Paisley Rekdal Pursues Articulation of Sexual Violence in New Essay

In the current issue of American Poetry Review, Utah poet laureate Paisley Rekdal extends her composition of the poem "Philomela," in which the rape of Philomela by her brother-in-law Tereus is left out, isn't described. This gets tangled up, in fragments, with language, imagination, rumination, quotation, and personal account. An excerpt of "Nightingale: A Gloss" follows:

“Will not my tongue be mute?” Tarquin wonders, at the thought of raping Lucretia. The rape must mark him as well: a blot upon his face as well as his character, violence carving its sin upon him. If she cannot go unmarked, he cannot either; the body giving tongue to its distress.

Shakespeare, “The Rape of Lucrece,” 227.

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I don’t call it rape, but that doesn’t mean others wouldn’t. Sexual violence has been historically difficult to articulate. Chaucer devoted the fifth book of “The Legend of Good Women” to creating subcategories of words akin to rape: ravine a rape linked with abduction, robberie a rape occurring in the woods, stelthe an attack cloaked in secrecy. We would not care to make such distinctions, but Chaucer’s characters do. When Amans (Latin: “Loving”) is asked whether or not he has committed the sin of ravine, he denies it, admitting only to the possibility of stelthe. It is important, he fumes, to make such distinctions. What happened to me feels like something that exists between words, a subcategory of expression for which there is no one easy expression.

Ravin/raven: OF, ravine + L. rapinare: to plunder, to seize or divide, to devour voraciously.

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Raving: MF, resver, to wander, to be delirious. “Raving” is applied to the Bacchantes or Maenads, whose name means “raving ones.” Procne first appears in Ovid’s tale dressed as the Bacchantes’ queen, “in all the dress/ of frenzy,” spear over her shoulder, draped in vines and deer hide. Philomela, voiceless suffering, is visited by her sister, rage. A raping. A raving.

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“Raving”: at the heart of the story is female madness, a word sonically, if not etymologically, attached to the word for rape.  Raving is a curse that spreads through imagination and desire. In “The Rape of Lucrece,” when Tarquin puts his hand on Lucretia’s breast, her terrified heartbeat “moves in him more rage.” To the ancient writers, only raving explains female aggression. Agave, driven mad by Dionysus for her “unbridled tongue,” doesn’t know her son, Pentheus, spikes his head on a stake.  Medea, to punish an unfaithful Jason, dismembers their children. To wound one is to wound the other, bodies linked by sperm, and milk, and blood. Don’t infect me with your madness.

Euripides, The Bacchae, 438

Shakespeare, “The Rape of Lucrece,” 469

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If art is the eloquence left Philomela, what answer does it inspire?  Pain speaks to pain. “Why should one make pretty speeches and the other be dumb?” Procne wonders, looking back and forth between Philomela’s tapestry and her son.  Itylus’ ability to speak throws Philomela’s silence into loud relief, and though he says nothing in the myth, his flesh “keeps something of the spirit alive.” When Procne dismembers him, he “leaps in the boiling water, hisses on the turning skewers.” Pain too is a language. The body speaks it fluently.

Ovid, VI, 647-649.

Read the whole piece at APR.