March 2006
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  Dear Editor, Frequently those who feel wronged politically, as in having been underrepresented in a canonical anthology, will wring their hands over who was not included. At the risk of reducing January’s exchange on “women’s poetry” to sophomoric and paranoid tallying, I found it odd that only a handful of living women poets were mentioned, with an equal number of dead women poets, and many, many dead men poets. I wish to cast absolutely no aspersions on the distinguished women poets and editors whose discussion this was—all of whom I admire a great deal. Yet I found it strange that nowhere in the exchange did the WOM-PO (Women’s Poetry) listserv come up. Founded by poet, critic, and anthologist Annie Finch in 1997, the list of now over six hundred subscribers is hardly a secret and claims many distinguished women poets—and even a few men—as members. I have belonged to WOM-PO for seven years and can say that the list engenders plenty of healthy debate and scholarship which would have fueled the exchange. While J. Allyn Rosser dismisses as unconvincing Alicia Ostriker’s concept of “exoskeletal style,” and Eleanor Wilner notes admiration for Ostriker’s concept of “stealing the language,” neither spends much time examining to what extent those theories apply specifically to women’s poetry. I had hoped the exchange might touch on the work of such established contemporary women poets as Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, the three Marilyns (Hacker, Taylor, and Nelson); younger women formalist poets like A.E. Stallings, Deborah Warren, Kate Light, Beth Gylys, Chelsea Rathburn, Julie Kane, and Chryss Yost; and yes, the scholarship and poetry of Finch, Ostriker, and dozens of others who may be found either discussing or as the topic of discussion on WOM-PO, not to mention in Poetry itself. By failing to do so, much of the exchange trod familiar and well-worn ground, miles away from the poems and poets at issue. I am grateful that Poetry dares to publish interesting work by anyone who is not part of that same old tired coterie of the usual suspects, but am disappointed that, in this case, Poetry failed to consider its own contemporary women poets. As one who relishes the old (and new) Paris Review interviews, I very much like the idea of Poetry’s “exchange” feature. I enjoy it even more when it thoroughly engages the question. Robin Kemp Atlanta, Georgia Dear Editor, The exchange of commentaries on “women’s poetry” in the January issue will nourish many a debate in 2006 and thereafter. One thing missing in it is a historical context that explains precisely how “women’s poetry” came to be named and stigmatized in the twentieth century. Here are a few points of reference. Wordsworth wrote an unwitting manifesto of Romanticism in 1787 in his now much-examined piece of juvenilia, “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress,” and later in the studied emotionalism of the Lyrical Ballads. Strong fits of passion identified with the feminine became the hallmark of Romantic poetry, carried forward prominently through the nineteenth century by Tennyson—for example, in “Tears, Idle Tears.” When Whitman dismisses “Tennyson’s sweet sad rhyme” in “Song of the Exposition” he is championing the muscular rhetoric of nation-building against the domestic and tender-hearted sentiments ceded to women as their province of expertise. Modernist poets needed an antagonist to sharpen their edge of irony and impersonality, and the best-selling poetry of women in the twenties provided them with a vulnerable target. Carolyn Kizer’s reference to “sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales” in “Pro Femina” directs our attention to the kind of high-emotion poets modernists disdained: Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie. Like “women’s films” and “women’s fiction,” “women’s poetry” had to undergo a half-century of condescension before the label imploded thanks to the feminist movement and the rise of a new, expansive poetry synthesizing the innovations of modernism with the expressive practice of the Romantic tradition. There are poets and critics who have completely missed this significant recovery, this move forward into a more capacious rhetoric and a more generous apprehension of fully human experience. But the majority of the poetry-reading public has moved on. Laurence Goldstein Ann Arbor, Michigan Dear Editor, Back in the seventies women were ready to fight for a place in the canon. To do so they had to call not just the canon but the whole process of canonization into question. Much was learned then about the gaps and omissions in the Great Tradition. And many attempts were made (some of course tendentious and misguided) to reformulate the tradition in a way that would respect the lives and experiences of women as well as men, of Asian and African and Native American peoples as well as of Europeans. Reading the exchange on “women’s poetry” in your magazine, I got the sense from your interlocutors that the fight was over, that all we have to do now as cultured men and women is to sit comfortably in our dens and examine the excellences of individual authors and works. I’m not sure it works that way, just as I’m not sure that the fight is over. In the world of politics, for example, we see a well-funded and multi-pronged attack on the rights of women and minorities and an attempt to reassert the prerogatives of wealth and power, but we also witness something similar in the arts. As far as I can tell, the “culture wars” are still on. “Liberal” and “feminist” are dirty words not only in legislatures but also in universities. I read just yesterday in the Los Angeles Times about the so-called Committee for Academic Freedom, which is paying students at UCLA to rat on liberal teachers. For the past thirty years, we’ve seen continuing attacks on freedom of expression, not just on Piss Christs and elephant-dung Madonnas, but on anything which expands our vision of the world beyond the doctrinaire bounds of a narrowly religious, superstitious, and tribal worldview. Who today does not hear treasonous overtones in Williams’s startling declaration, “Everything is permitted in the imagination”? Lee Rossi Los Angeles, California Dear Editor, An essential constituent of readers absent from the necessary and vital conversation about “women’s poetry” is gay men, who have a greater affinity for poetry by women than many—including Meghan O’Rourke, J. Allyn Rosser and Eleanor Wilner—may realize. Rosser states that from a marketing perspective, “men are not very likely to clamor for books that focus on women’s experience.” When I first came to contemporary poetry in the early eighties, poetry by women was exactly what I clamored for. The first book of poetry I bought that was not assigned for a college course was Adrienne Rich’s Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974. I became a rabid reader of Forché, Glück, Lorde, and Graham. I tried to join a women’s poetry group but was denied entry due to my gender. But the first time I entered Sharon Olds’s hot pink office as her student at NYU, I felt vindicated. She (and a women poets course) introduced me to Alicia Ostriker—a fountainhead of knowledge, form, and humanity (thankfully present in the exchange)—and Muriel Rukeyser, perhaps the most committed poet and writer of the twentieth century. Richard Tayson Briarwood, New York Dear Editor, While David Orr may divert us with his brief, offhand reviews, his back-of-the-hand dismissal of John Greenleaf Whittier and others [“Eight Takes,” December 2005] rings unfair and untrue. Whittier’s work has lasted more than a century and will last longer. Any poet can be made to look bad by trotting out his or her weak lines. Orr and others should remember/reread poems like “Snow-Bound,” “Abraham Davenport,” and, perhaps best of all, “Telling the Bees.” From the latter, consider these two (yes, honeyed) stanzas: A year has gone, as the tortoise goes, Sure, these lines are sweet and lazy, but they’re apt to outlive much of what poets have done lately. Nope, we don’t write like this anymore—so what? Cut the large-souled spirits of the past some slack! Whittier doesn’t try to write like Whitman; neither does he seek to be postmodern. But now that we have abjured the seemingly patriotic, the near-sentimental, and the leisurely journey in verse, poets like Whittier run up against the paper-thin people of Norton and the likes of Orr. Ethan Fischer Shepherdstown, West Virginia Dear Editor, “An archaism is annoying,” whines David Orr in his review of Yvor Winters: Selected Poems (December 2005), articulating a common contemporary prejudice against an expansive vocabulary. Yet the instance he cites from Winters’s poems (“amid evil true”) is not an archaism but half a chiasmus. The lines he quotes from “To a Woman on Her Defense of Her Brother Unjustly Convicted of Murder” seem to me unobjectionable— Yet may you two, bound in a stronger whole, —the brother and sister portrayed as both firm and true, although I admit that I’m not sure what he means by “the human due”: a debt we owe or something owed to us? Both? But to return to the animus against archaisms: annoyance is surely in the eye/ear of the reader/listener. Why should poets restrict their diction to the idioms used in common, uh, parlance or intercourse or whatever? Some people object that archaisms are overly literary and smell of the inkhorn, but isn’t it a romantic pose for most poets to pretend they aren’t literary? (On second thought, perhaps not.) Are we forgetting that the same volume that included the romantic manifesto of the poet as “a man speaking to men” (Lyrical Ballads) also included “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which begins, “It is an ancient Mariner,/And he stoppeth one of three.... ”? One would have to be completely tone deaf to object to that “stoppeth.” Orr’s misreading of Winters’s poem bespeaks another loss to contemporary poetry. We not only have a diminished vocabulary but we are also rhetorically deprived. Confined to declarative sentences and simple diction, our poems would resemble Pope’s parody: “And ten low words oft creep in one dull line.” It’s a miserly poetic that hoards all its riches in the past. Daniel D'Arezzo New York, New York In the December issue it was nice to see the “The View From Here” section again. It was, however, disappointing to see this section start off with two writers who give incredible credence to spoken word, slam, and rap artists, with the implication that their creations are on par with what is commonly known as poetry. I know this is not the opinion of Poetry by what is printed in the pages thereof—I’m just a tad bit surprised the editors even gave someone else the room to say it. I say this as a huge fan of hip hop. At first, I thought, “Wow, they got the guy from VIBE to do a column, and Nas has appeared in Poetry magazine.” But this is not why I read poetry or why I read Poetry. A person who takes pictures is not a photographer, and a clever wordsmith is not a poet. Hip-hop heads who are serious readers know this, kids who spit at poetry slams do not. Making the comparison only broadcasts your ignorance. Mickey Minnick Silver Spring, Maryland Dear Editor, “Word’s Worth” by Rob Kenner is priceless! [December 2005] Thank you for printing it. There’s definitely a voyeuristic cultural fascination with the children of celebrities, but I’m always particularly fascinated by the musings of the offspring of famous intellectuals. The big question for me is, are these kids going to rebel against the erudition of their literary parents, or will they follow suit in their own intellectual endeavors? Kenner’s piece was so funny and heartwarming because he defies my black and white categories. His love of rap and poetry—or rap as poetry—makes him the perfect example of someone who has inherited his father’s critical perspective while being fully immersed in the beauty and strangeness of contemporary popular culture. He brings the ivory tower into the realm of the everyday, and this was very refreshing! Kylie Gordon Evanston, Illinois Dear Editor, From the debate on the translation of Greek Lyric Poems by Sherod Santos in recent issues [see October and November 2005] it seems that, despite Garry Wills’s claim to the contrary, the classics are vital to the modern culture. And that is good. As an old lover of poetry (seventy-three years old), and one of your new subscribers, I agree with Rosanna Warren that Santos has made a good work of “creative” translation. The translation is una bella infedele (a beautiful unfaithful) rather than una brutta fedele (an ugly faithful). Alessandro Novellini Turin, Italy |
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