How lucky can a woman get? I have wonderful in-laws, and my mother-in-law, particularly, has always nurtured my poetry. (Of course Mom has, too, but since we're supposed to take our parents for granted, that's what I'm doing--most of the time.)Reading over the poems as I nibbled on aging Easter eggs this morning, I was reminded how much I love Atwood's work. And, because I followed up a student poetry reading last night with a trip to a bar for dessert and was, unfortunately, pegged at once as the chaperoning professor rather than a winsome coed, Atwood's "aging female poet" series spoke directly to me.
Aging Female Poet Reads Little Magazines
Margaret Atwood
Amazingly young beautiful woman poets
with a lot of hair falling down around
their faces like a bad ballet,
their eyes oblique over their cheekbones;
they write poems like blood in a dead person
that comes out black, or at least deep
purple, like smashed grapes.
Perhaps I was one of them once.
Too late to remember
the details, the veils.
If I were a man I would want to console them,
and would not succeed.
I am lucky to be surrounded by a few amazingly young beautiful woman poets. My AYBWPs, however, don't write poems like blood in dead people, nor do they let their hair fall down around their faces. My AYBWPs remind me how fun it is to speak our poems aloud, to see the faint lines drawn in the sand and, grinning, to step over them. My AYBWPs (I use the possessive so lovingly) are feisty, loud, amusing, involved, over the top rabble rousers. They do not want to be consoled by a man, men in general, but they do want to be noticed. I know I was one of them once, and, inside, still am. I remember the details, the veils, and am not ashamed to say that I enjoyed them. Still, the melancholy in this poem, the bitchy crone posture, gives me a wonderful thrill. A necessary lift.
iv
Margaret Atwood
My daughter crackles paper, blows
on the tree to make it live, festoons
herself with silver.
So far she has no use
for gifts.
What can I give her,
what armor, invincible
sword or magic trick, when that year comes?
How can I teach her
some way of being human
that won't destroy her?
I would like to tell her, Love
is enough, I would like to say,
Find shelter in another skin.
I would like to say, Dance
and be happy. Instead I will say
in my crone's voice, Be
ruthless when you have to, tell
the truth when you can,
when you can s ee it.
Iron talismans, and ugly, but
more loyal than mirrors.
There's so much in this poem that hits me, umph, on that deep level, the subterranean level of poetry in the body. "How can I teach her/ some way of being human/ that won't destroy her?" How can I read those lines and not feel them, like a soft knife in my womb? This advice, I realize, I've given myself, will give Lizzie, have given to writing students: "Be/ ruthless when you have to, tell/ the truth when you can,/ when you can see it." Yes, that is the point, at least for me, finally.
The Words Continue Their Journey
Margaret Atwood
Do poets really suffer more
than other people? Isn't it only
that they get their pictures taken
and are seen to do it?
The loony bins are full of those
who never wrote a poem.
Most suicides are not
poets: a good statistic.
Some days though I want, still,
to be like other people;
but then I go and talk with them,
these people who are supposed to be
other, and they are much like us,
except that they lack the sort of thing
we think of as a voice.
We tell ourselves they are fainter
than we are, less defined,
that they are what we are defining,
that we are doing them a favor,
which makes us feel better.
They are less elegant about pain than we are.
But look, I said us. Though I may hate your guts
individually, and want never to see you,
though I prefer to spend my time
with dentists because I learn more,
I spoke of us as we, I gathered us
like the members of some doomed caravan
which is how I see us, traveling together,
the women veiled and singly, with that inturned
sight and the eyes averted,
the men in groups, with their moustaches
and passwords and bravado
in the place we're stuck in, the place we've chosen,
a pilgrimage that took a wrong turn
somewhere far back and ended
here, in the full glare
of the sun, and hard red-black shadows
cast by each stone, each dead tree lurid
in its particulars, its doubled gravity, but floating
too in the aureole of stone, of tree,
and we're no more doomed really than anyone, as we go
together, through this moon terrain
where everything is dry and perishing and so
vivid, into the dunes, vanishing out of sight,
vanishing out of the sight of each other,
vanishing even out of our own sight,
looking for water.
Atwood so poignantly gets to the center of the matter--the matter of "being" a poet. Of choosing to write and, presumably, to try to publish (and thus communicate) poetry. Do we really suffer more than others? Is it that we're defining those who don't have a voice, or, as Whitman would have it, giving voice to the voiceless, the "others"--and thus doing them a celestial favor? Are we a doomed caravan, a desert tribe, lost, stuck in the place we've chosen for ourselves (the Sahara of literature?), having taken a wrong turn on a pilgrimage, having lost the guiding star? Perhaps. What Atwood so nicely captures for me here is the sense of wandering I experience when I write, and read, poetry. It is a sense of blue loneliness, invested at least a bit with the fear of never finding the place I seek, or even knowing the place I seek. The landscape is a "moon terrain/ where everything is dry and perishing" and "lurid/ in its particulars, its doubled gravity." How wonderful to realize that what we might be looking for is not God, or a lover, or a chance to talk with that elusive other, but water (which is probably all of these things at once, and more.)
Nana, if you're reading this, thank you for the poems! I've got a taste for Atwood again. I'll have to go to the bookstore and pick some of her up, take her home, eat her smothered in hot fudge, whipped cream, nuts and a cherry. (Oh, and I hope you realize just how much you look like the aging Canadian siren...)
