Women of Words: A Prefatory Note (1974)
Why should there be a book of poems by women?1 “If they are any good,” a publisher (male) says, “they can stand up in an anthology with men.” What will such a book be, a kind of wastebasket?
Why does a woman write a poem? This question has not come up during all the rising questions now being asked; and this moment, the time of publication of this book, may be the last moment for such questions. You will hear queries about equal rights, about dominance, about orgasm—Is there a vaginal orgasm? The answer to that is: Since there is orgasm every other inch of the body, why not there?
But deeper, as deep as these, are the questions concerning the poems of women, and they are answered here. Or partly answered. Because this race of women, the women poets, have opened a music in their lives that out of a mixture of strength and weakness, sex and protest, visibility and invisibility, offers us a glimpse of possibility that we may be on the edge of claiming.
Have you ever known the curious happiness and sadness of the young woman poet, who is such a source of confusion to her family and the people around her, if they are culturally tied, hobbled, spancelled, as the Irish say? Have you ever lived in a jail for women, and felt the solidarity and frustration of that suffering, imposed so wildly and lopsidedly?2 Have you known the double joy and despair of women as daughters and poets? Or the joy and until recently the despair of women homosexuals; or wives or mothers? These may be extremes of what we see here, but they may not be. These cries, these formalities, these bursts of song, this formal music, seen in a brief sampling of four hundred years, will let you make your own decision. We have had Men of Letters; here are the Women of Words.
We have seen many of these writers before. They have appeared in glorious anthologies—I think of Louis Untermeyer’s, with his critical building and introducing of the poets I first met—or in books by women devoted to one woman poet, like Marya Zaturenska’s work on Christina Rossetti.3 But here they stand in a procession that says extraordinary things to us.
That procession begins, for me, with Miriam and Deborah and Sappho.4 The last will be found in Louise Berkinow’s sharp and fascinating introduction, but the other two—who dealt with triumph and justice—are not mentioned.5 It is the haunting beauty of that long procession that stays with me, along with certain poems and songs which you will find here. That beauty has been selected out for you. You do not feel it when all the poems, by women and men, are grouped together.
How do poems by women reach students in the schools today? One undergraduate said to me, “There are no women poets until after Easter.” In this book, Queen Elizabeth, Aphra Behn, and a few others, come “before Easter,” and if the book were opened to poetry in translation, of course there would be many more.
And here we come to poems by black women, mill workers, blues singers, set with the “literary” forms. Many musics.
Often there are gaps, for the heroes can be the “ten anonymous women,” of my “Ann Burlak” poem in the thirties.6 And some of the questions are not here—“Will the male voice answer?” Marya Zaturenska asks in a poem.7 And Sara Bard Field, Elizabeth Bishop, Léonie Adams, Marie Welch—they come in the same procession.8 The poets I have just named were publishing widely before 1950, the cut-off date of this book. It is a good stopping-place, the end of one stage of what I called in “Ajanta” (1941) “the journey, and the struggles of the moon.”9 The journey reached a turning-point; the moon—in all the senses with which we reach her—took on new meaning.
But, even after those years, I remember reviews of books by women poets grouped in a “liberal” magazine under the title “Ladies’ Day.”10
There are traces in the poems here of the attempt to get through the burden of sorrow that the speech—speech alone—of women has brought on them; attempts to get through the hostility engendered by that frustration; attempts to find one’s own voice, clear of those choking emotions. These are poems, not simply of protest, not simply of the cunt, but of the person entire, the woman.
Yesterday, in a city park, I saw fifty flying children, girls, boys, running along the stone in what looked like free patterns. One girl lifted up a small bright cape, and ran. Maybe these children will be spared the weight of the burden that even their parents—brought up since 1950—have felt. Maybe their poems. Or does it take forty years in the desert, clear of that “Egypt” of women, those idols, those fleshpots, those pyramids of death and power, before we can make an art that is not branded?
But that is the next book. Here is this one, a good one.
(The World Split Open, 1974)
1. This essay is Muriel Rukeyser’s preface to the second-wave feminist poetry anthology The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–1950, ed. Louise Berkinow (New York: Random House, 1974). A line from her 1968 poem “Käthe Kollwitz,” in CP, 463, lent the volume its title: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” The anthology closes with Rukeyser’s 1939 poem “Ann Burlak,” in CP, 191–195, about a labor organizer.
2. Rukeyser alludes to her brief incarceration in 1972, following her arrest at an anti-war protest. See Muriel Rukeyser, “The Killing of the Children,” in this volume.
3. On Louis Untermeyer, see Muriel Rukeyser, “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact,” in this volume, note 6. Socialist poet Marya Zaturenska wrote the biography Christina Rossetti: A Portrait with Background (New York: Macmillan, 1949). For a review of Zaturenska’s poetry, see Muriel Rukeyser, “The Classic Ground,” in this volume.
4. On the influence of biblical figures Miriam (from the book of Exodus) and Deborah (from the book of Judges), as well as ancient Greek poet Sappho, see Muriel Rukeyser, “Many Keys,” in this volume.
5. The anthology’s introduction mentions Sappho only in relation to posthumous collections’ omission of certain poems by Christina Rossetti. See Louise Berkinow, introduction to The World Split Open, 5.
6. The title figure “speaks to the ten greatest American women,” all described as “anonymous.” Rukeyser, “Ann Burlak,” in CP, 193.
7. “Clear woman’s voice, long fingers whitely straying, / Over the speaking keys, do you hear the answer? / Will the male voice answer?” Marya Zaturenska, “Woman at the Piano,” in Golden Mirror (New York: Macmillan, 1944), 36.
8. Twentieth-century American women poets, who do not appear in Berkinow’s anthology and who, except for Bishop, still lack critical attention.
9. Rukeyser, “Ajanta,” in CP, 211.
10. See Oscar Williams, “Ladies’ Day,” New Republic, October 23, 1944, 534–536. This group review of Rukeyser, H. D., Marianne Moore, Marya Zaturenska, and others describes their new works as “little books.” Also see M. L. Rosenthal, “Ladies’ Day on Parnassus,” The Nation, March 16, 1957, 239–240. This chauvinist group review of Katherine Hoskins, Kathleen Raine, and Moore appeared in The Nation, the same year that the magazine rejected Rukeyser’s groundbreaking essay on women’s poetry, “Many Keys,” in this volume.