| Having written a very long poem, in almost perfect isolation for nearly thirty years, I turned to the Internet to discover the extent to which anyone else had been pursuing anything like it. I was at first heartened, then dismayed, to see an entire journal dedicated to the very long poem, with essays, reflections and contemporary examples. The dismay was provoked by these ideas: Unintelligibility is desirable and perhaps requisite to favorable critical judgment about such a poem. Narrative is not merely dead, but in fact evil, perpetuating the mythological construct underpinning the patriarchal systems that historically and persistently oppress women and marginalized people of all kinds. Having just completed a story poem in twelve cantos, both these points of judgment rebuked my choices. This is an attempt to examine the rationale of those choices in the face of those rebukes. There is not much to be said about intelligibility. This is a matter of taste, and no one can suggest to another that her or his taste should be otherwise than it is. However, I harbor a suspicion that many preferences that pass for taste are, at their base, semiotic in-group indicators. But I could never prove this, and it must be as true of my own taste as much as anybody’s. So, one either prefers or is repelled by intelligible writing, and we could leave it at that. The objection to Narrative is another (though clearly related) matter, and it will serve as the topic to be addressed. I am a white male, now in my sixties, who wrote a narrative poem. What is my relationship to the patriarchy? Am I not a patriarch myself, profiting from and interested in perpetuating the status quo? In 1979, I was 27 years old when I began my long poem. The Women’s Movement was in full throttle, and has not lapsed since no more than (sadly) the need for it has lapsed. If a Feminist believes every woman has a inalienable right to realize her full potential, economically, socially and personally, if a Feminist opposes all impediments, institutional, governmental or social interfering with this right, then mark me down among them. I also believe that women, like others who suffer categorical oppression, require neither permission nor intervention from people not of their category to advance their struggles to claim full and unfettered participation in life. To suggest otherwise is rank paternalism, or to dolly back from a gender context, colonialism, as it is understood after Marcus Garvey’s and Malcom X’s exegesis of that term. They do require sympathetic action and willingness (in Dylan’s words) to “get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand. . . . Don’t block up the doorway, don’t stand in the hall.” So what did this Feminist start writing in 1979, coming to something like a conclusion in 2017? My long poem, Glorianna, had its origins in a proposition: Spencer intended the ultimate book of his masterwork, The Faerie Queene, to describe the siege of Glorianna’s citadel by Archimago and his minions. He never got that book written. What if I were to pick up the story? So I thought I knew what I was doing and what the effort was about, but I did not. The work evolved into a struggle with the meaning of images and concepts personalized in characters that were more presented to me than invented by me. Poetry emerges from that twilight border between the conscious and unconscious. So I should not have been surprised that the full import of the entire effort was not at all clear until the final year of its composition. — but I was so surprised. There may be more learning ahead as I may do one more pass through, but I think I am on to the basic idea. Spencer intended his work to answer the question: How should we live? He answered it for his time, and specifically for a certain socio-political class of his time, and to narrow it further, young males of that class. I did not set out to echo this, but that is what I did. I answered it for my time, and my socio-political milieu, quite different from his, and with a deliberate intent to include all my contemporary fellow travelers, without regard to their intersectional categories, and on the theory that the oblivion we all face is no respecter of such distinctions — it treats us all the same in the end. My further intent was to truthfully tell what I believe about facing that oblivion, and in so doing, to spell out the content of that amorphous and possibly chimerical construct I call my soul. My narrative features a male hero on a quest, consonant with the traditions of my epic-writing predecessors. He undertakes this quest on behalf of a female figure of power and virtue, an idealized woman. This resonates with Spenser, my model, who had his own Queen Elizabeth in mind. I put this in poetic form to sing the story, not just tell it, to weave it into passages of aural and intellectual pleasure for the reader, all the while understanding there may be very few readers besides myself. Perhaps none. No one is calling me to account. My isolation is unlikely to ever be compromised, so I undertake this essay in the same spirit Glorianna was undertaken. I am curious to know: How do I respond to the challenges implicit in the listed objections to just such a piece as I have created? Here is the first question I must address: Is there a distinction between gender qualities experienced among fully dimensional creatures of the world and the gender qualities of literary characters? I believe there is such a distinction, as I believe there is a profound, and not obvious relationship between the concepts of gender in both contexts. First, we shall speak of the world. The male/female dichotomy describes a vast majority of humans, but we know full well it does not serve to describe them all. It is critically and sometimes harmfully wrong about a host of fellow humans who self-identify in a myriad of diverse ways. We also know there is enough variety among those who self-identify with the traditional gender categories that it is dangerous to assume we know about a person based on those vague indicators. The women who hunt, fish, swig whiskey and are obsessed with football find their counterparts in men who dance, crochet, sip tea and well, write long, narrative poems. The pejorative labels — tomboy, sissy — indicate the age-old price of non-conformity. The response to these pressures must always be courage. Courage is personified in my hero, Fortus, who happens to be portrayed as a male. Does that mean that courage is an exclusively biologically male virtue, and his story should be of interest only to men? That is obviously nonsense, as anyone who has attended the birth of a baby, or witnessed a woman standing up to violence and violation can attest. All the same, could courage be described as a masculine virtue in a literary context? We can’t assess this in isolation. It is unfair. Let’s list some human qualities, virtues and non-virtues, and see if we agree on their gender quality. Sincerity Unfaithfulness Loving tenderness Self-centeredness Industry Laziness Crudeness Refinement That is enough. If we were to undertake personifying these virtues, what gender would the personifications be? Some of the qualities could go either way. But I would be surprised if anyone describes Loving Tenderness as a male characteristic. I would be equally surprised at Crudeness being characterized as female. We shall suspend judgment on the others. Are only females lovingly tender in their relations with others? I hope not. But could we characterize it as a feminine virtue? I believe so. Why? Are only males crude? Of course not. But could we characterize crudeness as a male fault? I believe so. Why? Our ancestors on the Savannas of Africa are my constant inspiration and font of reflection. Emerging as animals into a Hobbesian State of Nature, humans, with no recorded history to guide them, got by as best they could. There was no experience upon which to base a plan, let alone a judgment about their choices. The very survival of our species was not a given. They emerged from purely instinctual behavior to weighing alternatives only when blessed with a luxury of time for reflection, which was lacking more often than not. In fact the course of human affairs could be characterized as a progression from the instinctual to the intellectual. Where are we on that continuum in the present day? That is a question that is not susceptible to a precise, objectively measurable answer. When I place my experience of our life in context with what I know about our history I am led to believe we are not as far down that road as we think we are, that our connection to our origins is much stronger than we suspect. We are still buying time to think. Ernesto Fenellosa, in his pre-1908 essay The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry described the poet as that person who “feels back upon the lines of advance” for connections to our present situation. I quoted Fenellosa from memory just now, but in checking my memory (and feeling a little triumph in having remembered accurately,) I came upon the context of the quote. I present it here, because it could not be more germane to this discussion. The chief work of . . . of poets . . . lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance. . . . The original metaphors stand as a kind of luminous background, giving color and vitality, forcing them closer to the concreteness of natural processes. . . . For these reasons poetry was the earliest of the world arts; poetry, language and the care of myth grew up together. Retrieved from: Here Myth and poetry: The bases of our dreams and inchoate visions, filtered through musical language by an artist functioning on impulse as much as by plan or design — this is how I see my business. To confuse our myths with our present circumstances is an error. To decide our myths are too different from our present circumstances to be relevant to them is another. This is the crux of my argument — gender in a mythic/epic context is not the same as gender in our present world, but they are importantly related. The male hero of my poem is not a man, but an image of a man. The female ideal that inspires that hero in my poem is not a woman, but an image of a woman. They partake of masculine and feminine characteristics to which anyone can relate, if that is understood. One of the great achievements of our age is the liberation of all individuals from the social and behavioral strictures related to our categories, including those of sex. The huntin’ and fishin’ and rough-housin’ man’s man still exists. The satin and lace, giggling stereotype of a girly girl can still be encountered. But even the big brute will drop a feminine tear over the grave of a friend, and more and more femininity is identified with integrity and archetypically masculine courage. The heroine of the film Legally Blonde is just such a girly girl as described, and its story, however comical, traces the protagonist’s successful struggle against prejudice and arbitrary, categorical power. She out-males the males, deploying equal parts pluck and intellectual accomplishment. Joan of Arc led the French in a suit of male armor. One of the items on her bill of indictment was the horror of the Inquisition at her adoption of male clothes. Happily, women adopting male clothes are no longer subject to the deadly sanction suffered by Joan. But the association of her clothes to the masculine was fundamental to her mission of turning the world upside-down for her king and people. So the courage that Fortus deploys in my poem is not only applicable to males in the real world. The empathy and integrity of Glorianna is not just for the women to admire and emulate. These are archetypically masculine and feminine qualities, but in the real world they belong to all of us, male, female and otherwise. Those acknowledging a nature that does not conform to the binary gender categories have special need for courage. Could they only relate to a similarly-gendered hero in a poem? If one of them were to write as I wrote, I suspect their hero would be like one of them. Fortus, like the four captains and their father, emerged from my personal aspirations — courage, enthusiasm, love, learning, integrity and imagination. In the end, this poet must write his poem — as that poet must write hers, and otherwise. I do not aspire to change the minds of those who stand in judgment of Glorianna based on the two criteria cited at the beginning of this essay. I confess that, in writing, I set out to be understood, though my own understanding did not come easily to me in the process. Also, I intended my narrative to support all people who need courage to face their lives, and their deaths, whatever their gender. I credit people with sufficient scope of understanding, irrespective of their intersectional categories, to comprehend my characters based on their storybook, mythic gender. But then, for this to happen, they would have to read it. I am pretty sure very few of them will. But if they did . . . |
| Glorianna Table of Contents |
| The Cantos |
| Appendices |