Shades of green

Distance
and a certain light
makes anything artistic—
it doesn't matter what.

May Swenson

In another lifetime, I was an English major at San Diego State University.  It was about then when the first "feminist" poetry books were being published. I still have some scribbled up, crumbling old paperbacks (Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich) on a bottom shelf somewhere.  Who knows (or for that matter cares?) what my margin notes mean now.  If you were on a college campus in the early 70's, everything was loaded, exciting, relevant.

In the evenings, I'd sometimes go with a friend to a "women's lib" reading circle, where we discussed these angry poems and talked about how mad we were, too. It's hard to describe the impact of books like Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1971. All those things no one ever told us! Compared to now, of course, when everything you want to know (and then some) is available at the flick of a keystroke. 

Young women were riled up then and with good reason, after a few millennium of injustice. I'm getting on the soapbox here, but American girls take their everyday freedoms for granted, and forget there was a "radical women's movement."  In many parts of the world, women don't ride horses, drive cars or take trips alone on airplanes. Sure, some of the demonstrations in the 60's and 70's sound silly now.  If a grandma told her granddaughter that she once burned her bra in a public bonfire, it would be hilarious.  But at the time, it scared and shocked people.

Looking back, what strikes me most about those "women's lib meetings" (I still hate that phrase) is the attention we paid to the issues and each other.  I suppose the biggest difference was we didn't have any distracting technology. The pay phone was down the street, if you had a dime.

So anyway, these were our favorite "feminist" poets from the 1970's:

Anne Sexton (dead, alcoholism)
Sylvia Plath (dead, suicide)
Adrienne Rich (died in 2010)
Marge Piercy (still very much alive.)

Garrison Keillor reads her poems sometimes on his daily radio program called The Writer's Almanac.  A link on his website led me to an interview with Marge Piercy, where she talked about the importance of observing nature. And just paying attention. 

Here's an excerpt:

You have said that the best gifts you can give a poet are field guides to rocks, stars, birds, amphibians, and wildflowers. Why would these be particularly helpful to a poet?

Imagery comes directly out of your own core. It comes from how you perceive the world, how carefully you look and listen, how well you remember, how your mind works. What we have to draw on is largely dependent on how much attention we've paid to what's within and outside of us. Learning to pay attention: looking at shades of green. Not all trees are green, and even those that are differ wildly. How many birds can you identify?

 In other words, how many times have you looked carefully at a bird? Can you tell by the weeds and wildflowers growing in a meadow if it is dry or wet, good soil or scanty, sweet or acid? How does the bark of a beech differ from the bark of an elm? The bark of a black cherry? The bark of a Scotch pine from that of a pitch pine?"

The more precise the attention you pay to the world around you, the more you will rejoice in, the more stuff will be in you that rises as real metaphor and simile, expressive, precise, powerful, felt. Anything we truly experience and take in is the stuff of metaphor...The wider your curiosity ranges, the more interesting metaphors will rise. Memory and observation can be trained to precision and retention.

Marge Piercy