Poetry & Motherhood

I’ve started preparing an hour and a half talk or rather tour  on the Poetics of Motherhood which is returned in the (obviously) correct phrase “poetry about motherhood.”  Only a lunatic or someone who had never heard of Helene Cixous or Kristeva could attempt any notion that the biologically determined role of mammal, albeit in human form, can be linked to a literary theory or tradition.  Consequently the organisers of the event which includes my talk sent me a blurb today which said:  This event will showcase the verse of a host of female poets who have pushed motherhood into poetic form.  Hush awhile and listen to the soothing voices of Anne Bradstreet, Anna Akhmatova, Lucille Clifton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Kate Clancy, Deryn Rees-Jones, Kathleen Jamie and more.….Host?……Female?   Who have PUSHED motherhood….SURELY NOT?      I corrected the text with a mixed sense of dread and nausea.  Had I not mentioned “The Pram in the Hall”  in my previous correspondence?  And what kind of sentient being could put the words hush, soothing voice and Anne Sexton in the same sentence?  I’m glad this event is some weeks away because I’m clearly going to have a hard time questioning the assertions in  Of Woman Born before a posse from the National Childbirth Trust Read-in Consortium.  Oh God.  What am I doing?  Nobody shares this view.  It’s a delusion which has been upon me since first reading Anne Bradstreet and believing that she is the Mother of American Poetry.  And rather than starting with the question on every English Literature undergraduate’s lips: Is a pen a metaphorical penis?  How about shoving that old paterfamilias – author-authority father figure off centre-stage and looking at the idea of Mother not only as the pro-creator and safeguarder of humanity’s future but as the creator of words.   Why is male sexuality so readily associated with the authority of texts when it has been always a matter of material and political power?  Can we really trust Adrienne Rich’s assertion that when she writes she writes as nobody’s mother?  Why not as everybody’s mother?

You can see my problem.  Only just beginning to get going with a polite introduction and I’d fail my exam in literary theory straight away.  I assert that the poet-mother is not an incidental figure in western literature – not a mere cipher to be pitied and wondered at but a central and glorious figure of resistance and revolution.  When Anne Bradstreet wrote her poem on the death of her daughter-in-law she wasn’t taking an afternoon off from being the angel in the house, for God’s sake!…..  It’s late….before I have a problem with my blood pressure  I have to share a wonderful line of Eavan Boland writing about Sylvia Plath (By Candlelight):

‘This is a speaker with a new kind of control: able to command the natural world because she herself is generative of it.  As a mother with her child – at the very center of the world – she can speak about seasons and times with a new freedom and invention.  Here is a female Prospero, speaking from her shipwrecked island, never doubting that the elements will obey her.

This is winter, this is night, small love -

A sort of black horsehair,

A rough, dumb country stuff

Steeled with the sheen

Of what green stars can make it to our gate.”

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