"Approaching the Altar:" Æsthetic Homecoming in the Poetry of Linda Marion and Lynn Powell

ESSAY "Approaching the Altar." /Esthetic Homecoming in the Poetry of Linda Marion and Lynn Powell______________ Gina Herring Linda Marion's Home Fires and Lynn Powell's Old and New Testaments are records of women being "called" to a life of poetry. This process of defining and embracing poetic power is problematic for a woman who must oppose conventional messages and images of female submission in order to achieve an assertive, independent voice. The female poet who inhabits a "room of her own" finds herself both empowered and marginalized—at home and alien. In this role Marion and Powell acknowledge the cultural traditions and voices of their East Tennessee upbringing. They do not repudiate these traditions but transform them, using the rituals and rhythms ofwomen's physical and domestic life to chart their progress as poets. Taking as their subjects and central images the Appalachian female locations of home and church, these poets also locate the origins of their art. The poetic quests of these women lead them away from and back to these mythically-laden locales, so that in both collections "coming home" is sexual, spiritual and aesthetic. Theirs is a sacred vocation—giving birth to love, to children, to their own lives, to poetry. Both Marion and Powell work within a female poetic tradition begun by America's most notable and controversial female poet, Emily Dickinson. Writing as a radiant "Nobody," conscious and proud of her own dual marginality as a woman and poet, Dickinson, says feminist critic Sandra M. Gilbert, used "the details of domesticity as ... metaphors in order to recreate herself and her life as a single emblematic text . .. structured .. . around a series of mysteries that were distinctively female" (22). Having literally retreated to a "room of her own," the best bedroom in her wealthy father's house, Dickinson famously remained "at home," finally refusing to go out at all or to receive visitors, engaging instead in her own domestic industry—the writing of nearly 3000 startlingly original poems. Dickinson's reclusiveness, of course, is not about the renunciations of a pathological personality but about a conscious, courageous choice 20 made in devotion to her art. Aware that marriage and motherhood entailed service and sacrifice in the nineteenth-century cult of true womanhood, she committed her life to poetry and became the "wife without the sign." A "wayward nun" of love and art, she "transformed the ordinary" and daily into the emblematic in a "religion of domesticity, a mystery cult," observes Gilbert, "in which she herself was a kind of blasphemously female 'Word made Flesh'" (35). Having rejected traditional Christian pieties, Dickinson followed a uniquely female "theology of the ordinary" which celebrated the "sacraments of the household" (Gilbert 33). In this way she parodies, subverts, enacts and deconstructs a complex system of cultural signs governing female identity, speaking—"in life as well as art—through an elaborate code of domestic objects, a language of flowers and glasses of wine, of pieces of cake and bread and pudding"—and a symbolically weighted white dress (Gilbert 34). If, as she demonstrated, an ordinary white morning dress can be made extraordinary through the "white heat" of her poetic power, then flesh can become word and words may be "esoteric sips/ of the communion wine"—sacramental signs of mysterious power and energy (Gilbert 32). The priestess of the ordinary, consistently observing and recording the surprising revelations of the domestic and natural worlds, eventually arrived at a "complementary vision of the mystical powers in woman's nature" (Gilbert 37). Surely, then, some consciousness of a matriarchal deity guided Dickinson whose worship celebrates the secrets of thebody, the arts of the housewife, the mysteries of the poet (Gilbert 38-9). Both Marion and Powell follow Dickinson's lead concerning the emblematic transformation and elevation of female domestic and religious experience. Unlike Dickinson, however, these women personally and literally embrace sexuality, marriage and motherhood as vital aspects of their creative lives. Both emphasize the saving power of home, the sacramental celebration of daily ritual and family history. But home for Marion is defined primarily as woman's psychic space, while Powell experiences home as physical space—woman's life in the body. Finally, however...