Morning Open Thread: We Have Howled for It – Poetry by Women Who Don’t Write Like Men

This author, who is on Pacific Coast Time, may sometimes show up later than when the post is published. That is a feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.

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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed

by wedding planners, dieting, in shapewear . . .

– opening line of Howl, by Amy Newman

In the bad old days before the Second Wave of Feminism, smart women were told they “think like a man”– as if only men could make intelligent conversation – a subtle put-down disguised as a “compliment.” Women who were writers were frequently divided by masculine critics into two categories: “feminine” writers who were therefore automatically inferior to male writers, and women who “wrote like men,” and were therefore unnatural examples of their sex.

One of the tools of “Women’s Liberation” was journal-keeping, writing down one’s thoughts, experimenting with language. A number of women who became feminist writers and poets started this way. But feminist writing goes back a lot farther than the 1960s, or even the 1860s.

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Aphra Behn, one of the earliest English-language women writers to earn her living with her pen, wrote this poem in the 1600s about the Double Standard.

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Love Armed

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by Aphra Behn

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Love in fantastic triumph sat,

Whilst bleeding hearts around him flow'd,

For whom fresh pains he did create,

And strange tyrannic power he shew'd;

From thy bright eyes he took his fire,

Which round about in sport he hurl'd;

But 'twas from mine he took desire

Enough to undo the amorous world.

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From me he took his sighs and tears,

From thee his pride and cruelty;

From me his languishments and fears,

And every killing dart from thee;

Thus thou and I the God have arm'd,

And set him up a Deity;

But my poor heart alone is harm'd,

Whilst thine the victor is, and free.

.

“Love Armed” from Selected Poems of Aphra Behn–Fyfield Books, 2003 edition

Aphra Behn (1640–1689), English author; as a young woman, she worked as an “intelligence gatherer” in the Netherlands for King Charles II, using the code name ‘Astrea.’  When the time came to return to England in 1666, her pleas for payment got no response, so she had to borrow the money to pay her fare. Back in England, the King and his underlings continued to ignore all her requests to be paid. By 1668, she was thrown in debtor’s prison. Since the prison did not provide food or much of anything else to the prisoners, most 17^th century women in her situation wound up bartering their bodies for survival. But Aphra Behn launched her writing career while in the prison, and was on her way to becoming one of the most influential Restoration era playwrights, and a famous – and sometimes infamous – poet and novelist.  

In 1677, she wrote in The Rover:

Pox of Poverty, it makes a Man a Slave,

Makes Wit and Honour sneak, my Soul grow

lean and rusty for want of credit.

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Carolyn Kizer was very much a writer of Feminism’s Second Wave, but she was also a student of history.  

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Pro Femina

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by Carolyn Kizer

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ONE

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From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women.

How unwomanly to discuss it! Like a noose or an albatross necktie  

The clinical sobriquet hangs us: codpiece coveters.

never mind these epithets; I myself have collected some honeys.  

Juvenal set us apart in denouncing our vices

Which had grown, in part, from having been set apart:

Women abused their spouses, cuckolded them, even plotted  

To poison them. Sensing, behind the violence of his manner—

“Think I'm crazy or drunk?”—his emotional stake in us,  

As we forgive Strindberg and Nietzsche, we forgive all those  

Who cannot forget us. We are hyenas. Yes, we admit it.

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While men have politely debated free will, we have howled for it,  

Howl still, pacing the centuries, tragedy heroines.

Some who sat quietly in the corner with their embroidery

Were Defarges, stabbing the wool with the names of their ancient  

Oppressors, who ruled by the divine right of the male—

I’m impatient of interruptions! I’m aware there were millions  

Of mutes for every Saint Joan or sainted Jane Austen,

Who, vague-eyed and acquiescent, worshiped God as a man.  

I’m not concerned with those cabbageheads, not truly feminine  

But neutered by labor. I mean real women, like you and like me.

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Freed in fact, not in custom, lifted from furrow and scullery,  

Not obliged, now, to be the pot for the annual chicken,  

Have we begun to arrive in time? With our well-known  

Respect for life because it hurts so much to come out with it;  

Disdainful of “sovereignty,”“national honor;” and other abstractions;

We can say, like the ancient Chinese to successive waves of invaders,  

“Relax, and let us absorb you. You can learn temperance  

In a more temperate climate.” Give us just a few decades  

Of grace, to encourage the fine art of acquiescence  

And we might save the race. Meanwhile, observe our creative chaos,  

Flux, efflorescence—whatever you care to call it!

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TWO

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I take as my theme “The Independent Woman,”

Independent but maimed: observe the exigent neckties  

Choking violet writers; the sad slacks of stipple-faced matrons;  

Indigo intellectuals, crop-haired and callus-toed,

Cute spectacles, chewed cuticles, aced out by full-time beauties  

In the race for a male. Retreating to drabness, bad manners,  

And sleeping with manuscripts. Forgive our transgressions  

Of old gallantries as we hitch in chairs, light our own cigarettes,  

Not expecting your care, having forfeited it by trying to get even.

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But we need dependency, cosseting, and well-treatment.  

So do men sometimes. Why don’t they admit it?  

We will be cows for a while, because babies howl for us,  

Be kittens or bitches, who want to eat grass now and then  

For the sake of our health. But the role of pastoral heroine  

Is not permanent, Jack. We want to get back to the meeting.

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Knitting booties and brows, tartars or termagants, ancient  

Fertility symbols, chained to our cycle, released

Only in part by devices of hygiene and personal daintiness,  

Strapped into our girdles, held down, yet uplifted by man’s  

Ingenious constructions, holding coiffures in a breeze,  

Hobbled and swathed in whimsy, tripping on feminine  

Shoes with fool heels, losing our lipsticks, you, me,

In ephemeral stockings, clutching our handbags and packages.

Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking,

In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,  

Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.  

Look at man’s uniform drabness, his impersonal envelope!  

Over chicken wrists or meek shoulders, a formal, hard-fibered assurance.  

The drape of the male is designed to achieve self-forgetfulness.

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So, Sister, forget yourself a few times and see where it gets you:  

Up the creek, alone with your talent, sans everything else.

You can wait for the menopause, and catch up on your reading.  

So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh,

All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility!

Meanwhile, have you used your mind today?

What pomegranate raised you from the dead,

Springing, full-grown, from your own head, Athena?

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THREE

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I will speak about women of letters, for I’m in the racket.  

Our biggest successes to date? Old maids to a woman.

And our saddest conspicuous failures? The married spinsters  

On loan to the husbands they treated like surrogate fathers.  

Think of that crew of self-pitiers, not-very-distant,

Who carried the torch for themselves and got first-degree burns.  

Or the sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen;  

Middle-aged virgins seducing the puerile anthologists  

Through lust-of-the-mind; barbiturate-drenched Camilles  

With continuous periods, murmuring softly on sofas  

When poetry wasn’t a craft but a sickly effluvium,  

The air thick with incense, musk, and emotional blackmail.

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I suppose they reacted from an earlier womanly modesty  

When too many girls were scabs to their stricken sisterhood,  

Impugning our sex to stay in good with the men,

Commencing their insecure bluster. How they must have swaggered  

When women themselves endorsed their own inferiority!  

Vestals, vassals, and vessels, rolled into several,

They took notes in rolling syllabics, in careful journals,  

Aiming to please a posterity that despises them.

But we’ll always have traitors who swear that a woman surrenders  

Her Supreme Function, by equating Art with aggression  

And failure with Femininity. Still, it’s just as unfair

To equate Art with Femininity, like a prettily packaged commodity  

When we are the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret:  

Merely the private lives of one-half of humanity.

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But even with masculine dominance, we mares and mistresses  

Produced some sleek saboteuses, making their cracks

Which the porridge-brained males of the day were too thick to perceive,

Mistaking young hornets for perfectly harmless bumblebees.

Being thought innocuous rouses some women to frenzy;  

They try to be ugly by aping the ways of men

And succeed. Swearing, sucking cigars and scorching the bedspread,

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Slopping straight shots, eyes blotted, vanity-blown

In the expectation of glory: she writes like a man!

This drives other women mad in a mist of chiffon.

(One poetess draped her gauze over red flannels, a practical feminist.)

.

But we’re emerging from all that, more or less,

Except for some ladylike laggards and Quarterly priestesses  

Who flog men for fun, and kick women to maim competition.  

Now, if we struggle abnormally, we may almost seem normal;

If we submerge our self-pity in disciplined industry;

If we stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep with editors;

If we regard ourselves formally, respecting our true limitations  

Without making an unseemly show of trying to unfreeze our assets;  

Keeping our heads and our pride while remaining unmarried;  

And if wedded, kill guilt in its tracks when we stack up the dishes

And defect to the typewriter. And if mothers, believe in the luck of our children,

And the luck of our husbands and lovers, who keep free women.

“Pro Femina” from Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000,© 2001 by Carolyn Kizer – Copper Canyon Press

Carolyn Kizer (1925-2014), poet, essayist, and translator; first editor of the journal Poetry Northwest (1959-1965). Her first poetry collection, The Ungrateful Garden, was published in 1961. She next got a job through the State Department teaching in Pakistan (1964-1965), then was the first director of literary programs for the National Endowment for the Arts (1966-1970). She won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Yin, three Pushcart Prizes, and the 1988 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize.

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Sometimes, history as written by men leaves out some pretty important details.

I wrote this poem about a missing detail.

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To the Disputed Woman Who First Graced the English Stage as Desdemona

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December 8, 1660 – A woman – likely Margaret Hughes, but possibly Anne Marshall – appears on an English public stage as an actress for the first time,
in the role of Desdemona in a production of Shakespeare’s play‘Othello’

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How careless men are with our histories!

How easily one pretty face confused for another.

Perhaps they were so beguiled

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By a glimpse of feminine ankle,

Or the sighs raising your womanly bosom,

They never noticed your face at all.

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Even now, the first thing ‘historians’ tell us

Is whose mistress you probably were.

© 2016 by me

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Audre Lorde described herself as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” It was sometimes an uncomfortable mix, but here she combines them into something older and greater than the sum of her parts.  

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A Woman Speaks

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by Audre Lorde

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Moon marked and touched by sun  

my magic is unwritten

but when the sea turns back

it will leave my shape behind.  

I seek no favor

untouched by blood

unrelenting as the curse of love  

permanent as my errors

or my pride

I do not mix

love with pity

nor hate with scorn

and if you would know me

look into the entrails of Uranus  

where the restless oceans pound.

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I do not dwell

within my birth nor my divinities  

who am ageless and half-grown  

and still seeking

my sisters

witches in Dahomey

wear me inside their coiled cloths  

as our mother did

mourning.

.

I have been woman

for a long time

beware my smile

I am treacherous with old magic  

and the noon's new fury

with all your wide futures  

promised

I am

woman

and not white.

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“A Woman Speaks” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, © 1997 by Audre Lorde – W. W. Norton and Company

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was an American writer, poet, feminist, lesbian, librarian, and civil rights activist. She was born in New York City, the daughter of a father from Barbados, and a mother from Grenada. Her poems and prose largely deal with issues related to civil rights, women, and the exploration of black female identity. Her first poem was published in Seventeen magazine when she was still in high school. She became an associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press in 1977, and a co-founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980. She survived breast cancer in 1978, but died at age 58 of liver cancer in 1992.

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Meena Alexander’s poem is about the real cost of treating women as commodities.

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fromRaw Meditations on Money,1. She Speaks: A School Teacher from South India

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by Meena Alexander

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Portions of a mango tree the storm cut down,

a green blaze bent into mud

and they come to me, at dawn

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three girls from Kanpur, far to the north admittedly

(we know this from national geography class,

the borders of states, the major cities).

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They hung themselves from fans.

In the hot air they hung themselves

so that their father would not be forced to tender gold

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he did not have, would not be forced

to work his fists to bone.

So that is how a portion of the story goes.

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Slowly in the hot air they swung, three girls.

How old were they?

Of marriageable age certainly.

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Sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, something of that sort.

How do I feel about it?

What a question! I am one of three sisters,

.

most certainly I do not want father to proffer money

he does not have for my marriage.

Get a scooter, a refrigerator, a horde of utensils,

.

silks, and tiny glittering bits of gold

to hang about my ears and throat.

Gold is labor time accumulated . . . labor time defined.

.

Who said that? Yes, I am a schoolteacher, fifth standard

trained in Indian history and geography,

Kerala University, first class first.

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The storm tree puts out its limbs and

I see three girls swinging. One of them is me.

Step back I tell myself.

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Saumiya, step back. The whole history

of womankind is compacted here.

Open your umbrella, tuck your sari tight,

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breathe into the strokes of catastrophe,

and let the school bus wait.

You will get to it soon enough and the small, hot faces.

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See how the monsoon winds soar and shunt

tropic air into a house of souls,

a doorway stopped by clouds.

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Set your feet into broken stones

and this red earth and pouring rain.

For us there is no exile.

.

“1. She Speaks: A School Teacher from South India" from“Raw Meditations on Money” inQuickly Changing River, © 2008 by Meena Alexander - Northwestern University Press

Meena Alexander (1951-2018) born into a Syrian Christian family from Kerlala, South India; Indian poet, scholar and author; when she was a small child, the family moved to Khartoum, and she attended school there, then enrolled in  Khartoum University when she was only 13, studying English and French Literature. She graduated in 1969, and moved to England, where she earned a PhD in English from the University of Nottingham at age 22.  She moved to India, where she published her first three books of poetry: The Bird’s Bright Ring; I Root My Name; and Without Place. After a year as a visiting fellow at the Sorbonne in 1979, she moved to New York, and became an assistant professor at Fordham University. Over the years, she taught at several New York Universities before becoming a full and later a Distinguished professor at the City University of New York. She published six more books of poetry, two books of literary criticism, two books of lyric essays, two novels and a memoir. Her best-known works are Illiterate Heart and Raw Silk. She died of cancer in New York at age 67 in 2018.

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Nikita Gill poses a very good question.

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If He Says

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by Nikita Gill

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If he says your body is ruined

because it has been touched

by another man’s hands

before his,

ask him how many woman’s bodies

have his hands ruined

and what is wrong,

in his mind, with a man’s hands

that they only know

how to ruin a woman’s body

rather than love it?

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“If He Says” from Your Soul is a River, © 2016 by Nikita Gill – Thought Catalog Books

Nikita Gill (1987 - ), British-Indian poet and writer, was born in Belfast to Indian parents, while her father, a merchant navy man, was preparing to take his captain’s exams at Ulster University. The family moved back to India when she was a few months old. Though she wanted to be a writer from the age of 12, when her first story was published in a newspaper, her parents encouraged her to seek a more realistic career, so she studied design at university. In 2012, she moved to the UK for her Masters, and began posting her poetry online in 2015. Though her following started with a single reader, she now has over 200,000 followers, several of them celebrities, including Alanis Morissette. Her best-known published poetry collections are Wild Embers, and Your Soul is a River.

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June Jordan’s poem is indeed a howl – of outrage – at the double jeopardy imposed on black women.

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Poem about My Rights

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by June Jordan

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Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear

my head about this poem about why I can’t

go out without changing my clothes my shoes

my body posture my gender identity my age

my status as a woman alone in the evening/

alone on the streets/alone not being the point/

the point being that I can’t do what I want

to do with my own body because I am the wrong

sex the wrong age the wrong skin and

suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/

or far into the woods and I wanted to go

there by myself thinking about God/or thinking

about children or thinking about the world/all of it

disclosed by the stars and the silence:

I could not go and I could not think and I could not

stay there

alone

as I need to be

alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own

body and

who in the hell set things up

like this

and in France they say if the guy penetrates

but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me

and if after stabbing him if after screams if

after begging the bastard and if even after smashing

a hammer to his head if even after that if he

and his buddies fuck me after that

then I consented and there was

no rape because finally you understand finally

they fucked me over because I was wrong I was

wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong

to be who I am

which is exactly like South Africa

penetrating into Namibia penetrating into

Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if

Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the

proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland

and if

after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe

and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to

self-immolation of the villages and if after that

we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they

claim my consent:

Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of

the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what

in the hell is everybody being reasonable about

and according to the Times this week

back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem

and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they

killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba

and before that it was my father on the campus

of my Ivy League school and my father afraid

to walk into the cafeteria because he said he

was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong

gender identity and he was paying my tuition and

before that

it was my father saying I was wrong saying that

I should have been a boy because he wanted one/a

boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and

that I should have had straighter hair and that

I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should

just be one/a boy and before that     

it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for

my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me

to let the books loose to let them loose in other

words

I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.

and the problems of South Africa and the problems

of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white

America in general and the problems of the teachers

and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social

workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very

familiar with the problems because the problems

turn out to be

me

I am the history of rape

I am the history of the rejection of who I am

I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of

myself

I am the history of battery assault and limitless

armies against whatever I want to do with my mind

and my body and my soul and

whether it’s about walking out at night

or whether it’s about the love that I feel or

whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or

the sanctity of my national boundaries

or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity

of each and every desire

that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic

and indisputably single and singular heart

I have been raped

be-

cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age

the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the

wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic

the wrong sartorial I

I have been the meaning of rape

I have been the problem everyone seeks to

eliminate by forced

penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/

but let this be unmistakable this poem

is not consent I do not consent

to my mother to my father to the teachers to

the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy

to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hard-on

idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in

cars

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name

My name is my own my own my own

and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this

but I can tell you that from now on my resistance

my simple and daily and nightly self-determination

may very well cost you your life

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“Poem About My Rights” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan© 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust – Copper Canyon Press

June Jordan (1936-2002) was born in Harlem, New York, the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents. She was a poet, essayist, teacher, feminist, civil rights activist and self-identified Bisexual. While the students at most of the schools she attended were predominately White, at Barnard College, “No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force . . . Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America.” She left without graduating, but returned later. Her first book, Who Look at Me, a collection of poems for children, was published in 1969. She wrote 27 more books, the last three published posthumously. Jordan was the librettist for the musical Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky. She taught at several colleges and at SUNY at Stony Brook, then founded the Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley in 1991. She died of breast cancer at age 65.

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Marie Ponsot passes on her grandmother's wisdom.

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Among Women

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by Marie Ponsot

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What women wander?

Not many. All. A few.

Most would, now & then,

& no wonder.

Some, and I’m one,

Wander sitting still.

My small grandmother

Bought from every peddler

Less for the ribbons and lace

Than for their scent

Of sleep where you will,

Walk out when you want, choose

Your bread and your company.

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She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.”

.

She looked fragile but had

High blood, runner’s ankles,

Could endure, endure.

She loved her rooted garden, her

Grand children, her once

Wild once young man.

Women wander

As best they can.

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“Among Women” from Springing: New and Selected Poems, © 2002 by Marie Ponsot – Alfred A. Knopf

Marie Ponsot (1921-2019) American poet, essayist, critic and translator; winner of the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Bird Catcher. Among many other awards, she was honored by the Poetry Foundation with the 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, awarded to a U.S. poet whose “lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition.”

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Dorothy Parker gets the last word on the delicate femininity that is supposed to be what attracts the male of the species.

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Interview

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by Dorothy Parker

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The ladies men admire, I’ve heard,

Would shudder at a wicked word.

Their candle gives a single light;

They’d rather stay at home at night.

They do not keep awake till three,

Nor read erotic poetry.

They never sanction the impure,

Nor recognize an overture.

They shrink from powders and from paints …

So far, I’ve had no complaints.

.

"Interview” from The Portable Dorothy Parker, edited by Brendan Gill, ©1926/renewed 1954 by Dorothy Parker – Viking Penguin

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) may be the most quoted – and misquoted – woman in America. Her formal education ended at 14, but she became a celebrated wit. Parker was a founding member of the famed Algonquin Round Table (circa 1919-1929). When the New Yorker debuted in 1925, Dorothy Parker was on the editorial board. As the magazine’s “Constant Reader,” she contributed poetry, fiction — and book reviews famous for pulling no punches: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” She made four failed suicide attempts, and said in an interview when she turned 70, “If I had any decency, I’d be dead. All my friends are.” In 1967, Parker did die, of a heart attack, at age 73. She bequeathed her literary estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

She had never met him.

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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

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