Currently Reading: About Women

Douglas Barbour, He. &. She. &. (The Golden Dog Press, 1974) p. 15-16

Tonight I pull the sheets into place
half sitting in the middle of the bed
while you read in the next room

Tomorrow Ive got to get up early
for work
But as I turn out the light
you turn out the light

& I remember:

Now
we move in
darkness under
our own
                  light
weight of
                 what gathers
in our slow bodies
Then
we move towards
each other
   &nbsp       &nbsp    dark
to each other
under a gloom
we did not support
                     (how
in this darkness we
know eyes widened how
will we see?)
Then
we shall meet
as we choose to
               then
in the bright distances
beyond now sight or hearing
as we desire it as
we wish it to be

The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader (Coach House, 2007), p. 56

all the words I once believed were saints
language the holy place of consecrations
gradually took flesh
becoming real

scraptures behind me
i am written free
so many people saying to me they do not understand
the poem they can’t get into
i misplace it three times

p. 76

my mother Cancer
                 she births herself
the twin mouths of women
                        w’s omen
it turns over & reverses itself
the mirrors cannot trick us
our words are spun within the signs our father left
the sibilance of s
                     the cross of t
there are finally no words for you father
too many letters multiply the signs
you are the one
    the unifying
no signifier when we cannot grasp the signified
saints in between
                the world of men

women
             the sign complete
the w & the circle turning
add the E

        the three levels
linked by line

Christina Rossetti, Selected Poems (Phoenix, 2002), p. 95

Monna Innominata 11

‘Vien dietro a me e lascia dir le genti.’ – Dante
‘Contando i casi della vita nostra’ – Petrarca

Many in aftertimes will say of you
    ‘He loved her’ – while of me what will they say?
    Not that I loved you more than just in play,
For fashion’s sake as idle women do.
Even let them prate; who know not what we knew
    Of love and parting and exceeding pain,
    Of parting hopeless to meet again,
Hopeless on earth, and heaven is out of view.
But by my heart of love laid bare to you,
    My love that you can make not void nor vain,
Love that forgoes you but to claim anew
Beyond this passage of the gate of death,
    I charge you at the Judgment make it plain
My love for you was life and not a breath.

The Men by Lisa Robertson (BookThug, 2006), p. 16

I have a friend who knew
Debord – the men are pleased
And their faces open
Sexually. There is no concrete
Or eternal thing there.
We form attachments. And then we
Go visiting. I do not mind. I
Go too. I saunter
Somewhere. The quick
Brown fox jumps
Over the lazy dog speaking
Language.

Last Child to Come Inside by Michelle Desbarats (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), p. 25

You won’t allow me to speak
unless my words are trimmed
with lace

The Wave in the Mind Ursula Le Guin, (Shambhala, 2004) p. 146 on prizes regularly being awarded 2:1 to 10:1, male to female.

Nearly two-thirds of mystery writers are women, but men get three times as many prizes as women, and since 1970, five times as many.

p.4

So when I was born, there were actually only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am the generic he, as in, “If anyone needs an abortion, he will have to go to another state,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man.

Each are singularly beautiful. I’ll go back through the few…

I love the bodies as different densities of light and dark within light and dark. The same sense of groping around, not knowing where this all could be headed, but treasuring just the same comes through.

Douglas Barbour does some things with space and enjambment and delicacy here. Lines stand, regroup in a way that echoes the story of the relationship, accordioning intimacy. He looks at the very specific moment of he & she in particulars. Much that resonates these days seems to do with where communication gets blocked.

This is like a poem that one finds in people’s collections that never gets read at readings, as if not trusted to the air, only the sheets. There’s a helpless passivity and yet longing hope for when it will be/was all coming naturally.

bpNichol has a playfulness, a longing for and mistrust of connection and a mystic ecstatic. Rather than ubiquitous pat lyrical poems which exert a knowing How Things Are and Should Be, he has fragments that he stacks, and reshuffles of This Seems, This Too. It’s a lost heart to rebuild heart it seems. It’s a position of lovely honest humbleness towards the world that crescendos to spirals into the letter forms.

In other areas of Martyrology he meditates on the nature of connection and what constitutes community. What does geography mean? What does self and the other mean?

p. 62 “metropolitan toronto population 1,916,00/ suddenly hit me/ watching the concrete walls of the QEW/some sense of history/a we that lacks connections”. How we and me mirror one another visually and we and me being part of women makes a sort of lexigraphical mandala.

“saints in between / the world of men” Men as architects of written word? Perhaps I draw causality there that wasn’t intended. Such weight in choice of space to break stanza between “the world of men” and “women” standing alone on its own line. A sad divison and pedestal both.

Words are saints that intercede for us with divinity by being an intercession, also are a separation. How meaningful is it to have an intercessor when by that exisiting one can never personally reach the signified, never grasp God or Mother? It’s a global sort of scope, looking at micro and macro at the same time.

Christina Rossetti speaks her mind for the record. She takes a historical voice to talk about large scope principles. Mainstream will say this of us, the tragic unapproachable desired woman on pedestal but then through the poem says a woman has her own agenda. The basic conflict is restated. It is not only if the man chooses her but a spiritual and pragmatic choice on her part. She chooses losses and gains. She speaks against the literary tradition of a generic women as object of affection, who may, on special occasions get a voice, in the ventriloquized sense.

In this poem she retorts, whoa boys, there’s an impact here to what we have been doing with our dual agency and, for mys
elf, I meant what I said, you? I’ll see you on Judgement day. Maybe then you’ll realize in retrospect, I’m not a breath of your life but time not with me was a major oversight. Just a tad jab of fire there with the grief of the set of sonnets.

Lisa Robertson’s lines (are) slap down. Her take is jaded and savvy yet crisp. She is speaking of the systemic but in the very particular. Woman gets importance by connection to a great man. A man is intrigued but more in belt-notch coup. She knows. Sexually and no concrete, nothing eternal all suggest a erection shrink. The score? Women are conquests. Men step out. That’s been the story. But guys? Women are sexual too and do some walking themselves. “Somewhere. The quick” the double entendre of quick as painful and the bitterness of calling the man just a dog who speaks, a reversal of women called a bitch. Woman proactively shoveling it back.

The entire book is looking at male-centric views. Although not similar in route, the effect reminds me of how A Brother’s Price popped up awarenesses of gender and invisibilities, challenging by the tweaking focus. Where in Spencer’s novel, prounouns assigned to roles and assumptions were reversed, in Robertson’s pointing out how every aspect of culture and creation comes back to male does a similar trick. The confounding of expected is scathing. And as well, rewarding ; why should males not be fragile and we remark on how daintily they move rather than these attributes which we can push onto objects but bar from men.

Michelle Desbarats’ book was with each poem a story, vivid, in that way she masters at being both darkly pointed and whimsical of these eternal core issues of mortality. In the poems around last selection up there Desbarats starts with the nitty gritties in a more personal-scaled story like Barbour did but the reach is wide.

She also invokes the dynamics of gender there in that line break of words being trimmed/ with lace is a powerful density.

There are patterns to gender as Ursula Le Guin points out. They can be made comic. We are within them, reacting to them. It is impossible to step outside them entirely. To do nothing is still doing or allowing something. Are we conscious of the processes at work? Where do we position ourselves to ourselves, to others? What constitutes an effective response? How much of us is the generic? How much the specific? We continually exchange atoms and ideas with the air around us and it becomes us and we become this air and light or lack of light.

What do we say of one another, to one another, presume of one another and ourselves? How to sidestep our bias and see more? What needs redress If there is a ways to go to seeing each other as mere equals, what route is best? Role sharing rather than role reversal? To educate, deescalate or escalate? What need do we have for ears that aren’t wooden?