The Kill Box

Was reading a post on Switchback Books about Girlesque Poets, feminism, the Woman question and the warped template, the exclusive bible of patriarchal histories. Below are some quotes that ring with me: 

"I have never thought there was one way women did or should or could write: style, form, structure, language, rhetoric are all tools consciously and unconsciously used in the deep agency of writing. As Woolf said in A Room of One's Own--certain material differences between men and women are still constructed and perpetuated in our society, and it is the job of feminism to resist these, to try to dismantle these, and, as well, to understand their impact, which can be considerable in the case of artists. This is the importance of feminist reception and writing inspired in the general matrix of ongoing feminist critique."

--Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work

"For writers, and at this moment for women writers in particular, there is the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored. But there is also a difficult and dangerous walking on the ice, as we try to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into, and with little in the past to support us."

--Adrienne Rich, "'When We Dead Awaken': Writing as Re-Vision"

"I am an instrument in the shape

of a woman trying to translate pulsations

into images for the relief of the body

and the reconstruction of the mind."

--Adrienne Rich, "Planetarium"

"...who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"

--Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One's Own"

"Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies -- for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text -- as into the world and into history -- by her own movement.

Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible.

If woman has always functioned 'within' the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this 'within', to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of."

--Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa"

Sharp shooter, put your boots back on - the dryer's buzzing like a dog pound leash.

I must contort this peony furnace into pliable beige, flip the roast, stir the pot.

Wipe the glaze from your chin. I must get back to being what I am not.