Poets Together!

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Re: New File – Between Dorothy and William

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  • September 17, 2020 at 2:37 am #96571
    Patricia Brody
    Participant

    Dear Poets Together , Translators, &etc as they wrote in the 19th c.

    As Joshua brought in the figures, writings, spirits of Dorothy Wordsworth
    and her brother William —

    I will join with some thoughts, written in very early 2000s when I
    discovered
    Early Modern Women, the Romantics and translation.– the carrying, bridging
    from past to present.
    It seems the ideas Mary Ann, Senora, Maureen and many others
    raised Monday 9/14 are often , ever present when we are ready to see them.

    Those who studied women writers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries
    re awoke
    Dorothy from her long sleep and many other women who wrote in “white ink”
    from Perpetua to Heloise to Aemelia Lanyer to Margaret Cavendish to Amy
    Levy to ….. Phyllis Wheatley ….to Dorothy Wordsworth. To name a very
    few.

    Last April in my note to many of you about Eavan Boland’s influence, I
    recalled
    Boland’s discussion at Columbia about the Wordsworths , brother and sister,
    particularly Dorothy’s writings giving earth and flesh to William’s sublime.

    *William’s Shy Romantic*

    She breathed her own ethers into his words.

    Recorded pine , cloud-cave, brother’s footfall;

    felt fog stir, heard lightning release, denied

    her own bruised feet, wrenched spine, rent heart

    with the starched nightdress, under the pillow.

    Brewed late-day, spiked possets, cooled his hot head.

    Too soon, he brought Mary and seven babes.

    She nursed them too with mother-herbs,

    chamomile, the poppies and packed journal

    tossed out in her green-world to curl yellow.

    She anticipated, enflamed his muse.

    Well, what was she to do? She did for two.

    If he were mouthpiece, even brain,

    she was lute, reflex let-down, milk-blue rain.

    Published in Western Humanities Review (2004)

    ************************************************************

    translation, tra

    On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 7:53 PM Patricia Brody <patriciannb13@gmail.com>
    wrote:

    Translate:
    >
    > Dorothy gives to her brother her Own writings in the journal. He carries
    > her material, through gender, voice, medium—
    > female penned to male penned; Dorothy to William; Journal notes to
    > crafted sonnet — to a new production/product .
    >
    > Crossed over. ( hers crossed out?
    > Subsumed?)
    >
    > On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 7:50 PM Joshua Wilner (Poets Together!) <
    > commons@gc.cuny.edu> wrote:
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    >> Hi Patricia Brody,
    >>
    >> ——————————
    >>
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    >> Joshua Wilner (https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/members/jdwilner/) uploaded Between
    >> Dorothy and William
    >> (https://commons.gc.cuny.edu?get_group_doc=1991/Westminster%20Bridge.docx)
    >> to Poets Together! (https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/poets-together/):
    >>
    >>
    >> Document description: I meant to share this before we gathered today, but
    >> I’m not sure it circulated. For whom is Dorothy’s journal destined? Is
    >> William’s sonnet a translation of her prose? Or should we say the reverse?
    >>
    >>
    >> Download the document directly:
    >> https://commons.gc.cuny.edu?get_group_doc=1991/Westminster Bridge.docx
    >>
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    >> —
    > Patricia Brody
    > Check out my book, *Dangerous To Know (poems in the voices of forgotten
    > women)* from SalmonPoetry
    > new writing, and other poetry-related events.
    >
    > brodypoet@gmail.com.
    >
    > Exercise your Right to Write: *SEEKING YOUR VOICE: Women Writing Poetry &
    > Memoir*
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    —
    Patricia Brody
    Check out my book, *Dangerous To Know (poems in the voices of forgotten
    women)* from SalmonPoetry
    new writing, and other poetry-related events.

    brodypoet@gmail.com.

    Exercise your Right to Write: *SEEKING YOUR VOICE: Women Writing Poetry &
    Memoir*

    NB: You can join now! Register at C. Bochar, Business Manager:
    212-678-2416
    http://our.barnard.edu/s/1133/16/wide.aspx?sid=1133&gid=1&pgid=3907&cid=13577&ecid=13577&crid=0&calpgid=2564&calcid=7072

    Visit my Blog at:
    http://brodypoet.wordpress.com

    September 17, 2020 at 4:57 pm #96653
    Patricia Laurence
    Participant

    Thanks to Josh for juxtaposing Dorothy and Wordsworth, and the other
    Patricia for sparking the issue with her thoughts and wonderful poem (“she
    breathed her own ethers into his words”). Male imaginings, voicing or
    appropriation of women’s perceptions, writing, and womanhood have
    preoccupied critics since –if not before–Woolf described women as the
    “looking glasses of men having the delicious power of reflecting the figure
    of man at twice its natural size.” This has taken many critical turns and
    led to claims that hover over Wordsworth, Hughes…. I wrote something
    years ago about James Dickey’s collection of poems, *Puella* and his
    dedication, “to Deborah, her girlhood, male imagined.” I wondered then why
    women poets do not write collections about the boyhood of their lovers or
    husbands (do they?). Dickey’s impulse in the poems is, partly, to “possess”
    his wife, Deborah, before she met him. I don’t agree with all I said then
    but I defended–despite his sometimes macho stances–Dickey’s resistance to
    fixed identity and his imaginings. He not only enters her psyche in the
    poems (many issues to be discussed here) but attempts to awaken the
    consciousness of a doll, tree, rain, a whale, crows, the environment. He
    attempts what Genette ascribes to literature in general, “It breathes new
    life into the world, freeing it from the pressure of social meaning, which
    is named meaning, and therefore dead meaning, maintaining as long as
    possible that opening, the uncertainty of signs which allows one to
    breathe.”

    September 17, 2020 at 10:43 pm #96700
    Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem (she/her)
    Participant

    hi patricia brody!

    thank you for this. i TOO love the romantic era women – i work on Phillis Wheatley, officially, and plan to do something on Mary Wollstonecraft and her outrageous-brilliant daughter, probably also the dad.

    …we should maybe think about doing something on the romantic women, a collaboration…??

    but, like, fair warning — as mary ann has said, i am no poet. and i don’t want to be. (i LIVE for poetry! other peoples’ poetry!) interestingly, about that i have said, as explanation: “i write sentences.” as in, “i’m not a poet: i write sentences.” not sure why but i think this means i see the craft of the sentence as a different species from the craft of verse. a verse being a fragment necessarily, the line controlled, stopped, started, stopped, started. a sentence trying to be complete, like an elegant figure eight, a perfect-complete representation of the thought, always failing, but we try on…sentence after sentence.

    thank you for the boland, too.

    tomorrow i zoom with my salmon poet friend — i will ask her does she remember you… 🙂

    ~mf.

    September 18, 2020 at 2:12 am #96717
    Patricia Brody
    Participant

    Brava Other Patricia !

    I love this: about breathing! Gennette’s? Literature as breathing…

    CAN we have literature “ free from social meaning. …therefore DEAD
    meaning “ I love this idea will now glug/ google Gennette!

    And in this same quote I hear & see Mary Ann’s passion for images and
    writing she has shown us — cant name the paintings darn! Dali?D’Chirico,
    Monet ( help here!) For me Da Vinci

    Titian El Greco Giotto Botticelli s drawings of Dante s Divine Comedy—
    these arts which are unfixed!!!

    As the Derrida postcard we heard last Monday— what I felt Dorothy might be
    doing( for us , as long as we read her words in his lines/ his … in
    hers? ) interesting so interesting what Pat L. writes here about men “
    writing” women , their wives. but women not doing the same for men,
    husbands: For

    if we stay on this Wordsworth brother/sister example. Dorothy’s journals as
    she writes the flowers, walks, landscapes, William’s health , etc
    I think do not transform earth into spirit.

    Yet he takes her images, language thoughts — her work , her gaze if we
    will , becomes his magic looking glass. From her heartbeat to his Sublime.

    Wow. Thank you for the fascinating look at Deborah and Dickey!

    And this fabulous air flow: “ maintaining as long as possible that opening,
    the uncertainty of signs ( aka Mary Ann Caws’s cause , well kind of?)
    which

    allows one to BREATHE “!!!
    My new mantra.

    Again thank you so much other Pat

    other other Patricia

    On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 4:57 PM Patricia Laurence (Poets Together!) <
    noreply@gc.cuny.edu> wrote:

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    September 18, 2020 at 12:08 pm #96729
    Patricia Brody
    Participant

    Maureen
    CAn i reply here.
    Sure. I have written some on Romantic – Victorion women authors.

    How Tennyson stole their voices

    Yes collaborate.

    A woman writer is a writer.

    On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 10:43 PM Maureen E. Fadem (Poets Together!) <
    noreply@gc.cuny.edu> wrote:

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    September 20, 2020 at 3:06 pm #96924
    Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem (she/her)
    Participant

    yes, collaborate! yes, stolen women’s voices. i’m writing about that re: phillis wheatley and an irish poet often called dark eileen as a kind of moniker (that’s eileen dubh, anglicized her name is Eileen O’Connell). maybe we can do something that would require me to start getting this piece done — it’s being written ultimately for a collection i plan to bring out called imperial debt. ~maureen

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