Speaking through Red Lips

Taking a break this week from my Workshop Hell series, because one can hardly call oneself a feminist poet and then proceed to do a blog post on International Women’s Day about pot poems, which I will get to next week, God willing. So, little joiner that I am, here I am with some red lips and some thoughts on—what else?—women and writing.

This year’s awareness gimmick is this red lips thing. I must say I’m not entirely sure how it works. I suppose it might substitute the enthusiasm formerly felt about the pink ribbons, now that the Komen Foundation is disgraced. Whatever one does this day or this month, as Maura Judkis of The Washington Post so aptly puts it, the important thing is to remember that celebration is not the same as activism:

Rock the Lips does not link to the International Women’s Day site nor offer details on the day’s themes and events for this year. Women who participate in Rock the Lips might not be aware of the day’s role in bringing important attention to issues such as gender inequality, education and health care, violence against women and income disparity.

International Women’s Day comes at a particularly telling time in the United States this year, as politics and women’s concerns about reproductive health have collided in the Virginia statehouse, on the campaign trail and among media personalities, such as Rush Limbaugh, who caused outrage with his remarks disparaging Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, prompting advertisers to flee his talk show.

Without more explanation and information about what the day means, people who pose for an Instagram and post their photos on the Rock the Lips site may never learn the substance of the women’s issues being raised.

I’m not about to start some rant about all the things wrong with the world today when it comes to women, don’t worry. For one thing, it would take a heck of a lot more than a single blog post to do that; the recent news coverage of women’s issues is just the proverbial tip of the giant, silent iceberg no one wants to heed. But the half-assed enthusiasm of the red lips campaign and Judkis’s comments have started me thinking about my own silences, how I seem to preface every remark I make about women with some kind of apology. Perhaps red lips, in their boldness, are just what we need, as long as they are speaking, of course.

Recently, on Wom-po (the Women’s Poetry Listserv), R. S. Gwynn posted about his experience teaching The Stepford Wives to graduate students:  “Next week I will tell them that their overwhelming rejection of ‘feminist’ (and most of them said that they couldn't embrace it because of all the negative associations it had acquired over the years) was so strong that it forced one person present to be silent. That person was Me! Ha!” I didn’t participate in the thread, but It’s been in the back of my mind ever since. All this time I’ve been arguing that the past decade or so has seen a tremendous silencing of women’s voices, it never occurred to me that I was one of them. I’ve been trapped into thinking I talk too much about women’s issues, that I “turn off” not just male students but female ones as well with my “outdated” views on feminism, and my women-heavy syllabi are inappropriate somehow. I’ve even caught myself questioning my poetry—who’s going to want to publish these poems with their twenty-year-old sensibility? WTF, as they say.

Speaking up is supposed to be hard. If you don’t receive resistance to what you are saying, if you’re not called names behind your back and viewed with suspicion or distaste, then you’ve got nothing to speak up for. Otherwise, it’s par for the course. This whole time I’ve been bemoaning the fact that the environment has become dismissive, intolerant, or even hostile to feminist thought, I should have realized that is all the more reason to push the issue. I don’t need to let the feminist stuff go, or to reduce it to fit the times. To do so would be to participate in this illusion that the battle’s over and we’ve won and all that. On the contrary, we need more discussion, a renewal of feminist thought and feminist watchfulness.

So, in response to Judkis’s question, “How do you plan to recognize International Women’s Day?” this is it. This blog post is my manifesto that I will continue to teach women’s writing and write about women and their issues, and to those who roll their eyes in the classroom, you can kiss my pouty red lips.

I’m looking forward to the papers my students will be turning in on Monday about PPD, post-partum distress, a unit based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” I began when the whole Komen thing blew up (you can read my original post here). Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about Sylvia Plath, perhaps my favorite feminist poet. It’s odd to call her that; so much of the attention she receives is swallowed up by her suicide and her relationship to Ted Hughes that it’s easy to overlook the fierceness with which she wrote about marriage and womanhood in poems such as “The Applicant”:

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

Might she still be alive if she had been successfully treated for her depression, especially her PPD, which she so clearly felt? Many critics and biographers do not recognize the role PPD played in her suicide, just thirteen months after the birth of her son, Nicholas. Tasha Whitton, for example, says of “Morning Song” that

Instead of analyzing the poem in relationship to Plath's own experiences, a more successful approach is to compare the emotions described by the speaker in "Morning Song" to those expressed generally by new mothers. Modern studies of postpartum depression have shed some light on the frequently unusual reactions of mothers to their children shortly after birth, but at the time that Plath wrote this poem such studies were not common knowledge. The feelings that she captures in this poem are not meant to suggest that the mother dislikes the infant but rather that she is confused by the mechanical quality surrounding it.

In fact, there is nothing “unusual” about PPD; according to Leslie Tam, one of the few specialists in the field of reproductive psychology, as much as 80% of new mothers experience some degree of PPD. What’s innocuously referred to as the “baby blues” can quickly deteriorate into major, life-threatening depression and psychosis, however, especially if the woman has a history of such problems, as Plath did.

I’m not suggesting that we go back in time and save Sylvia Plath, nor that we view all women’s writing as women’s writing. Turning a blind eye, however, to cultural, juridical, political, and even medical shortcomings in our culture when it comes to women is dangerous and costly. The last text we examined in my class on the PPD topic was Sex and the City 2, in which Charlotte has to fly all the way to Abu Dhabi and get drunk before she can admit to her best friend that motherhood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. She is so intent on pretending that the idyllic motherhood of pink cupcake frosting and Electrolux appliances is the natural consequence of giving birth, that even when her nanny finds her crying her eyes out in the pantry, she still can’t admit that something is wrong. One hundred and twenty years after the publication of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” we still don’t know how to effectively screen for and treat PPD, a condition that is common, treatable, and potentially deadly.

Plath was a great lover of red. Those of us who love her work remember that great last stanza of “Lady Lazarus,” where she writes “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.”  I leave you with “Tulips,” for obvious reasons.

Tulips

Sylvia Plath
(from http://allpoetry.com/poem/8498491-Tulips-by-Sylvia_Plath)

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage ——
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free ——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salty, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

I AM A FEMINIST POET

Wanna make something of it?


A bestseller. Ever
heard of it?

“America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash–and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the ‘Lamplighter,’ and other books neither better nor worse?–worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1855

"I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."
—VS Naipaul, 2011

There’s a post that’s been stuck in my craw for some time now—ever since the VIDA count came out last year, the statistics that proved an alarming disparity when it comes to which gender gets published in the major journals. I felt that griping about the status of women writers was off-topic for this blog, which I had started exclusively as a venue for discussing ideas pertinent to beginning writers. I went so far as to ask Lesley Wheeler about it, but I passed on the topic more than once since then.

I was wrong. It’s a very pertinent topic, especially if you’re a beginning writer who happens to be a woman. Here’s the thing: whether you want it to or not, the issue is going to affect you. You can no more not write as a woman than you can not write as a Latina or a black or an Asian, but that’s another post.

What finally threw me over the edge was Anis Shivani’s post about Philip Levine being chosen as the next poet laureate. To be incensed by Shivani is to be duped—he sets out to shock you, and so of course was bound to poop on Levine’s parade. I’d no more be upset by that than by Madonna (I show my age—Lady Gaga?). It’s the way he went about it that really upset me. Shivani has taken Levine’s appointment as an opportunity to blame all that is supposedly wrong with modern American poetry on women.

To be fair, Shivani’s rant is not original—people have been condemning modern American poetry for its depoliticized self-absorption for a while now. Billy Collins, he whose great poetic oeuvre is the ode to osso bucco, has made a career out of not being self-aggrandizing (it’s no surprise that Shivani mentions him in his rant). It’s also nothing new to blame the contemporary confessional poets for this so-called bankruptcy. After all, you can only be depressed for so long before people start telling you to shut up and get over yourself, and after the initial voyeuristic thrill of the first confessional poets, those who came after were bound to bear this criticism. It’s also not Shivani’s fault that most of the major second-generation confessional poets happen to be women: Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück. All this being said, however, Shivani’s rant shows too much glee. What a wonderful opportunity, via the thinly disguised excuse of Levine’s appointment, to totally diss the top women writers of our day. Everything that’s wrong with contemporary American poetry is directly attributable to women’s obsession with the personal and domestic. They are outside of history, their dramas of no interest to the world: “Whereas Robert Lowell had a secure sense of himself as a conductor in the vast orchestral schema called History, for Olds and the post-feminist writers of our era womanhood as it exists is an unfathomable conspiracy, a calumny against some ideal nature that must nevertheless be embraced.”

Yikes. Olds writes in “flat language, unimpressive diction, predictable rhythms, and barely passable metaphors, lumped together in herky-jerky fashion across intentionally unclean line breaks.” Graham is “unreadable.” For Glück, “from 1968 until now nothing in the real world seems to have impinged on Glück's domestic melodrama.” He must complain about Levine, or the ruse collapses, yet of him Shivani says, “unlike Olds, Graham, and Glück, Levine does possess some measure of genuine skill.”

WTF? Glück, in particular, gets a lot of hate. Not many people liked her last book, A Village Life. Admittedly, it’s not her best (although it doesn’t suck, either). But read William Logan’s New York Times review and you’ll get a whiff of that same old stench. Glück’s “pinch-mouthed poems have long represented the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse — starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing.” She is unable to strike out successfully in a new direction, unlike “Eliot, Lowell and Geoffrey Hill, who have convincingly changed their styles midcareer.” All the groundbreakers—except for Plath—are men, and women who follow them, like Glück, cheap imitations. Apart from Eliot, Lowell, and Hill, Logan compares Glück’s work to the bible, Edgar Lee Masters, even M. Night Shyamalan. Nowhere and no one is too bizarre an original from which Glück copies. Even Plath doesn’t get credit: “Glück learned much from Plath about how to make a case of nerves central to poetry,” Logan says, but “both poets owe a shadowy debt to Eliot”!


A new semester is beginning. I have to be careful, because on Rate My Professor someone has warned my new students that “SHE iS SUCH A fEMiNiST! EXtREMELY RUdE iF Y0U d0Nt AGREE WiTH HER ViEWs! i LEARNEd AL0t Ab0Ut W0MENs RiGHTs! bUt ALL t0GEtHER SHEs N0t tHE BESt PR0f!!”

So be it.

One of the greatest tragedies I have witnessed—yes, I mean it: one of the greatest—in the last two tragedy-filled decades is the demise of feminist discourse. Somewhere between Buffy and Bella, “feminist” became an archaic term, something like “abacus.” To be a feminist not only marked you as some old warrior fighting a remote battle belonging to some long-forgotten war, but as a man-hater, baby-hater, fat-ugly-hairy nuisance.

WTF? I’m not going to claim some sort of media conspiracy is to blame for the death of feminism—I don’t believe the world is that organized. True, the word became too rigid at some point, and it became difficult to be a feminist while at the same time being heterosexual or Catholic or—worst of all—pretty. But these multiple identities were present in feminist thought since its inception. What really happened, I think, is that we just gave up. Exhausted by the effort, by the glacial pace of it all, it was much easier to say yippee, we won, than to continue fighting.

Perhaps what makes me “rude” is my refusal to play along. Look at Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, the freshmen will say (remember when we made the effort to refer to them as “first-year” students?). Go ahead, look at them. Clinton had to pretend not to be fazed by people telling her to “stop running for President and make me a sandwich.” Palin had to stand being referred to as “Caribou Barbie.”

Two of the most critically acclaimed American films of the last two decades are American Beauty and Revolutionary Road. Both were directed by Sam Mendes. Both screenplays were written by men, and the novel on which Revolutionary Road is based was also written by a man. How are these not domestic dramas? No; they are biting social commentary, meditations on the collapse of the American Dream. They would only be petty, self-absorbed domestic melodramas if they were written by women.

I am a feminist poet. I have to be. If you are not only a beginning writer, but a woman, I suggest you figure out how you feel about this issue, before someone else figures it out for you. Define your feminism or lack thereof any way you want to, but define it. Because you will never be a writer—you will always be a woman writer.