From the Woman’s Canon

Paula Rego, Germaine Greer (1995)

Dear friends and readers,

At long last I have made a new section on my website. It will be a kind of online anthology of women poets, beginning in classical or the earliest recorded time we have and continuing to today. I call it “From The Woman’s Canon,” for it can represent only a small part of a canon that itself doesn’t properly exist. Paula Backscheider (whose Eighteenth Century Women Poets and their Poetry I reviewed) is just one of many women scholars who have demonstrated that a large and varied women’s canon would exist but that much of it has been destroyed and what was left censored, with its original perspectives changed, often reversed. I probably first became aware of this when a couple of years after finishing graduate school (1982) I discovered that there had been quite a number of Renaissance women poets, and a number of these had large oeuvres of poetry. No one had said anything about such a group when I was in graduate school, and for a time I majored in the Renaissance.

by 1984 I had begun to go once, twice, perhaps three times a week to the Library of Congress to do research on Anne Finch whose poetry I had fallen in love with while doing my dissertation on Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Grandison. During that time I had learned there were many women novelists who were good and had written fine novels; but their works were no longer available and what one could learn of their lives was the result of very recent compilations, surveys, books like Mothers of the Novel by Dale Spender. Now I began to discover more women poets, 17th through 18th century and many poetry that I loved and thought superb. They often took a woman’s view of the world. Among the critics I read then to whom I was grateful for her work was Germain Greer (whose picture you see heading this blog).

Well that was 30 years ago, and I’ve gone on to read many feminist (and not so feminist) histories of women’s literature, and seen an explosion in publication of women’s writing. I have myself now translated the complete poetry of two Renaissance women (Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara), done original researching on the still unpublished writing of a great 18th century poet, Anne Finch, and written for conventional publication as well as here online about many women writers.

I find especial solace and strength and write about women’s life-writing, novels, films, but poetry remains my special love. and sometime during 2005 I began to write short lives of women poets to which I attached what I thought were their best or most characteristic poems and evaluative commentary. I would also offer a list of essays or books by or essays on these poets, or anthologies which included them. I put these on my first blog, Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Too (see remnant of part of blog devoted to Jane Austen).

It was probably around 2005 I joined Wom-po, a listserv community devoted to talking about and sharing women’s poetry, and there I met the listowner, Annie Finch, poet and translator who had declared Wednesday to be a day for us all to share poems by women. She was committed to recovering a woman poets poetic tradition, to the reality that women “think back through our mothers” as writers, readers, artists.S She had declared Wednesday to be a day for us all to share poems by women. After I began to post, she declared Friday to be a day for posting poems about and lives of “foremother poets.” The custom continued for some months, but after that most of the people only contributed now and again. I was one of the people who contributed consistently and by the time of the First Annual Festival of Women’s Poetry (online), had with thirty lives and poetry ready to be put on the site.

Since then I’ve written more of these little lives, posting them to Wom-po and also the listservs I moderate (at Yahoo: Eighteenth Century Worlds, Women Writers through the Ages, Trollope19thCStudies), and when I opened my new blogs I began on Fridays to write them regularly (Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two, and Reveries Under the Sign of Austen). Now, in order to make these visible to others, to have one single handy place to reach them, and to fill in unnoticed gaps, I have decided to gather all I’ve done on my website onto this one place.

Foremother Poets: From the Women’s Canon

As you will see, I tell a version of the above little history, define “foremother” and have arranged the poets chronologically. To facilitate finding individuals I also provide

An Alphabetical Index

Stevie Smith (one of my favorite mid-20th century poets)

While my selection must reflect my own knowledge and tastes, I have a wider goal because I have gained so much in my life of meaning, strength, pleasure from women’s writing, and so have made a third section which I mean to add it. It is a list of

Anthologies, Handbooks, Histories & Essays, Blogs & Periodicals.

I had early on when I first made my website (1995-96), put together a bibliography of women’s literature. This was simply intended to help other researchers do research on any and all women writers; its origin in my studies of Renaissance literature is reflected in the choices, but it is wide-ranging and attempts to supplement all sorts of causes. This new site is narrower and perhaps shows my experience over the past 15 years of life on the Net, socializing with writers, readers, editors, publishers, and may useful for those coming to it beyond any needs for research or specific knowledge.

In Annie Finch’s “How to create a Poetic Tradition,” Finch demonstrates how central to visibility and thus a perceptible, findable, and usable context for writers and readers is “the entire literary apparatus of reviews, anthologies, journals, histories, panels, conferences, encyclopedias and textbooks.” Anthologies which are 90% male and where the choice of poem is often an unacknowledged masculinist bias (presented as universal or general) cripple the woman writer. Anthologies, handbooks, histories of literature come out of people’s desires, respect, point of view, what they think others will value. So the context is the manifestation of living people and people in the past reading, writing, talking, acting together: “numerous small acts of persistence … To edit, write, and create this apparatus is creative and fulfilling work in itself and tends to enrich a poet’s poetry.” I hope also to enrich other women’s lives as readers, as people, to be able to find a book or text that really speaks home to her.

The site is intended to help reading girls and now women especially not feel alone in their particular sensibility.

Cardplayers: Francis Coates Jones (1757-1932), called The Perplexed Player

If you want to find the books that Germaine Greer wrote as a feminist and specific research on feminism or any women writer, go to the bibliography; if you want to reach a picture of the woman’s poetry canon join in this is yet another place on my site where you will find women thought to be unusual because they were writers but whose lives were like your own in many ways gathered together.

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Paula Modersohn-Becker (“To sleep among my paintings is beautiful”)

I hope to keep adding to this website. I have written “lives and work” blogs for a few women artists and many more postings about many women artists for Women Writers Through the Ages, and mean eventually to include these on my site as blogs or linked in from the Yahoo site

My speciality has for the last 15 years been the 18th century, and I read French fluently and Italian pretty well, but would be happy to add material for other languages and women poets beyond my three. I realize how weak my site is in German anthologies, to say nothing of non-European texts.

If anyone knows of an anthology of women’s poetry you think ought to be included, please to let me know. The sole criteria is that it should be an anthology, history, handbook devoted to women poets. I know I have already broken this “rule” (consistency is a bugbear &c), but in the couple of cases where I did there were so many women poets in the supposed general anthology and the selection seemed so good or important I cited it; also I have a few general histories of women’s literature because they include many women poets or are historically important.

I have written about girls’ books and hope to make include this special and important subset of women, of whom I once was one. (See also Deborah O’Keefe, Good Girl Messages and Maureen Corrigan’s Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading) I have two (biological) daughters of my own.

Vanessa Bell (1878-1961), “Her granddaughters [Amaryllis and Henrietta] reading” (with their dolls nearby)

Ellen