| Women Poets |
 Adrienne Rich In the novel „Božanska glad“ (Divine Hunger) by Slavenka Drakulić, the heroine meets one handsome and exotic Joao Amado at a library. Introducing himself, he tells her that he has written one semi-successful novel, that he is currently writing a history book about the natives of the Amazon area, but that he also works as an editor in a publishing company because “who could possibly make a living as a writer in a such a poor country as Brazil.“ Then he asks her if she writes as well. At first, her answer is “no, no“, but then she says: “I write essays, essays mostly…"
“Poet” is also a label used for protection against negative connotations. Ah, she’s a poet… This, of course, implies justification for the illogical, the contradictory, the whimsical… And we women, intellectuals, strive to be perceived as smart, rational… But while reading the poems and essays by excellent women poets, I am beginning to notice that my discomfort about that identity is diminishing.
Poetry provides us with this specific light within our being, which we use as a foundation for all of our hopes of survival and the changes which occur in the language before anywhere else. Poetry is a metamorphosis of silence into language and action. Poetry is not a luxury, as is stated in the title of one of the essays. Even Virginia Woolf noticed that, due to the low cost of paper, women more often wrote than painted… And Audre herself points out that she often wrote poems when she was between jobs. Poetry is not a luxury and therefore it is indispensable as a tool for revealing the essence of experience. In the conversation with an also very well known American poet, Adrienne Rich, she shares memories of her childhood. Even as a little girl, when asked how she was, she would respond with a poem. She loved to read, she knew what her favorite poems were, but when somebody asked her what that particular song was about, she could not provide an answer. She started to write because there were so many complex emotions that there were no poems about. She would learn all of her poems by heart; she even tried to think in the forms of poems. She noticed that the other people think step-by-step, very much unlike her, whose thoughts were like bubbles arising from chaos and that yet have to be captured by means of words. When she was asked to read something out loud at school, she did not read it in the way she was supposed to – to her, everything was a poem, with different curves and levels. Therefore she started to “practice” thinking, which is, to study grammar. Grammatical tenses are important because, as she points out, they are the means to introduce order into the temporal chaos. But still, she continues to emphasize the importance of non-verbal communication. She has also written a brilliant essay on the use of erotica. Erotica is the confirmation of the woman’s living power, and the spirituality must not be segregated from erotica because that would reduce spirituality to a world of numbed senses. Erotica most not be reduced to mere sexuality either, it has to be tied with work, it has to be connected to every aspect of our life. Audre Lorde reminds us that we were raised in such a way to be afraid to say “yes” to our deepest of desires. And we should not agree to live by somebody else’s orders, she concludes. It is interesting to notice that some narrow-minded feminists blamed Audre Lorde for reducing women to mere physical bodies with her way of thinking. But that is just a relic of an archaic complex, left over from the times when not even feminists dared to discuss the body because that would mean going back to the old man-the mind/woman-the body dichotomy. One other objection directed at Audre Lorde was that, by emphasizing the emotions, she supports the stereotype of an emotional Black Woman and reasonable White Man. Without a doubt, we can find some essential ideas in the African-American tradition, for example, that reason is a quality of Europe and emotion is of Africa. But as it is clearly visible from her conversation with Adrianne Rich, there is no room for suspicion that Audre Lorde is prone to these kinds of simplifications. Audre: “I say that we never ought to close our eyes when faced with horror, with the chaos that is Black, that is artistic, that is female, that is dark, that is rejected, that is confused, that is…” At the same time she points out that it is in no way a simplification like the “Black is beautiful” pamphlet. Audre Lorde retells how a teacher once refused to publish one of her poems, telling her “Audre, you certainly do not want to be a sensualist poet”. Adrienne tells of a similar example from her life – she has also been told that, as a poet, she should not be angry and get personal. Adrienne Rich wrote essays on poetry as well. To her, the poetry is what raises the awareness, so she herself quickly turned away from formalism and started to write, as she claims metaphorically, “without the asbestos gloves”. The editor of another anthology of women’s poetry, Louise Bernikow, points out in her prologue that women poets have, throughout history, been ascribed with either sentimentality or obscenity. Some of the critics have even claimed that women can never be poets because they focus on details. I have had all of those things in mind, and had been thinking about them just around the time when my first collection of poems was to be published. I still chose to define myself as a poet in the “note about the author” at the end of the book. And as soon as two days later, I was laughing at my own vanity. Because – could there be anything worse than taking oneself too seriously… Still, the question remains, is this attitude the exact reason why women writers remain marginal, and always outside the literary mainstream?
First published
in the ‘Kruh i ruže’ (‘Bread and Roses) magazine            |
