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Reading feminist poetry: A study of the work of Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Audre horde, and Olga Broumas

Casto, Estella Kathryn, Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1990

UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Aibor, MI 48106

Reading Feminist Poetry: A Study of the Work of Anne

Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and,Olga Broumas

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of the Ohio State University

By

Estella Kathryn Casto, A.B., M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1990

Dissertation Committee: Approved by:

Anthony Libby

Marlene Longenecker

Jeredith Merrin

Advisor

Department of English To Mary Casto and Tim Miller

11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Anthony Libby for his

insight and patience throughout my doctoral program. I have benefitted as well from the careful reading and commentary of Dr. Jeredith Merrin and Dr. Marlene

Longenecker. Finally, the support of Susan Sweeney,

Kim Montague, Debian Marty, and Robin Casto has been

invaluable to me.

iii VITA

April 30, 1959 . . .Born, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

1982 ...... A.B., Ohio University, Athens, Ohio

1985 ...... M.A., Ohio University, Athens, Ohio

1986-1989 .... Teaching Assistant, The Ohio State

University, Columbus, Ohio.

Department of English and Center

for Women's Studies.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Area; English; Contemporary American Poetry.

Dr.Anthony Libby.

Minor Areas: Feminst Criticism. Dr. Marlene

Longencker and Dr. Jeredith Merrin.

Composition Studies. Dr. Sara G a m e s

and Dr. Suellyn Duffey.

XV TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION...... il

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... ill

VITA ...... iv

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER PAGE

I. "To speke of wo that is in mariage": The Family Dramas of Anne S e x t o n ...... 34

II. Political Necessities and Personal Desire: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich ...... 88

III. Crashing Through the Margins: Audre Lorde's Myths of Power...... 144

IV. Olga Broumas' Feminist Inheritance . . . 198

CONCLUSION...... 248

WORKS C I T E D ...... 266 INTRODUCTION

The Politics of Misreading

Except for the indubitable talents of Marianne

Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and, of course, Emily

Dickinson, Harold Bloom cites "problematic aspects" in

the work of writers included in his American Women

Poets. one volume of the Critical Cosmos writers series

that he has edited. /!/ Justifying the inclusion of

"these others" in the series as well as their

separation from the larger body of American poets, he remarks that their work has value "rather different

from the qualities of their strongest male contemporaries," and that "some of these differences do ensue from a vision, an experiential and rhetorical stance, that has its origin in sexual difference" (2).

His understated defense of separate consideration of women's writing suggests that though feminist poetry and criticism have not been without effect, both remain somewhat hysterical, their excesses overshadowing critical common sense. Such common sense tells us, for example, that to evaluate poetry according to its politics either simplifies the complex ambitions of good work or magnifies the significance of the mediocre. And Bloom gently admonishes those of us still harboring such wrongheaded notions of what poetry should do. "That polemic and ideology should be so overt in much feminist literary criticism is understandable," he says, "and unfortunately aesthetic considerations are sometimes submerged in political and programmatic designs, but nothing is got for nothing, and I foresee that the emphasis of feminist criticism will be modified by the success of that criticism" (2).

Bloom's concern that art not be feminist cannon-fodder is reiterated by writers whose cultural critiques exclude consideration of the complex demands that a feminist politics can make upon women's art.

Thus, while Charles Molesworth finds much to praise in

Robert Lowell's and Allan Ginsberg's efforts "to batter the language" in order to "buy back some authenticated version of the contemporary conscience" (41), he argues that Anne Sexton's examination of domestic life is at once too strident and too much confined to private, personal experience to win merit as social criticism or public art: the very proclaiming, histrionic prosaicism of her language keeps her poetry from having the artistic "rightness" of Plath's or Berryman's, and her increasing reliance on a flattening irony . . . becomes increasingly less rigorous. In a sense she was from the first the most "confessional" of the four poets tPlath, Berryman, Snodgrass and Sexton] discussed here, if by that word we mean a commitment to recording as directly as possible the shape of a private pain and an intimate sickness, without regard to artifice or aesthetic transcendence (73).

Charles Altieri rescues Adrienne Rich from drowning in political prosaicism by subsuming her "particular responses to woman's plight in our time" within his own

"general human concerns for identity and community"

(167). "Thus," he says

the power of her poetry resides not in ideas, which remain somewhat simplistic, but in the poet's grasp of what it is like to try to live in accord with an explicit body of ideals and commitments. . . . So the greatness of such poems lies less in how they structure experience than in how they dramatize capacities to reflect on and within it as the poets try to keep themselves from hardening into their ideas or using their poetic powers to create alternative worlds (180-81).

Though he is willing temporarily to suspend aesthetic criteria and base critical judgment on this drama of self-construction, in avoiding "the Scylla and

Charybdis of reductionism . . . and blind self-staging"

(20) that "limit" politically committed criticism,

Altieri overlooks the specific context that feminism and a feminist community provide for Rich. In fact. her own self-consciousness grows from the marked absence of powerless groups from her predecessors'

"general human concerns for identity and community": her community is grounded in the experience of exclusion and the need to find language that disrupts visions of humanity in which women's specific identities are either denigrated or ignored. Altieri defends what Helen Vendler has identified as Rich's

"public poetry of protest," a part of her canon weaker than the "introspective and psychologically framed poetry which retells, many times, the story of her own rebellion and struggle for self-liberation" (371): the two strains, he would say, work together to "produce and to test a set of character traits exemplifying a woman's power to create an identity in touch with plausible sources of strength and capable of responding forcefully to an oppressive sociopolitical order"

(167). But "woman's" here denotes no particular power, no necessary set of ideas. Vendler's sympathy for poets' private voices, Altieri argues, "lacks firm intellectual or cultural contexts" (4). Yet he, too, insists upon his ability to sympathize with Rich's vision and so both distances himself from her politics and removes the possibility of recognizing the difference between her context and his own. Though I agree with some of their conclusions— though Sexton's irony is debilitating and

Rich's process of negotiation with her community merits attention— 1 question these critics' insistence that women writers' attention to their private lives and

feminist communities either doesn't matter or weakens their poetry. For feminist critics and writers, defining the self through poetry is a political act. A poetics that fails to take into account political ambitions motivating the work pastes a generic label on poems whose key ingredients— the foregrounding of women's muted experience, the articulation of suppressed female desire— alter aesthetic categories and rewrite our definitions of art. Moreover, such poetry enables us to rewrite definitions of ourselves, though we need not sympathize with writers' experiences nor find our questions embodied in theirs for their work to elucidate the complex political positions we occupy and, perhaps, wish to change. Altieri hopes that the cultural context he provides for contemporary

poetry will give rise to "contrastive language with a substantial claim on nonliterary forms of value" (200), ethical judgments which reach beyond the limits of aestheticism. Yet, he is unwilling to consider the contrasting identity to which feminist poetry gives shape and to experience a disruption of the paradigm which gives him authority.

Clearly, feminist ideology has to have complex ambitions of its own if it is to understand really how the personal is political. Delineation of "female experience" works just as detrimentally as do demands

for "aesthetic transcendence" or "general human concerns" to ghettoize writers or amortize troubling aspects of their work. For the poets in this study,

feminism has provided rhetorical strategies for

representing experience outside male-authored, heterosexual paradigms. Just as important, these

women's experience of different and contradictory cultural locations within a complex society challenges

and changes oversimplified political theory that has

frequently fused the different faces of Woman in a

cameo of its own design.

I chose Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde,

and Olga Broumas as the subjects of this study because all have been influenced by the notion that,

collectively, women assume roles shaped and sustained

by the power of men. Consequently, they are also

preoccupied with self-definition, and use poetry as a

forum to state and restate the revisionary positions

from which they speak. For these poets, the radical

misreading of tradition that Bloom attributes to male poets struggling to allay belatedness and father their own literary line takes place on two levels: when the

individual woman poet rewrites her position in a literature which disallows her experience; and when she

rewrites feminism to make a place for personal expression. Although a case can be made for the

working of a women's tradition in each poet's canon— and although I explore that tradition as each of

these writers acts in some way with and against her

female predecessors— I am more interested here in the way that individual poets revise feminism in order to place themselves. As such, the dissertation is as much about how I think feminism can work in the very different lives of different women— the way each of us

rewrites it and are rewritten— as it is about literary tradition and lexical change, i suppose, too, that

buried here is a psychoanalytic model describing young women's usurpation of feminist theoretical authority.

Western feminism, as it is personified by Mary

Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Stanton,

Ida B. Wells, Mary McCloud Bethune, Simone de Beauvoir

and countless, overwhelming others constitutes a female

tradition in which the apprentice must find her place.

But my own misreading of mother critics calls to

attention these poets' need to find a sufficient

politics rather than their desire to dislodge a 8 powerful parent. Annette Kolodny points out that the

Bloomian family feud fails adequately to render

"interpretive strategies that are learned, historically determined, and thereby necessarily gender inflicted"

(47). It is to feminist instruction in interpretive strategies and to poets' revision of these strategies that this study is devoted.

For each poet, feminism provides a means of interrogating received knowledge concerning subject matter appropriate for poetry. The result is a body of work concerned with the composition and condition of female experience, a thematics of physical and emotional difference from men documented most thoroughly by Alicia Ostriker. /2/ Of greater concern to me, however, is the identity of the interrogator, the kinds of selves feminist poets construct and the kinds of authority they muster. Fortunately, none assumes the self-interested power of the precinct officer of Adrienne Rich's "Rape," whose scurrilous questions reveal his place in a murderous patriarchal brotherhood. But their identification as women who defy patriarchal prescription can itself become a uniform, and their political poetry, a rounding up of the usual suspects. Though critical misconception or disparagement of these poets underscores the insufficiency of a poetics that wishes to distill transcendent aesthetic value from political art, the

rhetorical force and music of their best work do arise

from the writers' struggle toward a complex social vision, rather than from their elaboration of

politically useful generalizations about femaleness.

If feminist politics rewrites male literary tradition,

so does experience undermine political theories that

interfere with the power of figurative language to

point toward what is inarticulate, inchoate, or

repressed. "In short," as Wallace Stevens has argued,

"metaphor has its aspect of the ideal." He understands

"the ideal" to be beauty that arises from and that

drives new conceptions of reality. For these poets,

however, "the ideal" describes not just aesthetic

values but the shape of human communities, a remaking

of the world that requires imaginative inquiry as well

as political coalitions, language that surpasses

reality as well as the power to change it. "This

aspect of metaphor," this sense of its utopian reach,

Stevens says, "cannot be dismissed merely because we

think we have long since outlived the ideal. The truth

is that we are constantly outliving it and yet the

ideal remains alive with an enormous life" (81-82).

For Anne Sexton, "the ideal" is "an accident of

hope," the wish that "the worst of anyone" might harbor

"some order" that represents a true rendering of 10 women's desires and relationships. /3/ She provides a remarkable example both of resistance to critical convention that derides poetry describing women's personal experiences and of susceptibility to conventional women's roles. "Anne Sexton's poems so obviously come out of deep, painful sections of the author's life that one's literary opinions scarcely seem to matter," James Dickey has commented. "One feels tempted to drop them furtively into the nearest ashcan, rather than be caught with them in the presence of so much naked suffering" (117). Her failure to achieve aesthetic "rightness" is related to the proximity of this suffering; she is at her best, her critics insist, when irony or fiction puts pain at a distance. Yet in her first two books, irony is

Sexton's means of acceding to the sanity of male doctors. She is indeed distanced from her own female craziness, but is also trapped in a position from which introspection is impossible, let alone examination of the kind of power that doctors wield.

In "The Double Image," Sexton's account of her mother's death, she locates two alternatives to this ironic and staid sanity: on the one hand, her mother's own powerful, threatening voice, able to recount for her daughter stories of betrayal and loneliness; on the other, the voice of the daughter herself, whose desire 11 for smothering love is also a wish to be silenced.

Though her feminist readers have argued that women poets must achieve an autonomy that puts them beyond this kind of isolation or dependence, Sexton's poetry articulates a desire for love and power that is never requited; in fact, desire is the motive for her poetry, the reason she speaks. Moreover, when she does adopt an ostensible autonomy as "Ms. Dog," the poetry defies masculine gods without discovering means to speak an alternative truth. Because the positions of mother and daughter, power and love, are mutually exclusive, their voices are soon exhausted. "Ms. Dog" bears superficial resemblance to the ironic speaker of earlier poems, but at the end of her life Sexton knows very well the experience that "craziness" only obliquely describes and the very common, very familiar pain that voluminous recapitulation makes only more acute.

Locating themselves within a feminist sisterhood,

poets after Sexton hope to discover in new myths of women's bonds to each other a kind of writing that does

not require incessant battle with masculine predecessors and that transgresses traditional

oppositions between the power to write and the capacity for love. "Thus," Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest. 12

where the traditional male hero makes his "night sea journey" to the center of the earth, the bottom of the mere, the belly of the whale, to slay or be slain by the dragons of darkness, the female artist makes her Journey into what Adrienne Rich has called "the cratered night of female memory" to revitalize the darkness, to retrieve what has been lost, to regenerate, reconceive, and give birth (Madwoman 98-99).

Feminism explains for Rich connections between the

inexorable guilt that accompanies motherhood and her

horror at atrocities deemed reasonable by her government: patriotism is a corollary of patriarchy, and she (along with the Third World) is enslaved by both. Identification with nature is a means of return

to prepatriarchal values and a femaleness that women can resurrect and share. The Dream of a Common

Language, published in 1978, explores this "cratered night of female memory" and espouses withdrawal from men's "argument and Jargon" for a kind of writing that articulates the identity between "two women, eye to

eye / measuring each other's spirit, each other's /

limitless desire" (76).

Given the Identification among women that Rich

hypothesizes here, one wonders whether writing is necessary at all, so much does intimacy among women

satisfy the needs that compel Anne Sexton's poetry. At the end of "Transcendental Etude," the poem quoted

above. Rich likens the female imagination to a "stone 13

foundation, zockshelf further / forming underneath everything that grows” (77). Margaret Homans points

out that "Rich's rock is an image of mother as nature, the chthonic feminine object whose existence as the

valorized image of womanhood has impeded and continues

to impede the ability of women to choose, among many

other things, the vocation of poet” (229). /4/ Though

this position, equating woman and natural object, does

seem one perhaps even more easily exhausted than that

of Sexton's silent daughter or isolated hag— what,

indeed, does one need to say to one's mirror image or one's sister rock?— Rich has responded most strongly in

her poetry, not to white poststructuralists who object to her simplified definition of woman's place, but to

the growing body of black feminist writing. "We realize that the only people who care enough about us

to work consistently for our liberation is us,” the

Combahee River Collective asserts (16), recalling for

Rich that exact identity between women is impossible, so much are we participants in hierarchies that depend

on sexual and racial difference. Rich still hopes for a female autonomy from men's definitions through

collective realization of muted connections. But

increasingly conscious of her own multiple political

locations in her society. Rich acknowledges the privileged tradition from which her poetry derives and 14 has begun to write sequences which purposefully deconstruct all the statements they make. Her belief in a female center is now a matter of faith, an assertion of the ideal that is possibly indescribable in language, since writing always takes part in the system of differences in which women define themselves.

Audre Lorde is one of the most vocal of Rich's critics, arguing that "difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic" (Sister Outsider 111). She, too, asserts existence of the ideal, calling it "the terror, the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is

..." (Sister Outsider 101). Here, what has never been written is "rejected" rather than inexplicably inarticulate. Neither white feminism nor mainstream poetics will grant Lorde the audience that Rich was able to claim with her first book, albeit written within a tradition that she was later to reject, and

Lorde finds a position from which to represent

"rejected" experience only when she uses Dahomeyan mythology to reformulate her own African-American identity.

Like Sexton, Lorde gives voice alternately to daughters and mothers and for similar reasons: 15 rejecting the roles relegated to her by the "bleached" culture, the daughter speaks out of desire for a mirroring blackness; and though isolated from relationships that might render her dependent, the mother is a powerful spokeswoman for children murdered by whites. Unlike the daughter in Sexton's poems, however, Lorde's daughter probes cracks in names already given her for a fuller appellation rather than yearning for silent drowning in love. She becomes a trickster, like the god Elegba, whose facility with language and disguise is her legacy. "I am," she asserts in "A Woman Speaks," suggesting the "chaos" in which she seeks self-definition. But the words she locates do not locate her:

I am sun and moon and forever hungry the sharpened edge where day and night shall meet and not be one (Black Unicorn 4-5).

Lorde is much less willing than Rich to deconstruct the sources of her authority, possibly because she is so much consumed by political struggle; she sacrifices interest in exploring her own position as a lesbian within the black community for the power to give it unified direction. Moreover, though she uses African mythology to redefine what it means to be a black woman, her most recent poetry relies on myth to 16 celebrate women's participation in armed struggle.

Here, the "different" kind of authority she derives from the goddess Mawulisa, the origin of life, ends up looking a lot like that exercised by the government she opposes. Good and evil are too easily delineated, again on the basis of race and sex, and women are again defined according to maternal roles that have entrapped them in both Africa and the United States.

I conclude the study with a discussion of Olga

Broumas, whose first book acknowledges its debt to Anne

Sexton, Silvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Adrienne

Rich. Not just feminism, but a recognizable poetic

tradition enables her confidently to project lesbian sensuality through Greek myth— and to receive a Yale

Younger Poets Award for her efforts. For her, writing becomes the practice of women's difference, a project

defined most clearly by Luce Irigaray and Helene

Cixous. /5/ Here, poetry need not articulate any

discursive meaning. Broumas' recent collaboration with

Jane Miller produces prose poetry that is itself

sensual expression, not enclosed within traditional

paradigms of women's sexuality since it abjures the

systematic construction of ideas. Words, images are

associated at random; I think the poetry is meant to be

heard, understood through its music and its conjuring 17

of disparate, lovely images, rather than deciphered and decoded.

Nevertheless, from a feminist perspective, the poetry's political voice is muted by its refusal to make statements. Unlike Rich, Broumas does not propose

faith in an unspoken or unspeakable female center; it

is precisely the indefinite and protean quality of her

own sensuality that she captures and celebrates. But

her newest poetry recognizes the force of events that

end linguistic play and form centers of experience: death, suffering, poverty. Broumas resists still the

paradigms that would seek to explain these experiences, yet her writing gives them temporary shape and texture,

even though her constructions are meant to collapse.

This poetry's critique of traditional grammars of

racial and sexual difference gives rise to a poetics in which concern for the political effect and buttressing

of language is inseparable from its artistic

"rightness." Moreover, the work requires a criticism

capable of recognizing and responding actively to its

efforts to revise political categories, rather than one

imposed from without by a reader who cannot share the

social locations from which the poetry has grown. In

other words, this work demonstrates how poetry can be a

means of political agency through which writers

construct and reconstruct their own positions as 18 subjects and through which readers, certainly grounded in an ideology which directs perception, can experience disruption of this grounded identity and locate examples of change.

Teresa de Lauretis has argued that the very subject of feminism is this "movement from the space represented by/in a representation, by/in discourse, by/in a sex-gender system, to the space not represented yet implied (unseen) in them" (26). As their means of devising and defining subjectivity, these poets' best work refuses the borders of hierarchy and seeks that which transgresses and subverts. The important word is

"seeks," at least for these women for whom conflict between the need to define themselves outside all existing categories and the need to speak powerfully as a member of an oppressed group forces them to revise their own statements. Here, the knowing self comes into being through movement, in agency identified when the poet reads and rereads, writes and rewrites herself. Thus, though each of these poets lives within the multiple identities assigned her, poetic practice points toward, and begins to articulate, what isn't up front, isn't always/already spoken. "The condition of feminism here and now," de Lauretis suggests, is to inhabit two kinds of spaces at once, to feel "the tension of a twofold pull in contrary directions--the 19 critical negativity of its theory, and the affirmative positivity of its politics” (26). Thus, feminist practice can be seen as the process of negotiating our way through neither minefields nor wild zones but through the crowded streets, stairwells and subway stops of daily life, where humanity's crush collapses our categories and we try to withstand the weight.

The idea that feminism is a continuous process of interpretation and self-assertion, rather than a static interpretive strategy with single-minded goals, both draws upon and challenges two different threads of feminist thinking. The first of these proposes that women must aim for autonomy, must write whole, integrated selves into existence. Though Adrienne

Rich's poetry models self-conscious, recursive revision of feminist ideas, in her prose she has been one of the most forceful proponents of the notion that women should be "self-identifying and self-defining" in poetry and in life. /6/ We gain autonomy, she thinks, through deepening identification with other women— in mutual discovery of femaleness that eclipses race and class divisions fostered by patriarchy. Rich's hope is that women's communities will engender

love experienced as identification, as ten­ derness, as sympathetic memory and vision . . . a nonexploitative, non-possessive eroticism, which can cross barriers of age and condition, the sensing our way 20

Into another's skin. If only in a moment's apprehension, against the censure, the denial, the lies and laws of civilization (LSS 307).

In part, the basis of this liberating

"woman-identification" is physical. Toward the end of

"Disloyal to Civilization," an essay arguing that patriarchy is responsible for debilitating differences between black and white women. Rich imagines two female lovers who "drink at each other's difference," who

"begin to be fused" (LSS 299). As she says elsewhere, it is in lovemaking that women sense most strongly a feeling of "interpenetration. . . . the melting of the walls of flesh, as physical and emotional longing deliver the one person into the other, blurring the boundary between body and body" (Of Woman Born 63; her emphasis). Yet, Rich also argues in "Compulsory

Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" that the term

"lesbian" can encompass women's shared cultural and historical experience as well as describe relationships based on their sexual orientation; and she thinks that a "lesbian continuum" enables us to represent most precisely relationships of "primary intensity" among women, experiences which perhaps resemble

"interpenetration" except that physical similarity or bonding is no longer its source. 21

No doubt taking the poet at her word, critics have expected Rich and other women writers to recover a

specifically female autonomy from men in their work. A bona fide women's literature would unmask the

victimized self and/or exceed victimization in

identifying a femaleness outside men's definitions.

Thus, in their introduction to Shakespeare's Sisters.

an anthology of feminist critical work on poetry,

Gilbert and Gubar identify the lyric poet as

continually aware of herself from the inside, as a subject, a speaker: she must be, that is, assertive, authoritative, radiant with powerful feelings while at the same time absorbed in her own consciousness (xxii) .

The consequence of such self-revelation is women's

growing independence of the "pen/penis" that has

entrapped them within men's fictions. Descendents of

those female artists for whom "the essential process of

self-definition is complicated by all those patriarchal

definitions that intervene between herself and herself"

(Madwoman 17), contemporary women poets learn "over and

over again that, in Plath's words, 'I / Have a self to

recover, a queen'" (Shakespeare's Sisters

xxiii). /?/

That a process of self-recovery takes place in

many women's work is evident even in this study, where

autonomy is identified neither as possibility nor 22

Imaginative goal. But the "political and programmatic designs" of criticism calling for women's independence have limited its scope, not simply because it espouses a particular view, but because it prescribes a format for poems that surpass— or even vitiate— it. In her effort to identify the themes and political implications of American women's poetry, Suzanne Juhasz in Naked and Fiery Forms also tries to distinguish between poems expressing "genuine" female concerns and female-authored works that she thinks comply with male literay values. Thus, she complains of Marianne Moore that the latter could "safely use only those elements of subjective personal experience that are not specifically sex-linked, and for even these she must find acceptable objective correlatives" (36). Equally insufficient for her purposes is the work of women poets of the 1960's, whose "politics are more governmental than sexual. That is, they might find

'poet' to be a political word, but not 'woman'" (65).

Unlike Juhasz, Alicia Ostriker does not often censure poems that avoid "female experience," but she sometimes overlooks poets' problematic ideas in order to claim their writing for feminism. She argues, for example, that Anne Sexton translates the "conventional concept of God as love" into a prototypically female statement about the value of human intimacy in these 23 lines: "'When the fuck they are God . . . When they break away they are God . . . In the morning they butter their toast / They don't say anything. / They are still God.'" Yet Sexton's version of intimate love in this poem, "The Fury of Cocks," /8/ doesn't convey a new sense of female value to me: "last night," she says eleven lines earlier, "the cock knew its way home,

/ as stiff as a hammer, / battering in with all / its awful power."

For both Juhasz and Ostriker, the tenet that women must struggle for autonomy from men's language causes them to overlook poets' less obvious, equally important means of constructing a female self in poems. /9/

Moreover, underlying the notion that there exists outside patriarchy a truer version of woman is the growing power of these mostly white, mostly affluent women to describe what that female nature might be. If we are persuaded that Marianne Moore failed to write a

"woman's" poetry or if Anne Sexton defines it, it is hardly likely that such work will come from poor or nonwhite women still engaged in common struggle with men.

The theoretical problems generated by women's varied political needs and affiliations also complicate the desire of feminist critics of Jacques Lacan to locate in "feminine" writing a new, disruptive force 24 that can undermine traditional oppositions between a masculine subject and a subordinate "other." Thus, the second prescription for feminist practice upset by the contrary pull of construction and collapse proposes that "feminine" writing give utterance to what Mary

Poovey has called a "middle voice" (53). This disruptive subjectivity is said to be outside what we understand masculinity and femininity to be, but its proponents often conflate within their notion of the

"feminine" different writers' very different means of literary or linguistic subversion.

For feminists based in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the woman writer's response to her imprisonment is not to build an equally confining room of her own but to point to cracks in the ediface, interstices which signify the real fragility of the whole structure.

"Turn everything Inside out," Luce Irigaray insists,

inside out, back to front. . . . Insist also and deliberately upon those blanks in discourse which recall the places of her exclusion and which, by their silent plasticity, insure the cohesion, the articulation, the coherent expansion of of established forms. Reinscribe them hither and thither as divergences . . . in ellipses and eclipses that deconstruct the logical grid of the reader-writer, drive him out of his mind, trouble his vision to the point of incurable diplopia at least (142; her emphasis).

Such writing may take the form of her own parody of

Freud and Plato in Speculum of the Other Woman. It is 25 arguably neither male nor female but both masculine and feminine, since theoretically, men, too, are capable of deconstructing the opposition between presence and absence upon which their own gender is based. On the other hand, women are said to have access to a kind of writing that does not defy so much as it escapes signification, a language of the body that expresses

its unlimited pleasure outside the alienation we experience when we try to speak desire. "If a woman cannot be part of the temporal symbolic order except by

identifying with the father," Julia Kristeva asserts,

it is clear that as soon as she shows any sign of that which, in herself, escapes such identification and acts differently, resembling the dream or maternal body, she evolves into this truth in question. It is thus that female specificity defines itself in patrilinear society: woman is a specialist in the unconscious, a witch, a baccanalian, taking her jouissance in an Anti-Apollonian, Dionysian orgy (154).

Though it points to the value of examining what is unconsciously not said in poems, this criticism's prospectus for the Joy of writing sometimes reads like a how-to manual. If it succeeds in shaking off political dicta, it nevertheless supplies its own recipes for linguistic pleasure and fails to account

for diverse techniques passed down through generations

of women— for the uses women have found for words. Its most cogent psychoanalytic rebuttal is Gilbert and 26

Gubar's recent argument that Lacanian analysis is a reaction against the feared primacy of the mother, who does, after all, often teach her children to talk. "In that case," they assert, "it is not only the presence of the mother's words that teaches the child words, but also the absence of the mother's flesh that requires the child to acquire words" (No Man's Land 264).

But Mary Poovey has underlined most pointedly the analytic tools that this variety of feminist thought can offer and the limitations that it presents. It is indeed valuable for us to chisel through gendered oppositions that only seem carved in stone; critics like Irigaray, Poovey observes, help us to dismantle binary thinking. Yet as they do so, she argues, these feminists' writing "subordinates the diversity of the real historical women who occupy that position to the likeness they share by virtue of their placement as

'other.'" Moreover, this criticism "works against any analysis of who comes to occupy that position, why certain groups occupy it at various times, or the relationship among these groups" (61).

We engage in this more precise analysis, I think, by looking carefully at the literature of women themselves, using it both to deconstruct and to reconstitute our necessarily varied definitions of what is linguistically "feminine" or sexually female. 27

Elaine Showalter, who has herself substantively revised

and expanded our understanding of nineteenth-century woman's literature, remarks that "the problem is not

that language is insufficient to express women's

consciousness but that women have been denied the full

resources of language and have been forced into

silence, euphemism, or circumlocution" (255). "Rather

than wishing to limit women's linguistic range," she adds, "we must fight to extend it" (257).

I hope to supplement this work in reconstituting traditions and reassessing literay value with a study

of poems aided in their birth by a large, sometimes anarchic, always tumultuous movement of women who gave to American letters a new source of the ideal. Though the poetry underscores the notion that women face a

system of traps and barriers when they enter into

literary discourse, it also exemplifies the way that writers draw upon the work of predecessors and

political ideas to translate idealism and transliterate

fractured, contradictory experience into art. This

poetry hasn't the virtue of "aesthetic transcendence," value that overshadows the diverse political ideals and

social locations of its readers. Yet, the "aspect of

the ideal" that metaphor can elucidate, the utopian

wish that compels these women's imaginative claims,

instills into their writing "an enormous life" for 28 their readers. The poetry thrives because it struggles to find language to construct ideal selves and visionary societies, because these constructions must respond to women's real political differences and diverse needs. Audre Lorde has argued that poetry

"forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change" (Sister Outsider 37). We measure this quality not just according to its political efficacy, not simply in terms of its music, but in relation to the breadth of its hope and the intelligence of its judgment, its capacity to illuminate reality and to help us realize our wish for more. 29

Notes

/I/ The series, published by Chelsea House, contains— and claims to define— the "best recent criticism on the major works of Western literature," as its book jackets declare.

/2/ See her Stealing the Language; The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. Though Ostriker's work delineating a thematics of women's poetry is quite valuable, I disagree with some of her conclusions. The "quest for autonomy" that she argues is at "the core of the women's poetry movement" (59) seems to me a rubric that sometimes excludes and falsely categorizes writers as much as it describes their work. See my discussion of this trend in feminist criticism below.

/3/ From "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further," Complete Poems 34-35.

/4/ To his credit. Bloom has reprinted a section of Homans' Women Writers and Poetic Identity as the essay on Rich in American Women Writers. Homans' "designs" as a feminist critic are not particularly programmatic, but she does endorse a kind of writing that subverts Romantic conflation of women and nature. For her, the "lovely woman in the lamplight" of "Transcendental Etude" "turning her back on the 'argument and jargon' is as much a threat to the life of the female mind as Dickinson's Mother Nature, who "'Wills Silence - Everywhere'" (229). "Rich knows her language is lovely enough to persuade us that she embraces inarticulateness," Homans remarks (229), and she evaluates this poem on the basis of its troubling political agenda rather than its admittedly fine construction.

/5/ Though both find theoretical grounding in Lacanian psychoanalysis in which female sexuality is signified only as absence or lack, Cixous and Irigaray employ a kind of writing that exploits women's place outside this paradigm. For Cixous, writing is an act which will not only 'realize' the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength, it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal ..." (250). 30

Though Irigaray insists on a feminist criticism that testifies to what Is unsaid, she also hopes from women's writing a restoration of sexual pleasures "kept under seal." Such language will articulate the jouissance of self-touching that men's spéculums and speculation interrupts: When the/a woman touches herself . . . a whole touches itself because it is infinite, because it has neither the knowledge nor the power to close up or to swell definitely . . . . Body, breasts, pubis, clitoris, labia, vulva, vagina, neck of the uterus, womb, . . . and this nothing that already gives pleasure by setting them apart from each other: all these foil any attempt at reducing sexual multiplicity to some proper noun, to some proper meaning, to some concept (233).

/6/ On Lies. Secrets, and Silence 279. Henceforth, I will refer to this volume as LSS.

/!/ Rather than deriving from a similar call for female autonomy, Gilbert and Gubar's most recent study of modern women's writing in No Man's Land is based on analysis of complex literary relationships among women authors and between women and men.

/8/ From Sexton's sequence "The Furies," Collected Poems 363-78.

/9/ See especially Jeredith Herrin's study of Moore in An.Enabling Humility; Marianne Moore. Elizabeth Bishop and the Uses of Tradition, forthcoming in 1990 from Rutgers University Press. 31

Works Cited

Altieri, Charles. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Bloom, Harold. "Introduction." American Women Poets. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 1-8.

Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. In Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New French Feminisms. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1980. 245- 64.

Combahee River Collective. "A Black Feminist Statement." In Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith. All the Women Are White. All the Men Are Black. But Some of_Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist P, 1982. 13-22.

De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender; Essays on Theory. Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

Dickey, James. "First Five Books." Poetrv 97 (February 1961): 318-19. Rpt. J.D. McClatchy, ed. Anne Sexton:__..AJLtist-aild,,iLer Cl.lt.iC5.. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. 117-18.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in t hs A ttlcj Thg Voman-.WxJLtjex-âDd. tlie. Nineteenth-Centurv Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

. No Man's Land:__ The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1. The War of the Words. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar, eds. Shakespeare.'.3,,-SJuS-texs.; Feminist B88a.ys._pji women Poets. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity; Dorothy Wordsworth.„ Emilv Bronte, and Emllv Dickenson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. 32

Irigaray, Luce, speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Juhasz, Suzanne. Naked and Fierv Forms: Modern American Poetrv bv Women, a New Tradition. New York: Octagon-Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976.

Kolodny, Annette. "A Map for Rereading: Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts.” Showalter, New Feminist Criticism 46-62.

Kristeva, Julia. "About Chinese Women." Ihfi. Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.

Lorde, Audre. The Black Unicorn. New York: Norton, 1978.

. Sister outsider; Essavs and speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing P, 1984.

Molesworth, Charles. The Fierce Embrace:__A Study..Pf Contemporary American Poetrv. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1979.

Ostriker, Alicia. Stealing the Language:__Uifi. Emergence of Women's Poetrv in Amexica. Boston: Beacon P, 1986.

Poovey, Mary. "Feminism and Deconstruction." Feminist Studies 14.1 (Spring 1988): 51-65.

Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language. New York: Norton, 1978.

. On Lies. Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose. 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979.

. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience.and Institution. New York: Norton, 1986.

Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems. Boston: Hough­ ton Mifflin, 1981.

Showalter, Elaine. "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness." Showalter, New Feminist Criticism 243-70.

Showalter, Elaine, ed. The New Feminist Criticism: Essavs on Women. Literature, and Theory. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 33

Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Anoel; Essavs on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1951.

Vendler, Helen. The Music of What Happens: Poems. Poets. Critics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988. CHAPTER I

"To speke of wo that is in mariage”; The Family Dramas of Anne Sexton

To every wight comanded was silence. And that the knight sholde telle in audience What thing that worldly wommen loven best. This knight ne stood nat stille as dooth a best. But to his question anoon answerde With manly vois that al the court it herde. "My lige lady, generally," quod he, "Wommen desire to have sovereinetee As well over hir housbonde as hir love. And for to been in maistrye him above. This is your moste desir though ye me kille. Dooth as you list: I am here at youre wille" (Chaucer 151).

Power makes us women happy, the crone reveals to the young knight in "The Wife of Bath's Tale." Though all the women of the court concur and the knight is granted his life, the crone, who wins her handsome lover through verbal skill, gives up her power with her ugliness, and as beautiful young wife "obeyed him in every thing/That mighte do him plesance or liking"

(155). The lesson of the tale is not so much that women want power— and so will do anything to get it— but that they will trade the scraps of power they

34 35 can claim for love, available only to beautiful women and only from the men who desire them. Powerless in the hands of scheming or vengeful hags, the handsome prince becomes a precious and necessary "manly vois" of approval for the solitary woman dependent on men's valuation for her own worth.

"We must all eat beautiful women," Anne Sexton writes /!/ and identifies herself variously as hag and daughter, the latter susceptible of being devoured by mother, father, and husband at once. The "Dame Sexton" of Transformations. Sexton's fifth book, usurps her mother's power and recounts tales of women's maturity, loss, and powerlessness in her own terms. Yet, unlike

Mary Daly's "Crone"— an image to Daly of "strength, courage and wisdom" (15)— Sexton finds love only as daughter— as that ambivalent infant, separated from her mother, who forever seeks return. The poetry grows, nourished by the tension between desire for love and

for the power to retell the myths in which both women and love are defined— desires mutually exclusive in

Sexton's universe where hags never win men's love and where daughters' voices are silenced in the father's ravishment and the mother's devouring womb.

Though criticized as an embarrassingly personal poetry, Anne Sexton's work is most notable for its defensive strategies: Sexton distances herself from 36 painful experience through objectifying similes and uses "death” and "madness" as ironic figures for the obsessive guilt and hunger for love that threaten her with incoherence and, ultimately, silence. As a crafty storyteller, she appropriates the language of popular culture to write a poetry of family passions and to conjure stories that only hint at the real power of fathers to control their daughters and wives. This witch-figure is removed from the conflict that engulfs her characters, and her voice crackles with a comic

irony that veils the real horror of the stories she relates.

The defenses collapse when the daughter speaks, but in their fall the poetry is nearly extinguished.

Seeking ways to speak the enormous hunger that

"madness" only ironically masks, Sexton writes a halting, condensed poetry that tries to express the silence either of absolute deprivation or of utter fullness— each of which is barely suggested in earlier,

ironic wishes for death. Finally, having exhausted the positions available to her, Sexton becomes "Ms. Dog," her whole persona simply a palindrome for the masculine power she rails against but can't escape. Though

influenced by a growing feminist movement, the politics that she adopts center the institutions and values that have confined her, and her later poetry is a 37

tongue-lashing that has neither the imaginative breadth of the witch's stories nor the arrested energy of the daughter's longing.

"And what went wrong?" Robert Lowell laments.

For a book or two, she grew more powerful. Then writing was too easy or too hard for her. She became meager and exaggerated. Many of her most embarrassing poems would have been fascinating if someone had put them in quotes, as the presentation of some character, not the author (Lowell 71).

Though he values her early work, Lowell's feeling that

Sexton's poetry is often "embarrassing" was shared by

many of Anne Sexton's critics, including her early

mentor, John Holmes, the instructor of her first poetry workshop and the leader of an informal writing group,

including both sexton and Maxine Kumin, for three and a

half years. "Something about asserting the hospital

and psychiatric experience seems to roe very selfish,"

he wrote to Sexton in 1959, after she had submitted to

the group the material she would include in her first

book. To Bedlam and Part Wav Back

— a forcing others to listen to you, and nothing to give the listeners, nothing that teaches them or helps them .... It bothers me that you use poetry this way. It's all a release for you, but what is it for anyone else except a spectacle of someone experiencing release? /2/

Diane Middlebrook has argued that Holmes'

"censorship" enabled Sexton to clarify the difference 38 between the literary standards he represented and the poetry of personal, female experience she was to write,

Indeed, her response to Holmes, a poem she entitled

"For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further" (CP

34-35), opens the second part of Bedlam in which, as

Middlebrook points out, "Sexton collected her most ambitious and self-revealing poems" ("Apprenticeship"

204). Though Sexton protests Holmes' strictures and does "enquire further" into a technique and thematics that he found offensive, the poem illustrates the defenses that protect her, if not from critical lambasting, at least from the parts of experience that she is afraid to "release." "Not that it was beautiful," she begins, circumscribing her claim to aesthetic value. On the contrary, her experience is limited, mundane, and her attitude toward it is marked with cautious diffidence. There is only

a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind, in the commonplaces of the asylum ....

Her crazy head "was glass, an inverted bowl," a thing quite incapable of suggesting the incoherent passion that Holmes complains about. And the poet herself is modest in presenting this "spectacle" to anyone else;

And if you turn away because there is no lesson here I will hold my awkward bowl, with all its cracked stars shining .... 39

The transformation of self into object, the ironic belittling of madness as something that just happens to this odd thing, the notion that death is just one of this crazy lady's inexplicable obsessions all add up to the cautious sanity of a speaker who talks about painful experience without actually falling into incoherence herself. In fact, almost all of Sexton's

"almost incredible feats of indiscretion" /3/ in To

Bedlam and Part Wav Back seem to be very much the discreet, careful constructions of a poet, who according to her colleagues in the early days, revised and rewrote tirelessly, who demanded criticism from anyone acquainted with her or her work. /4/ Sexton said in a letter, "I was crazy as hell, but I knew it.

And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse. I would watch it happen and I heard the same voice crying from the locked wing" (Letters

289). The same kind of separation is evident in the poetry. The speaker, listening to this voice from a distance, understands it from the same "sane" point of view as do the doctors who recommend poetry for therapy, or the fellow writers who recommend more stringent poetic controls. Irony marks the clean emotional break between persona and subject, protecting the speaker from madness that cries from a locked wing.

Only at the end of some of these works do sanity and 40 madness, subject and speaker, converge In statements about "myself” that unexpectedly conjoin the separate spheres the speaker has so carefully laid out. "I" is neither powerful writer nor powerless madwoman, but a new category of person, one whose role comes into being not so much through the language and tone of the poem, as by a sudden final announcement that the woman speaking is no longer the one previous lines had described.

At the end of "You, Doctor Martin," the poem which introduces the speaker's former madness and the book, such craziness takes on feminine names and attributes, while sanity belongs to Dr. Martin, "god of our block, prince of all the foxes" (CP 3-4). /5/ The madwoman under his care is a "queen of this summer hotel," tallest among the "foxy children who fall / like floods of life in frost." "Once I was beautiful," she recollects. "Now I am myself." Here is the troubling resting place, different in tone from the irony with which she has described herself, child of the doctor whom she loves. Not beautiful, but not mad either, the self who speaks finally sees herself in a new role, undefined in the context she has provided.

In the following poem, "Kind Sir: These Woods" (CP

4-5), the speaker identifies the self once again as a child and then as a woman whose dark mental turnings 41 are like nothing so much as the games children play, where "the woods were white" and the "night mind / saw such strange happenings, untold and unreal." The speaker's belated capacity to make sense of such darkness links her to Thoreau, the "kind sir" she addresses. She can even identify a kind of courage in her willingness to take the "inward look that society scorns," but she is only ironically relieved that the woods hold nothing "worse / than myself." Once again, she is "caught between the grapes and the thorns," devoid of place in the attempt to identify the mad self with the writer able to talk as men do.

This estranged double is defined only as the speaker dissociates herself from craziness through a studied Irony. Though distance allows sexton to talk about the experience of insanity, it also permits this abnormal, private, female experience to remain marginalized. The poetry relies on an alienation from the self-as-object that is shared by reader and poet.

Such alienation provides a protective hiding place, but

it also traps the knowing self in a position which disallows its own introspection and its ability to find in madness anything but an image of "the circle of crazy ladies," repeated througout the first part of

Bedlam. 42

Yet, Sexton works in the culminating poem o£ this

collection, "The Double Image” (CP 35-42), to create a

speaker involved herself in release, able to let go of the need for ironic, "sane" knowing in order to find

what Sexton calls in her letters her own voice, a place

in the poetry from which to speak "madness" without

dissolving incoherently into the phenomena she attempts

to describe. Here, she unpacks the term "crazy lady"

to show the enormous guilt and hunger for love

disciplined in the poetry with irony. It is also in

this poem that she finds the different feminine

"selves" whose varying tones and voices she will

exploit. On the one hand, Sexton identifies powerful

language as the attribute of her powerful mother.

Later, she will usurp that position, understanding that

as mother herself she is capable of creation— not of

giving birth to new poetic forms but of retelling old

stories, as hags have always done. She is hardly the

strong and loving predecessor that Mary Daly imagines,

however. The mother inhabiting Sexton's poetry wins

power at the cost of intimacy, and the irony that locks

feeling in a steel box is both more comic and more

bitter in later work. Thus, it is only as daughter

that Sexton risks loss of self for devouring love and

speaks a tonally flat language in which desire is

articulated only in its monotonous rhythms and 43 repetitive images suggesting her own absence. "The

Double Image" resides at the center of Sexton's canon since it delineates the origin of both positions and is spoken by a woman more complex than either describes.

"I am thirty this November," she begins, trying out an elegiac tone whose nostalgia is quickly dissipated into characteristic distance. The "yellow leaves / . . . flapping in the winter rain," however much they recall time lost, are more sharply associated with the speaker's brain, which "will never be as true as these / struck leaves letting go." Such a mind is an "ugly angel," a "green witch," whose vicious tongue is identified, understood, only as it exists in opposition to the speaker's control. But if the persona dare not give voice to such dangerous utterances, her mother does, siding with the witches in accusing the speaker of causing death and assuming the witches' tongue. "I cannot forgive your suicide," the older woman says, and her subsequent illness, she claims, is proof of her daughter's murderous guilt and selfishness.

This voice persecutes the speaker, who will take refuge in a portrait, an image of the self set in the poem for her to look into as she retreats. It is a defense, another hiding place, yet is also a kind of dark room where secret, dangerous idenfications can be 44 tried on like mother's clothing. /6/ "Your smile Is like your mother's," remarks the painter of her portrait, making a comparison that Sexton will not venture on her own. Yet as the witch's censure forces her withdrawal Into a still Image of herself, the likeness between mother and daughter provokes exploration Into the source of the poet's madness.

Suzanne Juhasz has remarked that while Sexton's poetry grew from therapy, "the therapy was occasioned by her womanhood itself, by the very real strains and conflicts that Sexton experienced while attempting to exist In her world as a woman" (118). On Its surface, this equation oversimplifies both mental Illness and the effects on women of their confinement In conventional roles; unlike Sexton, most women do not attempt suicide repeatedly and do not request

Institutionalization for much of their adult lives.

However, Inadequacy Is built Into the family positions through which Sexton defines herself: as daughter, she can never love her mother enough; and as mother, she herself can never get enough love from the daughter whom she fears, so much does she depend on the younger woman for emotional sustenance.

Reworking the Freudian paradigm to explore female, pre-oedlpal connections, Nancy Chodorow explains the way In which women are caught In this web. Daughters, 45 she says, never truly abandon their mothers as love objects; though women may fulfill the desires of men who seek their own mother-substitutes, men never really satisfy daughters who yearn for a fuller motherlove.

Indeed, the reason they turn to men in the first place

is that they learn little esteem for their own

femininty and grow to envy men's power. But emotional satisfaction comes only with children. Thus, mothers

always want more than daughters will give and daughters are riven with guilt for not supplying the love that

they are taught belongs first to their fathers and then within their own nuclear households. /!/

Perhaps because it is grounded in analysis of the white middle-class, Chodorow's theory of female anxiety

provides an outline of relationships underlying the

fears and desires that compel Sexton to write. "During

the sea blizzards" the mother

had her own portrait painted. A cave of mirror placed on the south wall; matching smile, matching contour.

The "white woods," "the floods of life in frost"— here,

those frightening metaphors for unnamable madness are

conflated within the "cave of mirror," a representation

of the unrequitable female desire and persistent

rivalry that underlie madness. "And you resembled me,"

the speaker says immediately to her own daughter. At 46 this moment— and only for the moment— identification as mother allows the poet to articulate desire as well as fear, need in addition to guilt. Such desire goes in two directions at once— into the cave of mirror, with its intimations of infantile regression and loss of self, and toward the child, whose love promises affirmation of self and whose resemblance to the mother assures her that "you were mine / after all."

This statement of possession gives solidity to the possessor, and the relationship enables the poet to conceive of herself as the source of specific, nameable desires and of the power to command satisfaction. /8/

The mother's painting is "my mocking mirror, my overthrown / love, my first image" and "that stony head

of death / I had outgrown." The image threatens death and recollects loss, but it remains that first love which the speaker will try to reproduce in relation to her own daughter. "And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure / nor soothe it. I made you to find me." Contained in the last lines of the poem, this admission gives voice to guilt threaded with a passionate wish for affirmation. Once again, the speaker fails to place herself; she is both mother and daughter, and yet is neither, "never quite sure / about being a girl." At the same time, she is more able to voice these contradictions— to speak as a desiring 47 mother instead of a narrator struggling to distance herself from the events and feelings of her life. The project of much of her poetry, then, becomes an effort to recite her own history, to look carefully at the images of women that she recreates, and not to succumb either to the witches that pursue her or the desires that leave her lost inside the cave of mirror.

Though distance from "madness” is a necessary caution exercised on behalf of her "normal"— and censorious— audience, Sexton's speaker also seems wary of her crazy self in order to preserve the ability to communicate at all. But the voices that speak to her are not all inside her head. The mother of "The Double

Image," like the witches and angels haunting the poet, is both powerful and threatening; she tells a truth that her daughter believes and cannot believe if she is to continue to talk. "They carved her sweet hills out and still I couldn't answer," the poet says, caught in a double bind; while identification with her mother in the desired "cave of mirror" means loss of self, speechlessness, separation implies that a primary source of love for both has disappeared, that the mother's scarred chest will fill her child with guilt.

Margaret Homans suggests that "The Double Image" seems to be Sexton's effort to free herself from this bond to her mother (225). "Motherhood still represents 48

the same group of values and qualities that it did in the nineteenth century," Homans claims, and the helpful analysis of psychoanalysts such as Chodorow "does nothing to relieve what was threatening about the suggestions of that identity" (224). What Homans does not take into account is that, for Sexton at least, the

mother is more than a silent and silencing portrait, an

image of death. The mother also speaks, is not only

"my mocking mirror, my overthrown / love, my first

image" but is also, in "The Division of Parts" (CP

42-46), "my Lady of my first words" who makes her

daughter her "inheritor." "Dame / keep out of mv

slumber. Mv good Dame, vou are dead." the poet cries.

Yet as "Dame Sexton," the narrator of the fairytales in

Transformations. Sexton moves beyond the distanced, watchful speaker of most of Bedlam and becomes the

witch she is afraid of, not mad, but powerful, "a woman

. . . not a woman quite," who is able to recount for

her daughters stories of the entrapment they face in

separating from her.

Her feminist critics see Sexton's transition from

the poetry of self-exploration to the storytelling of

Transformations as a critical departure in terms of

both voice and theme. "Whereas in her earlier work the

persona 'Anne' bore the closest possible resemblance to

herself," Estella Lauter argues in her discussion of 49

Sexton's mythmaking, "in her last books Sexton adopts the masks of taboo figures . . . and God-figures . . .

as deliberate means of understanding experiences that

lie beyond her own" (26). For Alicia Ostriker, in

Sexton's early poetry, "Self was the center, self the perimeter of her vision" (Writing 64), while in the

later work, "the poet increasingly sees herself not as

merely a private person, certainly not as a

psychoanalytic case study, but as the heroine of a

spiritual quest" (Writing 71). Suzanne Juhasz would

agree, as she also points out that Sexton's public persona "is able to discuss the race in addition to

herself" (127). Juhasz, writing before Sexton's death

in 1974, argues that this transition in her poetics is

positive, that the witch of previous poetry has transcended her role as guilty madwoman. Working with

this proposition, Diane Middlebrook sees that in

Sexton's work, "femaleness itself was an aspect of

identity that had, with great difficulty, been assimilated to the sense of authority necessary to

mastery" ("Apprenticeship" 212) and discusses Sexton's

"public persona," apparent even in her third book. Live

or Die, as one that the poet assumed as she grew in power.

Sexton has indeed discovered a female persona that

allows her to speak with authority, but her voice and 50

her vision remain limited by the separation already marked between the witch and those people she loves;

she is a mobile narrator, as Alicia Ostriker remarks

("The Thieves of Language" 329), but she works only

from the three positions defined in previous work /9/; as hag she exploits middle-class language and speaks

powerfully of women's penchant for self-destructive

relationships; as daughter, she is trapped by those

relationships; and as mediator between those positions,

she simply does not participate, separated by an irony

that diminishes the self with whom the speaker purports

to identify. In Chaucer, the female protagonist is

fortunate enough to be hag and daughter at once,

powerful enough to manipulate a man into marrying her

and beautiful enough to satisfy him— to be loved. If

Sexton, too, assumes multiple identities, the trade-off

is the same: love for power, power for love.

The witch of Transformations inherits her mother's

storytelling power, but the tales she recounts are

clearly transformed from those Sexton remembers in "The

Division of Parts." In the latter poem, though the

feeling of guilty inadequacy endemic to Sexton's psyche

persists, her mother's death marks the disappearance of

a tangible representation of her failures and frees her

to reconstruct their relationship. The last section of

the poem begins again in elegy, in what is now a signal 51 that the poet Is making sense of the past and coming to terms with the pain harbored in memory:

Spring rusts on its skinny branch and last summer's lawn is soggy and brown. Yesterday is just a number. All of its winters avalanche out of sight. What was, is gone. Mother, last night I slept in your Bonwit Teller nightgown. Divided, you climbed into my head. There in my jabbering dream I heard my own angry cries and I cursed you Dame Keep of my slumber ■. Mv good Dame, vou are dead. And Mother, three stones slipped from your glittering eyes.

Awake, she is able write poems that rework this incoherent "jabbering dream" into extended recollections that dissipate the anxiety of memory in a stream of friendly objectifications:

Now it is Friday's noon and I would still curse you with my rhyming words and bring you flapping back, old love, old circus knitting, god-in-her-moon, all fairest in my lang svne verse, the gauzy bride among the children, the fancy amid the absurd the awkward, that horn for hounds that skipper homeward, that museum keeper of stiff starfish, that blaze within the pilgrim woman, a clown mender, a dove's cheek among the stones, my Lady of my first words, this is the division of ways.

In Transformations, these harmless renderings of

"mother," words taken from stories loving mothers tell, are translated into the commercial language which the 52 m o d e m daughter Inherits and which lace

Transformations' fairy tales with a bitter Irony absent

from the potpourri of "The Division of Parts." The

"freewheeling" that Ian Hamilton calls "decorative

frill" (129) and that, according to Rosemary Johnson,

"dilapidate[si" the language and "wander[si far off the

literary track" (93) Is an extension of the middle-class vernacular; Sexton uses the language of TV

commercials and the names of products In the supermarket to create a larger, popular context for the

family battles she portrays. Thus, she retells the stories of the Brothers Grimm In the minor key of

household conflict, so that they lose the distance of myth but become tales of homelife In the late twentieth

century. In this way, Sexton also presents In a

familiar, safer context the anger, jealousy, and

betrayal that are too much a part of her own personal

life In the minds of her critics. Sexton-as-wltch can

separate herself from the drama of her life as it appears in these stories, while she takes more risks

with details of that drama. The distanced speaker of

Bedlam was cautious; this persona, speaking from the

grotesque milieu of the stories, can afford to be bitter.

The Snow White of Transformations Is a kind of

doll, "rolling her china-blue doll eyes / open and 53 shut," thoroughly objectified in comparison with the products whose names compose the vocabulary of consumers. "[Clheeks as fragile as cigarette paper, / arms and legs made of Limoges, / lips like Vin Du

Rhone," Snow White is also "full of life as soda pop" after the dwarfs rescure her from the first of the

Queen's dirty tricks and a "dumb bunny" for eating the poison apple. /lO/ The ostensible lesson is that

suburban women who share Snow White's problems--they

are too beautiful to get along with other women, they

fall into emotionally empty relationships--have no

inner life and are not very smart. Clearly, the

culture manufactures such creatures, just as it mass produces the dolls they resemble. But in revealing the

way it really is for the world's Snow Whites— the

speaker has been around long enough to know that

happiness ever after is a lie— in dispelling Illusion,

the witch doesn't invite much sympathy for her

characters. The real lesson is that they are too much

like the poet for her to look closely at their

failures.

"Anne Sexton," Maxine Kumin recollects,

tall, blue-eyed, stunningly slim, her carefully coifed dark hair decorated with flowers, her face skillfully made up, looked every inch the fashion model. . . . Earrings and bracelets, French perfume, high heels, matching lip and fingernail gloss bedecked her, all intimating sophistications 54

In the chalk-and-wet overshoes atmosphere in the Boston Center for Adult Education, where we were both enrolled in John Holmes' poetry workshop ("How it Was" xix).

Sexton's allusions to herself in the narratives of

Transformations deliberately besmirch this attractive

image; such a beautiful "dumb bunny" could never tell these stories. Here she is a witch, and the mirror of

"Snow White" reflects the multiple visages of all the

"mothers" in the tales: the unnatural mother of

"One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes" (CP 258-64), "strong as a telephone pole," keeps her children needy; the witch

of "Hansel and Gretal" (CP 286-90), "red / as the Jap

flag," bakes in the oven she had prepared for the girl

and boy; and the thirteenth fairy of "Briar Rose" (CP

290-95) is characterized soley by "her fingers as long

and thin as straws, / her eyes burnt by cigarettes, /

her uterus empty as a teacup." This latter old woman

possesses the "evil gift" of prophecy, and if her eyes

resemble Sexton's, so must her evil curses. Not only

does this witch give up the possibility of love, but

expresses the same contempt for the woman who craves it

that Sexton's critics have shown. Her attitude also

dispells the threat of this private sickness toward her

own ability to speak; Sexton permits her caricatures

the autism only suggested in the attraction of the

mirror in "The Double Image," while as wicked queen, 55 she revels in viciousness, not only wishing to kill her daughter, but to chew up what she supposes is the girl's heart "like a cube steak."

Only indirectly, slyly, do the poems of

"Transformations" allude to the complex emotional life that the caricatures defend from attack. In both

"Rapunzel" and "Briar Rose," "Dame Sexton" temporarily abandons the role in abandoning her objectifying language, and a different, conflicted speaker voices the loneliness and terrible isolation that the culture imposes on women who inhabit the families it idealizes.

In the prologue to "Rapunzel" (CP 244-49), the relationship between mother and daughter is described through comparisons with nature, and the poem assumes a sensual texture that is abruptly abandoned once the tale begins. In this first section, an old woman is allowed the hunger for love that makes fools of her younger counterparts. "Put your pale arms around my neck," she says to the younger woman.

Let me hold your heart like a flower lest it bloom and collapse. Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark. Give me your nether lips all puffy with their art and I will give you angel fire in return. We are two clouds glistening in the bottle glass. We are two birds washing in the same mirror. 56

We were fair game but we have kept out of the cesspool. We are strong. We are the good ones. Do not discover us For we lie together in green like pond weeds. Hold me my young dear, hold me.

In the context of the story itself, this desire is ridiculous. Rapunzel’s beautiful tresses, correlative

of all that the witch loves, are as "strong as a dog leash,” and the old woman "shinnied up the hair like a sailor." Their private lovemaking takes its place amidst all the other human acts that the culture puts up for sale, and the witch, whose "heart shrank to the size of a pin," is the dupe of her own illusions.

Almost. Though the witch is old and ugly, Sexton resucitates the natural imagery at the end of the poem and allows her witch-surrogate feeling that is not merely comic: the witch's isolation really is lonely, here, "and only as she dreamt of the yellow hair / did moonlight sift into her mouth."

Again in "Briar Rose" (CP 290-95), the poet sheds the role of "Dame Sexton" to relate a tale of incest at

the end of the poem. In Sexton's version of the story, the princess falls asleep as she is supposed to, according to the wicked fairy's curse, but it is a kind of hypnosis. "She is stuck in a time machine," the

poet remarks with characteristic irony. 57

suddenly two years old sucking her thumb/ as inward as a snail, learning to talk again. She's on a voyage. She's swimming further and further back, up like a salmon, struggling into her mother's pocketbook.

She wakes to find a handsome prince, but continues to suffer from a peculiar Insomnia, a fear of going to sleep. "I must not dream," she says,

for when I do I see the table set and a faltering crone at my place her eyes burnt by cigarettes as she eats betrayal like a slice of meat.

But it is not the crone she fears. Despite--or rather because of— the "love" of prince and father, the daughter's fate will follow that of the wicked fairy who curses her at birth, the witch discarded for her ugliness, feared for her "evil" power with words. At the end of the narrative, the positions held by poet, witch, and daughter merge as the speaker recounts the story of rape that separates her from motherlove forever and that sets crones and daughters forever apart. Yet her story is neither dreamed nor fantasized :

Daddy? That's another kind of prison. It's not the prince at all, but my father drunkenly bent over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon me like some sleeping jellyfish. 58

"What voyage this, little girl?" the narrator sneers, but as she does so, she questions herself as well as the women whose lives she retells. In "Briar

Rose," the poet identifies with both daughter and wicked fairy, and has conflated their roles at the end of the tale with that of "Sexton"— herself a sufferer from insomnia and her eyes "burnt by cigarettes."

Nowhere in the poetry does Sexton employ more artfully the different ruses that enable her to speak about her life. Unfortunately, however, the poet's evil ways with words enable her only to describe; she has no power over drunken daddy, and the poem ends in a rhetorical question suggesting that fathers and fatherly God are the real authors of reality:

What voyage this, little girl? This voyage out of prison? God help— this life after death?

"I wish my poems were gay sometimes. I am tired of my gloom and death," Sexton wrote to Frederick

Morgan just after Bedlam had been published (Letters

94). Transformations is perhaps as "gay" as Sexton will be, engaging as she does in fairy-tale narratives that will permit her to put distance between her poetry and her personal life. At the same time, she really does isolate a strain of mad feminity in conventional images of middle-class marriage and family life. "I 59 see it as part of my life’s work," she said of the book, defending it before Houghton Mifflin's Paul

Brooks when the company was hesitant to publish it.

"After this, and I have already begun," she reassures him, "I would like to do a book of very surreal, unconscious poems called The Book of Folly. At the same time I plan to start another book called The Death

Notebooks where the poems will be very Sexton . . .

intense, personal, perhaps religious in places"

(Letters 362-63). In these volumes, Sexton pursues the

"very Sexton" until it wears out— until she has exhausted the powers of the witch of Transformations as well as those of the autistic daughter, both of whom emerge from the madness of the first book but who never cease to reconstruct the defenses that madness makes necessary.

The mother who will talk about herself— not as character, but as self— is never able to tell a story with such gleeful irony as the witch of

Transformations. In "Mother and Daughter" in The Book of Folly CP 305-307), the speaker takes up her daughter's point of view— looks at herself through the daughter's eyes— and sees an empty old woman, abandoned, used. "Question you about this," Sexton says of Linda,

and you will sew me a shroud 60

.... Question you about this and you will see my death drooling at these gray lips while you, my burglar, will eat fruit and pass the time of day.

Mothers never win their daughters' love for very long, but to their daughters— to this speaker when she appears as daughter— they are nonetheless terrifying in their threats of taking love away. The speaker of

"Anna Who Was Mad" (CP 312-13) begs forgiveness for her aunt's madness and death. "Am I some sort of infection?" she asks. "Put me in the stirrups and let a tour group through. / Number my sins on the grocery list and let me buy." This campy confession is followed in the book and in the poem by a falling into silence: "Say not I did. / Say not. / Say," the speaker pleads at the end of the first stanza, asking not only for a release from the guilt of being herself but also for the full and unifying love that individuation has cut off.

Alicia Ostriker discusses Sexton's daughter poems in the context of the work of other modern women poets, claiming that "motherly attachment in these poems means infantilism and shapelessness for mother and daughter, absorbed in each other, neither one capable of independent self-definition" (Stealing 73). She echoes

Margaret Homans' discussion of women's poetry in the nineteenth century, a body of work hampered by the 61 poets' perception that to be a "docile daughter o£ nature" meant that it was "all too possible to pass

from continuity to identification and thence to a loss of their own identity" (15). Sexton's speaker, however, does use poetry to recollect yearning for her mother, and she expresses this desire in speech that

recalls infancy, if it can't very well reproduce

speechlessness. The poetry written from the position

of mother and daughter gains its power from pushing against the limitations that these critics describe;

the daughter poetry in particular articulates a desire

for silence, for a swallowing that would eradicate its

voice. Yet, paradoxically, the desire itself provides

Sexton a place from which to speak, a way of knowing

her own identity, not as a fully autonomous woman, but according to the self's formation within relationships

from which she has been cut off and for which she

harbors endless yearning.

For Diane Hume George, Sexton's "infantile" poems

derive from the sadistic need of the child to resist

the mother's attempts at toilet training. Sexton, she

says, "employs the oral and anal stages of psychosexual

development to explore the crises of oral incorporation

and anal defiance as primary sources of poetic power"

(Oedipus 74). Such an interpretation sheds light on 62 poems like "The Hoarder" (CP 319-20) in which Sexton deliberately compares language to feces:

. . . it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it and me loving me for it but the hate won didn't it yes the distaste won the disgust won and because of this I am a hoarder of words.

Nevertheless, Sexton never gets as much poetic mileage from defiance as she does from desire, of which defiance is perhaps symptomatic. In the daughter poems, the impetus for speech seems to come not so much from the need for individuation but from the need for love that neither motherhood nor poetry— the achievements of the adult woman— has given. Here, the white spaces of the poem represent a fullness that words only approach. In giving into desire, the poet very nearly gives up writing, and her condensed syntax and halting rhythms perhaps come as close to articulating silence as poetry can get.

"The Silence" (CP 318-19), for example, is an attempt to create a sense of the daughter's disappearance from the poem even as she speaks. "My room is whitewashed, / as white as a rural station house / and just as silent," the speaker begins, working toward a description of silence that is an

"enormous baby mouth," the speaker's own mouth as she tries to express through language a primal and pressing 63 hunger that resists expression. "Words leak out . . . like a miscarriage," never approaching what they are supposed to represent, collapsing in the empty spaces of the poem. Neither words— pointers to the

inexpressible— nor white space— a nothingness beyond the reach of desire— will "speak" for the poet. It is

the verge of linguistic collapse, I think, that she

comes to understand, the tension of being almost ready

to fall forward that she is able to articulate most

fully.

The poems of "The Death Baby" sequence work toward

a disappearance or a devouring or a falling that is

generally either embraced or escaped by the speaker in

the last two lines of each poem. The "death baby" is

both the daughter and the doll she holds, as she

reenacts in play the death she wishes for. In "Dreams"

(CP 354-55), she is an "ice baby" isolated in the

refrigerator to freeze. The voice here seems that of an adult recollecting the humiliations of childhood.

"I remember the stink of the liverwurst," she tells us.

"How I was put on a platter and laid / between the

mayonnaise and the bacon." Her tone is no longer

gleeful; the indicative voice and the end-stopped lines

create a monotone, a flatness, despite the violence of

the imagery: "The milk bottle hissed like a snake. /

The tomatoes vomited up their stomachs." This speaker 64 assumes the tone of an "Ice baby," even as she takes note of food— liverwurst, mayonnaise, caviar— decidedly adult in its appeal.

This odd persona— the adult woman assuming a childlike syntax and tone— speaks with a childlike diction in the second part of the poem. She is "at the dogs' party," remembering that

I had been carried out like Moses and hidden by the paws of ten Boston bull terriers, ten angry bulls jumping like enormous roaches.

This remembrance comes to life in the clipped lines that follow, and the speaker identifies, suddenly, with the child she was:

I became very clean. Then my arm was missing. I was coming apart.

It is here that the poet comes close to speaking her own dismemberment and disappearance. "I was coming apart" begins a motion that can't be finished in this poem, since it expresses a desire— to vanish, to be eaten up— that can't be realized by a speaking subject.

The voice that concludes the poem belongs once again to the adult who interprets her dreams in proper psychoanalytic terms, as imaginary history. "They loved me / until I was gone," she says, wishing for an eradication of self which she remembers but cannot, as writer, recreate. 65

"The Dy-dee Doll" (CP 355) works In the same fashion, though the diction of the adult speaker reappears in the collapse that almost happens at the end of the poem. "My Dy-dee doll / died twice," she begins in a sing-song that leads into a child's story of death repeated in play.

Once when I snapped her head off and let it float in the toilet and once under the sun lamp trying to get warm she melted.

"She was a gloom," replies a different voice, articulating the child's unconscious knowledge, "her

little face embracing / her little bent arms." In this poem, the child usurps the voice of the poet, who then

saves herself from disappearing into similar desire through conscious understanding. That "she died in all

her rubber wisdom" lets us know that this part of childhood is over, its appeal lifeless as the adult

language that can talk about death and can pass down the newly-articulate wisdom of past recollection.

The motion of "coming apart," "embracing," recurs

in "Baby" (CP 357-59), the last poem of "The Death

Baby" sequence and the place where this dreaming woman will get off the couch and tell us what she knows.

This final image of autistic rocking, plunging backward and forward until the speaker can imagine a final push. 66 communicates most strongly the sense of impending collapse that I get from all these separate pieces.

Here the baby doll is death, soft and doughy and white, which the speaker rocks back and forth as the poem

itself takes on the motion of her rocking. "I rock. I rock," she intones

Glass eye, ice eye, primordial eye, lava eye, pin eye, break eye, how you stare back.. . .

The glass eye reflects this speaker as she goes through the motions of deepening identification. "You have seen my father whip me," she says, recollecting an old

intimacy. "You have seen me stroke my father's whip."

But before this, before the advent of what will be adult femininity, she is one with this creature. "We are stone," she chants. "We are carved, a pieta, / that swings and swings."

Memory takes the poem no further than this swinging. In the final sections, the speaker directs her thinking outward, warning us that "there is a death baby / for each of us. / We own him. / His smell is our smell." She relinquishes the voice of the daughter, the voice of the doll, and recollects that the audience requires speech, an articulation of feeling, not just a 67 falling into it. She says at the end of the poem— for our sake—

Someday, heavy with cancer or disaster I will look up at Max and say: It is time. Hand me the death baby and there will be that final rocking.

The ominous, rather ponderous tone of this warning tells us that the dream is over, that its fulfillment must await real death which the speaker certainly longs for but, like a good adult, will postpone. She has taken this voice as far as it will go, I think, rocking herself toward the brink of the unconscious but never really falling in, into that dark place of engulfing love where speech is no longer necessary— or possible.

If anything acts as analyst— the parent figure

insistent on interpretation— it is poetry itself, the language which will go only so far in its articulation of desire and which will never recreate the love or vanishing into love which the speaker wishes to bring into being. Death might do so, but the death of the speaking self cannot happen in poetry, however much this speaker wishes to use poetry to approach it.

"The Death Baby" marks the exhaustion of the poetic power of this nearly-autistic voice. Sexton seems intent on pursuing death, however, on letting this voice of infantile desire speak for itself without 68 withdrawing to the commentary of the more "knowing” speakers of earlier poems. Ostriker argues that

Sexton's figuration of Christ in "The Jesus Papers" expresses "the active and aggressive (i.e. 'male') elements in her character which she was reluctant to acknowledge while writing as a woman" (Writing 85n).

Whether or not these figures are part of Sexton's character, Jesus and the Christopher of "0 Ye Tongues" are masters of language and can reartlculate the desires of Sexon's feminine speakers without collapsing

into a love which swallows them up. Rather than a

figure offering a critique of Christian mythology, this

Jesus arises from Sexton's need to locate love and power in the same person. No ordinary male alter ego will do: Jesus/Christopher is both feminine and brotherly, loving and loved, humble and powerful.

Not that he is good. As child, Jesus is able to act out the defiance of female speakers and not feel their guilt. "Mary, your great / white apples make me glad," he says in "Jesus Suckles" (CP 337-38). But at the end of the poem, these feelings are "all lies."

Sexton's failure to love her mother enough is the one source of guilt that the speaker cannot bear. Here,

Jesus can claim arrogantly, "I am a truck. I run everything. / I own you," meaning it, not regretting

it, yearning for the mother he has lost, but finding a 69 more available object in the harlot he desires and more power in the masculine divinity inherited from God, his father.

Sexton's need to reach for a Jesus to reenact the narratives she has already dramatized— Jesus running over his mother like a truck, just as Sexton has; Jesus making miracles through sly talk, just as Sexton has;

Jesus asking God to "put His steaming arms around

Me"— comes from a need to retell these stories differently, so that the speaker doesn't disappear into madness or desire, so that she can cry out to God all over again, safely this time, while no one is looking.

"With his penis as a chisel / He carved the pieta"

("Jesus Asleep," CP 338-39), the poet recounts, in a voice most closely resembling that of the witch in

Transformations; "He carved his death," just as she would like to. Yet, as in the "Briar Rose" tale, the witch cannot remain entirely distanced from her female surrogates, and again in "The Jesus Papers" she gives herself away in a sudden disolving of irony, an intimacy with her subject uncovered in a difference in tone.

Two poems illustrate this speaker's identification with her charcters most clearly. In "Jesus Raises up the Harlot" (CP 339-40), he lances the breasts of a woman who comes to follow him around "like a puppy" and 70 become "His pet." This distance, created characteristically through objectifying similes, vanishes abruptly. "His raising her up made her feel /

like a little girl again when she had a father / who brushed the dirt from her eye," the poet says, voicing empathy with the puppy she has created. In "Jesus

Unborn," Mary, too, is reduced to a beast: she is

"instinctive as an animal";

she would like to doze fitfully like a dog. She would like to be flattened out like the sea, when it lies down, a field of moles.

Yet, when Jesus, that "strange being"

leans over her and lifts her chin firmly and gazes at her with executioner's eyes she is once more fully woman, a projection of the speaker, whose Jesus never really expresses feminine desire so much as he annihilates it.

Jesus is more loving in "0 Ye Tongues" (CP

396-413) when Christopher— an amalgamation of the mad poet Christopher Smart and brotherly Jesus— helps

"Anne" face the "death hole." The formal boldness of this poem, the insistent energy of images that pour and pour across the page make "0 Ye Tongues" the last work

in which Sexton is truly innovative, in which her preoccupation with death takes on new vitality. /II/

It is a furious poem in a furious book. Sexton's

infantile wish for smothering mother love explodes in a 71

prophetic voice inherited from a male predecessor who

shares her "female" madness, and her claim to this

legacy becomes a final assumption of power.

"For I shat and Christopher smiled and said let

the air be sweet with your soil .... For I lay

single as death. Christopher lay beside me. He was

living": here the speaker's monotone, recalling that

of the "doll" in other poems, is interrupted by the

rolling cadence of Smart's "Jubilate Agno," a rhythm that compels movement and that renews her will, even as she seems to slip once again into desire for silence and death. Together, Christopher and Anne are able to

"come forth with a pig as bold as an assistant professor," to make shit sweet, and thus to defy the

fear of loss or of destruction that Sexton's speaker expresses whenever she resists authority. Together, they compose a mother capable of love. For their baby

There are milk trees for her to hiss on. There are milk beds in which to lie and dream of a warm room. There are milk fingers to fold and unfold. There are milk bottoms that are wet and caressed and put into their cotton.

This waterfall of milk is what the daughter in

Sexton's poetry dreams of, remembers as a lost bliss regained only in death. In "0 Ye Tongues," Sexton's speaker creates an Anne who "remembers the baby she was" and never herself "locks and twists or puts lonely

into a foreign place." Nor is she afraid of the 72

Inevitable loss o£ her own daughter, the lovelessness

to which she will return as mother, for there is

Christopher "who will go with her" when she dies.

"Christopher who stabbed his kisses and cried to make

two out of one."

The journey toward death is the subject of the

last poem of this sequence. "For I am not locked up,"

the poet says, acknowledging her freedom from the madhouse where always she has been caught between her

own darkness and the false light of the "real world."

"For I am placing fist over fist on rock and plunging

into the altitude of words. The silence of words."

Her destination here is familiar:

For Anne sat down with the blood of a hammer and built a tombstone for herself and Christopher sat down beside her and was well pleased with their red shadow."

The death she desires, with Christopher empowering her voice, becomes visionary, speakable, existing not

through a collapse of language but in the rhetoric of

announcement. Here, Sexton assumes a power that.

Godlike, is the word of creation, and her death becomes

a creative act as she realizes through it union with

God. It is at first a sleep, though its imagery is

revitalized by the following, living "For":

For the milk in the skies sank down upon them and tucked them in.

For God did not forsake them but put the blood 73

angel to look after them until such time as they would enter their star.

For the sky dogs jumped out and shoveled snow upon us and we lay in our quiet blood.

For God was as large as a sunlamp and laughed his heat at us and therefore we did not cringe at the death hole.

Alicia Ostriker argues that "The Author of the

Jesus Papers Speaks," the poem which serves as epilogue to that sequence, "fixes the position of its author as

one who is by no means protesting the Images of herself and other women within Christianity. . . . For herself, and on behalf of all beautiful women, she accepts humiliation. We may even say, since after all the dream is her invention, that she requires it"

(Stealing 78). Sexton's speakers do risk humiliation, do in fact require it, since for them to gain love is to give up power; "We must all eat beautiful women" because that is what feminine beauty is for— to gain

love that provides only meager recompense for love lost at birth. Once again, the feminine figures that Sexton has created fit neatly into Chodorow's psychoanalytic schema. Because women never emerge cleanly from the

Oedipal triangle, "they are more likely to want children to supplement heterosexual love and to reactivate the preoedipal stance" (204). Yet, Sexton's

"mothers" relearn loneliness when they lose their daughters to men; as "daughter" herself, she speaks a 74 desire to regain preoedipal fullness through reunion with a mother who comes increasingly to represent death. Finally both figures acknowledge this death wish, as death becomes the one deprivation that adequately punishes the daughter's defiance, the one abundance that can satisfy the need of mother and daughter for a love that completes them.

Though male figures speak with and for the feminine "Anne," her relation to them is ambivalent.

Loving men entails entrance into an economy in which beauty and power are for barter and in which crones must finally go begging, once they realize that even their power to tell stories enables them only to recreate scenes of betrayal and loss. For Estella

Lauter, Sexton fails to locate in one woman-centered mythology archetypal images of maternal and sexual love; consequently, the adult speaker forsakes the daughter's search for motherlove and looks to a masculine God for punishment and forgiveness (43).

Certainly, the death she seeks in The Awful Rowing toward God is much different than the immersion in suffocating love imagined in "The Death Baby" sequence.

Though Maxine Kumin has stated that "there is no psychic distance between the poet and the poem"

("Sexton's The Awful Rowing" 81) in this last work, the poems are savagely ironic: gone is saving, mystical 75 identification with a powerful mother who represents a kind of love in death. Nor is there a brotherly, crazy

Christ to mediate between Anne and madness or between the emotional life depicted in the poems and the critics who refuse to hear a woman's voice. God is now wholly other, wholly masculine, and seems a fitting object for this speaker who regards the self with an alienating disgust that forbids anything but fervent

"rowing" toward a figure which will impose upon her the humiliation she deserves.

Maxine Kumin recalls that both she and Sexton were

"increasingly aware of the women's movement" at this time and that Sexton's appellation, "Ms. Dog," "was only a token signal of where we stood" ("How It Was"

XXX) . Sexton, as Kumin says, is "impudent" here, but her flippancy is just that— a name-calling never powerful enough to speak an alternative truth. "When I tell the priest that I am evil," she says,

he asks for a definition of the word. Do you mean sin? he asks. Sin, hell! I reply. I've committed every one. What I mean is evil, (not meaning to be, you understand, just something I ate).

In this poem, "Is It True?" (CP 446-54), and in "Hurry

Up Please It's Time" (CP 384-95) "Ms. Dog" grows defensive linguistically, as though Sexton perceived feminism only to be ironic defiance of the world, an 76 armor protecting the self, instead of the attempt to know the self differently and to reshape the world.

Nevertheless, when she says that she's evil, she means it. Given the desire for penance especially pronounced in the first poems in this book, her abrasive language here seems an awkward mask, making certain that we do not understand what the evil might be— making sure

"Sexton" is incognito and her evil desires are carefully hidden away.

Sexton appears to have given up the search for love and power and to have settled for a protective irony which asks very little of the speaker who claims to describe a new vision of herself. She accepts this feminine self as powerless, as harboring a ratlike ugliness that must be expurgated by a masculine God.

Such acceptance does not take risks and tells the same story over and over again without pursuing new ways to articulate a desire that must be risky if its satisfaction lies in the death that Sexton says she wants.

"It is difficult for one woman / to act out a whole play," she says; "there are few humans whose lives / will make an interesting play" ("The Play," CP

440-41). The problem, though, is not that Sexton is fabricating a life for her readers or that the life doesn't supply material for an entertaining 77

fabrication. This speaker engaged in self-deprecation

isn't going to let us in on the nature of her sin. Nor

will she venture questions about her condemnation.

Ostriker suggests that Sexton's "need [for an adequate

Godhead! is no match for her sense of the significance

of divine power, which is the power of the parent writ

large" (Stealing 78). If so, Sexton conceals her

belief in divinity by concealing emotion. From this

awful rowing, I get the sense not so much of new-found

Christianity but an old self-hatred and fear of coming

close to that which is feminine, ugly, and mad. God appears only as punisher; his divine power seems to

extend no further than torment of this old crone who wishes no longer to either to understand or to revel in

her sinfulness.

The last line of "The Rowing Endeth" (CP 473-74)

claims that death is no longer anything to be afraid

of. The speaker loses to God in a card game in which

he cheats. Rather than protesting, she simply backs

out of the poem. "Dearest dealer," she croons,

I with my royal straight flush, love you so for your wild card, and that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha and lucky love.

Sexton has coated the bitterness, the hopelessness and yearning with sugar, settling for a romance that has

never sufficed, one that as witch she found false and 78 that never replaced the unspeakable fulfillment of the womb.

Though feminism does not provide Ms. Dog with new ways of imagining God, I think that the power and the limitations of Sexton's poetry are connected with her feminist politics. Encouraged largley by Kumin who was for her "part superego, part sister, as well as pal of my desk" (Kelves 7) /12/ and compelled by emotional needs unsatisfied by what she called "the American

Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream" (Kelves 3-4),

Sexton examined female "nightmares" that the "little white picket fences" of middle-class America failed to keep out and tried to keep quiet. Her opponents, however, were both formidable and cruel. "Her death,"

William Pritchard said in the Hudson Review in 1978,

came almost as an anti-climax. I remember hearing about it at a dinner party in Cambridge, where the only comment any­ body had to make was— well, she finally did

Not only was her desire for death seen as ridiculous as she had pictured it in in Transformations, but the poetry, too, was seen as hardly worth attention. "The collected poems are due to appear next year," Pritchard continues,

but my own sense is that she is already being and will come to be read less and less, her main audience a few unhappy college students, probably female ones (391). 79

That a readership of discontent young women is taken to be a measure of insignificance suggests the brick wall of misogyny that Sexton faced and explains, in part, the reason for her construction of elaborate defenses: writing about women for women is clearly the most marginal of poetic endeavors, a project that should be carefully masked, if undertaken at all.

Though her best poetry surfaces when she defies the limits that convention prescribes for women, when her daughters and mothers speak, I think that Sexton's political ideas also circumscribe what they can say.

Though she was never entirely isolated— among her voluminous collection of letters is correspondence with

Plath, Tilly Olsen, and Kumin— she was held fast in a lonely place within a family whose strictures she perceived so accurately. The name she finally adopts,

"Ms. Dog," seems to defy with irony the familial roles that women assume, but the title does not replenish a voice that has by now exhausted the possibilités for saying anything.

In an interview with Elaine Showalter, Sexton says that a women's movement earlier in her career would have made her feel "legitimate" and would have allowed her and Kumin to be more open about the supportive, close relationship they had developed. Yet when elaborating on the effects of such a movement on their 80 lives, Sexton says "I mean, our husbands, we could have thrown it at them" (173). Though she tells us volumes about women's desire for love from other women, her imagination stops short when she tries to think about what might happen if women's relationships to each other actually took precedence over their attachments to powerful men. Thus, the poems about God in The

Awful Rowing are not so much wlsh-fulfillments as final excoriations of the self and what it is capable of imagining. And, at the end of the book in "The Rowing

Endeth," Sexton gives up.

The feminist community in which Adrienne Rich takes refuge from guilt and within which she discovers the capacity for love and power might not have saved

Anne Sexton. /13/ Her poetry, in fact, defies the prescriptions of feminist critics for women's autonomy as much as It struggles against the strictures of those for whom gender ought not influence the poetry's

"universal," aesthetic appeal. It is perhaps true, as

Suzanne Juhasz points out, that because Sexton "knew who she was, she could give out knowledge. And the process was wonderfully reciprocal, circular; for she knew who she was within her poems; her words caused her to know who she was" (130). Sexton certainly constructs female identities through poetry, but they assume shape and texture in relationship to the poet's 81 conflicted desires and the problems that arise in

"confessing" these desires to an audience. /14/

Identity is neither static nor autonomous; nor does its shaping necessarily "create a speaker who is open and intimate; who reveals the self of the writer rather than shields it" (Juhasz 142). Poetry does not allow for x-ray vision into a writer's soul. Rather, it is the site of relationship, where both poet and reader create meaning that is politically motivated and socially dynamic. Thus, for poets who come after

Sexton, a new politics provides new poems in part because there are new audiences, a community whose sources of authority and names for the self eluded her. 82

Notes

/I/ From "The Author of the Jesus Papers Speaks," The Complete Poems 344-45. I will refer henceforth to Complete Poems as CP.

/2/ Unpublished letters of John Holmes, February 8, 1959. Quoted from "'I Tapped My Own Head': The Apprenticeship of Anne Sexton" by Diane Middlebrook. I am indebted to Middlebrook's discussion of Sexton's relationship to Holmes; indeed, much of the autobiographical information cited in this chapter derives from the portrait of Sexton arising in her work.

/3/ Mona Van Duyn, "Seven Women," 140.

/4/ "There was no more determined reviser than Sexton, who would willingly push a poem through twenty or more drafts," writes Maxine Kumin ("How It Was," CP XXV). "She had an unparalled tenacity in those early days and only abandoned a 'failed' poem with regret, if not downright anger, after dozens of attempts to make it come right."

/5/ See also Diane Middlebrook, "Poet of Weird Abundance." Middlebrook points out that Sexton begins to "suspect" that she suffers from "femaleness" in her third book. Live or Die. I find such "suspicion" already apparent in To Bedlam and Part Wav Back.

/6/ Many critics note only the negative aspects of the identification between the speaker and her mother in "The Double Image." For Juhasz, the poem introduces Sexton's project of establishing an autonomous self, since "true relationships between people . . . cannot occur unless each member of the pair is secure in her own identity" (124). Karen Elias-Button argues that "the entire body of Anne Sexton's work can be seen as her attempt to explore the negative aspects of the relationship with the mother in terms that are meant to be explicitly autobiographical" (199). Yet, however threatening the mother of "Double Image" is, she remains a powerful figure whom the speaker repeatedly seeks out and whose power she will appropriate.

/!/ See especially Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering. 83

/8/ At the end of "The Double Image," "doubleness not only denotes proliferations, but duplicity," Middlebrook argues. Naming a daughter for a desirable state of mind, like having her portrait painted, appropriates the daughter's identity, turns her into a mirror, implies that the struggle to separate will have to be violent: cracked mirror, psychotic break ("Becoming Anne Sexton" 32). Sexton is appropriately guilty for such duplicity. Yet, in this poem, many of her characteristic defenses are down, and she acknowledges her underhanded search for identity, even if she fails to discover alternatives.

/9/ Ostriker argues that, "while the tales are fixed," Sexton's narrator "emits an air of exhilarating mental and emotional liberty, precisely because she is distanced from the material she so penetratingly understands" (Stealing 234). While the narrator may understand the implications of the stories she retells, she too is trapped by the same limited roles defined by the Brothers Grimm. Not entirely distanced from her material, she identifies usually with the mother or daughter victimized by the relationships she cannot help but enter into.

/lO/ From "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (CP 224-29).

/II/ I am indebted here to Sandra Gilbert's review of The Death Notebooks and her assessment of "0 Ye Tongues." For her, the final sequence is "the ornament of the collection, . . . poetry that anyone would flirt with almost any disasters to write" (165). Her enthusiasm led me to rereadings of the work and, finally, to a much more positive view of it than a first look produced.

/12/ See also Elaine Showalter and Carol Smith, "A Nurturing Relationship: A Conversation with Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, April 15, 1974."

/13/ Middlebrook contends that while Plath and Sexton "revitalize images of women as mothers and brides by enlivening them with intelligent feminine subjectivity," Adrienne Rich "takes this work one step further" (Mirrors 81). For her. Rich is a "mythmaker" who "seeks to dethrone stereotypes entirely by setting in their place images of women liberated from the 84

isolation of family life." Yet these new images change in Rich's poetry. Unlike Sexton, she does not remain trapped by the limitations of her own feminine positions, but enables the growth of her poetry by questioning the ideology and assumptions that underlie the means she has found to speak.

/14/ Other feminist critics have identified Sexton's speakers as mirror images of the poet herself. For Jane McCabe, "The sources of Anne Sexton's poetry are her own life. . . . Her poems are about personal relationships and about the intensities of her own emotions" (217). Ostriker concludes that in Sexton's early work "(slelf was the center, self the perimeter of her vision" (Writing 64). 85

Works Cited

I, Primary Works

Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

II. Secondary Works

Chaucer, Geoffrey. "The Wife of Bath's Tale.” Norton Anthology of English Literature.. Ed. Meyer H. Abrams. Major Authors ed. New York: Norton, 1975. 126-156.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkley: U of California P, 1978.

Daly, Mary. Gvn/Ecology; The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon P, 1978.

Elias-Button, Karen. "The Muse as Medusa." The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature. Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner, eds. New York: Frederick Unger, 1980. 193-206.

George, Diane Hume. OediPUS Anne; The Poetry of Anne Sexton. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.

Gilbert, Sandra. "Jubilate Anne." Nation 219.7 (Sept. 14, 1974): 214-16. Rpt. McClatchy, Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics. 162-67.

Hamilton, Ian. "Poetry." London Magazine IV (March 1965): 87-88. Rpt. McClatchy, Anne Sexton; The Artist and Her Critics. 127-29.

Holmes, John. Correspondence of Anne Sexton with John Holmes, 8 February 1959. Anne Sexton Archive, Humanities Research Center, U of Texas, Austin. Quoted in Diane Wood Middlebrook, 'I Tapped My Own Head': The Apprenticeship of Anne Sexton." 203.

Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth. Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickenson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Johnson, Rosemary. "The Woman of Private (But Published) Hungers." Parnassus: Poetry in 86

Review 8.1 (Fall/Winter 1979): 92-107.

Juhasz, Suzanne. Naked and Fierv Forms; Modern American Poetry bv Women. A New Tradition. New York: Octagon-Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.

Kumin, Maxine. "How It Was." Introduction, The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton, xix-xxxiv.

"Sexton's The Awful Rowing toward God." la. Maks 9 Prairie; Essays on Poets. Poetry, and Country Living. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1979. 81-82.

Lauter, Estella. Women as Mvthmakers:__ Poetry and Visual Art bv Twentieth-Centurv Women. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Lowell, Robert. "Anne Sexton." McClatchy, Anne Sexton; The Artist and Her Critics. 71-71.

Kelves, Barbara. "The Art of Poetry: Anne Sexton." Interview. McClatchy, Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics. 3-29.

McCabe, Jane. "A Woman Who Writes: A Feminist Approach to the Early Poetry of Anne Sexton." McClatchy, Anne. .SeaLan; The Artist and Her Critics. 216-43.

McClatchy, J. D ., ed. Anne Sexton; The Artist and Her Critics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978.

Middlebrook, Diane Wood. "Three Mirrors Reflecting Women: Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich." Worlds into Words: Understanding Modern Poems. New York: Norton, 1978, 65-96.

"Becoming Anne Sexton." Denver Quarterly 18.4 (Winter 1984): 23-34.

"A Poet of Weird Abundance." Parnassus : Poetry in Review 12-13 (Spring-Winter 1985); 293-315.

"'I Tapped My Own Head': The Appreticeship of Anne Sexton." C o m i n g tO-.L i g h t I American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century. Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom, eds. Ann Arbor, U of Michigan P, 1985. 87

Ostriker, Alicia. Stealing the Language ; The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon P, 1986.

. Writing Like a Woman. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983.

Pritchard, William H. "The Anne Sexton Show." Hudson Review 31 (Summer 1978): 387-92.

Showalter, Elaine and Carol Smith. "A Nurturing Relationship: A Conversation with Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, April 15, 1974." Women's Studies 4.1 (1976): 115-36. Rpt. No Evil Star; Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose, by Anne Sexton. Ed. Steven E. Colburn. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1985. 158-179.

Sexton, Linda Gray and Lois Ames, eds. Anne Sexton; A Self-Portrait in Letters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Van Duyn, Mona. "Seven Women." Poetrv 65.6 (March 1970); 430-32. Rpt. McClatchy, Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics. 139-41. CHAPTER II

Political Necessities and Personal Desire: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich

"Blest the Babe,” Wordsworth exclaims in Book II

of The Prelude.

Nursed in his Mother's arms, who sinks to sleep Rocked on his Mother's breast; who with his soul Drinks in the feelings of his Mother's eye! For him, in one dear Presence, there exists A virtue which irradiates and exalts Objects through widest intercourse of sense (2.234-40). /I/

"Yes," I imagine Adrienne Rich insistently to rejoin,

that acute joy at the shadow her head and arms cast on a wall, her heavy or slender thighs on which we lay, flesh against flesh, eyes steady on the face of love; smell of her milk, her sweat. . . . This is what .ghe_wag. and t his is how I can love mvself-- as_QJilv a woman can love me . /2/

The last line of Rich's passage marks the twist, of course: Wordsworth wishes to usurp the capacity to create unity, to find in his own mind the

"hiding-places of man's power," while Rich searches within a women's community for the feeling of wholeness that should have been her birthright.

88 89

For Rich, one aim of poetry is to reconstitute this wholeness and heal the split between love and power that bound Anne Sexton to a Catherine's wheel of alternating feminine positions. "I think of Anne

Sexton as a sister whose work tells us what we have to fight, in ourselves and in the images patriarchy has held up to us," Rich has written. "Her poetry is a guide to the ruins, from which we learn what women have

lived and what we must refuse to live any longer." /3/

Initially in Rich's work, this refusal requires a reimagining of mythic femaleness, whose references she, like Wordsworth, finds in nature and whose salvaging is concommitant with the poet's return to the natural world. Yet, while Wordsworth can never really rejoin nature any more than he can give birth. Rich looks for a permanent femaleness resident in the earth's permanent forms, a representation of woman in nature that, finally, seems very much part of the patriarchal ruins she hopes to leave behind. At the end of

"Transcendental Etude," the poem quoted above, the poet becomes "the stone foundation" underneath the changing landscape, the "rockshelf further / forming underneath everything that grows." Though the poem dramatizes

Rich's throwing off the trappings of her destructive civilization, the trope wears its civilized ancestry 90 like a corset: women have "rolled round in earth's diurnal course" /4/ for a long time.

And they do so, Margaret Homans reminds us, at their peril. Though feminist critics have found in this conflation of woman and earth a radical ecology and poetics, /5/ Homans warns that it may just as easily signify burial. For her. Rich's rockshelf "is an image of mother as nature, the chthonic feminine

object whose existence as the valorized image of womanhood has impeded and continues to impede the ability of women to choose, among many other things, the vocation of poet" (229). And in fact, the poet seems to have found satisfaction that ends all desiring and quite possibly all writing; the embrace of neither mother earth nor female lover requires reentry into rooms full of men's "argument and jargon," and one wonders what exactly is the "whole new poetry beginning here." But Rich's visionary gleam at the end of

"Transcendental Etude" concludes a book rife with the tensions that have elicited shifts in thinking

throughout her career. Longing for a woman's language,

for women's love, gives her impetus to write.

Nevertheless, she believes, the absence of both is manufactured and sustained by a political system.

Thus, her search for natural symbols to represent some kind of permanent, authentic femaleness, to enable 91 constructions that resonate with mythic truth. Is

Intertwined with the need to forge political ties with other women. Rich's visions of sisterhood obscure these women's ongoing Isolation and resistance to alliance with privileged white writers; and for Rich, vision does not suffice when It remains empty of the presence of other women, when It falls to combat the historical forces which Impede connections among them.

"There Is no liberation that only knows how to say

'I,'" she writes; "there Is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through." /6/

Rich's poetry never does rescue us from the

"ruins" of our history. But If she doesn't lead us to salvation, the process of her thinking shows how poetry can Interrogate a complex political order through questioning Its own sources of satisfaction. Nature proffers Insight glossed lovingly, lyrically In the most musical of Rich's poems. Politics Is more prosaic; not only do narratives of women's lives and feminist recitatives disrupt lyric rhythms, they also trace the troubled history of a land whose beauty cannot recompense lives lost for It. Though, like

Homans, I am disturbed by many of Rich's poems, I think that the work harbors Its own best criticism, lines of debate that the poet patiently, doggedly follows through. In this chapter, I will show what such 92 persistence has gained: not a unified theoretical vision, nor poems resolving all the contradictions they contain, but a way of thinking about political necessity and personal desire that illuminates how feminist writing can conceive the world anew.

Though "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" (FD 35-39) is Rich's first version of a sustained feminist complaint, other, less politically confident poems illustrate the psychological fragmenting and recuperation within nature that becomes the feminist mythology of later work. Indeed, the poet's description of the women in "Snapshots"— their minds

"mouldering like wedding-cake, / heavy with useless experience"; their achievements reflecting "indolence read as abnegation, / slattern thought styled intuition"— is a savaging of their lives, despite the implied sociological reasons for failure. /I/ That any one of them could be "ma semblable, ma soeur" points to a guilt and self-hatred more evident in poems that capture the language as well as the experience of disintegration. In "Antinous: The Diaries" (FD 39-40) for example. Rich has said, "I let the young man speak for me" (FD 329n), perhaps because his voice helped her to recall forbidden emotions, perhaps because it helped her to hide them. /8/ He is the Emperor Hadrian's favorite, a position comparable to that of the 93

"indolent" child-women of "Snapshots" and to Rich herself, a favorite of both father and male patrons as

luminous as W. H. Auden. /9/ Unlike the seasoned acumen

of "Snapshots," Antinous' tone bespeaks disgust with

his own failure more than anger at its social roots:

What is it I so miscarry? If what I spew on the tiles at last, helpless, disgraced, alone, is in part what I've swallowed from glasses, eyes, motions of hands, opening and closing mouths, isn't it also dead gobbets of myself, abortive, murdered, or never willed?

Inauthenticity, the life falsely and only partially

lived, is killing here, though the only measure of

integrity we are given in the poem is a willingness to

face death. Though there must be some story behind his

misery, Antinous can link the dishonesty o£ life at

court only with the artifice that shields It from

knowledge of death:

the rumor of truth and beauty saturates a room like lilac-water In the steam of a bath, fires snap, heads are high, gold hair at napes of necks, gold In glasses, gold In the throat, poetry of fur and manners.

Nature provides refuge from this chimerical beauty

because It is real. Yet this dramatization of Antinous

dying with the autumn season doesn't resolve the

problem of his unwilled life, and both his story and

the full implications of his return to earth are hidden

from us, halted abruptly as death saves him from

troubling associations: 94

evenings, needing to be out, walking fast, fighting the fire that must die, light that sets my teeth on edge with joy, tt/o] till on the black embankment I'm a cart stopped in the ruts of time.

Art shouldn't be duplicitous; life should not

cower behind protective artifice: the lessons of

"Antinous" dictate a poetics that the poem itself vitiates. To follow her own admonition. Rich must find a way to write as herself, a woman whose anxieties might cause pain, who might be labeled "shrill" if her emotions were brought to light. In a journal entry

from 1960, she writes.

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternations between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness. Their voices wear away at my nerves, their constant needs, above all their need for simplicity and patience, fill me with despair at my own failures, despair too at my fate, which is to serve a function for which I was not fitted. /lO/

Death might well dance with the truth if the cost

of authenticity is to be seen as a "monster of

selfishness." Failed as an artist, failed as a mother.

Rich as self-censor is as relentless as her "fate" is

inescapable: she is "death's head, sphinx, medusa."

"You scream," she says to her child.

Tears lick at my cheeks, my knees 95

droop at your fear. Mother I no more am, but woman, and nightmare. /II/

These lines project a mother's guilt rather than a

child's fear. Moreover, they trace blame for violent

feelings not to Antinous' prevaricating social world,

but to Rich's own unnatural, unmotherly inheritance

from evil ancestresses. If she no longer chooses a man

to voice her own estrangement from the roles she plays,

if she no longer displaces anger in poems about other

women, she remains trapped within a femininity very

familiar to Anne Sexton. "And so she danced until she

was dead," Sexton recalls of another bad mother,

a subterranean figure, her tongue flicking in and out like a gas jet. /12/

Rich gave birth to a monstrous image of herself

when she bore her children; as mother, she is neither

powerful nor loving, merely criminal, though apart from

this position she does not exist. Nevertheless, in

1965, she is beginning to identify the cause of failure

in the culture which gives her no role except that of

devoted mother and which can imagine women's creativity

in no other way:

Paralyzed by the sense that there exists a mesh of relations between e.g. my rejections and anger at [my eldest child], my sensual life, pacificism, sex (I mean its broadest significance, not merely physical desire)--an interconnectedness which, if I could see it, make it valid, would give me 96

back myself, make it possible to function lucidly and passionately— Yet I grope in and out of these dark webs (OWE 30).

Feminism begins to provide the necessary light.

Relieved of the burden of solitary failures, finding her "failures" reinterpreted. Rich shakes off paralysis by transfiguring the symbolism of "Antinous."

/13/ The false, inauthentic culture serves up power to men who only feign obedience to ideals of peace, justice, and love; women's failed artistry, their inability to talk about their lives truthfully, are part of the way the culture works. Nature, on the other hand, remains a sanctuary of female values despite the damage it, too, has incurred.

Even in poems written before 1965, death is a luminous, abstract symbol of return to earth, a figure intimating escape, embrace, and exile at once. In "The

Corpse-Plant" (FD 58-60), for example, the flowers are

"whiter than life," and suggest a death infinitely more allusive than the restricted possibilities of paraphernalia cluttering women's lives; "leaves, crayons, / innocent dust." Illuminating large, unspoken meanings, eradicating strung-out, disjointed, and confusing images of dailiness, death also harbors release from madness yawning below life's surface:

obedience of the elevator cage lowering itself, crank by crank into the mine-pit. 97

forced labor forcibly renewed—

but the horror is dimmed: like the negative of one intolerable photograph it barely sorts itself out

under the radiance of the milk-glass shade. Only death's insect whiteness crooks its neck in a tumbler where I placed its sign by choice.

Though she has little compassion for the white men who are the war's victims as well as its sponsors. Rich stitches the meaning of real deaths reported nightly throughout the sixties into this symbolic weave. Death still binds women to a saving natural order, even if male murderers pursue their violent intentions outside it. In "5:30 A.M." and "Abnegation," written in 1967 and 1968 respectively (FD 91-92, 93-94), Rich uses a fox as symbol of femaleness sent to death by man, that

dull-jawed, onrushing killer, being that inanely single-minded will have our skins at last.

Because it is a return to earth, because death separates the hunters from the hunted and is a hallmark of her innocence, the fox's dying seems to resolve the problem of female powerlessness: not just morality but nature, the only source of genuine, lasting power, is on our side. "The vixen I met at twilight on Route

5," Rich will write almost twenty years later, "was an omen / to me, surviving, herding her cubs / in the 98 silvery bend o£ the road." /14/ Yet for the fox of the earlier poems, longevity in the male culture represents fatal capitulation. Rich has given troubled voice to the desires of a female consciousness ravaged by patriarchy, but she has gained little admiration for women's actual lives since describing the mouldering minds of "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law." Women's mere survival isn't good enough, since there can be no true rendering of femaleness in this death-dealing civilization.

If feminism helps Rich to explain death and to assign it a gender, it also inspires the radical rebirth of woman bodied forth in Diving into the Wreck

(1973), for which Rich received the National Book

Award, and The Dream of a Common Language (1978).

Underlying her efforts to provide new images of women and new language is the belief that patriarchy has been a catastrophe; its cultural wealth is the deceptive brilliance of "gold in the throat," the "poetry of fur and manners" of "Antinous"; the beauty of its falsifying art is a measure of its refusal to acknowledge the deaths it countenances as well as the death that awaits it. Thus, the first demand upon a revolutionary poetry is that its language break the soporific hold of music on the charmed reader and that its images shatter precious mosaics of the beautiful. 99

"We need to know the writing of the past and know it differently," Rich writes in 1971, "not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us" (LSS 35).

Yet, the work in both of these books is taxed by

contradictory impulses: Rich hopes to disrupt the

images of women she has inherited, but romantic

tradition continues to provide the material she will

use to reconstitute femaleness; she also hopes to write

an activist poetry, but provides her readers with the

terms of spiritual redemption, rather than political

change.

Though poetry will change history, its most

serious shortcoming here is its failure to account for

its own historical roots and the complex social history

of the political actors it purports to describe.

"Rape" (FD 172-73), for example, combats stereotypes of

promiscuous women and seduced attackers with its own

cast of one-dimensional characters: the white cop

exemplifies the identification of male power and

sexuality; the woman, raped by a maniac, is once again

victimized by police interrogation. Though the poem

removes rape from melodramas used to uphold sex, race,

and class inequality— stories in which savage black men

attack white women or fallen women seduce suburban

husbands and sons--it plays out its own moral script.

The cop "comes from your block, grew up with your 10 0 brothers"; his blue eyes that "grow narrow and glisten" with excitement are "the blue eyes of all the family."

The character of the rapist is now familiar— rape, in fact, is only one aspect of the patriarchal "machinery that could kill you"--but It is still maniacal.

Victimized and still threatened, the woman herself has

"hysteria" in her voice and her mind is "whirling like crazy." In fact, the only reasonable speaker is Rich, who not only challenges her female character to affirm the point of view presented in the poem, but seems to dare her readers to constradict her reading of rape:

and if, in the sickening light of the precinct, and if, in the sickening light of the precinct, your details sound like a portrait of your confessor, will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home? [t/o]

That the rapist really is a husband, boyfriend, father, or neighbor, that his motives may appear mixed to the woman, that he himself is unclear about his motives, that her resistance was tempered with justifiable fear or that she was successful, at least in staying alive: that nobody was in fact behaving maniacally or hysterically but within a context which historical analysis might enable us to understand is beyond the comprehension of the poem. Thus, it relies on old dichotomies to pronounce judgment: people are either good or bad, pure or impure, reasonable or crazy. /15/ 101

The line in which Rich conflates the terms

"rapist” and "maniac” is particularly striking in its

attempt to disrupt notions of imagery and language appropriate to poetry and to approach political truth.

But in asserting that the woman speaks with "the

maniac's sperm still greasing [her] thighs," she

substitutes her own hype for a more conventional

euphemistic or romantic gloss and forces this woman's

experience into a context that fits what the poet wants

to say about male power. It is unlikely that a rape

victim would actually feel her attacker's sperm

greasing her thighs while making a police report. But

the image makes us squirm: the rape is a greasy and

gruesome attack that Rich wants to make us feel,

viscerally, so that disgust leads us to see the rapist

as powerful maniac, the woman as hapless victim. /16/

These terms dictate that change requires upheaval

rather than reform, the creation of myth rather than

social policy. The poet's task is not to examine the

personal histories of the actors in her dramas, but to

bring to the surface and to question the larger,

cultural meanings of "male" and "female," "power" and

"love." Yet, Rich hopes that challenging

defininitions will culminate in individual change and

that mythic rebirth will enable solutions to social

problems. The title poem does not survive these 102 complex intentions, but it points to the internal conflict that will deconstruct the simplistic sexual categories of poems like "Rape."

"Diving into the Wreck" (FD 162-64) represents, as

Wendy Martin suggests, the "experience of primal wholeness" (190). Yet such wholeness is not apparent to me in the androgynous speaker who is to be the figurehead of a new mythology of human sexuality.

Rather, rebirth takes place once again as the poet descends into nature, this time into the ocean, to be united with a powerful mother from whom the male myths she has repudiated had cut her off:

First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out.

As the colors of daylight merge into darkness, all that we have managed to name and understand melts back into unknown origins. The diver's "mask is powerful," feeding her human needs in this deadly environment, but at the origin there is no separation between her and anything outside her:

the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element.

My students have argued— without knowledge of her work or her feminism— that Rich is talking about death.

Their assessment is born, I think, of attention to 103

Imagery: the ocean swallows at the same time that it gives life, a^id to be one with the deep element generally means that humanity has surrendered to a more powerful force. The poet is witness to

the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters.

She abandons the flat language of her narrative to dwell on this image: though threadbare, beauty arrests the diver, and the search undertaken in the austere opening section ends here, in the gaze of death.

Nevertheless, surface existence demands that she rescue sexuality; though symbols of drowning invest the poem with imaginative life, the poet responds to the requirements of reality with figures representing men and women's new sexual roles:

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold I am she: I am he.

Rich paints a representation of female desire in

"Diving into the Wreck" that frightens her, I think, because its dangerous terms don't salvage women's sexuality for immediate political use. The mermaid and merman suit her need for symbols of men and women who 104

can move more easily in the murky realm of unconscious desires. Moreover, realizing poetically her will

toward androgeny exemplifies for Rich the verbal self-creation denied to other women, whose power to

interpret their lives and feelings is usurped by men. /16/ But this saving gesture toward masculinity

seems false, given the emotionally charged symbols of

femaleness that carry the weight of meaning in the poem

and the persistent menace that the masculine poses in

the rest of the book. Thus, both mermaid and merman

seem like fairytale figures imported into the work to

save the poet from her dive into darkness. Rich

falters in her leap from personal, imaginative vision

to transformative politics, in part because the symbols

she has chosen are improvised to meet aims that the

poem doesn't develop. But the greater problem, at

least in terms of her political vision, is the hope to

substitute myth for history, revelation for social

struggle. If the disasters fathered by patriarchy

compel redefinition of human nature and human

relationship with nature, the poet's ostensible

repudiation of the past snaps the threads tying hope to

praxis. Moreover, at the same time that she disclaims

connection to tradition. Rich cloaks with feminism a

version of female fullness suggesting the very silence

that Homans fears, that Sexton recognized as "death." 105

The poetry of The Dream of a Common Language Is much more consistent in its representation of female desire; the return to nature of Diving into the Wreck blossoms into love for other women, whose sexuality is as fertile, liquid, and nourishing as "the deep element." It is not often as dangerous: except in

"The Twenty-One Love Poems," Rich puts aside the possibility of drowning, and sexual love becomes the secret locus of a mutuality beyond the descriptive power of patriarchal language. The body's truth, its genuine meaning for women, is resurrected from burial beneath men's stories. "In arguing that we have by no means explored or understood our biological grounding, the miracle and paradox of the female body and its spiritual and political meanings," Rich writes, "I am really asking whether women cannot begin, at last, to think through the body, to connect what has been so cruelly disorganized— our great mental capacities, hardly used; our highly developed tactile sense; our genius for close observation; our complicated, pain-enduring, multi-pleasured physicality" (OWE 284).

And, in "thinking through the body," Rich is able to propose a kind of knowledge discovered outside the realm of divisive differences that patriarchal language creates. Joanne Feit Diehl has observed that in The

Dream of a Common Language "Rich turns away from the 106 outspoken word, the power of the voice to advocate a language that borders on silence. . . . Consequently the poems in this volume address, in various ways, the need to minimalize language, to divest the word of its accretions of power by replacing it with actions identified as preserving and sustaining a woman's integrity" (101). In "minimalizing language," Rich defers to a truth that is unspeakable, but which she hopes women may come to know in truly knowing one another. Once again, the poet does not propose political struggle so much as she hopes to recharge women's memory of a primordial fullness. Mary

Carruthers remarks that the the "energy" of the work— as well as that of other lesbian poets--

springs from the perception that women together and in themselves have a power which is transformative, but that in order to recover their power women need to move psychically and through metaphor to a place beyond the well-traveled routes of patriarchy and all its institutions (294).

Yet, again, metaphor is less a self-conscious creation of meaning than a borrowing of old figures of femininity: the poetry doesn't change the language so much as it gestures toward a self-knowledge possible only in women's return to nature and their "natural" selves.

As its title suggests, however. The Dream of a

Common Language is at least conscious of its 107 subordination of political analysis to mythmaking; and the poet's dream Is troubled, not just by the violence that makes It necessary, but by the conflict between women lovers depicted In "The Twenty-One Love Poems."

That "The Floating Poem" (FD 243) of this sequence Is outside numerical order suggests that Its sexual joy represents lasting value, helping us to organize experience and outliving It; like a prayer. It directs attention to the metaphysics rather than the politics that governs dally life:

Your traveled, generous thighs between which my whole face has come and come— the Innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there— [t/o] your touch on me, firm, protective, searching me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers reaching where I had been waiting years for you In my rose-wet cave— whatever happens, this Is.

The poet can find no predicates for the meaning of sensual pleasure; she counts the ways her lover communicates feeling outside language and says, simply, that the memory persists. Yet, the relationship falls because communication falls. Lovemaklng cannot salvage lives wounded by dally battering, and the common language that would dispel the Isolation fostered by pain remains a dream:

That conversation we were always on the edge of having, runs on In my head, at night the Hudson trembles in New Jersey light polluted water yet reflecting even sometimes the moon and I discern a woman 108

I loved, drowning in secrets, fear wound round her throat [t/o] and choking her like hair. And this is she with whom I tried to speak, whose hurt, expressive head [t/o] turning aside from pain, is dragged down deeper where it cannot hear me, and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul. /IS/ [t/o]

Diehl notes that this woman's love story "may establish the experiential basis for figurative discourse no longer dependent on the traditional pattern of heterosexual romance" (97). Yet, at least on its surface, this drowning seems little different than the grim conclusions of other sad affairs:

Ophelia, Maggie Tulliver, Edna Pontellier are all silenced, even if return to nature fails to quiet political questions raised in the narratives. That the surviving speaker here is also female suggests that the end of love need not be the endof women's lives.But the sequence describing their relationship doesn't defy convention so much as it replaces male suppression of women's voices with its own: Rich recuperates this love story within her romantic dream of female plenitude; and in so doing, she subsumes the lover's different consciousness within the narrative that her own dream requires.

Long before secrets choke her, the lover's point of view has drowned in poetry— the imagery Rich uses to talk to herself. Though she gestures toward silence. 109

Rich brings the full power of her language to bear on images linking female nature and the voiceless natural world. In "The Floating Poem," lovemaking is "like the half-curled frond / of fiddlehead fern in forests / just washed by sun." Elsewhere, the lover's eyes are

everlasting, the green spark of the blue-eyed grass of early summer, the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring (III, FD 237). tt/o]

And the clitoris is

the small, jewel-like flower unfamiliar to us, nameless till we rename her, that clings to the slowly altering rock— that detail outside ourselves that brings us to ourselves, tt/o] was here before us, knew we would come, and sees beyond us (XI, FD 241). tt/o]

The failure of this mutual knowing kills the relationship— and quite possibly the lover. Patriarchy is held responsible, since men's power over women engenders and lives off their isolation. But it is only the lover's secretiveness that the poet mourns, the lover's inability to locate points of reference that allow women to know each other. Though this woman is given no voice, we are to take the speaker's word for it that her words both explain the other's silence and describe a completeness that each has enjoyed.

"I_dreamed-Y-Q.U.. wees .a__p.OSm, she says, "a poem I wanted to show someone"(II, FD 237); and I suspect that it may be precisely this idealization of the other that 110 isolates, this poetic "talking to my own soul" that precludes reciprocal understanding. Rich's notion that women can "think through the body," that nature harbors symbols of this voiceless communion, leads to a disregard of "superficial" differences among women and to the assumption that her language, her gestures toward this full silence, describe what all women want.

In "Transcendental Etude" (FD 246-69), the book's lavish finale, women's "whole new poetry" is portrayed as a literal weaving together of nature rather than the carefully patterned words of which it really consists: leaving behind "the argument and jargon in a room," the poet is

turning in her lap bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps, laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards in the lamplight, with small rainbow-colored shells sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away, and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow-- original domestic silk, the finest findings— and the darkblue of the petunia, and the dry darkbrown lace of seaweed; not forgotten either, the shed silver whisker of the cat, the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling beside the finch's yellow feather.

"Rich knows her language is lovely enough to persuade us that she embraces inarticulateness, and that we should too," Homans points out (229). But if this paradox has escaped the poet, it certainly hasn't escaped elaboration in the book, especially in "The

Twenty-One Love Poems" where dream and damaging reality Ill conflict and where need to explain and console herself for lost intimacy seems to make writing necessary. At the end of this litany of new poetic materials. Rich imagines herself "the stone foundation, rockshelf further / forming underneath everything that grows," but the elaborate hope of this poem— that in seeing

"eye to eye" women really can leave talk behind— rather than resolve the problems set up in "Twenty-One Love

Poems," can only eloguently wish them away. The

Invention of a redemptive, reconstructive women's community remains the central project of Rich's work after The Dream of a Common Language. But in examining the tension between romantic wish and political necessity, her poems become much more introspective and much more ambivalent about the connections she has tried to establish.

Rich outlines a new poetic in the introduction to

Blood. Bread and Poetry, her most recent collection of prose:

Trying to construct ideas and images afresh, by staying close to concrete experience, for the purpose of alleviating a common reality that is felt to be intolerable— this seems to me fair work for the imagination (xi).

Distancing herself from attempts to find symbols for a common female origin. Rich now engages in a politics of

"location"; that is, theory that seeks to understand where particularities of race, class, and sex "converge 112 as points of exploitation" (BBP xii). Rather than a monolith overlooking a boiling sea of oppression, patriarchy is redefined as a system of divisions and hierarchies in which women participate and in which

some have gained power. The female body is no longer a

source of originative knowledge, but a site of multiple

identities, including, for Rich, that of white North

American. Her language, rooted in educational and

monetary privileges, may yet be a barrier between her

and other women, but in worrying over its history, in

formulating images that reach across barriers to shared

experience. Rich hopes still that she can find words in

common with others.

One route to common understanding is analysis of

her own literary inheritance. "The Spirit of Place"

(FD 297-303), Rich's rewriting of D.H. Lawrence's essay

from Studies in Classic American Literature.

exemplifies her intervention into the system of

meanings that has covered up exploitation of nature and

native people with romance. "Every continent has its

own great spirit of place," Lawrence proclaims:

Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality (16). 113

For Lawrence, "what gives the Yankee his kick" (14), a vital effluence all his own, is defiance of the Old

World masters. Even so, American shouting of freedom will be just a "rattling of chains" until men obey the unconscious passion that masters restlessness, the constant movement that Americans mistake for liberty;

Liberty in America has meant so far the breaking away from all dominion. The true liberty will only begin when Americans discover IT, and proceed possibly to fulfill 1%. It being the deepest whole self of man, the self in its wholeness, not idealistic halfness (17).

Woman, of course, threatens this masculine wholeness, is "inevitably a destructive force" (102). An expatriate himself, Lawrence finds spiritual kin among male writers of the American Renaissance and builds his version of the American spirit of place as a kind of prison-house, where the woman who threatens their brotherhood is to be kept in check by the "bounds and restraints of man's fierce belief in his gods and in himself" (102).

For Rich, this faith in masculinity too easily translates into "the spirit of the masters." "[F ]or it was not enough to be New England," she adds to his homily:

as every event since has testified: New England's a shadow country, always was. 114

Her critique of Lawrence's celebration of "[b]lood knowledge, instinct, intuition, all the vast vital flux

of knowing that goes on in the dark, antecedent to the mind"— the Ü that leads to freedom— moves Rich back to

a community where "blood" or unconscious connections are less trustworthy than political coalitions based on

shared needs and collective accountability. "The sin,"

Lawrence preaches, "was the self-watching,

self-consciousness. The sin and the doom" (94). But

self-consciousness is at the center of Rich's

examination of the moral consequences of mastery; it it

is not enough to "shout" of freedom, to "be New

England," for women,

it was not enough to name ourselves anew while the spirit of the masters calls the freedwoman to forget the slave.

Assessment of her location in American history

keeps the poet mindful that the exact reflection of

essential femaleness in the eyes of another is

impossible, so much is femininity a construction of

lives, needs, and power structures; it also brings to

consciousness the imperative to rethink spurious

interpretations of "freedom" so that the "spirit of the

masters" can no longer equate looking after its own

self-interest with liberty for all. New England's

"pure / solutions bleached and dessicated / within

their perfect flasks" are examples of the "dried blood" 115 of our culture, not because they valorize rational thought, but because they are not conscious enough; the practical, logical ramifications of abstract arguments— defending the rights of slaves and women, for example— are deliberately cut off in the aggressive endeavor to master the land and its inhabitants.

The conclusion of "The Spirit of Place" refuses the wish-fulfillments of "Transcendental Etude," and suggests Rich's renewed scrutiny of the place in which her culture locates her:

I want our own earth not the satellites, our world as it is if not as it might be then as it is: male dominion, gangrape, lynching, pogrom [t/o] the Mohawk wraiths in their tracts of leafless birch [t/o]

watching: will we do better?

The "spirits" Rich seeks at the end of her poem are those massacred by the masters whom Lawrence celebrates. To "do better," she must live in the world, no matter how reluctantly, and practice knowing it. For Lawrence, this is a "drug habit," "the nice fluttering aeroplane sensation of knowing, knowing, knowing" (97) that keeps men from attending to the real business of making gods of themselves. For Rich, now, the female connection required by "the blood"— by desire--demands study, the construction of understanding among women, not just romantic symbols of 116 their common return to earth. Moreover, the language through which we come to know is inevitably figurative, fictional, tentative as it posits and reposits the names of others, absolute knowledge of whom we can never really possess;

The world as it is: not as her users boast damaged beyond reclamation by their using Ourselves as we are in these painful motions

of staying cognizant; some part of us always out beyond ourselves knowing knowing knowing.

In valorizing unconscious apprehension over cognition, neither Rich, in "Transcendental Etude," nor

Lawrence leaves much room for poetry. Whether it is the language of wily women or selfish men, poetry exists only to be discarded for more powerful, private ways of seeing. With her revision of Lawrence's apology for self-centeredness. Rich reenters the social world, finds that history and politics have located women so differently that whatever their essential femaleness might be, whatever the common language is, the dream of reconstituting either is second to the construction of knowledge across differences. As

Charles Altieri has said of Rich's recent work.

As community forms with the past, and as sympathy produces self-knowledge, it is possible to imagine poetry as a form of action. In poems one aligns oneself with other women and one tries to dramatize one's capacity to take power through and for them. . . (Self and Sensibility 181). 117

But the poet never closes the drama, never knows the outcome. Fragile, capable of being endlessly rewoven, poetry becomes a necessary web from one location to others, an effort to know that is continuous and collective.

At the end of "The Twenty-One Love Poems," the poet is alone, "the mind / casting back to where her solitude, / shared, could be chosen without

loneliness." Bereft of exact reflection in another woman's eyes. Rich locates herself among symbols of womanhood more ancient than patriarchy: she is a figure

the color of stone greeting the moon, yet more than stone a woman.

Now, history deprives her of even these icons of an old order, since she can no longer situate herself outside the society which transforms nature to meet its own needs. Yet, though she scrutinizes human ties with the natural world, it remains a source of imagery through which she tries to grasp values more permanent than those we construct. There must be, she thinks, in both landscape and the people who have inhabited it a spiritual core left undamaged and unnamed by an oppressive culture. Rich's poetry has not lost all of its romantic preoccupations; cached in nature are symbols of a lifeforce that endures despite human 118 carelessness and cruelty. But the way In is not through dim remembrance of a female past: such wishful recollection she would now call amnesia— a leaving behind of the real women whom she knows and a denial of the constrution of self in her culture that has taken place since birth. /19/ Rather, her own physical suffering becomes an essential source of knowledge. On the one hand, pain represents a means for the poet of identifing with others' oppression while still retaining a sense of historical place. Yet it also provides a way past identification into exploration of the spiritual center that resists oppression, that refuses to succumb to suffering. "Are we all in training for something we don't name?" she asks at the end of "The Spirit of Place,"

to exact reparation for things done long ago to us and to those who did not

survive what was done to them whom we ought to honor tt/oj with grief with fury with action On a pure night on a night when pollution

seems absurdity when the undamaged planet seems to turn like a bowl of crystal in black ether they are the piece of us that lies out there knowing knowing knowing.

This "piece of us" must be muted, since her society has repressed the voices Rich tries to hear.

Yet, because she can afford neither silence nor a lapse 119

In scrutinizing her own, white woman's assumptions.

Rich begins to write sequences In which Individual, short poems try out tentative statements about a shared female Identity whose terms are subsequently questioned and taken apart. "Sources," the sequence that begins

Your Native Land. Your Life Initially recommences the poet's return to the her "home" In the natural world.

Even now nature renders textures, colors, and contours that resurrect memory and give meaning to Intuitions of

Immanent life:

Shapes of things: so much the same they feel like eternal forms: the house and barn on the rise above May Pond; the brow of Plsgah; the face of milkweed blooming, brookwater pleating over slanted granite, boletus under pine, the half-composted needles It broke through patterned on Its skin. Shape of queen anne's lace, with the drop of blood. [t/o] Bladder-camplon veined with purple. Multlfollate heal-all (I, 3).

The "eternal forms" of nature very nearly reconstruct the poet, whose quiet list belles her sculpting of this scene: for the moment. It seems that nature has already made the consummate poem, reflected consummately in transparent language. That these natural perfections exist is never questioned; rather.

It's her own pleasure In the words that Rich resists.

What capacity, she wonders, does language which rationalizes the sorry history of this land have for talk of such healing unity of mind and nature? To what 120 extent is she, a speaker, using her power to conjure up similar satisfactions? No healing vision survives scrutiny of its motivations, and the poet's transparent knowing is disrupted in III:

From where? the voice asks coldly.

This is the voice in cold morning air that pierces dreams. From where does your strength come? [t/o]

Old things. . . From where does vour strength come, vou Southern Jew? [t/o] split at the root, raised in a castle .of air? (YNL 5).

The interrogating voice is cold enough to freeze the pleasure of landscape and language. Inherited from her Jewish father, from her mother's Southern kinsmen, the questions are grounded in antagonism— between Jew and Christian, immigrant and native, daughter and parents— and reveal that Rich's unifying perception of herself is a construction built over trembling faults.

Not quite the impregnable stronghold of patriarchy, language still masks the needs that inspire speech and the power that compels attention and belief. Like those whose power and whose anxieties are her legacy.

Rich has tried— and failed— to heal splits in allegiance, contradictions in thinking, dissatisfactions and incongruities by sinking all in emotion-laden terms: "home," "homeland," words that 121 establish a solid identity with nature and justify actions taken in its defense.

The private meditations of "Sources" exemplify the historical inquiry which has become imperative for

Rich, but they don't help her establish the common cause with other women that remains the larger project of her work. Now that she has unpacked her history, the grace distilled by the landscape is embittered by the sharp scent of death in the air; too much suffering has taken place, still takes place for nature to harbor much solace. Moreover, though she knows the bite of oppression. Rich cannot claim to share in the lost history to which the land still bears witness:

And has any of this to do with how Mohawk or Wampanoag knew it?

is the passion I connect with in this air trace of the original

existences that knew this place is the region still trying to speak with them

is this light a language the shudder of this aspen-grove a way

of sending messages the white mind barely intercepts

are signals also coming back from the vast diaspora

of the people who kept their promises as a way of life? (XII, 14).

Some words are buried with their speakers, who remain

forever silent to the generations surviving them. Rich 122 romanticizes this lost native culture: "the people who kept their promises / as a way of life" were not only less powerful than their persecutors but less dishonest. But her sense of "messages / the white mind barely intercepts" suggests both the familiar wish to find genuine knowledge resident in the landscape and the difficulty of recreating life histories that the politicized language blocks out. Like a cat with its mouse, "Sources" worries its historical antecedents, shaking the life out of what were important images, luminously connecting poet to nature to other people.

Assertion of the possibility of a common language has been too easily the psalm of a woman drawing from the vast cultural resources to which she has privileged access. If she can't renounce these traditions without discarding her only poetical raw materials, she has to find means to refire them.

The metaphor is apppropriate, I think, to what

Rich attempts in "Contradictions: Tracking Poems," the sequence that ends Your Native Land. Your Life. Less a direct questioning of her ways of making poetry than is

"Sources," the short pieces suggest a rekindling of the imagination that is numb and isolated. Unlike

"Sources'" opening hymn to nature, "Contradictions" begins in winter, when insight freezes with the land:

Heart of cold. Bones of cold. Scalp of cold. 123

the grey the black the blond the red hairs on a skull of cold. Within that skull the thought of war the sovereign thought the coldest of all thought. Dreaming shut down everything kneeling down to cold (2, 84).

Though Rich will offer no saving vision to warm her country back to life, she uses the sequence to discover a path out of this cold place for herself. The only available heat comes from the rapture of the lovers in the third poem:

My mouth hovers across your breasts in the short grey winter afternoon in this bed we are delicate and tough so hot with joy we amaze ourselves tough and delicate we play rings around each other our daytime candle burns with its peculiar light (3, 85).

But, unlike that of "The Floating Poem," this scene is fixed in a grim landscape— "on the cusp of winter"— and neither transforms nor transcends it: sex provides an afternoon's respite, not mythic redemption. Thus,

immediately following the poem is a monologue spoken by a battered woman imprisoned for defending herself.

"She is carrying my madness," the poet says— about this woman and all those whose suffering privilege has allowed her to escape:

She walks along I.S. 93 howling in her bare feet She is number 6375411 in a cellblock in Arkansas And I dread what she is paying for that is mine She has fallen asleep at last in the battered women's safe-house and I dread her dreams that I also dream If never I become exposed or confined like this 124

what am I hiding 0 sister of nausea of broken ribs of isolation [t/o] what is this freedom I protect how is it mine (5, 87).

If she is not to freeze, if her poems are to voice the suffering of these women silenced in a country oblivious to their experience. Rich has to find some word whose meaning breaks through the cellblocks and safehouses where they are confined. "I feel signified by pain," she writes, and tentatively asserts that pain is common ground, common feeling that bridges political differences even as its mention calls to mind the deep-rooted and different reasons for women's suffering. Moreover, pain insists that poetry alone does not heal, that feeling remains the ground of authenticity, of a reality that words neither conceal nor repress. "The problem," she says,

unstated till now, is how to live in a damaged body In a world where pain is meant to be gagged uncured un-grieved over The problem is to connect, without hysteria, the pain of any one's body with the pain of the body's world (18, 100).

Rich's emphasis on "hysteria" seems self-admonitory, reminding her of how easily her own will toward clarity has been subverted by fear of social reprisal or overtaken by peremptory needs. But the staid and steady language of her testimony to other women's suffering breaks into lyric in the penultimate poem of 125 the sequence; not "hysterical," the poem nevertheless gives to pain and impending grief a richly-colored gloss:

This high summer we love will pour its light the fields grown rich and ragged in one strong moment then before we're ready will crash into autumn with a violence we can't accept a bounty we can't forgive Night frost will strike when the noons are warm the pumpkins wildly glowing the green tomatoes straining huge on the vines queen anne and blackeyed susan will straggle rusty as the milkweed stakes her claim as she who will stand at last dark sticks barely rising [t/o] up through the snow her testament of continuation We'll dream of a longer summer but this is the one we have: I lay my sunburnt hand on your table: this is the time we have (28, 110).

Elegiac, its energy breaking from imagery that is well-loved and lovingly chosen, eloquently restrained at the finish: this, we may think after having followed the poet's wrenching search for words, is poetry. But it is situated like an heirloom gem within the postmodern work she has fashioned, a striking recollection of love. It will not work as Rich's conclusion, though its roseate lyricism— the poet's gift from romantic predecessors— gives way to an assertion of mystical solidarity that is not as clean a statement as her politics seems to require. "You who think I find words for everything," she says to a listener who might be her own internal skeptic. 126

this is enough for now cut it short cut loose from my words

You for whom I write this in the night hours when the wrecked cartilage sifts round the mystical jointure of the bones when the insect of detritus crawls from shoulder to elbow to wristbone remember: the body's pain and the pain on the streets [t/o] are not the same but you can learn from the edges that blur 0 you who love clear edges [t/o] more than anything watch the edges that blur (29, 111).

Rich's earlier, more prosaic statement concerning the problem of relating one kind of pain to another emphasizes a process of negotiation that is already mystically complete in this last poem: "cut loose" from obstructive language, the poet's feeling connects her to others. But the listener's strong presence In the poem prevents anything but assertion of the wish, and Rich's persistent desire for belief in permanent, genuine connection struggles with bedrock skepticism.

Commanding us to watch the edges of identity blur is not the same as troping similarity, and the writer's hope is painfully distinct from what her poetry can render.

Rich's most recent work in Time's Power /20/ presents these two impulses— skeptical and wishful— in stark contrast; rather than resolution they require acceptance. Yet, as she sees death more clearly in the foreground, her hope to find immanent value present in 127 the landscape grows stronger, despite her inability and her unwillingness to give it a permanent name. "Desert says: What you believe / I can prove": from "The

Desert as Garden of Paradise," the most ambitious of these poems, this line points ruefully at Rich's own symbolic constructions as well as more at the more destructive systems of belief she will describe.

I: amaranth flower, I: metamorphic rock. I: burrow, I: water-drop in tilted catchment, I: vulture. I: driest thorn.

Rocks in a trance. Escaped from the arms of other rocks. Roads leading to gold and false gold (1, 25).

Solitary, miserly with its life, vast and oblivious to human needs, the desert is a virtual garden of meaning.

It is a place of temptation, wandering, and fasting, where bereft of comfort or companionship, we find our gods. Rich is drawn there by a voice on a tape player, that of a Mexican woman who is singing not to her, but to a homeland lost to American conquest. Her gods are nameless, and it is the desire in the singer's voice to

locate them that Rich hears, her need for confirmation of self and history in the land:

This is why I ask you,

when the singing escapes the listener and goes from the throat to where the mountains hang in chains [t/o] as if they never listened why the song

wants so much to go where no song has ever 128

gone (2, 26). [t/o]

Rich wants nature to verify our naming, wants as

much as the singer does that her song "go where no song has ever gone." Her depiction of crusaders and

missionaries as carriers of death overdoes the point

that their religions fail to provide a satisfying image

of a loving God; there's nothing new in these stories,

and Rich finds nothing of value in Western faiths. But

the land both encompasses and resists any name we give

it, socially valuable or not. And, despite its having

given birth to hatred, bigotry, and murder, the effort

to locate our spiritual center in mountain or desert or

sky— to bring what we perceive as numenous power into

our system of naming— is also the motive for poetry.

At least it is hers.

The last two poems of the sequence assert both

Rich's refusal to claim primacy for her vision of

nature and the personal need to try again and again to

say what she has found there. In the penultimate

section,

Miriam, Aaron, Moses are somewhere else, marching You learn to live without prophets without legends to live just where you are your burning bush, your seven-branched candlestick [t/o] the ocotillo in bloom (10, 30). 129

Religious images seem like bits o£ useless memorabilia, passed down through generations until the faith of which they were emblems is attenuated. The ocotillo, however, suggests an ongoing need for symbols of freshness and fertility, for a kind of grace that renews life "just where you are." There is a way to sing holiness. Rich wants to say in the final poem.

But the sacred outlives our songs,

is nameless moves in the eyeflash holds still in the circle of the great arid basin once watered and fertile probes outward through twigbark a green ghost inhabiting dormant stick, abstract thorn What's sacred is singular: out of this dry fork, this wreck of perspective what's sacred tries itself one more time (11, 31).

Charles Altieri turns to Rich's poetry as exemplary of the way to escape "the shattered heritage of an overheated and overoptimistic romanticism." If, as he argues, her contemporaries try to dissolve late twentieth-century anxieties in a fuzzy nostalgia for lost beliefs. Rich uses poems to "create an identity in touch with plausible sources of strength and capable of responding forcefully to an oppressive sociopolitical order" (Self and Sensibilitv 167). /21/ At the same time, she has led Altieri at least part way out of his own entrapment in tradition. The turn from modern to 130 postmodern poetics, he has theorized, is in part a turning back from a modernist commitment to the

"creative, form-giving imagination and its power to affect society" to an understanding of poetic creation

"more as the discovery and the disclosure of numinous relationships within nature than as the creation of containing and structuring forms" (Enlarging the Temple

17). /22/ In other words, postmodernists try to reestablish romantic ties with the natural world in order to overcome the alienation from body, environment, and unconscious that Is the human condition in a money-and-war-mongering society. It's not difficult to see this turning in Rich's thinking, especially in the return to nature dramatized in Diving into the Wreck and The Dream of a Commmon Language.

Altieri argues that this "immanentist" poetics is incapable of entering into political debate because, in his words, "one needs abstract intellectual and imaginative structures by which to judge the present and to pose alternatives to it" (ET 20). Modernist thinking, in his mind, presents us with such structures, social values which give us at least a point of reference from which we can talk about the gap between ideal selves and socio-political reality.

Radical feminism calls into question this return to humanism because humanism's notion of ideal 131 societies has always managed to exclude women— among other exclusions based on race, class, and ethnicity.

If there is, as Altieri believes, "a deeper ground" within humanism "for values carried by the tradition but never realized" (ET 237), the human ideal is still based on the perfectability of man— whose imperfect

unconscious desires find their object in his definition

of woman. "You worship the blood," Rich says in

"Waking in the Dark" (FD 152-55);

you call it hysterical bleeding you want to drink it like milk you dip your finger into it and write you faint at the smell of it you dream of dumping me into the sea.

No feminist himself, Altieri is nevertheless attracted by Rich's loyalty to a woman's community, and suggests

that while her ideas "remain somewhat simplistic," the power of her work lies "in the poet's grasp of what it

is like to try to live in accord with an explicit body of ideals and commitments" (SS 180). Thus, I suppose, are we reconciled with modernism, as poetry dramatizes the way ideas empower the members of a community. Yet

the development of Rich's ideas— of sisterhood, of political location, of a commonality beyond difference— takes place as her grounding in modernist and romantic traditions erupts. Her effort to trace

the possibility for femaleness outside male-authored roles at first only reiterates romantic identification 132 of woman and nature— and a place outside the political debate, "the argument and jargon in a room," that determines the status of both. Lawrence's celebration of mastery provokes her reentry into the struggle over words which define sexual difference, but the most significant turning in her poetry since the late 1960's comes with the often painful acknowledgement of differences among women themselves. Race, class, religious, and ethnic divisions, though they are fostered by patriarchy, constitute ways of knowing the self that are as "real" as sexual identity. In fact, though her own history as a white Jewish women is in part a legacy of victimization, it is also the source of Rich's language and her ideas. Her problem is to find words that conjoin what are felt as disparate struggles without sacrificing the sense of individual heritage that has enabled different people to survive.

Dominant traditions constructed upon the silence of these sisters are valuable primarily for their manifest inconsistencies, the eruption of all they hoped to obscure.

Altieri is able to subsume Rich's feminism within

"general concerns for identity and community" (SS 167) in part because he assumes that Rich's ideas are tested within a stable, generic woman's community. Yet her most recent poetry calls into question the ideas that 133 had bound this community together in The Dream of a

Common Language. As she examines the possibility of connection and the plausibility of her own romantic faith in a female nature, her poems also question feminist critical theory that relies on the existence of a common woman's experience that defies patriarchal definition. Rich's interrogation of her language, of all the sources of her ideas resembles in its intent

Luce Irigaray's insistence that "feminine" never be defined but that it signify disruption of terms relying on hierachical opposition for meaning. "Why try to speak with a man?" Irigaray asks:

Because what I want, in fact, is not to create a theory of woman, but to secure a place for the feminine within sexual difference. That difference — masculine/feminine— has always operated "within" systems that are represen­ tative, self-representative, of the (masculine) subject. . . . In other words, the feminine has never been defined except as the inverse, indeed the underside, of the masculine. So for woman, it is not a matter of installing herself within this lack, this negative, even by denouncing it, nor of reversing the economy of sameness by turning the feminine into the standard for "sexual difference": it is rather a matter of trying to practice that difference (159) .

Even though she refuses to define "woman," Irigary's use of the category implies that sexual difference incorporates all others and that a woman's self-identification as "lack" or "absence" will come with respect to man. That this way of knowing the self 134 may be interwoven with being black, being poor, being

Jewish is never considered, nor are the ways that women have managed to speak through the cracks o£ men's discourse; the "practice o£ dl££erence," though it encourages resistance to a reordering that doesn't alter £undamental hierarchies, has little use £or the

history o£ survival and accomplishment that £osters community, the persistent sources o£ power that have

given Irigaray hersel£ words and a pen. "Every drought-resistant plant has its own story," Rich might

reply,

each had to learn to live with less and less water, each would have loved

to laze in long soft rains, in the quiet drip after the thunderstorm each could do without deprivation

but where drought is the epic then there must be some [t/o] who persist, not by species-betrayal but by changing themselves

minutely, by a constant study of the price of continuity a steady bargain with the way things are

("The Desert as Garden of Paradise" (4, 27).

Her analogy between people and plants points to the inseparablity of self and the positions occupied

within a culture, of survival and adaptation to "the way things are." Thus, her thinking also brings to

light problems with Elaine Showalter's "gynocritics," an analysis of women's culture grounded in literary 135 scholarship rather than psychoanalysis but still based upon the idea that this separate culture "forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women to each other over time and space" (26). According to Showalter, study of "those activities, behaviors, and functions actually generated out of women's lives" may give rise to understanding of a "wild zone" of female experience, a woman's realm existing alongside the dominant order but neither defined nor understood by it. Though both women trace the strengths as well as the powerlessness that accrue to us from women's history, I think Rich would argue against the notion that a collective women's culture overrides mitigating differences of generation, race, and class. She identifies strongly with the writer

Ellen Glasgow, for example, in her poem "Education of a

Novelist" (YNL 37-40), but her inheritance mixes a talent for self-assertion with denial of the privilege that enables her to speak. Glasgow's words might well be her own, she says, and so might Glasgow's forgotten black servant Lizzie Jones, whose silence is a measure of the white writer's power:

Lizzie Jones vanishes. Her trace is lost. She, who was winged for flying Where at the...s.nd of the nineteenth century you ask could one find the Revolution 136

In what mean streets and alleys of the South was it then Ivina in ambush? Though., I [t/o] with the world's suffering . . . "A s a,opn as I learn my letters. Mammy, I.m going to teach you yours" but by your own admission you never did

Where at the end of the twentieth century does the Revolution find us in what streets and alleys, north or south is it now lying in ambush? It's not enough using your words to damn you Ellen: they could have been my own: this criss-cross map of kept and broken promises I was always the one.

That nature provides symbols of a human spirit outside the reach of culturally-rooted differences, that the experience of pain enables a poet to touch what lies across these boundaries: these beliefs, sustained by hope rather than fact, perhaps constitute

Rich's practice of disruption in the face of a political order that has ordained her own "steady bargain with the way things are." In questioning the possibility of defining a woman's culture or psychology, she subjects this hope to the study of our history and the analysis of continued powerlessness that real social change requires. Poetry engages both the dreams just beyond the grasp of language and the choices that unrelenting attention to words— to the 137 power and history of what they inscribe— leads us to define. "I have wished I could rest among the beautiful and common weeds I can name," Rich writes, ending the poetic inquiry of "Sources" in a weary but still insistent prose:

But there is no finite knowing, no such rest. Innocent birds, deserts, morning-glories, point to choices, leading away from the familiar. When I speak of an end to suffering I don't mean anesthesia. I mean knowing the world, and my place in it, not in order to stare with bitterness or detachment, but as a powerful and womanly series of choices: and here I write the words, in their fullness: powerful; womanly (XXIII, 27). 138

Notes

/I/ From Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stlllinger.

/2/ "Transcendental Etude," In The Fact of a Doorframe; Poems Selected and New. 1950-1984. 264-69. Henceforth, I will refer to this volume of collected work as FD. /3/ gn Llea*.Secrets, and Silence 123. Henceforth, I will refer to this volume of essays as LSS.

/4/ Wordsworth, "A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal," Selected Poems and Prefaces 115.

/5/ In her discussion of Rich's Diving into the Wreck. Carol Christ says, "I would argue that rather than ignoring or denying feelings of connection to nature, women (and others) need to develop a new understanding of being human, in which the body is given a more equal footing with the intellect and the human connection to nature is positively valued at the same time that the awesome (but not unlimited) human capacity to control nature is recognized" (129). In a similar vein, Estella Lauter finds in the mythmaking work of Rich and other women poets a wish to "overcome the restrictions on being we have built into our symbolic code" (212) and discover the "permeable boundaries between the female self and other phenomena" (215). While it is true that imagining ourselves masters of the environment may now prove fatal, consigning to women's bodies a mythic affinity with the natural world fuzzes our participation in the fouling of the earth and doesn't show us what to do about it. Moreover, rather than a new poetics, I will argue that Rich, at least, resucitates romantic figures which obscure important differences among women and which empower Rich as rhetorician without giving voice to her sisters.

/6/ Blood. Bread and Poetry 224. I will refer to this volume of collected prose as BBP, henceforth.

/!/ Paula Bennett discusses the connection between Rich's poetry and her dissatisfactions with personal life in terms of a struggle with form and speaking voice. Bennet argues that "to be honest, poetry had to duplicate the raggedness, the complexity, the uncontrollability of experience" (190). Yet, her 139

Imperative to be "honest" in poems presents problems that Rich Is never able to resolve: poetry never Is the transparent medium she desires between writer and reader or poet and her own perceptions. In fact, her failure to create a common language or to articulate grounding truth gives Impetus to writing which continually examines Its own assumptions and Its pleasures.

/8/ Rich has remarked that, like formalism, using the persona of a man "allowed me to handle materials I couldn't pick up barehanded" (LSS 40-41). Nevertheless, even "Antinous" refuses Introspection, and the boy's alienation Is clouded In a parallel with nature: the winter's gloom Is supposed to comprehend human despair, though the terrifying Image of self-destruction at the end of the poem Isn't explained by the narrative that precedes It.

/9/ Auden remarked In his Introduction to A Change of World, the volume that he selected as winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award, that "the poems a reader will encounter In this book are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, repsect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs" (Gelpl 127). /lo / Q,£ Woman Born; MatMihood as Experience and Institution 22. Henceforth, I will refer to this volume as OWE.

/II/ "Night Pieces: For a Child," FD 67-68.

/12/ "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," Collected Poems 224-229.

/13/ "The women's movement connected for me with the conflicts and concerns I'd been feeling when I wrote "Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law," as well as with the Intense rapid politicization of the 1960's New Left," Rich has said In an Interview. "It opened up possibilities, freed me from taboos and silences, as nothing had ever done; without a feminist movement I don't see how I could have gone on growing as a writer" (Bulkin 51).

/14/ "Sources," Your Native Land. Your Life 1-27. I will refer to this volume henceforth as YNL.

/IS/ Helen Vendler argues that "Rape" "Is a deliberate refusal of the modulations of Intelligence 140

In favor of an annulling and untenable propaganda, a grisly indictment, a ficticious and mechanical drama denying the simple fact of possible decency” (243). Though I agree with Vendler's negative assessment of the poem, for me its fault lies not so much in a denial of decency but a failure to explore adequately the politics of rape.

/16/ Rachel Blau du Plessis argues that Rich's diver is not to be taken as archetype, but as prototype— "not a binding, timeless pattern, but one critically open to the possibility, even the necessity of its own transformation" (299). She also points to the ambition underlying Rich's effort to transform women's place in traditional mythology. Yet, the prototype of "Diving into the Wreck" eases neither the poetic nor the political tensions of the book; the writing is still too much in love with easeful death, too hard on masculinity for the experience of androgeny to provide an satisfying paradigm, even if it is only temporary.

/II/ Du Plessis groups Rich with postmodernist poets who, in contrast to modernist use of myth "as a framework by which a total culture can be organized," give attention "to inwardness, to the energies of process, to learning to inhabit a world, not creating one" (299). Rich's feminism both directs this inner processing of experience and changes because of it. Though she looks for permanent symbols of femaleness, for shapes embodying persistent spiritual life, immanent moments in time are, as du Plessis notes, "seen . . . as something which one's own consciousness— evolutionary, relative, and historical— can respond to and judge" (299-300).

/18/ "The Twenty-One Love Poems," XXI (FD 246).

/19/ See Rich's essay "Resisting Amnesia: History and Personal Life," BBP 136-155.

/20/ Henceforth, TP.

/21/ Henceforth, SS.

/22/ Henceforth, ET. 141

Works Cited A. Primary Works

Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New. 1950-1984. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.

. Your Native Land. Your Life; Poems. New York: Norton, 1986.

. Time's Power: Poems. 1985-1988. New York: Norton, 1989.

B. Secondary Works

Altieri, Charles. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

. Enlarging the Temple. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1979.

Auden, W. H. "Foreword to A Change of World." Gelpi, Adrienne Rich's Poetry. 125-27.

Bennett, Paula. Mv Life a Loaded Gun:__ Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics. Boston: Beacon, 1986.

Bulkin, Elly. "An Interview with Adrienne Rich: Pt. I. Conditions 1.1 (1977): 50- 65.

Christ, Carol. Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. Boston: Beacon P, 1980.

Cooper, Jane Roberta, ed. Reading Adrienne Rich; Reviews and Re-Visions. 1951-81. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984.

Carruthers, Mary. "The Re-Vision of the Muse: Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, Olga Broumas." The Hudson Review 36.2; 293-322.

Diehl, Joanne Feit. "'Cartographies of Silence': Rich's Common Language and the Woman Poet." Cooper 91-110. 142

Du Plessls, Rachel Blau. "The Critique of Consciousness and Myth in Levertov, Rich, and Rukeyser." Shakespeare's Sisters; Feminist Essavs on Women Poets. Eds. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979. 280-300.

Gelpi, Albert. "Adrienne Rich: The Poetics of Change." Gelpi, Adrienne Rich's Poetry. 130-148.

Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth and Albert Gelpi. Adrienne Rich's Poetrv. New York: Norton, 1975.

Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth. Emilv Bronte, and Emily Dickenson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY; Cornell UP, 1985.

Lauter, Estella. Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentiety-Century Women. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Garden City, NJ: Anchor-Doubleday, 1953.

Martin, Wendy. An American Triptych: Ann Brad- street. Emily Dickinson. Adrienne Rich. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983.

Rich, Adrienne. Blood. Bread and Poetry; Selected Prose 1976-1985. New York: Norton, 1986.

. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1976.

. On Lies. Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979.

"Three Conyersations." Gelpi, Adrienne Rich's Poetry. 105-22.

Showalter, Elaine. "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness." Fam inlst. CU-ti.Cl.5m; Essays on Women. Literature. Theory. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 243-270. 143

Vendiez, Helen. "Adrienne Rich." Part o£ Nature. Part o£ Us . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. 237-270.

Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Riverside Editions. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, CHAPTER III

Crashing Through the Margins; Audre's Lorde's Myths of Power

Thus far I have described how poetry illuminates and enables the complex construction of positions from which female writers speak. While Sexton's poetry pushes against the limitations of women's conventional roles in a nuclear family, Adrienne Rich's diverse feminist community both encourages visionary reconception of these roles and questions the all-encompassing definition of femaleness to which she gives primacy. The political ideas that influence these writers are like a machinist's lathe, it seems to me, empowering them to shape experience and embodying constraints against which their imaginations struggle.

Sexton's later poetry fails, I think, because her ideas about the roles she can assume circumscribe both experiences she can talk about and her means of

recounting them. Rich is the greater poet, largely

144 145 because she hopes to speak to a larger audience whose differences from herself, in terms of its ideas and political locations, induce her passionate, persistent search for common language.

The "politics of location" that leads Rich to examine her own multiple identities arises in part from a critique by black women, whose ambivalent position within political hierarchies not only keeps them from pledging unequivocal allegiance to the Black Power or white women's movement, but has often left them without allies. The title of an influential text outlining a black women's studies articulates both this ambivalence and the writers' struggle toward self-empowerment: All the Women Are White, All the Men Are Black,—But

Some of Us Are Brave argues for "Black feminism's total commitment to the liberation of Black women and its recognition of Black women as valuable and complex human beings." Moreover, these women claim, "Iblecause we are so oppressed as Black women, every aspect of our fight for freedom, including teaching and writing about ourselves, must in some way further our liberation"

(xxl).

Audre Lorde has been one of the most vocal critics of a feminist movement whose vision of sisterhood has failed to acknowledge women's varied political and social differences. "Advocating the mere tolerance of 146 difference between women is the grossest reformism," she maintains. "Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic." /I/ Her work also exemplifies commitment to liberation won with political power. In fact— as the editors of Some of Us Are Brave argue that It must be— poetry Is one Important means to power. In both Its construction of a powerful self and Its Insistence that this self represents a larger, heretofore silenced, group. "I write for myself," Lorde says. But,

[wlhen I say myself, I mean not only the Audre who Inhabits my body but all those islâJty, Incocrigbls, Black women who Insist on standing up and saying I am and you can't wipe me out, no matter how Irritating I am" (Evans 268).

Though she has said that she Is "persona non grata" In black literary circles because of her lesbianism (Evans 262), Lorde tends to suppress exploration of her own difference from members of the black community In the hope of establishing the authority of a representative voice. While In The

Dream of a Common Language Adrienne Rich can Imagine a mirroring of desire that eludes the strictures of men's language, Lorde's sexuality sets her apart from heterosexual women, and her race distinguishes her from the women whom Rich Imagines as her counterparts, for 147 whom differences in history and status disintegrate with patriarchy. Thus, some poems in The Black Unicorn represent Lorde's attempt to name her position in "the very house of difference" (zami 226). Here, she Is a daughter finding a mirroring image in neither mother nor sister, who resist the poet's erotic desires and whose potentially powerful "blackness" is only a means of protecting themselves from whites. Yet "poetry is not a luxury," Lorde has argued, and the deaths of black children— rather than the need to examine this undefined female identity— move her most urgently to write. Lorde's polemical voice derives from the role of "sister outsider," the woman at the bottom of political hierarchies who defends those who share her oppression. While Rich's focus on her specific location as a North American white results in meditation on the complexity of this position, Lorde's most recent poetry sustains the split between private sexuality and public political gesture. And, though she accurately documents the grisly effects of American power, she herself relies on military metaphors to celebrate a revolution whose aims and methods she does not question— whose costs are never reckoned. African mythology helps her to revise what it means to be a black woman, yet Lorde's mythic imagination— with its clear delineation of good and evil— does not allow for 148 a very democratic politics, since there Is never the complication of reasonable disagreement, an opposition that need be overcome by anything but force.

Lorde forces me to ask whether the construction and questioning of the self that I value In Rich Is a consequence of her willingness to remain marginal, never the unequivocal representative voice for a large and angry following, despite her being a model of complex and compelling processes of mind. What place

Is there for such a person in the world of products or of poverty, where power becomes the necessary focus of human ambition? Lorde places herself among the victims of American racism and will not for a moment relinquish the opportunity to impress upon us their fury and potential for violence. She does indeed represent a large and angry group, she tells us, "who do not speak, who do not have verbalization because, they, we, are so terrified" (Evans 262), and whose collective identity arises in their desire to survive. Her poetry also suggests the consequences of such an identity, fixed in place by its opposition to a system of power relationships and thus defined with that system at the center of consciousness. In celebrating violence at the expense of considering its effect on human beings, she simply reverses the categories denoting good and evil that her enemies have relied on to rationalize 149 their own privileges and their own uses of violence.

In crashing through the margins, she becomes a political player in the system that she hates.

If I attend in this chapter to the failures of artistry and feminist thought that result, I wish to inquire just as carefully into what has delimited this writer's attention, against what adamant obstacles she has tried to practice her art. Lorde has pitted herself against injustice across continents. The formidable problems presented by her work are, I think, as worthy of study as a lesser success.

Like that of both Sexton and Rich, Lorde's early poetry is remarkable for its effort to protect rather than depict experience. The monotonous rhythm and overwrought symbolic gesturing of "Gemini" characterize this writing:

Moon-minded the sun goes farther from us split into swirled days, smoked, unhungered, and unkempt no longer young.

All earth falls down like lost light, frightened out between my fingers, here at the end of night, our love is a burned out ocean, a dry-worded brittle bed. Our roots, once nourished by cool lost water Cry out— "Remind us!"— and the oyster world cries out its pearls like tears.

was this the wild calling I heard in the long night past [t/ol wrapped in a stone-closed house? I wakened to moon and the sound-breached dark— 150

and thinking a new word spoken some promise made broke through the screaming night seeking a gateway out. /2/

Here, Lorde's obvious talent for metaphor and her emotional energy have not found a poetic home, and the

frequent bursts of precise language are burled In astract archetypal symbols that plunge through the poem

In a kind of waterfall. These symbols are too heavily burdened with their surreal vision; the poem never achieves the depth the writer Intends, In part because her Images are all so urgent— In four short lines we must reckon with a "burned out ocean," a "dry-worded brittle bed," "lost water" and an "oyster world."

More Important, the poet seems to hope for an amorphous

large effect rather than for any particular meaning; her language Is meant to elicit a sense of profound experience, but she Is either too protective of It or too uncertain of It to tell us anything more about her life or herself.

The same problems recur In "Coal" (CP 10-11),

though here the language of the Black Power Movement provides both an identity for this anonymous poet and a convenient shield: that she Is a black woman Is

Intended to reverberate within the "I" that takes up the entire first line, but the appellation and Its power seem borrowed from a political rally: 151

I is the total black, being spoken from the earth's inside.

The poet's grandiose claim still resembles that of

"Gemini" where the "earth falls down / like lost light frightened out between my fingers"; one difference here is that she is black, so there are, we must suppose, mythical reasons for her association with "the earth's inside." Yet the pretentious tone of the opening is brushed with an irony that begins to fasten this speaker to a specific place and time. Now the poem shines, briefly, but not with arch implications pilfered from popular slogans:

There are many kinds of open how a diamond comes into a knot of flame how sound comes into a word, colored by who pays what for speaking.

From "the total black," the poet has become a canny critic, paying her own dues for being heard, and her imagery begins to suggest the cost of experience as a black woman. Lorde's ironic bite, the bitterness of her identification later in the poem with an

"ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge," indicate the direction that her interest in large effects will take: she induces discomfort in her readers by hurtling at them images of pain and anger from poems that seem to come from the very center of these emotions. 152

Despite this intimation o£ a workable technique, the last four lines of "Coal" suggest a continuing need for abstract images to carry poetic weight that she can't yet trust to everyday life:

Love is a word, another kind of open. As the diamond comes into a knot of flame I am Black because I come from the earth's inside now take my word for jewel in the open light.

The second line, repeated from the first section of the poem, is an echo of T. S. Eliot, an odd precursor but

one of Lorde's favorite poets (Hammond 18). The lines echo the violent redemption that releases Eliot from

the trappings of time at the end of "Little Gidding," but these dim soundings fade in the circumlocution of

Lorde's comparison. The multi-directional simile— the

fiery diamond is like the poet's blackness and her

words which convey love— takes on more meaning than the language can easily manage. Again, the abstractions are bloated rather than spacious, and the identity assumed by the speaker lapses from the sharp observer

of the middle lines to a mythic earthmother whose significance is assumed.

"Coal" is unusual among the early poems in that the poet at least identifies herself as black, though she is not very explicit about what that means. I

think that her dependence on abstract language to give these poems depth and herself identity is related to 153

Lorde's not knowing exactly whom she's talking to or what she represents. In an interview, she remarks, "I

looked around when I was a young woman and there was no one saying what I wanted and needed to hear. I felt totally alienated, disoriented, crazy. I thought that there's got to be somebody else who feels as I do"

(Evans 261). While the deep imagery seems to be directed to the obscure "poetry audience," other poems

like "Memorial II," the recollection of a dead friend, and "Martha," a long homily to a friend who is injured

in an auto accident, are written to individuals who can provide a context that the poems don't. Though these people inhabit the black and lesbian communities that

Lorde addresses in her more personal poems, she lacks a strong, representative voice, possibly because the communities themselves are in the middle of forging

their own names. Moreover, she usually does not dwell

in a community both black and lesbian, nor has she yet claimed that integrated identity for herself. "Coal," with its abstract references to "Blackness" and "Love"

begins that process, but both Cables to Raoe and

The First Cities. Lorde's first two books, bespeak confusion about the poet's claim to our attention and the response she desires from her readers. Lorde's growth is not just a matter of developing aesthetic 154 control, but also of articulating who the "I,” "the total black," that begins "Coal," might be.

Lorde's penchant for making things deeper than they already are Is equally telling In her early political poems. In "Rites of Passage" (CP 19), a poem that she dedicates to Martin Luther King, the anger

Identified In the book's title. Cables to Rage. Is distanced from the speaker by opaque language and a cryptic tone:

Their fathers are dying back to the freedom of wise children playing at knowing their fathers are dying whose deaths will not free them of growing from knowledge of knowing when the game becomes foolish a dangerous pleading for time out of power.

These lines seem more an elaborate disguise for both writer and subject than an expression of anger, sorrow, or even polemic. Yet, though neither of her early books consistently places her In a particular political context, her publisher and anthologists do. The book following Cables to Rage. From a Land Where Other

People Live. Is picked up by Broadside Press, a Detroit publishing house whose writers Include Sonia Sanchez,

Nickl Giovanni, Don L. Lee, Gwendolyn Brooks and

Margaret Walker. Toni Cade's The Black Woman, published In 1970, the same year as Cables to Raae, 155 indicts white feminists and black men for excluding black women from their writings and their movements; her book "reflect[s] the preoccupation of the contemporary Black woman in this country” (11), and includes in its collection of essays, poetry, and stories, two poems by Lorde. One of these,

"Naturally," is absent from both Cables to Rage and The

First Cities, and its irony, diction, and clear political stance set it apart from anything that Lorde has yet composed. Here, she satirizes the commercialization of black women's struggle for new standards of beauty, and "A trifle / Yellow" herself, she berates her own attempts to achieve a "natural" blackness :

But I've bought my can of Natural Hair Spray Made and marketed in Watts Still thinking more Proud beautiful black women Could better make and use Black bread.

The poem is also included in Stephen Henderson's

1973 anthology. Understanding the New Black Poetrv in a section he entitles "The New Black Consciousness, The

Same Difference." Citing Imamu Baraka as preeminent among these writers, Henderson argues that black poetry since the 1960's is "informed and unified by the new consciousness of Blackness" (183); "what joins [these poets] together," he says, "is the startling awareness 156 that Black people are poems, that all Black people are

Africans, and that the ultimate poem Is the literal transfiguration of Africa and her peoples— socially, politically, morally, and spiritually" (186). This assessment of what comprises "blackness" In a poem Is not particularly true of Lorde; whatever a "literal transfiguration of Africa" might be, Lorde has not yet tapped African mythologies as a source of poetic

Insight. Henderson's categorization places her In a way that her poetry does not; nevertheless, her

Inclusion In both of these Important works highlights a change In the way Lorde will Identify herself In both

From a Land Where Other People Live and her fifth book.

New York Head Shoo and Museum, where she moves from

Indirect political statements of artificial depth to

Ironic critiques placed squarely In a political context that Is black, feminist, or lesbian, though again not often all of these at once.

Lorde has said that "the question of social protest and art Is Inseparable [sic] for me" (Evans

264). "For women," she argues,

poetry Is not a luxury. It Is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward arrival and change, first made Into language, then Into Idea, then Into more tangible action (SO 37). 157

Lorde's white academic readers are clearly moved by the anger that begins to drive this kind of poetry. Though

Helen Vendler finds Lorde "much less gifted in her abstractions than in her storytelling" (8), for her

Lorde's "street photographs are acidic and hard-edged, and sardonic 'cables to rage' are humming with their

own electricity" (8). Hayden Carruth remarks in the

Nation that he doesn't "much care for her writing,

which seems far too close to the commonplace" (712);

"yet," he says, "few poets are better equipped than

Lorde to drive their passion through the gauzy softness

of commonplace diction and prosody." Sandra Gilbert

complains of "fatigued echoes of Ginsberg howling against Moloch" and the occasional poem that is "mere

sloganeering" (297), but applauds "fury (that) vibrates through taut cables from head to heart to page" (297).

Though these critics do not attack Lorde's politics, their assessments imply, correctly I think,

that she valorizes passion and polemic at the expense

of careful deliberation. Certainly they are right

about poems meant to establish the poet's own authority within her community, though they often cite as poetic

failures Lorde's successful efforts to make her voice heard, at least by anthologists and publishers. Even

though she abandons the heavy-handed language of

"Gemini" and "Coal," Lorde's concern for political 158 action outweighs a need to interrogate imagery or meditate at length upon the issues she brings forward.

And, remonstrating with her readers or calling them to arms takes precedence over desire to question the integrity of her own political location, once she is able to establish it. She has said, "first and last I am a poet" /3/ implying perhaps that as she matures, these aesthetic and philosophical concerns will become more obviously her own. Yet I don't think that a

"self-sustaining language" /4/ or a meditative

inwardness will ever be Lorde's most important achievement or her goal. Her diction and rhythms do change as she is better able to identify her audience and establish her own authority. In the commonplace of poetry workshops, she "finds her voice," but it is not the perfected expression of experience so much as it is expression of her determination to provoke change. She becomes a more confident writer, but her attention "to the thing itself" is most often explicitly polemical; the more certain she is of her stance, the more committed she becomes to eliciting action from her readers.

Most often she derives this consensual authority from her position as mother. "To My Daughter the Junkie on a Train" (CP 79-80), for example, articulates the selfless rage and protectiveness that the black mother 159 of Lorde's imagination must project; rather than meditate on what divides her from her community,

Lorde's mother is entirely preoccupied with defending the literal survival of her children, indeed, "[mlinds committed like murder / or suicide / to their own private struggle" are more culpable than are junkies who represent their failures. Mothers are particularly guilty; on the train where a daughter "slumps" down beside the poet,

women avert their eyes as the other mothers who became useless curse their children who became junk.

Here, Lorde's identification with what she feels a black mother should be enables her to articulate with grim poignancy the terrible apathy of her community.

Her "sloganeering" in this context becomes a means of speaking to a group of people who have already heard what she has to say, but have failed to act. Poetry becomes a rhetorical exhortation to reject complicity with a system whose "gifts" are insidiously destructive; "the amer lean cancer," she says elsewhere,

destroys By seductive and reluctant admission For instance Black women no longer give birth through their ears It/o] And therefore must have a Monthly Need for Iron: [t/o] For instance Our Pearly teeth are not racially insured And therefore must be deem e d for Fewer Cavities: [t/o] 160

For instance Even though all astronauts are white Perhaps Black people can develop Some of those human attributes Requiring Dried dog food frozen coffee instant oatmeal Depilatories deodorants detergents And other assorted plastic. /5/

Yet concern for "private struggles" remains a delicate thread in this canon dedicated to defending in

public the life of a community. Though "coming out" is clearly a political gesture, Lorde's sexuality remains a subject for love poems, not poems of direct political statement, and the fact of being a lesbian and the fact

of being a black mother and activist do not coincide in either New York Head Shoo and Museum or Fx.om .a...Land

Where Other People Live. Lorde's two Broadside publications. Her unwillingness to further political divisions may be one reason that poems which delineate her difference from the heterosexual black community are at once so precise and so infrequent. The other, more important reason seems to be that "private struggles" distract her from the single-mindedness with which Lorde feels she must broadcast the larger problems of her community; though personal concerns might seem to be part and parcel of broader questions, the tentative voice which examines the self's position

in intimate relationships is never audible in Lorde's strong assertion of her "children's" needs. "Love 161

Poem" (CP 77), for example, troubled Lorde's Broadside editor, and he was anxious to ascribe the speaker's eroticism to a man. Yet, Lorde herself tacked the poem to a wall in John Jay College— where her students were primarily future police officers— as way of announcing her sexuality. /6/ In Its mood and some of Its metaphors the poem resembles "On a Night of the Full

Moon" from Cables to Rage. Yet the characteristic moon symbolism that drowns Intimate pleasure in the earlier poem is forgone in favor of accurate description of an explicitly lesbian sexual experience, an effort which generates fresh language, most careful at its most erotic :

And I knew when I entered her I was high wind in her forests hollow fingers whispering sound honey flowed from the split cup impaled on a lance of tongues on the tips of her breasts on her navel and my breath howling into her entrance through lungs of pain.

The typically abstract image of the speaker as "high wind in her forests hollow" gives way to sharper language; the mellifluous second and third lines of this section voice pleasure that is as intense and fleeting as the lovemaking she describes. Intimacy allows for a precision that I think is new; briefly, the poet is more interested in figurations of erotic love than in projecting a powerful persona. At the 162

same time, she must communicate the value of her erotic

life to an audience who probably sees lesbian love as

taboo. To do so, she abandons the quiet voice of private love, and the images that conclude the

paragraph dissolve in melodrama.

The differences between a poetry of exhortation

and of self-definition are even more pronounced in

The Black Unicorn. Published by W. W. Norton, the book

addresses its white and black audiences separately,

furiously correcting the powerful, destructive

ignorance of the one and more gently reproving the

narrow, self-serving vision of the other. Here

Dahomean mythology forms the basis of Lorde's revision

of African-American identity and provides a symbolic

structure adequate to the large meanings she had tried

to approach in earlier work. /?/ Her incarnation of

Mawulisa, the androgenous Dahomean goddess of creation,

arises from her desire for a loving mother who affirms

her "blackness" instead of trying to protect her from

the danger of a hostile culture by "bleaching" her to

conform to its expectations. Assuming this position

herself, Lorde is once again the black mother, not

ironically underlining the failures of her community,

but lashing out against the larger social structure

responsible for the murder of black children. /8/ As mother, Lorde's position is unequivocal. But as the 163 daughter who desires this affirmation for herself— whose decided ”1 am" repeatedly splits into tropes of loss, desire, and solitude— Lorde finds a more suitable progenitor in a male god, Elegba.

Figuring in all the various pantheons inhabited by the numerous Dahomean divinities, he knows all languages and translates human discourse into the language of the gods. Two of his attributes become important in Lorde's project of self-definition.

First, Elegba's mastery of language enables him to affect human fate in a way that individual actions cannot; since destiny is decided by the gods, only his intervention can alter the execution of their will

(Herskovits, II; 229). Second, Elegba is also a trickster who slips into varied identities and whose worshippers are often women who dance his part in ritual ceremonies with huge phalluses tied around their waists. /9/ Identification with him allows Lorde herself to act as trickster, disrupting gender positions and the "destiny" which they prescribe. "I am treacherous with old magic," she warns in "A Woman

Speaks"; "I am / woman / and not white."

In "From the House of Yemanja" /lO/ Lorde travels the edges of the positions underlined by "woman" and

"not white." Here, "Yemanja" represents all that resists definition within historical representations of 164 black women; though her mythical foundation gives her credibility— she really is reciting stories of origin— Lorde is less a spokesperson or prophet for a clearly defined community than she is a trickster, conjuring names for what it can't yet express. Yemanja

is the name Lorde uses to describe Mawulisa's female aspect; here, the goddess is not an adrogyne, but a new name for a newly whole "mother." The old appellation denoted a divided woman with two visages and two personas, one white and one black:

My mother had two faces and a broken pot where she hid out a perfect daughter who was not me.

The impossible perfection this mother hopes for is that defined by whites. Whiteness, then, comes to suggest the absence of her love and a hunger born of the ancient memory of a nourishing darkness:

I bear two women upon my back one dark and rich and hidden in the ivory hungers of the other mother pale as a witch.

The "mother" of line four above is both "other" and object of the poet's desiring address. And, since her mother's alien "white" demands indelibly overwrite black "nature," the poet calls upon African mythology to give them both new birth. Even so, the mother that emerges from myth is clearly shaped by her daugher's 165 needs; though ancient, she assumes a form given her by the daughter's desire:

Mother I need mother I need mother I need your blackness now as the august earth needs rain.

The repetition of these lines alters the direction of the poem from one of inward meditation to outward plea.

The shaping mind of the poet attempts to create a common ground between itself and a more permanent mythic consciousness by directing all attention to a shared object. Naming "blackness" as the object of desire, inscribing loss of that blackness in a familiar metaphor— the dried "august earth"— she conjures up

Mawu/Yemanja in the name of both social and personal need.

Yet, this enveloping, rainy motherlove does not survive the speaker's internal divisions. In "A Woman

Speaks" (BU 4-5), "I am" is given its own line before

its splits into "woman / and not white." Here, the poet claims a self-definition underlined by the absence

of discrete meaning that has driven her to rename her mother :

I am sun and moon and forever hungry the sharpened edge where day and night shall meet and not be one. 166

Her sensibility lit by desire, the poet neither participates in the social structure which gave birth to her needs nor sees her way entirely beyond it.

Yemanja is not simply a projectile she can hurl at the whites. Rather, the goddess represents the desire for self-representation that precipitates change in the language and in the social structure which language upholds. I think that Lorde's sense of her audience— their unfamiliarity with her subject matter or her position as outsider— presses her to dramatize the conflict between mother and daughter in a way that clarifies her language and substantiates her tone.

Nevertheless, in this poem she remains a kind of trickster, refusing to let us to pin her down in a position defined by gender or race, capable of altering the language so that it no longer sustains the destiny prescribed by these inexorable roles.

Most of the other poems in The Black Unicorn don't undertake the complex reimaglning— the importing of myth into the poet's psyche— that Lorde plays out in

"In the House of Yemanja." Though the poem does provide a context for other work, she is not content to reside in the blank spaces of our language, opened up by desire, but uses mythic figures as a source of rhetorical and historical authority. Again, the imperative for social change is never absent from these 167 poems; they ask us to consider how replenished black identity can be a source of communual energy. But, as in New York Head Shop, the poems become more exhortatory than meditative, and though they reiterate political themes with rhetorical drive, they do not forge many ideas which answer the needs of a speaker dwelling in that place where varied social differences coincide.

In "125th Street and Abomey" (BU 12-13), Lorde surrenders to Seboulisa— another name for Mawulisa--"my well-guarded past / the energy-eating secrets" which have composed the most identifiable legacy of her mother. "Give me the woman strength / of tongue in this cold season," she pleads and gains internal coherence simply by calling up forbears. True, she is a "severed daughter," but the split is healed by goddess and progeny's "laughing our name into echo / all the world shall remember."

In identifying with Seboulisa, she assumes once again the position of black mother, an icon in the poetry of strength and incontrovertible moral authority. But the irony of New York Head Shoo, directed toward herself as well as her faltering community, becomes a plainspoken rage for children lost to violence, meant as warning to the white community and as call to arms for blacks. The urge to question 168 her imagery is usually abandoned in favor of forceful political statement. Rather than a daughter-poet living on the "sharpened edge" of the different identities her community offers, Lorde becomes the representative mother of all injured children. This giving up of ambiguity and the assumption of mythic authority quells the ambition of the poetry: it subordinates the reimagining of myth— and the fresh

imagery and innovative language that reimagining requires— to political statements that seem simplistic and dogmatically stated. Yet, Lorde’s blunt style and unremitting vehemence have a moral force that seems to be made necessary by the exigencies of her situation.

For her, widespread violence doesn't allow for lingering questions about one's own identity, at least for the present. She wishes us to see this violence clearly, to know its origin, and to act--just as she feels that she must act. /II/

Lorde is at her best when these poems dramatize the reason that political acts and positions become necessary. In "Chain" (22-24), for example, the poet-mother compels our acquiescence to the grim truth of her observations, while the voices of children still question their place in a society whose behavior contradicts all of its stated values. "Look at the skeleton children / advancing against us," the poet 169 demands as she recounts the story of two girls returned to their father after bearing his children in foster homes. The mother knows her task; the need for her to protect her offspring and confront the patriarchy that produces such fathers is made obvious and compelling by the situation she faces The girls, like the speaker of

"In the House of Yemanja," are more confused about their own identities:

Am I his daughter or girlfriend am I your child or your rival you wish to be gone from his bed?

The girls' powerlessness permits dislocation— as does

Lorde's own lack of power when she is trying to figure herself someplace in between the contradictory images of self presented by her mother. By purposefully resuming that fragmented identity, she may allow for interesting questions about the impossibility of placing woman in language, but she does not provide much of moral platform. The different perspective of

"Chain"— when Lorde is a mother brooding upon the disastrous sexuality forced on her daughters--displaces questions about self in order that she may garner the strength to protect these children. The daughters' questions at the end of the poem force the mother to inhabit a position solid enough to give them the grounding that incest has denied:

Here is your granddaughter mother 170

give us your blessing before I sleep what other secrets do you have to tell me how do I learn to love her as you have loved me?

"For those of us who cannot indulge/the passing dreams of choice," Lorde says in "A Litany for

Survival" (BU 31-32), "it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive." Poetry must carry out that imperative, she repeats in "Power," must be speech that can mean something to a community rather than "the sterile word play" that she ascribes to white fathers. "Power" (BU 108-109) elaborates "the difference between poetry and rhetoric"— the latter being another term for her white predecessors'

"imagination without insight"— and underlines what

Lorde thinks to be the social necessity for the kind of poetry she writes. /12/ It also demonstrates the strengths and limitations of this poetry. Her political position is clear and forceful, as is the ethical argument she hopes to make. The poem is not particularly well-rendered imaginatively, especially in places where its moral force folds into self-righteous anger. Moreover, in expressing her own outrage, Lorde loses track of her human subject, and the compelling drama of "Chain" disappears in a general statement about the plight of black children. Yet, in all its unevenness, the poem is a vigorous emotional statement: 171

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children;

I have never been entirely sure of what she means here, but I don't think that killing is at all metaphorical.

Lorde implies that "idle" ratiocination or "rhetoric" does indeed leave children open to the destruction awaiting the daughters in "Chain." I think that she takes the idea of "killing yourself" just as seriously; the hatred that Lorde feels as an adult witness is either manifested in useful poetic rage or, like a dream deferred, it explodes.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and my stomach churns at the imagined taste while my mouth splits into dry lips without loyalty or reason thirsting for the wetness of his blood as it sinks into the whiteness of the desert where I am lost without imagery or magic trying to make power out of hatred and destruction trying to heal my dying son with kisses only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

It is worth quoting this long section to trace Lorde's gradual centering of her own emotion and the loss of energy she experiences as she moves inward. The violence of the dream literally dries up as the poet feels herself without recourse to anything that might renew the boy's life. At the same time, the extended 172

predicate of this long sentence loses the vigor of the

first line, and it grows beyond the subject's control.

Lorde doesn't achieve the incantatory effect she aims

for; lines ten, eleven, and twelve above with their

opening adverb and prepositions seem more monotonous

than hallucinatory. But the passage indicates her lack

of interest in introspection; the quick rebuttal of the

following section provides such a shocking contrast in

tone that the dream is only memorable in its slowness:

The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood It/o] and a voice said "Die you little motherfucker" and there are tapes to prove that. At his trial this policeman said in his own defense "I didn't notice the size or nothing else only the color." and there are tapes to prove that, too.

The tragedy of the boy's death is nearly lost in the poet's fury and her own hatred of the policeman. Like the policeman in Rich's "Rape," this cop is a straw man— his personality encapsulated in the mean-spirited synecdoche, "cop shoes"— and he is too easily shot down for Lorde to make much of a point; the taped "proof" of his incriminating bigotry asserts a truth that she--rather belligerently— assumes her white readers won't believe and that the poetry refuses to establish.

Yet, I believe in her anger, what she calls "the destruction within me." For her, the court's failure to convict the policeman despite the evidence against 173

him reflects a more general shrugging off of crimes

against black children. The last section of the ppem,

then, contains both a warning and a lesson in the

politics of interpretation;

unless I learn to use the difference between poetry and rhetoric my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire and one day I will take my teenaged plug and connect it to the nearest socket raping an 85-year-old white woman who is somebody's mother and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed [t/o] a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time "Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are." [t/o]

Part of the anger in this poem is directed at

Lorde's white readers. The "greek chorus" of

traditional art belongs to that audience, as does the

shocked response to a white woman's murder: whites are

incapable, she seems to be saying, of correctly reading

a black woman's poetry or black man's behavior. Even

so, the rape represents "power" turned "corrupt." The

self-righteous rage of the lines castigating the

policeman becomes more even-handed, here, and I sense a

more complex authority willing to admit multiple sources of social problems. Her position as black

mother connects her with both victims; at the very

bottom of political hierarchies, she Justifies the

centering of her own consciousness in the midst of all 174 polemics with an insistence that her oppression is linked to victimization everywhere.

This foregrounding of self works in

"Power”— sometimes: even though we lose the story of

Clifford, the boy to whom Lorde dedicates the poem,

/13/ she redirects the focus on her own anger to the

social consequences of rage that is ignored by a ruling class. Yet, this displacement of her ostensible

subject with a record of her own feeling is frequent and often troubling. On the one hand, the fact of her writing, the fact that she knows and speaks to a group of readers, does separate her from those whose victimization will never be known except through her viewing. Thus we expect that she at least dramatize her relationship to them. On the other hand, the poet's love for individual black children is given less attention than her rage for all, because it is rage, she thinks, that the black community will share and can

learn to use and that white people might come to fear.

I lie knowing it is past time for sacrifice I burn like the hungry tongue of an ochre fire like a benediction of fury

I yield one drop of blood which I know instantly is lost. 175

These lines from "A Woman/Dlrge for Wasted Children"

(BU 66-67) certainly reiterate the pain and anger of the poet. But her feeling, her giving up blood seems overemphasized, and her sense of loss does not adequately represent the meaning of the children's deaths for all the community;

I am broken into clefts of screaming that sound like the drilling flickers in treacherous morning air on murderous sidewalks I am bent forever wiping up blood that should be you.

Though the final sentence of the work redirects attention back to Clifford— again the ostenible subject of her poem--he has never been anything but an abstraction. In fact, the poet is much more intent on voicing her own frustration at powerlessness, both hers and the boy's. It doesn't really matter who the victim was, since examples of victimization are to be found everywhere; better that he remain an anonymous symbol of what we should understand to be ubiquitous violence and that her emotion represent a community's persistent outrage. Whether or not she has the right to speak for those left voiceless by the power structure killing them off, whether she need demonstrate her connection to the dead are questions that never seem as important as the facts and fury that her poetry recounts. The 176 work does not make a case against injustice so much as

it relies on our recognition of righteous anger. And,

though such dependence limits the statements Lorde is able to make, her anger is indeed right and requires

our attention, so passionately is it expressed.

Lorde is quite conscious of assuming a public

persona split from her private self, conscious as well

that this persona relies on its own overwhelming

rectitude for authority. "No I don't think you were chicken not to speak," she says in "Letter to Jan"

(88-89) .

You did not come to me speaking because you feared me as I might have been god mother grown affluent with payment of old debts or because you imagined me as quick chic cutting your praise song shared to ribbons thankless and separate as stormy gulfs where lightning raged to pierce your d i t with proud black anger or to reject you back into your doubt smothering you into acceptance with my own black song.

But Jan's silence represents the only response possible

from sympathetic white feminists, fearful because the poet's moral authority will not bear argument and because she disdains white assent. Lorde herself wishes to dispel this imperious aura; "all the time," she says reprovingly, "I would have loved you." But most of the time, Lorde's "proud black anger" is Indeed 177 the emotion projected most strongly in the poetry, since love does not touch the larger powers that destroy the lives for which she mourns. The woman

"full of loving" at the end of "Letter to Jan" is

"bent / forever / wiping up blood" in "A Woman/Dirge for Wasted Children." Love remains private, separate from expressions of rage or assertions of power, because it doesn't change the reality of violence and poverty.

"Letter to Jan" suggests the probable outcome of

Lorde's poetry for many of her readers, at least those for whom the moral case against injustice has already been won: we are silenced by a poet who is right to be furious. Most recently, in Our Dead Behind Us— again published by Norton— she uses African myth, not just as a source of authority for herself, but as a means of claiming pan-African unity among all black people.

Anxious to break through the debilitating frustration of watching children die, she also celebrates common armed struggle by placing it in a mythological context.

Though the poems of previous books rely too heavily on our assent to the poet's right to represent voiceless victims, her anger is believable and justified by what we already know to be the facts of poverty and racism.

Our Dead Behind Us, however, illuminates the consequences of using myth as a substitute for analysis 178 of one's own political position and of relegating to private life concern about what the self becomes In relationship to others. Though Lorde can count on us to value the lives of children, she needs to make an argument for violent upheaval and to elucidate Its real effects on the lives of Individuals. In Its failure to do either, the poetry loses Its capacity to compel assent, and at least for me, undermines Its purpose by alienating sympathetic readers.

In a journal entry written at about the same time that she Is composing the poems of Our Dead, Lorde tries to think through the political Implications of the word "black" as an emblem of connection among all oppressed people, a certain way of establishing unity, though even the phrase "women of color" hides enormous cultural differences:

I am thinking about Issues of color as color. Black as a chromatic fact, gradations and all. There is the reality of defining Black as a geographical fact of culture and heritage emanating from the continent of Africa. . . . Then there Is a quite different reality of defining Black as a political position, acknowledging that color Is the bottom line the world over, no matter how many other Issues exist alongside It. Within this definition. Black becomes a codeword, a rallying identity for all oppressed people of Color (Burst of Light 66-67).

The poetry sometimes distinguishes between

Africans and African-Americans better than the prose. 179 but Lorde's determination to establish this "rallying

Identity" overpowers her recognition of differences.

"Someday you will come to my country / and we will fight side by side?" asks the poet's South African lover In "Sisters In Arms" /lA/, directing the emphasis on my to a partner who may never share her specific battles. "I could not return with you to bury the body," the poet replies,

reconstruct your nightly cardboards against the seeping Transvaal cold I could not plant the other llmplt mine against a wall at the railroad station nor carry either of your souls back from the river In a calabash on my head.

Lorde buys the lover a ticket to Durban on her American

Express; she reads about South Africa In the New York

Times. though she knows its half-page story conveys only a partial reality: she Is black and American, though her dual Identity separates her from both the apathy of whites and the more fully-engrossing commitment of black South Africans to their own liberation. Even love-making underlines difference:

wherever I touch you I lick cold from my fingers taste rage like salt from the lips of a woman who has killed too often to forget and carries death In her eyes.

Yet, I think the Imperative to propose rhetorically effective modes of political action tends to suppress distinctions that the poetry begins to 180 elucidate. "Sisters in Arms," of course, means doubly: the women are lovers and fighters at the same time.

Though the title washes over distinctions made by the poem, it does intimate the idealization of violent struggle repeated throughout this book. After the lovemaking— or love affair— is over, the "silence

[exploding] like a pregnant belly / into my face / a vomit of nerves" conveys strongly the lover's literal

or emotional absence; and, despite the grotesque associations created by the simile, the lines also suggest the poet's guilty feeling of separation and alienation from her lover's revolution. However, in the sequence that follows, violence is planned and unavoidable, and the lover who, hauntingly, "carries death in her eyes" assumes the character of a mythical heroine :

Mmanthatisi turns away from the cloth her daughters-in-law are dyeing the baby drools milk from her breast she hands him half-asleep to his sister dresses again for war knowing the men will follow. In the intricate Maseru twilights quick sad vital she maps the next day's battle.

The South African woman is reduced in her transformation. Whatever it means to kill "too often to forget" is lost in Lorde's imperative to justify violence by associating it with an archetypal mother's protection of her young; and whatever sisterhood could 181 mean across continents and struggles is muddied in the story of essential female nurturance and courage. This contradiction between knowlege of difference and an equally strong assertion of mythical solidarity disrupts many of the poems in the book. Though she doesn't resolve these contradictions, Lorde is much more conscious of "location" in this poem than in the works of Black Unicorn which make her a representative, rebellious victim; indeed, it is this very consciousness that makes the washing over of difference so disturbing. In her long poem "Outlines" (OD 8-13),

Lorde is particularly open to the dictum of her prose to see difference as "a fund of necessary polarities"

(SO 111). Like that between African-American and black

South African, the relationship between the black and white lovers of "Outlines" is symbolic of any sisterhood extending across barriers of difference.

In fact, the private dramas of both "Sisters in Arms" and "Outlines" identify the real difficulty of loving despite similar allegiances.

Because I value the way this drama of intimacy refreshes feminist politics, I think Lorde's insistence on being a representative figure gets in the way of poetry that questions— albeit indirectly— her public gestures, especially when her attachment to violent 182

Imagery seems to exaggerate whatever genuine pain or isolation these lovers might feel;

you entered my vision with the force of hurled rock defended by distance and a warning smile fossil tears pitched over the heart's wall.

Here, the melodrama of "hurled rock" and the peculiarity of "fossil tears" create only a caricature of falling in love. The image of their battles seems equally ill-conceived—

dreams where you walk the mountains still as a water spirit your arms lined with scalpels and I hide the strength of my hungers like a throwing knife in my hair— as do lines in which isolation as lesbians entails that they are "embattled by choice / carving an agenda with tempered lightning."

Lorde is much better when the security of intimacy allows her to examine difference and refigure an identity that changes shape in relationship to other women. She spends several lines relating that the lovers have risen "to dogshit dumped on our front porch" and informing pacifist feminists that she has registered for a shotgun. She is speaking from a podium, but suddenly she shifts to an image of her lover in a more familiar space, in a gesture that seems private and carefully spoken:

In the next room a canvas chair 183

whispers beneath your weight a breath o£ you between laundered towels the flinty places that do not give.

Lorde's use of a heavy-handed symbolism to convey the

problems of living in an interracial, lesbian

relationship suggests a need to underline the public

implications of her private life. Yet, in their

everyday occurence, the women's differences are

commonplace, predictable, and painful:

One straight hair on the washbasin's rim difference intimate as a borrowed scarf the children arrogant as mirrors our pillow's mingled scent this grain of our particular days keeps a fine sharp edge to which I cling like a banner.

The poem's strength lies in this examination of

intimate life; the women's "shared edge" is sharpened

in their struggle to love despite racial barriers.

Though the difficulty of the lovers' struggle is

implicit in these lines, at the end of the poem we are

again thrown up against the force of the poet's anger,

and her writing reads like a speech:

we have chosen each other and the edge of each other's battles the war is the same if we lose someday women's blood will congeal upon a dead planet if we win there is no telling.

Lorde's military metaphor asks the reader to

distinguish between an us, whose differences are 184 acceptable, and a them, whose entirely different political motives are not. All the violent imagery is directed toward this monolithic power and its insidious force within the feminist community, and its clear and present evil justifies whatever action this community deems necessary; they are at war, the costs of which

Lorde never has to calculate since the evil of the enemy is so clearly in view.

Lorde documents this danger in other poems; the murdering of black children that she mourns in The

Black Unicorn is more widespread, and the murderers represent the U.S. and South African governments, rather than the amorphous white population of "Power.”

Images of violence are graphic and reported without use of metaphor; Lorde wishes us to know reality, everything the newspapers don't publish. The New

York Times story of "Sisters in Arms” is

Not of Black children massacred at Sebonkeng six-year-olds imprisoned for threatening the state not of Thabo Sibeko, first grader, in his own blood [t/o] on his grandmother's parlor floor Joyce, nine, trying to crawl to him shitting through her navel not of a three-week-old infant, nameless lost under the burned beds of Tembisa.

In "Equal Opportunity" and "Soho Cinema" Lorde berates middle-class American women— the "successful” ones who buy her books and come to readings to perform their political duties— for their destructive, wilful 185

Ignorance and passivity. "When the six o'clock news is over / does the child pat her mother's wet cheeks," she asks sardonically in the latter poem:

does she cradle her daughter against her and weep for what she has seen beside the bed under which they are lying deathstink in the mattress her son bayonetted to the door in Santiago de Chile [t/o] a corolla of tsetse flies crusting her daughter's nose. /IS/ It/o]

That feminism can no longer be a matter simply of personal change, that affluence is won at the cost of human life: these are the truths that Lorde corroborates with evidence as damning to her readers, white and black, as the tapes in "Power." Lorde's condemnation of ignorant complicity in others' exploitation is powerful. Here, her explosive authority derives, not from a position as mythic mother or repesentative victim, but from her elaboration in terrifying detail of the price we pay for bits of power: though the "home girl" of "Equal Opportunity"

(CD 16-18) looks terrific in her uniform as "american deputy assitant secretary of defense," she— like any of us living content with our own "liberation"-- "swims" toward the safety of status "through a lake of her own blood" :

The moss-green military tailoring sets off her color beautifully she says "when I stand up to speak in uniform you can believe everyone takes notice!" 186

Superimposed skull-like across her trim square shoulders [t/o] dioxin-smear the stench of napalm upon growing cabbage the chug and thud of Corsairs in the foreground advance like a blush across her cheeks up the unpaved road outside Grenville, Grenada.

As compelling as I find her arguments against liberal feminism, as much as I am persuaded by her indictment of our complicity with destructive power, I think that her use of war as a metaphor for feminist struggle for social change damages the poetry and simplifies her politics: part of the "american deputy assistant secretary of defense's" problem is that she is on the wrong side, and other, equally destructive violent measures are celebrated. Even though Lorde recognizes the difficulty of achieving a shared vision, violence is still justified by an artificial division between them and us., so that destruction wrought in the name of justice disappears into mythic heroism instead of making itself felt in our lives. Such divisions allow us rightly to scrutinize complicity with a power that purchases allegiance with nice uniforms and a smidgeon of authority, but they don't help us know what to do about it; altering our lives and the social structure within which we live is too much like getting rid of sin and burning Satan's representatives instead of engaging in the painstaking and painful work of rethinking social values and reorganizing institutions. 187

Though I am enchanted by the Incantatory power of

"Call," the final poem of Our Dead Behind Us. I find it to be one of the most troubling poems Lorde has written

(OD 73-75). "Aidwo Hwedo is coming," she prophesies throughout, trumpeting the appearance of the "Rainbow

Serpent" of Dahomean myth. Though the serpent

functions in different ways, here it is an all-mother of life and death; according to Lorde's note, it represents "all ancient divinities who must be worshipped but whose names and faces have been lost in time" (OD 75n). The apocalypse the poet foresees with the coming of the serpent suggests all the problems that lie in her other romanticizations of violence: the simplifying of political positions and arguments; the glorification of single-minded allegiance to a cause; the celebration of destruction. Now,

On worn kitchen stools and tables we are piecing our weapons together

even the young guerilla has chosen yells as she fires into the thicket Aido Hwedo is coming.

The construction of weapons is associated with women's traditional nurturing activities; the women are as pure in their motives as they would be if sewing or preparing food, we must think, since they are mothers or sisters; the guerilla, too, must be on the right side since she is young and female. 188

Whatever is right derives simply and exclusively from a blossoming of the essential, nourishing, loving, and protective nature of black women in touch with the goddess :

We are learning by heart what has never been taught you are my given fire-tongued Oya Seboulisa Mawu Afrekete.

Lorde's recitation of the names of the mother is hallucinatory, and her poem is meant to draw women together in a frenzy of desire for liberation. After documenting throughout the book the destructive work of white power, she puts us in touch with the "good," represented unequivocally by the heroines of the past— descendants of Mawu:

we are shouting

Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer Assata Shakur and Yaa Asantewa my mother and Winnie Mandela are singing in my throat.

But liberation is only defined as the apocalyptic abolition of an old order. Lorde uses the mystic equation of birth and death to embrace martyrdom: "my whole life has been an altar worth / its ending," she proclaims and welcomes a death that brings with it all that she has worked for.

Aido Hwedo is coming Aido Hwedo is coming Aido Hwedo is coming: 189 the chant that ends the book drops the problems It has

Introduced into a firepit of indiscriminating fervor that is not particularly good for poetry or feminism.

Lorde's language is seductive enough to make her poem seem final, a rousing cry to arms— in both senses suggested by the phrase. But her elaboration of the difficulties of love, the necessity for political action— those elements which make her poetry necessary and valuable— evaporate in the heat of this myth, which celebrates destruction and confuses it with life.

"It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular difference" (Zami 226),

Lorde has written. In this assessment of her life in the Greenwich Village lesbian community of the 1950's, she locates herself in an unexplored territory that demands the revision of traditional gender roles. Yet, while private relationships provide the security of loving intimacy and allow this poet to rewrite constructions of herself, her public gestures are unrevisable. The rage exuded by this persona carries the weight of a whole community, and she makes herself its representative by assuming an incontestable mythic authority. In the poetry of The Black Unicorn though her language is as circumscribed as her unimpeachable persona, Lorde still uses poetry as a means of 190 underlining shared values and drawing readers Into her own fury. Though she takes for granted her connection with the dead children whom she mourns, it remains her responsibility to play out her relationshipship with us, to win her readers because we, too, must mourn the deaths of our young. Her courage and capacity to tell us "how it feels" is the great strength of Lorde's poetry; even at her most self-righteous, these "cables to rage" are still "humming with their own electricity," as Vendler says (8),— still true to the equal measures of wrath and tenderness that the poet experiences. Her copious documentation of violence in both The Black Unicorn and Our Dead Behind Us permits us to "feel" the horror of enormous power exercised without conscience or consciousness of the fury that gathers in its wake. The poet is angry, and she attempts to represent voiceless anger that grows more deadly as it is increasingly, mockingly provoked.

The later poems, however, are themselves a form of ammunition. And, when their purpose derives from the failure of words and the necessity of arms, they lose the capacity to change the language and its speakers.

In the past, Lorde has described herself first and foremost as a poet. Now she claims she is a warrior.

And, in engaging in war, she has stripped from the work all questions about her cause and herself and has 191

filled with calls to violence all the blank spaces in our naming that in The Black Unicorn had induced a poetry razor-sharp in its imagery, acid and direct in its tone. If Lorde has forced her readers to question

their own participation in a power structure that

grants small favors while it lives off destruction

carefully hidden from view, she herself tends to dwell

in a political position which resembles those positions

she condemns: she doesn't question the consequences of violence for the woman who "carries each death in her

eyes" as either victim or perpetrator.

. . . We shrink from touching our power, we shrink away, we starve ourselves and each other, we're scared shitless of what it could be to take and use our love, hose it on a city, on a world, to wield and guide its spray, destroying poisons, parasites, rats, viruses— like the terrible mothers we long and dread to

be. 716/ [t/o]

These lines from Adrienne Rich's "Hunger," addressed to

Audre Lorde, underline the enormous force that the

latter's poetry exerts in bringing to the consciousness of a society the experience and emotion of those people

its excludes, ignores, and, often, destroys. The poem, like many of Lorde's, attempts to rethink women's positions in this order so that "mothering" is a way of exercising power. Yet, the idea of "hosing" love on a city doesn't seem like much of a transformation to me. 192

In fact, it resembles the wielding of power we associate with patriarchy: "natural," obviously just, peremptory, and— only if necessary— violent. 193

Notes

/I/ Sister Outsider 111. I will refer to this collection of speeches and essays as SO In the text, henceforth.

/2/ Chosen Poems— Old and New, by Audre Lorde, p. 7. Henceforth I will refer to this volume as CP.

/3/ Burst of Light 62. This collection of Lorde's prose contains one Interview, three lectures, and a lengthy excerpt from Lorde's journal as she underwent treatment for cancer In Switzerland and the United States.

/4/ Vendler remarks In this review of Lorde and several other poets that none have attained the "single Indlspenslble quality needed for poetry— a self-sustaining language, where meaning scarcely matters till the second time round" (14).

/5/ "The American Cancer Society, Or There Is More Than One Way to Skin a Coon," (CP 68-69).

/6/ In the Interview with Lorde In which she recollects this Incident, Adrienne Rich remarks that hearing the poem was "Incredible. Like defiance. It was glorious." "That's how I was feeling," Lorde responds, back against the wall, because as bad as It Is now, the Idea of open lesbianism In the Black community was— I mean, we've moved miles In a very short time— totally horrible. My publisher called and literally said he didn't understand the words of "Love Poem." He said, "Now what Is this all about? Are you supposed to be a man?" (SO 98-99).

/!/ In her discussion of lesbian mythology as the source of values In poetry by Rich, Lorde, Judy Grahn, and Olga Broumas, Mary Carruthers argues that "lesbian encapsulates a myth of women together and separate from men. . ." (294-95). Yet, I think that Lorde's African mythology maintains Important differences among lesbians and never allows the poet to separate herself from the political struggles of black men. Though she addresses an audience of women In Our Dead Behind Us. the earlier Black Unicorn Is directed to men and women, black and white— even If the poet speaks In a different voice to each group of readers. 194

/8/ For a discussion of Lorde's novel Zaitii as "a book about Lorde's reconciliation with her mother" (15), see Barbara Christian's article "No More Severed Lives— The Theme of Lesbianism in Lorde, Naylor, Shange, Walker." Christian also notes that, among the four writers, Lorde is the only one to discuss "an interlocking of oppressive systems" (15).

/9/ Melville Herskovits discusses this ceremony of initiation to the cult of Elegba in Dahomey; An Ancient West African Kingdom 124-27. Lorde includes this work in the bibliography appended to The Black Unicorn.

/lO/ The Black Unicorn 6-7. Henceforth I will refer to this volume as BU.

/II/ Erlene Stetson, who also includes Lorde's "Natural" in her anthology of black women's poetry, argues that the demand for action is a consistent theme in all these women's work: This modern poetry as a whole can be called a blues song: though deeply personal, it is not merely concerned with present conditions nor does it allow its audience to receive it passively and then rest content. It challenges the poet and her audience. It is an active dialogue, and sometimes even an argument, among the poets and between the poets and their readers, about what action modern problems require (54).

/12/ Lorde has said in her essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" that poetry must be the "revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean— in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight" (SO 37).

/13/ "I was driving in the car and heard the news on the radio that the cop had been acquitted," Lorde says of the case upon which the poem is based: I was really sickened with fury, and I decided to pull over and just jot some things down in my notebook to enable me to cross town without an accident because I felt so sick and enraged. And I wrote those lines down— I was just writing, and that poem came out without craft (SO 107). 195

/14/ Our Dead Behind Us 3-5. Henceforth, I will refer to this volume as CD.

/15/ CD 19-20.

/16/ The Dream of A Common Language, by Adrienne Rich, pp. 12-14. 196

Works Cited

I. Primary Works

Lorde, Audre. Chosen Poems. Old and New. New York: Norton, 1982.

. The Black Unicorn. New York: Norton, 1978.

. Cables to Raae. London: P. Bremen, 1973.

Coal. New York: Norton, 1976. Coal is the Norton edition of poems previously included in both Cables to Rage and The First Cities.

. The First Cities. New York: Poets Press, [19681 .

. From a_Land Where Other People Live. Detroit, MI: Broadside, 1973.

. New York Head Shoo and Museum. Detroit, MI: Broadside, 1974.

. Our Dead Behind Us. New York: Norton, 1986.

II. Secondary Works

Cade, Toni. The Black Woman. New York: New American Library, 1970.

Carruth, Hayden. "A Year's Poetry." Rev. of The Black Unicorn, by Audre Lorde (and other books). The Nation 23 December 1978: 712-14.

Carruthers, Mary. "The Re-Vision of the Muse: Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, Olga Broumas." The Hudson Review 36.2 (Summer 1983); 293-322.

Christian, Barbara. "No More Severed Lives: The Theme of Lesbianism in Lorde, Naylor, Shange, Walker." Feminist Issues 5 (Spring 1985); 3-20.

Evans, Mari. Black Women Writers (1959-1980). Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984.

Gilbert, Sandra. "On the Edge of the Estate." Rev. of GhÊâE. by Ruth Stone and New York Head Shoo and Museum by Audre Lorde. Poetry 129 (February 1977); 296-301. 197

Hammond, Karla. "Audre Lorde: Interview." Denver Quarterly 16.2 (Spring 1981): 10-27.

Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry; Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

Herskovits, Melville J. Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom. 2 vols. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1967. Vol. 2.

Hull, Gloria T. and Barbara Smith. "The Politics of Black Women's Studies." All the Women Are White. All the Men Are Black, Jil -ÜS. Are Brave. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist P, 1982. xvii-xxxii.

Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light. Ithaca, NY: Fireband Books, 1988.

. The Cancer Journals. Argyle, NY: Spinsters Ink, 1980.

"My Words Will Be There." Evans, Black Women Writers. 261-68.

. Sister Outsider:__E s.g.ayg— ?.P-£g.c.lia.g.. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1984.

. Zami; A New Spelling of Mv Name. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1982.

Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language. Poems 1974-1977. W. W. Norton, 1978.

Stetson, Erlene. Black Sister: Poetry bv Black American Women. 1764-1980. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1981.

Vendler, Helen. "False Poets and Real Poets." Rev. of New York Head Shoo and Museum by Audre Lorde (and other books). New York Times Book Review 7 September 1975: 6-18. CHAPTER IV

Olga Broumas' Feminist Inheritance

What does one say to a child?

What does one say to the little fingers, sticky with libido, reaching compulsively out of the dark enclosure to face the light?

All noble resins: frankincense, amber, tears of a mother grieving a mortal child.

Anne. Sylvia. Virginia. Adrienne the last, magnificent last. /!/

In what way is Rich "last" in "Demeter," this tribute to Olga Broumas' literary mothers? She is the only one of these writers still alive, the only one not to take her own life, but that she has lasted in no way implies that the literary line is dying out. Perhaps she is last because Broumas would be first, a

Persephone newly arrived in the homeland she has adopted (Broumas is originally Greek), speaking a language she has chosen, seeking mothers whose legacy will best suit her purposes. /2/ For Broumas, the

198 199

"sticky fingers of the libido" situate her in relationship to forbears, lovers, and readers; "I read

Adrienne Rich," she has remarked, "because I could not live without her" (Hammond 38). Like Sexton and Lorde as well as Rich, Broumas writes from a "drive to connect," but hers are self-conscious, self-motivated constructions, fabricated connections that reveal this writer's desire for pleasure in love and language rather than for a shared female nature to which poetry gives rebirth. Her inheritance is not bequeathed but chosen, and rather than assume her "mothers'" struggles or struggle against them, Broumas accepts lyric challenges that their commitments preclude. Feminism, she has said, "has given me a context. I no longer have to explain, so I can sing" (Hammond 39).

For women writers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue, the female precursor can be thought of as a muse inhabiting "an eternally inspiring moment of being"

(217); they find in daughter-writers both the desire to renounce a forbear's pain and the recognition that such refusal might leave them outside the sexual battleground where women writers' wars are won. /3/

Thus does Broumas "adopt" Rich as mother, only vicariously participating in the older woman's arguments and establishing herself as first poet at the same time that she elects Rich the "magnificent last." 200

At the dinner following Broumas' Yale Younger Poet

Award ceremony, Stanley Kunitz said that he "could not relate to the poems of Anne Sexton . . . because 'Anne

Sexton screamed'" (Duncan 326). Broumas does not engage in such "shrill" harangue, does not, as Kunitz says, write "idle feminist palaver" (BO x), not because

her mothers have shrieked their way through their enemies' defenses, but because she seeks a different way to be first.

Broumas' remarks on Rich's achievements in a review of The Dream of a Common Language are as much a prospectus of her own project as a summation of her predecessor's. Discussing the failure of the older poet's voice in impersonal, polemical poems, Broumas

insists that it

may seem paradoxical that the way back toward a common language begins with a fantasy, a speech to one's self; and yet, commonality is an ethics, and as such concerned with value . . . which though it does not exist until it is manifest and tested in the world, must be envisioned and revisioned in the mind, the heart, the most private quarters" (285).

Fantasy, dreaming, myth: Rich's poetry derives from this realm but cannot rest there, is immediately tested in a world which the poet feels called upon to change. For her and for Audre Lorde, poetry is not a luxury, and the need for immediate response to a terrible situation often overrides the desire to pick 201 apart the Implications of a thought or to experiment in

"the most private quarters." Poetry delivers those

responses in the most compelling way possible, and both

poets have often assumed the personas of resurrected

female warriors whose imaginary strength and goodness

annihilate evil with ferocious and troubling certainty.

For Broumas, however, poetry is most useful to women,

exploits its own characteristics to best advantage,

when it disturbs certainty, when women writers overstep

convention to join in a play of sound and image not

bound by the need to make an explicit argument. The

writer's libidinous "fingers" reach into mutable,

dense, otherwise intractable experience, displaying a

sensibility that is steadfastly female, but whose

female qualities are often contradictory and temporal.

Erotic life is clearly not the basis of a new myth of

essential womanhood, but, as Luce Irigaray has said, it

points to excess, the phenomenal perceptions that

overrun the confines of rational meaning. /4/ Because

Broumas envisions and revisions the meaning of her own

sexuality in her own "private quarters," "the female

erotic" remains a point of reference on a map of

multiple impressions and interpretations, a point whose

definition is created by the lines of perception

passing through it. "For women," Gilbert and Gubar

argue, "female genealogy does not have an inexorable 202

logic because the literary matrilineage has been repeatedly erased, obscured or fragmented" (199). This means, I think they would say, that In electing her

forbears, Broumas has selected the terms best fitting

her own needs for meaning and Is able to use the distance between mother's voice and daughter's body to

explore the myriad planes of sense experience that lie

between desire and requlttal.

I hear Adrienne Rich In Broumas' Beginning with fi,

though It Is here that she Implies her own primacy. In

"Sometimes as a child" (1-2), the poem that serves as prologue to the book, the younger poet begins again to rewrite "the book of myths" of "Diving into the Wreck"

in a way that leaves behind much of the diver's need

for a world-saving conclusion and explores the "deep element" in which Rich learns to "turn my body without

force." For Broumas, the sea Is Indeed "another story"

/5/ whose erotic embrace eclipses the tale of power struggle that Rich ends up recounting throughout Diving

Into the Wreck. Unlike her single-minded predecessor,

Broumas enters Into mythical regions through

happenstance; the gripping present tense of Rich's determined parable Is conditional here, and the

significance assumed by the diver's rebirth is based on

the chance of sun, calm water, mood;

when the Greek sea 203

vas exceptionally .calm the sun not so much a pinnacle as a perspiration of light, vour brow and the sky meeting on the horizon, sometimes

you'd dive from the float, the pier, the stone P K QmonJiLOJx*— thaaqh .water .s^-g.taitled. It held the shape of vour plunge, and there

In the arrested heat of the afternoon Without thought t-fi.££or.tl,e.a& as a m antxa. .tucainq you'd In tho-paused.,waKe.-o.f your dive, enter the,,su£k-oi-t.hfi-Parted waters, you'd emerge Glean cesarean, flinging live r.l-v.ulets„ from, your hair, your .own b%eath_airestsdk

Mutable experience is held static, however, once she enters the water so that heat Is arrested and water stilled. /6/ This cessation of movement, we can guess.

Is also the hope of the poem, which has to work against

Its own narrative to capture moments out of time:

"you'd dive," "vou'd turn." the speaker says,

Interrupting the steady push of parataxis for brief pauses that stop narrative from engulfing the act In chalnstltched representations of sky, sea, woman, sun.

This "turning" Is Intransitive; there Is nothing to act on, only to act with, for the sea symbolizes for both

Broumas and Rich a dissolving of distinctions between self and other. Inside and outside. Yet, for neither poet does this configuration bear up under Interpretive pressure; we drown too easily and unpleasantly for 204

"diving" to be much more than an insufficient name for union desired but unrealized. Rich begins to swim, to

explore, and to interpret the wreck she discovers, and the poem pushes past the earlier turning without force

to a recognizable pursuit of meaning. Broumas, too,

imagines a diver reborn into the familiar air, yet she

is more interested in resurrecting this numinous,

barely sayable moment than she is in sallying forth to

brandish new names for what the sea has revealed. This

experience of "something immaculate" takes on meaning

only through comparison to erotic life, which in turn

rebuffs any permanent names applied to it:

In x a.i.PT qrsen Oregon now, approaching thirty,__s.ometlm2a. ths_aame rare cpncsrt_of sp-in.e. pespnates in my qLLg-tgninq starfish, LQiLer.,,,.ycmr,. finqsLS beagh up.

The equation of female sexuality and sea in

Broumas' poetry have less to do with the identifiable

characteristics of either--fluidity, fecundity,

ferocity--than the perceptions of both that we name

only through saying what they are not: that they are

shapeless, seamless, indefinite. The reconstructed myths and stories that follow "Sometimes as a child"

give political thrust to this calculated ambiguity:

the mythic structure of these narratives of origin

serve as a political chessboard upon which Broumas can 205 move against the strategy set in place by men to contain women's desire. "Leda and her Swan" (BO 5-6) for example, pretends that "the fathers" recede into irrelevance while the poet and her lover discover that to own the swan, to put on its power, means returning to its watery, more ancient source:

The fathers are Dresden figurines vestigal, anecdotal small sculptures shaped by the hands of nuns. Yours crimson tipped, take no part in that crude abnegation. Scarlet liturgies shake our room, amaryllis blooms in your upper thighs, water lily on mine, fervent delta

the bed afloat, sheer linen billowing on the wind: Nile, Amazon, Mississippi.

The flowers blooming from the lovers' thighs are meant to bedazzle Yeats, I think, whose Leda feels her thighs loosened and caressed, but whose response— like her body— is overwhelmed by the masculine swan. They also bedazzle us, too, preparing us for the abandonment of syntactical connection that marks the plunging conclusion. Whatever symbolic reference the flowers begin to assume is swallowed up by all this water— which suggests, to the extent that language can, the impossibility of signification. The naming of rivers intimates not so much that we are to bring back their specific qualities— muddiness, length, depth— to lovemaking but that there is some excess in love as in 206 the real bodies of water that only the the exotic names, unconnected to other roots in our English language, can suggest. What do the names mean? What system of meaning binds them to their opposites? All we can do, tongue-tied, is to point.

In The Dream of a Common Language. Rich hopes to find names not just for lesbian love but for a femaleness that men's language has repressed. Erotic love works as metaphor for the joyous self-discovery made possible by exact reflection, and the book fantasizes ways this self-discovery can be made possible in women's communities; "I have never loved / like this," the poet says in the spirit-voice of Elvira

Shatayev, the resurrected leader of an ill-fated women's moutain-climbing team; "I have never seen / my own forces so taken up and shared / and given back."

/!/ For Broumas, neither self nor eroticism is so easily or so happily captured. Her myths are not so much truthful versions of patriarchal stories as they are a means of indicating— as does "Leda's" inconclusive conclusion— that myths' centers do not hold, and the poems named after the gods point mutely toward a world of feeling larger than they can say.

The symbols of the female— that women mythmakers before

Broumas wished to translate into a literal female nature— resonate with implications for which we haven't 207 names and which need not be codified. "I work In silver the tongue-llke forms," she says In "Artemis"

(BO 23-24),

that curve round a throat

an arm-plt, the upper thigh, whose significance stirs In me like a curviform alphabet that defies

decoding, appears to consist of vowels, beginning with 0, the 0- mega, horseshoe, the cave of sound. What tiny fragments

survive, mangled Into our language.

The "0" of her name, the 0 of the vagina, the curvature of these "tongue-like" forms are like the "mantra" of

"Sometimes, as a child": they turn the mind away from argument and the struggle to establish permanent meanings In which all our talk relentlessly engages.

Like Rich, Broumas Is "a woman committed to / a politics / of transliteration," yet hers Is

a mind stunned at the suddenly possible shifts of meaning— for which like amnesiacs

In a ward on fire, we must find words or burn. /&/

Broumas avoids the pull between love and power that so occupies Sexton, Lorde, and Rich because she refuses to oppose the terms; If she begins with myths that place her as mother or daughter, the poetry does 208 very little to recuperate either position into a new story of origin that delivers men's power over to their mothers. Broumas' interest in reserves of private experience does not free her of the responsibility for a community that engages and sometimes seems to entrap

Lorde and Rich. Yet, she tries literally to alter the terms which they refire into weapons, better allowing for differences in women's private experience of their sexuality since she refuses to pin names to it.

Possibly, the same disinclination to affix empowering labels to private life saves her from anxiously scraping up and inspecting pieces of childhood and crooning for the return of a mother from whom she felt separated at birth. Broumas' lesbianism rarely seems a revisiting of the womb. Like drowning, that permanent return bespeaks a naming that doesn't quite fit the poet's need to reconstruct experiences that are sudden, unexpected, and brief, and that give meaning to all other moments of intense feeling.

If the mythic structure of these poems lends to them accessible narratives and political weight, it sometimes seems at odds with the poet's intent: though she wishes to disrupt the fight for correct naming, her recounting stories of origin makes Broumas too easily heard as one of a crowd of voices clamoring for preeminence. She also points toward a poetics that she 209 does not yet practice. In Beginning with 0. the sea can suggest what is beyond the grasp of mythic narratives: fluid perception and a joy in mutability that binary systems of naming fail to contain. In the poetry written after Beginning with 0. love does not exist separately from the words in which it is constructed. The unstable comparison between love and drowning of "Sometimes^ as a child.” the mute pointing of "Leda and her Swan": these devices for suggesting the inadequacy of language to describe intense experience become a delight in the music of words which measure the play of sensibility. The erotic is not a solid, though undefinable, feeling beyond language, but a manner of speaking. Unlike her mythmaking predecessors, Broumas is engaged neither dissolving nor in reconstructing the contexts in which we come to understand female eroticism; rather she uses words themselves as erotic gestures.

In the center of this development is a coda.

Unlike anything she created before or after it,

Broumas' second book. Sole Sauvage, creates a speaking voice that is fairly coherent because it is engaged in defining itself; the book opens with poems about the breakdown of relationships, the inability to write, and it works as a record of healing. Yet poetic renewal is accomplished not so much within the book's loosely 210 structured meditation on self— the poetry that feminist critics calling for honesty and an abandonment of patriarchal masks seemed to want— as it is by her subsequent recollection of concerns voiced in Beginning with 0 . In Soie Sauvage Broumas has temporarily lost her generous willingness to revel in sensual

experience, and language and self are prosaic and reserved ;

Strange as it is, the only thing familiar is this act. [t/o] Writing. Getting stoned with anyone since you is bringing home total strangers. I thought grass cleared everyone's daily defensive fog, brought on its kind of music. The extra gesture. The flower, the odd piece of silver beside the bowl. Most often now I like to smoke alone. I try to care at least as well for me as I did for you. I didn't know about such subtle losses. A light pain that goes on too long gets forgotten, becomes an agent, you trust the familiar face till she flashes a badge and it's you in the funhouse mirror. In line for lunch, a woman's [t/o] voice above the clatter and starch, "It has to grow a scab before you scratch it." /9/

Broumas' assumption of the American idiom in the last

line of this section of "Five Interior Landscapes"

suggests that part of the healing of this book might be

the closing of the rift between her and the culture she

has adopted. The poet seems to accept the veracity of

truisms which accommodate us to everyday life— the

irony attatched to the last line suggests a grim 211 surrender to popular wisdom— and with the quote erases the gap between herself and the tongue she has chosen; it has as good as chosen her, now, and clasped her in the grip of the truths taught to all of us born into it. In fact, the topography of these poems is

American, too. Adopting the "landscape" motif in nine of the pieces in the book— they are even titled as such— Broumas visits places whose names are spoken with the familiarity of a native: Oregon, Staten Island,

Vermont. Absent here are the elements of place that provide essential metaphors for her meditation on mutability and the possibility of unpredictable pleasures: the sun and sea of Beginning with 0 . In calling attention to herself as an American poet— in domesticating the "wild silk" of her French title--Broumas also seems to cut herself off from symbols that direct and sustain the lush sensibility of earlier work.

"Greek sounds harsh / and foreign to my ear," she says in the final poem of Soie Sauvage. "It pains me / to admit this of my mother tongue and haven't for years." Nevertheless, the Greek poet Odysseas Elytis is the most obvious influence upon the changed writing of

Pastoral Jazz, a book published in 1983, five years after Soie Sauvage. /lO/ In her translation of a selection of his poems, Broumas remarks that the 212

"poetry of odysseas Elytis has been a homeland to me since my arrival in this country in 1967. His song burns the senses as the Greek sun and sea burn daily and annually into the skin, and his dignity is of my people, joyous, active" (What I Love, translator's note). Parataxis, repetition, musical consonance, attention to the varied emotional timbres of a symbol, self-conscious eroticism: Broumas picks up the threads of Elytis' technique, illustrated richly in this segment from a prose poem, to weave a pastoral poetry that abandons the American landscape of Soie Sauvage for the sea:

. . . by the terraces, near the musical complaint of your hand's curve. Near your transparent breasts, the uncovered forests full of violets and vegetables and open palms of moon, far as the sea, the sea you caress, the sea that takes and leaves me leaving in a thousand shells. /II/

I think that it must be Elytis who permits Broumas greater play with syntax and symbol. "I have chosen to give Elytis' voice in English," she says in her introduction to the translations;

and being true to his voice is to create an English with an accent, idiosyncratic, true to the man whose sensibility is born of and flowers in a cultural and syntactical grammar foreign to a world shaped and expressed by English (not paginated).

This sensibility is "homeland" for Broumas, and her own grammar corresponds increasingly to Elytis' more fluid 213 constructions. /12/ Moreover, without the structure of the myths and fairytales that she had used to ground the poems of Beginning with 0 . she grows freer in playing with the significance that surrounds a resonant symbol. If Beginning with 0 and Soie Sauvage provided the political direction upon which Broumas' female

forbears insisted, her later work cares more for the expression of an individual mind than for its

intelligibility and applicability for a reader looking

for articles of faith.

Paradoxically, this poetry that reflects so much the idiosyncratic indirection of its author's sensibility seems less egoistic than the more accessible poetry that she had been trying to write.

Charles Altieri has commented that "for the post-moderns" — including Gary Snyder, to whom Soie

Sauvage is dedicated,

the ego is not a thing or a place for storing or ordering experiences; the ego is not a force transcending the flux of experience but an intense force deepening one's participation in experience. . . . the ego does not create order but allows the poet to capture intimate energies and qualities also operating in the experience of others (Enlarging the Temple 43).

Giving up this last article of faith— that the perceptions of the individual ego can get at "intimate energies and qualities also operating in the experience of others"— allows Broumas to follow the "flux of 214 experience" without having to translate it or deepen

its surface significance by insisting on its immanent qualities. Broumas has remarked in an interview that when Adrienne Rich says "'I woman,*" she means '"We the

World'" (Hammond 38). Yet, it is exactly this

intention that Broumas abandons and that frees her to pursue lines of feeling cut off in the interest of creating a coherent, persuasive speaker.

Though Audre Lorde insists on the difference between poetry and rhetoric, her work is consumed by

its demand for readers' attention and action; once she finds her audience, her writing is devoted to speaking to them— and inviting them to act— much more than it is to exploring the nuances of either situation or trope.

Broumas' poetry after Soie Sauvage is marked primarily by the absence of any clear rhetorical purpose, of any aim or reference for her language beyond the shifting

images and varied musical riffs it calls to mind. Yet there is political intent— to avoid calculation of what moves a reader, what will create a desired response, and so avoid the American language that we think is the

opposite of poetry but which commands the hearts and minds of American people in a way that political poetry might like to do: that is, the language of advertising and government propaganda, the platitudes and cant that 215 has made us a nation of vicarious warriors and would-be consumers.

Calling now upon Antonin Artaud rather than Rich as muse, Broumas lays out in "Sea Changes" the metaphor for her technique: jazz, certainly an American music, the expression of an oppressed class, but an art that effects its revolution unprogramatically, dependent as

it is on the virtuosity of individual musicians who play off a rhythm and a riff, rather than a score.

All I ask is to feel my brain, Antonin, Antonello, father brother counterpart and self, to lie about on my instrument in that somnolent way musicians have, no baton thrust but indolent lush jazz massages, piercings made each moment by the riddling light. /13/

Of course, there is that basic rhythm, there is that opening, often hummable tune that makes jazz music more than a cacophany. For Broumas, the underlying melody is composed still of sea and sexuality, now

freed of any trace of immediately applicable significance and intelligible only in the world of her poetry, where the terms are the basis of variation, repetition and reversal. "Sea Changes" initially brings to mind Stevens' meditation on the sea's changing surface, but for Stevens, even in as playful a poem as "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," the ocean is

still a deep source of mythic meanings if only the mind could plummet them. In "Sea Changes," the sea is. its 216 surfaces, variations which provide a model for the

language that chases the waves. Moreover, this vision of the sea is intimately tied to the feeling and expression of love. The sea works as figure for the erotic, while erotic desire lends its poignance to all phenomena the senses perceive: the body is immersed in

odors, flavors, feelings that capture the desiring mind all at once. Broumas' "indolent / lush jazz massages" play off these feelings without "the baton thrust," the egotistical naming of the world's permanent meanings.

"All I ask is to feel my brain," she says, and rather than link mental structures to the world as a means of enclosing it with human value, she is interested in the variety and unbounded connectedness between the structures themselves.

The photographic quality of the following images from "Sea Changes" gives way to lines of perception shaped by memory and directed by the poet's free associations. These are not meanings delivered up from nature:

If you would stop the girls are waiting in lavender and green against the sea, the clouds are cloudlets. Three ordinary boys, lanky, not too rich pass by. The black lip of a frisbee surfaces, slides, and possibilities to move without embarrassment, execute gestures without shame, palpitate in its wake. Day after day of cloudlessness, hubristic, ardorous, imperative: more 217

and more naked lie before the world.

The first three lines suggest abstract meaning associated with symbols rather than the concrete images we usually expect of a pastoral poetry; the girls are amorphous suggestions of young femininity; their coloring helps us to identify a spring-like freshness of blooming life; and the sea engulfs them in a surrounding largesse, incapable of definition. The boys are more pictoral, until their frisbee disappears

into a central quotation from Mark Rothko— "to move without embarrassment / execute gestures without shame" /14/— telling us that consciousness, the play of words, not nature, is in charge of the construction of this scene. The lines evoke a wish for a freer way of

"feeling the brain," liberated from the social constraints that insist on direction and meaning.

Fulfillment, we are led to believe, comes in life, that

lying naked in front of everything. But for Broumas, hubris, ardor, imperative exist in the gestures of

language which give feeling momentary shape and music, even as the meanings shift to signify something else.

Though these free associations are not meant to be translated into systematic meaning, the poetry is

feminist in that the rhetorical thunderbolts she hopes avoid are presented in masculine terms: the force of 218 language is a "baton thrust," what Luce Irigaray calls

"the phallic emblem of man's appropriative relation to the origin" (Speculum 42). For Irigaray,

within a given economy of meaning . . . the words 'female libido" cannot mean anything, since the possibility that they might mean anything would inevitably lead us to question the project and projections of that meaning itself. The "unjustifiable," intolerable nature of those words "female libido," would be one symptom of something outside that threatened the signs, the sense, the syntax, the systems of representation of a meaning and a praxis designed to the precise specifications of the (masculine) "subject" of the story (Speculum 43).

"Sea Changes" defines the speaking subject only in terms of language that maps shifting connections between mind and phenomena. And, this subject is

feminine only in the deliberate rejection of mastery over feeling or symbol. Its politics lie in disruption of a more centered discourse that disregards anything

jeopardizing its conclusions, anything that threatens

its hold on thought and perception. The "alibis" of this way of thinking, "heap the dreary grounds,"

Broumas says:

Like children of the filthy and the filthy rich, slick with the wet glue off the pier, thin little failures of the will, we dig a hole and rub its grainy flank. Just by appearing we create problems, murderous, poignant, marring the rails under the chairs, drunk, and superb, and insensate. /15/ 219

Broumas' language has less the effect of an oppositional, disturbing presence— like that of the

filthy or filthy rich children who are the "we" of this paragraph— than a studied withdrawal, leaving ambiguity

in its wake. Yet, her escape from the stultifying

effects of confirmed meanings is suggested not by mute

pointing, but by a playful mix of sound and colors.

"The child goes underground," she says, describing such

a disappearance. "A grid of many colors, like the

underside of an old rug, / light and filmy, remains.

The day is clear, green, liquid." In this cleansed sea

of perception, one can hear "the music faultless, in

whose lime-white brain / octopi, saffron medusae /

alone some moment, pure, begin to dance." Simplicity

becomes the necessary basis of imaginative reaching

out, and represents a conscious dissolving, not of

desire, but of all the remnants of old thought patterns

which impede fresh perception.

"Sea Changes" concludes with the simplest

vegetarian meal, a kind of transusbstantiation that

involves a devolution of human into its food and that

seems to connote connection to earth, instead of an

insistence on transcendental values:

You sit down to a common meal, raw carrots, lettuce, radishes, olives and other things, a place both empty and set. 220

But Broumas refuses to intuit certain meaning from ordinary life, here. Her naming of these symbols of pure living— "raw carrots, lettuce, radishes, olives and other things"— is a quotation from

Bela Bartok taken out of context. /15/ Language is still the stuff of human perception, and what looks like Broumas' wish for simple communion with the earth becomes a wish for clean language, "raw" not in its riveting connection to elemental emotion but in its simple symbolic and musical drive.

Such a wish, to scrub language of its ideological stain and reveal brilliant surfaces, pulls against

Broumas' pastoral sensibility and engagement with the tradition of poets like Elytis, whose love of pastoral beauty becomes nationalism and whose sensual immersion in the erotic "lush massages" of the body involves an objectification--however appreciative— of a female other: "I spoke the love the health of the rose of the ray / That alone directly finds the heart," he says in

"Sun the First," another of Broumas' translations;

"Greece who with certainty steps on the sea / Greece who travels me always / On naked snow-glorious mountains" (What I Love 3-13). Pastoral Jazz ends with a different kind of manifesto, a determination not to make the kind of sense that leads to either sexism or patriotic fervor. Broumas' poetry will be 221

A theme with neither variations nor development Not directed towards meaning As in hysteria I.] /16/

Pastoral Jazz is still deeply engaged by the tradition it hopes to move beyond. The poems tend to theorize about what they do— in proposals that poetry is not a "baton thrust," for example--and deliver samples of what this new writing might look like. The prose poems of Black Holes. Black Stockings, however, truly exemplify what it might be for a poet

to relax all force and watch the freefall as though fruit What I feel Not what I feel about what I feel." /II/

Though Black Holes is written collaboratively with Jane

Miller, we get no sense of either writer as a discrete, separate personality, nor of the two writers as some merged "we" displaying a consistent, female point of view. We can construct speakers who are, physically, women, who are travelers relating pieces of their travels, but whose perceptions are not meant to impress us with an unfamiliar depth, meanings we have never traced. Meaning moves horizontally, not drawing all planes together into a significant whole, but shifting from surface to surface and concluding arbitrarily, according to serendipitous, happy conjunctions of words or images. 222

This, Jane Miller has asserted, is a "a language that admits the self, without its cult" ("Angel Fire"

20). That is, the poetry is the construction of contradictory, playful sensibilities, revelling in pleasurable constellations of words. "Just as in the design world," Miller argues,

where comfort, price, and materials must be gotten right before innovation can be introduced, so too must poetic form represent the needs of language— heft, resilience, a taking on of the light, a visually lavish experience, detailed, meticulous, and with an obsessive control of material. And not minimalist material. For the present, poetry must truly consider horizontal, parallel explosions of meaning. A linear straightforward narrative must contend with the future and the future is not surrealistic but is a multiplicity of objects right here and now" ("Angel Fire" 19).

Despite her "design world" metaphor. Miller thinks this to be a poetry revolting against the commoditization of humans and the natural world, the "world," as she puts it, "of the Central Intelligence Agency, in which the end result of covert action justifies the means. . . "

(19). We are in the grip of our conclusions, she says.

Thus, the need for a poetry examining the

"simultaneous" present rather than movement toward a foreseeable and intelligible end.

Thus, too, a disruption of the mechanized measure of time is one of the poets' more obvious aims. A reader who wishes to be paid off for his or her 223

Investment of time in reading the book may be disappointed to learn that precise attention to its disparate themes doesn't really lead anywhere in particular. The "pay-off," if there is one, has to come in the exact moment of reading, in the pleasure of following verbal tones and coloring in ifiultiple directions. For these poets, a genuine accounting of the passing of time— by experiencing the present rather than squinting into the future— comes with exercise;

"Time," they say, "is practice. "Before, during, after, east one mile, waves, weeds, right and left, the third one, almost, best, worst, continuous, aside" /18/: everything coming at us all at the same time demands attention.

This intention of presenting everything all at once seems to necessitate a prose form. Charles

Molesworth has commented in reference to the prose poems of Robert Ely that

for such eruptions of the marvelous and such blessed sinkings back into the everyday no strict verse form will suffice. Verse, even intense lyric poetry, has traditionally had a public dimension; it cannot be whispered .... But prose poetry sets up a different writer-reader contract by asking the reader to surrender his or her own sense of regular measure. Verse promises a return to some unit of measure that implies, however weakly, a mediation between the cry of a revealing truth and the closure of a presentable argument. By their very irregularity, prose poems suggest: the best of them almost always are masterpieces of 224

Insinuation (132).

Several of these ideas are useful in coming to grips with the formal requirements of Broumas and Miller's conception of what poetry should do. They do not seem to have negotiated a "writer-reader contract" at all.

The abstract weave of word and image that forms the substance of these poems takes on no perceivable direction: neither the poems' composition nor their ideas compel our reading through persuasive language or appeal to common values; nor do they recite narratives of desire that conclude in permanent (imaginary) capture or loss of a loved object. We are indeed asked to surrender our "sense of regular measure" and with it our commitment to interpretation. But these poems do not insinuate anything beyond themselves; their diffuse, irregular surfaces are our only source of pleasure, and the consistent prose form, our only ideational lifejacket in the waterfall of words. The poems in Black Holes are not "a sort of self-erasing indicator of something beyond themselves" (Molesworth

132) but a renunciation of both cry and argument, the supposed revelations of emotion or reason. On the contrary, these short, packed, carefully-wrought turnings of the mind hope to catch "Now, hurrying" through tropes that evoke its changing aspects:

Decorated in yellow braid with an artificial 225

rose, ravenous. It became younger and younger to us. And from under Its covering of black grapes finished smoking its cigarette, erotic, perfumed, to sit opposite us, then upon us. Behind the smoke set the red sky like a fresco. Who can guess what it means? (BH 27).

The poets have not chosen two, rather familiar directions for this intention to renounce meaning: a pointing toward silence or deliberate nonsense. Though deliberately disjointed, the images evoking the poem's mood and music hover close to the landscape, however much our vision of that landscape shifts. In reconstructing our apprehension of the natural world,

the poets toss together in a crazy salad oppositions we are most inclined to rely on as the basis of defining the profound meanings of this world: god and human, word and referent, self and other. "The gods are never the same but remain the same body or rather the sign for it, hearts like pears like beacons" (BH 52): here, nothing stays at rest, not gods, nor their bodies, nor, ultimately their signs, as the signifiers of empirical and spiritual reality— hearts, pears, and beacons— confound meaning in games with sound and reference. This is not to say that implication disappears into sheer noise; it is simply extended until relationships between words and their possible meanings are played out. "All that I knew imagining went beyond," the poets say: 226

Churches and baths— churches out of sand and baths when the sea floods in. Beautiful arches like bodies in love and veins of darker sand leading to the water, labyrinthian, hold like cathedral light whatever I say after the fact; energetic mountains beauty tires of; therefore the miracle of the tide accepted. The hymns and prayers fire, the rhymes air, they are cheering. Breath of god and with two unspeakables (BH 53).

"Flooding sea," "energetic mountains," "breath of god": all these symbols of deepest, most resonant meaning are sewn together with language detailing the human effort necessary to create them; the tokens offered up by memory--churches, baths, arches, sand, and sea— are transformed by imagination seeking connection between recollected images and present feeling. The mind bodies forth its own version of the world In "hymns and prayers" to be cherished more for their own

"fire"--their very insistence--than for any transcendental vision they point to.

That neither nature nor imagination has primacy in defining what is real alters the way that the mythological symbols of Beginning with 0 function for poet and reader. Charles Altieri argues that for modernist poets, myth

is essentially a collective form of poetic language defining the way a culture experiences and structures those interchanges between human and natural orders which it finds most important for maintaining its identity (Enlarging the Temple 47). 227

"For the postmoderns," he says,

myth is less a way of ordering and commanding experience than a means for experiencing events and actions charged with religious force and endowed with the collective psychic energies of an entire community aware that it in turn shares the event with past generations. Myth is not a way of universalizing the concrete, but of finding universal natural and cultural forces active in a numinous present (Enlarging the .Te.mple 47-48).

Though, on the one hand, Broumas and Miller's technique seems very much like modernist stream-of-consciousness writing, and on the other, like Charles Olson's definition of projective verse ("A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it . . . by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader), /17/ they do not use myth or mythological symbols either to provide meaningful structures for human experience or to give numinous resonance to aspects of nature. Nor do they seek an alternative myth that better corresponds to women's understanding of themselves. The "breath of god" is to be found neither in permanent symbols nor in nature, but simply in the language that works as gesture of human desire.

That there is nothing to grasp is dizzying:

Pairs, night and day our part of the world, and spin, dissolve into models, while over here alluding to experience without a hold are the twilights: the imperfect construct of heaven on earth letting, like a zephyr lets, go (BH 84). 228

But, confident in their virtuosity, the poets' egos let go, too, and the world, deeply loved, is neither possessed nor swirling off in its solitary gasses while the writers wax solipsistic in a darkness.

Quite obviously here. its rich landscapes engaging human perception, the earth bears infinite human affection, even though love never attains union, words never name permanently, and neither poet imagines the end of love as being, eternally, "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, / With Rocks and stones and trees."

Earth with a blush to its cheek, earth with a bell on its toe. The hills roll continent to continent, a mare with the virility of a horse and the devotion of a cow. Hills yielding grapes, almonds, apples, avocado, grains, spitting them forth in good weather or wrestling them loose. Water clings to the shallow places, modest drops of rain in union like geishas active and contemplative. They bend the grasses that return to feed. Within the earth the seedlings pantomime and on it the wild goose traces. All the lines the same, broken in the same vein. The only one that keeps loving is the earth, a concord of soil against loneliness, against intimidation the mountainous as-I-go, the watery hand of the Serengeti to hold (BH 84),

Poetry, here, doesn't record the earth's actual visage but works as lovers' response: we can read

"grapes, almonds, apples, avocado, grains" less as the celebration of a timeless pastoral world— that will take its place as symbol in some higher, mythological discourse— than as the poets' lavish pouring forth of 229 names in response to a generous reality. Tropes stream through sentences reaching for all possible

implications, whose value is to be calculated in terms of present pleasure, not lasting, powerful meaning.

"Static electricities who have been massaged," the poets

pick up intuitions like balloons. Green magnets in a blue frame with their addictions, their predilections, their repulsions as formless as numbers. Iconographie, pornographic (BH 85).

In a discussion of Black Holes. Black Stockings in the Women's Review of Books, feminist critic Adrian

Oktenberg observes that as the movement has grown, matured, and fragmented, "feminist poetry appears to have lost much of its audience." "Some of this," she says, "is a natural consequence of maturity. As it

became less directly polemical, it became less accessible" (17). Though she quotes Audre Lorde in asserting that poetry is still "not a luxury" for women, she says that Broumas and Miller's prose poems

"are each of them fabulous, gorgeous poetry. They are

the freshest, most beautiful poetry I have seen in

years" (19). On the surface, there seems to be no

contradiction between Lorde's mandate for women to use

poetry as the "light within which we predicate our

hopes and dreams" and Broumas and Miller's work. But

Lorde insists that there be a direct transfer from 230 dream to language to Idea to action. While I suppose that action is one possible result of reading Black

Holes— having one's idea of god broken into infinite possibilities, one might choose meditation over organized religion— it is never the authors' aim. And, though Broumas said in 1980 that feminism had given her a "context" and an audience (Hammond 39), neither poet tries to redirect in any particular way the values of feminist readers. If there is direction in this poetry at all, it is negative and lies in the poets' breaking apart hierachies of meaning, seemingly self-sustaining symbols that empower those who employ them. For

Broumas and Miller, however, the figurative names of things are so clearly the manifestation of mental play that symbols lose all capacity to sustain permanent social relationships. These poems also exploit

Irigaray's argument that female sexuality— as it takes shape in language— must remain formless in order to be truly oppositional; here, poetry is an erotic gesturing that wishes neither to own nor to merge with its object. Desire does not close down the possibilities for naming, as it threatens to in the drowning posited in "Sometimes, as a child." but, in its refusal to settle for verbal wish-fulfillment, buzzes from image to image, sounding out implications like a persistent bee in a field that infinitely flowers. 231

The poetry is not exactly inaccessible; one doesn't need literary theory or philosophical underpinnings to like it, just patience and interest and attention. Jane Miller has said that language evoking the multiplicity of phenomenal experience "may raise the issue of obscurity in poetry." "But poetry," she argues

should be digressive, incomplete, active, imaginative, disjointed. It is prose's function that language be arranged as a synthesis. In prose, the sentence is mental, as system. But in poetry, which over the years has borrowed so heavily from prose, we must get back to what occurs in the text as duration— the story, really, is the least important thing ("Angel Fire" 21).

That the commitment of poetry should be to its language— "digressive, incomplete, active, imaginative, disjointed" and new— presents to us a wholly different direction than that outlined by many male and female critics of American poetry. If Audre Lorde insists on honest expression and calls to action, Adrienne Rich in

Blood. Bread, and Poetry has said that she is "trying to construct images and ideas afresh, by staying close to concrete experience, for the purpose of alleviating a common reality that is felt to be intolerable" ( xi).

The title of this recent collection of prose equates in

importance and connects in social consequences the construction of meaning, physical nourishment, and birth (or maybe death in a women's revolution); along 232 with Lorde, Rich maintains that the purpose of poetry must be to help us build a social world where nourishment and birth are valued. Likewise, Charles

Altieri argues that American poets must begin to reconstruct viable social myths by dramatizing the tension between our assumption of diverse political positions and the collective values and images we can use to transcend an "intolerable reality" (Enlarging the Temple 236-37). Though he thinks Rich's ideas are simplistic, Altieri admires her "self-scrutiny," her

"grasp of what it is like to try to live in accord with an explicit body of ideals and commitments" in the midst of political conflict (Self and Sensibility 180).

Charles Molesworth values the poetry of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg because these poets "batter the language" in an effort to "buy back some authenticated version of the contemporary conscience" (41). Like

Altieri, he admires poems that attempt to "name and rectify the crucially operative values in any society"

(146). /21/ Stressing the importance of creating this

kind of social poetry, he thinks that "it might be that a new awareness of whom to address and what to lift to consciousness will be an important force in shaping the new ideas of form" (21). Finally, Robert Pinsky has

found that "some of the most exciting, overwhelming moments in the modernist tradition have come when a 233 poet breaks through Into the discursive freedom of prose." Here, he says, "the poet claims the right to make an interesting remark or to speak of profundities, with all the liberty given to the newspaper editorial, a conversation, a philosopher, or any speaker whatever"

(145). With this call for "prose virtues," Pinsky

echoes the humanist argument of these critics that

poetry should function as "language for presenting the

role of a conscious soul in an unconscious [or

unconscionable] world" (152).

The limitations of both ways of thinking about

poetry are clear enough. On the one hand, no one may

read writing that doesn't reward with new vision or

direction. Broumas and Miller's collection has been

taken out of the OSU library seven times since

1985— twice by me. /22/ On the other hand, listeners

may flock to a poetry reading--! have seen Lorde and

Rich attract over 500 people scrambling for seats— but

take home a lasting vision that they feel is the poet's

last word, since that is the way it is sometimes

presented. Irigaray warns us that though women's

sexual difference "has always operated 'within' systems

that are representative, self-representative, of the

(masculine) subject" (This Sex 162), we do not escape

these systems by a simple reversal of values.

Accordingly, though Rich and Lorde have engaged in the 234

•'rigorous interpretation of phallogocentrism" that she calls for, their imperative to create revolution tends to lead them back to the clear and permanent delineations of good and evil that allow for conviction, straightforward interpretations of the world, and the same kind of violence that underlies the hierarchies they fight against.

Michelle Barrett has underlined the limitations of a political art whether it intends disruption or war, mythmaking or the deconstruction of myths. Ideology, she says, "— as the work of constructing meaning— cannot be divorced from its material conditions in a given historical period. Hence we cannot look to culture alone to liberate us— it cannot plausibly be assigned such transcendental powers" (83).

Moreover, since authors can't predict the way their texts will be read, even the strongest rhetorical

intentions may never take effect. Yet Barrett's argument for a politicized, feminist art is pointed:

. . . the struggle over the meaning of gender is crucial. It is vital for our purposes to establish its meaning in contemporary capitalism as not simply "difference," but as division, oppression, inequality, internalized inferiority for women. Cultural practice is an essential site of this struggle. It can play an incalculable role in the raising of consciousness and the transformation of our subjectivity (83). 235

Black Holes. Black Stockings can be viewed as its authors' struggle to create a meaning for female perception and feeling outside the structures created for women by men. Rather than ignoring the needs of its audience, it is, perhaps, trying to change our ideas about what "feminist" poetry can be by calling attention to possibilities open to, rather than the limitations imposed upon, a women's sensibility. Yet there is very little sense here of what the poets are up against, and their imaginative currents seem to run freely. If the poetry is obscure or alienating, it is not because of its theoretical difficulty but because it bears few traces of that place of "division, oppression, inequality, internalized inferiority" where many women are located; it is self-conscious neither of its freedom nor of the enormous demands it makes upon readers considerably less free. Youth, health, money, travel, education: all these elements of privilege form the stage from which the poets view the world, and none is accounted for.

Broumas' newest poems begin to take stock of limitations, and their continued linguistic "jazz" is more somber, more restrained, and— because shared political and physical reality forms their context— more emotionally compelling. Despite the wish implied by its title, Peroetua, Broumas most recent 236 book Is dedicated to a friend who has died; and

Broumas’ preoccupation in most of the poems with the deaths of friends and family suggests a permanent sense of loss that poetry sings but cannot recompense:

Chafed ocean, a chadored moon fluting the supple acres, the silver spine of surf drawn from

a shore still resonant, each sounding molecule discrete yet filled with sameness so continuous

we might believe you too though drawn from us instill us who are left

with eucalyptus resin on our fingers, after the flowers, torn from styromoss,

have drowned the hollow grave its sound. /23/

Water remains a figure for shifting perceptions and feeling here, though "chafed" and "chadored" intimate a chastening also manifested in a restricted form and the sibilant threads of quiet grief. The moon, given power over "the silver spine of surf drawn from / a shore still resonant," bears responsibility, too, for death;

"you" is "drawn" from us like the tide, and loss, otherwise inexplicable, perhaps unbearable, is figured within a trope that makes it part of the continuous cycle of the ocean's return to shore. "[Sloft,"

Broumas whispers, wishing now that language invoked truth,

the hands on the shovel as if one last time 237

your arm— peace Is that continuity,

you were trying to tell us,

faithful and loyal to the last you were cast from, friend in the vibrant elements,

song without skin to hold.

The poem struggles to fulfill its own wish to create ongoing life from death: the permanence of death is contained, limited in its comparison with the lunar force conjured up by the r e s o n a n t imagery of the poem.

"We can believe" this, she says, admitting that she would like to trope a less painful reality, implicitly confessing as well the incapacity of her language to alter very much the fact with which she must now live.

In "Next to the Cafe Chaos" (PE 59), "fact" is equally chastening. Under the cafe's neon sign,

the neon-pale geraneums rappelling on burgher curtains drilled with light at night and night tobacco-stained by day, we lunge made slow by the urge to love untrammeled by the sirens' aggrandizing thrust.

The "thrust" of significance is harder to avoid in this scene "drilled" with light and noise. Though the lovers are ostensibly "untrammeled," we are not— are shot through with warnings of a reality that burns beneath the brilliant surfaces of this poem. Even its 238

tense, rigid consonance suggests possible, violent eruption of the world of fact into fantastic vision;

A gaseous flame

leapt from the greengold filth of the canal, the squatters' barricades lit up and their annointed faces appeared in the journalist's probe outlined in kohl like convict masks.

The poet is "loaded with fact like methedrine" and

though the poem seeks to transform it, fact does not

allow the imagination much free play. The squatter's

poverty, the canal's filth undercut the her attempt to

aestheticize them or subsume them within a wishful

trope. "By the unvanquished halo from the

Terra/Incognita's strobe we hug," the poem concludes,

but the loving gesture is not very saving, haunted as

it is by the terror of a world whose facts fit in no

one's cognitive— or poetic— schemes.

Methedrine is, of course, a form of speed. None

of the critics I have mentioned use it as a metaphor

for what experience of the world might do to poetry,

but it works to illustrate the technique Broumas has

discovered to mediate between elaboration of what

"feminine" difference in language might be and poetry

that documents the material reality that confines many

people's lives. There is still that wish to free

perception and language from its dismal anchoring; to

use fact as a stimulant allowing poetry to shake off 239 the restrictive meanings and obsessive desires that slow the mind down. But stimulants wear off, the body finds its old equilibrium, facts preoccupy us, pulling us again into costly arguments over meaning.

Mary Poovey delineates succinctly the powers and limits of feminist deconstruction of "Woman" into constitutive women whose identities are both defined and contradicted by the social hierarchies in which they live. "In its demystifying mode," she observes,

deconstruction does not simply offer an alternative hierarchy of binary oppositions; it problematizes and opens to scrutiny the very nature of identity and oppositional logic (59).

"Demystification," in turn, allows us to "rethink our notion of power and identity and see their fragmentary quality— we can rethink social organization dependent on gender so that new forms may come into being" (59).

On the other hand, she says, writing that suggests undefined feminine "difference" gives us no tools for analyzing specific differences between women or proposing change.

I think that Broumas and Miller's Black Holes.

Black Stockings exemplifies both the pointed critique and the utopian possibilities of this deconstructive variety of feminist politics: reading the poems, I recollect the the purposeful, studied eroticism of

Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and am reminded that even 240 pleasure can be so strictly defined and directed that it narrows rather than expands women's imaginative compass. Certainly, Black Holes defies the poetic limitations of the sensual smothering of Anne Sexton's

"Death Baby" sequence as well as the intellectual confines of the liberating lesbianism fantasized by

Rich and Lorde. Yet, I like these poems better, I return to them despite their failures, perhaps because they exemplify the limitations upon my own imaginative, erotic freedom and because the poets sometimes model ways of rethinking my own relationships. "Not that it was beautiful," as Anne Sexton has said, not that I can trace in the development of this poetry a way to get hold of a self that is whole, powerful, integrated, and permanent. But there is an intellectual and emotional strength to be gained in reconstructing ideas and relationships when the pressures of new experience force old ones to collapse. The power of poetry that illustrates this composition of female selves lies not so much in the specific definitions of femaleness to which it gives voice nor in the specific proposals for change that it describes, but in the ethical commitments from which the poetry derives and the poets' willingness to let experience of others' disagreement and difference decree change. 241

Despite their substantial accomplishments, for

Sexton and for Lorde there are limits to this reconstruction of self because their understanding of power is itself limited: for different reasons, both women narrow the meaning of the word to a force one uses against someone else. Consequently, both imprison themselves in battles— against male gods or white people— fought on the oppressor's terms. Here, even victory guarantees nothing but a reversal of roles held by victim and victimizer. Rich, on the other hand, persists in questioning the imaginary victories and satisfactions to which her poetry gives form. In doing so, she engages in the critique that Poovey attributes to deconstructive criticsm and dramatizes the construction of powerful responses to an "intolerable" reality. I think that Broumas, in the response to

"fact" illustrated by her newest poetry, is taking the same winding, seemingly endless road. Paradoxically, it is in this travelling with and away from her magnificent predecessor to give form to her own sensibility that Broumas is indeed first, while she ensures for the rest of us that Rich is not the last of her line. "We lack," Broumas says.

Not without prayer. Not without

the pluck and humor of the song your bones thrum while the blood still laves their broadside and flank. 242

I kiss your bones. In mind each rounded pinnacle of rib is white against an O'Keefe sky and light their lingua franca. Such thinking heals the moment. It divides us for its duration like a cyclone fence from our despair, our rage, our bitter greedy fear. /24/ 243

Notes

/I/ From "Demeter," Beginning with 0 21-22. Henceforth, I shall refer to this volume as BO.

/2/ Stanley Kunitz remarks in his "Introduction" to Beginning with 0 that Broumas was the first Yale Younger Poet to write in English as an adopted language. In thinking about the road that Rich helped to pave for Broumas, it is interesting to compare Kunitz' assessment of the younger poet's achievement with Auden's praise for Rich's "modesty." "It does not seem at all presumptuous for Broumas to link herself with the goddesses of the Hellenic age," Kunitz remarks, "for she has honest ties of kniship to that age in blood and in spirit. Her witnessing to this heritage gives her work, even in its most reckless and indecorous manifestations, a kind of magnitude, an illusion of heroic scale" (xi).

/3/ Gilbert and Gubar's discussion of the relationship of women writers to female predecessors refers to turn-of-the-century literature. Yet these writers' "anxious but healing response to wounding male assaults against women as well as female fears of contaminated blood lines" (207) may well describe, I think, the feelings of a poet paying homage to Rich and Sexton. "Now and then I detect a note of stridency in her voice, a hint of doctrinal overkill," Kunitz observes (xii), and we are reminded of all the "idle feminist palaver" that he applauds Broumas for avoiding. "Though speaking the truth as a lesbian feminist" remains, as she says, "a political art," Broumas' poetry reveres her predecessors at the same time that she avoids incurring the same critical wounds inflicted on them.

/4/ See especially Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One. "How can I speak you?" she asks of her own erotic life. "You remain in flux, never congealing or solidifying. What will make that current flow into words? It is multiple, devoid of causes, meanings, simple qualities. . . (214-15).

/5/ The phrase is from "Diving into the Wreck" (The Fact of a Doorframe 162-64) .

/6/ The lover in "Sometimes as a child" is not assigned a sex. I assume that Broumas is thinking of a woman because the book celebrates her lesbianism. 244

/!/ From "Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev," The Fact of a Doorframe 225-27.

/8/ From "Artemis," BO 23-24.

/9/ "Five Interior Landscapes".

/lO/ The translations were published in 1986, three years after Pastoral Jazz, though it is clear from Broumas' note to the translations that Elytis' influence has been longlived.

/II/ "Famous Night," What I Love 15.

/12/ "I wanted to make clear that our language was able, and ready, to imprint the most complex rhetorical schema," Elytis has said of his own syntax and choice of imagery, follow the least restrained delirium, be endowed with the brightest luxury, fill two and three pages, if circumstances required, with a single phrase inscribing its orbit with the largest possible leisure and grace, a comet ambling in slow curves, losing itself in the night sky, sparkling " ("First Things First" 3).

/13/ "Sea Changes," paragraph 2. From Pastoral Jazz 21-25.

/14/ Pastoral Jazz 72n.

/15/ Pastoral Jazz 72n.

/16/ "Sea Changes," paragraph 6.

/17/ "Jewel Lotus Harp," Pastoral Jazz 65-70.

/18/ "Home Movies," Pastoral Jazz 35-40.

/19/ Black Holes. Black Stockings 26. The prose poems in this sequence do not have individual titles. Henceforth, I shall refer to this volume as BH.

/20/ "Projective Verse" 16.

/21/ See the "Introduction" of this study for the contradiction that I find in Molesworth's praise for the social poetry of Lowell and Ginsberg and his lambasting of Anne Sexton. 245

/22/ None of the circulating libraries of the New York system owns any volumes of Broumas' poetry.

/23/ "Walk on the Water," Peroetua 48. Henceforth, I shall refer to this volume as PE.

/24/ "The Moon of Mind Against the Wooden Louver," PE 44-45. 246

Works Cited

I. Primary Works

Broumas, Olga. Beginning with 0 . Yale Younger Poets 72. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.

Pastoral Jazz. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 19 83.

Peroetua. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1989 .

Soie Sauvage. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1979.

Broumas, Olga and Jane Miller. Black Holes. Black Stockings. Middleton, CN: Wesleyan UP, 1895.

II. Secondary Works

Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1979. — . Self and Sensibility In Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1984,

Barrett, Michelle. "Ideology and the Cultural Production of Gender." Deborah Rosenfelt and Judith Newton, eds. Feminist Criticism and Social Change; Sex, Class and Race ..In Literature and Culture. New York: Methuen, 1985. 65-85.

Broumas, Olga. Review of The Dream of a Common Language. by Adrienne Rich. Jane Roberta Cooper, ed. Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Re-Visions, 1951-81. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984. 274-86.

Duncan, Erika. "The Meeting of Two Revolutionaries." Book Forum 3 (1977): 322-29.

Elytis, Odysseas. "First Things First." Trans. Olga Broumas. American Poetry Review 17.1 (January/ February 1988): 3-12.

. What I Love: Selected Poems of Qdvsseas Elytis. Trans. Olga Broumas. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1986. 247

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. No Man's Land: The g.lage.Qi the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1. The War of the Words. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.

Hammond, Karla. "An Interview with Olga Broumas." Northwest Reveiw 18.3 (1980): 33-44.

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum o£ the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Kunitz, Stanley. "Forward." Beginning With O . Yale Younger Poets 72. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977. ix-xiii. \ Miller, Jane. "Angel Fire." American Poetry Review 18.2 (March/April 1989): 19-21.

Molesworth, Charles. The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1979.

Oktenberg, Adrian. "A Quartet of Voices." Women's Review of Books 3.7 (April 1986): 17-19.

Olson, Charles. "Projective Verse." Selected Writings of Charles Olson. Ed. Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1966. 16-24.

Pinsky, Robert. The Situation of Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.

Poovey, Mary. "Feminism and Deconstruction." Feminist Studies 14.1 (Spring 1988): 51-65.

Rich, Adrienne. Blood. Bread and Poetry; Selected Prose 1976-1985. New York: Norton, 1986.

• Th9 Fact-_PX_a...Doo.]:_f.ra m s_; Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984. New York: Norton, 1986. CONCLUSION

The Uses of Feminist Poetry

Adrienne Rich, Charles Altieri has said, is one of our best poets because she gives voice to the

"contrastive language," the ethical, controversial stances which he thinks that it is the task of literary artists to delineate. Yet toward the end of his discussion of her work, Altieri pauses for a moment to bring up two questions that disturb the persuasive argument he has presented. The first, which I have addressed in the introduction to this study, is "the issue of whether [Rich's] explicit address to women and questions of female identity can or should be read as an instance of more general human problems" (193). /I/

The second is whether "Rich's commitment to practical freedom may keep her from exploring the dense or elegant forms of linguistic complexity and exuberance that characterize the greatest lyric poetry." Might we not, Altieri wonders, find "in that complexity . . . the forms of freedom that poetry best exemplifies?"

248 249

(193). It is the second of these questions that I would like to take up here.

Why try to use poetry as a vehicle for social

change? Clearly, there are more direct ways of

influencing others' behavior, of changing their minds,

and clearly there are other uses for poems. One reason

that feminists use poetry to formulate their politics

might be that writing poetry, unlike work outside the

arts, gives utterance to fantasy, allows them to write

into reality desires that direct the actions taken in

other areas of life. In fact, it may be that poetry

even more than prose fiction or drama allows for

fantastic visions of self and community, dreams not

tied to the naturalizing requirements of

characterization or plot. /2/ And it may be, too, that

finding tropes for our fantasies is bound up with

becoming full participants in a society that has curbed

the reach of women's imaginations and in so doing,

limited their creative resources and circumscribed

their lives. In this conclusion to my study of Sexton,

Rich, Lorde, and Broumas, I would like to elucidate the

connections that these poets have discovered between

poetry and power. In the case of the latter three

writers, I will also talk about the way in which poetry

is thought to empower a feminist community, as well as

the poet who constructs her stronger self through 250 writing. Finally, in tracing the persistent revisions of Broumas and Rich, I will try to describe the way in which change in these poets' thinking illustrates the necessary building and rebuilding of feminist models of community: necessary because we must respond actively to the diverse needs of different women, not just by integrating them into the ideas we have formulated about ourselves, but by changing those ideas to meet their requirements. In "staying close to concrete experience, for the purpose of alleviating a common reality that is felt to be intolerable," /3/ poets help us to revise the generalizations of theoretical models, generalizations often blinded by institutionalized racism, class privilege, and heterosexual bias.

Likewise, poets' ability to reconstruct their own experience in light of different women's points of view exemplifies a way out of solipsism and provides the means to understand how each of us gains a fuller life to the extent that members of our community live fully.

Margaret Homans finds much to praise in Rich's vision of women's collective life after death in

"Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev." /4/ Unlike the poetically limited union with nature the poet had envisioned in "Transcendental Etude," this resurrection of a women's climbing team, their bodies roped together with "a cable of blue fire," makes "outrageous claims" 251 for poetry's "fiction-making power"; the figure of the cable itself, Homans says,

joins the bodies together simultaneously as it joins them to sublime regions; and it makes the necessity for figuration inseparable from the necessity for collectivity and for transcendence (235).

Not only does this poetry allow the writer to create impossible fictions, but it asserts that impossible fictions are necessary in the imaginative recreation of women's lives. These climbers are not part of nature, but take active part in the human endeavor to name and rename the natural world. "When you have buried us,"

Rich's Shatayev sings,

told your story ours does not end we stream into the unfinished the unbegun the possible.

Diane Middlebrook argues that a similar fantasy empowers Anne Sexton to bury her estranged teacher,

John Holmes, and assert her own, female, imaginative primacy. /5/ "Must you leave, John Holmes, with the prayers and psalms / you never said, said over you?"

Sexton begins her poem:

Praised by the mild God, his arm over the pulpit, leaving you timid, with no real age,

whitewashed by belief, as dull as a windy preacher!

The insipid, falsifying sermon offered by conventional religion is as much to be mourned as her mentor's death, Sexton thinks. She recreates heaven in her own 252 fashion, not so much celebrating Holmes' past vigor as claiming that his afterlife must rectify real life's auster ity;

Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden. tt/o]

Let there be this God who is a woman who will place you [t/o] upon her shallow boat, who is a woman naked to the waist, [t/o] moist with palm oil and sweat, a woman of some virtue [t/o] and wild breasts, her limbs excellent, unbruised and chaste. [t/o]

"In Sexton's elegy," Middlebrook observes,

"reasonableness and wildness became two gods: one male, identified with institutions; one female,

identified with poetry." Moreover, she says, the poem

"insists that poetry belongs to the territory of wildness: libido, darkness, fertility, beauty, strangeness" (211). Rather than argue over the real political and personal differences between her and

Holmes, Sexton overcomes the poetic strictures that

Holmes sought to enforce— that her work ought not to deal so directly with "crazy," "private" experience— by making femaleness synonymous with the highest kind of

imaginative power: poetry permits her to be loony enough, wild enough to recreate God.

Where then does fantasy or fantastic vision get us? Homans might argue that Rich and Sexton both 253 participate in the same imaginative recreation of God and nature that romanticism aims for, and so are successful in winning for women the same opportunities to "exploit the dense or elegant forms of linguistic complexity" that male poets enjoy. But mythmaking is not quite enough for either writer. "Death, / I need my little addiction to you," Sexton had written in

1960, two years before her homage to John Holmes; /6/

I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.

Sexton's yearning for death in poetry is not the same as a real-life suicide threat; in fact, "death" is often a figurative wish for love that the poet reworks in remarkably incisive, varied ways. But the woman who rises from the sea here, "all woman," can't muster the authority to imprint upon the "deep element" her own goddess's visage. "Aphrodite, my Cape Town lady,"

Sexton will write in 1972,

I ask you to inspect my heart and name its pictures. I push open the door to your heart and I see all your children sitting around a campfire. [t/o] They sit like fruit waiting to be picked. I am one of them. The one sipping whiskey. You nod to me as you pass by and I look up at your great blond head and smile. We are all singing as in a holiday and then you start to cry, you fall down into a huddle, you are sick. /?/ 254

Love is like a sickness, a debilitating need voiced only in the hope of being quelled. For Sexton, power is not endlessly creative, is often only the ability to repudiate desire and tell stories of its destructiveness. Rarely in her poetry do we see imaginative wildness defeat death or poetry enact female capture of male bastions of authority.

Not so Rich. "Poetry," she says, "is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relation to everything in the universe. It is as if forces we can lay claim to in no other way, become present to us in sensuous form" fOn

Lies. Secrets, and Silence 248). Figuration, thus, is not only a means of winning for the female imagination free rein in male territory but of changing the social relationships that designated boundaries in the first place. Though poetry is not required to stick too closely to a naturalistic representation of women's experience, its fantastic visions, we are to believe, recreate more truthfully than prose narrative the meaning of our relationships to each other and our conflicts with men. Moreover, recognition of this higher truth makes possible the collective power to overcome conflict, to make real life as utopian as poetic invention. We have come full circle, from

Homans' discussion of the power of nonliteral language 255 to make outrageous claims for the imagination to the assertion that these claims do indeed denote a higher, literal truth, that poetic fictions are closer to reality than prosaic descriptions. Poetry is to provide not just vision but verities unavailable from any other source.

These two assertions about what poetry does are not necessarily contradictory. For the poets in this study, at least, constructing the truest version of the self often demands poetry that points just beyond the

ideas and images we find there. Line-breaks and white space, broken sound and halting rhythms become just as important in the poem's suggestion of what isn't there as do the words' literal announcement of what is. The

figuration of dreams lies not so much in interpretable

imagery, but in what neither we nor the poets can quite grasp: "the unfinished the unbegun / the possible."

I did not fall from the sky I nor descend like a plague of locusts to drink color and strength from the earth and I do not come like rain as a tribute or symbol for earth's becoming I come as a woman dark and open I.1 /8/

So often in the work of Audre Lorde, for example, "I"

takes up whole lines, becomes symbolic of a woman

uprooted from her English language, who assumes

strength through naming herself African. /9/ 256

Traditional modifiers mystifying female power— the

"darkness" and "openness" with which Lorde identifies here— are linked to to the names of African goddesses, linguistic icons which disrupt the systematic debilitation of "African" in American language. The title of this poem, "The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were

Warriors" hopes to sever the speaker's "darkness" from dichotomous signifiers--"light," "enlightenment,"

"clarity," among the most obvious— and place her within an ancient, egalitarian, powerful sisterhood, separate from the enslavement of her race and her imagination.

Yet the very real suffering that still results from persistent dichotomies hinders this process of resistance and reconstruction, and resistance alone seems to take up all Lorde's time. "The edge of our bed was a wide grid," she says in the first line of

"Sisters in Arms,"

where your fifteen-year-old daughter was hanging gut-sprung on police wheels as a cablegram nailed to the wood next to a map of the Western Reserve. /lO/

This nonliteral figure of death made present in a cablegram only serves to underline the reality of tragedy. Any claim for the power of language that the trope might make is buried underneath the weight of event, as is Lorde's concern that African names be 257

radically subversive of linguistic hierarchies.

Solidarity with real South African women means

engagement in violent struggle against a violently

oppressive political system. The poetry of human

complexity has to wait, she would have us think, until

the human lives Lorde reels compelled to defend are no

longer at stake.

The fluid associations of Olga Broumas' poems are

also cut off in their sensual gestures by the fact of

human suffering. Assisting at the birth of a child in

"The Pealing," Broumas senses the mother's

eyes locked into mine and once again I am

inside the camp the peaked cap and eyes implacable and blue with pleasure. /II/

The blue of ocean, symbol of indefinite, uncontained

eroticism in earlier work, is connected, too, with the

perverted pleasures of Klansmen and Nazis. The

"natural pain" of the woman in labor is linked to the

suffering that humans invent for each other, a

technology of pain suggested here by weapons that serve as synecdoches for people cut off from their physical

humanity: "the clubs the whips / barbed wire cattle prods napalm." The child emerges "blue" into this sea

of cruelty,

blue, cyanic, ocean blue 258

in flat dawn light, pale blue and sudden in six breaths and Beth stopped a long moment

as in strobe elbow to knee inscribed dark totem with two heads one fierce, one blue.

The child is a boy, now separate from the "fierce” struggle to give him life and related to his "truant father" whom the poet mistrusts. His color suggests physical need for oxygen, the possibility of being engorged with life, and the potential for asphyxiation— the idea\that he might or might cause others to suffocate. Broumas notes at the end of the poem only his "Plum testicles: / waxy, veined, seamed / still to the tree." As symbolized by innocent genitalia-'this unharvested fruit--the child's gender is still undefined, but the directions the poet perceives are ominous. Western myth blames women for this potential for evil--for picking the fruit— but the poem points out that the suffering of birth for women really lies in their delivering a child into the hands of men, those "truant fathers" who abjure the responsibilities of parenthood for more destructive roles.

Broumas identifies herself as a healer in this scenario. In "The Pealing" she is a birth assistant, and in "The Massacre" she is a masseuse: "The friends 259 of the dead lie on my table," she says; "I do what I can / with their breath and my hands." /12/ The role does not enable her to contain the world's damage— breath and hands are fragile defenses against forces that seem to work separately from individual human consciousness and intention. But the attempt to heal may be a way to understand suffering and the response to violence that suffering engenders:

I understand the urge to beat and maim and kill. If I were Black, which I am, if I were Jew, which I am, Irish, Palestinian, native or half-breed, which I am, I am homeless or disappeared, immigrant or queer -

As it for does Audre Lorde, the fact of human suffering seems to stop Broumas' ventures out in darkness; her overconfident "I am" is an assertion of affiliation that she wishes were true for the sake of political solidarity— is a statement in which she might place belief if she had to, as Lorde feels she has to.

But Broumas' assertions are obviously fictions, however much they wish for truth. Except for the last two, none of these appellations really fits; the poet cannot elect these particular histories for herself. Broumas wants to use poems, the instability between word and referent that metaphor can induce, to break through the 260 relative safety of her role as healer and try to reconstruct the speaking self somewhere else, in the place of those she speaks about. The aim is impossible; and at the end of "The Massacre" the poet cries out, "I pound the mattress. / What I don't understand / holds us back." But her intent is the intent of the best poetry of this study: to eschew roles that limit the ways women can talk about themselves and their relationships to others and to reach toward Impossibility, the ideal that is not yet defined.

I agree that making and exploring seemingly outrageous claims for the power of a female imagination is the best use of feminist poetry. These women’s poetry grows, as Adrienne Rich has said, from their effort to "construct ideas and images afresh," /13/ to refresh understanding by piecing together symbols that make sense of a complex social order and that give voice to personal desire. Aesthetic value is connected not just to sound and image, but to the kind of vision which blossoms from the poetry. The language is compelling because it searches for words to describe common needs and individual aspirations, because it wishes to speak a common language that is nonetheless the poet’s own. Yet for feminist poets, the need that drives this experimentation— to construct an exemplary 261

self, to discover ideas that unite a conununity--o£ten

stops it, particularly when the desire to make strong

political statements about women's lives outweighs the desire to disconnect language from limited, literal

referents. Thus, the poetry's strength lies not just

in its imaginative reach, but in the relationship

between the utopian push of its dreams and its

persistent, prosaic arguments for ethical action.

Because it wishes to empower women's

fiction-making, because it grows from writers'

perceptions of pressing, diverse material needs,

because it hopes for community that draws strength from

differences, feminist poetry can be a means through

which writers mcdel the construction of ideal selves

and societies. It can also show us the strength to be

gained in leaving the safety of what we know, in

letting our constructions collapse in order to respond

more fully to others. Mythmaking is not enough, poetry

is not enough to end racism, stop violence against

women, erase class divisions. But it is for me a

necessary means of getting hold of a politics

sufficient to undertake these tasks, of articulating

and reassessing political location and my own personal

beliefs.

Though all these poets participate in this process

of envisioning and revisioning themselves and their 262 communities, Adrienne Rich's writing has been for me the most important. It is not so much her specific feminist arguments that I need to read over and over again. Rather, I attend to her passionate endeavor to articulate personal longing and her persistent work to alter radically her own ideas in response to other women. The power of her work derives not so much from a cache of mythological or theoretical artillery, but in the intellectual, poetic struggle to establish common cause with those whose differences are honored and whose ideas grapple with her own. "I stand," she says

I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo­ luted that a light wave could take 15 years to travel through me And has taken I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind. /14/ 263

Notes

/I/ Cf. my discussion of Altieri, pp. 2-4.

/2/ Margaret Homans points out in her "Introduction" to Women Writers and Poetic Identity that [1 lyric poetry lacks the novel's representational framework of character and plot, and a theory of feminine imagination appropriate to poetry cannot make use of historical material as effectively as can theories of the novel (6). Contemporary feminist poetry, I will argue, does often try to represent real women and plausible behavior, so that "historical material" is relevant to its analysis. But the exploitation of nonliteral language that Homans sees as characteristic of good poetry works in tandem with the impulse to model the action of real selves in real communities. In my opinion, the value of this poetry lies in the tension between the two kinds of practice. Altieri summarizes the unique capacities of lyric poetry that I find so important. "Here," he says, "the world's adequacy to the demands of the self is most importantly and intensely tested, without the full-scale displacement of the imaginary or the subordination of mental to to social forms that are typical of the novel" (13).

/3/ Adrienne Rich, Blood. Bread, and Poetry xi.

/^/ The Fact of a Doorframe 225-227.

/5/ "Somewhere in Africa," Complete Poems 106-107.

/6/ "Letters to Dr. Y," February 16, 1960, Complete Poems 561-562. "Letters to Dr. Y" is a collection of poems written from 1960 to 1970 and reserved by Sexton for publication after her death (Editor's note. Complete Poems 599-600).

/7/ "To Like, To Love," Complete Poems 581-583. See also Sandra Gilbert's discussion of this poem in the context of women writers' use of the Aphrodite myth in "The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire."

/8/ "The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors," The Black Unicorn 14-15. 264

/9/ C£. my discussion of "Coal," pp. 134-136, and "A Woman Speaks," pp. 147-148.

/lO/ Our Dead Behind Us 3-5.

/II/ Peroetua 28-32.

/12/ Peroetua 38-43.

/13/ Blood. Bread, and Poetry xi

/14/ "Planitarium," The Fact of a Doorframe 114-116. 265

Works Cited

Altieri, Charles. Self and Sensibility in American Poetry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Broumas, Olga. Perpétua. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1989.

Gilbert, Sandra. "The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire." Kenyon Review 5.3 (Summer 1983): 42-66.

Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity; Dorothy Wordsworth. Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980.

Lorde, Audre. The Black Unicorn. New York: Norton, 1978.

. Our Dead Behind Us. New York: Norton, 1986.

Middlebrook, Diane. "'I tapped my own head': The Apprenticeship of Anne Sexton." Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century. Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom, eds. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1985. 195-213.

Rich, Adrienne. Blood. Bread, and Poetry; Sel&cted. Prose. 1979-1985. New York: Norton, 1986.

• The Fact of a Doorframe; Poems Selected and New. 1950-1984. New York: Norton, 1984.

. On Lies. Secrets, and Silence;__Selected. 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979.

Sextan, Anne. The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. WORKS CITED

I. Poetry

Broumas, Olga. Beginning with 0 . Yale Younger Poets 72. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.

Pastoral Jazz. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1983.

Peroetua. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1989.

Sole Sauvage. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1979.

Broumas, Olga and Jane Miller. Black Holes. Black Stockings. Middleton, CN: Wesleyan UP, 1985.

Elytis, Odysseas. What I Love: Selected Poems of Qdvsseas Elvtls. Trans. Olga Broumas. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1986.

Lorde, Audre. Chosen Poems. Old and New. New York: Norton, 1982.

The B^ack Unicorn. New York: Norton, 1978.

Cables to Rage. London: P. Bremen, 1973.

Coal. New York: Norton, 1976. Coal Is the Norton edition of poems previously Included In both c a bl.e.5.._ka.JBagg. snd The First ...Cities•

The First Cities. New York: Poets Press, [1968].

. From a Land Where Other People Live. Detroit, MI: Broadside, 1973.

. New York Head Shoo and Museum. Detroit, MI: Broadside, 1974.

266 267

. Our Dead Behind Us. New York: Norton, 1986.

Rich, Adrienne. A Change of World. Foreword by W. H. Auden. Yale Younger Poets 48. New Haven, Yale UP, 1951.

. The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems. New York: Harper, 1955.

Diving into the Wreck. Poems. 1971-72. New York: Norton, 1973.

. The Dream of a Common Language. New York: Norton, 1978. — . The Fact of, a Doorframe; Peemg-S.ele.cted and New, 1950-1984. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.

Leaflets. Poems. 1965-1968. New York: Norton, 1969.

Necessities of Life. Poems. 1962-1965. New York: Norton, 1966.

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. Poems. New York: Norton, 1971.

Time's Power: Poems. 1985-1988. New York: Norton, 1989.

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. Poems. 1978- 1981. New York: Norton, 1981.

The .M i l. to. Ch^ n g.eur— Eeeme., 1 9 6 8 - 1 970 • New York: Norton, 1971.

Your Native Land. Your Life; Poems. New York: Norton, 1986.

Sexton, Anne. All My Pretty Ones. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

. The Awful Rowing toward God. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.

The Book of Folly. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. 268

The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

. The Death Notebooks. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974 .

Live or Die. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.

Love Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969.

. Transformations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Riverside Editions. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

II. Poets' Interviews and Prose Works

Bulkin, Elly. "An Interview with Adrienne Rich: Pt. I. Conditions 1.1 (1977): 50- 65.

Broumas, Olga. Review of The Dream of a Common Language, by Adrienne Rich. Jane Roberta Cooper, ed. Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Re-Visions. 1951-81. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984. 274-86.

Elytis, Odysseas. "First Things First." Trans. Olga Broumas. American Poetry Review 17.1 (January/ February 1988): 3-12.

Hammond, Karla. "Audre Lorde: Interview." Denver Quarterly 16.2 (Spring 1981): 10-27.

"An Interview with Olga Broumas." Northwest Reveiw 18.3 (1980): 33-44.

Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light. Ithaca, NY : Fireband Books, 1988.

The Cancer Journals. Argyle, NY: Spinsters ink, 1980.

"My Words Will Be There." Mari Evans. Black Women Writers (1959-1980). Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984. 261-68.

. Sister outsider:__Essavs and speeches. Trumansburg, NY; Crossing, 1984. 269

. Zaml: A New Spelling of Mv Name. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1982. — • gistsr.Outside::_ Essays and gpeechea.. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1984.

Miller, Jane. "Angel Fire." American Poetry Review 18.2 (March/April 1989): 19-21.

Rich, Adrienne. Blood. Bread and Poetrv:__Selected Prose 1976-1985. New York: Norton, 1986.

. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1976. — . On . L 1 eS.J■ ■,ge«.ets an d . g 1 le,nee ; gelec.ted P.:ose 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979.

Sexton, Linda Gray and Lois Ames, eds. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

III. Feminist Theory and Critical Studies

Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1979. — . s.e.lf and , genslbllity in C.Q.n.temgxary American Poetry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Barrett, Michelle. "Ideology and the Cultural Production of Gender." Deborah Rosenfelt and Judith Newton, eds. Feminist Criticism and Social Change; Sex. Class and Race in Literature and Culture. New York: Methuen, 1985. 65-85.

Bloom, Harold. "Introduction." American Women Poets. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 1-8.

Bennett, Paula. Mv Life a Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics. Boston: Beacon, 1986.

Cade, Toni. The Black Woman. New York; New American Library, 1970.

Carruth, Hayden. "A Year's Poetry." Rev. of The 270

Black Unicorn, by Audre Lorde (and other books). The Nation 23 December 1978: 712-14.

Carruthers, Mary. "The Re-Vision of the Muse: Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, Olga Broumas." The Hudson Review 36.2: 293-322.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkley: U of California P, 1978.

Christ, Carol. Plying Deep and Surfacing; Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. Boston: Beacon P, 1980 .

Christian, Barbara. "No More Severed Lives: The Theme of Lesbianism in Lorde, Naylor, Shange, Walker." Feminist Issues 5 (Spring 1985): 3-20.

Cixous, Helene. ''The Laugh of the Medusa." Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. In Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New French Feminisms. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1980. 245- 64 .

Combahee River Collective. "A Black Feminist Statement." In Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith. All the Women Are White. All the Men Are Black. But Some of Us Are Brave; Black Women's Studies. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist P, 1982. 13-22.

Cooper, Jane Roberta, ed. Reading Adrienne Rich:__Reviews and Re-Visions. 1951-81. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984.

Daly, Mary. Gvn/Ecologv: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon P, 1978.

De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essavs on Theory. Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

Duncan, Erika. "The Meeting of Two Revolutionaries." Book Forum 3 (1977): 322-29. (Broumas)

Du Plessis, Rachel Blau. "The Critique of Consciousness and Myth in Levertov, Rich, and Rukeyser." Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essavs on Women Poets. Eds. Sandra 271

Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979. 280-300.

Exias-button, Karen. "The Muse as Medusa." The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature. Cathy N . Davidson and E. M. Broner, eds. New York: Frederick Unger, 1980. 193-206.

Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth and Albert Gelpi. Adrienne Rich's Poetrv. New York: Norton, 1975.

George, Diane Hume. Oedipus Anne: The Poetrv of Anne Sexton. Urbana: U of Illinois P, -1987.

Gilbert, Sandra. "On the Edge of the Estate." Rev. of Cheap by Ruth Stone and New York Head Shop and Museum by Audre Lorde. Poetrv 129 (February 1977): 296-301.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in tbQ At-tlg; The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

• MP...MaDJLg-Land.; The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Centurv. Vol. 1. The War of the Words. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar, eds. Shakespeare’s Sisters:__Feminist Essavs on Women Poets. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetryj Black speech and Black Music as Poetic References. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

Herskovits, Melville J . Dahomey; An Ancient West African Kingdom. 2 vols. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1967. Vol. 2.

Homans, Margaret, Women Writers and Poetic Identity. Dorothy Wordsworth. Emilv Bronte, and Emily Dickenson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Hull, Gloria T. and Barbara Smith. "The Politics of Black Women's Studies." All the Women Are White.^11 the Men Are Black. But Some of Us Are Brave. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist P, 1982. xvi i-xxxi i. 272 irigaray. Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian Gill. Ithaca; Cornell UP, 1985.

. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985.

Johnson, Rosemary. "The Woman of Private (But Published) Hungers." Parnassus: Poetrv in Review 8.1 (Fall/Winter 1979): 92-107.

Juhasz, Suzanne. Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetrv bv Women, a New Tradition. New York: Octagon-Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976.

Kolodny, Annette. "A Map for Rereading: Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts." Showalter, New Feminist Criticism 46-62.

Kristeva, Julia. "About Chinese Women." The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.

Kumin, Maxine. "Sexton's The Awful Rowing toward God." To_Make a __Essavs on Poets, Poetrv. and Country Living. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1979. 81-82.

Lauter, Estella. Women as Mvthmakers: Poetrv and Visual Art bv Twentieth-Centurv Women. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Garden City, NJ: Anchor-Doubleday, 1953 .

Martin, Wendy. An American Triptvch: Ann Brad- stre^jL, Emilv Dickinson. Adrienne Rich. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983.

McClatchy, J. D., ed. Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978.

Mlddlebrook, Diane Wood. "Three Mirrors Reflecting Women: Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich." Worlds into Words: Understanding Modern Poems. New York; Norton, 1978, 65-96.

"Becoming Anne Sexton." Denver Quarterly 18.4 (Winter 1984) : 23-34 . 273

"A Poet of Weird Abundance.” Parnassus : Poetrv in Review 12-13 (Spring-Winter 1985): 293-315.

”'I Tapped My Own Head': The Appreticeship of Anne Sexton.” C.omtn.g...tQ Light:__American Women Poets in the Twentieth Centurv. Diane Wood Mlddlebrook and Marilyn Yalom, eds. Ann Arbor, U of Michigan P, 1985.

Molesworth, Charles. The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetrv. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1979.

Ostriker, Alicia. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetrv in America. Boston: Beacon P, 1986.

. Writing Like a Woman. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983.

Pinsky, Robert. The Situation of Poetry. Princeton; Princeton UP, 1976.

Poovey, Mary. "Feminism and Deconstruction." Feminist Studies 14.1 (Spring 1988): 51-65.

Pritchard, William H. "The Anne Sexton Show." Hudson Review 31 (Summer 1978): 387-92.

Showalter, Elaine. "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness." Showalter, New Feminist Criticism 243-70.

Showalter, Elaine, ed. The New Feminist Criticism; Essays on Women. Literature, and Theory. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

Showalter, Elaine and Carol Smith. "A Nurturing Relationship: A Conversation with Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, April 15, 1974." Women's Studies 4.1 (l?7o): 115-36. Rpt. No Evil Star; Selected Essavs. Interviews, and Prose, by Anne Sexton. Ed. Steven E. Colburn. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1985. 158-179.

Stetson, Erlene. Elg.gK. S.lstei; R,

Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essavs on 274

Realltv and the Imagination. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1951.

Vendler, Helen. "Adrienne Rich." Part of Nature^ Part of Us. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. 237-270.

"False Poets and Real Poets." Rev. of New York Head Shoo and Museum by Audre Lorde (and other books). New York Times Book Review 7 September 1975: 6-18.

. The Music of What Happens: Poems. Poets. Critics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988 .