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Vow
to Poetry
Excerpt
- Author's Note
The
volume at hand cobbles together a range of writing-speaking-thinking,
and of being interviewed about poetry and its demands
as a living “vow”— meaning, as in the Frank O’Hara line,
you “go on your nerve.” This vow is felt as a metabolic
necessity. As practitioner of the art, as teacher, as
performer, as editor, as cultural feminist and activist,
as student of Buddhism, the call to articulation is
on the one hand choiceless, and on the other a matter
of ongoing activity and improvisation. Vow
comes from the middle English vowe, which is from vou,
from Old French, from Latin votum:
vote. Vote
comes from the neuter past participle of vovere: to vow. Also to be enjoyed: the playful
association with vowel from Middle English vowelle,
from Old French vouel,
from Latin vocalis:
sounding, from vox, voc: voice. By my own skewed associational mathematics,
Vow = Voice. I vote always for the transforming of language’s
energy side with a full voice.
Poetry is, of course, from poiein: to make. This English fifteenth-century
word, which means “courtly makers” is the exact equivalent
of the word poets. The whole world is the court now (judicial,
economic, worldly, spiritual, virtual), in which the
making of alternative versions (poems) and realities
for poetry activity seems more pressing than ever. With the exception of the interviews sprinkled
throughout, Vow to Poetry is organized nonchronologically,which
is more conducive to sensing the relative momentum of
each piece to the pieces around it. As such, the arrangement
attempts to juxtapose a range of “takes” from soapbox
to schoolmarm. Many of the pieces evolved from notes
for, or transcriptions of, classes and panels at Naropa
University on a range of subjects, many are autobiographical,
often instigated by travel, while others are musings
or responses to issues at hand. An inordinate amount
of outside interest provoked mutterings around various
Buddhist notions and how they might relate to a practice
of poetry.—awFeminafestoHow
different are times now for women writers? you ask.
Women anything. Women scientists. Women Buddhists. My
mother suffered her creativity a scant generation ahead
of me. She didn’t have a room of her own. Her children
were her work. Only in her sixties did she have the
confidence—with the support of a daughter and other
women and poet-publisher Leandro Katz, to publish her
translations from the French of Cesar Moro and Greek
of Anghelos Sikelianos. She had been playing the “spirit
of heroin” in an off-Broadway production of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and died that same year. By
then she was an embodiment for me of the “hag” who had
thrown off the shackles of mean expectation, could finally
manifest beyond “girl,” “wife,” “mother,” other domesticities.
To some extent she’d stopped measuring herself against
a heterosexist world. She would say to me, young, don’t
let men touch you until you “prove yourself.” What did
that mean? Prove something to her? To “them”? That a
woman’s sexuality and her work were diametrically at
odds? That you couldn’t be easy and pliable, and be
respected for anything else you might do? That the work
was hieratic, untouchable in some sense, but they, poor
men, were confused and couldn’t abide a thinking woman.
Or that I might be sidetracked, and have true passions
of writing and “religious” study sidelined? That love
would be downfall rather than Muse? And wanting even
then, young, to live the fantasy of scholar-nun in comfortable
albeit modest ivory tower, hidden away from secular
and sexual temptations. The grinding care of husband
(“the quickest way to his heart is through his stomach”)
and children. She said when I first married “I swear
if I see you pushing a baby carriage a few months from
now, I’ll come and shoot you.” She had a tall ambition
for me and she was right to worry. For I was, and still
am, an incurable romantic, raised in a curiously ambivalent
culture. But that has little to do with having a family.
“A man needs a maid?” I never promised domestic bliss.
And yet my father was an heroic figure, survived the
war, returned home from Germany sobered by his experience
bringing spoils: Nazi bayonets, medals, haunting image:
“Dead limbs rising from strewn rubble of twisted metal.”
He was sensitive, literate, a former artistic bohemian,
swing piano player, and a frustrated novelist. As a
couple—both had been married previously and my mother
with one son—they were optimistic about building on
some kind of ashes, on the shards of war, Depression,
Prohibition. Things looked brighter. He went to school
on the g.i. Bill—all the way through a doctorate at Columbia University.
My mother had been a college freshman-year dropout wanting
to study painting, went to Provincetown, a distinctly
alternative artistic community, then married at age
nineteen the son of the Greek poet Anghelos Sikelianos
and sailed off to Greece the next day. After a little
more than a decade that chapter of her life was closed.
Divorce, the war, back to Provincetown, matured, met
my father at an Isamu Noguchi party. He was living next
door to John Dos Passos. They fell in love. A second
marriage. Not that he held her back exactly. It was
a condition of the times. You merged with the man in
an imitation of enlightenment. Joining the “other,”
joining the “light.” How close can you get? Teachers
in my formative years were male. I especially remember
Mr. Grief at ps 8, our poetry teacher, who would hold
female students by the scruff of their necks and bend
them out the window. “Mr. Grief brings us grief” was
the common chant, like “Rose is a rose is a rose.” He
was clearly disdainful of the girls: they were lesser
beings. High school teacher Jon Beck Shank was a blessing,
whose recitations of classic and modern poetry I will
never forget, nor his sympathy with “the girls.” Because
we were soft on poetry too? My male teachers in college
perhaps thought us dilettantes. Always that persistent
need to prove oneself. Get serious. Cut class. Write
a poem. One mentor would say to me, “You are a both
a peasant and a queen.” What did that mean? More categories
of definition in a heterosexist world. And when I went
to meet my first Buddhist teacher, Mongolian lama Geshe
Wangyal, at eighteen, my boyfriend pleaded Take off
your lipstick please it’s disrespectful. And a husband
would say with accusation You are just like all the
male poets. Just like Robert Creeley. Traveling the
globe, leaving hearth and home, abandoning child, jawing
with other poets ’til wee hours, god knows, how can
I trust you? And how could he? For I wanted this other
path, desperately. Poet, outrider, free woman. I could
hold my own with the boys, I could “drink like a man!”
I could “talk like a man!” Of course, I’d always identified
with the male protagonists in the novels I voraciously
read as a kid. I was the constant reader. And I was
even hungrier than the boys for their adventure, wanting
to be right inside Balzac’s monde, hang out with actresses
and dandies, twist in fatal political and love intrigues.
I would follow and live Siddhartha’s journey through
the words of Herman Hesse. I had a box of exotic costumes.
Favored disguises: Robin Hood, Prince Charming, Annie
Oakley, priest. I played the characters “Tom Boy Joe”
and Shakespeare’s “merry wanderer of the night” Puck
in grade school before I grew tender breasts. At a later
age I would yearn to play first Hamlet, then King Lear.
And I saw myself as ageless Puer, picaresque adventurer,
traveler in boy garb, entering the Hindu temple in Puri
strictly forbidden to women, or making the long Haj,
the pilgrimage to Mecca. Do you have to be circumscribed?
Do you really have to be circumsized? Women are considered sebel, unclean, in Hindu Bali. You are forbidden
to enter temples if you are menstruating, or you wear
the chador which covers all but the eyes, but even they
must be lowered, averted, in narrow Arab streets. Your
power, your nakedness, would cause men to go mad, commit
unspeakable deeds. Would change the world! Would paint
it scarlet! Would seize & restore the night with
sweet ancient control. Check out the Levite laws in
the Bible, the destruction of the Astoreth goddess temples.
Your passion would run amok, make riot. Your multiple
orgasms, your oceans of bliss, your cum would flood
the world. Coming into power as a writer had to do with
becoming a mother as well. I could say outrageous things,
could proclaim my “endometrium shedding.” Could manifest
the “crack in the world.” I shouted, “You men who came
out of my belly, back off!” I could literally stomp
and “walk on the “periphery of the world.” I might—as
Sumerian Inanna did—get the male poets (my fathers)
intoxicated on alcohol, methedrine, ecstasy, charm them
with my wit, my piety, then steal their secrets. Cast
a discerning eye at the progressive anthologies of poetry.
Are we still having to count the men versus women, and
is the canon a lost cause or is it the battleground?
Look at the scarcity of women in any institution, sacred
or secular. Keep counting. How many pinks to so many
blues? Is language phallogocentric? Is writing a political
act? Do you women writers I’m speaking to feel marginalized?
Do you agree, you’d almost have to, dear scholarly sisters,
that the experiences of women in and with literature
are different from those of men? Much feminist criticism
has centered on the misogyny of literary practice—women
as angels or monsters, mothers or nuns, daughters or
whores—harassment of women in classic and popular male
literature and text. You know it: James Joyce, Freud,
Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Homer, the
Bible, the Koran, the Vinaya, etc. But I want here to
declare an enlightened poetics, an androgynous poetics,
a poetics defined by your primal energy, not by a heterosexist
world that must measure every word, every act against
itself. Not by a norm that assumes a dominant note subordinating,
mistreating, excluding any other possibility. In fact
you could be a man with a “lesbian” consciousness in
you, a woman with a “gay” consciousness inside. I propose
a Utopian creative field where we are defined by our
energy, not by gender. I propose a transsexual literature,
a trans-gendered literature, a hemaphroditic literature,
a transvestite literature, and finally a poetics of
transformation beyond gender. That sings its wisdom.
That the body be an extension of energy, that we are
not defined by our sexual positions as men or women
in bed or on the page. That the page not be empty female
awaiting penetration by dark phallic ink-juice. That
masculine and feminine energies be comprehended in the
Buddhist sense of prajna
and upaya,
wisdom and skillful means, which exist in all sentient
beings. That these energies co-exist and are essential
one to the other. That poetry is perceived as a kind
of siddhi, or magical accomplishment that understands
these fundamental energies.
Perhaps women have the advantage of producing
a radically disruptive and subversive kind of writing
right now because they are experiencing the current
imbalances and contradictions that drive them to it.
They are turning to skillful means in figuring how to
combat assaults on their intelligence and time. She—the
practitioner—wishes to explore and dance with everything
in the culture which is unsung, mute, and controversial
so that she may subvert the existing systems that repress
and misunderstand feminine “difference.” She’ll take
on the subjects of censorship and abortion and sexual
harassment. She’ll challenge her fathers, her husband(s),
lovers, male companions, warmongers, micromanagers,
spiritual teachers. Turn the language body upside down.
What does it look like?
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