Edited by Andrea Hollander Budy
Autumn House Press 2009
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies
Balancing Acts
“The paradox in American letters is that it has always been easier for a woman to write and for a man to be published.”
—Paul Theroux, on the social and professional acceptance of writers in “Being a Man”
In 1973, Florence Howe and Ellen Bass, preoccupied by the dearth of anthologized women poets, created the groundbreaking women’s poetry anthology No More Masks! Howe, commemorating the occasion in the collection’s introduction, writes of its exigent formation: “The most important reason for this volume to exist is an ideological one: a belief in the uniqueness of women.” Unique and underrepresented, the eighty-seven original contributors revealed, through their poems, their preoccupation with the politics of the moment.
The collection caused quite a stir in the poetry community—Elizabeth Bishop famously declined to contribute, noting what she perceived as the “segregation” inherent in the collection’s intentional exclusion of any male writers. Others criticized its politics-heavy momentum. But regardless of its reception, No More Masks! gave women writers an invaluable gift, setting the precedent for the existence of all-women’s poetry anthologies; the tradition has continued with a re-issue of No More Masks! and several new women’s anthologies, including Columbia University Press’s The Extraordinary Tide. Here to contribute vibrantly to this tradition comes When She Named Fire, the new all-women contemporary poetry anthology from Autumn House Press.
Born between 1925 and 1976, the writers included in When She Named Fire comprise the heavyweights of American women poets; current United States Poet Laureate Kay Ryan has a section, as do former Poet Laureate Rita Dove and literary luminaries Jane Kenyon, Mary Oliver, and Maxine Kumin, the sole poet appearing in both anthologies. With ninety-six poets overall, the tag “American women poets” allows for great variegation of voice, culture, and style, and editor Andrea Hollander Budy takes care to cultivate this diversity.
Though diverse, the poets’ gender unites them, and a study of what it means to be a woman graces the pages with insight and clear focus. The poets here write about loss and birth, the changing of the seasons and the changing of a tire with an eye for new exploration. Political exigency, though present at spare moments, largely steps back to make way for more complicated, contemporary examinations of a woman’s world. And while some contributors rely heavily on expected tropes and thus contribute weaker poems, overall When She Named Fire examines women’s lives with a marked consistency of skill.
In an anthology with such well-loved contributors, isolating individual achievers proves a difficult task. As a whole, however, this collection serves as a study of what preoccupies women writers in 2009, and illness rates high among these preoccupations. Deborah Bruce writes deftly in “Prognosis” of the anxiety grown from waiting for a diagnosis: “But what I’m searching for is what I’ve left/behind—the snug, sunlit privilege/of making plans with when instead of if.”
HIV/AIDS also figures as subject in several contributors’ poems. Marilyn Hacker, who makes brilliant use here of the ghazal and glose (historic Spanish) forms, links the making of “easy” art to the contraction of AIDS. In “Ghazal: min al-hobbi ma khatal,” she writes,
The all-night dancer, the mother of four, the tired young doctor
all contracted HIV from the love that kills.
There is pleasure, too, in writing easy, dishonest verses.
Nothing protects your poetry from the love that kills.
An examination of AIDS also appears in the poetry of Marie Howe, whose brother John died of the disease in 1989; she takes John as subject in her masterful poem “What The Living Do.” Perhaps no contributor writes more hauntingly of disease than Kenyon, who passed away in 1995 of leukemia. “I got out of bed/”, she writes in her staple, “Otherwise,” “on two strong legs./It might have been/otherwise.”
Spiritual concerns also consume contributors’ attention. Chana Bloch, poet and translator, writes of the experience of keeping a kosher household in “‘And the darkness he called night:’”
I was trying to keep things neat and shiny.
I had two sets of dishes—one for love,
one for hate. I kept them in separate cupboards.
For Bloch, the rituals of Judaism mystify even as they compel, and her poems focus beautifully on this contrast. For poet Naomi Shihab Nye, interfaith struggles serve as subject in “Half-and-Half:”
You can’t be, says a Palestinian Christian
on the first feast day after Ramadan.
So half-and-half and half-and-half.
He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,
chips. If you love Jesus you can’t love
anyone else. Says he.
Here, Nye studies the challenges borne from interfaith unions, an issue of crucial relevance in today’s mixed-religious society. Judeo-Christian archetypes also figure prominently in the collection, with Biblical allusions appearing throughout. For numerous contributors, faith both limits and liberates, carrying undeniable importance.
If No More Masks! provides a retrospective history of women writers in the twentieth century, When She Named Fire aptly looks forward, ringing in the 21st with some of contemporary poetry’s most celebrated voices. Whether curious readers pick up the collection for its striking female assemblage or to unlock current concerns of the larger contemporary poetry movement, they will find satisfaction in the collection’s examination of women’s issues. No More Masks!, in its 1993 reissuance, successfully expanded its contributors from eighty-seven to one hundred and four; When She Named Fire adds 95 poets to the list, making the number of anthologized women poets both vast and accessible to any reader.
No longer must women like Howe and Bass worry about the historical future of women writers—here, in a collection as strong as When She Named Fire, they will surely last, and continue their canonization in anthologies to come. Utterly of-the-moment and thoroughly inclusive, When She Named Fire, in step with this historical importance, will hold the attention of even the most well read of interested poetry connoisseurs: even those already well-acquainted with women writers in particular. Bishop might be correct that to distinguish by gender is to emphasize separation. But I’d contend it is equally true that to assemble work that updates us on the state of a historically under-represented group in American letters is a valuable, leveling, enterprise, lest we take several decades of progress for granted.
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