The Role of the Poet
The role of the poet requires endurance. Poets have a voice that speaks to the suffering world of memory—body and soul— and imagination. Where lines and forms meet on paper to illuminate the cruelties of those forgotten or left voiceless, only by the poet’s mouth is a message left behind that is vivid and timeless. When a woman steps into the role of poet, a specificity of incantations, rhymes, and images presents themselves contrastingly against the male poet’s point of view. Where there was once a silence, now it is unbroken. We hear the flight of caged birds released and tamed tongues raging with the courage to speak.
1. Emily Dickinson, The Mother of American Poetry
“Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work… The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and Browning’s works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized” (poetryfoundation.org).
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263)
BY EMILY DICKINSON
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —
2. Audre Lorde, self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet"
“She was central to many liberation movements and activist circles, including second-wave feminism, civil rights and Black cultural movements, and struggles for LGBTQ equality. In particular, Lorde’s poetry is known for the power of its call for social and racial justice, as well as its depictions of queer experience and sexuality” (poetryfoundation.org).
3. Adrienne Rich, A Leading American, Feminist Poet of the Second-Half of the 20th Century
“Rich’s metamorphosis was summed up by Carol Muske-Dukes in the New York Times Book Review; Muske wrote that Rich began as a “polite copyist of Yeats and Auden, wife and mother. She has progressed in life (and in her poems …) from young widow and disenchanted formalist, to spiritual and rhetorical convalescent, to feminist leader ... and doyenne of a newly-defined female literature.” Her poetry of the 1970s and 1980s serve as central texts for the second-wave feminist movement. When she died in 2012, she was one of the most respected American poets” (poetryfoundation.org).
Image: Eamonn McCabe / Camera Press / Redux
4. Joy Harjo, the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States
Image: Carlo Allegri / Getty Images
“She once commented, ‘I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to all the sources that I am: to all past and future ancestors, to my home country, to all places that I touch down on and that are myself, to all voices, all women, all of my tribe, all people, all earth, and beyond that to all beginnings and endings. In a strange kind of sense [writing] frees me to believe in myself, to be able to speak, to have voice, because I have to; it is my survival.’ Her work is often autobiographical, informed by the natural world, and above all preoccupied with survival and the limitations of language. She was named U.S. poet laureate in June 2019” (poetryfoundation.org).
Also, READ: "Becoming Seventy" by Joy Harjo
5. Amanda Gorman, the First National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States
“She is the author of the The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country (Viking Books for Young Readers, March 2021), the poetry collection The Hill We Climb (Viking, September 2021) and The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough (Penmanship Books, 2015). In 2017, Gorman was named the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States. She previously served as the youth poet laureate of Los Angeles, and she is the founder and executive director of One Pen One Page, an organization providing free creative writing programs for underserved youth” (poets.org).
Back to the Past
BY AMANDA GORMAN
At times even blessings will bleed us.
There are some who lost their lives & those who were lost from ours,
Who we might now reënter, All our someones summoned softly.
The closest we get to time travel Is our fears softening,
Our hurts unclenching, As we become more akin
To kin, as we return To who we were
Before we actually were Anything or anyone—
That is, when we were born unhating & unhindered, howling wetly
With everything we could yet become. To travel back in time is to remember
When all we knew of ourselves was love.
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/from-call-us-what-we-carry-poetry-by-amanda-gorman
Created by Avery Castillo
for WGS 2300 Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies
Texas Tech University
Spring 2023
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