Dear Mairead
I have no idea why my reply to this message hasn't got through...I sent it yesterday.
Well, I'll try to remember what I said about Plath's 'Three Women' and I'll write it
again soon...
Ali
---- Original Message ----
From: Mairead Byrne
Date: Tue 2/20/01 2:11
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Broken Epics
Dear Ali,
I am writing about what I call "broken epics" -- the long poems about
childbirth of Sylvia Plath ("Three Women"), Alicia Ostriker ("The
Mother/Child Papers"), and Toi Derricotte ("Natural Birth"). Secular
poetry about childbirth only achieved articulation in the English
language tradition in the twentieth century. The most common form of
such poems, especially in the late twentieth century, is lyric -- a form
I call the magnificat (as there is no established term comparable to
"elegy"). But these great long ambitious poems by Plath, Ostriker, and
Derricotte are a bridge to making the subject of childbirth heroic
(something Sharon Olds manages to do in a short poem, "The Language of the
Brag"). Your project sounds wonderful, and I don't know if you are
interested in incorporating engagements with the
epic by women poets in terms of definitively female quests. I think the
epic is "broken" at this point in time because of the confusion about God
-- a confusion which has, happily, allowed the woman writer space.
Good luck with your valuable work,
Mairead
On Mon, 19 Feb 2001 [log in to unmask] wrote:
> > In times when the only way for a younger poet to make an impact
> >has been getting fairly short poems published in highly intellectual (read:
> >anti-mythical) journals, am I deluded to be investing my energies into a
> >work which can only be published as a dismembered body in a variety of
> >potentially hostile journals before seeing the light of the day as an
> >entire volume? And is there a way out of this maze?
>
> Ali - if an epic is what demands to be written, then write it.
> Otherwise, I wouldn't bother.
>
> I'd hesitate to call Nightmarkets an "epic" - surely much more
> novelistic. Also Monkey's Mask and so on. I don't know what you'd call
> John Scott's work; some of it has much more in common with classical
> _lyric_. I used to say the epic was a dead form, which seemed to be
> confirmed by the yawn lines of poems like Omeros.
>
> But then I read a couple of poems. Fredy Neptune is most definitely an
> epic poem, and I liked it immensely, thinking of it as a kind of Iliad,
> though it by no means adheres to any formula, and Alice Notley's The
> Descent of Alette, which draws richly from the Comedy and the myth of
> Inanna, among many other things, and is "set" in the subways of NY. And
> which is the first poem I've read which I wholeheartedly wished I had
> written myself.
>
> So I had to eat my words.
>
> Best
>
> Alison
>
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