Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Too
We are two part-time academics. Ellen teaches in the English department and Jim in the IT program at George Mason University.
Autobiography and Poetry · 19 March 06
Dear Harriet,
A friend, a member of Wompo, Liz, has asked me to put a posting onto this blog that I sent to Wompo so she can link it up to her blog. So I put aside my work to write a letter to you, Harriet.
The issue on Wompo was whether autobiography is relevant to poetry; people had been citing the case of Elizabeth Bishop where when what is known about her life is published is apparently (according to a couple of people) of such a nature that it makes others judge her as weak and respect her less. She was perhaps bisexual, but mostly a lesbian, drank heavily, and deeply dependent on her beloved companion-lovers. Someone on Wompo suggested that common readers tend to "side" with a particular lover-friend, Lota.
Further, recently poetry Bishop wrote that Bishop never published has been appearing in the New Yorker, NYRB and other paper publications and on the Net, and some souls on Wompo who appear to fetishize publication in paper are upset.
A comparison was also made between Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Bishop by someone else who said she much preferred Bishop. It was said Bogan had published a scathing review of Bishop’s poetry. This was probably aimed at a posting I had put on a couple of weeks early, a "foremothers" posting (a custom on Wompo) where I presented Louise Bogan as good poet and foremother, reprinted her beautifully moving and ironic "Evening in the Sanitarium", and narrated a very brief life, where I included her time as poetry editor of the New Yorker.
So I wrote:
"I suggest logic would tell us we take into account the poet’s autobiography as we open a volume. The argument for women’s poetry as a separate form is at heart an argument for the importance of autobiography. We don’t read in a vaccuum.
I sympathize with Bishop’s or anyone’s desire to keep aspects of their life from public view. The public is filled with narrow-minded people who enjoy judging. Myself I don’t like or respect her any the less knowing about her life, but probably many might or would, and that would make them less respect her work. I once consulted a lawyer about cyberspace publicity and he gave me an outline of the law I can’t repeat as I don’t remember it well enough. The jist of it though was that once you put yourself into the public as a public person you have invited commentary and cannot control it unless it be a malicious untruth and known to be so. You had also probably better be able to prove damages (you have been badly hurt, you have lost money or opportunities) before you go to a court.
The old taboo against women appearing in public probably comes from this reality as women are naturally often despised and their norms or values are not of those of the masculinist set of values that are made the superior. They are as a group still tabooed from free enjoyment of sexuality, answerable with their bodies, made into sacred totems (on behalf of motherhood for which they are supposed to sacifice self).
Of course the problem might be stated as once we acknowledge autobiography, the public in general doesn’t want to talk of anything else. The life crowds out the work and the public tends to sympathize with the non-genius much more. This is the same problem as the public is uninterested in poetry. Turn on the TV and you see what the majority is content to let into their minds and be said to agree with. What’s wanted is to keep the autobiographical element in its place, and when it’s significant bring it up and when it’s not so (or universalized) not.
For myself while I like Bishop’s poetry (I have a volume) and don’t know Bogan’s poetry very well (I have only selections in anthologies), I don’t like Bishop as much as poets who are more open. For me she’s an avoider—like Marguerite Yourcenar who perpetually has a young boy as the central of a tale and who also professed not to be feminist. Both did what they could to distance themselves from other women. Ashamed of them? Of herself too? I prefer the bold and the open, someone who speaks in ways that may not be subtilized and reframed out of its core meaning for the poet, its origination if you will in her psyche and actual life.
Don’t misunderstand me. The poetry doesn’t have to be passionate and insistently subjective. For me Stevie Smith is bold and open and universal: she is satiric, quirky, all sorts of things, e.g., "Phèdre".
The argument for a women’s poetry list is both pragmatic and idealistic. Since the WRofB started up again, I’ve been led to count who reviews what books in the central periodicals I got (NYRB, LRB, New Yorker, TLS, Nation). Every week it’s one or at most 2 women and all the restl men, and every week it’s 1 or at most and sometimes no work by women under review. So without the WRofB I wasn’t hearing about the good books by women and wasn’t getting a woman’s point of view. Can’t be heard. Read Dale Spender on women in cyberspace bullied and pressured and ridiculed and shamed into silence.
That’s the pragmatic. As for the spiritual, I prefer women’s literature to men’s very often. Not all the time of course. I dislike some women authors very much as I like some men. But I’ve found that there’s a vein in men which may be seen as critical of the dominant ideology and validating some norms and kinds of feelings said to be typical of women and these are often the men whose work I like. Not always (Pope’s a misogynist and I like his stuff), but the male’s attitude towards women is important. I can’t stand Coetzee for what I take to be his cruelty to women in his books.
And yes ask me which are the poems I love best or most respect I’m likely to cite women’s poems. I think Adrienne Rich’s "Diving into the Wreck" the equivalent of T. S. Eliot’s "The Wasteland." Just the other day Sophie sent Rich’s very great "Transcendental Etudes to Anne.
My projects for my website fit the above outlook. My latest—it will take lots of time (which I like) is to put up an autobiography by a 17th century woman who was a spy and has hardly ever been reprinted and then misframed: Anne Murray, Lady Halkett. She wrote no verse but she did write a profoundly true and brave autobiography.
[Chava did send Fanny Bishop’s "Please Come Flying, a poignant upbeat friendship poem from Bishop to Marianne Moore some time ago.] Here’s a poem by Bishop where she is at her best. It’s not that she’s autobiographical, but that she does not disguise, does not avoid. She presents the brutal truth of her woman’s typical experience:
In the Waiting Room
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist’s appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist’s waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
‘Long Pig,’ the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
Aunt Consuelo’s voice
not very loud or long.
I wasn’t at all supprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn’t. What ook me
comlpetely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I—we—were falling, alling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Georgraphic,
February 1918.
I said to myself: three days
and you’ll be seven years old
I was saying it to stop
the senation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an _I_,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
I couldn’t look any higher
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How—I didn’t know any
word for it—how ‘unlikely’ . . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn’t?
The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
Then I was back on it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night, and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth of
February, 1918.
********
The poem makes me remember Rich’s famous "Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers" and all the many scenes in women’s literature where the heroine is either a niece or aunt. Psychoanalytically it’s easier to relate to a woman who is biologically related as the aunt or niece than mother or daughter, and at the same time you can bring all the same psychological baggage and identity trauma in. Bowen was a niece for a long time; Austen &c. There’s that telling line about hanging breasts. "In the Waiting Room" beats much Auden (maybe Auden’s poem about the fall of Icarus, "About suffering they were never wrong" or his Christmas Oratorio, "For the time being" come up to this by Bishop). I’d trade it in for Larkin’s relentless poems too (e.g, "This be the verse"). It has more pity because (I think) Bishop is a woman and identifies, recognizes her life in that of others.
Just a few thoughts."
Jim argues that we should not try to define someone as a great poems for we end up counting how many. Rather we should look to read great poems.
I have not heard from Lady Mary Parker lately. Just as soon as she writes I’ll let you know.
You don’t need me to tell you how wonderful is an all-women’s college, Harriet, but I can’t help exclaiming this aloud as I’ve just returned from Sweet Briar where I left Yvette off with Jennica.
I hope all is well with you and Lord Peter,
Sylvia
--
Posted by: Ellen
* * *
Comment
- This was really a pleasure to read. Thank you.
— bob Mar 19, 10:18pm # - The footnote of paradise lost says that Eve’s long hair is a sign of her submission to adam’s authority. Why is it a sign of submission?
Did you put a picture of the cover of Mansfield Park on your blog one time? I’m experiencing deja vu by looking at the cover.
— Jennica Mar 20, 7:11am # - I thought I’d add more about Jim and my discussion last night over dinner:
Jim maintained that we should not try to find or credit people as great poets rather look for great poems. He suggested in reality what we find are distinct single great poems by an individual, and these are what we value. So Empson wrote a handfull of stunners; T. S. Eliot said that Johnson was a great poet simply based on "The Vanity of Human Wishes." This does then obviate fetishizing the author; it prevents counting (how many poems altogether produce the great poet); it does make what the book’s architecture in which the poem appeared not important also where it was published—he pointed out for hundreds of years publication was done through manuscript and suggested the Net could be regarded as a vast public form of ms publication. In this thinking "Diving into the Wreck" and "Transcendental Etudes" is what we care about not Adrienne Rich and we care about her autobiography only because it illuminates the poetry.
He agreed the problem for women would be that women's poems are not known. He has never read "Diving into the Wreck" and never heard of "Transcendental Etudes" before I put it on the blog (mostly in response to a comment on the blog). And the way anthologies are set up come out of politics, cliques, notions about knowledge (which come down to history and chronology often) and how most readers persist in wanting to know the biographies of the authors they read. So presenting women's poetry to make it known often involves a compromise from the austere integrity of saying what we look for are great poems.
Of course how do you tell a great poem? And once you go back to content, you are thrown back into life, milieu, politics
Sylvia
— chava Mar 20, 8:11am # - Dear Jennica,
Sylvia is supposed to be the woman who is the scholar, student, studying poetry, romance, history of literature, the book lover. She went to an all-women’s college with Harriet Vane. The book here is Gaudy Night by Sayers. Yvette has read it and will tell you about it.
I didn’t mind your state of undress in the room at all. I was very glad to see you.
Sometimes editors write silly notes in anthologies. They feel they must say something and can expose themselves
3.2 is pretty good. You have still 2 and 1/2 years to go.
What cover do you have for Mansfield Park? Some covers are so annoying because they misrepresent the text, it seems deliberately. Also the publisher is trying to attract people to the book in crude ways (particularly through sexualized pictures). Or they try to sell the book by putting a still from a movie adaptation of the text on the cover. I’ve cut off covers. When we look at such covers, we may feel we are categorized or our book placed into a group of people whose ideas, tastes, way or reasons for reading we are embarrassed to be part of or dislike.
Sylvia
— chava Mar 20, 8:29am # - I was happy to see you too, but I was disappointed that I didn’t really talk to you, because you were busy with Yvette. How long are you staying on the 29th? Am I going to have a longer time to talk to you that day? I thought it was funny that I was in a towel, but Yvette didn’t seem to think it was funny.
Yes, 3.2 is pretty good, but 2.0 isn’t good. And I still don’t know whether I want to get a BS or a BA in psych.
I looked up MP in the library, and it said it had 3 versions, one from 1906, one from 1908, and one from 1970. I didn’t know whether it made a difference what year it was, and the person at the desk said that it’s usually best to go with the newest one. Have you been in the stacks at SBC? I thought I was the only one who is afraid of them, but my friend said that she won’t go into the stacks alone. So I thought that I was going to be scared when I went to the stacks to get the book, and I was expecting to think that a monster was going to jump out and kill me, but it wasn’t that scary to go into the stacks. Only a tiny bit scary. I found two versions of MP, and one was two volumes and they were thick, and the other one was in one book, and it wasn’t as thick as one of the volumes. I was wondering why one of them was so small and one was so big, but the person at the desk said that they are the same. The one I have is the Vox edition. The picture is a bunch of people around a table with a teapot on the table. The title is written in black with the M and the P in red.
I spent so much time during break getting ahead on my Social Psych reading that now I’m behind in the reading for my other classes. I should have done more work the week before break, because now I feel like there is no way I’m going to have time to get everything done. I spent most of the time Mon-Thurs during break doing homework, and I did almost no homework the Fri and Sat at the end of break, and I did a little bit of homework the Fri and Sat at the beginning of break.
— Jennica Mar 20, 9:23am # - My major GPA isn’t 2.0! They did the math wrong! Or maybe they just wrote it wrong. I calculated it myself and it’s supposed to be 2.51. I tried to calculate it in my head, because I didn’t have a pencil and paper, which means I couldn’t take notes in class, and I kept coming up with numbers that couldn’t be right, like 1.85, and I decided that I was just going to keep calculating until I got it right, which means I wasn’t paying attention in class either. But I don’t think the prof said anything except which chapters would be on the test and told us that she doesn’t expect us to do the reading or have the whole paper done when it’s due. It seems stupid that it doesn’t matter whether students do work. So then I finally did the math right and could pay attention in class. If I hadn’t kept trying to do the math correctly, I would have spent the rest of class waiting for it to be over so I could go back to my room and calculate it on microsoft excel. That’s what I use for a calculator, but I have a real calculator. And my major GPA would be 2.6 if you don’t count the biology class, which counts for the 7 additional credits in science other than psychology requirement.
— Jennica Mar 20, 2:35pm # - Ok, so I was wrong. I asked the registrar and they said that the GPA that is listed is the minimum GPA required to graduate, not my GPA. But it says Major GPA: 2.000. Doesn’t that look like it means it’s my GPA?
— Jennica Mar 20, 3:05pm # - Kathy also replied:
"I was also fascinated by your entry on women’s poetry, cyberspace, and autobiography. I especially liked this:
"The old taboo against women appearing in public probably comes from this reality as women are naturally often despised and their norms or values are not of those of the masculinist set of values that are made the superior. They are as a group still tabooed from free enjoyment of sexuality, answerable with their bodies, made into sacred totems (on behalf of motherhood for which they are supposed to sacifice self).
"Of course the problem might be stated as once we acknowledge autobiography, the public in general doesn’t want to talk of anything else. The life crowds out the work and the public tends to sympathize with the non-genius much more. This is the same problem as the public is uninterested in poetry. Turn on the TV and you see what the majority is content to let into their minds and be said to agree with. What’s wanted is to keep the autobiographical element in its place, and when it’s significant bring it up and when it’s not so (or universalized)"
You’re such an intellectual, Ellen. I’m fascinated by your ideas. Yes, women are despised: it’s obvious from something much cruder than the art you discuss: the horrific fashion ads in the style issue of The New Yorker. The Banana Republic ad shows a wholesome woman, a mother. The Dior ad portays a skinny woman on the verge of death or orgasm from the strain of holding a Dior bag. Etc.! They’re all defined in relation to things. Some look as though they’ve just had a dose of heroin (or whatever’s popular these days).
When should one participate in cyberspace discussions? When not? Does the internet help or hurt us? Your blog contains a series of stimulating essays, reviews, and journal entires. The down side I can see to that is that someone might plagiarize your ideas (not me: I’m not an academic). But I am for freedom of speech, and the internet still provides that.
Knowing a little about an author can be troublesome. I recently read A.S. Byatt’s second novel, The Game, a fascinating study of sibling rivalry.
Here was the problem: I recognized several references to the Brontes, but since I’ve read that Byatt and her novelist sister, Margaret Drabble, have a longstanding feud, I wondered how much of the novel was about that. I’d rather not know about their feud, but several newspaper articles have mentioned it. Newspapers do tend to exaggerate, though. In this case wondering about the autobiographical elements was a distraction.
Thanks for the Bishop poem. I used to love Elizabeth Bishop."
To which I rejoined:
One participates in cyberspace discussions for ourselves. Remember in my paper on women in cyberspace I said why not revel in it for itself. Why care what’s happening in the rotten world when you cannot affect it?
What do I care about my ideas being plagiarized? I can make no money from them; I can make no position for myself. That is only for those who are careerists? To think about such things and in this way is to keep the silence. I circulate decent ideas. That’s what writing should be about. Not property ownership and self-aggrandizement. I’m not against that if I could do it, but like the overwhelming majority of people I can’t.
On principle I put things on my website. I participate in cyberspace discussions, make them happen because I rejoice to talk to others who feel about the world in ways analogous to mine. We can find one another outside of the world’s exclusionary cliques.
Sylvia
— chava Mar 21, 7:25am # - I am unhappy that I can’t spend all day reading Mansfield Park.
— Jennica Mar 21, 8:15am # - Dear Jennica,
No more time but for just a brief note. Have you started MP? I will be very interested to know how you feel about Fanny.
Sylvia
— chava Mar 21, 8:32am # - I have started it, and I’m confused by it. What is confusing is the characters. In most books I read I have trouble figuring out who the characters are and remembering who is who. Do you have any idea why I have that problem?
When I read the Merchant of Venice, I had to keep looking at the character list, and I kept forgetting who the characters were and had to look at the list again. But now that I’ve reread parts and written a paper on it I remember who is who. But some of the books I’ve read recently, Harry Potter, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, and My Sister’s Keeper, I had no trouble knowing who the characters were.
But other than the characters, I’m not having trouble understanding MP.
I had a lot of trouble understanding books in middle school and high school, but I think that problem has gone away. Did I have a learning disability? In 7th grade it was either White Fang or Call of the Wild that my English class was reading, and because of how I did on the quizzes and assignments, the teacher thought that I hadn’t read the book. But I did read the book. And with some books my problem was that I knew the details, but not the big picture. I wasn’t able to tell someone what the book was about, but I knew the details of the book.
Here are the problems I’m having with MP. Mrs. Price is Fanny’s mother. Is Mrs. Norris Mrs. Price’s sister? Is Lady Bertram also Mrs. Price’s sister? Why did Fanny live with Lady Bertram? Fanny was going to live with Mrs. Norris after that, right? Why was she going to live with her? I think those are my only questions.
Maybe the reason I didn’t like reading in middle school and high school was that it was hard for me. I probably did better reading in elementary school because they were easier books, so I liked it, and then in middle school and high school when I read more difficult books, I stopped liking reading. But now that I’ve mostly gotten over whatever learning disability or reading comprehension problem I had, I enjoy reading again. I just finished chapter 3. That’s how far I am in the book.
There are a certain number of minutes I’m allowed to read each week for my psychology project; I don’t remember whether I told you about that, and I don’t remember whether I already counted the number of minutes I read during breakfast. I’m going to cheat myself out of reading if I accidentally counted breakfast twice. I’ll just add up the times I remember reading this week, and if I forgot about a few of the minutes I will get extra minutes. But that’s cheating. It comes to 12 minutes less if I add the ones I remember. Wait, I think that’s the number of minutes I read at breakfast. But I thought the 40 min I read today included breakfast. Maybe I should record the times I read in addition to recording the total minutes so I don’t get mixed up.
Well now I’m wasting time sitting here trying to figure it out. I’ll just take the average of the two numbers and I’ll either get 6 extra minutes or lose 6 minutes.
— Jennica Mar 21, 10:55am # - Dear Sylvia,
I received a trunk call from Harriet this morning, worrying that neither she nor you had heard from me in some time. They’ve been at Talboys nearly all month… Though I fear March there will be a muddy mess, Peter sounded very happy at the prospect.
As Harriet knows, I find having company lovely, but it’s hard for me. I did so little reading while my grandmother was here! And so much less writing!! Only enough of the former, in the late night, to feel myself in one piece; not frittered and fractured away. But there was nothing left for thinking and writing about what I’d read. We were four to six times as busy as I normally would be… Visiting and family gathering and conversation (and medical appointments) ruled the day. Though all concerned people I love, and I enjoyed much of it, I found it very very tiring.
Finally returning to ‘normalcy’ is restorative; welcome. So too is reading your entry and the poetry, back at my desk, sipping Darjeeling. I do agree that while lives can be illuminating, it is the art which wins primary place: the ‘life’ a supporting role. I thought Kathy captured perfectly the kind of feeling that used to haunt me: the fear of knowing too much, losing the material the author wanted to convey in the swamp of too much biographical conjecture and detail. (Of course, I made the foolish choice, as I now see it, of reading too little; ending by missing too much.)
Thank you especially for linking to the poems by Louise Bogan and Stevie Smith. Much as I appreciated others, especially "Diving Into the Wreck," those two suit me. I love the wry, the ironic…
Peter will be pleased to see me enjoying more poetry. He used to say I had a ‘dangerous addiction to prose.’ (Perhaps that is part of why I love Charles. :)
My best, as always, on all of your projects; and my apologies for not writing sooner. I’ve been torn, in wanting so much to join in.
Most affectionately yours,
Lady Mary Parker
— Julie Vollgraff Mar 21, 4:52pm # - Dear Sylvia,
Another note, as I just sent off a letter (barely in time to catch the post!) and realized I’d forgotten something.
You’d said: ‘What do I care about my ideas being plagiarized? I can make no money from them; I can make no position for myself. ... To think about such things and in this way is to keep the silence. I circulate decent ideas. That’s what writing should be about.’
It is. This way you make an impact on more lives and more people’s thought, enter more into a public discussion, than otherwise you could. Your ideas move, have potency, because they aren’t shut up tight: they get air and sunlight and get picked up, as it were, easily, lightly; passed on the breeze. Better this, really, when one cares about the ideas, and the position or prestige and ideas’ dissemination cannot both be had.
Simply looking at it the way you have is one of those decent ideas. Though the more you are credited, the better. Hopefully decent people, in writing or publishing, will remember their debts of thought and fertile conversation. Regardless, among the rest of us, it is most appreciated.
With much respect,
Lady Mary
— Julie Vollgraff Mar 21, 5:15pm # - From Wompo:
"Clips from Ellen Moody’s post:
’.. we should not try to find or credit people as great poets rather look for great poems….in reality what we find are distinct single great poems by an individual, and these are what we value. ...
This does then obviate fetishizing the author; it prevents counting (how many poems altogether produce the great poet) ...’
What a great post, Ellen. Very thoughtful. In a somewhat slant response, I offer these statements from Borges:
‘After the ancients, from the East there came a different idea of the book. There came the idea of Holy Writ, of books written by the Holy Ghost; there came Korans, Bibles, and so on…. Indeed, I have read that [Muslims] think of the Koran not as a work of God, but as an attribute of God….
‘And thus there came into Europe the idea of the Holy Writ—an idea that is, I think, not wholly mistaken. Bernard Shaw (to whom I am always going back) was asked once whether he really thought the Bible was the work of the Holy Ghost. And he said, ‘I think the Holy Ghost has written not only the Bible, but all books.’" (THIS CRAFT OF VERSE, Harvard U. Press, p. 9, 10)
‘As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that line does me no good, because, as I’ve already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer…. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless’ (THIS CRAFT OF VERSE, Harvard U. Press, p. 15)
and, from the preface to his Collected Poems, I think:
‘After all these years I have observed that beauty, like happiness, is frequent. A day does not pass when we are not, for an instant, in paradise. There is no poet, however mediocre, who has not written the best line in literature, but also the most miserable ones. Beauty is not the privilege of a few illustrious names. It would be rare if this book did not contain one single secret line worthy of staying with you to the end.’
Best regards,
Rosemary"
—
— chava Mar 22, 1:17pm #
commenting closed for this article