Women poets and everyday moments

It’s been another round of grading papers and a lot of meetings after work lately… So I’ve been MIA. I’ve also been busy reading, though. I just finished two books, a novel by Ron Rash called One Foot in Eden, which I didn’t expect to like, but enjoyed very much. More interesting, though, is Eavan Boland’s Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. The book has a wide and wonderful scope, and deals with many subjects, but the one I was looking for particularly is how does one become a poet when one is also a woman? Now this sounds like a simple question: write poems. But Boland thinks it more complicated than that, and so do I. Here’s an excerpt:

But where, says the voice in [the woman poet’s] ear, is the interest in all this? How are you going to write a poem out of these plain Janes, these snips and threads of an ordinary day? . . . . Suddenly the moment that seemed to her potent and emblematic and true appears commonplace, beyond the pale of art. (241)

According to Boland, being a woman poet means shifting from being the object of poetry, then, to being its subject. The nagging voice of doubt suggests how difficult this is. And so much of what I write I struggle with. Once, around one of our significant anniversaries, the tenth, I think, I tried for months to write a love poem to my husband. It was a disaster. I wrote a couple of poems that were just doggerel. I wrote one anti-love poem about falling out of love. Finally I wrote one small tight poem I was pleased with, but the work it took. And I’m still not sure if it’s any good.

I tried again earlier this year--in the winter my husband wakes up much earlier than the rest of us, and when I go outside to leave for school, he has invariably warmed up my car already and scraped the windshields. I’m somebody who believes in real love that’s a day to day thing, not one of those fuzzy romantic moments… I decided to marry this man when I had my tonsils out as a young woman. There I was, throwing up from the anesthesia, and this crazy boyfriend kept rinsing out the throw-up bucket and bringing it back. Don’t misunderstand--my husband is funny and interesting and wonderful too, but I want somebody who can handle the throw up as well. So we got married. And how on earth do you write a poem about this and defrosting the car? Rhetorical question, by the way--please don’t try to tell me. If I figure it out, I’ll let you know. I’m working on it.