What I'm Doing For Class

[akirlu]

We're reading postmodern poet Katarina Frostenson for my Swedish class. Quite unexpectedly, I wrote a poem in response.


On Reading Frostenson

Here we go again, Katarina, with your virgins and your unicorns –
The eternal maiden and her lost maiden’s head
Object of the male gaze
Object of a thousand desires
Object of strange verbs and unlikely similes

Always the metaphor and never the poet

A forgotten bride’s bouquet: hacked to pieces like the Dahlia, pulled apart
and strewn about, from one poem to the next, drained of blood,
so only the white shows – whites of their eyes, birch white, Snow White.

Don’t Shoot. You might not be the hunter. You can’t always tell.

Tell the tale, but never straight. What was that? Sound and fury? So five minutes ago.
“Write like a man,” but no straight shooter
You throw your curves: curved backs and foreheads, spavined allusions,
snaky sibilants and all the lost, aimless wandering between darkened boles, all along the river’s edge
where the faces look up, unseeing,

but in the end, Artemis must loose her quarrel
shoot straight, hit her target, or miss clean, Miss Clean, Miss Madonna so white,
just like that gaze, male or not, misses:
the point,
the person,
the Other self in you.

Look at the seesaw: did you see what I saw? Never. Not possible.
You saw. I see. We talk past each other, trying to be heard.
We stumble in the darkened wood, reaching outstretched hands.

If a poet falls in the forest, does anyone hear?

So what the hell?

Pull up your big girl pants. We’re all of us solitary,
Diogeni raising our moon lanterns high in search of the ones who will see us true.

No, me.

See ME.

The lens is there in your hand, and the camera doesn’t blink, but the image fades

All you get are these dizzy reflections
fractured glass,
pieced together with bloodless fingers.

O, for a tiger, burning bright, to hunt me that damnable unicorn,
O for a muse of fire, to light this murky path,
O for a barkentine, bark boat, birch white, to sail me home,
but all I have is words.
Words, words, words,
whole walls of them, and signifying nothing.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Wow, that is strong stuff!

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I understand it, but, as Dave Locke might have said once upon a time, that's some damn fine word-whipping.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'm pretty positive you don't understand it, not all of it, through no failing of your own but because you aren't likely to have enough context. Hell, I'm not sure I understand all of it, since it came out all in a tumble as an impressionistic stream-of-consciousness response to yesterday's readings and the overall arc of this survey of Swedish poetry that we've been taking over the last 7 weeks.

At the core of the poem is me bitching about the poetics of Katarina Frostenson. Part of what I'm complaining of is the recurrence of the allusion to the virgin maid (jungfru) in the poetry of Swedish women poets in general, and in Frostenson in particular, as a coded reference to women as the objects of poetry, rather than the subject/poet, and complaining that they're still being objectified. My problem is that I feel like Edith Södergran did a better job of grappling with that topic a hundred years ago by inhabiting the body of the objectified virgin, and simply stepping right past the male as observer or even significant figure, to instead declare herself a force of nature sufficient unto herself. Given that Södergran knocked it out of the park in the early days of the 20th century, I'm a little impatient that we're still wittering on about it, especially as cryptically as Frostenson does.

One of the poems we read yesterday was a fragmentary one that on the surface is (again) about a maiden among birches, but apparently (so we're told in class) is really an allusion to the rather grisly (probable) murder of an immigrant prostitute who was found cut up in pieces and wrapped in plastic and dumped in a wood. I say 'probable murder' because apparently the head was never found, and somehow without it the cause of death could not be determined, and so the two guys who cut her to pieces (a pathologist and a doctor) have been found, and were briefly jailed, but eventually let go again because it couldn't be proved that they actually murdered her, rather than simply having hacked her to pieces after the fact. Anyway, the case made me think of the Black Dahlia murder, and in retrospect I felt that Frostenson sticking these fragmentary images of virgins everywhere, especially alluding just to pieces of their bodies, was doing something pretty creepy given that, at least in the one poem, the virgin maid is actually a dead prostitute who's been cut to pieces.

And no doubt that's already way more exegesis than you could possibly have wanted.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

No, that's very interesting exegesis, and it helps me understand the Black Dahlia connection.

I really liked "Artemis must loose her quarrel," by the way, which is a ripe image in this context, even if I didn't find your own quarrel particularly clear yet. Amongst other things, I liked the suggestion of "lose" in "loose". Or at least I saw one, intended or not!

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I figure it might also explain the maiden's head/maidenhead pun. And no, I didn't consciously intend to draw that wordplay connection between "loose her quarrel" (shooting her bolt) and "lose her quarrel" (coming out the loser in an argument), but it's an interesting interpretation, and not obviously wrong. Funny things can come out when you let your subconscious do most of the driving. In fact, in looking over the poem again today, I can see that I might take "all along the river’s edge where the faces look up, unseeing," as an allusion to the suicide of Ophelia, even though I certainly didn't think of Ophelia at the time I wrote it. Funny old brain.

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

Impressive!

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It kinda came out of nowhere.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I plan to never, ever read Katarina Frostenson now! What a great response to her work.