Women Poets and Feminism

Literature in the United States, as in most other countries, was long evaluated on standards that often overlooked women's contributions. Yet there are many women poets of distinction in American writing. Not all are feminists, nor do their subjects invariably voice women's concerns. Also, regional, political, and racial differences have shaped their work. Among distinguished women poets are Amy Clampitt, Rita Dove, Louise Gl?orie Graham, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, May Swenson, and Mona Van Duyn.

Before the 1960s, most women poets had adhered to an androgynous ideal, believing that gender made no difference in artistic excellence. This gender-blind position was, in effect, an early form of feminism that allowed women to argue for equal rights. By the late l960s, American women -- many active in the civil rights struggle and protests against the Vietnam conflict, or influenced by the counterculture -- had begun to recognize their own marginalization. Betty Friedan's outspoken The Feminine Mystique (1963), published in the year Sylvia Plath committed suicide, decried women's low status. Another landmark book, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1969), made a case that male writings revealed a pervasive misogyny, or contempt for women.

In the l970s, a second wave of feminist criticism emerged following the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in l966. Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977) identified a major tradition of British and American women authors. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (l979) traced misogyny in English classics, exploring its impact on works by women, such as Charlotte Bront맳 Jane Eyre. In that novel, a wife is driven mad by her husband's ill treatment and is imprisoned in the attic; Gilbert and Gubar compare women's muffled voices in literature to this suppressed female figure.

Feminist critics of the second wave challenged the accepted canon of great works on the basis that aesthetic standards were not timeless and universal but rather arbitrary, culture bound, and patriarchal. Feminism became in the 1970s a driving force for equal rights, not only in literature but in the larger culture as well. Gilbert and Gubar's The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985) facilitated the study of women's literature, and a women's tradition came into focus.

Other influential woman poets before Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton include Amy Lowell (1874-1925), whose works have great sensuous beauty. She edited influential Imagist anthologies and introduced modern French poetry and Chinese poetry in translation to the English-speaking literary world. Her work celebrated love, longing, and the spiritual aspect of human and natural beauty. H.D. (1886-1961), a friend of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams who had been psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud, wrote crystalline poems inspired by nature and by the Greek classics and experimental drama. Her mystical poetry celebrates goddesses. The contributions of Lowell and H.D., and those of other women poets of the early 20th century such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, are only now being fully acknowledged.

Multiethnic Poets

The second half of the 20th century witnessed a renaissance in multiethnic literature that has continued into the 21st century. In the 1960s, following the lead of African Americans, ethnic writers in the United States began to command public attention. The 1970s saw the founding of ethnic studies programs in universities.

In the 1980s, a number of academic journals, professional organizations, and literary magazines focusing on ethnic groups were initiated. Conferences devoted to the study of specific ethnic literatures had begun, and the canon of "classics" had been expanded to include ethnic writers in anthologies and course lists. Important issues included race and ethnicity, spiritual life, familial and gender roles, and language.

Minority poetry shares the variety and occasionally the anger of women's writing. It has flowered in works by Latino and Chicano Americans such as Gary Soto, Alberto Rios, and Lorna Dee Cervantes; in Native Americans such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon Ortiz, and Louise Erdrich; in African-American writers such as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Michael S. Harper, Rita Dove, Maya Angelou, and Nikki Giovanni; and in Asian-American poets such as Cathy Song, Lawson Inada, and Janice Mirikitani.

Chicano/Latino Poetry
Spanish-influenced poetry encompasses works by many diverse groups. Among these are Mexican Americans, known since the 1950s as Chicanos, who have lived for many generations in the southwestern U.S. states annexed from Mexico in the Mexican-American War ending in 1848.

Among Spanish Caribbean populations, Cuban Americans and Puerto Ricans maintain vital and distinctive literary traditions. For example, the Cuban-American genius for comedy sets it apart from the elegiac lyricism of Chicano writers such as Rudolfo Anaya. New immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America, and Spain constantly replenish and enlarge this literary realm.

Chicano, or Mexican-American, poetry has a rich oral tradition in the corrido, or ballad, form. Seminal works stress traditional strengths of the Mexican community and the discrimination it has sometimes met with among whites. Sometimes the poets blend Spanish and English words in a poetic fusion, as in the poetry of Alurista and Gloria Anzald?heir poetry is much influenced by oral tradition and is very powerful when read aloud.

Some poets have written largely in Spanish, in a tradition going back to the earliest epic written in the present-day United States -- Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva México, commemorating the 1598 battle between invading Spaniards and the Pueblo Indians at Acoma, New Mexico.

A central text in Chicano poetry, I Am Joaquin by Rodolfo Gonzales (1928-2005) evokes acculturation: the speaker is "Lost in a world of confusion/Caught up in a whirl of gringo society/Confused by the rules..."

Many Chicano writers have found sustenance in their ancient Mexican roots. Thinking of the grandeur of Mexico, Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954- ) writes that "an epic corrido" chants through her veins, while Luis Omar Salinas (1937- ) feels himself to be "an Aztec angel."

Much Chicano poetry is highly personal, dealing with feelings and family or members of the community. Gary Soto (1952- ) writes out of the ancient tradition of honoring departed ancestors, but these words, written in 1981, describe the multicultural situation of Americans today:

A candle is lit for the dead
Two worlds ahead of us all

In the 1980s, Chicano poetry achieved a new prominence, and works by Cervantes, Soto, and Alberto Rios were widely anthologized.

Native-American Poetry
Native Americans have written fine poetry, most likely because a tradition of shamanistic song plays a vital role in their cultural heritage. Their work has excelled in vivid, living evocations of the natural world, which become almost mystical at times. Indian poets have also voiced a tragic sense of irrevocable loss of their rich heritage.

Simon Ortiz (1941- ), an Acoma Pueblo, bases many of his hard-hitting poems on history, exploring the contradictions of being an indigenous American in the United States today. His poetry challenges Anglo readers because it often reminds them of the injustice and violence at one time done to Native Americans. His poems envision racial harmony based on a deepened understanding.

In "Star Quilt," Roberta Hill Whiteman (1947- ), a member of the Oneida tribe, imagines a multicultural future like a "star quilt, sewn from dawn light," while Leslie Marmon Silko (1948- ), who is part Laguna Pueblo, uses colloquial language and traditional stories to fashion haunting, lyrical poems. In "In Cold Storm Light" (1981), Silko achieves a haiku-like resonance:

out of the thick ice sky
running swiftly
pounding
swirling above the treetops
The snow elk come,
Moving, moving
white song
storm wind in the branches.

Louise Erdrich (1954- ), like Silko also a novelist, creates powerful dramatic monologues that work like compressed dramas. They unsparingly depict families coping with alcoholism, unemployment, and poverty on the Chippewa reservation.

In Erdrich's "Family Reunion" (1984), a drunken, abusive uncle returns from years in the city. As he suffers from a heart disease, the abused niece, who is the speaker, remembers how this uncle had killed a large turtle years before by stuffing it with a firecracker. The end of the poem links Uncle Ray with the turtle he has victimized:

Somehow we find our way back,
Uncle Ray
sings an old song to the body
that pulls him
toward home. The gray fins that
his hands have become
screw their bones in the
dashboard. His face
has the odd, calm patience of a
child who has always
let bad wounds alone, or a
creature that has lived
for a long time underwater.
And the angels come
lowering their slings and litters.

African-American Poetry
Black Americans have produced many poems of great beauty with a considerable range of themes and tones. African-American literature is the most developed ethnic writing in America and is extremely diverse. Amiri Baraka (1934- ), the best-known African-American poet of the 1960s and 1970s, has also written plays and taken an active role in politics. The writings of Maya Angelou (1928- ) encompass various literary forms, including poetry, drama, and her well-known memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).

Rita Dove (1952- ) was named poet laureate of the United States for 1993-1995. Dove, a writer of fiction and drama as well, won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Thomas and Beulah (1986), in which she celebrates her grandparents through a series of lyric poems. She has said that she wrote the work to reveal the rich inner lives of poor people.

Michael S. Harper (1938- ) has similarly written poems revealing the complex lives of African Americans faced with discrimination and violence. His dense, allusive poems often deal with crowded, dramatic scenes of war or urban life. They make use of surgical images in an attempt to heal. His "Clan Meeting: Births and Nations: A Blood Song" (1971), which likens cooking to surgery ("splicing the meats with fluids"), begins "we reconstruct lives in the intensive / care unit, pieced together in a buffet." The poem ends by splicing together images of the hospital, racism in the early American film Birth of a Nation, the Ku Klux Klan, film editing, and x-ray technology:

We reload our brains as the
cameras,
the film overexposed
in the x-ray light,
locked with our double door
light meters: race and sex
spooled and rung in a hobby;
we take our bundle and go
home.

History, jazz, and popular culture have inspired many African Americans, from Harper (a college professor) to West Coast publisher and poet Ishmael Reed (1938- ), known for spearheading multicultural writing through the Before Columbus Foundation and a series of magazines such as Yardbird, Quilt, and Konch.

Many African-American poets, such as Audre Lorde (1934-1992), have found nourishment in Afrocentrism, which sees Africa as a center of civilization since ancient times. In sensuous poems such as "The Women of Dan Dance With Swords in Their Hands To Mark the Time When They Were Warriors" (1978), she speaks as a woman warrior of ancient Dahomey, "arming whatever I touch" and "consuming" only "What is already dead."

Asian-American Poetry
Like poetry by Chicano and Latino writers, Asian-American poetry is exceedingly varied. Americans of Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino descent may often have lived in the United States for eight generations, while Americans of Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese heritage are likely to be fairly recent immigrants. Each group has grown out of a distinctive linguistic, historical, and cultural tradition.

Developments in Asian-American literature have included an emphasis on the Pacific Rim and women's writing. Asian Americans generally have resisted the common stereotypes as the "exotic" or "good" minority. Aestheticians have compared Asian and Western literary traditions -- for example, comparing the concepts of Tao and Logos.

Asian-American poets have drawn on many sources, from Chinese opera to Zen Buddhism, and Asian literary traditions, particularly Zen, have inspired numerous non-Asian poets, as can be seen in the 1991 anthology Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry. Asian-American poets span a spectrum, from the iconoclastic posture taken by Frank Chin (1940- ), co-editor of Aiiieeeee! (an early anthology of Asian-American literature), to the generous use of tradition by writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston (1940- ). Janice Mirikitani (1942- ), a sansei (third-generation Japanese American), evokes Japanese-American history and has edited several anthologies, such as Third World Women (1973); Time To Greez! Incantations From the Third World (1975); and Ayumi: A Japanese American Anthology (1980).

The lyrical Picture Bride (1983) of Chinese-American Cathy Song (1955- ) also dramatizes history through the lives of her family. Many Asian-American poets explore cultural diversity. In Song's "The Vegetable Air" (1988), a shabby town with cows in the plaza, a Chinese restaurant, and a Coca-Cola sign hung askew becomes an emblem of rootless multicultural contemporary life made bearable by art, in this case an opera on cassette:

then the familiar aria,
rising like the moon,
lifts you out of yourself,
transporting you to another country
where, for a moment, you travel light.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 848