And such a line can also be drawn between ideologically obedient hack verse and an engaged poetics that endures the weight of the unknown, the untracked, the unrealized, along with its urgencies for and against.
7
Antonio Gramsci wrote of the culture of the future that “new” individual artists can’t be manufactured: art is a part of society—but that to imagine a new socialist society is to imagine a new kind of art that we can’t foresee from where we now stand. “One must speak,” Gramsci wrote, “of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality and, therefore, a world intimately ingrained in ‘possible artists’ and ‘possible works of art.’ ”
In any present society, a distinction needs to be made between the “avant-garde that always remains the same”—what a friend of mine has called “the poetry of false problems”—and a poetics searching for transformative meaning on the shoreline of what can now be thought or said. Adonis, writing of Arab poetry, reminds Arab poets that “modernity should be a creative vision, or it will be no more than a fashion. Fashion grows old from the moment it is born, while creativity is ageless. Therefore not all modernity is creativity, but creativity is eternally modern.”
For now, poetry has the capacity—in its own ways and by its own means—to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still-uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, torture and bribes, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom—that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the “free” market. This ongoing future, written off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented: through collective action, through many kinds of art. Its elementary condition is the recovery and redistribution of the world’s resources that have been extracted from the many by the few.
There are other ghostly presences here along with Hugh MacDiarmid: Qaifi Azami. William Blake. Bertolt Brecht. Gwendolyn Brooks. Aimé Césaire. Hart Crane. Roque Dalton. Rubén Darío. Robert Duncan. Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Forugh Farrokhzad. Robert Hayden. Nazim Hikmet. Billie Holiday. June Jordan. Federico García Lorca. Audre Lorde. Bob Marley. Vladimir Mayakovsky. Thomas McGrath. Pablo Neruda. Lorine Niedecker. Charles Olson. George Oppen. Wilfred Owen. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Dahlia Ravikovitch. Edwin Rolfe. Muriel Rukeyser. Léopold Senghor. Nina Simone. Bessie Smith. César Vallejo.
I don’t speak these names, by the way, as a canon: they are voices mingling in a long conversation, a long turbulence, a great, vexed, and often maligned tradition, in poetry as in politics. The tradition of radical modernism, which crosses and recrosses the map of poetry. The tradition of those who have written against the silences of their time and location. Without it—in poetry as in politics—our world is unintelligible.
A friend asks: And what about Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, D. H. Lawrence, Montale, Plath, Ezra Pound, Rilke, Rimbaud, Wallace Stevens, Yeats? In the context of that conversation, their poems flare up anew, signals flashing across contested, even infected waters. I’m not talking about literary “intertextuality” or a “world poetry” but about what Muriel Rukeyser said poetry can be: an exchange of energy, which, in changing consciousness, can effect change in existing conditions.
Translation can both betray and make possible that exchange of energy. I’ve relied—both today and in my lifelong sense of what poetry can be—on translation: the carrying-over, the trade routes of language and literature. And the questions of who is translated, who are the translators, how and by whom the work is done and distributed are also, in a world of imbalanced power and language, political questions. Let’s bear in mind the Triangle Trade as a quintessential agony of translation.
In his Poetics of Relation Édouard Glissant meditates on the transmutations opening out of that abyss of the Middle Passage. He writes of the Caribbean that
though this experience [of the abyss] made you, original victim . . . an exception, it became something shared, and made us, the descendants, one people among others. Peoples do not live on exception. Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge. . . .
This is why we stay with poetry. . . . We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.
Finally: there is always that in poetry which will not be grasped, which cannot be described, which survives our ardent attention, our critical theories, our classrooms, our late-night arguments. There is always (I am quoting the poet/ translator Américo Ferrari) “an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.”
The living relation between the poem and the world: difficult knowledge, operating theater where the poet, committed, goes on working.
Plenary Lecture, Conference on Poetry and Politics, University of Stirling, Scotland, July 13, 2006. First published in 2007 as Poetry and Commitment, a chapbook, by W. W. Norton & Company.
Notes
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978
“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971)
1G. B. Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (New York: Hill & Wang, 1922), p. 139.
2J. G. Stewart, Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from Letters (London: Merlin, 1959), p. 140.
3Henry James, “Notes on Novelists,” in Selected Literary Criticism of Henry James, Morris Shapira, ed. (London: Heinemann, 1963), pp. 157–58.
4A. R., 1978: This intuition of mine was corroborated when, early in 1978, I read the correspondence between Woolf and Dame Ethel Smyth (Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations); in a letter dated June 8, 1933, Woolf speaks of having kept her own personality out of A Room of One’s Own lest she not be taken seriously: “. . . how personal, so will they say, rubbing their hands with glee, women always are; I even hear them as I write.” (Italics mine.)
5A. R., 1978: Yet I spent months, at sixteen, memorizing and writing imitations of Millay’s sonnets; and in notebooks of that period I find what are obviously attempts to imitate Dickinson’s metrics and verbal compression. I knew H.D. only through anthologized lyrics; her epic poetry was not then available to me.
6A. R., 1978: Texts of poetry quoted herein can be found in A. R., Poems Selected and New: 1950–1974 (New York: Norton, 1975).
7A. R., 1978: When I dreamed that dream, was I wholly ignorant of the tradition of Bessie Smith and other women’s blues lyrics which transcended victimization to sing of resistance and independence?
8Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973).
“Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman” (1973)
1Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948), pp. 221–22. A. R., 1978: Her Common Reader essays, so many of which were on women writers, bear nonetheless the marks of her struggle with masculine ideas of what is important, appropriate, or valid (a struggle eloquently described in her speech before the London/National Society for Women’s Service, 1931, reprinted with Woolf’s own manuscript revisions in The Pargiters, Mitchell Leaska, ed. [New York: NYPL/Readex Books, 1977]). So, in 1925, writing of Jane Eyre, the future author of To the Lighthouse (1927), A Room of One’s Own (1929), and Three Guineas (1938) was able to declare that “Charlotte Brontë does not attempt to solve the problems of human life. She is even unaware that such problems exist.” Woolf herself still meets with similar incomprehension today.
2Q. D. Leavis, Introduction to Jane Eyre (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), p. 11.
3A. R., 1978: Ground-breaking as Women and Madness (1972) was in its documentation of the antiwoman bias of the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic professions, Chesler oversi
mplified, I believe, the mother-daughter relationship, perceiving it as almost entirely, if tragically, negative. To a large extent she resorts to “blaming the mother” for the daughter’s disadvantaged position in patriarchy. The more we learn of actual female history (to take but one example, of the history of black women) the less we can generalize about the failure of mothers to cherish and inspirit daughters in a strong, female tradition.
4Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon, 1967), pp. 17–18.
5Erich Neumann, The Great Mother (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University, 1972), pp. 55–59.
“Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson” (1975)
1“The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs, vol. 1, no. 1.
2Hughes, ed., A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 11.
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976)
“Foreword”
1“Rape: The All-American Crime,” in Jo Freeman, ed., Women: A Femimist Perspective (Stanford, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing, 1975).
2Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975). Reviewing Brownmiller’s book, a feminist newsletter commented: “It would be extreme and contentious . . . to call mothers rape victims in general; probably only a small percentage are. But rape is the crime that can be committed because women are vulnerable in a special way; the opposite of ‘vulnerable’ is ‘impregnable.’ Pregnability, to coin a word, has been the basis of female identity, the limit of freedom, the futility of education, the denial of growth.” (“Rape Has Many Forms,” review in The Spokeswoman 6, no. 5 [November 15, 1975].)
3To these American capitalism is adding a third: the profit motive. Franchised, commercially operated child-care centers have become “big business.” Many such centers are purely custodial; overcrowding limits physical and educational flexibility and freedom; the centers are staffed almost entirely by women, working for a minimum salary. Operated under giant corporations such as Singer, Time Inc., and General Electric, these profit-making preschools can be compared to commercial nursing homes in their exploitation of human needs and of the most vulnerable persons in the society. See Georgia Sassen, Cookie Arvin, and the Corporations and Child Care Research Project, “Corporate Child Care,” The Second Wave: A Magazine of the New Feminism 3, no. 3, pp. 21–23, 38–43.
4“Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges,” in Feminist Studies 3, no. 1–2 (Fall 1975), pp. 8, 13.
“Anger and Tenderness”
1Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family from Colonial Times to the Present (Cleveland: 1917). See also Gerda Lerner, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 149–50 ff.
“Motherhood and Daughterhood”
Epigraph from “Mother and Child,” in Like the Iris of an Eye, by Susan Griffin (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).
1Alice Rossi, “Physiological and Social Rhythms: The Study of Human Cyclicity,” special lecture to the American Psychiatric Association, Detroit, Michigan, May 9, 1974; “Period Piece—Bloody but Unbowed,” Elizabeth Fenton, interview with Emily Culpeper, The Real Paper, June 12, 1974.
2Charles Strickland, “A Transcendentalist Father: The Child-Rearing Practices of Bronson Alcott,” History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psycho-History 1, no. 1 (Summer 1973), pp. 23, 32.
3Midge Mackenzie, ed., Shoulder to Shoulder (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 28.
4Margaret Mead, Male and Female (New York: Morrow, 1975), p. 61.
5David Meltzer, Birth (New York: Ballantine, 1973), pp. 3, 5, 6–8.
6Lloyd deMause, “The Evolution of Childhood,” in deMause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), pp. 25–26, 120.
7Jane Lilienfeld, “Yes, the Lighthouse Looks Like That: Marriage Victorian Style,” unpublished paper, presented at the Northeast Victorian Studies Association, Conference on the Victorian Family, April 18–20, 1975, Worcester, Mass.
8Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), pp. 58, 92, 126, 79, 294.
9Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1951), p. 46.
10Diaries and letters of Paula Modersohn-Becker, translated by Liselotte Erlanger, unpublished manuscript, quoted by permission of the translator. See Diane Radycki, ed., and trans., The Letters and Journals of Paula Modersohn-Becker (Metuchen, N.J., and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1980).
11Thomas Johnson, ed., The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), III: 782.
12Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, ed. Aurelia Plath (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 32, 466.
13Virginia Woolf, op. cit., p. 79.
14Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Pocket Books, 1974), p. 32; first published 1928.
15Sue Silvermarie, “The Motherbond,” Women: A Journal of Liberation 4, no. 1, pp. 26–27.
16Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1, no. 1, pp. 1–29.
17Lillian Krueger, “Motherhood on the Wisconsin Frontier,” Wisconsin, A Magazine of History 29, no. 3, pp. 336–46.
18Lynn Sukenick, “Feeling and Reason in Doris Lessing’s Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 14, no. 4, p. 519.
19Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage (New York: New American Library, 1970) p. 111.
20Kate Chopin, The Awakening (New York: Capricorn, 1964), p. 14; first published 1899.
21Cora Sandel, Alberta Alone, trans. Elizabeth Rokkan (London: Peter Owen, 1965), p. 51; first published 1939.
22C. Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (New York: Pantheon, 1967), pp. 13–94.
23Ibid., pp. 127–28.
24Ibid., p. 130.
25Ibid., pp. 132–33.
26Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (New York: Popular Library, 1972), pp. 213–14, 218–19, 222–23.
27Jean Mundy, Ph.D., “Rape—For Women Only,” unpublished paper presented to the American Psychological Association, September 1, 1974, New Orleans, La.
28Clara Thompson, “ ‘Penis Envy’ in Women,” in Jean Baker Miller, ed., Psychoanalysis and Women (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), p. 54.
29Robert Seidenberg, “Is Anatomy Destiny?” in Miller, op. cit., pp. 310–11.
30Tillie Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle (New York: Delta Books, 1961), pp. 1–12.
31Evelyn Reed, Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family (New York: Pathfinder, 1975), pp. 12–14.
32Adrienne Rich, “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1980).
33Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton, 1961), pp. 28–29.
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985
“What Does a Woman Need to Know?” (1979)
1United Nations, Department of International Economic and Social Affairs, Statistical Office, 1977 Compendium of Social Statistics (New York: United Nations, 1980).
“Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence” (1980)
1See, for example, Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon, 1986); Beth Brant, ed., A Gathering of Spirit: Writing and Art by North American Indian Women (Montpelier, Vt.: Sinister Wisdom Books, 1984); Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, 1981; distributed by Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, Albany, N.Y.); J. R. Roberts, Black Lesbians: An Annotated Bibliography (Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad, 1981); Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Albany, N.Y.: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1984). As Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith pointed out in Conditions 5: The Black Women’s Issue (1980), a great deal of fiction by Black women depicts primary relationship
s between women. I would like to cite here the work of Ama Ata Aidoo, Toni Cade Bambara, Buchi Emecheta, Bessie Head, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker. Donna Allegra, Red Jordan Arobateau, Audre Lorde, Ann Allen Shockley, among others, write directly as Black lesbians. For fiction by other lesbians of color, see Elly Bulkin, ed., Lesbian Fiction: An Anthology (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, 1981).
See also, for accounts of contemporary Jewish-lesbian existence, Evelyn Torton Beck, ed., Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, 1982; distributed by Crossing Press, Trumansburg, N.Y. 14886); Alice Bloch, Lifetime Guarantee (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, 1982); and Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, eds., The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology (Montpelier, Vt.: Sinister Wisdom Books, 1986).
The earliest formulation that I know of heterosexuality as an institution was in the lesbian-feminist paper The Furies, founded in 1971. For a collection of articles from that paper, see Nancy Myron and Charlotte Bunch, eds., Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement (Oakland, Calif.: Diana Press, 1975; distributed by Crossing Press, Trumansburg, N.Y. 14886).
2Alice Rossi, “Children and Work in the Lives of Women,” paper delivered at the University of Arizona, Tuscon, February 1976.
3Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, 1962 (New York: Bantam, 1977), p. 480.
4Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and the Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor, 1978); Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon, 1976).
5I could have chosen many other serious and influential recent books, including anthologies, which would illustrate the same point: e.g., Our Bodies, Ourselves, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s best seller (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), which devotes a separate (and inadequate) chapter to lesbians, but whose message is that heterosexuality is most women’s life preference; Berenice Carroll, ed., Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), which does not include even a token essay on the lesbian presence in history, though an essay by Linda Gordon, Persis Hunt, et al. notes the use by male historians of “sexual deviance” as a category to discredit and dismiss Anna Howard Shaw, Jane Addams, and other feminists (“Historical Phallacies: Sexism in American Historical Writing”); and Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), which contains three mentions of male homosexuality but no materials that I have been able to locate on lesbians. Gerda Lerner, ed., The Female Experience: An American Documentary (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), contains an abridgment of two lesbian-feminist–position papers from the contemporary movement but no other documentation of lesbian existence. Lerner does note in her preface, however, how the charge of deviance has been used to fragment women and discourage women’s resistance. Linda Gordon, in Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Viking, Grossman, 1976), notes accurately that “it is not that feminism has produced more lesbians. There have always been many lesbians, despite the high levels of repression; and most lesbians experience their sexual preference as innate” (p. 410).
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