Saturday, August 25, 2012

ABANDONING MALE PEDAGOGY IN POETRY


For centuries, women poets sought to make the structure of male poetics their own.
Dickinson took the sonnet and sought to carve out a feminine place within it.
But a new breed of women poets have set out on their own, creating a poetics that
ignores the structure of sonnet, quatrain, ode and all of the European male canonical framework.
This is an important step in asserting a selfhood, if you will: A reality of poetics in which women abandon the need to identify their thoughts, their existence, their selves by male standards.
This feminist poetics opens vistas of possiblities. Woman can stand separate, no need for a Freudian battle to overthrow the Oedipal and assert the -- the what? The Iphigenia? The Dido?
The poet Rae Armantrout is a prime example with her poem “As We’re Told”

“At the start, something must be arbitrarily excluded.
The saline solution. Call it an apple. Call this a test
or joke. From now on, apple will mean arbitrary
choice or ‘at random.’ Any fence maintains the other
side is ‘without form.’ When we’re thrown out, it’s onto
the lap of our parent. Later, though, Mother puts
the apple into Snow White’s hand,
and then it’s poison.”

Juliana Spahr and Claudia Rankine present this feminist poetics in “American Women Poets in the 21st Century.” The women whose work they present , along with critiques, use modernist techniques within lyric context.
Whether working in the language school or imagist, these poets reject “ the fence” and assert their own existence.
Spahr and Rankine’s book is published by Wesleyan University Press. 
It focuses on 10 major American women poets -- Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berseenbrugge, Lucie Brock Broido, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach and Harryette Mullen.

It is a must read for women poets.


If you use the universal in your discourse as you create a work, be it poetry or prose, you don’t have to use a construct of form -- like the sonnet, villanelle or pantoum -- as an emotional distancing device. 
These phallocentric devices are crutches. The universality of experience can be used as the restraint mechanism when talking about grief and other emotions.
This classical challenge, of the need to emotionally distance oneself, need not be met with the classical solution and all it inherently carries as a male pedagogical construct.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

THE ONYX MAN


There is no holiday from race.
I think that I 
can enter his world,

But it is foreign to me 
and I find
I want to keep it that way.

Tears, 
tears and grief
flow from his eyes.

His body shakes,
his form so soft, so malleable,
It pulls at my heart.

And yet, I stand
a distance off,
watching this man,

his anguish, washing
over the room,

tidal waves
that  ebb and flow, 
catching in his throat,
escaping as sobs,

the depth of which I know too well.

I want to take this man,
envelope him
in understanding

reach out gently
to touch this wound,

this gaping maw 
that makes him lift the bottle,

But his path is solitary.

Surges pull him
awash in dopamine --
from my world

to an expanse, a void
too solitary to join.

And so, as he pushes off,
I stand on the shore of sanity
and watch,

No widow’s walk for me.