My pleasures (poems) are rigidly regulated and delimited by a system—a baroque system at cross-purposes with itself that inscribes me—which suggests that it overwrites an essential or original, ewwww—or constructs me in my multiple manifestations of body/subjectivity/identity/cocktail.

The competing vectors on which I conduct most of my conscious lived experience necessarily, vehemently produce feminist writing. Gender, emotion, pain, and the past.¹

Donna Haraway says “bodies are perfectly ‘real,’ and nothing about corporealization is ‘merely’ fiction. But corporealization is tropic and historically specific at every layer of its tissues.” She understands bodies as “material-semiotic generative nodes.”²

The body is real. It lives, means, generates, reproduces (babies, mirror neurons,³ starfish-style, etc), and sheds its materials everywhere, a sweeping windstorm of DNA and cohabitants as it moves seemingly-forward in time and space. I don’t imagine that I am greater than my body, or less than it either.

Wait: Look: we should not assume that generative is good, ethical, superior, or desirable. Though it is dull to remember aloud what we are never allowed to forget, the female body has often been suspect in its generative powers. Male bodies⁴ have often had their generative capacities ignored until moments of crisis (cancer, bullet wound, decomposition, etc.). Generative is the term we use to denote production, though we could just as well argue that the body is contaminating, destroying, or merging-with. It is a fact with which we must concern ourselves.

Sometimes I look at my husband, whom I would usually identify as my partner, except in those moments when I explicitly want to discuss breeding and property. Sometimes I look at my husband and am horrified by the knowledge that his DNA has lodged in me, courses through and activates me via the fetal cells that travel in pregnancy to the host’s brain, breast tissue, etc. I am my family’s—my kin’s—living crypt. I house their discarded materials, reanimate those materials, and endure their consequences / reap their benefits / no one knows. One day, molecular biologists will bother to verify the absorption of other humans’ cells by male bodies and will wonder what those cells are up to, but today is not that day. Today we understand that in addition to all sorts of non-human life, the female body-that-breeds sustains human cells that are not made exclusively of her own materials. I will not go so far as to suggest that bacteria and fetal cells take responsibility for my poems. In fact, I catch myself thinking ungenerously of these entities as freeloaders, despite the fact that I’d die without them. Bacteria, protists, etc. pay rent by keeping me alive, but I do feel I am doing the lion’s share. Because I foolishly believe in an I. All poems do.⁵ I foolishly believe in my own DNA, as do all courts of law.

Is this worse than being the knowing receptacle of all cultural waste and excess? Is this worse than knowing that to conduct one’s body across the floor is to heave a mass of seething vectors and entities that work against each other, that work for and against the hegemony, that produce a landscape on which surveyors conduct the laziest cultural evaluations? Is this worse than to heave it under the constant brittle-making light of the male gaze? It is not worse. It’s sometimes the most pleasurable experience to conduct that heap into the light. Lady Lazarus conducts her own resurrection not because she is divine, but because she is beneath notice of the divine. As are all men,⁶ whose gaze will be riveted and then petrified by the postmodern Medusa stage show.

Theology, philosophy, theory, science, literature, art, history all tell us we are pukes. We are the lowliest puke eking out a fractured living on the warehouse floor, in the gutter, beneath the chemical sky. Wherever. Women, though hardly a unified people, occupy this knowledge. 1. we are told we are pukes. 2. we reply that we are not pukes. 3. we open the portal to puke.

When I was a real girl, by which I mean biologically pre-pubescent and culturally smack-dab in the heart of US American girlhood, I began writing and the voice that came out was a hideous man’s. I’m not sure it’s possible to write in a voice other than that of a hideous man, though I do know it is possible to dress him in drag and interfere with his speech.

I’m talking about semiotics, of course.

Speech is a sense and sensory organ. Through it, we palpate. China Miéville says this better than I do in Embassytown. Like vision(s), speech is also an affect or environment that can overcome or overtake one. It has heft and tone. Whether the authorities consider a vision divine or neural defect often depends on its vessel and its tastefulness.

Few critics have liked the tone of “Daddy.” Commenting nearly a decade apart, Irving Howe calls it “monstrous” and “utterly disproportionate,” and Helen Vendler finds it adolescent and unforgiving. Even a sympathetic ear like Margaret Dickie’s hears it as “hysterical.” […] other critics have been embarrassed, as Vendler is, that a woman of thirty reverts to baby-talk in her fury at parental injuries. The critical disapproval of Plath’s tone, it seems to me, indicates doubts both that the speaker’s excesses are altogether appropriate to the occasion and that Plath is entirely in control of her tone […] I grant the tone that critics have heard in “Daddy” is indeed present, but I believe its excesses are part of Plath’s conscious strategy of adopting the voice of a child, of creating a persona who is out of control […] The child persona dramatizes a woman writer’s powerlessness; it mirrors the cultural allegation that woman is child, and it gives form to her experience of being treated like one.

—Susan R. Van Dyne discussing Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”⁷

Van Dyne is on to something, here, and quite smartly so, but I think she misses a few opportunities. One: why say child and not girl? How often is a boy child represented as hysterical or shrill?⁸ Plath’s speaking as a girl in this poem. Van Dyne is right that women are infantilized, that our maturity is culturally halted. What she doesn’t unpack is whether or not one can ever become a mature, whole human in one’s culture by becoming a woman. Woman is a category thoroughly circumscribed by the patriarchy. We can look to that oft quoted Deleuze and Guattari passage on the girl.

This body is stolen first from the girl: Stop behaving like that, you’re not a little girl anymore, you’re not a tomboy, etc. The girl’s becoming is stolen first, in order to impose a history, or prehistory, upon her.… The girl is certainly not defined by virginity; she is defined by a relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness, by a combination of atoms, an emission of particles: haecceity. She never ceases to roam upon a body without organs. She is an abstract line, or a line of flight. Thus girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes…

—Deleuze & Guattari A Thousand Plateaus

Girl is a category that the patriarchy has deigned to construct in only the broadest strokes. In refusing to become woman, in continuing to become or occupy the category girl there may be some radically subversive potential. I don’t read Plath’s speakers as out of control, so much as wielding an excess with which the patriarchy can never be comfortable.⁹

The girl¹⁰ is uncultured and unrefined, crude and raw (though like much raw food, teeming with live active cultures, possessed and pungent). Let us be very clear. The girl I once was burdens me. I spend a great deal of time bleaching her out. She makes us vulnerable and ruins every day of our life. Though her shame frequency cannot be overwritten, it can be mined, directed, and amplified. The girl’s affect might be: 2 parts shame, 1 part indignation, 1 part desire, and 1 part gobbledygook. Shame is codified by resistance to the very source of shame. Had I more agreeably acquiesced to the genre woman, I might have embraced or discarded that which fuels shame.

Instead, I cultivated the hideous man through whom all my touch is filtered. He speaks to you, now, eyes rolled back in his head, mouth issuing frothed up feminine trill. Patriarchy! You made me thus! Artificial, possessed,¹¹ sincere.

Sincerity can be manufactured by playing the normate: dewy eye contact,¹² a low flame, her coolness plays against the genre’s sentimental excesses,¹³ etc. Is it sincere to efface the puke? Is it sincere to really, really mean it? When I point to a body of language and say that this is untenable, unendurable, shame-ridden, famished, and thoroughly ordinary. When I bleed casually into a paper cup. When I am melodramatic,¹⁴ cutesy,¹⁵ boooooring,¹⁶ mediocre,¹⁷ femme,¹⁸ or stabby.¹⁹ When I convulse against you via the only human contact I can sincerely perform, will you tell me it isn’t true?

Accused of exhibitionism, [Anne Sexton] was determined only to be more flamboyant; nevertheless, the strict Puritan²⁰ hiding inside her suffered and grieved over the label of “confessional poet.” For instance, when she wrote “Cripples and Other Stories” (in Live or Die), a poem that almost totally “occurred” on the page in an hour’s time, she crumpled it up and tossed it into the wastebasket as if in embarrassment. Together we fished it out and saved it, working to make the tone more consistent and to smooth out some of the rhythmically crude spots. Into this sort of mechanical task Anne always flung herself gladly.

The results were often doubly effective. […] “Faustus and I,” in The Death Notebooks was headed for the discard pile. It was a free-verse poem at the outset and had what seemed to me a malevolently flippant tone. Often when stymied for a more articulate response to one of her poems I disliked, I suggested, “Why don’t you pound it into form?” And often the experiment worked. In the case of the Faustus poem, the suggestion was useful because the rhyme scheme gave the subject a dignity it demanded and because the repetitive “pounding” elicited a level of language, of metaphor, that Anne had not quite reached in the earlier version.

—Maxine Kumin “How it Was” The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton²¹

Don’t imagine that I can’t produce a perfectly pitched, tightly wrought lyric, or that to do so I need turn my back on all my aesthetic commitments. What you read is juvenile, unusually enfaced,²² imbalanced, trivial, spitting, jagged, awkward, anxiety-riddled, pathetic, flailing, and melodramatic (rife with coincidence and icons of low-rent feeling) because it is a punishment and an opportunity. This is the price of speech, and an investment in the future, which I know to be studded with everything we once deemed ugly now orbiting the heavens.

References

¹Because I am a bourgie product of parse-resistant culture, I have to make an effort to experience myself along my unmarked lines of race, sexuality, age, class (if not finances), etc.
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²Quoted in Elizabeth J. Donaldson’s necessary essay “Revisiting the Corpus of the Madwoman: Further Notes toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Mental Illness” in Feminist Disability Studies. Kim Q. Hall editor.
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³See VS Ramachandran, see Lee Ann Roripaugh in the July 2012 jubilat
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⁴I say male and female bodies because this is the binary our cultural constructions tend to; biology and lived experience sex us in more nuanced ways.
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⁵Don’t they?
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⁶Biblical usage, or whatevs.
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⁷Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems
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⁸Those of us raising boy-children know their sisters haven’t got these markets cornered.
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⁹First presented on the SPD sponsored feminist poetics panel at MLA 2012 Seattle.
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¹⁰I’m not suggesting The Girl as a way to escape the patriarchally predetermined, rigidly scripted Woman. Though I’ve toyed with this, I don’t think mine is a necessarily positive alternative. I’m not seeing a “third way” or nepantla or not-a-woman as such a rich liminal position, but a descriptive, performative alternative with intriguing potential.
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¹¹See Kate Durbin's “A Teenage Girl Speaks As A Melodramatic, Hysterical Demon”
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¹²See Susannah B. Mintz's “Invisible Disability: Georgina Kleege’s Sight Unseen” in Feminist Disability Studies.
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¹³See Boris Kachka on Joan Didion in the recent New York Magazine: “Both The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights are recognizably memoirs of grief, but they’re rendered in Didion’s familiar remote voice. It’s an oddly effective fit: Her coolness plays against the genre’s sentimental excesses but still allows her to avoid argument and indulge in open-ended reveries built from repetitions of painful facts.”
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¹⁴See Carina Finn's “Melodrama Is the New Sincerity Montevidayo”
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¹⁵See Sianne Ngai's “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde” in Critical Inquiry, Vol 31, No 4 (Summer 2005) or at Scribd; Lara Glenum “‘From cosmos to cosmetics’ A Note on Aase Berg’s Guinea Pigs and Girly Kitsch” in Action Yes
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¹⁶See Kate Zambreno's “This. is. Boring-oring.” at Frances Farmer is My Sister
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¹⁷See Koritha Mitchell's “The American Way: Mediocrity, When White Looks Like Merit”
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¹⁸See “Letters from Eileen Myles to Jennifer Firestone”:

I think just when I'm a man, I'm a girl. The feminine line means that above all women mustn't be contemptuous of themselves. Just when the last thing that's going on is one's purported femininity, it erupts like a big bow. We're just so many things. I distrust my own jargon, my abandoning of the feminine for the female. I guess I was preferring sex over gender, but later thinking how arrogant to pretend not to be feminine. For anyone really. Why is the feminine the thing to hate? Something men, or mothers made to control girls. Surely it can free us too, then in some homeopathic way.

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¹⁹Valerie Solanas's S.C.U.M. Manifesto
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²⁰Sexton’s hideous man?
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²¹I don’t mean to compress eras, here, or to fault Kumin for what was surely a valued and valuable contribution to Sexton’s fraught writing practice. I mean to highlight the pressures both poets experienced in the face of our tendency to code masculine modes and tropes as great, dignified, important, and the like.
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²²Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s term for those people with what ableist discourse would term facial disfigurement. Normate is hers, as well.
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