Gail, I've admired your poems for years and it's a real pleasure to be on this panel with you. I sympathize with what you say about the effect of not being prolific on a poet's chances of recognition. I think T.S. Eliot once said something about how, if you wanted to be a famous poet, you either had to write a great deal or write very little. But he put himself in the latter category, so I don't give much credence to it!
I'm another fan of Bogan's The Blue Estuaries who never understood the last lines of "Women"--thanks for your gloss. In rereading The Price of Everything, I noticed that one of your own poems is provocative in a bit like the way Bogan's is. The speaker wittily disparages famous women poets, settling on a male poet for a Muse:
Searching for Muses
When I needed you, you weren’t there,
Anne Bradstreet (maybe just back from prayers
and packing the children off to bed
before you forgot what the pastor said).
What can a post-modern poet do
with a pious domestic wife like you?
When I needed you, you weren’t there,
Emily, having just flown upstairs
to hide from company out of sight
or change your dress to a whiter white.
What can a post-modern poet do
with a sad neurotic cliché like you?
When I needed you, you weren’t there,
Edna, combing your bright red hair
just before going out on a date
with your newest courtier--gay or straight.
What can a post-modern poet do
with a wayward scatterbrained nymph like you?
But Coleridge sits on the edge of the bed--
I admit he’s stoned, and his eyes are red,
but he still looks ready to talk all night
and tune each rhyme till it rings just right.
Dorothy Wordsworth liked him, too.
I need company. Col will do.
You and Katherine McAlpine have interesting things to say in the introduction to The Muse Strikes Back (where this poem doesn't appear) about what happens when the genders of poet and Muse are reversed. I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little about what inspired this poem, or what it means for a woman poet to search for, rather than be, a Muse.
|