Just down the steep hill from where I teach at Northern Vermont University in quaint Johnson, Vermont is a precious artistic resource, Vermont Studio Center. Known for its artist residencies since it began in 1984, the rural Vermont enclave hosts a series of talks and readings by visiting artists and writers for the surrounding community. What a score! It is part of the rich fabric of the arts that Vermont inspires and makes possible.
Through Vermont Studio Center programming, I have had the pleasure of being introduced to new work and making new friends and acquaintances. Indeed, it was through VSC that I met up with the dynamic duo, sometimes known on their reading tours as The Ladies Lazarus, also known as poets Erin Adair-Hodges (author of Let’s All Die Happy, University of Pittsburgh Press) and Jenny Molberg (author of Marvels of the Invisible from Tupelo Press and forthcoming Refusal: Poems from LSU Press). They inspire me. I love their smart, stunningly brilliant poems.
They also are editors at the prestigious Pleiades Press, which is woman-run. Little did I know that there is a poetic renaissance brewing, a feminist literary scene with chops, in the Kansas City area. Kansas City, Here I Come! The area boasts other formidable women poets that I am a fangirl of, such as Hadara Bar Nadav, Traci Brimhall, and Bridget Lowe. Next February I will be featuring their work in a special issue of Green Mountains Review.
Here’s a sampling of their fine work. First, Erin Adair-Hodges’, Unmappable, a poem that tries to locate the source of feminine dislocation. The poem interrogates the vast expanse of Kansas, how it can make the speaker disappear not only in size or scope but also through the political and social oppression of women in Kansas. Like Emily Dickinson’s “done with the compass, done with the chart,” Adair-Hodges’ speaker will find her own way, following the power of lightning, which also has power over the landscape of Kansas. “Anyone can be buried” in this place, but the narrator rides the Plathian arrow away from the deadly cooing of wheat and into the bullseye of her own unmappable power.
Unmappable
Kansas coos me into its wheat.
Done with direction, I follow the lightning,
God’s arrows insisting even the desolate
can be a destination.
In the black and white of a winter dawn
a train zippers the wetland
to a sky clouded with intention.
It looks more like a photograph
than a photograph resembles the moment
it captures, its frame diverting, its filter
slanting truths. Say I make of this a photo—
what would the evidence show?
That I was in a body here for awhile
and I wanted this to mean something?
Is this the alibi or the crime?
And who is the jury to receive this—no one
knows I’m here. I loaded the car in Technicolor
and drove east—had done milked the west
of fresh starts—but the time changed
so I don’t know when I am.
Kansas says it does not matter. Time
rolls over its husks and soil like fog, changing
nothing. So much land—
anyone could be buried out here.
(originally in The Sewanee Review)
Next, in Molberg’s poem, “Note”, there is the speaker’s desire to disappear from the oppressive patriarchy. In this cutting, yet almost quiet poem the reader understands that the aggressor’s threat of suicide becomes a part of the oppression of the speaker, a victim of domestic violence. Here the speaker’s life, like her favorite poem, is ripped out for a suicide note by a man who wants her to disappear so he can live, putting the other woman in her place. Here we have the very enactment of gaslighting, one of the methods by which oppression happens.
Note
He said he would hang himself
so as not to make a mess.
But he was still there the next day.
And the next. And the next.
He wrote the note for the cops
on a page he tore from my favorite book
of poems. That’s all I saw of it—
in absence—the ripped-out page
like a jagged fin down the spine.
What is my body but a rainstorm?
What are my bones
but flightless shards of light?
I did not feel secure,
though I married the only man
I believed was safe. Two children.
Three dogs. The dying cat.
Papers signed and unsigned.
The woman who pasted her face
over mine in our pictures
and mailed them as proof of their affair
before she tried to kill herself.
This, too, he does not tell me.
In the dream, he cuts
the air around my body
with a giant pair of scissors,
origamis me
until I am small as a ring-box.
In I go, with the rest
of my clothes, to the cardboard crate
where dress-sleeves stick out
like the arms of paper dolls. I nestle there.
I fold and fold. I try to disappear.
(originally in Ploughshares)
What follows here is an interview with Jenny Molberg and Erin Adair-Hodges about, among other things, The Ladies Lazarus Tour. Molberg and Adai-Hodges collaborated on the answers.
EP: Recently you and Erin Adair Hodges went on a reading/book tour together all over the country. The tour was called The Ladies Lazarus tour....why the Plathian name?
When we decided to go on a book tour together, we were talking about how our poetry speaks to each other, and our poetic influences, and we thought—of course, Plath! Independent of this collaboration, the poetry of Sylvia Plath has long been important to us as readers, scholars of poetic craft, as poets, and as women. Plath, for both of us, transcends her biography—in no way do we mean that in a New Critic sort of way, but because too often her work (and the work of many other poets writing from their particular experiences of gender-based oppression) is dismissed or glossed over as the niche work of the silliest of creatures—in Plath’s case, a young woman. Younger women are often drawn to Plath’s work because of its brazenness, its willingness to address issues of mental health, trauma, abuse, and misogyny with an unflinching gaze—some see this kind of risk or bravery as a liability, but we see it as a strength. Often young women have not been inculcated to hide their emotional selves, and as women who are often taught to sit pretty and shut up, or to write with a more “masculine” bent so as to appeal to a male audience, we find that Plath only deepens in her brilliance with age. She teaches us a poetics that is truly masterful in craft, sound, metaphor.
She is also often dismissed because her work is clearly a woman’s work, which we are taught is a weakness—she was often criticized for being hysterical, too loud, too much. Conversely, Plath has also been praised because her work takes a “masculine” tone or approach to craft—why is this masculine? Because it allows itself to be angry? Or, it is too female in its particular anger? It seems it is impossible to be both a woman and angry (and, like Plath, brilliantly in control of it). But, there is Plath on the page, making it possible.
EP: How do your poems speak to each other and/or compliment each other in terms of this greater umbrella of the Ladies Lazarus readings?
Plath’s work allows us to envision a poetics that is masterful in craft, gendered, angry, and visionary. Though we are both older than Plath ever was, she is our mother, our poetic godmother. We want to lift her up as one of the 20th century’s greatest English language poets, not to divorce her from her lived life, but to free her from the associations that others placed on her, that focus on her suicide and not her joy, her humor, her wit, her craft. In the wake of #metoo, the 2016 election, and our experience as poets, professors, and editors dealing with gender biases, we thought about Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus,” and the ways in which the poem addresses woman-as object, voyeurism, and patriarchal expectations of beauty, and decided that our tour would take its name from that iconic poem. So what if our poems “eat men like air”? Isn’t it time?
When we plan our readings, we are often responding to a current cultural mood, or the ways in which we are feeling unseen or unheard, and plan readings that revolve around those particular themes. We have such a good time creating these readings like mix tapes—one of us will read a poem and then we consider the last line and how it speaks to a first line of one of the other’s poems, how they lead in to each other thematically and through voice—it’s like a collaborative version of building a narrative arc within a collection of poems.
In terms of our poems, our voices and styles are not particularly similar and we love that, because we feel that it creates a more interesting dialogue during readings. We also want to welcome other voices, and have great fun at readings that include other poets or an open mic—reading collaboratively breaks us out of the funk of the traditional, quiet, institutional, “I” dominated readings we’re often used to. We both see ourselves as inheritors of Plath’s attention to sound, risk, form, play, and, most importantly, testimony. We are interested in revising the term “Confessional” to “Testimonial” poetry, because Plath as a Confessional poet can signify, in the Catholic tradition, that she is done something wrong, something to deserve the treatment she endured for many years during and after her life, mostly at the hand of her husband. Testimony, from the Southern Baptist tradition, would imply that she bears witness to her own life through her poems, which we both seek to accomplish with our own poems.
EP: What about the state of American poetry, culture, feminism?
We feel that in our current moment, Plath gifts us the language through which to speak about particular oppressions that seem difficult to speak out, especially when terms like “witch hunt” are being appropriating and victim blaming has become an Olympic sport. Our favorite Lady Lazarus reading occurred on the night following the Christine Blasey Ford hearings. We begin each Lady Lazarus reading with a Plath poem, and we chose “Mushrooms”: “Nobody sees us,” ”perfectly voiceless,” “… We / Diet on water, / On crumbs of shadow, / Bland-mannered, asking / Little or nothing. / So many of us! / So many of us!” When we got to the final lines, “We shall by morning / Inherit the earth. / Our foot's in the door,” we were awe-struck again by a poem we’d read hundreds of times—the decades-old words of Plath continue to resonate, to speak to our current moment, and that is how we remember her—in fervor, in power, and in resistance.
Finally, we acknowledge the shortcomings of this dialogue, that white feminism is a problem, and that we are centering this series around one white female poet when there is much other work we should include. As editors of a female-run literary journal, inclusivity is something we try to actively pursue on a daily basis. A well-known white male poet recently published an essay on the state of American poetry, in which recognizes the necessity of the sea change in the poetry community, but also laments the ways in which it affects his relevance: "It's weird to stand near what I believe is the end of the kind of control men like me have held, hoping it is the end, trusting there's nothing about any kind of human that gives them value greater than any other kind. Odd to feel this way while also knowing that, because force has been exerted for centuries against women and minorities, when that branch, so to speak, is let go, it has to snap back hard and far the other way, that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction."
We want our dialogue in the Ladies Lazarus to challenge this kind of pushback against a movement toward equal representation in American poetry, as it is difficult to recognize the poet’s imagined world where women, non-binary, and minority poets are dominating the culture, are being recognized more than white men, and are pushing white men into obsolescence. We see, more often than not, a poetic community, especially in academic and publishing institutions, that does not reflect these statements about change, but rather continues to be dominated by a white male status quo that enjoys its position of power. Chris Boeskool, in an article published by the Huffington Post puts it well: “Equality can feel like oppression. But it’s not. What you’re feeling is just the discomfort of losing a little bit of your privilege.” We seek to both recognize our privilege and to assert the ways in which we are not privileged in a patriarchal system; we also hope to highlight a dialogue in which we celebrate poets who experience less privilege than us.
EP: So, this reading tour is a kind of resistance to the current state of affairs in our country?
Through Ladies Lazarus, we seek to move our conversations away from our personal experience to a larger statement about the role of art as a form of resistance and power—just as Plath’s work transcends her biography, so should poetry be an open form for all expressions of experience, and thus we believe that Plath’s work, though it comes from a specific experience, can still resonate with many audiences. We also believe that we cannot ignore that Plath’s work, and our work, specifically addresses experiencing life as “women”; simultaneously, feminism must be inclusive. The Ladies Lazarus series isn’t intended to make a monolithic statement about what it means to be a woman or feminist. Poetry gives us the language to testify, but what should be even more important is poetry’s ability to help us listen, to hear the experiences of others, to learn them, to revise our behaviors. Ladies Lazarus is a microcosm of a bigger hope for poetry, that it can become a more collaborative form of resistance, through which we share, learn, and respond to the world around us. Sometimes (and often on our reading tours), that response is equal parts hilarity and rage: “Who do you think you are, / A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?”… “And the villagers never liked you. / They are dancing and stamping on you. / They always knew it was you.”
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