Verse as Mother, Savior, Muse

Abstract

Verse as Mother, Savior, Muse Helane Levine-Keating It Happens As We Speak: A Feminist Poetics Pat Falk Plain View Press http://www.plainviewpress.net 120 pages; paper, $14.95 Reading Pat Falk's engaging nonlinear memoir, It Happens As We Speak: A Feminist Poetics, is a reminder that the personal is still political, though the phrase may now feel dated for those who lived through the early days of the Second Wave of the Women's Movement. While moving both backward into the fifties to reveal the privileged yet unhappy suburban world from which she sprang and forward into the twenty-first century to the violent present she inhabits, Falk writes from the perspective of one whose work has been largely defined by the seventies and eighties, when many welcomed the term "feminism " as a synonym for "enlightenment" and when Robin Morgan's SisterhoodIs Powerful ( 1 970) could hardly have anticipated that Phyllis Chesler, author of the ground-breaking feminist treatise Women and Madness ( 1 972), would be compelled to write Woman 's Inhumanity to Woman (2002) and The Death of Feminism (2005) three decades later. However, let me be clear: this is not a memoir about feminism's death, but rather one that chronicles the continuing quest for a way to continue to live one's feminism as a divorced mother, poet, academic scholar, and college professor. While some reviewers have referred to // Happens As We Speak as a "hybrid" text, I see it more as a text written in a new language created out of the often contradictory lexicons ofthe worlds of poetry, academe, and feminism. Much as Gloria Anzaldüa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) blends poetry and prose, the personal and the political , and various dialects of Spanish and English to show what it means to be "a border woman [growing up] between two cultures," Falk has fashioned a feminist poetics out of her quest to "locate a center" as she seeks to answer the question she poses in a passage situated early in the book though written in 1997: "Without a familiar dualistic pattern of polarities and the dialectical process they engender, how can we create paradigms that embody female form?" Bom in 1950, Pat Falk grew up in a Jewish family in Jamaica Estates, New York, where, as she tells us, her narcissistic mother self-medicated, had affairs, attempted suicide, landed in mental institutes, and was likely to beat her daughters. However, underneath this madness, the author discovered, her mother was a talented writer who might refrain from beating her daughter if Falk "would write a poem and slip it to [herj mother before she went into a fury." Indeed, since writing "Poetry helped me stay connected to my mother, my body, myself," albeit through "negative, polarized energy," writes Falk, it is fitting that the memoir's prologue opens in 1 974 with Falk, a student at City College, telling poet Adrienne Rich, "I have come to consider you my literary mother." Not long after this, it will be Rich she seeks out when she learns of the suicide of Anne Sexton, for Sexton seems to represent the writer Falk's own mother might have been had she been validated. Yet, to be a poet is dangerous, the author learns, given her mother's breakdowns and Sexton's suicide, while to be an intellectual like her father, an attorney , allows her "to stay connected to people safely, rationally, sanely" and to find solutions. As the young wife of a resentful , substance-abusing man and the mother of a small daughter, Falk sees in Rich a mother and a poet who might provide a positive role model different from the one she has had, much as Denise Levertov will later serve the same function. Moreover , although she continues to write poetry and Rich has warned her that "The institution will fuck you up," Falk will eventually pursue the academic credentials she needs to teach on a college level in order to marry her father's "control" to her mother's untamed art. From traumatic memories of collecting newspaper articles chronicling murderous abortions by the family doctor, who also happens to be...