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.
