Candice, others, thanks for your support, but I didn't (call me thick)
read Helen's posting as an attack on _me_. (Was it, Helen?)
>Art will always be subject to the confines and boundaries of an ambitious,
>dominant power.
Art is the resistance to such powers: in poetry's case, the seductive
potencies of language, the subtle and not-so-subtle chains, the blinkers,
the legislations with rule us all unknowing. The problem with poems such
as Page's (and I confess, my indifference to it has been swiftly changing
to an active dislike) is that it so neatly fails to resist anything like
that: I can't read anything there which challenges any of the traditional
male shapings of femininity, but rather a glorification of those very
shapings, down to the sweet cadences. The poetries which rip these
things apart with a full-blown, unashamed female sexuality - say,
Harwood's, or Notley's, to take two extremes - do nothing of the sort.
They are all too happy to take so-called "masculine" language,
"masculine" traditions, and use them for their own ends - why should men
have all the good stuff? Since when were intelligence, skill, erudition
solely reserved for men?
I think we should be extremely wary of that definition of "feminine"
which seeks to infantilise us, or to define us solely by our biological
female functions. It's rather close to "don't bother your pretty head
with that grownup stuff", which is of course the velvet glove on the fist
of domestic violence. And we should be aware, also, of the limitations
there have been on men: on another list, a couple of male poets are
discussing how domesticity, when written about by men, has also been
trivialised by critics as "unimportant".
Best
Alison
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