City College, New York, 1974.
Adrienne Rich offers me a piece of chocolate from the Hershey bar she has just
unwrapped. We are in the faculty lounge of the English Department. I called
her a few weeks ago at her home, introduced myself, and asked if I could borrow
her copy of A Change of World; it's out of print and I need to read it before
I start writing my honor's thesis on her poetry. She was very kind, agreeing
to lend me the book, suggesting that we meet in her office the next day. Since
then I’ve been auditing her course, "Images of Women in the Poetry
of Men," talking with her frequently.
"Thank you," I say, slipping the thin square of chocolate on to my
tongue. We walk out of the lounge and down the hall.
"You know," I continue, "I have come to consider you my literary
mother."
"I felt that way about Simone de Beauvoir," Adrienne responds.
"That means I'm part of a feminist literary tradition..!"
"I suppose you can say that."
* * *
March 2, 1997
I am on sabbatical.
The word sabbatical is related to sabbath: rest, reflection, meditation. Like
keeping the sabbath day, like lighting a candle. I must take time from work,
note change with ritual, let go.
An old dream: I’m on the shore, holding on to the rope of a boat which
is being thrust and bumped against the bulkhead, then pulled out toward the
sea on huge cresting waves. The thick rope cuts into my palms.
I am bleeding and can't hold on any longer.
And if I let go? Maybe the boat will sail off to some great adventure; maybe
it will be smashed. But my power is not nearly as great as some other force—wind,
tide, current—a magnificent beast that presides on earth.
I let go of the boat and it's thrown on to the waves. I’m alone, standing
on expansive, shifting sand.
Another image: I am the boat. I let the winds and tide take me out.
* * *
Writing requires a leap of faith: in myself, language, art, music, in the daily
rhythms and currents of life. This is labor, different than work. In the morning,
when my mind is most clear and focused, I leisurely putter, clean up the house,
move from book to desk to a poem to a page of this manuscript; walk my dog,
have breakfast; drive to the beach.
Where sea meets land is the place of change: solid becomes soft, soft becomes
liquid; liquid, firm; shape, form, solid, stone. Boats are stones, winged with
sails.
* * *
I am reflecting on ideas, images and processes that I have valued, perhaps clung to, for much of my life; reflecting on change; and changing. I am trying to locate who I am as a woman and a writer in the world. It will happen as I speak.
* * *
April 14, 1997
I visited the Nassau County Museum of Art, saw the exhibit The Feminine Image.
On the way out, I purchased the catalogue, in order to return to the paintings,
photographs and sculpture, and to read the essays. Donald Kuspit, in the introduction
to the catalogue, notes that “the irony of many woman-made works is that
they reject man's double vision of her...but without the expected result of
independent identity...standing on her own, without the support of man's desire
for her--woman seems peculiarly limited and bereft, and more isolated than independent.”
* * *
Bereft? No, sad. On the shore, working, digging my feet into the sand, walking
inland, turning around, re-rooting, gazing out to sea—of course I want
to be desired; I need the kind of intimacy, companionship and support that enable
all of us to flourish.
Must I reject the male perception of me? Connect artistically, sexually, only
with women? I do know that I need to support and be supported by other women,
other artists of integrity and passion.
I must also live a consciously political life among people who see beyond a
binary vision of any human being. While remaining open to multiple perspectives,
I must negate when necessary, affirm when possible, but always challenge.
I must turn inward, at times, so deeply that I forget myself.
I must take action.
I am changing the pronoun in the title of this manuscript from I to We. It Happens
As We Speak: Notes Toward a Feminization of Form.
* * *
How much, as a child, I wanted to challenge authority. I couldn't wait to grow
up, determined to write a book that would expose what was going on in my family.
Later I wanted to challenge my professors, especially those who forbade the
use of the word "feminist" in my academic essays, or those who insisted
I write in disembodied, inhuman prose. But speaking up to—or against—our
parents, teachers, lovers, government—needs to be balanced by close examination
of ourselves, individually and collectively.
Because I find myself part of the traditions and institutions I am challenging,
it becomes more vital than ever to look at myself, my own patterns and postures;
to take responsibility for my creativity; change what I can.
* * *
Lindenhurst, April 18, 1997
The roots of my isolation go far back: to growing up in a family from which
I needed to estrange myself; to a tendency to forge masks, create walls; to
the child who used language to conceal and reveal. To the young girl who couldn't
understand why she was chronically ill with a disease that would years later
be diagnosed autoimmune disorder; to that lost young girl who, through a bizarre
complex of associations, imagined herself to be a young college student who
died and was dismembered in the hands of her doctor after a botched abortion.
To the young schoolgirl who never lived up to what she was told was her "academic
potential;" who was never pretty or popular like the girls with long straight
blond hair, the thin ones, the pretty ones. To the young woman who acted dumb
and cute in the company of men in order to appear feminine.
To the young woman in college, in graduate school, who became an "honor
student," it seemed, out of pretense, faking enthusiasm and intelligence
in order to get an A—while writing poetry "on her own." To the
woman who in marriage gave up her name and spirit, seeking various sources of
comfort to heal the continuing rupturing wounds.
* * *
There is also the woman who has spent the last two decades creating a safe, stable environment for herself and her daughter, finding that a rented house, overlooking a river that goes out to sea, could hold her, nurture her, protect her, inspire her. The woman-poet who is supported by an institution committed to academic freedom; who has twice been given the gift of sabbatical to reflect, write, publish; who is learning about friendship, healing.
* * *
No, the artist need not be isolated from the world. That's an old destructive
myth. But there are periods of isolation, inevitable loneliness and loss. There
is also a need to re-perceive, re-make, re-define myself, my poetics; and then
there is the coming out, the saying of the truth that is the only path toward
integrity, dignity, and community.
This has happened in women's writing. As we continue to explore, challenge,
open, speak, images of isolation change. We have become engaged in a process,
individually and collectively, changing perceptions of ourselves within and
apart from the community of men.
I began my own search for an authentic voice intuitively as a child; more consciously
in the mid-seventies while an undergraduate studying literature at The City
College of New York, focusing on the theme of "the problem of the artist."
I asked Adrienne Rich, then a visiting professor, if being a woman-poet was
a central concern for her at that time.
Yes.
We walked together across campus the day after Anne Sexton killed herself,
talking on the way to the lecture hall where Adrienne would address the college
community, where she would speak about our responsibilities as women and as
poets.
"What are you planning to do after you graduate?" she asked, turning
around to face me before we entered the building.
"Continue in grad school, I guess."
"The institution will fuck you up."
Is this what it means to be part of a feminist literary tradition? Why did Adrienne
say that to me? Will the institution make me crazy? Pregnant? Fucked up?
Later, in graduate school, I approached a professor regarding my plans for a
PhD dissertation. When I said that I wanted to write on feminist poetics, I
was forbidden to use the word feminist.
So I developed a strategy of circumvention and re-invention, re-casting the
term, "feminist poetics" into the process, the feminization of form.
I came up with a definition: the movement from internalization, assimilation
and mimesis of a patriarchal creative process to an organic rooting in authentic
female sensibility and its formalization in language.
Good. I had a starting point. I wasn't sure what I meant by a "patriarchal"
(male?) "creative process," but I sensed that it had something to
do with polarity, binary thinking, hierarchy, institutionalized logic. It often
embodied misogynist attitudes and assumptions about women and women's creativity.
I knew that I had to speak about the repression of wisdom—-Sophia—of
nature, instinct, multiplicity, matter: not necessarily essential female qualities,
but as entities historically associated with female qualities, thus devalued,
often destroyed.
To be clear: polarity and misogyny are not synonymous, yet they seem to negatively
support and intensify each other, perpetuating dangerous assumptions regarding
gender and the creative process, contributing to the split sensibility and pain
I have seen in my literary mothers and in myself. One of the most dangerous
splits: the male principle as active agent, spirit, thought; the female principle
as passive matter; the formative process resulting from the synthesis of these
two polarities. Yin/Yang, Anima/Animus, Structure/Form. To feminize form, we
have had to transform that sensibility, that split.
* * *
Adrienne Rich asks in "Notes Toward a Politics of Location,"
Is there a connection between this state of mind—the cold war mentality,
the attribution of all our problems to an external enemy—and a form of
feminism so focused on male evil and female victimization that it, too, allows
for no differences among women, men, places, times, cultures, conditions, classes,
movements? Living in the climate of an enormous either/or, we absorb some of
it unless we actively take heed.
Multiplicity, inclusiveness, and what has sometimes been referred to as "women's
ways of knowing" are often invoked as Post Modern antidotes to an either/or
perception. A kind of Keatsian negative capability: to be in “uncertainties,
mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
But how then to focus? How to stay grounded with so much sensory input? Where,
indeed, to locate a center? Without a familiar dualistic pattern of polarities
and the dialectical process they engender, how can we create paradigms that
embody female form?
The process, the feminization of form, must be tracked not only through a direct
observance of specific traditional poetic forms, such as the sonnet or ode;
or the formal arrangement of words, lines, stanzas; but also through what Annie
Finch refers to as “experimental” and “imported” forms
that enable us to embody organic female energy and rhythms. This becomes a “new
kind of formal poetics...radical formalism, tribal or root postmodernism...”
Most fully—and what I examine in this poetics—we need to explore
the peripheral stage of creation where process and substance merge, where the
verb to form becomes the noun, form.
Amityville, September 16, 2003
Of all places! A yard sale! I found a book by Jane Mills, Womanwords: A Dictionary
of Words About Women, published in 1989. I'm drawn to her discussion of the
history of the word, focus. In Latin, the word means "hearth, fireplace,
pyre, altar or, used figuratively, a home." Mills connects the meaning
of the word to the Roman goddess of the hearth, Vesta, adopted from the Greek
Hestia. She quotes from Patricia Monaghan's Women in Myth and Legend: “Living
at the centre of every home [Hestia]...symbolized family unity and, by extension,
as goddess of the public hearth, she embodied the social contract. In the beginning
of her worship, matrilineal succession seems to have been the rule, and traces
of it survived in the custom of classical Greece whereby a new home was not
considered established until a woman brought fire from her mother's hearth to
light her own. In the same way, Greek colonists brought fire from the mother
city's public hearth to assure the cohesion of their new communities.”
A woman's center—organic, rhythmic, cohesive. An individual journey within
the journey of many.
It is how this poetics has taken shape.
* * *