Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS October 19 2012 from Llewelyn Morgan's review of Stephen Halliwell's Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek poetics from Homer to Longinus : Homer's works were already, alongside everything else, a meditation on poetry's power to transform the pain and impermannence of mortal existence into kosmos , a lasting order or design. An overarching theme of Halliwell's discussions is the tension repeatedly diagnosed by Greek thinkers between poetry's capacity to transport its audience to another psychological place and its claim to offer insight into the truths of this existence, the "ecstasy and truth" of his title. Homer himself fails, ultimately, to square these two principles, and Halliwell arrestingly ties Homeric poetics to the figure of the Muse, an embodiment of poetry transcendent and beautiful, but representing a resolution only truly achievable on a divine plane, and only glimpsed by mortals.  *  However we choose to th...

Written as long ago as 1963, this book still speaks with a fresh, combative yet engaging voice. Friedan set out to understand the nagging sense of emptiness that American suburban housewives felt in the 1950s. Marshaling the data and arguments of psychology, sociology and history, she made the case that this existential nullity resulted from the attempt to live according to what she called the feminine mystique, the idea that a woman's sole purpose in life is to be a wife and a mother. In different chapters, Friedan analyzed and criticized the contributions of Freudian psychoanalysis, functional sociology (including Margaret Mead's later writings), sex-directed education, post-war uncertainties and rampant consumerism to the feminine mystique. The synthesis of research and polemic is quite compelling. Equally persuasive is her demonstration of the deadly consequences of the feminine mystique. Taking the home as the boundaries of her world, the American housewife exhausted her...

Poem written on January 13 and revised two days ago, after reading it at Cornelia Street Cafe. Emphasis The night when the nuptial song inside the body had to be taken out by emphatic sign language               Kim Hyesoon, “Ghostmarriage” Sign language had not meant to lay a hand on her but song looked only in the mirror when she sang. After crossing his heart seven times and still failing to turn her face, he reached for her with his hands. She looked at him from eyes as placid as a cow’s while her mouth squeezed the udder of her body. The squirts of sound tasted warm, and for a while he did not know to thank his hands or her singing. He thanked her the only way he knew, shuddering into the soft places where his hands had pounded. The song wrapping its tenderness around the sign, when he spilled his seed he could almost speak.

One More Dispatch from a Distant Land When I was fifteen, becoming a woman frightened me. When I was eighteen, being a woman struck me as loathsome. Now, how old am I? I have become too much of a woman. I can no longer return to being human; that age is gone forever. My head is small, my neck long, and my hair terribly heavy.             Tada Chimako, “From a Woman of a Distant Land” It was the most exquisite form of torture yet invented. The schools trained us to be rigorous scientists, subtle logicians, discriminating literary critics, scrupulous theologians. We were given every form of encouragement. Then we were overtaken by our bodies. We bled heavily without a wound. We joined with men, hoping to be shattered, but only mild pleasure, if not disgust, happened. They, on the other hand, cried like babies or dogs and wanted the same for us.   So we faked it and after a while could not tell the body’s rumor f...

In a Slate interview about the New Group production of his play Burnings at Theater Row, directed by Scott Elliott, Thomas Bradshaw explains that his characters are so different from mainstream theater's because they say what is on their mind and they do what they want, without hypocrisy or self-deception. "Where my work departs from traditional drama," he says, "is the fact that my characters pretty much have no self-awareness and are almost acting on pure id. There is never any subtext in my plays." It is a bold artistic aim that is mostly but unevenly achieved in Burnings . Two partnered white men adopt a 14-year-old white boy for help around the house and for their sexual satisfaction. A successful black painter commits adultery against his white wife by visiting a black prostitute. A white brother-and-sister pair swear to uphold their deceased parents' neo-Nazist beliefs. All of them say what they want, and pretty much do what they want in the next...

Finally finished reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex last Monday. "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman," so translate Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier that resounding challenge. So many terrific things in de Beauvoir's analysis of how one becomes woman. Nietzsche is transmuted into the existentialist project of self-transcendence. Part One rejects the idea of female destiny, as promoted by biological, psychoanalytical or historical materialist views. Part Two recounts the history of women from the hunters-gatherers to the twentieth century, highlighting the theme of patriarchy and its need for woman to be the Other. Part Three tackles the sexist myths about women, elaborated by Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Paul Claudel and Breton, before looking at how Stendhal romances real women. All that in Volume I. In Volume II Parts One and Two, de Beauvoir describes the lived experience of contemporary Western woman, from her childhood, through s...

TLS November 18 2011 from Patrick McCaughey's review of the De Kooning retrospective at the MoMA: The most telling example of de Kooning's progress through renunciation comes in the breakthrough years of critical acclaim 1948-53. He held his first one-man show in 1948 at the Charles Egan Gallery, a small and relatively obscure venue in New York, where he showed black-and-white paintings of the past two years. Most of them were just above easel scale, but they radiated an intensity of feeling, lightening white movements rent the unsteady black grounds. They rivalled the masterly, contemporaneous drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. Although they are abstract paintings with only the most fleeting reference to identifiable images--a roof, the letters spelling Orestes--they are burdened with an ominous foreboding. De Kooning prowled Manhattan by night and the black-and-white paintings hint at a city illuminated by erratic flashes of light, felt rather than observed. A famous rem...

Tearjerker My mum would insist on watching the latest release with Dad and me, some action flick like Iron Man or The Fast and the Furious . Clanks and clashes notwithstanding, she would fall slack, snoring. The plot, said Dad, is too complicated for your mum. But she could tell you everything you want to know about some 100-episode Cantonese tearjerker, who is sleeping with whom and not his wife, why he sells out his partner, how she takes her revenge, what is the relationship between real life and TV.

According to  Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts , by Georges Jean, when medieval scribes overlooked a line of writing, they would write it in the margin or at the bottom of the manuscript, and draw an arrow from it to the place where it should have appeared. The artist would even decorate the arrow with drawings of plants and animals climbing up the line of reparation. This wonderful detail coalesced with my reading of Susan Howe's That This , a book of poems about her husband's death. The book is made up of three parts. The third part, also the title sequence, "delivers beautiful short squares of verse that might look at home in a hymnal" (back cover). Most of the poems there consist of two couplets separated by stanza break. I follow that pattern in my poem "Copy" and include a missing line at the bottom of the poem, a line which should be re-inserted into the stanza break, where it belongs, with an arrow. The epigraph is from the first part ...

TLS September 23 2011 from Tim Blanning's review of Craig Koslofsky's Evening's Empire: A history of the night in early modern Europe : No longer a time reserved for sleep, the night time was now the right time for all manner of recreational and representational purposes. This is what Craig Koslofsky called "nocturnalisation", defined as "the ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night", a development to which he awards the status of "a revolution in early modern Europe." * The most effective instrument was street-lighting, introduced to Paris in 1667, Lille also in 1667, Amsterdam in 1669, Hamburg in 1673, Turin in 1675, Berlin in 1682, Copenhagen in 1683, and London, where private companies were contracted to provide the service, between 1684 and 1694. * It has always been the educated who had demonized folk beliefs, while the common people had made no automatic association between the night and evil ...

My Mother’s Hips these hips are big hips      Lucille Clifton, “homage to my hips” They have a bicycle in them, my mother’s hips. They move. They have a washtub in them. They do. Smell of soap suds. They have a gas station too. They don’t have a university in them, they don’t, no, sir, they don’t have a battlefield, but they have training grounds in Australia, they have India, and the greatest city on earth, New York, New York, where I praise my mother’s hips.

Subtitled LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality , the anthology is edited by Kevin Simmonds, published by Sibling Rivalry Press. The first part of my "Bull Eclogues" is reprinted; it looks helpless without the rest of the sequence. I think I may have made a poor decision to publish one part on its own. Many countries are represented in the anthology. I am amused to see Singapore listed immediately after the United States on the back cover. There are three of us in the anthology: Irfan Kasban, Cyril Wong and me. Gay. Singaporean. Poets. No women. It's a shame. The anthology is very lightly edited. The poems are organized by the poets' names in alphabetical order. The introduction claims a number of firsts, but says little about queer poets' take on spirituality, beyond the general affirmation that through this book queer poetry has taken its place at religion's table. It has nothing to say about the historical relationship between queer poetry ...

The Woman and the Idea of Trouble You are the wall at my road’s end, Open your gates, and let me through to God. —Anna Wickham (1883–1947), “Prayer to Love” In the day room a woman stupefied from masturbation. Another flirted with Bonaparte. A third delivered nightly a hundred babies and in the morning killed their mouths. A painter, once a great beauty, had rubbed all her hair out. The troublesome idea was that you were not so different. You recognized them as fun-house distortions of your lust, your love of power and of babies, your aspiration for art. The quinine, delivered in a kind tonic, queried your head. When your husband dragged you shouting from the garden to the confines of the house, you put a fist in the glass door. Your poem was a symptom of madness, as was your belief that your husband, an astronomer, did not understand you. Now you lived in a house that arranged its barred windows for your pleasure. Your head had not one, but two doctors. What yo...

Anna Wickham was famous in her time. She was friends with D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, Lawrence Durrell and Dylan Thomas. She moved in the circle of Natalie Barney, the American heiress and lesbian author who drew the fashionable artistic and literary set to her Paris salon. The poetry of Anna Wickham was published in England by Harold Munro of The Poetry Bookshop, and in America by Louis Untermeyer. It received favorable comments from Pound and Eliot. After World War II she killed herself (by hanging) and dropped out of sight. Jennifer Vaughan Jones, the author of this biography, has performed a real service by bringing back to vivid life this compelling woman. Building on the work of R. D. Smith, who published his memoir of Anna Wickham, with a generous selection of her poetry and her prose, in The Writings of Anna Wickham: Free Woman and Poet at the centenary of the poet's birth, Jones researched the archives of three countries, looking at newly discovered correspondence, a...

I am reading Jennifer Vaughan Jones's biography of Anna Wickham alongside the poems. Quite horrified to learn that her husband committed her to a mental asylum for no reason other than the suspicion of an illicit liaison, her emotional outbursts and her stubborn desire to write poetry. In one of these outbursts, from the garden, Anna had shouted at Patrick her poem "Nervous Prostration," which begins: I married a man of the Croydon class When I was twenty-two, And I vex him, and he bores me Till we don't know what to do! It isn't good form in the Croydon class To say you love your wife, So I spend my days with the tradesmen's books And pray for the end of life... Little wonder that Patrick was angered by Anna's poetry, an anger easily transmuted into a "concern" for Anna's sanity. Though Anna suffered much fear and many indignities in Brooke House, the asylum, she secretly carried out of it at the end of her time there 80 poems she...

The poems in Wickham’s second book are numbered as well as titled, giving the appearance of a sequence. Though the poems focus on recurring themes, they are written in different stanzaic forms, most often as a single stanza. They often rhyme in couplets too. This marriage of strict numbering and varied forms creates an impression of great spontaneity. “I Amourette” is a dialogue between the Woman and the Philosopher. Unusual to the dialogue form is a kind of prelude in which the two speakers talk to themselves about the other before they join in “argument.” The Woman asks herself how she can please man best. Two options present themselves: “Shall I be silent? Shall I speak?” The Philosopher does not question himself but rather questions whether a woman can be wise when “her philosophy is but a lure.” The Philosopher thus sees wisdom as antithetical to love, or, more generally, feeling. He does not want his wisdom to fall to the “arsenal of charm” and the “ammunition of her thought.” ...

According to the editor’s note, many poems of this privately printed collection (1911) were reissued in later volumes. This selection of 14 poems already presents the major themes, which recur in Wickham’s writings. The conflict between men and women is depicted in “Song of the Low-Caste Wife,” “Surrender,” “Divorce,” and “All Men to Women.” The ambition to be a writer appears in “Illusion,” “The Artist’s Life,” and “Inspiration.” The post-Darwin loss of religious faith inspires the poems “The Call for Faith,” “The Song of the Child,” and “The Sinner.” Finally, the theme of motherhood is expressed in “The Song of the Mother,” “The Town Dirge” (about the death of a poor couple’s child), “Outline,” and, most tenderly, in “Song to the Young John,” Wickham’s firstborn. The poems in this first collection, as indicated in the repetition of “song” in many of their titles, are stirringly lyrical. “Illusion,” the best of the short lyrics, begins with gigantic confidence but soon discovers, by...

Probably Written by a Man Old is this earth-cave, all I do is yearn. —“The Wife’s Lament,” from the tenth-century Exeter Book The husband has to go, for a distant government post or into exile for a violent crime or to the store for milk, the wife is left behind, alone, as women are apt to be through the ages, in China or England or any territory where schools and force and money all belong to men. I don’t like this unromantic truth. I prefer to imagine the wife, pretty as the day of the wedding or disheveled by the distress of not knowing where her lord will rest, watching by the thin curtains or sprinting to the head of the river every day to look for signs of his returning. For, the scholars say, the woman is not really a woman. She is the children of Israel in their Babylonian captivity crying to God for release, or the Soul yearning for reunion with Truth or Beauty or Goodness, those eternal verities, confirms the footnote in my Norton Anthology of Poetry. ...

The Xpakinté and the Drunk “The Xpakinté is not really a person, although she looks like a woman.” —Munda Tostó, “The Xpakinté” The woods seems painted in different shades of black but isn’t. The tall oak swerves into his face but isn’t. She looks like a woman but isn’t. She looks like his wife, her hair braided with red pompons, but isn’t. By the bank of fog a small light shines but isn’t. The light comes from the Xpakinté but isn’t. She loses her shawl and skirt and is naked but isn’t. Her cunt hides in black moss but isn’t. One finger-snap she is there but isn’t. He is hugging a hollow tree but isn’t. The tree is alive with hairy caterpillars (but isn’t) that stink like fire but isn’t. In the morning he is found dead but isn’t. He is home with his wife, the pretty one with red pompons in her hair, but isn’t.

Black Threads Long ago women made threads as today we make our children: They spun them with the strength of their bodies. —Loxa Jiménes Lópes, from Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women This is also the stuff of legend: a drawer that never ran out of underwear; buttons and studs torn from shirt cuffs and trousers reattached overnight. Fabulous until the day mother asked me, strange shy defiance in her voice, to thread the needle, for her eyes were not as sharp, her hands as steady as before, meaning the days of yore, meaning the body’s unmistaken sufficiency, which is also the spirit’s kinship to the instinct of the fast self-spinning spider. I was never one to do things on my own, nor am I now, nor will be, my love, though I try to help build the bookcase and clean up the mess after I cooked. Only in this, in the hours before light, leaving you asleep, wrapped tight, in bed, when I close the door behind me, and on my laptop throw out wet black thre...