On 30/8/05 9:14 AM, "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Example?
> 
> At 06:46 PM 8/29/2005, you wrote:
>> On 30/8/05 8:29 AM, "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hey, men do this too.
>> 
>> Er - yes (what's your point?) One example I was thinking of, but didn't
>> mention, was Catullus' parody of Cicero. But as a technique it can certainly
>> be inflected to feminist purposes.

I guess the easist examples to reach for are my own (and I could be talking
about something quite different from Annie).  It's been a long time since
I've done this kind of thing.  But when I was writing about childbirth &c,
while crashing head on into what a role and stereotype  and misogyny really
meant, I used and distorted a lot of devices I pinched from traditional
religious poetry, including as I recall gestures towards George Herbert, in
order to give humble and banal tasks like washing nappies or caring for
babies the kind of attentiveness I felt they deserved.  This was in a
context where persons were saying I was written off as a poet because I had
had babies and would now be swamped forever in the stink of domesticity...
obviously, in certain minds, the reverse of the literary or the
experientially significant, being anerotic and boring. I wished to record
having babies as an aesthetic experience.  Part of the sequence Domestic Art
below - it dates from around 1995, when Josh was born -

Cheers

A


you open and shut like wavelidded oceans you squall your greed you offer
your treasures
humbly I unravel your absolute languages

you sprang from love like a new god unstable and charged as weather
a tyrant of toilsome needs I bend low and serve you
now I feel my funeral its alleluias
arching under my flat pulse
holding your hard skull a helpless worship utterly dependent utterly
separate

Always under the patches and scuffs the indomitable cell the living pattern
of you

my soul is elastic my senses billow like nets to draw in your voices
your sleep lipping my sleep my sunflower skin beaming to you
more than the shock of reflection rather a blaze
in a mansion of unknown rooms and my chilled
hunger welcomed in and generously feasted at a table always my own



Alison Croggon

Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead:  http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com