Allison:
Thanks. I was into HD heavy this summer, too (an intensive season for me).
From what I've read, the Christian HD emerges through and after her analysis
with Freud; the "pagan," Hellenic HD was before that. To some extent, her
theo- tendencies were masked beneath the neo-classicism, and it took Freud to
unrepress her "true" self, more Hilda Doolittle. --- There's also a big shift
in her metrics that parallels her recovery and pull out of Borderline: the
lone, more pentameter-like lines take over.
I appreciated your and Candice's Joan of Arc/medieval poetess posts
tremendously, and I forwarded them on to Mrs. Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson, the
editor of the journal Outlet and publisher of the feminist avant-garde press
Double Lucy Books, who is also a Joan enthusiast (Reminds me: I photographed a
Joan statue that's in my church to scan and e-mail on to Mrs. E.T. Jackson!);
she uses a Joan of Arc quotes as one of those e-mail trailer inspirational
messages coded at the bottom of her letters, and often brings up Joan as a
heroine. ---So, if you decide to submit to Outlet's final "Paradise" theme
issue or to approach Double Lucy, you've had the good word put in for you
ahead, as far as "sisters in The Middle Ages"!
Have you read St. Catherine of Siena? She's one of the female Doctors of the
Church (of which there are only a couple of dozen, St. Thomas Aquinas as
another giving you some sense of the stature of that elevation; St. Teresa of
Avila and St. Therese de Lisieux, the latter so named only a couple of years
ago, being the two other women). St. Catherine wrote voluminously.
Parmagianino (painter of the self-portrait in a convex mirror that John
Ashbery's triple-crown-winning career-maker book was titled after) did a
beautiful painting of St. Catherine mystically receiving her wedding ring to
Christ. --- Anyway, she wrote voluminously, extraordinary, gigantic tomes,
whose rampant theological inaccuracies still did not stop the Church from
elevating her.
The eating or fasting mortifications of those saint women are astoundingly hard
to believe, their self-control --- or whatever fuels it --- was so titanic.
Going weeks living on nothing but The Host and water. There's some way in
which the '80s/'90s American pandemic of female anorexia is in negative
alignment with that drive, it would seem. I tend to view that continuum as
another case where The Holy Mother Church provided women with tolerant, even
adulating respect for their autonomy, in the absence of which cultures like
America pathologize the same behavior. The way that the Church created
structures so that women could live together and be self-governing. Or to free
the so-inclined from pressures to marry and congress with males. (!!!)
Jeffrey
-------------------------------------------
Alison Croggon wrote:
> Jeffry wrote:
>
> >Who I consider two of the topmost American poets, Susan Howe and Cole
> >Swensen, have been filling their post-modernism with more and more
> >frank material about--- Jesus {eek!} and Christology. They both, in
> >fact, focussed on the same New Testament passage, where "The Risen
> >Christ" tells Mary M. not to touch him ("Noli me tangere"), perhaps a
> >denial holding some multi-dimensional poignancy for women writers.
> >Swensen originally seemed to approach the material through a safer,
> >distanced device: her good book ~Try~ focussed on Renaissance
> >paintings (ekphrasis), which was this pretext that allowed her to
> >describe and write "meditations upon" madonnas, pietas, etc. But her
> >latest, ~Such Rich Hours~ now uses the Tres Riches Heures illuminated
> >MS breviary to the same ends, . . . although with a somewhat wider
> >historical sweep this time: Annunciations!
>
> Makes me also think of HD, whose work is often full of Christian images and
> concerns - esp Trilogy, Flowwering of the Rod and Tribute to the Angels -
> all beautiful and seriously religious poems, though hardly _devotional_ in
> that sappy sense.
>
> I've been thinking a fair bit lately about those Mediaeval woman mystics,
> whose language is so physical (of eating, hunger, or frankly erotic) or
> which (like Margery of Kemp) moved ecstatic and inner experience beyond
> language into cries, groans, screams and so on. St John of the Cross comes
> straight out of that tradition. The history of the Western subject is
> formed to a fascinating extent by the writings of these women, and clearly
> in their time it was liberatory language. I certainly see absolute
> connections to some of my work, though I'm hardly a Christian mystic - and
> I'm quite certain I'm not alone in that!
>
> Best
>
> Alison
>
> >
> >At the same time, --- which is what fascinates me --- they're sort of
> >cagey about this (embarassed?) and never spill over into the sort of
> >rhapsodies or sentimentality that deform inspirational verse, that
> >might definitely label them as oxymoronic Post-Modern Christian Poets
> >(!). They still maintain their very staunch, intelligent thinky-ness,
> >so it's not at all the sort of belly-up capitulation that the most
> >frequently cited case, Eliot, went through, where a return to the
> >church meant tossing out reason, in his poetry.
> >
> >I'm grateful that PoetryEtc is a safe haven and refuge where poets are
> >able to work through these unpresentable transitional phases. I don't
> >think I could talk about this on the larger American Lists.
> >
> >+ :)
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Home page
> http://users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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