Ask any female poet whether she considers herself a woman first or a poet first. For some, the answer is a simple one or the other. For others, the question is difficult to answer. And if you ask a female poet how the literary tradition of other female poets has influenced her writing, you’ll get as many different answers as there are poets.
The latter question was posed to 22 contemporary female poets by Sharon Bryan, who compiled the respondents’ essays into the collection Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition. This collection of insights into the creative process of these poets proves that you cannot pigeonhole poets based on gender.
Some of the poets, such as Judith Kitchen, named primarily male poets as role models, and for a variety of reasons. Kitchen’s essay recounts her poetic sensibilities as highly individualistic, rejecting the notion of speaking from or for an entire “community”, and that when she writes, she adds her “singular voice to the cauldron of voices.” She goes on to say:
This singularity of experience matters to me. It is what I write from—and for. To that end, there is not male or female art. To that end, if we submit to all-female journals, we make a statement—se way that we have an agenda, that gender comes before art. However much I might like to be a part of that community, I am not. I climb the tree alone.
Eavan Boland’s essay focused on her struggle to forge a tradition of Irish poetry from a female perspective. Boland admits in her essay that in her twenties, she realized “that the Irish nation as an existing construct in Irish poetry was not available to me.” In reading male Irish poets’ accounts of women’s issues, she found “rhetoric or imagery which alienated me: a fusion of the national and the feminine which seemed to simplify both.”
The essays in this collection also react against the notion that women are just too sensitive to be artists and that it was this conflict which drove so many early women poets to self-destruction. Wendy Battin says the day she heard Anne Sexton had committed suicide, a male professor cornered her and asked “Why do all you women poets kill yourselves?” But to read the essays in Where We Stand, you realize the progress women poets have made to move beyond this notion that the emotional rigeur of the writing life is beyond their gender.
A few of the essays in this collection also illuminate the traditions being forged by women poets who are also mothers. Pattiann Rogers recounts how she managed to continue her writing before her children entered school: “I had to write in any fifteen-minute snatches of quiet I could find, and that produced a certain kind of poetry. But these circumstances lasted only for a few years, not my entire life or even a major portion of it.” Rogers spoke of the trade-offs:
If, through caring for my children, I lost writing time, I gained by the expansion of vision and insight and compassion my experiences with them gave me. I never regarded my children as burdens or a hindrance to my writing, separate or alien from it…The writing I was able to do in those years is suffused with the energy my children radiated. I’ll always be grateful to them for sharing with me their driving curiosity and love of life, for letting me see the world anew through their eyes.
In assembling this variety of approaches to the idea of a women’s poetic tradition into a single collection of essays, Bryan has helped all writers to see the world anew through another’s eyes.
200pp.
