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03-31-2014, 07:00 AM
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Iowa City, IA, USA
Posts: 10,090
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Imitation is boring. Inspiration is something else entirely. Different women writers will connect with different work by female predecessors (and male predecessors, too, of course, but they probably won't turn to the men for ways to write about female experience). At various times in my development as a writer, there were different women whose work electrified me, and for different reasons: Plath, Sexton, Parker, Dickinson, Olds, Pastan, Espaillat, Glück, Cope, Stallings, just to name the most influential. I wouldn't say that I write like any of them, but I learned something about how to write from all of them. I also picked up some clues about how to be a woman who writes, both positives and negatives, from looking at what they did. I could list even more male writers who have influenced me, because there are so many of them. But I think most women writers tend to be aware of other women in their field, always on the lookout for role models, even if the supply of female mentors has been low.
Susan
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03-31-2014, 07:58 AM
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male writers, as a whole, are still more likely to be taken seriously as literary artists. VIDA
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03-31-2014, 09:39 AM
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Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Belmont MA
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Different issue, but no argument from me. The academy/literary establishment is also riddled with racial/ethnic/religious/ideological biases while constantly making self-righteous pronouncements about diversity.
I wish we could just take people as they are and look fairly at what they have to say.
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03-31-2014, 10:04 AM
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Location: usa
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Juster
I wish we could just take people as they are and look fairly at what they have to say.
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Sounds good to me, Mike.
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04-04-2014, 07:46 PM
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Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 528
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'Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,
The small raine down can raine.
Cryst, if my love were in my armes
And I in my bedde again!'
-Anonymous
Anonymous: therefore at least 50% chance of having been written by a woman. An argument has been made in favour of female authorship, something to do with seasonal/migratory work in that period, I don't remember the details.
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04-05-2014, 04:14 AM
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Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Sweden
Posts: 14,175
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I've always been under the impression that this was a medieval poem about waiting to go into battle.
I'm not trying to give battle when I say that the odds are not fifty-fifty, since the vast bulk of traditional poetry passed down through the centuries have male authors--even those by the highly productive Anon.
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04-14-2014, 08:27 PM
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Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Lewisburg, PA, USA
Posts: 1,511
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I can't let this thread go away without offering the following poem by Margaret Widdeimer. I forget who sent it to me back in 1999 when I was editing The Susquehanna Quarterly
MARGARET WIDDEMER (1884-1878)
Margaret Widdemer was home-educated. Writing poetry and prose from childhood, she achieved success in both in her early twenties. In 1919 she shared the American Poetry Society's Best Book of Poems prize with Carl Sandburg. A member of the American literary set from before World War I, Miss Widdemer lived most of her long life in New York and New Hampshire. She died in Gloversville, N.Y. in 1978 at age 93. Doubleday had published her collected poems in one volume, The Dark Cavalier, in 1958.
Old Ladies
They are lost. For they never had known
They would turn into little old ladies
Living alone.
They laughed and were arch, like the others,
They had beaux, and firm mothers,
And thick banged or pompadoured hair
All brown,
Or all yellow: "My dear, it came down,"
(They will tell you) "to there . . ."
They are frightened. "It's strange -- and so many have died
And so young!" they will say. "Only fifty -- or sixty!"
They are twenty inside,
With no one to tell them, today, what to do. . .
They are puzzled. They say
(Taking tea in some schoolmate's high flat,
Smoothing the sexless old cat
Or the ailing fat collie)
Tremulous, jerkily jolly,
"Why, would you believe it? I'm gray . . ."
They were told to be good,
To be meek or the world would be angry,
To walk quietly, brightly; to do
What God wanted them to
(In their mothers' translation.)
There was something, it seemed, they would get.
A great prize-day? . . . It has not come yet.
What they did was important then. Grown people stared
And God cared.
.
But no one had told them they might be forgotten,
Being bad, being good, as they please,
Asked to stupid small teas
As a kindness,
Making futile chirped talk, while the blindness
Of the younger ones hid them from sight;
No one had told them that Age was a place
Where you sat with a curious mask on your face
Of pallor or redness, of dragging odd places
Covered up (if you managed) with black velvet bands;
With thick veins on your hands
That you knew about under the laces:
With a rule that you must never talk about beaux
Or giggle, be scolded, or murmur of clothes,
Or preen to be watched and admired:
You were masked as a Mother, an Aunt, an Old Maid,
While inside you stayed
A whipped youth; a shamed child.
They are lost. They have little lone houses
And overstuffed rooms
Smelling heavy of cooking and clove-like perfumes
And mothballs, and that,
With under it all a faint odor of cat . . .
They are waiting for somewhere a curtain to rise
And real living to wake and begin.
They laugh; but their eyes crouch, ashamed. . .
Because till they've died
No one ever must know they're twenty inside.
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04-16-2014, 08:34 AM
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Iowa City, IA, USA
Posts: 10,090
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Thanks for posting that, Wiley. I enjoyed it.
Susan
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04-16-2014, 01:31 PM
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Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Lewisburg, PA, USA
Posts: 1,511
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Women's History Month
And let us, please, not forget Elizabeth McFarland (1922-2005) who, besides being a fine poet herself, as poetry editor of Scholastic Magazine and Ladies' Home Journal (1948-61), first published so many young and aspiring poets including Rhina Espaillat, Maxine Kumin, Sylvia Plath, John Updike and even myself. She also married and supported the career of Dan Hoffman, U.S. Poet Laureate in 1973-74, who died recently.
THE REJECTION
I say how beautiful your mansions are---
Your lakes and valleys and your peopled plain,
But thought of all that loss with all that gain,
And one geography is not enough.
One world, one world to loose the spirit in,
Will not contain a continental ghost.
I have a dream of islands drunk and lost,
of cities shining with a ripe decay
Where old ships feed about their harbors' knees,
---Far, far beyond your small and private seas.
MYSELF
I have stood so long in this place
I have lost account of my face.
I have stared so hard at this tree
I am grown blossomy.
In my branches, words
Bicker like birds.
(Poems from Over the Summer Water Orchies Press 2008)
Last edited by Golias; 04-17-2014 at 02:32 AM.
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04-17-2014, 12:56 AM
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Join Date: Sep 2001
Location: Arizona, USA
Posts: 1,844
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Janice D. Soderling
From Jane Kenyon: Collected Poems
Let Evening Come
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless. So let evening come.
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I'm floored by this perfect, beautiful poem. I know I'm nearly a month late, just saw it.
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