Olga Broumas : Beginning With O

Olga Broumas' poetry is full of image in Beginning With O in which she explores ancient myth and fairytale and often revisions the feminine into often a lesbian love. Not always. Her use of the natural world in language is explored and maintained in the first poem of the book, the opening that seems to be the epigraph for the rest of her work, "Sometimes, as a child." From the beginning, Broumas establishes a dive into myth,

"when the Greek sea
was exceptionally calm
the sun not so much a pinnacle
as a perspiration of light, your brow and the sky
meeting on the horizon, sometimes

you'd dive"

The Greek sea is evoked, and the image of a person meeting water on the horizon indicates some type of change, a perspective. The rest of Broumas poems in this book unfold to reveal elements of women in myth, women of today reaching out to explore those roles, sometimes even change them. The feminine is alligned with nature, often. This parallels into contemporary schools of philosophy and appraoches to literature in the ecofeminist movement of today. Broumas straddles many lands in the poems of this book, reaching into the past of myth, adding a lesbian twist to the stories, and predicting a future for poetry and literature. The poem continues, seeming to describe the birth of a woman,

"in the paused wake of your dive, enter
the suck of the parted waters, you'd emerge

clean caesarean, flinging
live rivulets from your hair, your own
breath arrested..."

Reclamation. Rebirth. Water and the feminine. Women are often bound to the sea, to water, strongly in the first section of the book in which ancient myth is explored. "Circe" moves away from the natal images of love and birth in nature. The poem opens, instead, with fire.

"The fire bites, the fire bites. Bites / to the little death. Bites / till she comes to nothing. Bites / on her own sweet tongue. She goes on. Biting."

In myth, Circe is a witch. She charms Odysseus' men and the men, in turn, become pigs. The metaphor is commonplace. However, Broumas shows Circe as a spider weaving a web, waiting in anticipation for the men to break themselves out of the spell they've cast on themselves:

"They tell me a woman waits, motionless
till she's wooed. I wait

spiderlike, effortless as they weave
even my web for me, tying the cord in knots

with their counting hands. Such power
over them. And the spell

their own. Who could release them? Who
would untie the cord

with a cloven hoof?"

Broumas leaves the ancient for the modern. A modern woman dressing for herself in the morning before leaving the house. For me the image of men around a construction site, hitting on a woman is too easy, the persona turning "men into swine" is too simple an end. However, the connection of ancient myth to modern woman is still a powerful connection. Furthermore, the fire in which Circe is personified opposesses the aqueous and lunar images of women in her other poems in the same section indicating a transformation of sorts.

The latter section of Beginning With O echoes Anne Sexton's Transformations with the reclaimation of the fairytale. In "Beauty and the Beast" I feel some of the images from the poems appearing earlier in the book are lost. Beauty and Beast are both symbollic, however, of two parts. Beast, masculine in usual perception, could be the speaker before meeting women. For instance, the description of the persona we meet is not beautiful, but more desperate and forlorn:

"For years I fantasized pain
driving, driving
me over each threshold
I though I had, till finally
the joy in my flesh would break
loose with the terrible
strain, and undulate
in great spasmic circles, centered
in cunt and heart. I clung to pain..."

The persona could be a beast in her own right. However, by the end of the poem there is a shift in tone when the speaker comes together with a woman:

"...The boy
fled from my laughter
painfully, and i
leaned and touched, leaned
and touched you, mesmerized, woman, stunned

by the tangible
pleasure that gripped my ribs, every time
like a caged beast, bewildered
by this late, this essential heart."

With "Cinderella," the connection Broumas is making to Anne Sexton's work is further strengthened when she opens the poem with an epigraph, a quote from Sexton. Unlike previous poems, Cinderella's speaker is a persona of Cinderella. A further connection to Transformations is made as Broumas leaves her form for the sake of a persona poem. (Sexton's Transformations is comprised of persona poems).

The imagery in "Cinderella" again shifts. This time, the shift is away from nature entirely and towards the domestic: "...I am a woman in a state of siege, alone / as one piece of laundry, strung on a windy clothesline..." Broumas connects fairytale and modernity:

"...I know what I know.
What sweet bread I make
for myself in this prosperous house
is dirty, what good soup I boil turns
in my mouth to mud. Give
me my ashes. A cold stove, a cinder-block pillow, wet
canvas shoes in my sisters', my sisters' hut..."

Broumas' lesbian theme is clear; Cinderella would rather be enslaved to the hearth, to sisterhood, than to marriage, to a man. The imagery of women in nature is lost to the domestic, the kettle, the piece of laundry, the stove.

Olga Broumas explores the lives and aspects of women throughout her poetry in Beginning With O. Her poetry often associates the feminine with nature, coming to love (or birth) through water. Her heroines reject heterosexual love for true connection with other female characters in myth and fairytale. Her language is luring, beautiful. Stanley Kunitz, who selected her as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets (197?) describes her lingual power best, "Among the most impressive features of Broumas's supple art is her command of syntax, rhythm, and tone. Her hedonism extends to the use of language itsef; she rollicks in 'the cave of sound'" (xiii).

Unreconstructed -- Ed Ochester

The hook into Ed Ochester's poetry is universality. Each poem -- even one's packed with metaphor such as "On a Friend Whose Work Has come to Nothing" -- reads on many levels. The plot, the why, behind each poem resonates with me. Ochester's poetry isn't didactic or about lofty ideals. Instead it is the truth -- both the beautiful and the ugly -- hidden in the moments of the everyday. The subjects and personas aren't archetypes. No. They are the everyperson, the nextdoor neighbor, the friend lost in passing. His poetry's greatest strength is in the connection it makes with its reader.

For instance, in "On a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing" Ochester explores the relationship of friendship, writing work, snippets of an individual life, and reflection -- inner-reflection -- after a long lost friend/collegue's death. Lines like, "and every one of us was the true illegitimate/son of Hemmingway who/by the way/was your very close friend" indicate emotions behidn a persona's words, represent the descent into grief, remembrance, and self-discovery. Although the example is literary, the moment after a friend's death, the feelings of closeness and a look of one's life work, is universal, even if it stays sealed on a person's inside.

His poetry resonates on history and a connection with the middle class. Almost anyone can pick up and pull something out of the words he puts on a page. Fresh language and the momentum push a reader through to the end. Ed Ochester is a universal voice for the people.

Transforming the Fairy Tale

Anne Sexton's Transformations lured me into her poems not only because I'm a sucker for a morbid Grimm brothers fairytale, but also because of the quality and ability Sexton takes to slip between stories older than centuries and apply their truths to the unfoldings of a modern and personal world. The words aren't a mere retelling of distorted fairytales. They are a reclaiming. A reckoning. Images of food and disease mix on a page to reveal inner truths about the human condition beyond a witch and an oven or a frog and Princess's plate. Kisses aren't always a savior. The "happily ever afters" exist in consequence. A clear, uncomfortable, unflinching sarcasm colors the words. The appeal of the depraved, innocent, and insane drips from the page onto the fangs of a wolf full of stones to the bloody spindle prick of an insomniac too frightened by reality to sleep. Sexton reenvisions the fairytales as the Grimm's first imagined, and we are present in each and every story.

Medusa, Medusa...

...with snakes in her hair. And eyes that can turn you to stone.

If only in myth. So the truth behind myth, I think, exists in the perceptions of the time period. For instance, let's take Medusa for example. In oversimplified summary, you have a broken Gorgon, ravaged by a horny god (Zeus) turned into an angry, man-hating monster. To perpetuate the masculine hypersensitivity, a demigod (Perseus) enters the scene, hellbent on destroying a woman-turned-monster over which his involvement is unnecessary. The removal of her head (acquired by the help of a beautiful god) releases a white horse, Pegasus from the blood of the silenced woman's throat. In essence, the infamous story, reformatted and rewritten for contemporary audiences from the ancient skew, is drenched in shame, wrath, and the oppression of women.

Contemporary versions of this very myth may reveal different truths about the reality behind the fiction. The modern differs from the ancient. One could argue today that Medusa is not the ugly Gorgon she once was portrayed to be, but an individual attacked and trying to vindicate herself against the world (and person) who betrayed her trust and harmed her. Pregnancy is a pop culture theme. Perhaps a modern spin on Medusa let's her consider an abortion.
Instead of dehumanizing the woman (Medusa) in a modern revisioning of the story; the myth would likely empower her to not become frozen by overwhelming anger, and instead, let her find her voice and discover an outlet for the wicked acts committed against her outside of herself. Perhaps through the acceptance and support of others -- which would be lost on an ancient audience -- Medusa would be able to forgive herself of that which she could not control and unbind herself from the guilt, that enrages her to snakes and stones.

The contemporary women should be empathetic to our modern Medusas. For we are many. And we are not to be maddened into exile, anger, and lonely silence. This is for the everyday Medusas, a beautiful sisterhood of Medusas, releasing thick tongues stuck to the back of throats, and outpouring our stories.

So...Why Words & Why Winos?

Because ... what's better than three friends and a bottle of cabernet over a few scribbles of poetry that aren't your own (and sometimes words that exclusively belong to you)?

Nothing.

Stay tuned.