunches, visited

friends in Cambridge, and found a Maltese

     restaurant in Kensington.

We learned how to love each other

     by loving together

good things wholly outside each other.

     We took the advice of my

dear depressed and heartsick Aunt Liz,

     who wrote us at our flat

in Bloomsbury: "Have fun while you can."


Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the poet Donald Hall, (books by this author) born in New Haven, Connecticut (1928) who spent summers on his grandfather's farm in New Hampshire, listening to his grandfather recite poems like "Casey at the Bat" as he milked his Holsteins. Hall moved back to that farm in 1975 with his wife, Jane Kenyon, and they lived there for 20 years until her death from leukemia. His book Without (1998) is about taking care of his wife, and the second part about living without her.
His collection White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006 came out last year.
Donald Hall said, "I try every day to write great poetry — as I tried when I was 14. ... What else is there to do?"

The World in Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave

An occasional blog entry in response to classes that I am taking this fall.

The World in Us, edited by Michael Lassell and Elena Georgiou, was published in April 2000. I’m fascinated by lesbian and gay poetry anthologies because I consider them artifacts of how gay and lesbian identity was constructed at the time that the anthologies were published. I’ve looked closely at two lesbian anthologies previously, Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry, which were publish in 1975 and 1981, respectively. As far as I know the first lesbian and gay poetry anthology was published in September 1988 and was titled, Gay and Lesbian Poetry In Our Time. Like The World in Us, it was published by St. Martin’s Press. Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time was edited by Carl Morse and Joan Larkin.

The World in Us contains work by 46 poets with between one and eight poems by each poet. There is an even breakdown between men and women included in the anthology and it is organized alphabetically. In the introduction, the editors note that they selected poems that are in some cases longer than poems usually included in anthologies, and indeed the length of the poems and the number of poems included by each author makes reading this anthology an interesting introduction to the work of each of the poets.

More than reflecting on the choices of the editors, however, the introduction provides some interesting insights into identity construction of gay and lesbian poets at the time the book was compiled. First, the editors posit that all of the poets are “mid-career,” which they define as poets who will write “their best work in the twenty-first century,“ or poets whose best work is in front of them. This is an interesting assertion, but I imagine most poets would feel that each poem immediately in the future is the best poem that they will write. That individual perception aside, however, one of the things about the construction of this anthology and the notion of “mid-career” is the way that it presents all of the poets as within similar generations. The editors write in the introduction, “The range of age is roughly midtwenties to mid-fifties. In other words, generally speaking, it’s a post-World War II crowd--in some cases, post-Vietnam (if generations are to be marked by violent global conflicts).” While this broad analysis may suit general readers, I see there to be a stark delineation among generations even within the anthology. I look here at the lesbian poets as their work I know the best. Of the twenty-three lesbian poets included in this anthology, I would consider there to be a generational break with these women being part of the second wave of feminism:

Olga Broumas+
Chrystos
Cheryl Clarke+
Marilyn Hacker+
Eloise Klein Healy
Joan Larkin*
Honor Moore+
Eileen Myles
Minnie Bruce Pratt+
Terry Wolverton

(* indicates inclusion in Amazon Poetry and + indicates inclusion in Lesbian Poetry)

Of those poets, there are some clear similarities in how their work is informed by feminist activism during the 1970s, both in terms of the creation of their poetry and the reception. With the possible exception of Eileen Myles, whose work I think was not received within feminist circles to the degree of the others, all of these poets could be considered poets of the lesbian-feminist movement.

Now consider the poets who are younger - that is not old enough to have been involved in lesbian-feminism, but more identified with the queer nation, for lack of a better word. I consider these poets in a different generation:

Beatrix Gates
Elena Georgiou
Melinda Goodman
Melanie Hope
Letta Neely
Achy Obejas
Gerry Gomez Pearlberg
Mariana Romo-Carmona
Ruth Schwartz
Robyn Selman
Linda Smukler
Cheryl Boyce Taylor

So why does this matter? Well, part of what I think all queer poet anthologies do is construct further the notions of the categories of “lesbian” and “gay.” The editors in their introduction note that there are differences between the anthology produced in 1988. They write, “Many of the writers included in Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time were literary lions, both living and dead. Remarkably, the world of queer poetry has changed dramatically since 1988. Its personnel has changed radically, and the mood is palpably different.” I think that the selection of writers to include for Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time in 1988 was driven in part by a desire to create, resurrect, affirm, and preserve a literary history for the lesbian and gay community. This was especially urgent in light of the AIDS crisis, which during the two years that the anthology was probably assembled was particularly acute in San Francisco and New York. By the time Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time was published the community - and by extension - the identities of gay and lesbian were immersed in grief in many ways while the political agenda remained to define and articulate a stabilized identity that could be read back through history, or at the very least through the post-industrialization history.

When The World in Us is published in 2000, there are very different identity concerns to be addressed in the assemblage of the anthology. Evident concerns include the need to articulate a queer of color perspective. The editors write, “Since 1988, the broadening, more inclusive community has become one of the most diverse groups on earth, and the poetry being written by its members is staggering in its variety as well as its energy. This new queer poetry (or perhaps ”postqueer“ describes it more accurately) is democratic in the best sense. . . . These young women and men are maturing in a world in which the unambiguous statement of equality has already been made. Their writing lives have had that context from the beginning.”

It is here that I see the generational issues most starkly. Consider one of the poems by Olga Broumas from “Caritas.” She writes,

With the clear
plastic speculum, transparent
and, when inserted, pink like the convex
carapace of a prawn, flashlight in hand, I
guide you
inside the small
cathedral of my cunt. The unexpected
light dazzles you. This flesh, my darling, always
invisible like the wet
side of stones, the hidden
hemisphere of the moon, startles you
with its brilliance

Broumas’ work in general and this poem in particular, although published in her book Rave from 1999, demonstrates values about women’s bodies and difference that are emblematic of a particular type of feminism during the second wave.

Also, consider Cheryl Clarke’s “Passing” which begins

i’ll pass as a man today and take up public space with my urges in the casual way he does in three-piece suit and gucci pumps big pants and large sneakers tight jeans and steel-tipped boots read my newspapers spread-eagled across a whole row of seats make my briefcase-boombox-backpack into an ottoman on the seat across from me on the l.i.r.r.

In this poem, from Experimental Love published in 1993, Clarke is working with gender roles to transgress them or to perform them with an ease to which she is entitled from her particular feminist analysis. I would argue that for her “passing” as a man means something very different than to a younger poet for whom the term “transgender” will come into play in different ways. Interestingly, this anthology makes no mention of bisexual or transgender although those two identities are very much contested spaces at the time that the book is published.

For the older generation of poets included in this anthology, I read gender, not only in their included works but in their broader oeuvre, as a site of action for their poetry, where as for the younger poets, gender is not acted upon as a site of their poetry in the same ways. By gender as a site of action, what I mean is that one of the projects of the poetry of these poets is to construct lesbian identity through their poetics either implicitly or explicitly. I also mean that these poets consider an analysis of the inequality between genders as a source of comment or transformative action for their work.

For the younger poets, the sites of action are different because the need to assert a lesbian identity, in opposition to hegemonic heterosexuality, is less strong, that is, a lesbian identity can be adopted more easily. Consider these lines from Melanie Hope’s “Only Days,”

Of course only days after I meet you i am imagining ways we will make love
Of course we will sit opposite each other in staff meetings so no one will suspect anything resembling sexual tension has wedged between us
Of course you are married to some degree and have no intention of messing around
Of course for a while work will not matter we will come and go easily in our crushed-out bliss
Of course we will have days when we are sure everyone in the office knows what’s going on
Of course I will try to like the things you tell me of your lover in an attempt to be open
Of course one day we will both call in sick and meet in a hotel near the airport to make love

This poem, about an affair between two women, both of whom have stable lesbian identities, drives the dailiness of a lesbian identity for the poetic persona home with the dramatic anaphora of “of course” which continues through the full thirty-six lines of the poem. Gender is not a site of action in this poem, sexual desire is.

Finally, consider Letta Neely’s poem, “8 Ways of Looking at Pussy.” In the second part, she writes,

swollen pussy
all laid out and relaxed
says to everyone in the room
“I have been to mecca and back
and it ain’t nuthin compared to what you
done did”

Especially in light of Broumas’ poem quoted above, Neely writes about desire in a different way. Less discovery, less unmasking of an unknown territory, and more external assertion of sexual prowess.

These generational tensions within The World in Us actually make it more interesting to read and consider. While the editors were explicit in wanting to include newer poets and not just people who were or were on the precipice of becoming “literary lions,” I think that the selection of lesbian poets in the anthology demonstrates the different ways that lesbian poetics are unfolding for different generations of poets.

Finally, though, like all texts that explicit gather gay and lesbian writers, one of the ways to read the text is by its exclusions. The editors note, “it is also true that many poets who share our sexuality refuse the appellation and will not consent to appear in the context of our poetry. Disappointingly, some high-profile poets declined to appear in this book, and their refusal shows there is still a sense of stigma attached to identifying oneself as a member of a sexual minority.” This then becomes my other area of interest in looking at the work of lesbian poets. How do we read a contemporary lesbian identity for a poet who did not identify as a lesbian, either by omission or by rejection? Can we consider there to have been a lesbian identity that was just mitigated by the closet and read a lesbian poetics in their work? I think about May Sarton whose lesbian identity seems to me very different than say Adrienne Rich. What about Elizabeth Bishop? Does she have a lesbian poetic? What about Mary Oliver? Rachel Blau DuPlessis addresses some of this in her meditation on feminist poetics and I hope to write more about that latter.

Grace Paley is Still Making Connections

Lately, everything I’ve been writing about is about spectral connections - the connections we living people experience with the people we love who have passed. It started when I was swimming at the pool at Maryland. I saw my sister. I wrote a poem. The Master Poet told me, “Whenever,” that is an important word for the beginning of the poem as though she might reappear. Each time you might focus on some different aspect of her - her eyes, a scar. So it began. The poems about seeing my dead sister.

And it has expanded. I have a poem in mind about the man who built and lived in our house. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and he is sitting on the couch smoking a cigar and drinking brandy or cognac. He never speaks to me, but I walk naked from my bed and I smell the sweet cigar and the bitterness of the alcohol and I look at him, sometimes naked too, sometimes in an old white terry robe - the kind that I want to have but don’t. We don’t speak. I try to quietly return to my bed in his bedroom. I want him to enjoy that smoke, that drink. Sometimes, he pets my cat.

Now today, all of the connections made by Grace Paley. She died shortly after I left Vermont, yet it is like she is still bringing us together. Us - those who have work to do to make the world better. It began with an obituary for the special issue of off our backs that I am editing. An artist in Vermont. A writer in Oregon. Some photographs. Some photographs from Tillie Olsen’s family. It extends out, further and further. Like she is reminding us to engage in the world, to find one another as though we might continue her work.

I need to call Merry. I need to tell her that Grace says we are to put together a special issue of oob on Women’s Friendships. I’m tired tonight and trying to gather my strength to celebrate a new year. To make my amends for the past year and enter the new one with a fresh slate. Grace calls, though. I will answer.

Mary Oliver "The Summer Day"

I think that this poem is a sign.

I don’t believe that I should be working today. I should be outside in the gorgeous rain, in the humidity that is permeating the place where I live. I should be looking for grasshoppers. Or just reading. Just letting the rain soak my shirt, then sleep in its warmth.

Poem: "The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver, from House of Light. © Beacon Press, 1992. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life? 

Happy Birthday to H.D.

It's the birthday of the poet who wrote under the initials H.D., Hilda Doolittle, (books by this author) born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (1886). She met Ezra Pound when she was a teenager and they fell in love, but her father forced her to break off the relationship. They stayed friends, and Pound brought her armfuls of books to read every day. She followed him to Europe and when she showed him some of her poems he loved them and sent them to Poetry magazine, signing them for her, "H.D. Imagist." He invented a new school of poetry based on her work that he called Imagism, which broke from formal metered verse and used clear, simple language to describe the world. She went on to publish many collections of poetry, including Sea Garden (1916) and Red Roses for Bronze (1929).
She wrote, "To sing love, / love must first shatter us."

Stanley Plumly: Swoon

Robert Pinsky writes in this week’s Poet’s Choice in the Washington Post about Stanley Plumly’s new book, Old Heart. It’s a divine book. Here is Pinsky’s column in its entirety.

Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, September 9, 2007; BW12

A rookie poet might fear to write poems that included the names of other poets, as though the life of art were not quite part of life. The veteran master may feel more confident about that. Stanley Plumly's rich, assured new book includes poems about poets of his own generation, living and dead, and of the past. Plumly's "Keatsian," a sonnet of subtly muffled rhymes, disarms by beginning with a sentence fragment that describes a scene seemingly far from Keats's "Ode to A Nightingale." But the word "English" is a smiling allusion, and the child's counting bicycle turns, then poetic forms, reminds us that an old term for verse was "numbers":
KEATSIAN

My brand-new Schwinn, its narrow English wheel.

I'd turn and circle figure eights until

I couldn't see or fell, the deep sun lost

behind the trees. I was as tall as Keats.

The game was numbers or the alphabet.

Later sorts of sonnets, quatrains, couplets.

Nobody died, as someone's mother or

mother-in-law would say about divorce.

At the end, sailing to south Italy,

grown-up Keats writes Brown that while "Land and Sea,

weakness and decline are . . . seperators . . .

death is the great divorcer forever."

In his marriage of the poem to matter,

written in stone if written in water.

"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water" is the phrase Keats asked to be inscribed on his headstone. Those words written in stone are a brilliant paradox, reflecting the young poet's awareness that he might -- or might not -- be the kind of artist we call "immortal." Plumly's tribute has a similar quality of quiet depths, something like a sublime wryness.

Paradox and the relation between enduring stone and fluid life also characterize Plumly's meditation on the great Italian modernist Eugenio Montale:

HERMETICISM

The tiering up the hillside, the tearing up, too,

from so much sunlight, so much man-made beauty.

Marianna, Montale's sister, describes the family villa

as a sequence of gardens, multiples of trees,

and staircase after staircase climbing -- masses of sage,

broom, and white and yellow flax, and palms mixed in

with poplars, holly oaks, (lemons), and candle-lit magnolias,

while higher up, placed between the olives and the pears,

valerian and cyclamen -- then views of "little villages

grouped among the cliffs, hanging over the sea,"

the blue-eyed Mediterranean: all of it, to Montale,

imprisonment, a "counter-eloquence" of the mind at noon,

the sealed heart almost too deep for the sun. Summer's

language like sunlight on stone, light itself the stone.

The interplay between words and reality, mortal imagination and the lasting world, shimmers in these poems.

(Stanley Plumly's poems "Hermeticism" and "Keatsian" can be found in his new book "Old Heart: Poems." Norton.

Copyright 2007 by Stanley Plumly.)

Poetry & Media

I’m taking a class called “Poetry and Media.” One of our first assignments is to come to class with 5-10 minutes of reflections on “what the big terms in the course’s title mean to you: poetry and media. What do you think about when you consider either? What are your primary interests in each separately and in both together? can the two be contemplated as separate and distinct from one another? How does one inhere in the other . . . or not? What questions are the ones that pique your interests when you hear the terms, when you saw the course’s title and description? What are you ambitions for this course of study, both in individual terms and as far as our work as a group goes?”

So this is my working through of those questions.

Poetry to me means the compression of words and ideas into a package that we call a poem that is meant to delight or surprise or interrupt or inspire or disturb. I think a central element of poetry is that compression. It is in many ways a compression that resists and even explodes suppression. This may mean that poetry, for me, is always working against suppression and repression. That would, of course, be a very political meaning to poetry, which I would agree, but would also be contested by many. Still, I think that the compression of poetry is where it gets its power and that compression also implies either a dropping away of unessential elements or a beating out of bloat. Suppression and repression, I think, cannot flourish in an environment where there is a rejection of the unessential elements or a constant beating out of excess. Poetry is more than compression, however. It is words and ideas that are packaged together with an intention to create power for a reader. That power generally results in a experience of emotion - the entire array of emotions. I think my favorite poems are the ones that elicit these emotions: delight, surprise, interruption or interrogation, inspiration, or disturbance. There are, however, hundreds of others. Poetry has to be connected with a feeling, though, for me. If there isn’t an emotive response, if the response is purely intellectual, then I find I am less interested. I’ll concede that saying this may indicate my limitation as a reader, but that makes it no less true for me.

Media is the system through which information is shared. It’s interesting for me to think about this term because a part of my job until recently has been to garner media for the person for whom I worked. So I think a lot about media as the systems of public information and entertainment in the United States and around the world. Thinking of media only in that sense has always been stifling to me. The conventional systems of media in the US today - radio, television, and newspapers - I find quite limiting in their views of the world. They rarely hold a vision of a world that includes me or in which I want to be. That’s of course why the Internet and the new media which has been emerging over the past fifteen years has fascinated me - there is both a space for me and for many of the ideas and issues that move me. New media, the digital media, has brought a place to enter and a reason to enter the conversation. I think of media as both the way that information is shared, literally, the medium through which data, information, ideas, words are transmitted, but also as the system that generates and informs the ideas. There is a co-generative relationship between the thing, perhaps in this case poetry, and the platform, or media.

My primary interests in each of these are hard to synthesize into a small statement. I feel especially over the past two years that poetry is this thing that has just infused my life at every level. I can no longer say this is my primary interest in poetry. I suppose I could say as Donald Hall urges me to, that my primary interest is to write great poems. That is true, but it feels so bold face to say that, that I necessarily recoil. My primary interest in poetry is to be an informed reader, to find poems that I can fall in love with, to feel wonder at beauty in the world. My primary interest in media is in that co-generative relationship. It is also in how media stimulates creativity. How does the method of transmission effect the creation? I’m very interested in that question.

The biggest motivation that I have behind this class is my interest in looking at how texts were created and received during the women’s movement and the lesbian movement in the 1970s. There was a huge publishing movement by lesbians at that time. Not only were lots of women writing poetry, but they were publishing it for themselves. I’m interested in how those texts, created by women in the movement and published by women in the movement, worked to shape women’s and lesbian’s senses of identity, self, and politics during that time period. I’m interested in learning the tools of analysis that Professor Martha Nell Smith has as an intellectual to learn how to use them to apply them to lesbian poetry during the 1970s.

I also want to read great poetry and think about it and talk about it. This class already has a great reading list evolving so I know that it will be incredibly stimulating.

Responsibility by Grace Paley

Responsibility

It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners
giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets
also leaflets you can hardly bear to look at
because of the screaming rhetoric
It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy
to hang out and prophesy
It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxes
It is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory
towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C
and buckwheat fields and army camps
It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman
It is the poet's responsibility to speak truth to power as the
Quakers say
It is the poet's responsibility to learn the truth from the
powerless
It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no
freedom without justice and this means economic
justice and love justice
It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all the original
and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems
It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it
on in the way storytellers decant the story of life
There is no freedom without fear and bravery there is no
freedom unless
earth and air and water continue and children
also continue
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman to keep an eye on
this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be
listened to this time.

by Grace Paley

Poem: Keys by Nancy Henry

Poem: "Keys" by Nancy Henry, from Our Lady of Let's All Sing. © Sheltering Pines Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission.


Keys

When things got hard
I used to drive and keep on driving—
once to North Carolina
once to Arizona—
I'm through with all that now, I hope.
The last time was years ago.


But oh, how I would drive
and keep on driving!
The universe around me
all well in my control;
anything I wanted on the radio,
the air blasting hot or cold;
sobbing as loudly as I cared to sob,
screaming as loudly as I needed to scream.
I would live on apples and black coffee,
shower at truck stops,
sleep curled up
in the cozy back seat I loved.


The last time, I left at 3 a.m.
By New York state,
I stopped screaming;
by Tulsa
I stopped sobbing;
by the time I pulled into Flagstaff
I was thinking
about the Canyon,
I was so empty.
Thinking about the canyon
I was.


I sat on the rim at dawn,
let all the colors fill me.
It was cold. I saw my breath
like steam from a soup pot.
I saw small fossils in the gravel.
I saw how much world there was


how much darkness
could be swept out
by the sun. 


One of the things that inspires all of us at Woman-Stirred is women who pursue their dream of writing. Morgan Hunt is one of those women. Morgan is an active member of the Yahoo discussion group, Lesbian-Writers, which is how we in Woman-Stirred met her. In 2001, she was treated for breast cancer and one of her resolutions after that was to feed her passion for mysteries and writing. This year her first book, Sticky Fingers, was released and it is the first installment in a projected three part series known as Tess Camillo Mysteries. None of us have yet dipped into our copies of Sticky Fingers, but we’re all looking forward to this luscious lesbian mystery series and we salute Morgan Hunt for her achievements as an author and as a woman who stirs our collective imaginations!

You can read more about Morgan Hunt at her website, www.morganhuntbooks.com, and at these two websites which feature great interviews with Morgan:

http://www.readerviews.com/InterviewHuntMorgan.html
http://www.justout.com/feature_story_03.aspx
We encourage you to go buy the book and let us know here what you think about it!

**This post is cross-posted with the Woman-Stirred blog.