Coming After: Essays on Poetry

15. Women and Poetry

167 Women and Poetry What a poem is, how it is good—what it looks and sounds like overall, the kinds of subjects it’s concerned with—all of this since when? since shortly after known history began, has, worldwide , been addressed by men with some input from women. A poem, looked at this way, is “male,” most ways of composing and setting down lines of poetry, of grouping them into poems on the page, seem “male”—the choices to be made are largely from among male solutions to male-generated formal problems. In poetry, as in everything else, one hardly knows, rather, what is “human.” To come suddenly back to this place this time: even the revolutionary generation of American women poets now in their forties or so are working from a position of modifying what men have thought and done; and the most supposedly radical feminists among them, in order to subvert the Western intellectual tradition, borrow from it to speak—who knows the difference between them and it? There are no forms of poetry that are entirely “owned” by women: what studies of women’s poetry seem to show are predilections for shapes and subjects, what our poetry tends to be like. This is rarely to say that we have made something very new, though there have been at least two geniuses in the last two centuries, Dickinson and Stein, of the sort to conceive some radical formal departures—Dickinson still working within the given lyric, changing American metrics though—Stein’s most radical works being both prosy and difAcult , and those two qualities together making an inadequate answer to the question: What might be a true female poetry? (Prose really isn’t the answer, isn’t a poem, is too sonically narrow , too singled-planed.) But the real question is, is that a real question? What might From scarlet, no. 5 (September 1991). be another kind of poetry? Whole other poetry springing from nowhere, as at the beginning of the world, in the hands of women? Or perhaps even more desirably, as at the beginning of the world, invented equally by women and men together. Not, as now, already made out of men. Do you follow me? I’m saying, there may be nothing of women in the way any poem looks now, in what its form is—the entire soil, all layers and most nutrients, are for all practical purposes male. What would it be like to make a female poetry? Is that possible? A desirable way to conceive an undertaking? What would another poetry possibly be like? Can there ever be any value in sexual polarization of activity ? Is there feminine and masculine? as well as what women and men each have done (I’ve not been talking so far about what men and women are like, each sex, but about what they’ve done—who owns the forms, who is quickly moving in on the, possibly, same forms)? The question then perhaps becomes, What is it like at the beginning of the world? I mean hopefully now—but the world is late and ugly. But we pretend anyway that we are the Arst ones, we open our mouths for the Arst time (there never was such a time), we speak with the Arst voice ever (there never was such a voice)—what do we say? Why must we have a poetry? And who are we? We see now that we are the world and the world is poetry , that words are our poetry, while other pieces of the world have other poetries—birds have their songs but also plants have their forms and patternings and the sky has its own look and process: poetry is the surface and texture and play of being, including the light that springs up in things from their depths. Then what is a poem? The poems are everywhere, we walk among them—an inAnitude of them occupying the same boundariless space—what are they? Our knowings of what is: born to know we are each being, born to be aware in the heart of being, we gently deAne shapes of being, in words, which are free of dimensions , free of cause and effect, free, but when they’re completely free, formless, senseless, also useless and meaningless— why bother? Poems are part of our being alive, to realize them, to say them, is completely natural to being alive: to say what we’ve done, how we feel, what we...