Not A Muse: World Poetry Anthology (with preface by Laksmi Pamuntjak)

Edited by Kate Rogers and Victoria Holmes
Preface by Laksmi Pamuntjak
Hong Kong: Haven Books
2009

http://www.mascarareview.com/article/187/

NOT A MUSE ANTHOLOGY

Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side all is correct, definite, orderly; the paths are strait, the trees regular, the sun shaded; escorted by gentlemen, protected by policemen, wedded and buried by clergy-men, she has only to walk demurely from cradle to grave and no one will touch a hair of her head. But on the other side all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course. The paths wind between bogs and precipices. The trees roar and rock and fall in ruin.—Virginia Woolf , Collected Essays Volume III.

We used the above quote from Virginia Woolf in our call for submissions. I came across it in two places within a period of 6 weeks: first, the third volume of Virginia Woolf’s Collected Essays, found during a meander through the stacks of the university where I work and then, while I was reading American Elisabeth Gilbert’s revelatory memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, where she quotes Woolf as an inspiration for making massive change in her personal and professional life. Finding it in these two places was too much for me: it seemed like a sign.

Someone close to me who is not a poet recently said in a somewhat puzzled (and possibly exasperated tone), “You squeeze every moment for meaning.” Perhaps it can seem that way to those who haven’t become acquainted with the muse, but in fact, from a poet’s point of view, meaning finds us. Whether it is stumbling across the same quote twice or experiencing epiphanies during our lives as poets, writers, teachers, academics, artists, accountants, doctors, lovers, parents, children—meaning finds us.

When I first sent that quote to our publisher Dania Shaawa, who was raised in the Middle East, she was powerfully moved and could strongly relate to the dichotomy of those paths on either side of that looming sword. Recently, in a meeting for the anthology, Dania mentioned an acid attack on young women walking outside their school in Afghanistan. It was made clear by the perpetrators that the girls were being punished for studying. Ironically, their burkhas were their protection. We have made a point of including the poetry (in translation) of women writing in countries where they have limited freedom, including of expression.

But what about those of us such as Viki Holmes as myself, who have been raised in privileged, middle class families in the UK and Canada? Why you might ask, do we need to explore being Not A Muse?

In part, because I believe, as a writer who has personally struggled to find that iconic “room of one’s own” (and I am more than a decade older than Viki, so perhaps my struggle has been partly generational), that we still have a long way to go. The experiences which move and surprise us as women, are still unfortunately, less valued and less celebrated in mainstream literature than those of men.

One such poem which celebrates the unique perceptions of women is by Elisabeth Harvour.

In this excerpt from THE DAMP HIPS OF THE WOMEN her narrator describes a sensual awakening while observing her mother and four friends:

up the path
from the beach, up the long
aisle of shivering poplars,
I remember spandex
and paisley

expanding, contracting
on the damp hips of the women,
but it would have had to be some other
fabric back in those edgy days of

pale sunshine and fog--not spandex
but some sort of elasticized jersey,
the air smelling of decay, effervescence,
damp birth or death of the earth,

one of the women walking
with the arms of her orange cardigan
tied into a broken-necked knot
on one hip, making her oiled back
end in an uneven and cocky orange apron

…

At nine, I couldn't
imagine ever being anything
but a lover of women

In THE GYNAECOLOGIST’S WIFE Jean Gill considers awkward and ironic intimacies:

The problem’s not as you would think
his lust for clients but

his clinical detachment
naked in my bed.

And then I bought the screen,
I called him ‘Doctor’,

dropped my knickers out of sight
and offered him my full blown rose.

The poets in Not A Muse explore in part how we define ourselves as women. Are we living our lives honestly, completely true to ourselves? If we choose an unconventional life, what are the costs?

Not a Muse is in part, about our choices.

How we define ourselves as women and poets. How we define freedom.

Male writers and poets throughout the centuries have turned to a feminine muse as a creative catalyst. But there is much more to us than providing a source of inspiration. Now, the Muse is finding her own voice.

Virginia Woolf wrote the essay from which we took that quote in 1925; in 2008 are we living in a post-feminist age? I would argue no, we are not. Many women around the world in both “developed” and “developing” countries continue to struggle for freedom of expression, the respect and time we need for writing from partners, spouses and children. And for the recognition that women poets find inspiration from our own lives, not separate from men, but different and worthy in their own way.

In an essay from Argument and Song: Sources and Silence in Poetry(1), male American poet and critic Stanley Plumly wrote:

The archetypes of our common and communal experience find their forms in our poems; the integrity of their expression depends …on how responsible the poet is to individual, archetypal experience. Just as our poetic forms are reinvested generation after generation, so is our community of experience.

As women, we are still creating our own community of experience: in Not A Muse, that is what we seek to honour and celebrate.

~ Kathryn Kate Rogers

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(1) ‘Words on Birdsong’, page 27, from ‘Argument and Song: Sources and Silence in Poetry’. NY: Handset Books, 2003.