July 13, 2010 - no poem yet

I've been re-reading Eavan Boland's, essay The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma. Who ever you are, female or male, if you want to understand some things basic to the way women have written in the 20th century, go read this essay. But be sure to question her claims too. After all, she writes about having identified herself as a writer before she became a wife and mother, at which time, she was thrown from her own center as a writer, to the hinterlands, so to speak, of those other roles.
I can't identify with that experience, having come to my self-identity as a writer long into my careers as wife and mother, having had no such 'center' for the first half of my life. It was a hidden part of me, one I protected and did not invite scrutiny of, in case I was wrong, in case I was pathetically presumptuous of my own ambition.
In fact I don't know many women who started out as Boland did. That has much to do with the fact that I left college within a year of arriving and was a wife and mother by the time I was 19. I did not move in the collegial or academic spaces where a woman in the early 1970's might begin to believe such things about her self. The women writers I know, are, by and large, former closet writers whose love of the practice was for long years, subservient to other practices including spousehood, parenthood, the work of making a living, etc.
I also realize that much of that lack of self-confidence came directly from that fact that I did use the lens of the canon to evaluate the worthiness of my own themes and subject matter in my poems.
So I do agree with so much of what Boland has to say about 'ghosts' and her discussion of Adrienne Rich's idea that we are 'drenched in assumptions.' That is, that women, at least into the mid-late 20th century, took their cues of their poems' poetic worthiness from themes and approaches the male poets had established, ie: we assumed the value of a topic based on what had already been found valuable to the canon. AND I agree with Boland that we owe the ghosts of other women and our own pasts their due in poetry.


This part of her discussion reminded me of a line from a poem by Louise Bogan, which reads in part "women have no wilderness in them". Bogan was not fond of many women poets and their work it seems. Or maybe it was that she was, herself, too drenched in those assumptions to see any other way of writing.

Go read this essay. I'm sure it's online somewhere. I'm reading it in my copy of Poetry in Theory, an anthology of essays on poetic theory by a staggering range of writers, from poets, to philosophers, to literary critics.

I'll go write on paper now and maybe have something to post by the end of the day.