When Women Blew Up American Poetry

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” Muriel Rukeyser asked in her 1968 poem “Käthe Kollwitz,” about the German painter of the same name. “The world would split open,” she answered. For many American women, the world had split open with the U.S. publication of Sylvia Plath’s posthumous volume, Ariel [2], in which the poet, an American living in England, and a recent suicide ripped the veil from the decorous solemnity ordinarily expected of women.

The year was 1966. Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique [3] three years earlier, just eight days after Plath’s suicide. The National Organization for Women (NOW) [4] was in its fledgling days. Less acknowledged than the women's movement Friedan's book ignited was the extraordinary explosion of poetry by American women that followed Ariel’s publication. It is a bounty that continues into the present, when more women are writing poetry of literary distinction than at any other time in history. Poems have been integral to the women’s movement from the beginning—no surprise given that feminism has always understood language to be instrumental in maintaining oppressive power relations.

At a recent reading to celebrate Poems from the Women’s Movement [5], an anthology I edited for the Library of America, Jean Valentine, a poet of Plath’s generation, remembered the shock of encountering her: “I had a manuscript, and after I read Ariel, I rewrote it.” Younger women like myself began to look to poetry as a way to articulate our own suppressed feelings, finding in Plath’s tragedy a mirror for our own pain, and in her provocation and wit, dramatization of a discomfort we could not quite identify.

“First, are you our sort of person?” asks Plath’s poem “The Applicant” [6]:

Do you wear
a glass eye, false teeth, a crutch
a brace or a hook,
rubber breasts or a rubber crotch?

So many of us still wore girdles, those lines hardly seemed surreal. The speaker’s anxiety was familiar—nothing would ever fit; one would never fit in. But the courageous expression of it was a revelation. And there was the implicit warning we could take from Plath’s suicide at the age of 31: that the female condition might prove lethal.

My own feminist epiphany was sudden. I was a drama school student visiting Vassar College for a performance of The Serpent by the Open Theatre. It was 1969 and I was sitting afterward with friends when the only other woman in the group turned to me and said, “Have you heard about this thing called Women’s Liberation?” I had marched and organized for Civil Rights and Peace, but I was beginning to feel confused about my place in these movements, which were, at the close of the 1960s still dominated by men. Women’s Liberation? What an idea! It was what Virginia Woolf would have called a “moment of being”—everything I knew becoming obsolete in a blaze of realization. How was a thinking woman to worship at the altars of faiths that supported what we now called patriarchy?

In poetry, women were beginning to face these contradictions with wit. No longer were we writing about suicide. “I’d rather be Muriel,” wrote Rukeyser, “than be dead and be Ariel.” Women were founding small presses and literary magazines all over the country. I read Sonia Sanchez [7], Audre Lorde, and Robin Morgan [8], and poets from the West Coast like Susan Griffin [9] and Alta, whose “Euridice” [10] is a new take on the mournful myth: “they claim i fell into hell./ damn them i say/ i stand in my own pain.” There were even poems that retold the Christian story.

But it was not enough simply to rewrite a myth. Consciousness-raising had taught us to tell our own stories with empathy for ourselves and others. Here, Diane di Prima [11] enters the consciousness of the 15-year-old girl who happens to be the Virgin Mary:

The tall man towers,
it seemed to me
in anger. I was fifteen only
& his inquiry
(murderous rage) an assault I
bent under. I saw the lilies bend
also. I had been spinning...

Because the poems women were writing carried experience rendered in language for the first time, it was only a matter of time before old ways of writing – even relatively new modes like the fragmentary lineation of Modernism – began to change to fit our content. This effort took the form of breathing new life into the sonnet or sestina, as Marilyn Hacker [12] did by using the limitations of form to articulate a poem’s ironic undertow. Or of mixing prose and poetry, as Judy Grahn does in “A Woman is Talking to Death.” [13]

Or of inventing something new. I am thinking of Michelle Cliff [14]’s “Women’s Work,” a long poem written in prose which would now be called a lyric essay, a formal approach that inhabits the terrain between nonfiction and poem. The poem’s title, “Women’s Work,” is a play on how what women do (sewing, cooking) is undervalued, but also acknowledgment of the new feminist historiography which at the time was breaking down the barriers that had kept the lives of women out of history books.

Cliff also introduces traces of anonymous women gleaned from the documents that comprise social history. She writes:

In Jamaica in the 1820s a slavewoman is found with roots and leaves she has gathered—arranged around her slowly pounding the elements together in a hollowed-out calabash.
She is preparing a solution.

The solution is a solution to unwanted pregnancy; in a harsh pun, it is not only the solution to the problem, but also the potion that will abort the child.

As the ’70s progressed, the movement gathered force and numbers – women who once valued their isolation now spoke as “we.” Perhaps the most innovative poetic achievements of this moment marked this new scrutiny of relationships between and among women. Carolyn Forché [15]’s poem about her immigrant grandmother, “Burning the Tomato Worms,” is not a sentimental praise poem but an examination of female strength and the ambiguity of female power, while Beverly Dahlen’s memory lyric, “Gesture,” [16] speaks of the traces of one’s mother in the way one moves. In Irena Klepfisz [17]’s “Death Camp,” the speaker bonds with a rabbi’s wife only when they blend as smoke emerging from the chimney of a crematorium. And Audre Lorde’s “A Poem for Women in Rage” [18] examines the terror of woman-on-woman racism in a hallucination of violence.

But it is Adrienne Rich, in a poem called “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” [19] who moves beyond a critique of what has already happened between women to envision a new model of female community. Taking the loss in a storm in Lenin Park of a Soviet women’s mountaineering team, she writes in the imagined voice of one of the perished climbers of a dream of women working together:

if in this sleep I speak
it’s with a voice no longer personal
(I want to say with voices)

With deft economy, she traces what women have experienced as individuals (“For months, for years, each one of us/ had felt her own yes growing in her”), giving her speaker the recognition that “we have always been in danger/ down in our separateness.” In the final triumphant lines she forges a visionary image:

A cable of blue fire ropes our bodies
burning together in the snow.

Evoked here are witches burned alone at the stake, the frigidity that has paralyzed women of the past, and the strong physical presence of the bodies women have now begun to claim.

While Rich brings Elvira Shatayev into history, Eileen Myles revises the meaning of the story of a woman we all know from history, Joan of Arc. Written in 1982, “Joan” [20] ends not with its heroine’s death by fire, but with a miracle. Nearly 20 years after Plath’s portrait of a powerless female applicant, Myles suggests that a woman’s power need not be vanquished by those who disbelieve her, at least not in poetry:

. . . A white dove
came out of her mouth as she died.
Four hundred and thirty-one years ago today.
A dove leaped right out of her mouth.

Poetry is not a luxury [21], Audre Lorde had written in a 1977 essay about the movement among women poets. It is “a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”