Tag: Women’s writing in English
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“These performative dimensions of public speech always carry tones, gestures, forms of acting out, contradictions, and self-corrections that contribute to new actions and capacities in others. The quote you have singled out to me suggests that poetry can show engaged citizens how to listen to, or respond to, public issues or actions.”
The above statement is about poetic engagement derived from a piece at J2, entitled Recasting poetry, the long biography of a poem. (at Link) . It is interesting indeed how writers use the internet and multi-media resources for poetics , but this piece is not about practice or gesture, it is about creating poetic spaces in the most public of places, the web. I saw this republished Atlantic article last week and wish to set this short post into that context.
Lots of readers will note the allusion to Virgina Woolf’s statement about writing spaces in the title of this post, indeed we know all about the oubliettes, the locked-doors, the time stolen or negotiated that forms the woman writer’s battle for self-expression. There are also varieties of instances of perceived adulteries caused by women musing upon their muses, written most poignantly by Mirjam Tuominen which could have net-applications… I may link that one soon.
I am concerned now with the issue of public writing, with space, and with the diary form translated and updated to the web blog form, and in how that impacts upon the practice of writing, specifically mine. I recently wrote a piece about writing practice ( for another blog) on the subject of transcription, which set me to thinking about how my writing practice has changed. There is an awkwardness about my left-handedness which does not lend itself to copying and pasting much, and most of the poems on this blog are transcribed directly from books, except the original works which are just written down and eventually typed out. However, I do a lot more in the way of communicating than I necessarily would just sitting in a room reading and writing (or doodling).
It has been excellent in many ways to be able to access other writers and discuss subjects such as poetry, gender, women’s presence online and imbalances in publication of women writers , most particularly literary women writers.
What hasn’t been excellent is that the scrawled jotting, associative thinking, and lateral imaging things are a bit neglected. No matter how much one refuses to admit it, blogging is a very public method of getting to the essentials of writing, it has its own space, time and decorative element. Blogging has rather severe limitations in terms of tailoring what one thinks people wish to read, and it is not a spontaneous or creative way of writing.
This very public space which is defined by what I want to go on the page lacks a creativity that is often exasperating, I don’t doodle here, or cross out things. Poems that I like or think others may like are what this space is about, it does not have the busyness of sets of inter-related note-books, folders, pencil-cases or writing smells like inky leaks. It is too neat. I am looking for ways to make it more natural at the moment.
One thing which annoys me beyond anything else about women who write is their constant referral to themselves as scribblers and not as writers. The two acts, that of writing and that of scribbling are not really related, scribbling is more a mode of generation than of production. Very few male authors tend toward that type of florid self description.
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” I give my indulgence – and- I am not the only one – and approval to those who wear the colours of their survival, the signs of their activity into the arena. Too much courage has shone among the female kind, and for too many years, for women, under the pretext of loyalty, to break the contract they signed with beauty. ” ( trans, Matthew Ward)
Alix had done the unforgivable and looked her age, which to the women in Colette‘s milieu was just plain wrong, Alix was not however invisible, nor was her experience –
I wonder at the literary year 2010- 2011, and those lists which include the Forward Prize, the New Yorker Magazine , the TLS and others whose editors seem to imagine that we will be distracted by Franzen’s glasses, or depth literature and angst from male writers, that do not and cannot ever write from the perspective of the woman’s relation to her body, to cosmetics, to pressing issues such as covering, torture, unfair imprisonment. The historical lessons learned about female voice and experience must be re-learnt for another generation of women, and indeed men.
There is just one other excerpt from Colette’s oeuvre on this blog, and it is about her own childhood, her unique relation to words and her development as a woman writer. I am inserting it here and as I do, I wonder at those people who would deny the veracity of female education and literary writing because : it is not male. What a bunch of codswallop to expect a great writer like Houellebecq ( whose description of a forty year old vagina in Atomised is clearly exterior to his understanding) to actually get into the head of that woman whom he writes so beautifully. He cannot, he can only describe outsides.
Colette , from Alix’s Refusal.
” But it’s my real face!” No. Your real face is in the drawer of your dressing table, and sadly enough, you have left your good spirits with it. Your real face is a warm, matte pink tending toward fawn , set off high on the cheeks by a glimmer of deep carmine, well blended and nearly translucent – which stops just under the lower eyelid, where it disappears deep into a bluish gray, barely visible, spread up to the brow; the thick eyebrow, carefully drawn out at the end, is brown like your thick curling lashes between which your gray eyes look blue.”(trans, Matthew Ward)
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And yet our lists have been dominated by male writers, more so these two years than in any others. I wonder do the publishing industry remark upon the absence of women literary writers and poets from lists, or maybe they expect that we are all gender-neutral ? What matter to them if the voice of the female rape or torture victim is written by a man who has not the experience of (for one) sexual discrimination as part of his experiential approach to his work ! See here and here .
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I am going back to reading Colette, to Carter, to West , to Weil, because these women writers resonate with me. Weil’s essays on affliction could be proofs for Colette’s Alix, though, without the emotional or philosophical depth. But we do not ask for depth amongst Colette’s heroines; the pearl-stringers, the corset-makers, the concubines, the show-girls or the bored, endangered and eternally restive wives of small-business owners. What a carnival of grotesques would occur if literature and poetry, being male-dominated, tried to write these women. Publishers assume that this is where the market is and by default those books furnish the halls of academia, making tokenism and or specialisation the provenance of the endangered female writer.
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Alix’s crisis is of discouragement , a ‘déflouquement,’ (Rabelais), I wonder what kind of crisis has to be provoked in publication to avoid this type of statement from Peter Stothard :
.“The TLS is only interested in getting the best reviews of the most important books,” and “while women are heavy readers, we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS.”
Quite. Clearly Peter Stothard does not recognise women’s contribution to the literary canon, no more than VS Naipaul ! But it’s always been about the market and for some reason publishers do not get that women are highly educated and whilst enjoy fluffy novels sometimes, we expect a bit more choice in our reading than to bombarded with depth interviews with literary giants and more dedication to bringing forward the female voice. Thanks, I am adding my refusal, my discouragement to my heroine’s.
My Mother’s House and Sido, by Colette. Originally : La Maison de Claudine , 1992 . Sido , 1929
http://poethead.wordpress.com/a-list-of-poets-from-poethead/
excerpts from The Collected Stories of Colette, Vintage Classics 2003.
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“This short post is related to what I do on the Poethead blog and I suppose to the area of women’s writing that has been a concern for a few years now.
Many of the poems that are a part of Poethead have found their way into my possession as gifts, or from the libraries and collections of people who bought (or ordered) the books when they were originally published. Quite a few of the books that I have been privileged to read are not obtainable from our local friendly bookshops, though they can often be had through Amazon or other such internet outlets.
The poems on the site were in the main transcribed from books by me, though not all of them are.
I started transcribing poetry as an exercise a few years ago because of something I had read in A.S. Byatt’s Possession. Roland Mitchell’s thoughts on the teaching methodologies of his superior regarding transcriptions stuck with me. I wanted to test how I would do if I were to know a poem through the copying of it. I soon learned that no matter how carefully one attempts a transcription, it is incredibly easy to mess up the simplest things and change the sense of the work completely. “
The whole article is available at the Women Writers, Women Books Blog , it is related to two pieces on Poethead, which I am linking here, Hannah Weiner‘s Book of Revelations and Nagy’s Hemisphere. I thought to add in Nuala Ní Chonchúir‘s piece about the Saturday Woman Poet also, here at Nuala’s Blog.
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Every Verse is a child of love.
Every verse is a child of love,
A destitute bastard slip,
A firstling – the winds above –
Left by the road asleep.
Heart has a gulf, and a bridge,
Heart has a bless, and a grief.
Who is his father? A liege?
Maybe a liege, or a thief.
by Marina Tsvetaeva
I Know the Truth
I know the truth – forget all other truths!
No need for anyone on earth to struggle.
Look – it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what will you say, poets, lovers, generals?
The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep beneath the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.
“I know the truth” Tsvetaeva (1915). Translation by Elaine Feinstein.
The above link is to Tsvetaeva’s Wikipedia page. This week news reports and statements suggest that Anna Politkovskaya‘s killer is now behind bars. Whilst researching and reminding myself of the small things that I did at the time of her death in 2006, like reading and connecting with the IWMF and publishing about violence against women writers and journalists, I came across some articles about poems, music and protests from those people effected by Politkovskaya’s writing. Interestingly Tsvetaeva’s work was read at the public protests and organically wound into musical tributes. I thought to publish two poems here as a type of memorial to two Russian women writers today.
http://blog.amnestyusa.org/waronterror/anna-politkovskayas-killer-finally-behind-bars/
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Dedicated to the Irish Magdalene Women, whose government chose to ignore their plight at the UN Committee on Torture 23/05/2011.
“Some of the issues that are raised and looked at in the Ryan report and that have been raised in relation to the Magdalene laundries relate to a very distant, far-off time,” said Mr Aylward in his initial response to the committee’s questions and observations.”
(Seán Aylward, Irish Govt Rep to the UN Committee on Torture 2011).
I have alluded before now on this blog to four women writers in particular who embraced the mystic, or quasi-mystic traditions, their names are familiar to regular readers, Marguerite of Porete, Barbro Karlén, Mirjam Tuominen and Simone Weil. I wrote about some of Weil’s themes last week here .
These women writers wrote from the prison of the body and of the intellect in a manner that is unrivalled, and should be celebrated but instead it is mostly apocryphal in its hiddenness.
I have often wondered at the shape and constitution of apocryphon, given that nothing that is ever part of the collective consciousness of humanity can be entirely obliterated and indeed often tends to re-emerge in a surprising manner. To take an example from art history for instance, wherein the pattern-books that constituted the architectural language of cathedrals often led to a generalised iconography. Popular sentiment refused the destruction or partial obliteration of some iconographies, thus the new and the old were cast together in a tension not always apparent to the eyes of the participant in ceremony of religious worship, but nonetheless present.
It is impossible to completely obliterate what was in essence an integral part of our societies, though there are faces hacked from statuary or black-marks on books or public records that tend to add poignancy to choices that were made. Most often an incorporation occurred, wherein that which had been cast away became transformed and emerged differently.
Literary incorporation is no different to art-historical, what Marguerite of Porete wrote ( before her inquisition and eventual murder) in Le Miroir des simples ames aneaties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d’amour has been consciously referenced by John Moriarty in What the Curlew Said, and subconsciously tapped into in Joyce’s Anna Livia soliquoy from Finnegan’s Wake. What comes from an identical archetype source, in this case dissolution, does not disappear because it inconveniences those who do not have time to read with attention. This includes ignoring the voicing of women’s experiences, including those our society would rather forget, Vis our history of the sexual repression of women.
“Being completely free and in command of her sea of peace the soul is nonetheless drowned and loses herself through God- with him and in him. She loses her identity, as does the water from a river-like the Ouse or the Meuse- when it flows into the sea. It has done it’s work and can relax in the arms of the sea, and the same is true of the soul. Her work is over and she can lose herself in what she has totally become: Love. love is the bridegroom of her happiness enveloping her wholly in his love and making her part of that which is. This is a wonder to her and she has become a wonder. Love is her only delight and pleasure.”
Marguerite Porete , from Le Miroir des simples ames aneaties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d’amour
Mirjam Tuominen wrote of war and of torture but her name is eclipsed by those of her post WWII contemporaries, as Weil’s is eclipsed by Paschal’s. The experience of the anchorite, the woman tithed, or the female prisoner of torture is absent from the literary canon by stint of the greatness we perceive in the male voice, though both wrote on the same theme but from a differing perspective. I have dedicated this post to the Irish Magdalene women , who were incarcerated by their society in the hope that they will use their voices again to tell of what happened to them in the institutions, in their own voices.
It interests me that we often reject and neglect the voices of the societally victimised and instead favour the putting of words into their mouths by the mostly male artistic and political establishment. I expect they like to add insult to injury by attempting to rationalise crimes through a relentless and gendered tone of empty propriety.
Edit : 06/02/2013
Why is imprisonment and denial of motherhood hidden, why are the words of the victims of an Irish version of Purdah ignored , traduced or treated with political ignorance ? The depth of current Governmental ignorance is a cause for deep shame.
Related article links
knowing the shape of your cell by C Murray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at poethead.wordpress.com. -
The following letter by Anne Hays was published on Facebook on January 2nd 2011, and since it is a day for correspondences , I thought to link it herein. Thus far the letter has had 31 likes, numerous replies, and is linked onto Twitter via VIDA, women in the literary arts.
January 2nd, 2011
The New Yorker
4 Times Square, 20th Floor
New York, NY 10036
Dear Editors of the New Yorker,
“I am writing to express my alarm that this is now the second issue of the NYer in a row where only two (tiny) pieces out of your 76 page magazine are written by women. The January 3rd, 2011 issue features only a Shouts & Murmurs (Patricia Marx) and a poem (Kimberly Johnson). Every other major piece—the fiction, the profile, and all the main nonfiction pieces—is written by a man. Every single critic is a male writer.
We were already alarmed when we flipped through the Dec 20th & 27th double-issue to find that only one piece (Nancy Franklin) and one poem (Alicia Ostriker) were written by women. A friend pointed out that Jane Kramer wrote one of the short Talk of the Town segments as well, though it barely placated our sense of outrage that one extra page, totaling three, out of the 148 pages in the magazine, were penned by women. Again, every critic is a man. To make matters more depressing, 22 out of the 23 illustrators for the magazine are men. Seriously!
Women are not actually a minority group, nor is there a shortage, in the world, of female writers. The publishing industry is replete with female editors, and it would be too obvious for me to point out to you that the New Yorker masthead has a fair number of female editors in its ranks. And so we are baffled, outraged, saddened, and a bit depressed that, though some would claim our country’s sexism problem ended in the late 60’s, the most prominent and respected literary magazine in the country can’t find space in its pages for women’s voices in the year 2011.
I have enclosed the January issue and expect a refund. You may either extend our subscription by one month, or you can replace this issue with a back issue containing a more equitable ratio of male to female voices. I plan to return every issue that contains fewer than five women writers. You tend to publish 13 to 15 writers in each issue; 5 women shouldn’t be that hard.”
A dismayed reader,
Anne Hays
One aspect of the 2011 reviews in literature, in the literary Arts was the absence of women from both the editorial panels which chose (overwhelmingly) writing by male authors, there were profound absences particularly in the US , of women, black and Hispanic authors. I shall add in a selection of Books of 2010 lists at the base of this link.
In fact heres Jezebel Magazine’s analysis of the New Yorker Debacle:
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Re-blogging this poem, I think its about time there was a bit more Edith Sitwell on the site. it was transcribed from *Facade*, so I have to find my notes to add in the Publication date etcetera.
‘The Octogenarian Leaned from his window, To the Valerian Growing below Said, ‘My Nightcap is the only gap in the trembling thorn where the mild unicorn with the little infanta danced the Lavolta (Clapping hands: Molto Lent Eleganta). The Man with the Lantern Peers high and low; No more than a snore as he walks to and fro… Il Dottore the stoic culls silver herb beneath the superb vast moon azoic.” From: Facade, by Edith Sitwell. … Read Morevia poethead
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Reporting a Lunar eclipse in Babylonia. With You by Mehri Rahmani
Your tender revolt
Contained by the illicit apple
Pounds in red
And your eye’s shattered diamond
A woman in seclusion
Revolves into a star
With you
On the surface of water
I am thirsty
Place the skies in your eyes
Blaze out the star
So that I can see you
The sea is peaceful
Silent…from : The Seven Valleys of Love, trans Sheema Kalbasi Poet ,
A Bilingual Anthology Of Women Poets from Middle Ages Persia to PresentToday I was reading more of Farideh Mostavi who features on the blog in two sections, her poetry can be accessed by using the search engine to the right of this post. The issue of Translation has been a part of this site since I started it up, Including the works of Mostavi, Tess Gallagher, the translators of Nagy and of Ursu. The sympathetic work of the translator being grossly undervalued in terms of what is actually available for people to purchase in bookshops. The IPWWC and translators committees have done tremendous work in funding and bringing to the reader some of our most incredible women writers.
In Ireland there is a wonderful tradition of writers and poets translating works; and bringing them to an interested readership.
There is a small post somewhere on the blog of a Marianne Agren Mc Elroy translation of Comes Somebody , by Nelly Sachs, it had fallen out of a Paul Celan book which I had been casually mooching at a friend’s house. It was one of three small and old pieces from a now defunct Irish newspaper. It really is an excellent poem, thus I am going to stick it beneath this post on the blog if I can. (the tech occasionally mystifies).
Chris Murray 