While in the midst of sorting through an interesting intersection of ideas related to gender, I ran across a very insightful essay by the poet Clare Pollard, printed in the current issue of Magma Poetry Online.  The essay, “The Female Poet and the Male Muse,” brings another interesting perspective to my own musings about masculinity and femininity as they relate to literature. 

In the essay, Pollard shares her own experiences as a female poet influenced by contemporary gender criticism.  She writes of the struggles she had as she searched for a legitimate, authentic voice in her poetry — one that was neither “sentimental slop” nor man-hating rhetoric.   In the early days of her search, she found little to help open the path for her in the poetry of other female poets, despite the great love for reading their work that she felt.

Instead, she writes, it was through the work of male homosexual poets that she was able to find a way to articulate what was authentic to her own experience.  As a heterosexual poet, the female body just was not to be the object of her gaze, and therefore she found herself cut off from traditional Muses.  The male body, though, had served as a useful Muse for these male poets, and it was an object that was certainly enough to engage the gaze of Pollard.

She later points out, however, that the problem did not only lie in the object of the gaze, but in the gaze itself — the very act, she says, is a masculine act from which women have always been excluded.  So, therein lies the problem.  To gaze upon the male body, to desire or to woo him, is to feminize him (and thus belittle him?).  

Pollard, though, has found her way.  Her husband often serves as her Muse, a concept she refuses to label as outdated or sexist.  Instead, she reconfigures the traditional understanding of the concept of the Muse and makes it work in her own poetry, and in her own relationship.  (After all, if the feminists motto that “the personal is political” is to be believed, the new configuration should be expected to work in the home as readily as it works on the page.)  And she notes the work of several other female poets who show similar signs of change in their poetry —  Polly Clark, Ruth Padel, and Selima Hill are all offered as examples.

I think this brings out an interesting observation worth mulling over further.  It is easy to take a concept like the Muse and label it as outmoded or sexist or whatever.  Sadly, this will cut us off from one of the main impetuses for writing poetry that our cultural history has passed along to us.  The appreciation (not to mention love and desire) of beauty has been a driving force behind much of the Western world’s great writing.  Do we really want to throw out one of the symbols of this force?  Why not, instead, reconfigure the political alignments associated with it, change them into more equal alignments?  This, it seems to me, is what female poets like Pollard are seeking to do.  They take the tradition and work within it and use it as their own, rather than discarding it altogether.

Indeed, this line of thought reminds me that any neat category that we think we have a nice handle on is always worth re-examining.  Why not, while we are at it, reconsider our views on what it is that constitutes the masculine or the feminine? Or even whether the dichotomies we like to see between these neatly organized concepts are reflective of the reality we live in anyway?  Is there not, perhaps, space for complementarity? 

I really appreciate the work of both men and women who have carefully considered and written about these complex issues.  I think there’s a long way still to go toward further understanding and appreciation, but there’s also been a lot of progress made since the “old days.”  Poets and writers who help to explore and push the boundaries in this way are, in my book, worthy of the utmost respect. 

© 2007 Shelly Bryant