Helen: I think this is a good poem--one of the best of yours that I've seen,
in fact--but even if it had seemed a bad poem to me, I wouldn't assume its
quality to be the reason for its turndowns by _Meanjin_ and the other
journals where it was rejected. Neither would I attribute those rejections
to any antifeminist bias or lack of interest in female experiences, such as
childbirth, although those could have factored into the various editorial
decisions to pass on your poem's publication. We simply don't know and can't
know, and I don't think it gets you anywhere to identify with the victim
politics of groups such as women or Aboriginal peoples (as you did awhile
back). You are not "woman" any more than Helen Reddy is, or than I am, or
than Alison is. Each of us is A woman who speaks for herself in her own
voice, which may or may not be a voice riddled with more or less frustrated
ambition. Your voice seems so riddled when you identify your poetry's
rejection by some editors with criticism of Page's poem on this list (by men
and women alike) and attempt to cast yourself in a martyr's light under the
"female voice" rubric in response to Alison's correcting your misimpression
of male poets as never writing about laundry and so forth.
It seems to me that you are evading responsibility for yourself, including
both your own poetry and its (self-perceived) failure in certain quarters
where Alison has been more successful, and I found your "I am woman, hear my
voice" false and deeply offensive from beginning to end as a result--not
least for its thinly veiled attack on a more successful female poet under
the spurious banner of a feminist poetics. I hope you'll begin to take
responsibility for yourself and your words by apologizing to Alison--it
would be an honorable gesture by one good poet toward another, in my opinion
as one woman, one poet, speaking my mind here in my own voice and presuming
to speak for no one else--
Candice
> Let's belly roll
>
> Echidna - Tachyglossus Aculeatus
>
> prickly to begin with
> and when approached
> you belly roll
> shoulder in a ball of silence
> it's the same for me
> except I rocked years
> under the doona
> perhaps that's our safety leaf
> when we're close to despots
>
> you hatch a single egg
> a tongue licks your breast
> in childbirth I curled screaming
> with eyelids closed
> even worse
> breast feeding was messy
> painful, brief
>
> here we differ greatly
> only in looks
> my body hair is minimal
> you have too much belly fur
>
> I’m buried in paper leaves
> your snout probes soil
> my enemies live in tunnels
> you eat them for lunch
> could we swap?
>
> human forms have ways
> of tearing forests to shreds
> it's like paring flesh
> from ants nests
> and insect wings
> do you still live in a rock retreat?
>
> if I look hard I might find you
> buried in soft sand
> somewhere, afraid of me
>
> Helen Hagemann
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