Why Study Women’s Poetry?

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For the Spring 2008 semester (during my first year as a full-time instructor), I designed and taught a new course, Contemporary American Women’s Poetry. I was working straight from my dissertation, and the course gave me the opportunity to see the poems I’d been living with for so long from a new perspective, that of my students. A poetry course can be a tough row to hoe, particularly when students have avoided studying poetry and are suddenly faced with going through works line-by-line and analyzing everything from punctuation and word choice to metaphor and rhetoric. That this was an upper-level course (juniors and seniors) only complicated matters because, in addition to analysis, students must now work at synthesis — in simple terms, coming up with their own ideas and interpretations. It isn’t enough for them to simply tell me what each aspect of the poem is (X is a metaphor for death, Y is a word that has two meanings and the poet meant both); they must also tell me how those parts combine to make a whole, and then tell me what the whole means.

As I was teaching the course, I was also organizing a one-day conference on women’s poetry. I decided to title the conference “Why Study Women’s Poetry?” because this was a question my students and I were discussing in class. “Why Study Women’s Poetry?” isn’t meant to suggest that the work of female poets is somehow inferior or less-worthy of study; what we all were struggling with was the idea of studying women’s poetry separately from men’s. We talked quite a bit about why you hear people discuss “women’s poetry” but not “men’s poetry.” We questioned whether teaching a separate course in women’s poetry was somehow buying into the idea that women’s writing was something different, something “Other.” My students (ten young women, two young men) struggled with these issues, often saying that they could see both sides: poetry is poetry and should be taught as such, without regard to sex or gender, versus the very real fact that poetry by women is often not taught in traditional lit courses (or, if it is, there are only one or two works by female poets included in the syllabus). That the scholars and poets who attended the conference were also struggling with the question “Why Study Women’s Poetry?” was reassuring to the students, even if it didn’t help them decide which side was right.

Then in May of that year, I ended up teaching Contemporary American Women’s Poetry as a “mini-mester” course. It was the first time the college was offering these intensive courses, which met from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for ten days. After the first day, we all (myself and my students alike) were viewing this as a sort of poetry boot camp. I had six students enrolled (three young men, three young women) and the majority of them needed this course to graduate. And I do mean needed, because graduation came smack-dab in the middle of the mini-mester and if they weren’t doing well they wouldn’t be able to walk at commencement.

Instead of using the poems from the semester-long course, I had the students get the anthology No More Masks! edited by Florence Howe (and don’t get me started on the fact that this wonderful collection is now out of print). We read a lot of poems and did a lot of work. I assigned some poems for them to discuss, and then we did a lot of “down and dirty” analysis and synthesis by picking out poems that appealed to us each day and doing cold readings of them. After three or four days, a young man in the front row raised his hand and asked wearily, “Are all the poems about sex?” The three young women and I cracked up, and I couldn’t help but tease him a little by saying, “Yes,” to which he (and the two other young men) gave a little groan. I then went on to explain that no, the poems wouldn’t all be about carnal pleasure; he managed a weak smile and bent back to his book.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that young man this summer as I work to revise the syllabus for Contemporary American Women’s Poetry, which I will be teaching this Fall for the fourth time. In June I reached out to the wonderful people on WOM-PO, the Women’s Poetry Listserv, and asked them if they were teaching the course what would be the one poem they believed absolutely must be included. I got many, many terrific suggestions (and no, most people couldn’t limit themselves to just one), and have been spending wonderful hours reading and researching and revising the course. But I keep coming back to that question: “Are all the poems about sex?”

What if we read “sex” to mean not physical relations but our own sex, the equipment we were born with (or chose to change)? Are all the poems we (both male and female poets) write somehow about our sex, about being a man or woman? I don’t think there is a poet in the world who would, like Lady Macbeth, cry “unsex me” before s/he sits down to write. We are who we are because we are men or women. Our experience of the world is mediated through sex (and gender, and race, and class).

Yet our experience of the world is also mediated through myriad other “smaller” things. I grew up in a small town on the coast of Maine. I read a lot as a child. My parents were both teachers. I have only one sibling, a sister, with whom I am close. I married later in life. All of these things, and hundreds more, go into shaping the way I move through the world, the way I observe things, the way I react to different situations, the emotions I feel in response to certain experiences. And the way I write poetry. We certainly are not going to break poets down into minute categories — that would be neither helpful nor productive.

So what do I tell my students this semester? One thing that has helped me frame this discussion is telling them about a book I read while writing my dissertation on metaphors of motion in women’s poetry. One obviously important metaphor for poets (both male and female) is walking. In my research I ran across an academic book published in 1991 that dealt with walk poems, and eagerly began reading. Here I was, almost literally hip-deep in copies of poems written by women about walking, wonderful poems that speak to the human experience and condition and do so through taking a particular experience and universalizing it. So imagine my annoyance when it quickly became apparent that the author of this book believed that women’s walk poems focused on the poet’s particular experience rather than on using the poem as a way to link different kinds of experiences together as men’s walk poems do. In other words, Walk Poems by men speak to a universal experience, no matter how particular the subject of the poems may be, while walk poems by women (and yes, the capitalization is deliberate on my part) speak only to the particular experience within the poem. My students are appalled, but the female students are not surprised. Though young, they have already seen this dismissal of women’s experience as too inwardly focused. Too particular. Too, well, female. They push back when they can, fighting the good fight as generations of women who came before them did, but they do get discouraged and it doesn’t help when the very place where they should be judged by their intellect and abilities — academia — is home to some of these very same prejudices.

This, then, is the answer to “Why Study Women’s Poetry?” Because we must.

Synchronicity II

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Being good stewards of the Earth means living within nature.

Being good stewards of the Earth means living within nature.

As if you didn’t see that title coming (with apologies to The Police).

What got me thinking about synchronicity in my last post was the work I have been doing to prepare for my Fall semester courses. As it happens, I am teaching an upper-level English seminar entitled “Nuclear Nightmares: Storytelling After the A-Bomb” and a Freshman Honors seminar on sustainable environment (this year’s Honors topic). The Honors seminars are interdisciplinary, but each of us who teaches one does so through the lens of our own discipline.

I had not planned things this way, but as it turns out there are a lot of points of convergence between the two topics, so my research for one course complements my research for the other.

What strikes me over and over, as I read things as varied as Silent Spring and On the Beach and Welcome to the Greenhouse (a terrific Cli-Fi collection of stories) and A Short History of Nuclear Folly and Flight Behavior and Fail-Safe is that so much of what gets us, and by us I mean all of us, into trouble is hubris. This isn’t a word you hear a lot about today, but it is a theme that is both as old as human time and as current as the debate on climate change: We are masters and commanders of not only our own human domain but of the natural realm as well, and woe betide anyone who tries to point out that maybe we haven’t been the best stewards of our world(s).

Which brings me to what is going on here in Maine. It seems to me that when we picture climate change, we think about the Arctic and Antarctic. We can visualize ice shelves separating, icebergs calving, as the global temperature rises. We can look at NASA’s illustration of the melting polar ice cap and, while the thought of this occurring is intellectually upsetting, it doesn’t really hit home. I mean, not really hit home, not with the sort of sock-in-the-stomach realization that things are changing for the worse.

What does give us this type of shock? The kinds of stories that have been appearing this summer in our daily papers and our local broadcast news. And even more than that, the changes that we are observing all around us.

Maine puffins, already on fragile footing, are having trouble finding the small herring that they need to feed their chicks. Higher tides, warmer water, everything associated with climate change is making it harder for the puffins to survive. These slightly-goofy, comic birds are doing a little better this summer than last, but problems still loom as the global temperature continues to rise.

Even puffins, though, are relatively out of sight for most Mainers. Chickadees, however, are a different story. Even before this article appeared in the Bangor Daily News, it was very apparent to me that something was up with the chickadees, Maine’s state bird. Bold as brass, these little birds will sit on the feeder pole or wait at your feet as you change the birdseed. For many summers, when I would sit out on our deck the chickadees would be all around me, sometimes going so far as to sit on the back and arms of my chair. (This always made me feel a little like Disney’s Cinderella.) This year, I saw one or two chickadees in early June and haven’t seen another since.

And don’t get me started on the fireflies (nearly all gone), bees (disappearing fast) and bats (dying of white nose syndrome).

So here is my challenge, as I see it. I need to help my students find the connections between “big-picture” climate change and the small, everyday moments in their own lives. And the connections between what is happening half a world away in terms of nuclear arms development and the safety of all of us on the planet. One way to do this, I believe, is through literature, by reading stories that humanize the issues involved. Another way is through helping them find the synchronous moments in their own studies, in helping them make the connections between the hard sciences and their lives, between political science and what is happening in their own backyard. Most importantly, they need to come to recognize the ways in which hubris can not only lead to personal downfall (Macbeth, Dr. Frankenstein, Nebuchadnezzar) but, when played out on a larger scale, end up causing global disaster.

Will I be telling them the answers? No. I have my own opinions about what needs to be done to help stop climate change, to end nuclear proliferation, but my task is to allow my students to come to their own decisions about what is happening in (and to) the world and figure out their own responses to what they are learning about. For that, they will need everything a liberal arts education can provide (STEM courses, humanities courses, public discourse and private studies). What we can do, as teachers, is give them the best education, the best resources, the best skills, the best ammunition we can, then keep our fingers crossed that they go out and do a better job than what has been done by those who came before them. Our students, then, embody – both literally and figuratively – the best hope our planet has.

So I guess we now have our answer to what sort of job a humanities major can have: She can save the world.

Synchronicity

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Synchronicity.

The juxtaposition of two things that appear not to be related, that seem to be occurring simultaneously by mere chance, yet are experienced as connected by meaning (rather than causality). A Jungian concept (see The Roots of Coincidence) that resonates with me when I write, when I read, when I teach.

So much of what I try to do with my students is get them to see the synchronicity of ideas. How a concept they encounter in their mathematics course can reappear when we’re reading a post-modern novel. How they might find an echo of a recent physics experiment within an SF short story. How the cadences and ideas of the Romantics find their way into the work of the Modernists. These are the connections that fuel our research, that lead us to spend an entire afternoon at the library not doing the reading we intended to complete but instead chasing a new idea from one author to another, from one discipline to another. Synchronicity is the fuel that powers the engine of thought.

And what powers synchronicity? The liberal arts. Or, if you will, the humanities.

I can hear your eyes starting to roll even now. Who needs the liberal arts? We need STEM courses so our students can get STEM jobs when they graduate — and save the country in the process because we have fallen far behind other nations when it comes to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Novels and philosophical debates have their place, but that place isn’t front-and-center in the college curriculum. You can’t get a job with an English major. This is what it has come down to: the choice between STEM courses and humanities courses, leaving supporters of the liberal arts to defend what they see as their ever-shrinking disciplines.

Thing is, this either/or is what my philosophy-teacher husband, Gerry, would call a false alternative. We need poetry and physics, sociology and history, philosophy and psychology. A wide swing of the educational pendulum that ends up with the bob firmly stuck on the STEM side means we run the risk of losing what is most human about learning. Why do you think they call it “The Humanities” anyway?

This cuts both ways, of course. Students on the Humanities “side” need to learn about and understand at least the basics of STEM disciplines just as much as students on the STEM “side” need to learn about and understand the basics of the liberal arts.

I am a poet and I am a science geek. No, I can’t explain the physics behind jet propulsion. And I’d get lost trying to untangle string theory. Heck, I usually have to use my fingers when figuring the tip in a restaurant (if I go to hell after I die they’ll make me do math). But I see the beauty in the Large Hadron Collider and the science behind it. I am fascinated by the Golden Ratio, am intrigued by the ROVs used in deep-sea exploration, and was in heaven when my husband and I toured NASA a couple of years ago. My interest in science is as much a part of me as the poetry I write. (And if you don’t believe science and poetry mix, listen to a NASA scientist explain how the gold in her wedding ring came from a distant exploding star, or Stephen Hawking talk about how the material in your right hand would have come from one supernova and the material in your left from a different dying star).

To me, then, the issue isn’t which we need more, the Humanities or STEM. The issue is how do we make sure that each of our students, regardless of her major, regardless of the discipline he is most comfortable in, becomes proficient in the career he or she pursues while at the same times becoming conversant with concepts and ideas from the other “side” of the academic aisle.

[Oh, about those English jobs. How about lawyer, librarian, public relations manager, politician, campaign manager, editor, CEO, stockbroker, archivist, lobbyist, copywriter, journalist or app developer?]

Chapter One: In which a blog is launched and an explanation proffered

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So. . .the title.

While contemplating starting this blog, I found myself thinking a lot about who I am, what my interests are, the things that amuse and enrage and downright puzzle me. About my artistic and academic work, and the places where those two parts of my life overlap (imagine a Venn diagram with rhymes).

I found that I kept coming back to the Victorian idea of the “unnatural woman.” Perhaps it’s the phrase itself. Or the Victorian paradigm of the Angel in the House and how everything (and I mean everything) that fell even a little outside of that paradigm was considered unnatural for a woman.

The list of things that made a woman “unnatural” in the Victorian Era is long. (And let’s be honest and acknowledge that we could say the same thing about today, although some items on the list have changed.) A woman who was an author was unnatural. A woman who married late, or not at all. Women who entered into a Boston Marriage. Women who worked at a job outside the home. Women who traveled alone. Women who wanted the vote. Women who wanted an education. Women who were artists. (When I discuss this with my students in class, I point out to them that I fit into an appallingly amusing – or is it amusingly appalling – subset known as the “unnatural wife”: a married woman with no children. They are horrified, and indignant on my behalf, which is kind of sweet when you think about it.)

These women who lived outside the norm were the unnatural women. The “odd” women. The “redundant” women. They were known by many names (not all of them unique to the Victorians): bluestocking, suffragette, spinster, adventuress, strumpet.

These were my sisters, the ones who came before. Not just them, of course. But in thinking about how I would describe myself for this blog, it was “The Unnatural Woman” I kept coming back to.

So. . .here I am.

I have no set expectations for this virtual journey, just an idea that there will be things I wish to write about that don’t fit neatly into either my poetic or academic lives (there’s that idea of fitting in again). Will I blog at least once a week? I hope so. Can I promise I will do so? Um, no.

However often I do post, I will be talking about teaching, about poetry, about feminism. About those things that amuse and enrage and puzzle me. And I hope that you will enter into a dialogue with me about these things. That you will join this Unnatural Women on her journey.