UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Cantatas of the Wild: Memoir, Mysticism, and Modern Feminist Poetry Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8pv9p0mf Author Keith, Melissa Dawn Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Cantatas of the Wild: Memoir, Mysticism, and Modern Feminist Poetry By Melissa Dawn Keith A dissertation submitted in satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Associate Professor Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Chair Associate Professor Julia Bader Associate Professor Natalia Brizuela Fall 2012 Cantatas of the Wild: Memoir, Mysticism, and Modern Feminist Poetry Copyright © 2012 By Melissa Dawn Keith 1 Abstract Cantatas of the Wild: Memoir, Mysticism, and Modern Feminist Poetry By Melissa Dawn Keith Doctor of Philosophy in English Professor Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Chair In this dissertation, the introduction defines the erotic-mystical mode, using the poetry and prose of the five feminist writers that I argue constitute a core poetic movement. Based on their shared understandings of the centrality of this disruptive new paradigm—with important influences from English Romanticism—these poets create both lyric and prose works that position them as major leaders in feminist thought in the seventies. Collapsing conventional binaries, their works offer examples of how to live, on the deepest level, as life-affirming beings, regardless of gender, race, class, or sexuality, on a damaged, yet still vibrant, planet. They never deny difference, embracing all that is living, yet still grounded in faith in possibilities of collective communication. No one style best expresses the erotic mystical mode; yet it occupies a place, in the seventies, I argue, linked with memoir-poems, paving the way for the contemporary surge of women’s memoirs. The first chapter concerns itself with selectively surveying the erotic mystical mode transnationally and across periods, while dipping into recent American examples, creating a kind of ground for the sustained individual author readings of H.D.’s Sea Garden, chapter three, and the poetry of Adrienne Rich, 1951-1984, chapters five and seven. The second chapter tells the stories of how this dissertation is constructed and why this particular methodology. It defines and justifies its hybrid methodology, attaching it to a history of genre-crossing writing by feminist critics. In order to do so, I draw from the fairly recent formation of an innovative, hybrid literary criticism by a vigorous diaspora of scholars, consisting of both second wave and contemporary feminist critics A number of feminist literary critics have written about these four poets in the past three decades. The feminist critical attention, of course, has gone largely to the poet, most famous and most lauded by the literary establishment, Adrienne Rich, whose first published book of verse predates the publications of the other three by at least fifteen years. In chapter one, I discuss a number of critics relevant to this dissertation, figures such as Francine DuPlessis, Susan Friedman, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Wendy Martin, and Jan Montefiore. 2 Their works inspired me to juxtapose creative memoir writing, comprising chapters four and six, with the more traditional chapters of literary criticism, chapters three and five. This personal memoir sprang up in response to years of immersion in the life-altering poetry this dissertation explores and celebrates. i In loving memory of my grandmother, Ida White May (1907-2003) For Stephen Keith, my forever joy and Julia Bader, dearest Professor ii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………. …….1 Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………....…..i Introduction……………………………………...…………………………………………..….iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………...…...xiii Chapter I………………………………………………………………………………………....1 The Erotic Mystical Lyrics of Seventies Feminist Poets: A Movement Towards Nineties Memoirs and Hybrid Literary Critical Forms Chapter II……………………………………………………………………………………….20 Musings of a Mind at One with Her Body Chapter III…………………………………………………………………………………...….35 The Elemental Poetics of H.D.’s Sea Garden Chapter IV……………………………………………………………………………………...78 Daughter- Right Chapter V…………………………………………………………………………………..…107 Towards Erotic Mystical Seventies Poetry (1952-1972): Mapping Adrienne Rich’s Early Verse-Memoir Chapter VI………………………………………………………………………………….…128 Strayaway Child Chapter VII……………………………………………………………………………………145 The Sentient Words of a “half-born” Woman: Adrienne Rich’s Electric Lyrics Endnotes………………………………………………………………………………...……169 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..…………173 iii Poetic Pillars of the Feminist Erotic-Mystical Paradigm: H.D., Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Susan Griffin, and Judy Grahn A life-affirming flood of lyricism burst forth, in the 1970s, in the works of four feminist poets; fortified by political directness, their volcanic lyrics, erupting beyond the confines of the page, represent the vanguard of the second wave’s articulations: whirlwinds of sound, clearing out eloquent passageways to personal and social change. Weapons of truth, these poems demonstrate this radical core’s shared mission to incite ordinary women to communicate the realities of their lives, and, in so doing, break free from stupor, self-forgetfulness, centuries of “mind-forged manacles” (Blake, “London”). Manacles, “heavy as frost” (Wordsworth), muffle even inspiration itself. For an aspiring poetic crusader, the stony blockage of the “valves of her attention” (Dickinson, “303”) results in an unconsciousness made invisible even to her, preventing an untold wealth of creativity from flowing forth. In such a dark time, the momentous necessity of unbolting the mental prisons that deny sharp hunger for connection, and muffle verbal expression, can activate a poet’s personal rage: freeing energy, which functions as a catalyst of collective lyric plotting for language capable of making large public changes beyond the poems themselves. Thus, in light of minimal critical attention having been given to these writers as a cohesive group, my dissertation focuses on Rich, Grahn, Griffin, Lorde, and on H.D., an important influence; my use of a hybrid methodology, which combines conventional literary critical techniques with creative writing (personal memoir excerpts), becomes an integral component of the argument itself. Using this approach, I intend to illustrate how the memoir- like, life-affirming poetics of these seventies poets foretold and helped make feasible the recent, unprecedented surge in women’s memoirs. What makes these poets cohere into a distinct movement of voices, I argue, occurs within each poet’s independent creating of spiritual-sensual meeting places, thereby, collectively building an intertextual erotic mystical ethos and paradigm. My introduction is primarily devoted to defining the meaning of erotic mysticism, mainly through using the ideas and words of the poets themselves. Multiple poetic works burst into print, simultaneously, in 1978; within a short, one-year period, an unprecedented feminist conspiracy of ideas erupts in the publications of the following works, all key to this dissertation’s erotic mystical argument: The Dream of a Common Language (1978) by Adrienne Rich; The Black Unicorn (1978) by Audre Lorde; Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) by Susan Griffin; The Work of A Common Woman (1978) by Judy Grahn. In this dissertation, lyrics from these crowning, second-wave, textual monuments to the innovators’ newly constructed, intensely life-affirming, paradigm show intertextual elements that listen and speak to each other: poets expressing from places of deep attunement with the unsung feminist wild. Above all, my purpose is to demonstrate an erotic- mystical paradigm’s core positioning within the political philosophy and poetry of this closely knit band of writers. Its all-pervasiveness makes it important to grasp its presence for a clearer appreciation of the full import of their works: their mirroring hues and far-reaching implications. Reminiscent of Blake’s “Robin Red breast in a Cage” in “Auguries of Innocence” (431), the sensibilities of these seventies lyricists, un-caged at last, explode into both writing and hearing each other into a new consciousness—an awareness akin at times to Blake’s “Heaven in a Rage” (431): the primary emotion long-taboo for females to express. One of most innovative “strategies for ideological dissidence” (68), to borrow the words of Miranda B. Hickman, used by the poets is the abundant flowering of angry lyrics by women of this decade. Hence, one can find dynamic discontent, among the wide array of emotions, dispersed throughout all the poetic iv works included in my study. Additionally, a significant influence on these four seventies poets’ ideas, Mary Daly— especially through her early philosophy in Beyond God the Father, 1973— goes on, in 1978, to define rage as a “transformative focusing force” (Gyn/Ecology 43); she pronounces wittily that “rage is not a stage” (43), taking aim at critics who dismissed women artists’ discontent as a passing whim. Seeing emotion as a healthy energy, merely a vehicle for moving in the direction of eventual freedom from pain and anger, these poets help women escape from the labels of madness; in their view, rage, then,