Finally home from Port Townsend, still wicked tired but glad to be back with my husband, my internet connection, my cats, and various other necessities like a phone and a television. Television, I’ve decided, is really my true muse – ten nights on the seaside with otters and herons, the full moon on the black water etc and nothing, no poems, but the minute I’ve watched some episodes of Futurama, I’m ready to write again. What is wrong with me? I also had a spurt of revisioning last night, I went back and altered about six poems to make them more interesting, brighter, tighter. I guess all that workshop time didn’t go to waste after all – it must have seeped into my unconscious at some point. Probably on those days when I only had three hours of sleep.
Waiting for me in the mailbox at home were beautiful contributor copies from Columbia Poetry Review, which featured many other women writers I admire, among them Alicia Ostriker and Denise Duhamel, as well as some well-known experimental poets (Heidi Lynn Staples, Arielle Greenburg.) Definitely an issue for me to read cover to cover.
Speaking of women poets, one of the lectures from the conference that has stuck in my mind was Paisley Redkal’s rather academic but fascinating delivery of a paper on the lyric I, anger as the “unacceptable” emotion in poems, how the recent rejection of emotion in poetry is actually a rejection of the feminine, how the reaction against “confession” in poems was likewise a reaction against poems about women’s lives, despite the fact that the first major confessional poets (Snodgrass, Lowell) were men. “You can write a poem about anything nowadays, except emotion” she said. “It doesn’t have to make sense, it’s all about wordplay and disguise, it highlights the intellect, it rejects those messy female “feelings.” Interesting stuff. It was enlightening to be at a conference where so many of the faculty (Debra Earling, Paisley, Rebecca Brown) spoke directly about “feminist” topics, about domestic violence, writing as a woman, what women are expected/allowed to say about their lives, etc. These things can seem so outré, so out of fashion in the current literary scene. There was a discussion of the saying in classrooms by girls, “I’m not a feminist, but…”
On a related note, the workshop I was in had several assignments, most of which involved writing poems re-telling news stories, fairy tales, pop culture. The point was to get away from the “I,” the poet’s own life, and widen the scale, while still keeping a narrative structure. Since re-tellings and persona poems are pretty much all I do anyway, I didn’t get many new poems, but I did enjoy looking in class at other poets who write these kinds of poems. Do I favor persona poems because I am afraid to write about the subject matter in the first person? I think mostly it’s because I’ve always been crazily empathetic, wondering about what’s going on in someone else’s head. In some alternate world I might have been a fiction writer, I love creating characters. On that note, I’ll try to have some empathy for my blog readers, and end this long rambling note…
It’s good to see you all again! And, a note of congrats to Paul Guest on his new job in Mississippi!