Jane, I have sometimes wondered if the difference in Australia is that
here are women poets who had no problems with a full-blooded desiring
eye/I - Gwen Harwood and before her, Judith Wright. Both very famous
here, or at least, as famous as poets get if they're not nationalistic
icons, aka Bush Poets. Wright wrote some beautiful poems about
sexuality, pregnancy and becoming as a young woman, and is one of
those poets who became more and more interesting as she got older (she
was an environmental activist). Before them there were poets like
Lesbia Harford, who wrote a stunning poem about the menstrual cycle,
Periodicity. (She was the first woman to attend Melbourne University).
But it's not as if there are not woman poets to learn from in the
so-called male "canon" in Britain in America, aside from the myriad of
women writing today. Earlier last century there's HD, for instance,
or Laura Riding, Muriel Rukeyser, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Sylvia
Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, plus those I mention above. In Europe there
are poets like Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsetayeva, Agnes Nagy,
Elizabeth Borchers, Ingemar Bachmann. Further back there's Dickinson,
Rossetti (whom I went back and completely reconsidered after reading a
great essay by Germaine Greer), Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett, Anne
Finch, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Benn and, of course, the model of the
desiring I, Sappho. And of course many more.
Susan Howe has taken Dickinson and done great things. Similarly Anne
Carson has taken Sappho and also done great things. Neither of those
pretext poets are marginalised or outside the "canon", though how much
that matters I am not sure. I simply don't understand this thing
about a "male" style, unless you want to make a somehow diminutive
"female" style. There's poetry and then you take what you want from it
and use it for your own purposes and make something else. That's all
anybody, man or woman, has ever done.
I am not about (see above) denying gender. It's just that many of the
importances attached to it, which seem to me about disempowering
women, are in my view best ignored or challenged. If it means that you
cannot see the richness of the achievements that have been made by
women, and can see no "strong role models", only passive, marginalised
women, then I am sure you're better off doing so.
All the best
Alison
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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