Alexs Pate, David Mura, Maxine Kumin, Annie Finch
Stonecoast 2009, photo by Suzy Colt

Bowdoin college campus. Cool perfect Maine summer night. The warm wake of a great reading—a strong and vivid event, Maxine Kumin and David Mura, each introduced with heart and thought by a Stonecoast student, and each reaching a powerful and somehow a shared place. Everyone else finally gone from the hall after the signings and the hugs and the photos, Max, her assistant Suzy, and I trail quietly up the staircase to the front lobby. I watch Max’s cane tapping repeatedly on the bricks of the steps as I slow my pace behind her. In the unaccustomed time I wonder for a moment why there are brick stairs inside, and first decide I don’t like them, and then that I do, and then we are at the top and Suzy says “we make a right up here.” “Hmmm,” I think, mostly just filling the wealth of time, “it doesn’t look like a turn to me,” but I don’t bother to say anything. Max, of course, does. “It looks like it goes straight to me,” she says. “Well, there was a small turn,” says Suzy. “A fork,” says Max, as we traverse the narrow corridor to the front door. “Two roads diverged in a narrow wood,” she says; “no, in a yellow wood.” “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both, and be one traveler, long I stood . . .” “ She always rambles like this,” says Suzy, a retired lawyer and horse-tender. I swallow a taste of shock. “It’s not rambling, it’s Frost.”

Undaunted, of course, Max goes on, as we approach the inner glass door (in Maine doors often come in twos), open it, and pass through a small dusky vestibule smelling of new rubber matting to the outer door. . . “and be one traveler, long I stood, and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth” . . . We walk through the door, I bending down close so as not to miss a word. We come through, at last, out onto the path under the dark waiting trees in all their height and night, “then took the other, as just as fair, and having perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear; though as for that the traveling there had…oh no, now I’m losing it.” “Passing,” I say.” “Passing? Oh, passing. Yes, that’s it. Though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same. . .”

We have all stopped on the path now, under the trees, a few summer students passing dark in the distance. Max had read a poem about Frost during her reading, prefacing it with an anecdote (“I am old enough to have met Frost… he said, “you call yourselves poets?” and everyone scattered . . .those of us who were left sat at his feet. . . he told us to look up at the audience, to pause between poems, to say something about the next one. He said, “make every poem your last.””) “I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence,” she begins; “Yet knowing how way leads on to way,” I offer; she begins, I offer, we reject. There’s something else that comes before that. “We’ll both have to look it up,” she says. “Yes. We can recite it tomorrow,” I answer.

We say good night and, offering final thanks and congratulations, I walk down through the night and come to a monument I have passed by quickly before. This time I stop. For the war dead—World War II, Korea, Vietnam—has been carved a stanza from Longfellow’s “Arsenal at Springfield: “I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus, the cries of agony, the endless groan, which, through the ages that have gone before us, in long reverberations reach our own.” I sit there a while, then return to my hotel and Google the Frost poem to come up with the missing three lines. The next day, Max has them too. But for her they came back on their own, as she lay in her bed remembering.

Years ago, I wrote the following story about the Muse:

. . .How did I come to think, as a young child who wanted to be a poet, that I had no Muse? The story rides on the kind of convoluted misunderstandings to which children are prone, yet in another sense its logic is impeccable. As far as I can reconstruct it, my reasoning used to go like this:

1. “A woman who concerns herself with poetry should . . . be a silent Muse and inspire the poets by her womanly presence,” wrote Robert Graves. I read this famous statement often enough, stated directly or indirectly, to absorb the idea that not only must Muses of course be female, but, more importantly for me, females must, presumably, be Muses.

2. Men, at least the men in my childhood Bible, Oscar Williams’ Immortal Poems of the English Language, address poems to women Muses. And they also address poems to women whose sexuality they desire or fear or admire. Therefore, according to my reasoning, male poets must have a heterosexual relationship with their Muses akin to the one they have with those other women who appear in their poems, Stella or Laura or Julia or Chloris or the Coy Mistress.

3. And therefore, the Muse must be a heterosexual, man-identified woman. Why should she be interested in women poets then? As feminist critics Gilbert and Gubar finally put it, years later, “is the pen a metaphorical penis?” No wonder the Muse was always hanging around male poets!

After I grew up and realized the Muse was still with me, I tried to find out more about this part of me that gave me poetry. The obvious turnabout was to look for a male muse. In Jungian therapy I uncovered my animus. Growing and writing and learning, I found the male side of myself, had long conversations with him, grew to love him. But though eventually I found him in many good forms—characters in my dreams, the wise man, Pan, the Green Man—he wasn’t where my poetic inspiration came from, but felt far from the place that is called, in Kundalini, “the empty-womb space where creation occurs.”

Inspired in part by my parents’ shared interest in the Goddess (they both took a class with the wonderful scholar Merlin Stone in the 1980s), by the Goddess movement in San Franciso where I was living, and by my interests in anthropology and feminism, I began to muse about and write poems about various goddesses, including Spider Woman, Aphrodite, Inanna, Coatlique, and others, for my book Eve. I forgot about the Muse for a while. . . until one day when I was reading The Muse Strikes Back, Katherine McAlpine and Gail White’s anthology of the poems women have written in response to male poets over the centuries. There suddenly I found her shimmering among all those challenges to the male appropriation of creative literary power. I found the Muse in the seam that links the voices and the answering voices of Meleager and H.D., Homer and Margaret Atwood, John Donne and Mary Holtby, Jonathan Swift and Louise Bogan. I could hear how fundamentally the halves of those dialogues were linked, and it was at last utterly clear to me that the same force had been inspiring the women and the men through all those centuries. The Muse’s voice is strong in the women’s poems. I recognize her tone.

Harriet commenter Terreson tells me that legend says Sappho was walking on the beach when Orpheus’ severed head washed up near her—still singing, inspiring her to be a poet and found her school. They sang to the same Muse. I’ve been calling her the Goddess. To paraphrase Ntozake Shange, “I found the Muse in myself. And I loved Her fiercely.”

But not only is my Muse my Goddess; my Goddess is my Muse. I began to understand this when I wrote he title essay to The Body of Poetry. Living with, and meditating on, the idea of the Goddess as immanent spriritual force brought together ideas I thought had been separate, from sentimentism to the postmodern poetess to metrical diversity to multiformalism (and just last week, in an interview with Tom Cable for the Robert Fitzgerald Award ceremony at the West Chester Poetry Conference, I understood how the metrical code is part of the same overall approach). Still, though, the spiritual aspect of my Goddess occupied one part of me, while my Muse, even though I thought of her in a similar way, was confined to artistic realms. It is only very recently—perhaps only tonight, as I write this final post for Harriet— that I realize that the truth is more demanding. My Goddess is my Muse, there’s no hiding from her, and she wants me to write poems.

As it turns out, the earliest poems ever known to have been written down were about the goddess Inanna, by her priestess Enheduanna. Diane Wolkstein collected these poems and assembled them into a remarkable epic story, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth (the basis for Alice Notley’s epic The Descent of Inanna.) Reading this book feels like standing in the Museum of Heraklion in Crete (home of the famed Ring of Minos, as far as I know the only place on earth where one can be surrounded by many rooms of artifacts not created under patriarchy, or matriarchy for that matter, but under the system of female-led equal partnership between the sexes that Riane Eisler in her book The Chalice and the Blade calls gylandry. It is mind-blowingly different, in terms of gender dynamics and entire outlook, than anything created in the West in the last four thousand years. One of my favorite passages from the epic is the wildly erotic love dialogue between Inanna and her husband Dumuzi (scroll down a bit to get to the good parts).

It may seem that there is not much blatantly goddess-oriented poetry in the world, but because the goddess’s nature is not to transcend the world but to inhabit it, actually the goddess has a way of appearing everywhere in poetry. Like the sound of a meter with which one has been unfamiliar until recently, she may be hard to recognize at first, and you may think she’s not there, but once you get to know her and get in the habit of noticing, you’ll find her everywhere and in all kinds of poets. Hopkins’ “Binsey Poplars,” Crane’s “Proem,” Spenser, and early Yeats are infused with it, not to mention many ancient poets, and mystical and rhapsodic poets of all traditions from Rumi to Elytis.

And the goddess can be found everywhere nowadays, from the candles section of Wal-Mart to the remarkable hints pages of Women’s World magazine at the supermarket. I have been meeting with a group started by some young mothers in my neighborhood, one of a huge growing worldwide movement based on Sharon McCarlane’s book The Grandmothers Speak. What strikes me about this group is that it is not explicitly pagan or goddess-worshipping or shamanic in the sense of the various groups and people I’ve learned from for decades now. Instead, this new movement is extraordinarily simple, inclusive of any spiritual or healing path, so that one woman shares a peace pipe ceremony in which she was initiated by Native American elders, another talks about herbs, another about new ideas of Jesus, another about Mayan prophecy, another about minerals, and yet all of them are on some level talking about the Goddess in the simplest way: as female energy. The Grandmothers message for July says,

“We, the Great Council of the Grandmothers, are calling you to work with us in order to return your planet to balance. We are calling women to step into the power of the great yin and we are calling men to support them as they do this. All life on earth will benefit from the work we will do together. . .We have told you many times that for the world to return to balance, women must lead. It can be no other way. The earth must once be filled again with the energy of yin that is presently dangerously depleted. And to this end we have come to empower women and confirm men.”

Married to an environmentalist, I think about the current state of the planet often. A fundamental shift is taking place, very quickly, in the way all of us think about our earth and other people and creatures. This can lead to backlash and fear, but the overall movement is unmistakable. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. In spiritual terms, we can see the movement towards self-determination and civil rights, on the part of all creatures and people, as the goddess in action: the honoring of immanent power. How could poetry not reflect all of this? The next time I go to the Grandmothers Speak group, I will talk about the Muse.

PS I am looking forward to a trip into wolf-dens with a biologist in Montana this fall to begin a poetry project about <a href=” wolves“>wolves (an animal long associated with the goddess). Wolves are under attack and you can help them <a href=” wolves“>here. Thank you dear Harrietteers for a wonderful visit here!

One about the challenge and delight of writing poems celebrating my husband and particularly his body without objectifying him, and whether or not objectification is such a bad thing, and how I feel about the plethora of poems by men that mention women in passing as if it is inadvertent. One (related?) about how I can’t figure out how to write about children once they can talk, so whenever mine are at one of my readings, I keep reading poems about when they were nursing infants ( I spent, I recently calculated, four years nursing the two of them, and it made for some good poetry-writing time).

One about two talented and interesting young poets from UT Austin I met at the West Chester Poetry Conference, Jill Essbaum and Jessica Piazza, who are excited about rhyme and meter, respectively, and in new ways. One in profound appreciation of Edmund Spenser. One about rapturous contemporary poets such as Margo Berdeshevsky and Oleana Kalytiak Davis, and their roots and branches. One about why there is so much wonderful modern Greek poetry. One called “Flowers for Algernon,” that began with an anecdote about Charles Bernstein and myself both owning the complete Swinburne, an anecdote posted for five minutes on a thread here before I took it down, so that I think only Don Share saw it.

One about the experience of putting together the Multiformalisms anthology I recently edited with Susan Schultz and how the formalism/language poetry are not at all the opposed forces people imagine they are but are practically in cahoots. One about lyric, tracing the contrast between the historical, contextualized attitude of scholars like Virginia Jackson, author of a great book Don recommended to me called Dickinson’s Misery, with Jonathan Culler’s call for a renewed appreciation for pure lyric in an essay in a recent PMLA.

One about Patricia Monaghan’s descriptions of the role of the bard in the Celtic tradition. One about our convention of writing from left to right and up to down and what that says and does about poetry. One about Japanese languge and metaphor, and one about Japanese language and dactyls. One about my visit to Robert Bly’s Great Mother poetry conference and how the cult of personality affects poetry. One about epic, from the Kalevala to Notley. One about Donald Green, who sold me a handwritten book of his poetry from a card table on lower Fifth Avenue as I walked home from an Academy of American Poets event (I have spoken about this for a podcast about Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, here).

One called “Time and Detail” about home decorating and poetry, how in each of them, detail is the trace both of love and of time spent. One about amphibrachs, following up on an earlier essay. One about how I adored translating Louise Labe’s poetry but could not make myself translate the women troubadours. One about the year I spent reading versification texts and what weird books they are. One comparing koans and kennings. One about the meaning of “craft.”

One on the tragedy of the ambitious Renaissance poet Amelia Lanier, who was only brought to light in the 1970s because someone thought she was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, and how immensely productive she was only during the one brief period when she had a (female) patron. One about verse drama and opera.

There are posts for summer solstice or Beltane, or both, and one called “On Being a Holy Fool: Good Fences” about how boundaries in poetry and life encourage rhapsody. And there’s one on how blogging at Harriet has been so enjoyable, with a tribute to the energy and erudition of the commenters and a gratitude for how this site has provided such a safe and exciting place to change and grow as a poet. But this is that post. Thank you.

And this is also a promised post about some wonderful books of poetry in translation that have crossed my desk recently—Fady Jouhah’s translation from the Arabic of the great Mahmoud Darwish; Susan Stewart’s translation from the Italian of Alda Merini; Juri Talvet and H.L. Hix’s translation of the most important poet in Estonian, the nineteenth-century poet Juhan Liiv, who wrote:

HOME
What made me glad at home,
What made me sad at home:
I don’t know, I don’t understand—
My mother loved me.

What made me glad at home,
What made me sad at home,
Made me sad, made me glad:
My mother loved me.

Father’s day came and went, and I’ve been wanting to say something about my dad, and all my poetic fathers, after all the talk about mothers. I want to thank my dad for a lot of things. For reading “The Night Before Christmas” aloud every year until I got addicted to triple meters. For telling me women couldn’t write epic so obnoxiously that I had to write one. For bombarding me with so many books about Dickinson that I ended up writing an essay called “My Father Dickinson.” For dragging me to Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska’s house where I was more-or-less inoculated against poetry gossip and exposed to the first library I ever saw that was entirely poetry. For taking me to Assissi and Lourdes and Delphi and Santa Sophia and Jerusalem. For typing out one of my earlyish poems on his old Royal typewriter that smelled of oil so that he could appreciate it better. For having an old Royal typewriter that smelled of oil, and keeping his thousands of draft manuscript sheets about Wittgenstein in neat stacks, and typing again on their backs. For his desk drawers (but I have written about those elsewhere).

For all the fathers he, in turn, gave me: For showing me D.H. Lawrence’s house and Shakespeare’s birthplace. For talking the merits of Eliot vs. Stevens or Stevens vs. Crane or Crane vs. Yeats over decades worth of cups of coffee. For his library shelves dripping with yards of Blake and Valery and D.H. Lawrence and Dogen. For intoning Hart Crane’s “Voyages: II” in tones I can never forget. For xeroxing an entire out-of-print book of Paul Engle’s poetry, cutting and pasting each page to fit the pages of an artist’s blank book, and mailing it to me just after I moved near Iowa City. For listening to LP records of actors reciting Vaughan and Crashaw and Traherne on the couch with his eyes closed for hours, especially in the months before his death, and for thinking a lot about Milton in the weeks before.

For telling me that e.e. cummings had been a very nice and ordinary seeming gentleman when he drove him home once from some event. For having once sat across from Thomas Mann on a train. For tracking down for me every obscure prosody volume I ever needed, even in the days before the internet. For mentioning “Lydia Sigourney, the Sweet Singer of Hartford” so often that I got curious. For saying John Ashbery should “just spit it out in Daddy’s hand.” For going to the Auden lectures where he met my mother.

For finally publishing his book of poetry, Flying Over Ocean City, just in time to see it on his deathbed. For including in it poems about balloons and philosophers, and one that opened, “Athena’s owls are little and friendly / and wise because they’ve made peace with the night.” For looking at a copy of my first chapbook around the same time, and telling me, “These are real poems, so I know people will look after you. I won’t worry about you. You’ll be allright.”

But the fact is, this book of free verse was laced generously with lines and passages in meter. This is not uncommon; probably about half the free verse readings I hear are full of meter. After reading and scanning metrical poetry for so many years—about 30 years now—when I am confronted with meter, I hear and notice its rhythmic pattern—in short, I scan it. It would be nice to be able to turn off this capacity when I’m at a free verse reading, since noticing the intermittent metrical patterns can distract me from the meaning of the words. But at this point—it really kicked in after I had spent some months scanning all of Leaves of Grass (which has a lot of meter mixed into the free verse) and all of Dickinson for a book on the metrical code, The Ghost of Meter– it has become impossible for me to stop.

It’s as if I have four ears: a set of language ears and a set of meter ears. When I am listening to prose or to free verse, there’s no problem. My meter ears take a rest, and I use my language ears, paying attention primarily to the words in sentences: their meaning, emotional connotations, imagery, tone, and so on. And when I am listening to metrical poetry, there’s no problem either; all four ears get working at the same time. As the language ears and the meter ears listen together, as if in stereo, I notice both the meaning of the language and its rhythm, savoring both the symmetry and the variations and more-or-less skillful counterpointing between them.

It’s when poems go back and forth, shifting between bits of meter and bits of free verse, that the curse of the metrical code kicks in. During a reading, such moments wreak havoc with my meter-ears and my prose ears; I move back and forth between them and keep missing bits of the poem’s meaning while trying to get a groove going. And while I’m at it, I notice the times when the meter and the meaning seem to be commenting on each other. That’s really what I can’t help noticing. It’s a very odd feeling, like a hall of mirrors in the brain…..

It happened today in three poems I came across, by Kay Ryan, Robert Hass, and Kevin Young. They were all iambic pentameters, single ones in the middle of free-verse poems, and the meanings of those particular lines were all very hall-of-mirrorsy. I jotted them down; I couldn’t help it. If I ever do find that piece of paper, I’ll add them here.

Labor Day march across the Mackinac Bridge

A poetic measure can mean so many things to different poets. The dactylic measure, for example, evoked serious Homeric epic for Virgil’s Aeneid and Longfellow’s Evangeline, but a more satirical epic quality for Carolyn Kizer’s Pro Femina. Here’s a smaller-scale yet equally meaningful kind of epic heroism commemorated by Genevieve Taggard:

“At Last the Women Are Moving,” Genevieve Taggard (1935)

Last, walking with stiff legs as if they carried bundles,
Came mothers, housewives, old women who knew why they abhorred war.
Their clothes bunched about them, they hobbled with anxious steps
To keep with the stride of the marchers, erect bearing wide banners.

Such women looked odd, marching on American asphalt.
Kitchens they knew, sinks, suds, stew-pots and pennies…
Dull hurry and worry, clatter, wet hands and backache.
Here they were out in the glare on the militant march.

How did these timid, the slaves of breakfast and supper
Get out in the line, drop for once dish-rag and broom?
Here they are as work-worn as stitchers and fitters.
Mama have you got some grub, now none of their business.

Oh, but those who know in their growing sons and their husbands
How the exhausted body needs sleep, how often needs food,
These, whose business is keeping the body alive,
These are ready, if you talk their language, to strike.

Kitchen is small, the family story is sad.
Out of the musty flats the women come thinking:
Not for me and mine only. For my class I have come
To walk city miles with many, my will in our work.

Taggard’s dactylic meter is rougher and more awkward than, say, Longfellow’s, perhaps in solidarity with the “stiff legs” of the women she writes about. She intersperses many trochees with the dactyls, and she varies the rhythm with running starts (“came,” “there,” “Oh but,” ) antibacchics (“clothes bunched a,” “stiff legs as,” “line drop for”), cretics (“housewives, old,” “bearing wide”), one-syllable feet followed by a rest (“Last,” “(e)rect,” “once,” “odd,” “sinks,” “suds”), and first paeans (“Mama have you,” “ready if you”).

As can be heard in this audio clip (which I think may be the first audio to be posted on Harriet–thanks Travis for figuring out how to do it!), throughout the poem the dactylic rhythm becomes increasingly sure and powerful, running over obstacles and rough places. Though the first stanza takes some time getting going, “hobbling with anxious steps” before it “keeps with the strides of the marchers,” this meter comes out of its classical past to inspire this poem with great energy, carrying both the force and the compassion of Taggard’s beliefs and personality.

My Sister-in-Law, Sister, Niece, and Me in My Mother’s Kitchen

Anna Leahy reminds us, in her recent essay “Is Women’s Poetry Passé?” in Legacy, that “in the January 2006 issue of Poetry, the three female poets who had been asked to comment on “women’s poetry” (Meghan O’Rourke, J. Allyn Rosser, and Eleanor Wilner) asserted, “we all concur that we ought to abolish the unpleasant term ‘women’s poetry.” And in the ensuing few years, consensus on this point seems, if anything, to have become wider. Even I, who claimed for myself the name of “poetess” in a 2002 essay, found myself beginning a paragraph in my recent Women’s Work post on Harriet with the caveat that “there may not be such a thing as women’s poetry. . .”

But the more I have thought about it since writing that post, the more I have decided that, whether or not women’s poetry exists, I am a woman poet, for three reasons:

1. First, being a woman poet helps me write the way I want to write. I like to write about mothers, daughters, female ancestors, and their lives and lore. I like to write about babies, birth, and breastfeeding. I like to write about nature, food, and spiritual life in ways that can feel female; for example, I learned this week that women have much better senses of smell than men and that women’s voices help plants grow significantly faster than men’s. These sorts of new truths make me wonder how such things affect poetry by women and more importantly, they give me the kind of deep curiosity that leads to poems. Women’s stories and experiences have been missing from so much of our cultural history; Judy Chicago, in her monumental feminist installation The Dinner Party, which I took my daughter to see recently, conveys this brutal lack of access to information about women by making it frustratingly difficult to see the gorgeously intricate patterns and embroiderery on the backs of each of the table runners commemorating the female guests of honor. Now at the earliest dawn of female recovery—a time when, in certain parts of the planet, it is just finally beginning to be possible to imagine a world in which women’s experience is valued equally with men’s—I feel lucky to be born a poet into a gender that brings with it so much experience that needs urgently to be expressed. To be a woman poet gives me access to a pomegranate, a cornucopia, of inspirations crying to be articulated through more than just my one lifetime. Whether I am writing about a female experience or about a female perception of a “universal” experience, if I start out from the position of a woman poet, it leaves more room within each poem to explore being a woman; there is that much less I need to establish for the reader at the outset.

And the way I want to write involves not only theme and subject matter but also form, style, poetics. My poetics involve incantation and repetition that grew directly out of my experiences of participation in women-led, earth-centered spiritual groups. Also, the meaning of literary traditions changes when I respond to them as a woman poet. Were I a male poet, for example, I imagine that I would not be nearly so interested, or at least would be interested in a different way, in the complexities of poetic form and meter. The fact that women have worked less than men in the range of traditional English meters makes these patterns especially intriguing to me as a woman; at the least, it has given me a fresh angle of approach towards the traditionally male field of prosody (and, going full circle from the male prosodists who were my own teachers, one that seems to be of fresh value to some male poets and prosodists as well).

2. Being a woman poet connects me consciously with a literary tradition of other women poets. As described above, I find myself writing about themes that women poets wrote about for centuries, and sometimes in subtly similar ways to the ways that they wrote about those things for centuries (for the curious, some of my thoughts about the aesthetics of the “poetesses” are summarized here). When undertaking an endeavor, it is helpful to have an accurate idea of who else has undertaken it and how they have fared, so this connection with tradition is one of the most obvious practical benefits of deciding to be a woman poet. As I have grown to know myself better as a woman poet, that self-knowledge has also spared me some real-life pain; for example, if an editor admires my poetry overall but finds fault with some aspect of it that seems essential to the fact that I am a woman poet (for example, suggesting my poems would be better with “bigger” themes or a “harder, rougher” tone (yes, both of these things have happened)), rather than beat myself up trying fruitlessly to change something integral to my work and meaningful within the traditions of women’s poetry, now I can seek out those editors, female and male, who are used to understanding and appreciating poetry by women poets, and can trust them for a more informed reaction to these types of poems.

3. Being a woman poet connects me with a literary future that I am excited about. And again, since literary traditions far outlast the tastes of any particular literary moment, this gives me a certain respite from the currencies of literary taste, as if I held onto an anchor of self-awareness in a sometimes difficult sea. Leahy, for example, quotes Sue Miller to the effect that “Women . . . are rewarded today not for writing as women traditionally have, but for writing as men have,” and suggests that the most highly-praised books by women may be those “in which so-called male subject matter—cultural clashes, war, anger—overcame female authorship.” [Please note: this is not to fall into the trap of essentialism; Miller is not saying women shouldn’t write about these things: clearly, many women are inspired to write about these topics and write very well about them. Miller simply means that the books that do take on these topics (or ones in which the authors take on familiar female roles such as the vamp or the mommy—also evident in creative nonfiction, as articulated in Anne Trubek’s essay “Where Are the Queens of Nonfiction”)—may be likelier to succeed in the current climate.] As a “woman poet,” I am free and even justified in maintaining a longterm view.

I realize that my decision to be a woman poet is a rather idiosyncratic choice. No doubt it is influenced partly by the fact that my mother is a poet too (see my Mother’s Day post). The women’s poetic tradition is a living reality for me. I don’t expect other women poets to do the same, nor do I question the importance for many women poets, such as those who opened this article, of trying to get rid of the term “women’s poetry.” I am simply speaking for myself, describing how it feels for me to have decided to be a woman poet.

Richard Epstein, commenting on Eratosphere on my Poetic Justice post, writes, “When I see forums devoted to poems by and about women or by and about people of color or by and about gay poets, my reaction is always pretty much the same: How would you feel if you encountered a forum called Poems by Men, White Poets, or Heterosexual Poets?” Epstein’s post makes clear that he expects such a forum would inspire “indignation” on the part of someone like me, for example, who has started a listserv for the discussion of women’s poetry). But in fact, I would feel exactly the opposite. I would be ecstatic to see anthologies, forums, and panels devoted to “men’s poetry.” It would signal to me that men had become conscious that maleness is a gender and can influence men’s poetic choices and voices.

One of the most exciting literary-critical thrills I have had recently came from an experience just like that. I was outside reader for a senior thesis at Middlebury College about the use of mythology in women’s poetry. Among the excellent feminist readings of poems by Sexton, Bogan, Plath, and many others, what knocked my socks off most of all was a brilliant “masculinist” reading of Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something” in terms of the male tradition of writing about the Narcissus myth. When this kind of reading is no longer shockingly new, that may be the time I will be ready to stop thinking of myself as a woman poet. When white poetry, male poetry, and heterosexual poetry are understood to be the poetries of specific kinds of people and not of the universal Poet, then all poems will have a good chance of being appreciated for what they are—poems by specific kinds of people. When my privileged status in terms of race (Anglo-Celtic), class (upper middle), and sexuality (hetero) is just as obvious and visible a classification as my gender status, that may be the right time to stop thinking of myself as a woman poet. At that point all of us will, I expect, be more tolerant of poetry built on unfamiliar assumptions; more curious to learn about the variety of poetic traditions in which poems operate, and more literate in the varieties of possible poetic excellence.

In deciding to be a woman poet, I know that I risk oversimplifying myself and my traditions. To reduce the staggering variety of women’s poetry to the “women’s poetic tradition” is just as absurd as reducing the staggering variety of men’s poetry to the “men’s poetic tradition.” It is absurd. Utterly absurd. But right now I prefer it to the alternatives: it feels as if it gives me more room to move.

“Go ahead, tell us about the dactyls and the anapests, we can handle it.”

“Thanks—thought I’d go for the Clara Bow look.”

“So I said to Madeleine Albright, “good job in Lithuania.””

“That’s it! It’s just a more well-groomed crowd than most poets.”

“I could tell you were in love! You look great!”

“I’ve read every word Tom Disch ever wrote, except for some of his reviews.”

“I call it the Single-Syllable Shout Method of teaching prosody.”

“I was commissioned to do a commemorative sculpture. It’s on Commonwealth Avenue.”

“The prosody award is what I try never to miss. That’s where I really learn something.”

“So, what do you think of Der Rosenkavalier?”

“It only has seven syllables, but it’s an iambic pentameter.”

“Will men be able to contribute to the women’s poetry timeline?”

“There are a lot of new urbanists in the new conservatism.”

“Gotta go fiddle—they’re getting out the instruments.”

“Richard Wilbur is so incredibly humble.”

“It’s kind of in scattered couplets.”

“Is there dancing later?”

Travis’s post and recent events call me to describe something I’ve been wanting to post about for a while. One of the most moving evenings I’ve had as an American poet occurred in Farsi. It was at the house of close friends born in Iran, who had asked me to join a circle of Iranian-born Mainers who get together once a month simply to appreciate and read and enjoy poetry together.

The night I was there, the focus of the evening was on the work of Forugh Farrokhzād, a beloved Iranian poet. Slides of her life were shown, and we read aloud some of her poems. I was asked to read one of her poems in translation and one of my own. The people in the group were so welcoming and absorbed the poems so deeply, some of them in tears at hearing my poem, that I was overwhelmed in return. None of these people would call themselves poets (though there was one novelist and one translator among them): they were readers and lovers of poetry who work in a great variety of professions from nurse to business executive.

We went around the circle, everyone sharing a poem, more often than not evoking tears and laughter in response. The audience was entirely engaged, and so was I. I have been in many countries where poetry is clearly loved and respected to a degree unknown in the U.S., but this evening was of another order still. Perhaps it was the added bittersweet emphasis of exile, perhaps the deep importance of poetry to Persian culture in particular Once in a while, during a break in the action, someone would kindly translate a snippet for me. But it hardly mattered. I was rapt. During one of these interludes, my translator, a nurse, said to me, “In the U.S., if a person is under stress, they are told to sit in a room and meditate. In our culture, they are told to read poetry.”

At the end of the evening, drums and tambourines were brought out and the poetry changed into song. After many hours, I went home deeply moved at the power of poetry to bring people together and to touch us into a place of common humanity. Though I could barely understand a word of what that happened that evening, the evening honestly brought me more joy and a deeper understanding of poetry than many of the evenings I’ve spent devoted to poetry in English. To be among a group of non-poets who have come together voluntarily so that they can literally laugh and cry over poems is a truly humbling experience for a poet.

I was not surprised when, recently, I read in Meg Bogin’s book The Women Troubadours that were it not for Persian poetry, English poetry would have no rhyme; the gift of rhyme came to us from Iran by way of the troubadour poets, through North Africa and into southern Europe. I will never be surprised again by anything I learn about the importance of poetry in Persian culture.

Poem by: Forugh Farrokhzad
Translated by: Sholeh Wolpé

Sky
The Wind will Blow Us Away

Inside my little night, alas,
the wind has a rendezvous with the leaves;
inside my little night, there is fear
and dread of desolation.

Listen.
Hear the darkness blow like wind?
I watch this prosperity through alien eyes.
I am addicted to my despair.
Listen.
Hear the darkness blow?

This minute, inside this night,
something’s coming to pass. The moon
is troubled and red; clouds
are a procession of mourners waiting
to release tears upon this rooftop,
this rooftop about to crumble, to give way.

A moment,
then, nothing.

Beyond this window, the night quivers,
and the earth once again halts its spin.
From beyond this window, the eyes
of the unknown are on you and me.

May you be green, head to toe—
put your hands like a fevered memory in mine…
these hands that love you.

And cede your lips
like a life-warmed feeling
to the caress of my lovesick lips.

The wind will one day blow us away.
The wind will blow us away.

From Sin–Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, translated by Sholeh Wolpe

The collection aims to put into practice Schlegel’s contention that “all poetry should be romantic,” including a great range of writing that would not heretofore have been thought of as “poetry,” let alone as “Romantic.” From prose by Erasmus Darwin and the Marqius de Sade to Lear’s limericks, the selections are, naturally, delightfully eclectic, and graced by extensive commentary. The entire collection is infused with a quality of strangeness, offness, askewness, that is as appealing and habit-forming as it is pervasive. Poems for the Millenium 3 is not just a book about romanticism; it gives us, to some extent, romanticism in action.

I spoke with coeditor Jeffrey Robinson at length about the anthology over lunch, soon after it came out, the day after a panel hosted by the CUNY Poetics group at their Graduate Center in a former department store on Fifth Avenue. Jeffrey corroborated my sense that this anthology is proving of widespread importance to poets in a way that anthologies of the poetry of previous centuries are usually not. Something about this claiming of the nineteenth-century roots of contemporary experimental practice has been engaging exploratory poets (he named Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, Julie Carr, and Elizabeth Robinson as examples) on an emotional level. Robinson attributes this to the fact that the book is like a map or a web, creating multiple connections among the texts involved so that when you do choose to look down into a single poem deeply, it creates a very different experience than an isolated reading.

Even the book’s organization is creative and idiosyncratic, from the “Preludium” through the First, Second, and Third “Galleries,” to “A Book of Origins,” “A Book of Extensions,” and a useful section of “Manifestoes and Poetics.” One might say the book’s organization itself is “romantic,” using one of the definitions provided at the front of the book, Andre Breton’s claim that romanticism is “a state of mind and temperament whose function is to create from scratch a new general conception of the world.”

As Robinson and I finished our lunch, we started talking about one of our shared interests, women poets of the Romantic period (long one of Robinson’s specialties). To my astonishment, I learned that Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther was of great importance to women poets of the time, that many of them wrote poems about Werther, and that Charlotte Smith even wrote a sonnet in young Werther’s voice. Alas, the poem is not in this book, whose heavy gender imbalance—11 women out of 128 contributors– has already drawn some criticism from scholars. Still, it is an exciting collection, worth reading and absorbing for anyone interested in the dynamic ways that poetic traditions are always changing.

I will close with a summary of Robinson and Rothenberg’s list of characteristics of Romanticism, from their introduction.

1. A challenge to closure.
2. A conscious emphasis on defamiliarization.
3. A foregrounding of emotions, feelings, and perceptions…as process and experiment.
4. The poet as visionary/seer.
5. The poet as a conduit for other voices.
6. An erasure of the boundaries between poetry and other forms of composition and speculation.
7. At its finest, a poetry that allows for the guiding principle of uncertainty.
8. Alongside the celebration of beauty (both “intellectual” and physical), a recurring exploration of the ugly and the grotesque.
9. A calling into question of traditional religious forms.
10. Alongside Romantic ideas of fancy and fantasy, an emergence of a new realism. . .an attention to the details of the everyday world.
11. A heightened sense of the transgressive set against an officially sanctioned ethos of gentility and conformity.
12. A widespread experience of exile.
13. Changes in form, including irregular forms, prose poetry, the fragment as a conscious poetic form, improvisation and performance poetry, sound poetry, dialect experiments, and verbal/visual interaction.

I recall Ange Mlinko posting a quote from a review by Randall Jarrell in the 1930s describing “contemporary poetry,” and pointing out how similar those aesthetics were to our twenty-first century poetics. I get the same feeling from the list above—it makes clear how much mainstream poetic aesthetics today are still informed by the revolutions of Romanticism. Presumably that is because we still have some of those same lessons to learn—and this anthology has a lot to reveal about the complex nature of those lessons.