Medusa's Head

A Response to "Calling Her Home," Brenda Shaughnessy, Interior with Sudden Joy It's a familiar story. From the small room, the women go flying, the lost mothers, a brief selection: as when a little girl how can I breathe! What song, devil, is best flying off, her mouth opening haunting the black air. Each one, a benediction, a blood stain.

Some lovely poems by Susan Rich : " Cloud Pharmacy ," " The Invention of Everything Else " Susan Rich What I most love about these poems is their complicated relationship with desire. Resistance and fascination tangle in these poems about female speakers and their desire for their male beloveds--and yet the discourse of romance isn't untroubled, easy, taken for granted. Instead there are complications, threats, perhaps even structural ones bigger than individuals: "an all-embracing/ ocean view" and "The pharmacist’s paper cone/ parsing out a quarter cup." Agency is complicated in these lyrics, and so, somehow, more accurate to the language of desire.

Lucille Clifton's response to the story of Leda's rape by the swan-formed Zeus, I cannot help but compare to William Butler Yeats' " Leda and the Swan :" "How can those terrified vague fingers push / The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?" Honestly, I think " Leda 1 " is a direct response: "there is nothing luminous/ about this." Clifton gives voices to other Ledas, less victimized than Leda 1. But all of them are attempts to give voice to women's perspective, not that of the swan-god or the onlooker. My reading of this poem is hardly original--for some interesting criticism that suggests that Leda 2 and 3 are Mary and Eve, visit Shara McCallum’s “ The Volta, the Vulva, Leda, and Lucille ” at Voltage Poetry. Note: It was disturbingly difficult to find an image of Leda where she isn't smiling or kissing the swan on the beak. Gross.

A Certain Kind of Eden by Kay Ryan : The Poetry Foundation "you can’t go back and pull/ the roots and runners and replant" It's hard for me not to read Ryan's poem as a feminist lament. If the foundations of our story are unhealthy and skewed, can't we start a new one? Some people argue that feminism, by always reacting to patriarchy, is restrained from new and original growth. But aren't we bound by our origin stories? We can attempt to change them, recode them, but can we ever destroy a story with the power of Eden?