Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

The Swan of Litchfield

This week's project (already past deadline!) is to write a book proposal for a new edition of poems by Anna Seward.  Here's an excerpt, followed by one of my favorite poems by the writer who made her small English city famous in the eighteenth century as "The Swan of Litchfield."

Seward (1742-1809) was one of the most popular and prolific poets of the early Romantic period.  So high was her reputation that none other than Sir Walter Scott edited the standard edition of her poems, the three-volume The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, in 1810.  Among other achievements, Seward was admired for renovating the sonnet form in English.  Arguably the dominant form in Renaissance English verse, the sonnet had gone into eclipse during the eighteenth century in favor of more public forms such as epic and satire.  Seward, along with two other important women poets, Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith, initiated a renewed interest in the form, which then became a prominent aspect of nineteenth-century poetics. 

Seward was admired by canonical first-generation Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, but her reputation went into decline with the emergence of the bardic role of the poet in later Romanticism.  Shelley, Keats and Byron, as famous for their athletic and sexual exploits as for their poetry, emphatically masculinized the image of the poet, and for the first time the term used to refer to women poets became the denigrating “poetess.”  The formative role of late eighteenth-century women poets in the emergence of Romanticism was obscured in literary history until the last thirty years of feminist scholarship.  Following on two decades of archival recovery work, the 1990s saw the publication of new editions of the work of Smith and Robinson (Oxford, 1993, ed. Curran; Broadview, 2000, ed. Pascoe).  What is missing is the third leg of the stool of the early Romantic sonnet revival:  a new edition of the poems of Anna Seward. 

I first became interested in Seward as a poet of love between women.  In my book Sister Arts, which includes a chapter on Seward, I describe the trope of "lesbian death wish elegy" in which the poet writes about the loss of her beloved after marriage, mourning it as if it were a death.  Here's one of Seward's notable contributions to the tradition.  It's addressed, as were many of her poems, to a beautiful younger woman, Honora Sneyd:

Sonnet XII

Chlll'd by unkind HONORA's alter'd eye,
"Why droops my heart with pining woe forlorn,"
Thankless for much of good?-what thousands, born
To ceaseless toll beneath this wintry sky,
Or to brave deathful oceans surging high,
Or fell Disease's fever'd rage to mourn,
How blest to them would seem my destiny!
How dear the comforts my rash sorrows scorn!-
Affection is repaid by causeless hate!
A plighted love is changed to cold disdain!
Yet suffer not thy wrongs to shroud thy fate,
But turn, my soul, to blessings which remain;
And let this truth the wise resolve create,
The Heart estranged no anguish can regain.

On Phillis Wheatley's Imagination

Today I had the pleasure of hearing Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley give a talk on the voudon loa Ezili, a force of nature that protects femininity and creativity, as an epistemology for understanding Caribbean genders and transgenders.  I have been working slowly and with great pleasure through Tinsley's book Thiefing Sugar:  Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature.

I was electrified to read the following sentence in Tinsley's Introduction:  "What happens when the beloved/landscape and the poet/lover are both women?"  Although Tinsley is writing about Caribbean literature and I'm writing about eighteenth-century gardens, these questions also describe the project of my own recent book, Sister Arts.  I think that makes our books sisters.

In this afternoon's lecture Tinsley spoke movingly about the hard work of being a black woman (as instanced by the cultural work of misisis and madivines, the Haitian genderqueers who are the focus of her new research).  She also talked about the transformative power of feeling good, and about the crucial role the imagination must play in that transformation.  My friend Omi Jones was in the audience and asked Tinsley about how she was experimenting, post-tenure, with new, poetic forms of writing (for instance in her recent essay "Black Atlantic/Queer Atlantic.")  And that made me think of Phillis Wheatley

whose poem "On Imagination" I read this morning as I continued to make my way through Black Nature, which I've written about here and here.  It's always seemed to me a stunning poem on many levels, not least of which is the sheer ambition of writing a sublime and existential poem that engages with a major Enlightenment aesthetic debate, all from a position of enslavement.  But not of the imagination, and that's the point.  That's the way in which the virtuousity of Wheatley's poetry is always making a rhetorical argument in favor the humanity of the speaker, but in the face of dizzyingly high stakes that would have silenced a lesser talent.  For your inspiration today, here is her poem:

Thy various works, imperial queen, we see,
How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee!
Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand,
And all attest how potent is thine hand.
From Helicon's refulgent heights attend,
Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:
To tell her glories with a faithful tongue,
Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song.
Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,
Till some lov'd objects strikes her wand'ring eyes,
Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,
And soft captivity involves the mind.

Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring though air to find the bright abode,
Th'empyreal palace of the thund'ring God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind;
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th' unbounded soul.

Though Winter frowns to Fancy's raptur'd eyes
The fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise;
The frozen deeps may break their iron bands,
And bid their waters murmur o'er the sands.
Fair Flora may resume her fragrant reign,
And with her flow'ry riches deck the plain;
Sylvanus may diffuse his honours round,
And all the forest may with leaves be crown'd;
Show'rs may descend, and dews their gems disclose,
And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose.

Such is thy pow'r, nor are thine orders vain,
O thou the leader of the mental train:
In full perfection all thy works are wrought,
And thine the sceptre o'er the realms of thought.
Before thy throne the subject-passions bow,
Of subject-passions sov'reign ruler Thou,
At thy command joy rushes on the heart,
And through the glowing veins the spirits dart.

Fancy might now her silken pinions try
To rise from earth, and sweep th' expanse on high;
From Tithon's bed now might Aurora rise,
Her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies,
While a pure stream of light o'erflows the skies.
The monarch of the day I might behold,
And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold,
But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.

1767-1773?

Wheatley is, as Tinsley would say, one of Ezili's children.

New York Times says fashion and poetry don't mix: "It's so girly, you know."

In this past weekend's Sunday Book Review, David Orr pretty much confesses to a"gender bias" in assessing the topic of my last post, O Magazine's poetry issue, especially its "Spring Fashion Modelled by Rising Young Poets" feature.  He calls mixing the two disciplines--fashion and poetry--a sign of "the coming apocalypse." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/books/review/oprah-magazines-adventures-in-poetry.html

This kind of highbrow dismissal of feminized popular art forms like fashion has been roundly critiqued for lo these thirty years by feminist cultural critics, but in the boy-boy world of the poetry biz, you can have your sexist cake, eat it too, and still pimp your book in the New York Times.  Hey David Orr, newsflash:  Fashion design and fashion modelling are both art forms.  Design is a form of making (like making a poem!  like making a sculpture!) and modelling a form of performance (like acting! or performance art!).  Neither are beneath the dignity of anyone seriously engaged with visual culture.  Let's take Kate Durbin, whose work seems to have inspired the feature Orr hates so much. 

Like Marina Abramovic (http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/96/56) or Linda Montano,

Kate is engaged in a long-term performance art project that involves in part reading her (extremely accomplished and well-regarded) poetry in costumes she creates specifically to blur the boundaries between fashion and poetry. 

Straight male poets have to work so hard to make poetry seem, well, masculine.  (Their work pays off, as the recent Vida survey confirmed.  Male poets take up most of the space in literary magazines in the United States and Britain.  Just more talented and deserving?  Check it out:  http://vidaweb.org/category/the-count.)

 

Throwing fashion, a business run by gay men that caters to women, into the mix, risks undoing all that good masculinizing cultural labor.  You know what?  Too bad.  And go Kate, Marina, Linda, and all the other genre-mixing, high-low culture-combining, irreverent and brilliant women artists who make David Orr and his ilk nervous.

O Magazine Poetry Issue Controversy

I would call reading O:  The Oprah Magazine a guilty pleasure except I don't feel guilty about it.  Aside from offering alluring fashion and juicy self-help, Oprah always employs A-list literary writers to write reviews, essays and features.  So I was delighted to open the latest issue and find a special section in honor of National Poetry Month entitled "The Power of a Poem."  Interviews with W.S. Merwin and Mary Oliver (where the famously reclusive Oliver actually mentions her 40-year "steadfast, loving relationship" with "Molly") were extra-pleasurable accompanied by O's glossy pictures.  There are articles by Wally Lamb and Maya Angelou (one of Oprah's well-known BFFs) and brief moments with Camille Rankine, Marina Abramovic, Maxine Kumin, and Sharon Olds.  Yes, there are a few too many flower petals strewn over the pages, the girly line drawing and typeface get a bit wearing, AND the whole thing is edited by Maria Shriver of all people,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMOzA7rRvEs

but most important, the issue is simply studded with poems.  Here's one of Oliver's:

The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice--

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

but you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations--

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice,

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do--

determined to save

the only life you could save.

After enjoying the issue thoroughly, though, I got a message via a women poets list I'm on from the L.A. poet Kate Durbin. Here's Kate:

Her message was titled "Oprah Magazine Scandal Rip-off."  Whoa.  As you can see, in addition to being the author of two poetry collections, Kate is a magazine-ready fashionista.  O Magazine contacted her about the possibility of including her in a fashion feature, in which "eight up-and-coming poets express their dynamic personal styles."  Kate says that after some back-and-forth, the magazine decided not to feature her, but that when she opened the latest issue she saw that they had ripped off one of her own text-and-textile projects.  Here's her take, as described on her own blog:

http://katedurbin.blogspot.com/2011/03/o-magazine-rip-off-scandal.html

Looking at Kate's work with felt letters on clothing, it's pretty clear to me at least that the designers of the O feature were inspired by the images on Kate's blog.  Of course, all artists steal--also known as homage, quotation, inspiration.  The difference here, though, has to do with economies of scale.  For O Magazine to use a similar concept--felt letters combined with fashion in the context of poetry-- especially after having been in correspondence with Kate, but then declining to feature her or her work, is a rip-off because O has a giant audience and vast resources compared to that of most poets, no doubt including Kate.  It just isn't generous to take inspiration from Kate's innovative work and then give nothing back, not even acknowledgement, when the Oprah dynasty has so much.

I hope Oprah herself takes a look at this issue and decides to give Kate her due....or better yet, publish her work in the magazine.  Until then, here is one of Kate's poems, from her book The Ravenous Audience (appropriately enough for readers of this blog, it's from the book's first section, entitled The Garden Plot):

A Real Young Girl

1)  A greenish grainy hue of a 1960s movie

2) Flies stuck to a comb of urine-yellow honey, wings limply moving

3) A pot of tea, black, too scalding to drink

4) Toast and cherry preserves, red as clots of blood

5) A moan of flies outside in thick summer air

6) A moan of flies inside in a dim airless kitchen

7) A fat man in a brown suit, scooping spoonfuls of brown sugar into a cup of tea

8) A woman with a string of blue beads around her neck, almost tight enough to cut off her oxygen

9) A girl with the face of a child and the body of a woman, dressed entirely in blue

 

               (but not her lips, those are crimson as a sudden gash cut

                into flesh, as the secret opening between her legs, which

                she feels warm and tingling even now, in this bleak

                picture, at this terrible table, between these two strangers

                who are her parents)

She takes the spoon in her hand, to scoop sugar into her tea, and drops it to the floor.

10)  A spoon on the floor

She reaches down to pick it up next to her father's foot.  Her fingers clasp the metal handle.  Moving it along the underside of the table she hesitates near the opening of her dress.

11) A spoon in her cunt

There was a cigarette on the bathroom floor of the girls' dormitory.  She smeared it with her toes on the dirty tile, black smudges circling like rings around a planet.  Bleeding her mark.  Ash.

Her mother made her come with her each morning to collect eggs from the hens.  One day when her mother's back was turned, the girl crushed a warm shell between her fingers, yolk slipping down her arm.

I can't accept the proximity of my face and my vagina.

She threw up on her frilly nightgown, and her bile was black as old blood.  Afterwards, she felt empty and whole.

I'm very well developed for my age.

When she went in the front yard to tan in her bikini, she fell asleep.  Her mother threw a bucket of cold water on her.

I decided to see what I'd look like if I were a whore like my mother said.

When she snuck out of the house, her crotch rubbed agains the seat of her old bike.

The dog sniffed her cast-off panties.

Her Fantasy:  At the beach.  Rubbing sunscreen into her girlfriend's tender skin.  They are laughing.

She wrote her name on the mirror in the girls' dormitory with her own cum.

Her Nightmare:  Tied naked to the earth with barbed wire.  His face above hers.  Her legs spread, nipples pointing to the sky.  He dangles an earthworm above her, long and moist and squirming.  He is laughing.

She always loved peeing after holding it in until she thought she would burst or die.

I'd never give my self to a man.

12)  A fly in the jam

I know, a little edgy for Oprah.  But the poetry issue does include Sharon Olds, so maybe there's hope.

 

 

 

 

A Lesbian-Feminist Storybook Garden

Yesterday I got the best present in the mail.  I received the page proofs of my book, Sister Arts:  The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, and they are gorgeous.

 

I love what the designers at the University of Minnesota Press have done with the luscious botanical and garden images, including a wonderful mash-up of Mary Delany botanical illustrations for the chapter headings—a kind of collage of collages.  In celebration of this next-to-last stage, I thought I’d share a short excerpt from the book’s conclusion.  The conclusion is called “The Persistence of Lesbian Genres:  A Circuit Garden,” and it’s a rapid tour through some of the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st century writers and artists working in the “sister arts” tradition of women’s landscape genres started by Mary Delany, the Duchess of Portland, Anna Seward and Sarah Pierce, the 18^th-century figures I discuss in the main chapters of the book.  Here’s part of my discussion of Toronto artist Allyson Mitchell, along with some yummy images of her iconic installation piece, The Ladies Sasquatch.  One of the things I love about this part of the book is that I get to quote my friend and colleague Ann Cvetkovich, who first introduced me to Mitchell’s work and is one of its most astute and loving critics.

Oh, and by the way, if you want to pre-order my book (and get the footnotes to the quotations below, which I deleted in this blog format), go to: www.upress.umn.edu

 

“Mitchell’s series “The Ladies Sasquatch,” which the artist has been making since 2005, consists of female sasquatch figures on a heroic scale installed in a wilderness landscape feminized and domesticated through materials: the figures are rendered in fun fur, and the hills, rocks and trees they ramble are created from “found fabrics, needlepoint, rug hookings and carpet samples, to make rocks and hills and logs.”

 

 Invoking the historical complexities of landscape politics in Canada, Mitchell acknowledges the provenance of this imagery in “Aboriginal tales about the Sasquatch, 'Wild Man of the Forest' or Big Foot (as he is referred to in the US)” which “have been appropriated by the white Canadian mainstream - arguably an expression of the racist fears around the "otherness" of native culture - and by default - nature in general.” The setting alludes both to a canonically pastoral “wild forest glen” and to “the bush,” that definitively Canadian location “outside what is formally understood as the city-state.” (Mitchell’s work also potentially puns on “the bush” as an affectionate term for women’s pubic hair.) As critic Ann Cvetkovich describes the work, Mitchell merges “Canadian wildlife myth with the tradition of feminist counterheroines,” taking “the stuffed animal of both natural history diorama and childhood toys” to a colossal scale. Averaging more than nine feet tall, the sculptures are fur-covered and feminine, with prominent vulvas and pubic hair, breasts and nipples, and underarm hair. “Lady Sasquatch is your dream girl,” reads the artist’s statement for a 2005 exhibition, “only bigger and hairier, and she may just eat you if you don’t watch out.” In a 2009 lecture, Mitchell said that she wants to engage viewers’ potential discomfort with women’s hairiness in these images of wild but somehow approachable female sexuality. The contrast in tone between the fun-fur fabric and long eyelashes of the figures, and their often menacing poses and great size, make them both alluring and repulsive, depending on the viewer’s relationship to female sexuality.

For the figure entitled “Oxana,” Mitchell draws especial attention to the figure’s buttocks and vulva--Cvetkovich calls the butt “especially important” in this work--by creating a highly-colored collage of fur reminiscent of a mandrill’s hind end. “You want nature? I'll give you nature!” One visual model Mitchell drew upon for creating Oxana’s butt is Georgia O’Keeffe. Mitchell alludes to O’Keeffe again in a mirrored red and pink rose in the hooked rug covering the base of the sculpture, just below the vulva. Mitchell says she is interested in how the figure’s haunches and vulva can be read as a flower, but also as anatomical--a key convention in the sister arts tradition.

Importantly, however, the figures are not exhibited alone. Rather, they are installed in relation to one another, “in a gathering, as though they’ve come together in some sort of clutch, or meeting, or who knows, maybe even a sacrifice.” In intentional contrast to the canonical Sasquatch myth, in which the creature is always pictured as male and alone, this is a community of powerful female figures gathering for their own mysterious purposes. The female bodies created here are specifically queer or lesbian bodies. For example, Maxie is “an homage” to Mitchell’s friend, the fat activist Max Airborne. The large back, small buttocks and short legs are meant to evoke a specific, recognizable type of woman’s body often seen among lesbians, which Mitchell calls “the refrigerator back.” In her evocation of female bodies rarely seen in canonical art history, Mitchell marries the myth of sasquatch wildness to “the mythology of lesbian culture…something like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, five thousand lesbians running around naked in the woods and all of the mythology surrounding that kind of a space.” Cvetkovich notices in the work “a queer erotics…one that lends itself to new worlds that enable different kinds of feelings.” Referring explicitly to both previous practitioners in the sister arts tradition and contemporary queer and lesbian communities, Mitchell calls Ladies Sasquatch “a lesbian feminist storybook garden.””

 

Sister Arts at British Studies

I gave a talk on my new book at The University of Texas on Friday.  My friend and former student, Deborah “Warrior Marks” Nguyen, snapped a picture of me so I thought I’d post it along with a short excerpt from the talk.

 

"In 2006, I traveled to the National Library of Wales to read 18^th-century garden designer Mary Delany’s voluminous correspondence.  The National Library of Wales, despite its official-sounding name, is an endearingly populist institution.  Located not in glamorous Cardiff but in Newton, a small provincial town about a thirty-minute train ride outside the capital, it is really just a collection of materials inside the regional public library, housed in a small strip mall above a fish and chips takeaway.  One memorable day I seated myself between a teenager surfing the Web on a library computer and an elderly gentleman reading the paper on a long wooden spindle.  The librarian eventually rolled out the cart stacked high with boxes and I nervously spread the precious papers in front of me, trying to avoid the teenager’s soiled and soggy backpack.

These letters have only been published once, in 1861-2, edited by a great-niece with an eye to the family name.  Reading her edition, one letter in particular had always intrigued me.  In 1732, Delany writes to her sister from Dublin, saying that she is not going to bore her correspondent with accounts of the men she meets, but rather give her a detailed account of her new women friends.  In the published version, one sentence reads:  “Letty Bushe is [a] very good humored agreeable Girl with abundance of fancy.”  In manuscript, the sentence is longer: “Letty Bushe is [a] very good humored agreeable Girl with abundance of fancy makes violent Love to me so we never meet without giving the company a great deal of entertainment.”

I found this exciting.  I looked to my left...the old man was not interested.  I looked to my right…the teenage boy was likely to be only too interested.  I stepped outside and made a very expensive phone call home to share the news.

Of course, the phrase “make love” as a euphemism for “have sex” dates only from 1950. The sense “pay amorous attention to,” however, dates from 1580 and is to me at least, clearly the sense meant here.  Letty Bushe is engaging in amorous behavior toward Mary Pendarves when they are with their friends.  Their friends find this not shocking or disgusting, but entertaining.  Such is the world of the cosmopolitan eighteenth-century bluestocking."

Want to hear more?  Order my book from University of Minnesota Press:

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/M/moore_sister.html