Song of a Reformed Headhunter

As far as we know, Aemilia Lanyer wrote only one book, but a big and ambitious one. Published at the age of 42, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) is a Christian defense of women's virtue against interpreters such as St. Augustine. It is made up of several parts but the most interesting for me is an apology for Eve. The defense, imaginative, ranging, and vigorous, may be summed thus: Eve's fault was only too much love. This idea I took as the premise of my opening poem "Eve's Fault," in which Eve has not one but three lovers, God, the snake and Adam. Lanyer's editor Danielle Clarke is certainly right to point out in her introduction that Lanyer's "feminism" must be carefully understood within the contexts and terms of her time. For instance, a revision of biblical tradition regarding Eve's culpability was not necessarily subversive. Lanyer was in fact very traditional in seeing the representative woman in Eve. My poem does not seek to ...

I Do, I Do In me (the worm) clearly is no righteousness, but this— persistence             H.D., “The Walls Do Not Fall” I’m eating my way through the books of dead women poets— Aemilia Lanyer’s garden where Eve is blameless the robin-eye in Elizabeth Bishop Phillis Wheatley’s bird- of-paradise the swart swan song by Marianne Moore Anna Wickham’s strangled cry the tunes of Li Qingzhao Annie Finch, not the American anthologist, the Countess of Winchilsea the living are eaten too Elisabeth Bletsoe’s Sherborne Woodcock, Pied Wagtail, Starling Molly Peacock Rita Dove And one born in Ghana whose name is a birdcall Ata Ama Aidoo

Eve’s Fault Not Eve, whose fault was only too much love —Aemilia Lanyer, “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum: Eve’s Apology” Though she has left the garden, she does not stop loving them. God won her when he whipped out from his planetary sleeve a bouquet of light. They watched the parade of animals pass. He told her the joke about the Archaeopteryx, and she noted the feathers and the killing claws, a poem, the first of its kind. On a beach, raised from the ocean with a shout, he entered her and she realized, in rolling waves, that love joins and separates. The snake was a quieter fellow. He came in the fall evenings through the long grass, his steps barely parting the blades. Each time he showed her a different path. As they wandered, they talked about the beauty of the light striking the birch, the odd behavior of the ants, the fairest way to split an apple. When Adam appeared, the serpent gave her up to happiness. For happy she was when she met Adam under the tree of lif...