David,

Ms. Croggon has requested that we back channel on this, and I shouldn't have posted yesterday. I had not been posting for a couple of days because I was too busy but felt I still owed you the more extensive explanation you had requested, so I went ahead and posted. So if this is too little a reply, it will just have to do, out of respect for our list owner's plea. 

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com

  -------Original Message-------
From: "david.bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 04/09/03 05:19 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the poem itself

> 
> Rebecca

as I recall I prefaced the posting of 'The Cloud' with a statement that is
was connected with my interest in a language of psychological
disintegration, it is a work of fiction in effect. I was looking for
primitivism in the piece and quite deliberately used images of sexual
disjunction, although there aren't any penile heads implied, I never
thought
of that. If the concept of sexism you imply were taken literally then
equally Sylvia Plath's late poems about male figures could be considered
so
too, which is absurd. 'The Cloud' is also about a broken relationship with 
a
Muse, not a sex object, as I say, it employs some very primitive levels:
spells, curses, etc. Eliot has nothing to do with it. And as I remember it
wasn't that piece that evoked an Eliotic comparison.

Thanks for taking the time to examine one poem, but you really can't
justify
a statement about my poems being sexist on such slender grounds.

Best

Dave




David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

Home Page

A Chide's Alphabet

Painting Without Numbers

<a target=_blank
href="http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm">http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm</a>
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 5:09 AM
Subject: the poem itself


David,

You asked me to do this, so here goes:

The poem I had been thinking of as having elements of sexism
was "The Cloud." In which the figure of a woman becomes little
 more than a coat hook for the speaker's  thwarted desire.
 The woman is used merely to evoke sympathy for the male
speaker. She's nothing but bad,  "who had tried to steal my
soul. Who had wanted to make me an adjunct of her emptiness,
 like a shrunken head hanging from a kangaroo skin hat. "

What's being replied to here is the dialogue between the
speaker's two heads, "No, no, not that, my better head said,
" evidently the speaking head as opposed to the penile head
which  "liked her, it said, nudge nudge."  A man talking to
his penis about a woman who's not interested.

The woman has a sense of boundaries, which the speaker
misunderstand as "a cheap perfume." In this complaint over
boundaries, "a voice breathed to which the dictionaries
prompted â?~borders' â?~attach' â?~defence' â?~definition'
the woman's insistence upon boundaries makes her a "witch"
who "rhymes with. . . " (bitch) just as her â?~hex' rhymes
with his â?~sex'.

And her sense of boundaries, which rise from the map,
are compared to â?~cheap perfume' because by being a
defined person, a person with definition and boundary,
she will not lend herself to the speakers' desire. So
the poem is false in the sense in which it claims that
she wanted "to make" the speaker "an adjunct of her
 emptiness," when the poem makes her merely an adjunct
of the speaker's thwarted desire.  The poem so reiterates
the stereotypical condemnations of women:
that she is a bitch, witch, casts a  hex,
 because she won't have sex.

 So in my view, it's sexist, though that is just a term.
I could say too it's boring, old-fashioned, full of
stereotypical attitudes which try to disguise themselves
in atmospheric language, etc.  I think Jon liked it and
compared it to Eliot, but then Eliot was new in his time.

And then I've already commented enough about the other poem
with its equivalence of shitting and childbirth. There' s no
point in repeating myself on my reading of that poem. A reading
which is not altered by your emphasis on your intentions.
You are right that your insistence upon your intentions
fall upon deaf ears, in my case anyway, for my view is that
the poem should stand or fall on its own merits. It matters
what the poem says, not what the author says about what he
or she meant. I'm interested in the poem, not the author's
explanation or defense.

So that's two poems in the last three months that I found
had sexist elements out of five poems that you had posted.
So about 40% of the time, you have these sexist elements
in your work. Since it's not exhaustive, that percentage
might not hold, but it's significant. And basically, finally,
do I need to say again that this is only my opinion of particular
works and posts, not some assessment of you as a person?

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
<a target=_blank
href="http://www.thedrunkenboat.com">www.thedrunkenboat.com</a>







n I've already commented enough about the other poem with its equivalence
of
shitting and childbirth. There' s no point in repeating myself on my
reading
of that poem. A reading which is not altered by your emphasis on your
intentions. You are right that your insistence upon your intentions fall
upon deaf ears, in my case anyway, for my view is that the poem should
stand
or fall on its own merits. It matters what the poem says, not what the
author says about what he or she meant. In workshop, one of the first
things
I say is that I don't really care what the poet's intention was, it's the
poem's intention that matters, the way in which the work comes alive, I'm
not interested in the explanations or defense, the work in my view must
stand on its own.  I think what you are saying is that though the poem may
be bad, you don't wish to be condemned as a bad person. But I'm not
condemning you.

So that's two poems in the last three months that I found had sexist
elements out of five poems that you had posted. So about 40% of the time,
you have these sexist elements in your work. Since it's not exhaustive,
that
percentage might not be entirely accurate, but it's significant. And
basically, finally, I am talking about my own sense and feeling of your
>