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From the Guest-Editor Women’s writing has been popular and admired in the past and yet forgotten. To ensure that this time it endures, poet-critic Annie Finch summons an “entire literary apparatus” like the one that has served men’s writing well—“reviews, anthologies, journals,” and more (The Body of Poetry 2005). Critic Jane Dowson adds that only the attention of creative writers ensures that other writers endure (Feminist Studies 1999). We agree. Natural Bridge 16 offers a Special Section of poetry and creative prose—by women and men, contemporaries and successors—that imitates, quotes, assimilates, and otherwise shows the influence of writing by women. Hearing of the death of forgotten Yale Younger Poet Rosalie Moore, contributor Robin Leslie Jacobson rues that “broadcast,” not “brilliance,” “makes remembrance.” In response, she commandeers the brilliance of Emma Lazarus—herself obscured by words “broadcast” from her sonnet on the Statue of Liberty. In her own sonnet, she uses Lazarus’s phrase for Liberty’s torch, “imprisoned lightning,” to illumine women poets’ “lyric shrine, one shelf / in the back corner of used books—a wealth.” Jacobson joins other contributors in giving women’s writing a material home. In the 1970s, Harold Bloom portrayed writing as a contact sport played fair and foul by men who rewrote the work of men: Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantics, Moderns, Contemporaries. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar replied that women writers look for a new game and a different kind of contact. In Natural Bridge 16, Gilbert finds both, giving us the heft of Ruth Stone’s poetry through a pun on her name, creating solidarity between writers in their gains and losses as women. Annie Finch brings both game and contact to our issue: her ballad form recalls Helen Adam’s ballad opera, “San Francisco Burning,” and brings Adam alive again for us before the microphone. Our Section’s thirty contributors are among the brave who write in the presence of women writers they find powerful. Beyond them are the hundreds of writers who’ve submitted to our Section and all who’ve submitted to this test. Scattered readings in poetry and creative prose led me to this Special Section: all made material for me the influence of women writers. In Julia Alvarez’s “On Not Shoplifting Louise Bogan’s The Blue Estuaries,” mirrored swans float across the book’s cover: “no blurbs from the big boys on the back”; instead, from its pages, “blue water drawn / into the tip of my pen.” An apprentice formalist, Alvarez “read and wrote” from her mentor, reflecting, not “shoplifting” her book. In Brenda Miller’s “The Date,” the essayist is as naturally a reader as she is a woman preparing for a date. Marilynne Robinson is quoted for her wisdom here, as Lynn Sharon Schwartz will be by Jesse Dwyer in our Section; here tenth-century courtesan Sei Shonagen counsels dishabille as companionably as Edna Millay will model attitude for contributors A. E. Stallings and Liz Robbins (with “two figs,” of course). In Rachel Hadas’s “Folded Back” (on Verse Daily and in her book Laws), Sylvia Plath’s marmoreal words from “Edge” are “‘folded back,’” paper now “to mark a place”—once a tree, once Daphne, now “two dimensions,” again three as “paper flowers.” A contributor to our General Section, Hadas everywhere and playfully disciplines readers in writing’s materials and the writing life, assuring girls and women that they are no strangers here. In our issue, Catherine Rankovic’s literary apprenticeship includes rewriting Plath’s “Cut” as “Paper Cut”; read this portrait-of-the-artist; laugh and weep. Beyond paper is the book. Like her model Marianne Moore (“O to be a dragon”), Ann Michael holds book and beast in her lap, “Hinged spine.” Kelli Russell Agodon finesses all the fuss over Emily Dickinson’s little sewn books by “just holding her / in my lap, her small head / resting against my knees.” Books are more than paper. Terri Witek letters her work “Walking Kimono (Sweet Flag Iris)” metaphorically in the fabrics and shades of Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji. In “Ghazal in Minium,” Rebecca Dunham reminds us of the red leads and mercuries on St. Hildegard’s illuminated manuscripts, stunning as lesions on a milk-swollen breast. Irene Reti finds her friend Gloria Anzaldúa, the great lesbian-feminist-multiculturalist, in death and a legacy of archives and the spirit across Anzaldúa’s famed “borderlands.” Leavened with materiality, the game between writer and writer is disciplined here to be a fair one, its league including apprentice, jester, critic, curator. Imitations? Gratefully we publish Anne Keefe’s near-translation of “Poem of the White Minute” by Julia de Burgos, Puerto Rico’s beloved lyric poet lost to the streets of New York. On page and stage, other women writers are dramatized here, Sonia Sanchez “charren the microphone” for Lenard Moore, Jayne Cortez “slicing” and “salving” situations for Ebony Golden, Marge Piercy lifting “forgotten forests” for Mohja Kahf, Julian of Norwich taking “loss” for her “refuge” in Shawn Fawson. Quotations? Puns, genres, allusions, images, all are quotations of a writer’s work. Written “after May Swenson,” Barbara Crooker’s plainspoken “Knitting,” Swenson-like, unifies the motions of body and mind. The visual images on our cover are quotations too. Using her own materials, collage artist Gaye Gambell-Peterson replicates images from throughout the Section—flower, scissors, breast, Lady Liberty (twice in our Section), and more. Assimilation? Off stage, off the page, women writers are assimilated to the speech, style, and idiom of other writers here, the surest sign of endurance. Akhmatova’s Leningrad snow melts into the ditches of Kansas for Mary Ruth Donnelly. Emily Dickinson begins as an indigestible school assignment in Lee Upton’s story and ends up indistinguishable from household speech. For Kelli Russell Agodon (with a nod to Billy Collins?), Dickinson thrives at several removes from herself (“broadcast” but at home) in what feels like a poetry blogosphere. The only writer to wangle two acceptances in our Section, Ann Fisher-Wirth assimilates Charlotte Brontë’s passionate style into novelistic poetry. Unforgettable phrases are coins truly struck and kept long in circulation. Brontë’s “heretic narrative” keeps its “brilliance” when “broadcast” by Fisher-Wirth. Ann’s ear for quotability begins with meter (the double-dactylic HERitic NARrative) and continues with sound (r’s, t’s, the consonance of HER-NAR). Quotable women writers give Gambell-Peterson’s cover its layer of phrases, floating above images and taking color and meaning from them. From our Special Section we’ve drawn “white minute,” “tender buttons,” “imprisoned lightning,” and more. We’ve searched further for quotability, finding “rebellious metronomes” in Cortez’s “Jazz Fan Looks Back.” Influence? Our Section takes up Moderns after all, those personalities so influenced and influential in Bloom’s literary generations. For our contributors (Beaumont, Brister, Michael, Ellis, Ayers), Stein, H. D., Moore, and Brooks are less personalities than three-dimensional artists. Stein bears out the suspicion that she is more postmodern than modern, punned by Beaumont as a tiny button-headed beer stein, with end words and more from Tender Buttons. Lisa Buchanan and Tamara Pavich engage in bravura postmodern “remakes” of classic American stories by Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates. These revenant tales roused our most heated discussions as editors. If Fredric Jameson is right (Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism), here we read less the individual woman writer than the cultural psyche, Oates (especially) sharing the force field of the 1950s, a psychic history that never was and needed Freud to invent it. Keeping us in Oates’s grip, Pavich’s “Tilt-A-Whirl” tenders the postmodern and feminist problematics of this never/always time (I recall State Fair and its 1945 and 1962 remakes). Jackson’s 1948 story probes a homespun fascism and inspires Buchanan’s study of a hempen-covenant community (its “square dances” a throwaway line in Jackson). The “whirl” in each story throws us off balance; then sexual self-possession (but of the 2000s? or1920s?) reasserts itself in Liz Robbins’s “Love of Mine.” Other writers bring the Special Section to a close. Illusion gives way to reality on a sub-atomic level in the strong and scientifically chastening work of Trina Baker, Rebecca Ellis, and Helen Eisen, schooled by women’s poetry and science fiction. Disequilibrium moves to an equilibrium more than dynamic (Eisen’s “continuation”). Jesse Dwyer introduces a human subject in motion in such a field, and William Woolfitt is moved to Appalachian activism by poet Muriel Rukeyser and novelist Denise Giardina. Editor Rewa Choueiri gave our General Section its ordering, from uncles and aunts, adults and children, love and separation, escape and return. This Section’s stories span continents, face war and immigration, and feature people and settings you mightn’t expect: a woman soldier in Iraq, China after the Cultural Revolution, fin de siècle Poland in Depression-era America. Established and emerging writers appear throughout this section. The sequence poem “Samsara in Illinois,” written under Adrienne Rich’s words from “Sources,” is “Poetry Responding to Women Writers” but finds a home in the General Section, fittingly enough for a piece named for the transmigration of souls.
Special thanks to our editors for these things and more: Victoria for
wide research into writers’ references, Rebecca J. and Betty for
seeing manuscripts another way and negotiating with contributors, Heather
and Cody for saying yes and no with refreshing certainty
and Rebecca B.-G. for seeing both sides, Maud for early-morning poetry
triage, Rewa for ghazals and section order, Cynthia for art and ethos,
Olivia for nearly the whole of the thing, and behind her and us, Steve,
Ken, Mary, and all of Natural Bridge. Section I of Irene Reti’s
“Comadre” appeared in another form in EntreMundos/Among
Worlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa (Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), and we thank editor Ana Louise Keating for permission to re-publish.
This issue would not be without the writers who’ve passed along
the word about Natural Bridge and our Section. Thanks to Ellen Bass,
Annie Finch, David Graham, Charles Guenther, Rachel Hadas, Barbara Harbach,
Ruth Ellen Kocher, the WOM-PO listserv, and all who know better than
I how much they’ve encouraged this issue and the writers who might
submit to it. Ellen’s and Florence Howe’s model in No
More Masks! stands behind us. And Issue 16 could not be without
our University’s Department of English and Institute for Women’s
and Gender Studies. |
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