(Cate Marvin, Vievee Francis, Jennifer Knox, Brenda Shaughnessy, Erin Belieu) Five contemporary female American poets explore how sentimentality is deployed in 21st-century women's poetry, with regard to both content and rhetoric, as a means to counter traditional assumptions regarding female desire and identity. What personal and political alchemies occur when the affectionate address verges on acerbic? What transformations are sought when a female speaker, once familiar as mother, daughter, sister, wife, or lover, employs sentiment to reveal herself as Other?

Published Date: July 12, 2017

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:05):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2017 A W P conference in Washington dc. The recording features Kate Marvin, Jennifer Knox, Erin Ballou, Brenda Nessi, and Vivee Francis. You will now hear Kate Marvin provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:36):

Hi everyone and welcome. My name is Kate Marvin and this panel is called Arsenic Icing Sentiment as Threat. First, a confession, I'm not so genius as to have come up with a term as brilliant as arsenic icing. Like any good writer, I stole it from a better writer. It was a description employed by Mary Robertson in describing in a nutshell a female character who's both charming and alluring by whom the narrator notes is like arsenic icing. She's a sort of delicious poison as a person to those who know better than to engage with her intimately. I was likely reading this story two decades ago when studying to become a fiction writer. When the female narrators I put forth in my short stories were markedly unlikable. So much so that my workshop peers, when forced to say something positive about my work might say I liked that I didn't like the narrator always sounding unconvinced, and it was women who said that, right.

Speaker 2 (00:01:33):

This may be why I deserted fiction. No one really seemed to mind if the speaker of my poems weighed in with their dismal observations as long as the craft was there. And of course, poets aren't out to sell their wares. Male and female poets alike, present speakers frustrated menaced and menacing impotent in the face of power. Once an agent asked to see my collection of short stories, he wrote back stating that it was too depressing to sell. By the time this phrase resurfaced in my mind some years later while overhearing a fierce discussion between women on sentimentality in women's work, I had begun to consider a tone that seemed peculiar to female poets and quite a few queer male writers. Richard Syken comes to mind as someone who should probably be sitting on this panel right now, an irony that works with a double edge blade.

Speaker 2 (00:02:19):

What happens when women play nice as a means to gain entry into another's mind and heart all while knowing they move with stealth, with a covert meanness of someone out to settle a score? Maybe I picked up on this because I was raised in one of those mean suburbs in the eighties where being genuine might result in your destruction, where your looks, if you had any, were as valuable as artillery during a time, which I hope is over now, in which the ability to seduce meant you might have the chance to turn the tables. Much like Amlin and Wyatts, they flee from me that sometimes did seek, find your own way. And now I see the problem with the scenario that there are two sides. What I would've given back then to know that there were more than two sides, there are a ton of women who truck in this brand of irony, and it might get old if it were not employed so deftly and with such acerbic humor, the first poet comes to come to mind is obvious.

Speaker 2 (00:03:14):

Sylvia Plath. You can take any number of her later poems and find them packed with backhanded platitudes. Every woman adores a fascist. Anne Sexton also has her share, and you can see contemporaries like Elena Kac Davis and Carrie St. George Comer doling out. Similarly, smarting rejoinder. I identify this rhetorical move as tonal coupled with a willingness on the speaker's behalf to appear pathetic and downtrodden only to sit right back up in her coffin to spit at the supposed beloved. But I also see the stance as a function of the roles women are expected to play as sweethearts, caretakers, mothers, lovers, nurturers of all the people who do not nurture them back. Being nice as an act, as an endeavor can be a frustrating experience. On the other hand, being expected to be nice is simply infuriating and is this expectation that verily contorts the female psyche compresses her honesty and intelligence by expecting her to assume a form she may regard as superfluous and a name.

Speaker 2 (00:04:12):

These are my opinions, right? Not the whole panel. Is it Stating the obvious to observe that acting nice requires women to downplay their intelligence. Then again, enacting this kind of performance in a hyperbolic, near burlesque manner leads to all manner of revelations, fresh turns, outrageous confrontations, and arrives at the true source of frustration and outrage. That is not when you come right down to it. Very ironic at all. A shrink I saw recently noted that depression comes from anger. I wondered why it took me 47 years to figure that out. Even though I'm now a professor and nearing the age of invisibility, I frequently find my speaker's positioned as I once was a lowly office worker who was forced to endure sexual harassment from her boss because she was a she and a lowly office worker. Occupying that station of vulnerability is an experience I'll never be able to forget because one can never truly vacate it.

Speaker 2 (00:05:08):

As Joyce Carol Oats states in her essay after Amnesia about her visit to a prison in Newark, New Jersey. It's a really amazing essay. You should check it out. I also think this mode of presenting oneself is mannered and obsequious of showing one's belly does something else. There's strength and vulnerability, sure, but the pathos inherent in one who willingly plays the victim, admits defaults. And here the fault is simply feeling sentiment toward a beloved who may regard himself as a superior has a vantage point of comedic strength. How many people feel like they're on the side of pla daddy? Very few. I would argue. In short, the stance commands empathy from the reader often because the manner of address is convincingly intimate and seemingly sincere when you come right down to it. These poetic confrontations are always power plays.

Speaker 2 (00:05:56):

Let's see. I've long considered my work rife with these examples of this irony for this talk. I felt compelled to choose samples, poems that serve from an onslaught of self-pity and delirious sentimentality. Naturally, these poems regard to topic of romantic love and all of its inherent frustrations. Imagine attempting to love someone who has not actively imaginatively attempted to understand your intelligence. Imagine finding yourself in a relationship with someone. You'll finally come to realize regards women as inferior. Imagine being asked by a complete stranger when told you. Write poetry. If you write angry woman poems. Imagine realizing that you are a cliche, that you're very polite. Your hope of being understood is in itself a cliche. Worse. Imagine reading the garish newspaper headline, more body parts of woman in trash and laughing because it's not you. And in thinking that would make a great poem title, it's in that space of macabre cynicism in the objectification of oneself that one finds the fuel for the particular violence that is arsenic icing.

Speaker 2 (00:07:01):

It is a mode and is also entirely reaction. Mind you that arises in a person, in this case a woman who once vulnerable comes to feel contorted by expectations to be nice. Finally, I would say that this mode, that bright smile turn malicious speaks to us of intelligence and survival, of perseverance, of a refusal to be in tune by society's expectations for women to engage in meaningless displays of their supposed mediocrity by the expectation that they have faced themselves. Because when a woman speaks directly, she's regarded as angry or even bitter. And finally perhaps deliberately misunderstood as the Brazilian poet Ilia Prado states in her poem with poetic license, pain is not bitterness, pain is not bitterness. And what we're going to do today is we're each going to read a poem and then we're going to talk about these poems. Okay, so I have Brenda Shaughnessy here. Her last book is so much synth. She's a professor at Europe. Rutgers. Yeah, in Newark, right, which is a really amazing new program where they give financial aid to everybody. Vie Francis who just won so deservedly the Kingsley Tufts Award.

Speaker 2 (00:08:21):

Aaron Ballou who teaches at Florida State University has been organizing a lot of protests, but she's not just an activist. She's one of the most amazing poets I know. And Jennifer Knox, who's one of the most humorous poets I know. And so welcome and I guess I'll start by reading my poem. Okay, and then we can each read our poem. Thoughts on wisteria. You are My ma Gun. When black ink won, ran down my page like a throat slashed attack. You were my bassinet. When the bow swung down came our rockabye baby and all those blue red swung their orb lights against fences as cops cars pulled their immediacy alongside my house. When you were the fence, the drunk driver smashed into in that ice age, knocked at an angle that cracked the frozen plastic of P V C fencing. Jaggedly still in half. It was your winter once you were nearly mine.

Speaker 2 (00:09:21):

Bar lights dimmed. But the attack mode of attack, I always relied on dumb. Another drink this time a mojito. You sniffed it. Sugars downed it. I'm looking for the next page. Here we are then turned the grind, the hip of the girl, the room like least. I'm still shoveling snow. I stubbed my toe. I fell down some stairs. One might've thought I was no one. No matter the nightgown, I was never meant to be your girl. The snowplows are out. They're coming from me and how my envy grows like a tree, summer me, the wisteria begins as a vine becomes a tree though needs more years than our species has for it to give us notice of its blossoms. Allow our noses to ride. Its fine fragrance as delinquent bees do. Now hovering on my neighbor's heavily piling of growth, a vine that centuries into a tree.

Speaker 2 (00:10:17):

It is terrible. Sweet. Who decides that which is flour that which is weeded. I'm begging. Its trespass into my yard, ply. Its errant length along my fence. Try tying it to me. Yet long ago, the stink of the polluted sea found its own accommodation. Long moved its lank figure within our orbit as smoke from my cigarette crawled and whisked through our final barroom brawl. Can I not be anything but modeling? Snows never over nor are blossoms gone. Glasses forever itch in cupboards to be filled with wine as mouths and dark plot to be kissed. Recall how you once suggested I sit by the sea to relax. I failed to admit the beach here is littered with syringes. This is my goodbye. I wish I lived in a little house by the sea, but I do. And welcome Aaron Ballou.

Speaker 3 (00:11:20):

Are we supposed to say something about the poem?

Speaker 2 (00:11:22):

We were going to do that after.

Speaker 3 (00:11:23):

Oh, okay. Hi, thanks for being here. Oh wow. I can't see without my glasses. I suppose the only thing you need to know about this poem is that it's a response to Shamus. He's poem digging. So I'm sure many of you know. And this is called the title reads into the poem and it's called I Growed, no Potatoes to Write about sir nor bogs nor fathers nor special water. That was my place alone to make me hard and wise. I did not sow nor bury, nor even try to fudge my nothings in such dirt with much be fangled PD spade. My wars were far away and fought by men. I fear I do not know. Hi ho. And hence to Lady work. I went ascent scent a ago long scrubbing at my bits to strip them extra minty meadow clean and only then convened the little ladies' manners.

Speaker 3 (00:12:21):

Class of Sundays played me wormy rows decaying that corsage of girls pinned to spindly ballroom chairs for lessons at our fancy lunch. Annette, sir, we were a pastel herd. When handing us the rulers be best assured, we clenched them tense between our knees. You mind your cues in peace, sir, we snapped our thighs. Right? Shut, sir. A hairy practice to quick the lady trap, but oh, it made a vessel woe to pay when rulers dropped to those who give a skinful inch. And so from there, my lady life increased soft balled, soft voiced with little tools to fit my box. Do not tell Sir for we are friends. Sir, is that a yes? Then I will confess of nights when tides are slapping me about moon doodled as I am. And that bat times I creep into your plot and choose your best and biggest digger secret. Like I press the shaft inside my knee, I strain until the blisters come freely, sir, without a word, I tamp. I work. I score your squelchy turf.

Speaker 2 (00:13:51):

I have a time machine,

Speaker 2 (00:13:55):

But unfortunately it can only travel into the future at a rate of one second per second, which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant committees and even to me. But I managed to get there time after time to the next moment and to the next thing is I can't turn it off. I keep zipping ahead, well not zipping. And if I try to get out of this time machine, open the latch, I'll fall into space unconscious then desiccated and I'm pretty sure I'm afraid of that so I stay inside. There's a window though. It shows the past. It's like a television or a fish tank, but it's never live. It's always over. The fish swim in backward circles. Sometimes it's like a rear view mirror, another chance to see what I'm leaving behind. And sometimes like blackout. All that time wasted sleeping myself. Age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment at having lost a library book myself, lurking in a candled corner expecting to be found charming. Me holding a rose though I want to put it down so I can smoke me exploding at my mother who explodes at me because the explosion of some dark star all the way back struck hard at mother's, mother's mother.

Speaker 2 (00:15:21):

I turn away from the window anticipating a blow. I thought I'd find myself an old woman by now traveling so light in time, but I haven't gotten far at all. Strange not to be able to pick up the pace as I'd like. The past is so horribly fast.

Speaker 4 (00:15:53):

This poem opens with an epigraph. She's not maternal, she's dangerous. Jamal may kymera. I have no charms. Admittedly, no gold comb can move through this mane. My skin is not translucent. Mine is a tale to fear. I know. And though a mother may destroy, she too sees fit to create beauty that would eventually grow into forms I would swallow if I gave in to my hungers. Nothing will come of this womb, but up from my wounds, from this goat's body up from my wood, smoke lungs, from the milk of me comes a song, a melody to open yours, then lick them clean

Speaker 5 (00:17:02):

A fairytale.

Speaker 5 (00:17:04):

When my father was nine years old, his mother said, Tommy, I'm taking you to the circus for your birthday. Just you and me and I'll buy you anything you want. The middle child of six, my father thought this was the most incredible, wonderful thing that had ever happened to him. Like something out of a fairytale. They got in the car. But instead of driving him to the circus, his mother pulled up in front of the hospital and told him to go inside and asked for Dr. So-and-so. After that they'd go to the circus. So he went inside and asked for Dr. So-and-so. A nurse told him to follow her into a room where she closed the door and gave him a shot. My father fell asleep and some hours later woke up crying in agony with his tonsils gone. A different nurse got him dressed and sent him outside where his mother was waiting in the car with the engine running. He couldn't speak on the way home to ask her. What about the circus days later when he could, he didn't. They never mentioned it again. 58 years later, he tells this story to his wife. His only explanation when she asked him, what are you doing home from church so early? He'd walked out in the middle of a mighty fortress, is our God never to return.

Speaker 2 (00:18:48):

So this work. Okay, so basically we each prepared statements about our poems, which we can either, I think we should maybe talk about why we chose the poems we chose for this. Do you want to start off Brenda, or do you want me to pass the mic to Aaron? Pass the mic. Okay.

Speaker 3 (00:19:06):

To where

Speaker 6 (00:19:08):

Do you want to

Speaker 3 (00:19:08):

Start? Oh, sure.

Speaker 3 (00:19:14):

As I told you that poem I Grow No Potatoes to write about sir was a response that I discovered as I was writing it to Seamus. He's poem digging. I'm a big fan of Seamus poem, so it's no snap on him. But one of the things I think perhaps a number of women writers have felt over the years is the sense that the subject matter in women's poems is often held up for a certain kind of critical disdain. And one of the things that the sticks that women poets have been hit with over the years critically is the idea of the Bad Daddy poem. And I was sort of curious about this idea because one of the things that I had observed in my own experience in the writing world and reading poetry over time is that women didn't have the monopoly on daddy poems.

Speaker 3 (00:20:18):

And there is this kind of, so one of the things a poem is trying to critique, I didn't really realize the strategy I was using until Kate suggested this idea. And I didn't realize that a whole idea of the sir and this sort of power dynamic that my speaker is acknowledging in a sort of sneaky way toward the end when she's squelching through his turf is sort of this idea, and I've made this joke before, but this kind of fascination in certain straight white male poetry with the father and the oh daddy and oh father and the potatoes and the dirt and the bogs and Oh daddy, I love to dig.

Speaker 3 (00:21:04):

And so that's always kind of just been a burr under my saddle was this idea that somehow women have a monopoly on this sort of fetishizing of the father. And I didn't really discover the strategy I'd used until Kate came up with this idea, how you can use this power dynamic to try to flip it around in the poem. I'm sure I'm obviously not the first person to do that, but that's really where the poem came from. I'm trying to think if there's anything, oh, and that image of the rulers, I'd always carry this image around, I don't know if any of you ever had to do this, but did anybody here ever have to go to ladies classes? Oh, you went to lady class? I went to lady class. Lady class. See how well we turned out?

Speaker 3 (00:21:49):

So when I was about kindergarten age, I was taken every Saturday. I actually kind of enjoyed it, but you got a new dress out of the deal every time. But we would be taken to this lunch anette back when they had the sort of tea, I don't know, shops and nicer department stores. And the image of the ruler was the thing that I remember very vividly from childhood, which was when you're that little, your feet don't touch the floor yet. And they would put a ruler between our legs because the lady had to keep her legs clamped together under, even if you fell out of an airplane or something like you, your legs must be clamped together at all times. And I just remember by the end of that lunch, all the girls sitting there planking uncontrollably for an hour because your feet don't touch the ground. So I'd always wanted to find a way to bring that image in because it just hits me as, I mean, I'm not actually 250 years old, so it's odd to think about that kind of training. I mean literal training and that training in relationship to how that voice emerged and why that story emerges in relationship to this conversation with Seamus poem. So that's all I have to say about it.

Speaker 2 (00:23:02):

Well, I grew up in Washington DC so it's strange to be here. I haven't been here for a really long time except for the march. And I was thinking I keep going back to my own childhood now. I grew up as a girl in the suburbs and my father was an intelligence analyst for c I A, so we could never talk about his job. And my mother was an editor and I was like, that's a really weird marriage of ways of thinking and not disclosing things ever or removing things repeatedly. And so I was in, I'm an only child, I love to talk about all the things nobody wants to talk about. And I was always accused of being sort of too much or too aggressive or too sensitive. I think a lot of us probably get this. And it was just the sense of kind of being monstrous when I grew up that I think sort of emerged in my poetry. And also being someone who wants to say a lot, a lot, lot and say all the things that shouldn't be said. And I think that the poem I chose is sort of such a, I feel like the speaker of it is just this sort of mess.

Speaker 2 (00:24:11):

I drew it on this thing where someone on my street did actually, I wanted to get P V C fencing into a poem really badly. But this person, the idea that the male obsession is totally honored, Yates, this whole thing that he had with Maude Gunn, it's really offensive when he's like his poem, he wishes his beloved were dead. Have you ever read that poem? It's like she were dead so he could better love her. And they're just like, that's really not cool. And then he is like, well hey, he doesn't wish women were dead. They die all we kill 'em all the time. So that's where my mind spends a lot of time around that stuff. So, so I wanted also in that poem, the speakers so pathetic in so many ways, right? And failed. But also it's this whole thing of being misunderstood also realizes when you think, oh, it would be so great to someday I'll have this great house.

Speaker 2 (00:25:13):

And I was really, the degree of the person who I was writing about was a nature poet and this was sort of very male. And I was thinking, okay, this person is actually, you should go sit by the beach and relax. And it was like there was such a separation between his reality and mind because literally you don't want to go to the beach in Staten Island. Why? Students would be like, don't go there, all beat you up. And so that was sort of what I was working on there. So pathos and then also with the dose of reality. I don't know how to tie that up. I'm just going to pass this on to, yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 (00:25:53):

I love listening. I don't even want to take this mic, but I could listen to more and more of that. And Erin, I can't get over. You just pulled that accent out just so perfectly so well. So I'm very struck by the idea that almost anybody's version of anything is preferable than a woman's version. And the time machine has this sort of faux science. There's this pretend officialness to the time machine, which is just your body. We all have a time machine that's sort of the joke of the title. I have a Time machine, as do We all. And this sort of created idea that there's just sort of this Star Trek science fiction ish version of actually having real feelings and real memories. It needs to have this kind of sort of a metal box around it somehow to make it official. I'm really interested in the idea that our memories are us. They are stories and we may have the only version of them. We may have unreliable versions of them, but they're not just nostalgia. It's not just, oh, back when I was a kid and I felt this way, or oh, remember those old times? It's not really just the sweetness, it's not just sort of comforting that memories are their weapons. Weapons.

Speaker 2 (00:27:40):

Sometimes we use them against ourselves sometimes if we sort of think about our memories as not something that's empowering or something that is sort of the story of us. And in that empowering, I don't know if anyone has ever had the experience of just suddenly being frozen by a memory suddenly just being, whether it's some sensory stimulus that's just brought you there or somehow the classic sort of smell that makes it, that jogs an old buried memory and you realize and either you're frozen or you sort of go out of body, these kinds of experiences you feel like we're out of control. But it's amazing to me how powerful it is and how even if we have no control over it, trying to find a memory, is trying to dig in a huge purse for something and you're like, I'm looking for my phone, but all I can find are gum wrappers.

Speaker 2 (00:28:34):

And you can't find the memory you want. You don't really have control, you don't have access over it. But I do know that we must use our memories somehow that the stories we tell ourselves about what really happened to us, whatever they were, and those will be used against us in the form of erasure marginalization if we don't actually take them and make them ours and own them. So this poem has a couple memories myself, age eight hole head burned with embarrassment to having lost a library book. When I first remembered that I'd lost this library book, I was swimming and I was doing my laps and I go through each lap with my, I reimagine that age. So age six, age seven, age eight, I'm on age eight. And this memory of losing this library book, everybody was on my case. The librarian was mad at me, my parents were mad at me. I couldn't find, it was so stressful. I just blushed. I became so completely covered in shame, so shame that even writing this poem decades later, I felt like I couldn't even, I didn't want, I was like, I can't write that. I can't admit that I don't want anyone to know. It was so bad, but only because I actually was able to externalize it. Look at it a little bit. I could think it's not that bad. Really,

Speaker 5 (00:30:03):

This poem's true. And normally I write with as much distance as I can get from not only sentimentality but sentiment. I often write in dramatic monologues and the voices of both men and women. And that distance has enabled me to arrive at

Speaker 5 (00:30:30):

A place, a sentiment that is I wouldn't have been able to go there in my own clothes. So I wanted to write this poem about my father, but I didn't know how to take the feelings with me. So the first part of it, I had to strip the story of any feelings that were attached to it. And I didn't know what was going to happen when I got there. I said, I'm going to write it, but I know I can't just write this story because that's like having sex with a map. If you already know what you're going to do, why do it? So I knew that there had to be discovery in it, and that's where the feeling was going to be in that act of discovery. And I had to start with this very emotionally loaded story for me that makes my whole family cry and cheer and they just love it. Oscar Wilde said that a sentimentalist is someone who wants the emotion without earning it and just taking this story with me and not allowing myself to feel anything until the turn I think is the earning to wait and to see what happens when you get there.

Speaker 4 (00:32:07):

So I'm going to read some very brief notes I prepared and then I want to comment on something Aaron said and then

Speaker 4 (00:32:18):

A couple of other comments. So I chose the poem Kymera. I often work with fairytales and Greek and Roman mythology, and I want to be very specific there. As with so many American, those inside of the American education system, these are the stories and myths that I know best. They're the ones we're spoonfed. I find sentiment inherent in such tales and more so in each retelling. So in this piece I bend to the common assumption of beauty with a capital B. And by doing so, I participate in my own erasure. So that's how it begins. One second here. The lovely thing about laptops is if you accidentally touch one of the new ones, it goes someplace completely where you didn't want it to go. But since the poem is right here, so that very first line, I have no charms. That really is part of the key to this piece.

Speaker 4 (00:33:42):

In this piece. Again, I've been to the common assumptions of beauty with a capital B, thus participating in my own erasure, I have no charms. However, it's from this wounding that the possibility of healing for others rest. The question becomes an accusation, a quiet one. By the end of the poem, I say, my wounding provides your healing. But what about my own healing? It's not that something is broken though. The poem may be read that way by those trapped and conventional and received notions around both gender and race aren't all round black women without the currency of the interlocking standards of western beauty mothers. Right? And I'm talking about maternalism. I'm not a mother, and if they aren't mothers and lack beauty, what then is their currency? Where are their charms? So for the slave, it was her labor. For myself, it is this labor of love.

Speaker 4 (00:34:37):

Only through poetry am I seen on my own terms. So I'm often asked to participate in my own erasure. It's a daily thing to note how beautiful the other, to admit how maternal I am at 53, I have no children. So that's a choice. But many keep insisting upon my maternalism. And when I say many, let me say all because men and women of all backgrounds eat from the same aesthetic plate, which is to say my invisibility begins at birth. And when I am seen, it's in fragments or pieces. A white female equivalent might be the broken statuary praised in museums. How lovely the woman with no head. So here the creature is made up of other creatures. I posit myself as a kymera and the goat of course indicates the tragedy of it. Despite this I create, I go on less irony than inexplicably, and of course I'm being facetious.

Speaker 4 (00:35:37):

I damn well know my value and my worth. It is in this keening. However that I reach others, if I've been to the sentimental nonsense that insists upon my supposed maternalism, my only value or maternalism of women at large as being their only value, it's only in the poem to secure an aperture through which I might posit my own positions through which I can penetrate. This is my attempt to get through to those who won't see me any other way. So the poem rises from a conversation. I've done a poetry reading and there was someone talking to me afterwards who kept saying it was just so much like Lucille Clifton, you are so maternal. I'm nothing like Lucille Clifton, I'm brown, I'm round. And that's about where it ends. And I'm impacted by Lucille Clifton. I adore Lucille Clifton, but, and so I said, I have no children.

Speaker 4 (00:36:39):

She had several and I don't really have maternal bone. My mother didn't have the maternal bone, but no, no, no, I get it. You are dangerous and women are mothers can be dangerous. And not finally the poet, Jamal May went up to the other poet who was accusing me of all of this maternalism and note I said accusing. And he just got close to him and he said, man, she's not maternal. Meaning she's not maternal in the way you're thinking of it and she's dangerous. And I liked that. I said, Jamal, if I ever write a poem, I'm going to put that in there somewhere. And I wanted him to see me as dangerous, meaning outside of his ideas around this sentimental idea of the mother. And I was to Kate's credit, I was surprised to be asked on the panel, because black women are put in a different position with sentimentality.

Speaker 4 (00:37:35):

We're only given two boxes. We can be a mother or we can be a hoe, and if we're good hoe we can get married. So there's our positioning and it's distressing. Where's the sentiment in that? And the sentiment falls in the maternalism and that idea. So that's what I was writing about to address Aaron. It's interesting what you're saying, and this is where we parse race inside of poets because the idea of that bad father and that being put on mothers and African-American poetry, and through my work as an editor, thousands of African poems from the African diaspora across my desk, half of it is around the Father and that father being written by men, men on the father. So I'm coming at it from a different angle, and I think that different angles supports what you're saying. It's not just women and daddy.

Speaker 2 (00:38:40):

So I just want to put a few things on the table really quickly. I'm thinking about the body being a time machine and the women's in particular being a particular kind of time machine in the way that what our body produces or whatever. It's great when it's children, if it's menstrual blood that needs to be put in a special container and sealed off with, I especially think about when I lived in Scotland, they would have these hazard signs on places where you're supposed to put your sanitary napkins or whatever. So that sort of being the thing that's value, but it's also completely disgusting. It's powerful. Then I also think about, we're talking about fairytales and about, I think of the blue beards that fairytale wear. It is always, if a woman is curious, then she gets hers. And that's the lesson. And then the other thing is the conversation I had with my husband about having cramps and he said, I don't think a uterus has muscles. And I was like, that's the level of misunderstanding about the female body and because a uterus is a muscle. So those were the three things I was thinking about. I just wanted to throw that out there.

Speaker 2 (00:39:58):

Is that just too much of a non-sequitur? But yeah, I mean, help me. Okay, I'm totally blown away by the way that we keep, how many different ways are there to be reduced to your body? How many, there's just so many. At my head is reeling. I've been feeling since the inauguration. How many different ways are they coming up with to fuck us? It's amazing how many different ways they were coming up with. It's a genius number of ways. And my head is really spinning right now, this question of mistaken identity that ViiV brings up. And this question of needing to put people in categories and by which tools and through what energy can we break that? When do we get to finally say things overlap, we intersect. We are many, neither in both so many things. When do we get to start doing that? When do we get to say no to checking boxes? When do we get to say to somebody, I am not maternal, I'm dangerous. And also what if I am maternal? Am I also not dangerous? I mean, when can we start by which, is it through poems? Is it through conversations? Is it from confrontations? When do we finally get to say we're many, many, many things you can't be heavy reduced. When do we get to do that?

Speaker 5 (00:41:25):

I think we're really lucky that we I know. I know. I think we're really lucky that we could do that. In poems we don't have, it's like animated. It's instantaneous. We set something up for a second and we can shift. We could come from any direction in it. It's very elastic. If I could, I feel very lucky to be a poet right now. I think our medium is terrific for saying we don't need those constructs anymore. We can come from any direction we want

Speaker 4 (00:42:08):

Addressing that question. I utterly agree. I mean I think this is one of those moments in poetry where that is exactly what we're doing. We're making our choices and pushing back. But I'd like to say too that we can do this in our lives. I mean, we can do this in the everyday lives. The thing is, are you willing to take the consequences? You accept the consequences of it, right? I can say within my own cultural milieu, I can say, okay, I'm not maternal and then I can remain unmarried, right? That's the consequence. I can say, I'm not going to accept this box. But again, there are consequences and the question isn't when do we get to do it? We can do it right now. It's just a matter of how many of us are willing to accept the consequences and with each other as women, because we are complicit in our own erasure so much. And when we find women that are willing to move outside of those boxes, we want them back into the convention box.

Speaker 3 (00:43:17):

That actually makes me think about when Kate and I were first having the discussion that resulted in Vita's beginnings, one of the reasons that we, and we were both in our, how old I, 10 years we were in our forties. And I remember having a very explicit conversation with you about whether or not we could afford to step outside of the particular boxes that we had been sort of put in as women poets who had actually been pitted against each other quite frequently. And I remember we both came to the, we realized we could afford to do vita because we had tenure and made a very conscious decision about we could, well, we were like, maybe we'll get 500 likes on Facebook.

Speaker 3 (00:44:09):

But I remember making that really conscious decision. There've been a couple of times in my life where I had to really make a conscious decision and recognize the box that I had. That you were safe. Yeah, I had stayed. I was definitely staying in my lane. One of the people, and this is a great teacher to have her point, her finger at you, was Adrian Rich who looked at my first book and I met her and had a correspondence with her and she was someone I admired deeply and I sent her my first book. I was really excited about it. And she was like,

Speaker 3 (00:44:44):

So you're a good formal writer. And I was I getting a lot of sunshine blown up my ass at that moment. And so I was sort of like, oh, right. But I mean she really made me look at that book. She asked me questions about who I was in those poems. She's the only person who did that. She was not a person who was going to just tell you what you wanted to hear. And that was a really big moment for me where I had to make some big decisions about, I became conscious of the fact that I was writing. It makes me think of Clave Watkins now famous essay that she wrote about writing for her teachers. And that's an interesting moment I think for a lot of women writers, having to figure out how you step out of your safety box. And I think Vivi, as long as you're willing to pay the consequences. But I still see my students, my women's students struggling with this all the time in the M F A and PhD where I treat where they are very, I don't mean to be depressing, but it doesn't feel like it's changed that much in certain ways because I still see so much fear in that education landscape about what happens if I open my mouth or what happens if I piss off this particular professor.

Speaker 5 (00:46:07):

I think that fear they're experiencing and their voicing is knowledge. And we didn't have that knowledge that was all behind a curtain when I was coming up. And the fact that younger people know that this is the reality of the landscape and they know to be frightened of it, I think is progress. Oh, good. Yeah. Your fear is progress. I'm making.

Speaker 2 (00:46:37):

I is

Speaker 5 (00:46:38):

Progress. Your fear is progress.

Speaker 2 (00:46:39):

I like that. You're so optimistic. I think for me, I kind of had a collision with being female because I had a baby on my own and I did it without having sex with anybody. I used donor sperm and that to me was just hilarious. But when I had the baby, I didn't realize I had basically how you talk about the woman being the safe maternal woman. I kind of had been the safe non maternal woman for myself. And I didn't realize that I had participated well. I just thought that it was totally like a token situation where I'd had a really good experience and then I had a baby. And then my academic colleagues, many of whom were female, who had disdain for me, I'd had a child and I was dealing with a stroller and people were like, bless it. Oh, bless you.

Speaker 2 (00:47:24):

And I was just like, what the fuck is going on here? And I was so solidly in a female body in that moment. And that's when I realized I had to look outside myself and I had to look at other women. I had to look at the women who had prior had intimidated me or made me uncomfortable and communicate with them and really positioned myself as a woman and not go along with, okay, I had a similar experience with the poet, Morris Manning was, he was like, you remind me of Louise Glick and Ellen Bryant Voit. And I'm like, those are probably the only two women he ever read. And I was like, I am. If I'm like Louise Glick, there's a problem. I mean, no offense, but it was just sort of allowing myself to speak to what I was observing. And that was when we started to count. I was like, every woman counts. We all look at these table of contents and see where we are in the mix. And it just seemed to be a really simple way of saying, this is what I see when I look at that table of contents. Maybe not what you see.

Speaker 6 (00:48:26):

Go ahead

Speaker 2 (00:48:28):

And then we'll talk a little bit more. And then we should have a q and a. Probably.

Speaker 4 (00:48:31):

I'm going to keep pushing it out of the poem and into the world because I think the poems act as a bridge for that kind of activism, if you will. And so in my own experience with a gentleman who kept calling me maternal, I kept pushing back almost an hour. I just kept saying it. And then it's telling that it was a male who also a younger male from a different vision, different background who also pushed back. So it's not automatic that a male has to decide, I'm going to agree. So the question is one of expectations, choice and agreement. We don't have to agree when we don't agree we're going to pay a price for it, but I'd rather disagree and pay that price then agree and keep bending. So it's a matter of quality of life. So for me, the poem is definitely attached to the life and my continuing to push back and say no. And I love what you just said, Kate, about talking to the women who make you feel that way. Talking to them. And for the record, I'm not anti maternal, I'm just not maternal for myself. And the quote word maternalism quotations in the poem, because I mean maternal as this gentleman thought of it, that was not a dangerous to me, it was to him, but not to me. For me, the real pushback is not agreeing, making choices based upon my own needs and dealing with the consequences.

Speaker 6 (00:50:17):

Do you want to open it up, Kate?

Speaker 2 (00:50:18):

Yeah. Should we open this up to q and a?

Speaker 6 (00:50:25):

Just to follow on what you said just now about maternal and dangerous, I'd love to hear more about what you love about being dangerous and what it really means. What does it look like to you?

Speaker 5 (00:50:36):

Could

Speaker 3 (00:50:36):

Everybody hear that?

Speaker 5 (00:50:37):

What does being maternal and dangerous look like to you? I think this question is directed to by vi, right?

Speaker 4 (00:50:43):

I think that well, in being African-American, I mean, when have black women not been thought of as maternal? I've been the tit for the world. I don't want to be that anymore. I want the choice to be mine. If I give milk to anything, it'll be to a child. I have no one else. And so I think there's this idea that black women are supposed to be nurturing and the second we're not nurturing, suddenly we're evil and angry. I can't accept that. What is dangerous, dangerous for me is making the choice to not nurture in those ways and to refuse to be seen in those ways. And round and brown, as soft as I am, I'm far more lover than mother. So outside of the standards are not another kind of danger. So I feel that we are dangerous anytime we push back against received ideas that are highly sentimental about what women are or should be. Every woman on here is dangerous.

Speaker 6 (00:51:57):

I also

Speaker 5 (00:51:59):

Do not have children. And when I meet certain people, it's almost fun to watch them run down the check boxes. They're trying to figure out, alright, what are you, where are we going to fit you in? And they don't end up with a sense of closure. And I see it in every subsequent interaction I have with people who do not feel a sense of closure with me when they don't have me in the box. They're very uncomfortable.

Speaker 6 (00:52:37):

It really resonates for me, and thank you for saying it, because I never wanted to be a good little mother, and I love being babies too.

Speaker 3 (00:52:48):

This made me think about something that's actually always bothered me. But for the last couple books, I actually have a 16 year old son, and

Speaker 3 (00:52:58):

Interestingly, there's been this other reaction that I've received, which is people in comments and God bless the internet where everybody can tell you what they think, your poems all the time. It's awesome. But I've had people say, blue is somebody's mother. If you can stomach this actually commentary on my stuff, if you can stomach the portrait of her toddler son or something. And I have a poem for my son called the Birthmark, which I think is a very loving but also very realistic poem about that sort of early part of infancy and how it's basically just puke an excrement and it's nicer in the poem. It doesn't sound so great when I say it this way, but remember, but I've never heard, I've got a pretty thick skin, but I've never had a comment that just took me the wind out of me for somebody. I felt like somebody had come up and put their hands on me in some really nasty way because they were reaching toward my kid through my poems.

Speaker 4 (00:54:06):

But that never

Speaker 6 (00:54:07):

Happens

Speaker 3 (00:54:08):

To men. No, I can't imagine it does.

Speaker 6 (00:54:11):

Somebody's father,

Speaker 4 (00:54:16):

Do you

Speaker 3 (00:54:17):

Kiss your son with that mouth? So yeah, I hadn't really thought about it until just then. Go ahead.

Speaker 6 (00:54:28):

I was thinking about how you push against the expectations and then you meet the consequences. We have to push against the consequences too. I mean these examples Yes, yes. Are great examples and we can only push against the consequences together. If you do it by yourself, you just get more consequences. But when we do it on each other's behalf, it begins to have some momentum. Yeah, when I said fear is progress, I don't want to leave it there. Like fear is progress, period. It's a comma and then you keep moving.

Speaker 4 (00:55:08):

I utterly agree with you. If we're listening to each other, that's why I'm happy I'm on the panel. If we're listening to each other, I'll give you an example. Pussy hats

Speaker 6 (00:55:25):

Pink.

Speaker 4 (00:55:29):

Not a damn thing on me is pink. Right? Do I see any hats that look like me

Speaker 4 (00:55:38):

Almost purple? No. Okay. So it's those tiny things. They seem small, but when I see this proliferation of pink, I can't help it. I get upset because nothing on me is pink. And I spent my entire childhood waiting for the pink to happen because pink is the aesthetic standard. That is just an example of not seeing each other, knowing each other. And if we don't see or know each other, we're not hearing each other. So I agree, we do have to do it together, but we also have to listen to each other across a lot of lines where we're not doi