What Do Women Want? (26 page)

“The Buddha in the Womb” has often been anthologized with poems about motherhood and pregnancy. In fact, I was not pregnant when I wrote it—but my imagination was. It is one of many poems I’ve written that meditate on generativity and creativity: a woman’s ability to create with her body and also create with her mind.

Women tend to be obsessed with this duality—at least during our childbearing years. We find it confusing that two forms of creativity are available to us, and we tend to think we have to choose between them. Most women poets grew up in a world where womanhood was not honored, nor was motherhood. The poetry we read did not even
include
motherhood. The women poets we studied and honored were the divine exceptions—the divine Dickinson, Millay the mad flapper, Marianne Moore, who lived virginally in Brooklyn with her mother. There
were
women poets who had been mothers—Muriel Rukeyser and Adrienne Rich among others—but the difficulty of their choices was not honored. Poetry, we were made to feel, was the preserve of the childless. And women were born to be either nurses or mothers.

My generation was destined to change all this. Of course, we could not know that in our school days. We were destined to breed poets like Eavan Boland, who would later comment on the fact of growing up in a world “where the word
woman
and the word
poet
were almost magnetically opposed.” Nor did you have to be Irish to feel the force of those powerful magnets. They were felt in America, too, felt strongly enough for a poet like Sylvia Plath to feel she had to kill her mythic “Daddy” to become a poet at all. Felt strongly enough for a poet like Anne Sexton to live in conflict between the poet and the mother and to make that conflict the essence of her work.

The women poets who grappled with these paradoxes sometimes gave their lives for them. Poetry was a dangerous art for a woman. Virginia Woolf asked: “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught tangled in a woman’s body?” You felt that a woman poet had to renounce her life as a woman or else renounce her art. The woman poet had to cut a deal with the devil. She had to put her heart on the chopping block in the kitchen and watch it drain itself of blood.

The baby or the book? This fearful symmetry has haunted every woman writer I have known who chose to be a mother. It is not surprising to find that it informs our work. “The Buddha in the Womb” is for me an early exploration of this dilemma. At the time, there was no actual baby to consider. Later there was. I returned to the theme with more self-knowledge in
Ordinary Miracles,
and I wrote many poems for my daughter, Molly, which are about poetry and motherhood and the similarities and dissimilarities between them. But whether I resolved the conflicts posed in “The Buddha in the Womb” remains to be seen. In “The Birth of the Water Baby,” the deep identification between mother and daughter makes moot the paradox of wanting/not wanting to become that dualistic being—a mother.

 

The mother
is
the child and the child the mother, so how can there be any question of choice between them? How can you choose between two creatures that are one?

In “Anti-Conception,” the strangeness of one creature’s bringing forth another is contemplated.

 

 

The mother-poet decides that she must get out of the way and let creation happen. She thinks of herself as publisher, producer, midwife to the baby’s grand spectacle:

 

 

Though the poems in
Ordinary Miracles
are among my favorites, they are not as edgy as “The Buddha in the Womb”—written before there was an actual child to distract me from the paradox.

The child and the poem are forever diverse. One grows and changes. The other remains fixed in words. The two forms of creation forever mock each other. But flesh is the lesson for both. Flesh, however, is perishable. If anything does, words remain. We learn them and pass on. Knowing this, we write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.

—COLETTE

 

 

 

People think they can do
without poetry. And they can. At least until they fall in love, lose a friend, lose a child or a parent, or lose their way in the dark woods of life. People think they can live without poetry. And they can. At least until they become fatally ill, have a baby, or fall desperately, madly in love.

 

 

wrote Moireen Fox in a poem called “The Faery Lover.” And it is hard to imagine a better conjuring of that cliché “madly in love.” Instead of a dead metaphor, we have a living image—an image with color, speed, defiance. We have the love, the mad yearning for the lover, and we also have the feelings the love evokes—all in two lines. We know that it is a love not only to die for but to go to hell for. And we know that the speaker—whoever she may be—is a furious, passionate person, someone who throws caution to the winds. We know more about her from two lines than we know about many people we have conversed with for hours because we know her thoughts
and
her feelings. We know the tone of her voice: incautious, passionate, proud. We know that she is free and ready to pay the price for freedom. We know this woman’s character in just two lines.

Only poetry can do that. Only poetry gives us language packed with feeling and personality. Which is why there are times in life when only poetry will do. Interestingly enough, they are the times when we feel most vulnerable, most human.

“The blood jet is poetry,” said Sylvia Plath, “there is no stopping it.” And that is another example of why only poetry will do at certain times. “Blood” tells us: essential, necessary for life, spill-able. “Jet” tells us: moves fast, moves under pressure, once turned on not so easy to turn off. The language of poetry is heightened, emotional, imagistic, condensed. It concentrates meaning as a perfume concentrates flowers.

I said we need poetry most at those moments when life astounds us with losses, gains, or celebrations. We need it most when we are most hurt, most happy, most downcast, most jubilant. Poetry is the language we speak in times of greatest need. And the fact that it is an endangered species in our culture tells us that we are in deep trouble. We treat our poets as outcasts, lunatics, starvelings. We give least respect to those who give us most.

Our public attitude toward poetry and poets shows that spiritual needs count for little in America. We may take care of the outer being, but we allow the inner being to languish. The skin, not the soul, has all our care—despite lip service to the contrary. And many of us are dying for want of care for the soul. The poet is the caretaker of the soul; in many civilizations, the poet’s contribution is central.

Poetry need not consist only of images. It can be declarative utterance packed with meaning. When Yeats directs that certain words be inscribed on his tower (“Inscription at Thoor Ballylee”):

 

 

he is giving us an image of time’s carelessness. He is pointing to mutability. Shakespeare is also obsessed with time. Its passage spurs his most passionate utterances.

“Devouring time, blunt thou the lion’s paws” is an image embedded in a command. It is as if, for the moment, the poet assumes God’s perspective, rather than the human vantage point.

And why shouldn’t the poet have God’s perspective—if only temporarily? As Anne Sexton once said to me: “We are all writing God’s poem.” The identity of the poet hardly matters. What matters is that the blood jet of poetry continues to spurt.

The blood jet is endangered in our culture not only because we do not respect our poets (poets can survive neglect if they are true poets: think of Emily Dickinson) but because we are destroying both solitude and the ability to
enjoy
solitude. Try to find a place without mixed media, traffic sounds, deafening music, distracting advertisements. You have to be a billionaire to escape the noisy overstimulation of selling that is ubiquitous in our cities, suburbs, airplanes, airports, and trains. Solitude has started to feel strange to us. We walk into the house and immediately turn on the TV for company. The sounds of silence seem peculiar. But poetry, like all creative work, is triggered by solitude. When Yeats described the “bee-loud glade,” in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” you knew he had listened to bees, not traffic. How loud the bees are in the bee-loud glade is known only by those of us who refrain from walking through the meadow with a boom box or a Walkman. Constant audio and video “input” drown our own “output.” The “wild mind” (as poet Natalie Goldberg calls the poetry-producing place in our brains) needs space to dream and retrieve images. We have nearly lost that space. Perhaps we have willfully abolished it. But frenzied consumption of material things cannot do for us what poetry can.

Where does the poet go to find necessary solitude? And where does the reader of poetry find the space to
read or to hear
? The truth is, both writing and reading are endangered. But the need for poetry is such a basic human need that it adapts itself to new circumstances. When so-called mainstream publishers stop publishing poetry and ignore the needs of young people for poets of their own generation, the young turn to poetry slams and coffeehouse readings. Or to rap music. When the book world turns its back, poetry springs up in the world of music. An oral medium, it returns to its root: the tongue.

Which brings us to poets reading and poetry as a medium for both ear and eye. I fell in love with poetry as a teenager in part by hearing poets read. I went to readings at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York. And I listened to the great recordings of Dylan Thomas. Poetry is given life by the voice because it is, basically, a transcription of voice and of breath—and of the silences between. When a poet reads, the creative process is somehow recapitulated. We almost hear the muse whispering in the poet’s ear.

Our age is rich in poetry recordings and poetry readings, so perhaps the poetic impulse will survive all our neglect. One thing is sure: Poetry cannot be killed. We do it for love, not money. Arts practiced without ulterior motive are the most durable arts of all. No “marketplace” or lack thereof can shout them down. The medium of exchange is love—and its helplessness against time.

Poetry preserves the living moment and our lust to inhabit it fully. As the seventeenth-century poet Bashō says:

Is all poetry about lust? Sometimes it seems so. Lust is the opposite of death. And since we know that death will gobble us in the end, we lust for lust. We suck on words as Bashō’s bee sucks on honey. The sweet peony makes us hungry where she most satisfies.

—SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

 

 

 

“I am thrilled to the spine . . .
and I feel as if I were going to get married—to the right man at last!” Edith Wharton wrote to a friend about her delight in renovating a ruined fortress above the Mediterranean at Hyères, France. And indeed she was to have her most prolific period in the 1920s, while dividing her time between this Mediterranean retreat and a grand house, Pavillon Colombe, outside Paris. Clearly both houses were more than just dwellings. They were constructions that mirrored some inner geography and had the power to release her creativity.

A writer’s house is a many-gabled dwelling. Its bricks are made not of clay but of imagination. Its windows are the writer’s eyes. Its chimneys smoke with our desires, and its fires blaze with the trees we chop down in our secret gardens.

Studying Edith Wharton’s quest for the perfect house—from her parents’ “cottage” in Newport, to her own house in Lenox, “The Mount,” to those two French locations where she spent the prolific years of her late fifties and sixties—we see that writers’ houses are hardly roofs against the rain. They provoke the sort of ecstasy we associate with falling in love. They play Cupid, midwife, Judas, and even grim reaper. The general reader may think the writer copies houses, but actually we invent them as much as any architect does. We put several houses together in our dreams, alchemize them again in the trance of fiction, and build a house that embodies mother, daydream, nightmare, aspiration.

The splendid Elizabethan house in Virginia Woolf ’s
Orlando
is a perfect example of such alchemy. It is based partly on Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst Castle (an Elizabethan ruin that she bought in the thirties and lovingly restored with her husband, Harold Nicholson), Knole (where Vita grew up and which, to her bitterness, passed to a distant male relative), and Long Barn, which Vita occupied before she restored Sissinghurst.