Deconstructing the Beats in favor of our foremother feminist poets
by Jannie M. Dresser
First published March 18, 2011, at examiner.com
The Beat movement continues to receive incredible amounts of attention and print-coverage, in part because its adherents have been able to shout over the heads of other poetry movements. Like slam, Beat poetry’s god-daughter, the style favors performance and extroversion. Have no fear: the legacy of the Beats has long been secured by the remnants of that tribe. They continue to be immortalized in film and in advertisements and my iconoclasm will do nothing to change this, nor is that exactly my intent.
What I worry about--and the reason for this article--is the neglect a certain group of poets who were much more important to me as a twenty-something female poet learning to write in the 1970s. The blossoming into expression that occurred in this period turned everything around for so many of us, yet there are hardly mentions of this in the contemporary poetry zeitgeist. Not the Beats, but the feminists, are my heroes, the true social changers who upset the apple-cart of the status quo that had carried over from the 1950s into the 1960s. Yet, there have been few testimonials, anthologies, interviews or other excavations of these foremothers who paved the way for so many poets, male and female, writing today.
For the generation of women awakened into adulthood during the 1960s and 70s, there was still a shadow cast by the double-standards and motivational conflicts of the 1950s and early 1960s, years guided by codes that banked on women keeping their mouths shut about their sexuality and about what happened in the home. We were taught to grin and bear the unequal attitudes towards sexuality and in the workplace, and what was worse, we were taught by our mothers and aunts that what men wanted “was an angel on the street and a whore in bed.” “Mad Men”? You don’t know the half of it.
Working in a chain bookstore, the only significant bookstore in Fresno County at the time, I was in the first deep wave of clinical depression and treating myself with marijuana, alcohol, casual sex and poetry. By age 21, my “on the road” experiences had resulted in sex, drugs and rock and roll, as well as rape at the point of a knife and friendships with other women who had undergone their own share of sexual violence. I had little idea how to make my way in the world as a writer and limited hope of finding steady employment in either academia (this was post-Prop 13) or publishing (not in Fresno, anyway).
Fueled by the tragic stories of Romantic poets and the knowledge of how many women writers had committed suicide, I was tempting fate when my good friend took me aside and read to me a poem that scolded Sylvia Plath for killing herself. “Get angry,” the poem said, and “don’t take it anymore. Look how they have profited off of you, Syl." I don’t remember the title of the poem or who wrote it, but it was a turning point.
As I worked in that B. Dalton Bookstore in Fresno’s Fashion Fair Mall, I discovered a stream of women writing in new ways and envisioning a new world, where they would not take it anymore and who were spelling out new ways of relating to their bodies, their families, to other women, and to men:
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
(Margaret Atwood, from Power Politics)
These women proclaimed their right to talk about the truth of their lives, of what had happened to them as girl-children and young women, and how hard they were struggling to create identities as separate but equal. I found voices daring to speak and write about things that were part of my world; they left no subject sacred in their pursuit of the visceral, the blood, the fear, the challenge of being in new kinds of relationships:
We are equal if we make ourselves so, every day, every night
constantly renewing what the street destroys.
We are equal only if you open too on your heavy hinges
and let your love come freely, freely, where it will never be safe,
where you can never possess.
(from Marge Piercy’s “Doing it Differently” in To Be of Use)
Liberated, yes, to make many many mistakes and to put ourselves at great risk as we coped with and challenged some of the implications of the sexual revolution. The flip side of freedom to choose promiscuity was failed contraception, finding yourself in a strange home with someone who refuses to take you back to the party, accepting rides with bad people, abortions, and following “rules“ proscribed by a “visionary” cult leader who was on his own kind of power trip. Most women bold enough to experiment with those new freedoms have their own kind of war stories to tell.
The poets who threw out the lifeline with their furious words, noble truths, and candid revelations were Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Diane Wakoski, Judy Grahn, Alta, Ai, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, among others. They were writing not only in response to a turbulent social transition, but also in response to the kind of self-destructiveness left by the model of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, all powerful women who had bitten down prematurely on the cruel edges of their psychic freedom.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth . . .
(from “Diving into the Wreck,” by Adrienne Rich)
Nineteen-seventy-three was just one of those groundbreaking years. The fabulous anthology, No More Masks! came out, edited by Ellen Bass and Florence Howe, showcasing a tradition of feminist poetry which reached back to Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan, Muriel Rukeyser and women poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and stretched forward to include poets concerned with social change as well as personal transformation. In just that year alone, several important titles came out including A Woman is Talking to Death (Judy Grahn), Cruelty (Ai), Diving into the Wreck (Adrienne Rich), Love Poems (Sonia Sanchez), and To Be of Use (Marge Piercy). It was clear the poets of the feminist movement were working for themselves and for society, to make it a better place, while the Beats seemed generally onanistic and self-aggrandizing.
These fighter-women poets bolstered me and set me free as to what I could and would write. They gave me permission, the way middle-class suburban boys were emancipated by the Beats. According to professor Suzanne Juhasz, the emergence of poetry that could be categorized as feminist in its first wave “can be characterized by its directness and accessibility in form: a rhetoric of statement and honesty; a personal voice; language literal or symbolic rather than figurative. For subject matter: lives, the personal, private lives of women.” (Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 1979).
The backlash came more quickly than we could have imagined, but not before a myriad new voices had access to the poetry publishing explosion that was launched in the 1970s with small women’s presses and that continues to this day. Now, I dare say the majority of poets being published (not necessarily by the major presses, but nonetheless . . . ) are women, not to mention the thousands of writing collectives, poetry groups, and readings circles that are created and kept going by women poets.
The backlash has taken a number of forms, most viciously from right-wing pundits who toss around the word “femanazi” and blame the women’s movement for most societal ills. But the backlash also exists in the literary world, first with generous heapings of the term “confessional” used to describe so much of what women write. (Never mind that the term was first used for the poetry of Robert Lowell, it is now usually applied to women’s poetry exploring their inner worlds, the domestic sphere, the physical body, gender dynamics, and personal experience in a disturbingly candid way.) Critics have conjured up this pejorative to dismiss poets who speak of themselves in ways that had not been considered proper subject matter for poetry in the past. The cardinal sins of so-called confessional poets are (1) writing about themselves, and (2) writing about domesticity, relationships, and sexuality. Here’s what one writer posted about feminist poetry in the blogosphere:
“ . . . one thing that can be stated with some certainty is that it is almost always subjective. There is little of the reflection on the truths of the world that characterizes male poetry, but rather everything becomes personal, even when someone or something very remote is the subject of the poem.” --Welmer, online blog, critical of women’s poetry being too much about sexuality.
In recent years, there have been those who feel they must warn us off poets who will not likely stand the test of time, as they see it. Anis Shivani, writer on the Huffington Post, is one of these. On his most overrated writers list published last year, quite a few were extremely popular women poets including . . . Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, and Louise Glück.
And, in the United Kingdom, a list of the “best-poets” included only one woman and was defended (by a woman) for doing so. Among those commenting on this situation, one writer noted how “Male poets grappling with life and death issues in their writing are dragon-slayers” . . . while “Women embarked on such odysseys are rarely granted similarly heroic status.”
Feminist poetry today is as often the subject of dismissal and joke. At Guilford College in North Carolina, a “bad feminist poetry contest” is held each year and draws a lot of outrageous and funny entries (who said feminists lack a sense of humor?) While at the University of Chicago, students have hosted a feminist poetry slam featuring poems on “feminism, sexism, transphobia, and the patriarchy, issues that the U of C Feminist Collective is passionate about.”
In spite of taking its hits--from those who would like nothing better than to roll American mores back to pre-1960, as well as from those who affectionately toy with feminist seriousness and impatience--the literary stem of this major movement established a strong, multi-voiced, multi-tracked tradition that blew poetry open and changed most of us who began to write under the influence of the feminist poets of the 1970s and early 1980s.
