Books: another update
May. 4th, 2013 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricThe Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse ed. by Susan Lever This was an interesting read. The majority of poems I posted on Dreamwidth between 7th Feb and 20th March came from this collection, although there are a scattering of newer poems thrown in for variety.
Rather than review the poems themselves, although many of them were delightful, I want to commend here the considerable work Susan Lever had clearly gone to in putting this together. A compendium of poetry, even narrowed in field by country and gender, is quite a juggling act. Some of the challenges which I reflected on while reading were:
- Periodisation: how much of the collection to devote to modern poetry? This is something any editor of anthologies must ask, but for women's poetry, there's the added imbalance of better publication and preservation options for women writers in the second half of the twentieth century. I'd say about 2/3 of the book is poems postdating WWII, which... I'm not entirely satisfied with, as a historian; but on the other hand, Victorian and Edwardian poetry can be as dull as ditchwater.
There were nevertheless many authors, and many viewpoints, represented in the earlier sections of which I was utterly unaware. Ada Cambridge's feminist and anti-Catholic writings; Lesbia Harford's strident complaint about period pain, not to mention her homoerotic piece 'I can't feel the sunshine'; Sumner Lock's bitter ballad of women's work during the First World War. My chief complaint regarding periodisation is that Lever chose to keep individual authors' works together - which makes sense, but one author might write over many decades, and she hasn't given the publication or composition dates of the poems, so one ends up lurching back and forth in time with no landmarks.
- Indigenous writers and indigenous issues: I do think Lever has consciously incorporated indigenous women poets into this collection (and also other non-white Australians, but the indigenous poets stand out most). Inevitably they are more present amongst the modern poets than the older works. What I find interesting here is the balancing act which takes place between accurate historical representation and retrospective distaste. Lever has obviously thought about this - she discusses it for a few paragraphs in the introduction, noting that Indigenous verse in translation is not included, because the act of translation fundamentally changes the medium.
Consider for example Mary Gilmore's 'Aboriginal Themes' and 'The Hunter of the Black', in which Gilmore adopts a first-person Indigenous voice in rather appropriative ways. She's sympathetic to Indigenous people, to some degree, but has fallen hard for the 'noble savage' thing, and is eulogising them as a dying society. It made me pretty uncomfortable! I'm not sure I like that being in a collection of great women's poems. BUT. Is that what an anthology is for? If the anthology is not to establish literary value but to present a historical portrait, a, a collection of primary sources if you like, then damn right there should be racist poetry in there - probably more aggressively racist poetry than has been included, I suspect. The second poem in the collection is Eliza Hamilton Dunlop's 'The Aboriginal Mother', a resounding denunciation of the brutality of the Myall Creek Massacre. It, too, appropriates an Indigenous voice - but the evidence of such coherent, vehement white-person opposition to acts of racist brutality is certainly worth preserving.
The trick to anthologies, I think, lies in balancing the 'primary source record' against literary quality (which is... what? exactly?). Do you preserve the most *popular* texts? Those which comment most aptly on their context? The most beautiful? The exceptional, in some way? I don't know, and I think the trick lies in steering the middle path. I'm pretty impressed with the path Lever draws in this collection, at any rate.
The Poems of Lesbia Harford ed. by Nettie Palmer
This was a really lovely insight into the life and thoughts of a poet I would never have heard about were it not for Susan Lever's anthology of Australian women's verse. I'd say I want to know more about Harford, but oddly, I feel like I know a good deal just from the collection - aided by the Australian Dictionary of Biography, mind you.
I suppose the main thing which struck me - aside from the fact that her poem I can't feel the sunshine was not included in the 1941 collection, which is the one I got my hands on - is how much Harford's articulated philosphies, especially on love, contrast with the historical picture of Federation era society which I had accumulated at school. Fairly strong sentiments of independence; ambivalence about marriage combined with strong heterosexual desire; something akin to an ideal of free love. And then her socialist poems & associated activity! None of this nice upper-class ladies running evening schools for the working poor (although that's important, too); Lesbia Harford up and went to work in a clothing factory, and her poems about her colleagues and experience there are... hmm, some are a bit trite, but others are sharply real. There's one about sex education, lived and theoretical. It's good.
I think what this little quest into Australian women's poetry is bringing home to me is that although I have a good general knowledge of Australian history, and a pretty good amateur speciality in late 19th/early 20th century women's stuff, I have nowhere near the trained historian's understanding. What I'm finding I lack, something I like to think I have for matters medieval, is... a good grasp of contradictions and plurality, I suppose? I'm no longer surprised to find weird and unique people & stories in the middle ages (although I save them up! I do love doing recounts of the sexy adventures of Heloise and Abelard, for instance); I find myself thinking "I never knew there were people who..." a lot when I venture out of my medieval comfort zone. MUST FIX THAT.
Smut Peddler, a collection of erotic comics ed. by Spike (whoever Spike is)
Jon brought me this for... er, temporally dislocated gift of some kind, possibly birthday or Christmas? Not sure, he brought it to me at Easter. At first I was puzzled. I do not do comics! Why would you bring me sexy comics?
Then they turned out to be awesome. Except for the boring one about the anime-like tree lesbians; and for the one about the fat black lady who had man-eating plants growing over her vulva but just needed a nice (fat, black) man to loooove her, whereupon the man eating plants opened into accessible flowers. There was a GREAT comic about some young adults being told by their drunk uncle about how their parents *really* met (bondage was involved).
Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity: This was really interesting and helpful in several ways! The vociferous objection to performative gender theories made me uncomfortable ('cos I like these ideas!), but on the other hand, the objections were valid, so. A few times I got angry because Serano obviously had her blinkers on, but most of the time I read this and thought AWWW YEAH, THIS ARE TRUFAX.
One problem I had was with the essay on masochism. I don't doubt that the essay represents Serano's experience truly and fully, but it also didn't... seem to have any awareness that some people who are not self-hating or seeking to punish their inner femme actually quite like submissive/maschocistic activities! As a personal essay, fine; as a chapter in a book which is trying to offer new and strong insights into sexism, misogyny & transmisogyny, I'm not sure that it's entirely helpful to unquestioningly put forward the view that masochism is a 'scar' on one's psyche. Which is not to say it's not true for Serano, I'm sure it is. I just... wish she had exhibited the same awareness of difference here that she does with respect to people's varying interests in feminine and/or masculine behaviour.
Rather than review the poems themselves, although many of them were delightful, I want to commend here the considerable work Susan Lever had clearly gone to in putting this together. A compendium of poetry, even narrowed in field by country and gender, is quite a juggling act. Some of the challenges which I reflected on while reading were:
- Periodisation: how much of the collection to devote to modern poetry? This is something any editor of anthologies must ask, but for women's poetry, there's the added imbalance of better publication and preservation options for women writers in the second half of the twentieth century. I'd say about 2/3 of the book is poems postdating WWII, which... I'm not entirely satisfied with, as a historian; but on the other hand, Victorian and Edwardian poetry can be as dull as ditchwater.
There were nevertheless many authors, and many viewpoints, represented in the earlier sections of which I was utterly unaware. Ada Cambridge's feminist and anti-Catholic writings; Lesbia Harford's strident complaint about period pain, not to mention her homoerotic piece 'I can't feel the sunshine'; Sumner Lock's bitter ballad of women's work during the First World War. My chief complaint regarding periodisation is that Lever chose to keep individual authors' works together - which makes sense, but one author might write over many decades, and she hasn't given the publication or composition dates of the poems, so one ends up lurching back and forth in time with no landmarks.
- Indigenous writers and indigenous issues: I do think Lever has consciously incorporated indigenous women poets into this collection (and also other non-white Australians, but the indigenous poets stand out most). Inevitably they are more present amongst the modern poets than the older works. What I find interesting here is the balancing act which takes place between accurate historical representation and retrospective distaste. Lever has obviously thought about this - she discusses it for a few paragraphs in the introduction, noting that Indigenous verse in translation is not included, because the act of translation fundamentally changes the medium.
Consider for example Mary Gilmore's 'Aboriginal Themes' and 'The Hunter of the Black', in which Gilmore adopts a first-person Indigenous voice in rather appropriative ways. She's sympathetic to Indigenous people, to some degree, but has fallen hard for the 'noble savage' thing, and is eulogising them as a dying society. It made me pretty uncomfortable! I'm not sure I like that being in a collection of great women's poems. BUT. Is that what an anthology is for? If the anthology is not to establish literary value but to present a historical portrait, a, a collection of primary sources if you like, then damn right there should be racist poetry in there - probably more aggressively racist poetry than has been included, I suspect. The second poem in the collection is Eliza Hamilton Dunlop's 'The Aboriginal Mother', a resounding denunciation of the brutality of the Myall Creek Massacre. It, too, appropriates an Indigenous voice - but the evidence of such coherent, vehement white-person opposition to acts of racist brutality is certainly worth preserving.
The trick to anthologies, I think, lies in balancing the 'primary source record' against literary quality (which is... what? exactly?). Do you preserve the most *popular* texts? Those which comment most aptly on their context? The most beautiful? The exceptional, in some way? I don't know, and I think the trick lies in steering the middle path. I'm pretty impressed with the path Lever draws in this collection, at any rate.
The Poems of Lesbia Harford ed. by Nettie Palmer
This was a really lovely insight into the life and thoughts of a poet I would never have heard about were it not for Susan Lever's anthology of Australian women's verse. I'd say I want to know more about Harford, but oddly, I feel like I know a good deal just from the collection - aided by the Australian Dictionary of Biography, mind you.
I suppose the main thing which struck me - aside from the fact that her poem I can't feel the sunshine was not included in the 1941 collection, which is the one I got my hands on - is how much Harford's articulated philosphies, especially on love, contrast with the historical picture of Federation era society which I had accumulated at school. Fairly strong sentiments of independence; ambivalence about marriage combined with strong heterosexual desire; something akin to an ideal of free love. And then her socialist poems & associated activity! None of this nice upper-class ladies running evening schools for the working poor (although that's important, too); Lesbia Harford up and went to work in a clothing factory, and her poems about her colleagues and experience there are... hmm, some are a bit trite, but others are sharply real. There's one about sex education, lived and theoretical. It's good.
I think what this little quest into Australian women's poetry is bringing home to me is that although I have a good general knowledge of Australian history, and a pretty good amateur speciality in late 19th/early 20th century women's stuff, I have nowhere near the trained historian's understanding. What I'm finding I lack, something I like to think I have for matters medieval, is... a good grasp of contradictions and plurality, I suppose? I'm no longer surprised to find weird and unique people & stories in the middle ages (although I save them up! I do love doing recounts of the sexy adventures of Heloise and Abelard, for instance); I find myself thinking "I never knew there were people who..." a lot when I venture out of my medieval comfort zone. MUST FIX THAT.
Smut Peddler, a collection of erotic comics ed. by Spike (whoever Spike is)
Jon brought me this for... er, temporally dislocated gift of some kind, possibly birthday or Christmas? Not sure, he brought it to me at Easter. At first I was puzzled. I do not do comics! Why would you bring me sexy comics?
Then they turned out to be awesome. Except for the boring one about the anime-like tree lesbians; and for the one about the fat black lady who had man-eating plants growing over her vulva but just needed a nice (fat, black) man to loooove her, whereupon the man eating plants opened into accessible flowers. There was a GREAT comic about some young adults being told by their drunk uncle about how their parents *really* met (bondage was involved).
Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity: This was really interesting and helpful in several ways! The vociferous objection to performative gender theories made me uncomfortable ('cos I like these ideas!), but on the other hand, the objections were valid, so. A few times I got angry because Serano obviously had her blinkers on, but most of the time I read this and thought AWWW YEAH, THIS ARE TRUFAX.
One problem I had was with the essay on masochism. I don't doubt that the essay represents Serano's experience truly and fully, but it also didn't... seem to have any awareness that some people who are not self-hating or seeking to punish their inner femme actually quite like submissive/maschocistic activities! As a personal essay, fine; as a chapter in a book which is trying to offer new and strong insights into sexism, misogyny & transmisogyny, I'm not sure that it's entirely helpful to unquestioningly put forward the view that masochism is a 'scar' on one's psyche. Which is not to say it's not true for Serano, I'm sure it is. I just... wish she had exhibited the same awareness of difference here that she does with respect to people's varying interests in feminine and/or masculine behaviour.