Tales of men and women

Cold morning with something unusual for here: a couple of orioles in the lilac bush. Lilac bushes are about as common as dandelions in the northeast (hence the lilacs of Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," but a morning with orioles in the lilac bush and goldfinches at the feeder? That's like a flash of sunset at noon. Despite the cold and yesterday's snow flurries, this has been a good week for songbird color with goldfinches and purple finches. I'm drinking tea and reading the distressing article in "The Atlantic" article on "the collapse of a large, wealthy, seemingly modern, seemingly democratic nation just a few hours’ flight from the United States"--socialist Venezuela. If you are drawn to Kafka on the toils of a man caught by the system, or else want to know about exactly how helpless a mother and father can be in the face of government corruption and abrupt loss of essential goods like drugs and food, have a read. The stories are heartbreaking.

Interesting to me for a number of reasons, most of them obvious--one of them local, as there is a Cooperstown connection--is this article, "The Diminution of Women Writers: An American Tradition." I'm not surprised that the author mentions Hawthorne's influence on Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and his dislike for much of the "scribbling" mob of women. I adore Hawthorne and always feel congenial with him, but wouldn't it be good to have some stories by Sophia, and not just her paintings? The writer gives Constance Fenimore Woolson, named in part after her great-uncle, James Fenimore Cooper, as a prime example: "Woolson’s work and career are a reminder that women’s literary ambitions are not a recent phenomenon. She was a writer who aimed for and reached the heights of literary recognition, despite even greater obstacles than those facing women writers today." She and Henry James were very close friends--close enough to have destroyed their letters to each other--and she influenced his work. Various people have suggested that The Beast in the Jungle is based on his feeling for Constance Fenimore Woolson. I have read that it was William Dean Howells who buried her reputation as a writer after her suicide, and unfortunately James did not defend her in print. Now her books are at last on the rise again.

Painter Yolanda Sharpe reminded me of the case of married painters Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, and how Pollock received far more attention. So I dug up this marvelous little quote from ARTnews (1949): "There is a tendency among some of these wives to 'tidy up' their husband's styles. Lee Krasner (Mrs. Jackson Pollock) takes her husband's paint and enamels and changes his unrestrained, sweeping lines into neat little squares and triangles." Aren't those phrases interesting? The name of the show, the tidying wife, the "Mrs. Jackson Pollock," the neatness, the "littleness." "Some of these wives." So the reviewer "sees" that masculine lack of restrain and "sweeping" lines beat female, so little and neat. (I find it hard to apply either adjective to Lee Krasner.)

And painter Ashley Cooper reminded me of the much-shared article about Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, "Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art."  I went back and looked at it again, Frida Kahlo photographed in what the journalist calls her "foolish little ruffled apron," tied over a black silk dress. She is "a miniature-like little person." Her "miniature-like technique" is opposed to the "heroic" figures of Rivera. The author clearly admires the work, though, describing "a skillful and beautiful style." Perhaps the most interesting element in the article is how well Kahlo knows that it is useless to defend her work or expose her secret ambition, and how she employs truth and laughter. He is the art star, come to Detroit to paint his Detroit industry murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts, and her own work is just beginning to flower. Listen to how she tells the truth of what she knows is inside her, beginning to break forth: "Of course, he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist." She laughs and mocks her questioner, but in the end she is right. At that moment, he is the better artist. Later on, she will surpass him.

***

And for a postscript, a little Emily Dickinson and Billy Collins...

A note from the Young Crones Club

Image via http://mahan.wonkwang.ac.kr/
Rare: an image of a medieval woman artist at work.

The glorious thing about being in the Young Crones Club is that suddenly you know well people of all ages. Of course, everybody knows about the down sides (like an over-cut diamond, growing older has many sides. I also think knowing a lot of people of many ages comes from living in a village setting, where the ages are not separated out and compartmentalized, as they often are in a city.)

It's a curious time of life, the time of the Young Crone, when children are struggling to fly outside or inside the nest, when parents are growing old and sometimes dying, when duties and requests for volunteer work increase madly when it seems they ought to lessen, and when the plain fact of growing older tells the writer (this one) to hurry up and finish all those almost-finished things strewn around the writing room. And then what? To dream of beginning a new work, death-defying and magnificent... Because every writer of any potency has the dream burning in the brain.

"Now let us sport us while we may; / And now, like am'rous birds of prey, / Rather at once our time devour." Words are sexy, fecund, powerful, and joyful: so Marvell sported in words with his would-be lover, the famous Coy Mistress, and made of desire that flies a kind of monument. And so we readers and writers may aspire to sport and rejoice through words--losing and finding ourselves in a more intense life.

P. S. Just peeked to see if I had written about the Young Crones Club before--and yes, I have (yes, the mind must be going!) And stumbled on this while I was at it: Joy in Poetry.

P. P. S. Thanks to Jenny B for including A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, The Throne of Psyche, and The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins on her list of recommended summer reads. Also included are books and chapbook by real life and e-life friends Dale Favier (never met but want to meet!), Robbi Nester (met in college), and Fiona Robyn (met in Wales in 2010.) And, of course, I can't leave out the poets in The Book of Ystwyth; I've been lucky enough to meet Dave Bonta, Damian Walford Davies, Callum James, and Andrea Selch in Wales, and I often feel that I know Clive's friend, the late Catriona Urquhart. It's a beautiful book, packed with Clive's images and well worth owning.

Poems at Mezzo Cammin

What Consoles the Fool

Glossary by Twilight

Invisibles

Take a look at the new issue--lots of familiar and not-so-familiar names in the realm of women-who-write-formal-poems. Also, please look at the just-prior and brand new post about "The Magician's Card," an essay written for Fujimura Institute.

A refusal to pine--

Note: If you're looking for the Great Poetry Giveaway, scoot down one post...

Image courtesy of sxc.hu and Patrick Nijhuis
of Deventer, the Netherlands.

I'm a little peeved at The Atlantic's writers-need-a-Vera article. I definitely don't agree with "The Legend of Vera Nabokov: Why Writers Pine for a Do-It-All Spouse." Let's just do the work, and if our bathrooms are cleaned a little less often and our laundry sometimes stands up in a mountain and we don't have as many dinner parties as we might like, well, so be it. And if we don't write as many masterpieces as we hoped . . . we can just remember than our number one piece of assigned work is life, and that we need to try to get better at it as we go on.

So what if some of us could use but can't manage a secretary, a housekeeper, and a full-time cheerleader? Sure, I lack all and would enjoy all, but who cares? My husband and I have three children to send to college, and I'd rather have the rather pricey children than the helpers. And I'm grateful that I was able to quit my "career" and stay home to write poetry, stories, and novels and raise children. I'm still pleased, and I'm not going to complain.

In fact, I feel wonderfully lucky not to have been born into a life where I'd end up cleaning hotel rooms (or crabs at the beach--what a tough job! I admire those women, cracking claws and laughing as they work), scraping paint off clapboard, or smiling as I ring up your brand new material possessions at Walmart. Writers need to be a part of the daily dirt and occasional magic of life just like everybody else, and we don't have to whimper if we don't live in a sweet rainbow bubble where other people serve us.

What is a spouse for? Not to be your personal servant, certainly! I'm glad to have married a man who likes to cook and does so. But I didn't and don't expect my husband to read or critique manuscripts, act as my secretary, clean the bathrooms, do the laundry for five people (or however many are in residence at the moment), vacuum, etc. Do I wish he would do all those things? It's a bit tempting . . . but no, not really, thanks.

As for Vera Nabokov, I thank her for managing Vladimir Nabokov's life and career. I hope she found considerable satisfaction and even some joy in her choice. Because that's what it was--a choice of how to live her life.

The David Gilmour Flap

Writing room with books, rocks, and birds

Has everybody on earth who has read a book now weighed in on the puckish, contrarian David Gilmour and his interview? No. I have not. I may be the last one.

Here I weigh in

I like the idea of a department having at least one teacher who is wild about his reading and talks about stories from a writer's point of view, and I hope that his enthusiasm for the books he likes is contagious. Then maybe his students will explore and find some of those women writers (he does read Virginia Woolf) he claims not to read. Students are not stupid; they'll notice right away that he doesn't like women writers. Not every professor has to meet every need, cover every question. A department is, one hopes, a wholeness made of disparate parts. (And I, a writer and a woman, am not in a tizzy because David Gilmour will never read A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. I am fine with that, recognizing that most people on planet Earth have not done so!)

Too many anchovies

The fact that Gilmour spouted all sorts of exciting, teasing non-p.c. things is unfortunate for him and fortunate for journalists and bloggers because he lives and works in a p.c. world. (I know the term "politically correct" is now out of fashion, but (alas) it still describes realities.) Maybe he had too many anchovies at breakfast. Maybe the department chair had just riled him. May the interviewer was a little too attractive. Maybe he had cat-scratch fever. I do not care one whit what his opinions are; they won't stop me from writing or reading as I desire. But I do wish he wouldn't lose his job because of this flap. (Here I note that men appear to be prone to getting themselves into sizzling-hot water at a fairly quick rate.)

The insanity of men and women's powers

I also note that if you look at the bell curves of sanity and neurological deficit, you'll find more men at each end--the crazy, wild smart end and the sad deficit end. Whether the fact that greater numbers of men than women are unleashed from normalcy (and thus, conventional thinking and writing) is a problem for women as writers is a thing we may be able to assess in a few hundred years. But I am confident of women's powers, looking at Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, and many more. If that estrangement from the norm is a measure, well, it seems likely that we have enough women who are also unleashed from the usual.

Weighing in on those who are writing posts (sort of like this, only different)

Can't we get over being so unbearably p. c. and also unloving of anything but the put-down? Violently snubbing him because he hasn't found women writers he likes (his loss) or only read Proust twice (actually he listened to audio twice and read twice, and I doubt that many professors have read/listened all the way through four times) seems absolutely ridiculous.

The Big Weigh

There are only two important genres of books. Good and not-good. Men have managed to write most of the books for many centuries, while women washed the dead and hung out the men's scrubbed undies and birthed the babies (and often died too young because of it, even if they had written Jane Eyre.) Of course there will be more books by men that are great books, and more first-rate work to teach by men. It would be fairly sad story for the male sex if that was not the case. But what about today? Well, time hasn't sifted there, has it? The twentieth century isn't settled yet, much less the current one. But in every age prior, the history of the action of the sands of time on literary works shows us than there is always much more not-good to be rubbed away than there is good to endure. Moral: Women who are writers and men who are writers will both suffer the sifting of time. 

The End. 

Quit quarreling about it. 

Love one another and stay out of trouble (i.e. go read a book or write one, quick! And while you're still online, sign up for Prufrock.)

Index to my online poems in Mezzo Cammin

2013.1

2012.1, 2012.2

2011.2, 2011.1, 

2010.2, 2010.1, 

2009.2, 2009.1,

2008.2, 2008.1, 

and 2007.1.

Mezzo Cammin is one of my favorite places to publish. I admire the energy and work of poet, Mezzo Cammin editor, West Chester director, and founder of the woman poets' timeline project Kim Bridgford. Here's a little map to my various publications there. More will be coming out in the next few issues. I think this compact list can serve as a little introduction to my poetry, as it contains a lot of variety, including a snip from Thaliad, poems from The Foliate Head and The Throne of Psyche, and some adventures with the Fool and the King from The Book of the Red King (forthcoming, some day!)

Wikipedia's woman-wrangle

Credit to Rutgers art history major Nicole of Bendomolina.
John Singer Sargent, "Apollo and the Muses," Boston MFA

The ongoing Wikipedia flap over the removal of women from "American novelists" and their placement in "American women novelists" continues. Here's a pretty good summation from The New York Review of Books. Out of curiosity I have peeked from time to time; yes, I was plunked into the women's sub-category.

Now I am back in "American novelists." Today there are twenty-one of us nestled under "Y." Nineteen are men; two are women. Ninety percent of Wikipedia contributors are men. Like VIDA statistics, these numbers are suggestive and need no comment.

The focus of all the articles I have seen on the general outcry (starting with an op-ed article by Amanda Filipaachi at The New York Times online site) is sexism, and there's no doubt that putting women in a sort of ghetto category is a slam against them. But I wonder if there is even more to it than unthinking sexism. Could this be a cracked, unintended consequence and legacy of university-based gender / multi-cultural politics--the sorting of literature and the humanities in general into gender, national, and ethnic categories that now govern many college programs? I wonder this in part because the man who started it all is currently a student in history at Wayne State.

Wikipedia mandates sorting and categories, but new categories ought to be judged by whether they are helpful or unhelpful. Of course it is not helpful for women to be shoved out of the category of "American novelists"; it simply suggests to readers that only men can be "real novelists," and that women writers do not matter. I expect Wikipedia will have to be content with the alphabet as a way to establish divisions among novelists and other kinds of writers. Any further sub-categories should depend on and refer back to what is called the parent category. (That's a bit of Wiki-geek-speak for you.)

Outside of Wikipedia, categories can be helpful when they attempt to redress invisibility--a lack of knowledge and lack of attention. I pause and feel thankful for the good work of poet, editor, and conference director Kim Bridgford and The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, an exhaustive database of women poets. Perhaps somebody needs to do the same thing for the novel. Couldn't one find a few equally well-known "Y" women to accompany the "Y" men on my Wikipedia page? And what about the remainder of the alphabet?

(Here's a little side tunnel off the main burrow. I just took a peek, and I am not in "American poets," where six men and one woman find themselves under the sign of "Y." Curious. I started publishing as a poet and have four books out with more to come, and am sorted as a novelist only. How do they decide? Is it a Potter sorting-hat moment, with madcap dithering between Ravenclaw and Gryffindor? Can't one be in two houses at once?)

What's the upshot of all this? If you are a woman with some spare time and an interest in the issues, you might think about joining the site. They feel the lack of women members, it appears. The current contributing members need to realize that in the case of Wikipedia, mere inclusion or exclusion amounts to a judgment. When Wikipedia is the first and often the last resort for many, especially college students accustomed to leaning on the site for information, it is essential that women be part of major (parent) categories such as "American novelists."

* * *

Marly, recent and elsewhere:

• Thaliad's wild epic adventure in verse, profusely decorated by artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012) here and here 
• The Foliate Head's collection of poems with art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Stanza Press (UK) here
• A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (novel) from Mercer University Press (ForeWord 2013 finalist in the general fiction category; The Ferrol Sams Award, 2012) here
• The Throne of Psyche, collection of formal poetry from Mercer, 2011, here
• Samples from my 2011-12 books at Scribd.
• See tabs above for information on individual books, including review clips.

Useful motto

For poet Sarah Busse, a phrase nabbed from my rather silly facebook post about playing Cleaning Girl and having Them mess up the job (and so why ever do we bother?) Here goes:

Unworldliness

Fra Angelico (1395-1455) Annunciatory angel
Here's an account of the "sublime exhibition"
where I encountered this angel in 2005.

Rose at five to roust a boy for a faraway wrestling tournament and dry the singlet (ah! forgot.) The world is still deep-blue-and-night-on-snow. I've had a number of reasons of late to remember how strange it is to be an artist of any kind--how odd my concerns look in a worldly light. And yet I am so blessed and lucky to live when I do, in a time when I didn't die in childbirth (but would have, in an earlier age), a time when a woman is allowed to twist words into shapes and a man is allowed to cook her dinner.

In front of me is an image of one of Fra Angelico's angels, the reality encountered and the print bought at an extraordinary show at the Met some years ago. The shape between halo and wing is full of grace and beauty, and the flushed, alien skin and rich hair are still alive with an unworldly light. The wings are eyed like a peacock's, seeing everything. How wonderful that half a millenium later, this angel is still speaking, and I am alive and harking to its lovely gestures.

In his turbulent age, Fra Angelico found again and again the peace to make such radiant paintings, ballasted with what Makoto Fujimura calls "angelic weight." In our time, so rife with visual noise and loud, time-frittering leisure and the world's terrible alarms, that peace is an island of hush that still exists if we can only sit still and wait--as I wait now on words.

Marja-Leena asks a question

I enjoy going to Marja-Leena's site and think you would too.

Yesterday artist Marja-Leena Rathje wrote me a letter and asked about the truth of a post from a website she visits—it’s a useful site about books from Finland. The post argued various things: that women writers are judged and marketed by age and by looks; that the “old” and “ugly” have trouble finding publishers and agents; that women are sometimes asked not to write “too intelligently”; that foreign agents want to know book-sale numbers, looks, and age only; that “the media does not care whether writing is “the stuff of classics or reduced-calorie-ice-cream-human-relationship prose,” only that it has attractive interview fodder; that readers are underestimated by publishers; and that such writing and marketing beliefs as these “won’t result in art.”

These plain old facts of the way the world works are ones that I have long understood about the mainstream writing world in the U. S. After all, the states have led the globe in moving the focus from substance to celebrity. Substance in this case means art rather than the ephemeral and good books rather than weak ones. Pause. Caveat: I affirm this despite the fact that there are still great book reviewers and feature writers, agents, and editors out there, and honor still flourishes where it can. But I find it telling that these ideas weren't obvious and simple for Marja-Leena, who is a bright woman, accomplished and active in the arts.

So.  I acknowledge the justice of those remarks and their seemingly intractable nature:  then what can the woman who writes and aspires to art do? How can she navigate the world as it is?

She can seek to embrace a circle of readers who are loyal to her and support her work—that’s what big-house publishers once wanted for their “stable” of writers. They strove to provide and grow a “readership.” It’s not an easy thing to do, and she will be often on her own in this effort. She may be often discouraged by this obligation and feel that there is not enough time and that making new work is more important—that precious time to write is scarce when the needs of job and family (perhaps a spouse, perhaps children) already divide her pie of time. But in the 21st century she must certainly add this push toward community to her list of things to do.

She can hope to be part of a glistening spiderweb stretched across the globe; she can hope to find readers who will care that she is able to continue to publish (and the truth is that selling a certain number of books is always part of that ability to publish in the future) and so will buy and read her books and tell other people about them. She must have a certain confidence in and hope for the good will of others and the power of word-of-mouth.

The writer can look beyond the big-house monolith to university and small presses if she finds she is stymied in the larger system, her "progress" doomed by the fact that her promotion is so limited. But even in a less aggressive world she will find that she must sell to help her publisher and herself, though the demands are not as great as they are in a large mainstream house where she is often expected to produce numbers without sufficient promotion.

But most of all, the woman who strives to make the most beautiful and meaningful poems or stories or novels she can make must know some greater things. It's out of fashion to aspire, like Keats, to "the pantheon." Didn't postmodernism give a last smashing blow to that  shelf of writers' busts, mostly men's and often not at all pretty? But she must be out of fashion, this imaginary woman--this woman who exists in many shapes and with many faces.  Like Cather, she must sit down with the best, whatever the sex, whatever appearance they wear. Unlike a "celebrity," she must have humility in the face of what has gone before. Like Rilke she must follow the star that inspires revolution of life, like Austen she must learn how to write in the family parlor, and like Dickinson she must set aside any lack of notice from the world. She must attempt to be an Amazon, a version of that Blakean, Yeatsian archer who strives "to shoot the arrow of desire out of this flat plane of time and space"  (Stauffer, The Golden Nightingale.)

In such company, she can know that it is not ultimately about sales numbers or her pretty or not-pretty face—she can know soul-deep that it is not in the least about media or glitz or “youth culture” or celebrity or trivialities or the run-amuck American obsession with selling. She is in that world but not of that world, and so she can know what matters.

She can know that creation is beyond gender, though not beyond birth.  It is about instilling so much life into words that a story or poem comes to have a kind of life of its own: to be a new thing in the world. It is about the lonely room where the creator brings something out of nothing. At times it may seem to be about the hard chair, patience, and obsession. For the novelist it may be the sometimes laborious knitting and unknitting and re-knitting of the dream. It may seem all hard chair and no light.  At times it may seem to be about not quitting. But all that is just being a kind of servant, attendant on creation, ready and prepared for something to be born. 

At its best and highest, creation in words is about the joy of streaming language, the water from the fount, the light coming into the world. It is about the fire in the head and the exuberant chase of beauty and truth. And the woman who is a writer? She may join that wild hunt, whatever her age or face.

 Art without end, amen.