Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton

4. Plath, Clifton, and the Myths of Menstruation

chapter 4 Plath, Clifton, and the Myths of Menstruation the woman who menstruates receives a monthly message from her body. Written in blood, the menstrual message is rich in meaning and metaphorical possibility. Although the authors of The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation may be overstating the case when they say, “Men cannot enter or even entertain the language of menstruation, with its fluidic periodicity, its mood-signaling, its cyclical reminder of the feminine real,”1 menstruation does provide a natural subject for women’s poetry. The twentieth-century American women who have taken up the challenge include Sylvia Plath, May Sarton, Anne Sexton, Marge Piercy, Ellen Bass, Ai, Sharon Olds, and Lucille Clifton. Some of these women’s poems concern fertility and childbirth; others take up the stigmas and taboos associated with menstruation; in still others the monthly blood is a source of pride and wonder. The moods run the gamut from joy to despair, and scanning even a partial list of titles reveals a wide-ranging response to this most intimate of subjects: “Maudlin ” (Plath), “She Shall Be Called Woman” (Sarton), “Menstruation at Forty” (Sexton), “Tampons” (Bass), and “poem in praise of menstruation” (Clifton).2 These poems attest to a willingness to write frankly about female sexuality, yet menstruation is not as pervasive a subject in American women’s poetry as one might expect. Although many poets have written poems alluding to this bodily process, few have given it the thematic importance that we see in Plath and Clifton. By contrasting Clifton’s menstrual poems with Plath’s, we can contextualize the life-affirming view that Clifton’s poems typically offer. As the previous chapter has shown, Clifton concerns herself in poem 1. Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth, The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 81. 2. For an overview of pertinent poems, see “The Miracle of Blood: Menstrual Imagery in Myth and Poetry,” in Delaney, Lupton, and Toth, 186–99. 83 84 wild blessings after poem with the many conditions of womanhood. The same is true of Plath. Although Clifton’s poems typically reflect her life as a black woman, neither she nor Plath speaks narrowly to members of one race or gender. Their poems about female sexuality, especially those about fertility, are highly revealing. The menstrual cycle inspires them both, yet the physical realities, emotions, and myths of menstruation lead them in decidedly different , if not totally incompatible, directions. Plath’s fertility poems are characteristically ambivalent, even self-castigating, whereas Clifton’s are gentler and more self-accepting. In Plath’s Collected Poems, virtually any combination of blood, moon, and blossom spells trouble for the female persona. The omnipresent moon is a baleful witness to private suffering; a red flower, an excruciating reminder of one’s own blood flow; and menstrual blood itself, the bright mark of mortality. For Plath, the female body is a mythological template, and menstrual blood is the raw material from which poetry is made. For Clifton the stigmas associated with menstruation do not preclude an affirming mythos. While Clifton’s poems may objectify the body, she typically views female attributes with grace and tenderness. Lest we think her a misty-eyed romantic , however, Clifton also acknowledges the hardships that attend menstruation. In her poems, the so-called curse is a mixed blessing. Three years into her marriage to Ted Hughes, Plath wrote in her journal, “Great cramps, stirrings. It is still just period time, but I have even waves of nausea. Am I pregnant? . . . Maybe some good pregnant poems, if I know I really am.”3 The term “good pregnant poems” effectively merges two of Plath’s strongest desires at that time in her life: to be pregnant and write good poems. As a pregnant poet, she would embody creativity, and if she wrote good poems about being pregnant, all the better. So the tardy arrival of her period came as a terrible disappointment: “Yesterday a nadir of sorts. Woke up to cat’s early mewling around six. Cramps. Pregnant I thought. [No] such luck. After a long 40 day period of hope, the old blood cramps and spilt fertility.”4 Once she was menstruating, the prospect of 3. Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough (New York: Dial, 1982), 298. 4. Ibid., 298. plath, clifton, and the...