Comments on: Women Poets & Mentorship

By: Daisy

Daisy — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:29:22 +0000

I find it very interesting that you mentioned Plath in your blog. I have recently connected Dickinson to Plath in way of influence. As both were confessional poets and both struggled with emotional problems and insecurity, as well as the fight against male dominance in society during their lifetimes. I believe that Dickinson had a large influence on Plath in writing style and in her mentality about writing poetry. Both poets wrote about unusual and unconventional topics as well as confronting death and sexuality; both radical topics for these women to write about during their times. It also seems as though both women write solely for themselves, as if they wished no one else to even ever see their work, their deep confessions of their souls. I would say Emily Dickinson falls more on the “bad” side of influence of Sylvia Plath, although I believe Plath would have followed her same path even if she had not clung so tightly onto the influence of Dickinson.

By: Maggie

Maggie — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 04:39:41 +0000

Annie
I find it really interesting to ‘eavesdrop’ on the opinions and public expressions of taste by highly educated poets on poetry and poets, because I find my tastes and opinions, while very much formed by twenty-five years of intensive reading, have Not been formed in response to what feels expected or intellectual within the poetic community. I would have no problem confessing a great love of many of Millay’s gems or Dickinson’s beauties.

By: Ellen

Ellen — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 19:51:01 +0000

Back again a few days later and typing on a laptop from a hotel in NYC.
I find important Annie’s idea there is less mentoring between women in the 20th century than before. It’s impossible to quantify such a relationship nor count them before the 20th century. So much has been destroyed. So much is never written down. And women didn’t have careers to record such things before the 19th. Yet I feel that women turned to other women — partly they did have low expectations. Outcries like Austen’s are rare and couched in irony.
In the interim I’ve been reading the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann. While two of her more moving poems are to Nelly Sachs (who won the Nobel after all), her relationship with Paul Celan and Max Frisch are cited as the ones that counted. It may be true they helped her get published or connections more than Sachs. And the fame is about her love affairs with them. Her book Malina reinforces that. But the tones of the poems to Sachs are so deeply intinate and full of understanding.
Bachmann is one famous woman poet who was actively heterosexual. Alas she came to a sad end: towards the end self exiled reclusive drinking heavily she burnt to death in a fire of her own making – she failed to put out one of her cigarettes.
Just some thoughts reinforcing and qualifying Annie’s.
Ellen

By: Annie FInch

Annie FInch — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:33:32 +0000

Thomas,
Yes, not true at all of contemporary women poets, as has been said, but does seem to be true of women poets publishing before the mid-20h century. Why? is a very good question.
Feminist theory can shed some light (for example, Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, with its famous first sentence, “is the pen a metaphorical penis?”). In the patriachal view, the male is considered the self-sufficient norm, and the female exists only in relation to the male and as a lesser version of him.
So, when the female is manifestly placed in relation to the male, as when Millay writes poems about being a woman in relation to men, the female ia automatically discounted as lesser than the male-who-has-been-invoked-by-her-poetry, even if he is nameless. Since poets need to be respected as self-sufficient, a woman poet who identifies as a woman in this way can’t, ipso facto, be respected as a poet in this kind of social context.

By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:55:32 +0000

Annie,
My post to you never showed up, so I’m going to try again,
Yes, Elizabeth Barrett was a thousand times more worldly than Emily Dickinson, wrote epics, famous in her time, eloped w/ a major poet, was surrounded by famous people in Florence, etc. Yet Dickinson is a thousand times more popular. Barrett had this invalid/mom domesticated Victorian thing going on, however, and this might be part of the reason she’s not popular. (She is a good poet.)
Perhaps Barrett never recovered from her one iconic love sonnet, and this leads into your statement: “Woman poets known to be actively heterosexual are remarkably absent from the thin ranks of seriously respected women poets today” –which I think is true, Annie!
Dickinson, Moore, Bishop, Plath (writing her last great poems during divorce and before suicide) all fit what you are saying; Millay, a counter-example, is neglected, even snubbed by Hugh Kenner of ‘The Pound Era,’ for instance, the Modernist clique (to which Moore somewhat belonged) was rather sexist, so I think your statement is correct.
It would be fascinating to explore the ‘why’ of your statement…
Anyway, thanks for this thread,
Thomas

By: Ellen Moody

Ellen Moody — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:41:55 +0000

Dear Mary,
There’s a strong tendency to reify and half-invent things like “salons” and close relationships between early modern women for which there is little evidence. A case I investigated was that of Katherine Philips. She is credited witha “salon.” If you look,you find she had a bunch of women and men friends while she lived in London, but there is no evidence for her as a saloniere, which is quite a different thing.
I’ve not read about Sidney in a while, but my reading at the time suggested to me she kept close to her family female and court connections and later in life was not social. She met Lanier but there is no evidence of particular favors; they might know one another’s poetry, but that’s not the same as mentorship. Sidney had a lot to hide, was a rather bitter sort,and they were of a very different class, with disparate status, Mary Sidney high and Emily Lanier not. This counted enormously in this era. Further, Mary Sidney’s poetry is quite different from the Lanier type: Lanier’s imitates Jonson and Daniel in their more Horatian phases or she is a throw back to earlier Renaissance forms; what she does is change the country house landscape poem to feminize it into a poem of friendship and patronage by a woman to a woman. Sidney is highly inventive and is a sonneteer in the woman’s Petrarchan mode (something in and of itself, coming to her from Colonna and others in Italy), but like Stampa (a courtesan from Venice so not with that much to lose when she’s frank), very daring too, explicit about sex as Lanier never is. It was daring of Sidney and I’ve thought shows her need to express herself fully and tell of her life. Her novel is a roman a clef. She got hysterical when it began to circulate and did all she could to stop the novel spreading because of the early reactions to it.
In a way too much talk about mentorship doesn’t help women either. We lose what makes them different.
I mentioned the denigration and even hatred of Bluestockings and how ridicule of women in groups and the organization of society works against women mentorship in my first. Well, a story about a young woman who won a high scholarship at Oxford demonstrates my point:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article5818247.ece
The reaction to Gail Trimble in the words of the Times online article… ’swung wildly between gross sexual insults and gross sexual invitations.’ The article links this back to the bluestockings and the long history of prejudice and discrimination against educated and intelligent women. Do you think this young woman will seek a woman mentor? Well, today she appears in the Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/4887275/University-Challenge-winner-Gail-Trimble-to-marry.html
a story I think deliberately inserted by friends, where she looks prettier, though still wearing glasses and without make-up (gasp!) and we are told she’s engaged to be married. So you see she’s all right after all.
Ellen

By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:25:18 +0000

Ellen, thanks for your posts. Wasn’t Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, a mentor for Amelia Lanier? I think Sidney was the first woman poet published in England, and was a mentor for several women writers, as well as a muse and supporter for male poets, such as Spenser. My understanding is that Mary Sidney founded Wilton Circle, one of the most important literary coteries.

By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:52:56 +0000

Lemon and Nick, Sorry, to clarify, when I made that remark I was caught up in the discussion about literary history, and I meant “canonical” women poets–obviously, the situation is very different for contemporary women poets, as this book, for one thing, makes clear!!! I’d be very interested to see if anyone comea up with a list of “seriously respected” women meeting that description who were publishing before, say, 1960. Sorry for the confusion.

By: Ellen Moody

Ellen Moody — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:27:27 +0000

IN response again,
The word is problematic, e.g.,
I don’t see how one can exclude the official teaching relationship. Unofficial teaching is central to mentorship of an interactive face-to-face, phoning and letters kind. Mentor was Telemachus’s tutor.
He also replaced Odysseus while Odysseus was gone away to Troy and wandering about the seas. So it was in part a father-son relationship. My own experience, what I’ve read and seen tells me the analogous mother-daughter one is far more fraught.
I’d like to exclude patronesses unless they were deeply congenial to the writer. So I don’t know if Amelia Lanier’s patroness (to whom she wrote the beautiful country-house landscape poem that has come down to us) was congenial, encouraging. I assume so, but one can pretend and flatter. However, it’s probably wrong to exclude patronesses since obviously one of the modern ways one mentors (as the word is understood today) is to help forward someone’s career.
I myself think of reading another women’s work deeply as being mentored by her. But that is actually vague, sort of hard to prove, and unless the woman is on record saying that such a reading relationship was of immense intense importance to her (as some women are), we will perhaps assert a relationship that wasn’t there. Rivalry is probably not mentorship most of the time, but it can function that way: to spur on through emulation.
Turning to earlier women (pre-10th century): the forms of proof are poems (friendship, in imitation, in admiration), letters and what’s said in them, biographies, documents which may record the two lived together or wrote (the letters not having survived). In each case it takes looking into the case carefully for (as Greer said) women’s writing far from being saved, was often destroyed, regarded as biodegradable. The analogy is here is telling if a woman had a career since the outward appearance of a woman’s career before and including the 20th century looks quite different from a man’s.
Ellen

By: nick

nick — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 03:06:23 +0000

even sticking to the most conservative definition of “seriously respected”, and sticking to Americas, in 30 seconds I get
Jorie Graham
Louise Gluck
Alice Notley
Lyn Hejinian
CD Wright
Anne Waldman
Susan Howe
Annie, you must be trying to make some more specific or nuanced point?–taken literally, your claim seems outlandish….