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.

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.

PONDERING BRIDGEWATER & THE PRESS

How do you unwrap an enigma

about a man and his town?

How do you separate wheat from

shaft 

as you shake allegations,

searching for the facts?

There is a responsibility 

weighing heavily here.

There is a need to paint,

with not too wide a swath,

the portrait of this man --

He is sinew and flesh.

He is a blend

of contradictions and certainties,

like any other man.

He fears.

He is under fire.

He is in our hands.

We must be gentle.

*Through 2008 to 2013, Bridgewater's long standing

first selectman was under fire in the press as lawsuits,

allegations and investigations haunted his last years

in office.

A SUDDEN MOMENT

I was thinking,

as he was talking,

And our consciousness

Clicked,

linking together,

entwining,

And I thought the thoughts he thought
as he spoke them.

It was magic, ephemeral --

And I looked away.

A THOUGHT FOR AVERILL

“I learned life is not personal,” the poet Averill Curdy writes in his piece in the July/August 2012 Poetry magazine.

You learned wrong, Averill. Life is nothing if not personal. 

We go to colleges of some prestige to learn to distance ourselves from the all-to-personal aspect of life. We come away somewhat shielded, perhaps with veneration for those who went before us into that good night untouched, unfettered by the insatiable personal-ness of it all.

OH REALLY LAWRENCE?

 I rail against Ferlinghetti’s premise:

“there is what used to be called the ‘mystery of Woman,’

a romantic concept that endowed her with an illusive inscrutable

allure, both sexual and spiritual. 

Then the feminist revolution brought Woman down from her

pedestal.”

What pedestal? I ask.

Raped in back alleys, suffering back-room abortions, or

raising children alone in ghetto apartments?

Where is the allure of a screaming child,

going without enough to eat, warm clothes to wear,

or a man to hold him and to mold his character?

No mystery in the drudgery of waitress

days, spent

Standing on swollen feet, 10, 12 hours at

a stretch.

No allure in broken bones, 

swollen lips or blackened eyes

suffered by battered women.

“the feminist revolution,” Lawrence,

freed women from their bondage

of male fantasy, Romantic pedagogy,

and unspoken suffering.

Take your wistfulness, Lawrence,

o’re fantasy lost

And shove It.

SIMPLE PLEASURES

I like the concave

shape of a spoon,

it’s simple symmetry

of curve and line.

“He liked to spoon,”

she said.

And I thought of you.

Curved  ’gainst my back,

or I ’gainst yours,

we’d drift 

eluding consciousness --

Two travelers in the

world of counterpane,

intent on hedonistic pleasures

of the gentlest kind.