Poetry Series

I'm taking a literature class this term at school and have to do a final 'project'. I opted for poetry because a) I like to write and b) this teacher thinks some really bad poetry is amazing and I want to show her some gooder stuff.

Now, I made a wiki page for it because I thought you guys might have some input. The class is on women's writing, and the poems had to be linked to the class... so the series (hopefully) discusses history, meaning, and stuff like that, but my main focus is on silences and breaking them, and how women's writing breaks silence.

Whew. Yeah.

(and if anyone else wants to put up other series and stuff, do it!)

(this is just the first draft)

                        /Silences/

I

 for years now you have been wondering why
 when your mouth opens and spills
 out words worthy of hearing - 
 why there is no echo to your ear.
 you have only to look at yourself. see
 how your chest swells quietly and you walk
 with the easy sway of one who knows 
 how hips are meant. they call this 
 sex. gender. identity.
 this flesh or lack therof 
 is the reason that for countless eons
 your words have been worthless. 
 
 once upon a time somebody opened his mouth and pointed a finger and said
      ((you. you shut up. all of you.))    
 and somebody listened.
                 and fear swallowed a thousand stories
 and a sonnet worthy of you went unwritten
 and sex became not a difference like being left-handed but more like
 having extra toes or maybe no toes at all

 in this way
 a hundred artists lived and died
 without ever, ever knowing 
 that their souls were bringers of light. 

 and billions of small atrocities later 
 finally someone stood
 and opened her mouth
 and held out her hand, and in it was
 a pen.
 and she wrote ((i will not be quiet, I am an artist)) and 
   someone else read it and thus
 we are born.

II

 ghosts in the shell
 what does it mean to claim the title
 writer, painter, dreamer, artist
 it means to stand up
 with the graceful peace we have all naturally
 come to expect from your sex - and to open your mouth
 sweetly
 and scream.

III

 she
 wipes the baby's face
 put him down for his nap 
 tosses a load of laundry in the wash 
 and stirs a pot for supper and breaks up a fight 
 and then she gets out her sewing and mends her husband's
 work shirt and then she flies upstairs and gets 
 the baby up and then she stirs the pot again
 and makes the kids go outside to play and 
 she weeds the garden so she can watch
 them close and she brings in the 
 peas and shucks them and then
 quick, while the kids are busy
 quick, while dinner's cooking
 she runs into her room and she
 she grabs a crayon and she
 scribbles
 furiously 
 the poem she'd been writing all that day and then she 
 remembers her husband and dinner and kids and then she runs
 back 
 out.

IV

 so even now
 after all this hassle for Women's
 Liberation, for the sake of our freedom and glory
 and our voices; after all this 
 whose words have you read? we are liberated, oh
 yes, but still not heard. silently working 
 at our hard-earned jobs, not making a 
 sound: we might lose them. But how can you call us
 equal, if we can all still lose our lives at a whim?
 and when we read to you the glorious sounds
 of Walker or Dickinson or Gilman, your ears are full of
 the dead white boys so cherished, and in a way
 we are all becoming 
 dead white boys
 boys
 boys - with our mouths now full of their talk. to save
 what little dignity we've got left, we lose
 the beauty of our own speech.
 silence comes in many shades. 

V

 I make it a personal goal to know imtimately
 the writers, the yellers, the I-dare-youers in my world.
 clutch their names to my chest
 like armor: bell hooks I say when frightened.
 adrienne rich, alix olson, alice, ani
 their voices my best defense.

 my personal goal is to write (to talk)
 whenever there's an opportunity.
 in the back of my mind I am thinking to myself ((maybe if
 I can yell louder than my silencers, maybe if I wear these women's 
 words so everyone can see, maybe then
 they'll see me finally, maybe then they'll remember
 my right to my voice))

Robyn L. Hauck, February 2002

The Essay Part (i.e. So What?)

 I am a woman - and a writer as well. Much of my time as both of these
things has been spent thinking carefully about what to say, and what not to
say. We as a culture are obsessed with politeless and rudeness, bashful and
bold, and often these qualities are associated with gender. Women are
"supposed" to be polite where men are rude, soft where they are hard, and
silent where they are noisy. Although this line is blurring with time and
effort, it continues to be a struggle for people of -both- genders. 
 Writing is for me an extension of talking. And like talking, writing is
nearly always about what the writing -isn't- saying as well as what it is.
Women's writing, like women's speech, is still a restricted thing in our
world, and like talking its boundaries are being slowly pushed back.
 Taking this class gave me a tremendous sense of the histor behind women as
creators - and our terrible history of silence. Coupled with my musings on
speech and silence, the shape of this piece began to come together. I felt
the need to write about gender and writing, silence and talking, and how
these things are related.
 My goal is to share with you the struggles of being a woman who talks when
she isn't supposed to and writes about things she shouldn't - and also to
relate these struggles to everyone's struggle to be heard. Speech and
writing are valuable but hard-earned tools. I hope they're worth your
trouble to fight for, as they are for me.

any thoughts? Stuff about women's writing? Silence? Yelling? Whatever?