The Virgin Book of Wicked Verse edited by Jill Dawson generally lives up to its title. The women here are not “angels in the house,” in the immortal phrase coined by Virginia Woolf, nor are they the “ilaw ng tahanan” (lamp of the home).
While gathering poems for this anthology, Ms. Dawson avoided those that portrayed women as being wicked in the “conventional” sense. That includes eating a lot, sleeping with men who are not their husbands, or “acting on their appetites.” Rather, she sought those poems that were subversive. “What began to surface was an abundance of poetry by women in gloriously rebellious, angry and wicked mood. Stevie Smith’s poem ‘Lightly Bound’ is a startling rejection of the honey-dipped picture of motherhood, and Liz Lochhead in ‘Everybody’s Mother’ dissects this persistent myth of the mother with a poet’s ruthless scalpel.”
But then wickedness, like all things, should be put in its proper context. You have Chinese poets in the old dynasties satirizing the system of matchmaking and sexual rules. You also have a 20th-century lesbian who seduces her partner to make her stop mouthing her dreary political slogans. But Ms. Dawson is only too keenly aware that there are voices not represented in her anthology. “Like Virginia Woolf, I am aware of the women who are not with us here because they are washing the dishes and looking after the children… not to mention women who went on the streets last night in order to feed their children.” One way to plug this gap is to include folk poems, rhymes, ballads, and songs written by Anon., the anonymous author who is generally regarded as a woman who could not speak during earlier times.
But then, what does “wicked” mean? The editor was teaching creative writing to children at the Queen’s Park Community School in North London when she was working on this book. The children, bless them, quickly grasped the meaning of “wicked.” For them, it meant “funny, good, deft, sexy, awesome . . . and it is in the spirit, more than any other, that the anthology is intended.”
The anthology is divided into five chapters. It’s easy for the prudish and the hypocrite in this Catholic country to dismiss these poems as trash, if not totally obscene. But woman writers in the 20th century have begun to write about their bodies, looking at it as landscapes that could be explored in terms of images and words. Too long have men (Henry Miller, Philip Roth and company) written about the female body without understanding what goes beneath its slope and declivity. These are poets who perform one function of art: not to shock, the way juvenile writers do, but to surprise, with the sheer power of their performance on the page.
The other poems in this chapter include “Vagina Sonnet” by Joan Larkin, “In the Praise of Dreams” by Nobel Prize of Literature winner, the recently departed Wislawa Szymborska, and Lynn Peter’s “Why Dorothy Wordsworth is not as famous as her brother.” The last poem amply demonstrates that Dorothy was as good a poet (if not better) than her brother. But then, she worked as a virtual housemaid while her brother spent the days writing, cribbing her verses, and yes, and yes, gazing at the startling daffodils of spring.
Steve Smith (1902-71) was the eccentric grande dame of British poetry. Her reputation was established through a series of highly successful reading in the sixties. She published three novels and eight collections of poems, and won the Queen’s medal of poetry in 1969.
Her poems are short and brisk as a breeze. “Lightly Bound” goes this way: “You beastly child, I wish you had miscarried,/ You beasty husband, I wish I had never married./ You hear the north wind riding fast past the window?/ He calls me./ Do you suppose I shall stay when I can go so easily?”
The poems can also carry their anger lightly, even wittily, as in this anonymous poem about match-making in ancient China, as translated by Cecille Liang. “I’m eighteen,/ He’s nine./ At night/ I carry him to the ivory bed./ He’s more son than man./ Damn the lousy matchmaker/ Who found me a husband/ small as a nail./ In the middle of the night He pisses on me.”
Let me end with two vastly different poets. Izumi Shikibu (974-1034 AD) came to the Japanese Heian court to serve an empress. Although already married with a daughter, she began a passionate affair with the empress’s stepson. This affair fueled the writing of her poems. Because of this, her family disowned her. When her lover died, she began an even more controversial affair with her lover’s brother. Even if she is long gone, her free spirit still lives in her poems. Listen to this translation from Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani: “Undisturbed, my garden fills/ With summer growth –/ How I wish for one/ Who would push the deep grass inside.”
From grass we go to “Grease,” a poem by Grace Nichols, a writer from Guyana who has migrated to England and won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. “Grease steals in like a love/ Over the body of my oven./ Grease kisses the knobs/ Of my stove./ Grease caresses the skin/ Of my table-cloth,/ Getting into my every crease./ Grease reassures me that life/ Is naturally sticky/ Grease is obviously having an affair with me.”
Well, if I were you, I would be careful with grease.
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