Why Are Female Poets Nuts?

I came on it in two ways. The first occurred last Sunday, when I was coaching a student on a poem by a poet unknown to me: Jane Kenyon. Paradoxically, the poem is called Happiness:

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                  It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Well, it was that image, that “wineglass, weary of holding wine,” that stuck in my mind. So much so, that it wasn’t the name of the poet but her image of the wineglass that allowed me to track Kenyon down.

And if Kenyon knew about happiness, it was hardly the neighbor who dropped every morning for coffee, gossip, and laughter. For Kenyon, happiness was the ghost she saw slipping into an abandoned house at dusk.

How depressed was she? Well, consider a famous poem: Having it Out with Melancholy. The first stanza clues you in pretty quickly:

When I was born,

you waited behind a pile of linen in the nursery,

and when we were alone, you lay down

on top of me, pressing

the bile of desolation into every pore.

Kenyon, born in Ann Arbor but living in New Hampshire, died early at age 47 from leukemia. But the question troubling my afternoon today is whether she also suffered from the Sylvia Plath effect.

The idea goes back to Aristotle, if not before, but got named in 2001 by James C. Kaufman; Wikipedia has this to say about it:

Kaufman's work further demonstrated that female poets were more likely to suffer from mental illness than any other class of writers. In addition, female poets were more likely to be mentally ill than other eminent women, such as politicians, actresses, and artists.

Well, looking at the 20^th century, it’s not hard to see that there were seriously troubled women out there, often writing extraordinary poetry. Besides Plath, there was Anne Sexton, Sara Teasdale, and not so much a raft as a cruise ship of others.

Writing, in fact, is on the list of the ten most depression-prone professions. But it seems that female poets outstrip all others for being nuts. Why?

Well, unless you have the fortune to be born with…well, a fortune, poetry is a pretty awful profession. And what happens if you don’t particularly want or like to teach?

You’re also digging, digging into some of the messiest terrain around—your own psyche. Worse, there’s the terrible fact that there is all too often an inverse relationship between a poem’s intrinsic worth and its financial worth. Which is to say that bad poetry sells.

Then there’s not much support out there for being a poet. Novels are sexy, everybody venerates a Hemingway or Steinbeck. But a poet, who has produced a slim little book of sixty poems or so—the fruit of two years of sitting alone with her thoughts and feelings? It sort of pales next to a 600-page novel.

Right—so now we get to chicken and egg: does the poetry create the madness, or do crazy people decide to become poets? Well, the age-old question has now been solved, and by a Harvard man no less. Here, from the American Psychological Association, is what the authors have to say:

There isn't a link between mental illness and the actual process of creating, says psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg, MD, of Harvard Medical School, who has studied Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners and other highly creative individuals. Rather, he argues that mental illnesses such as anxiety, thought disorder and depression disrupt the cognitive and emotional processes necessary for successful creativity.

I agree—but there’s something that has to be acknowledged: it may be that the depression of creative people is distinct from the depression of the rest of us. Business people, plumbers, doctors have some external yardstick against which they can measure themselves. But creative people—and especially artists and poets—have no such thing. The question, “am I any good?” awaits by the bedside in the morning, perches on the shoulder for the rest of the day, sours your morning coffee, and stalks you, side by side, throughout the day.

It was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life—resolve the issue with the cello, that had led to self-inflicted bites on my arms, and three or four spectacular choked auditions. In the space of two or three weeks, I went through madness and came out the other end.

Two or three weeks?

Sorry—a lifetime….

Two Wings and a Lady

Cuba y Puerto Rico son

De un pájaro las dos alas

It’s a famous quote from a poem by Lola Rodríguez de Tió, and can be translated roughly as “Cuba and Puerto Rico are two wings of the same bird.”

Well if true, it may be that the wings of the bird are flying in completely different directions.

From the video below, it seems that the Cuban wing is set to soar. Raúl Castro has had to face the inevitable: the economy, supported all those years by the Iron Curtain buying Cuba’s sugar at inflated prices, was broke. The fields—five million acres of them—were overrun with a weed called marabú (marabou.) Nor is it just a weed—it’s highly invasive and thorny. If you attack it with a machete—pretty much the only thing at hand in lightly mechanized Cuba—you’ll end up bloody at the end of the day.

The buildings are falling down in Havana, and the state workers, who are supposed to repair the houses, are backlogged and slow to respond. How slow? One woman interviewed has waited 16 years with her ceiling propped up with four-by-fours. She worries that the roof will collapse every time it rains.

Seventy percent of the food has to be imported; supplies in the state-run shops are scant. Doctors make twenty-five dollars a month; one doctor interviewed makes a better living selling copper tubing on the side.

And so, you say, how can the wing be flapping skyward?

Well, Cuba’s economy grew 3% last year, and is expected to grow about the same this year as well. Sure, it’s not quite the 3.6% that Castro wanted, but it’s not far off.

And by allowing 181 jobs to be done by licensed private individuals, the government has at last introduced some incentive to work. In the past, there was a saying, “the government pretends to pay us; we pretend to work.” Now, there’s the beginning of an independent, free market economy.

And let’s face it, where was Miami before the Cubans arrived?

My friend Harry has a story. In those days when Harry was selling shoes, he entered a small shop, got tossed out, and went to a café. Still burning with the humiliation, he overheard a conversation among the boys—a group of middle-aged guys who were complaining: the damned Cubans had come and taken all the jobs away in Puerto Rico. Harry turned to address them.

“If the Cubans are working and you are not, it’s because they are NOT sitting in cafés drinking beer at 10 o’clock in the morning. They came with nothing and got a bike and sold what they could sell and now they have multinational corporations and live in gated communities. Oh, and I’m not Cuban but Puerto Rican….”

Which will explain why the Puerto Rican wing seems to be plummeting.

La producción propia es la tarea urgente contra la dependencia de fondos federales en Puerto Rico

That’s one of the headlines in today’s El Nuevo Día. Economists are urging us—as they have for all the twenty odd years I’ve lived here, to create jobs to avoid dependency on federal funds.

And on the double, since 24,200 fewer people are working here on the island than last year. Granted, that may not be a problem, since we are also shrinking in population, but government (the largest employer on the island) is reporting 20,600 fewer jobs this year than last.

Here’s Caribbean Business Report on the subject:

Puerto Rico’s population was pegged at 3,725,789 in the 2010 Census, down from the 3,808,610 registered in the 2000 Census. It marked the first time the island population had declined between census counts. The 2010 Census also showed there were 4.7 million Puerto Ricans living in the states, marking the first time more Puerto Ricans lived stateside than on the island. Only one state, Michigan, registered a drop in population in the 2010 Census, dipping 0.6 percent.

It’s happened before—in the Great Depression, droves of Puerto Ricans left, primarily workers who would man the factories of the (then) industrialized North East. Who’s leaving now?

Young professionals.

Which is why the article in Caribbean Business Report ends thus:

The population drop of nearly 83,000 over the last 10 years and the continuing exodus raises the prospect of less federal funding for Puerto Rico, increased pressure on the financially ailing public-pension system and a dramatically aging population with fewer financial resources.

Yes and no.

I’m sitting in a terrific local business, Poet’s Passage, run by a great lady, and named in fact, Lady. She explained this curious fact by noting that her father’s family came from Australia via Scotland, where they were all lords and ladies. (Tactfully, I never inquired as to the exact circumstances of the move to Australia).

And Lady has been here since 11AM—busy getting her sister store adjoining the café ready for an activity tonight. Which means that she will be here until the wee hours of the morning.

“There’s money in poetry,” she told me once, “and I sat down with the board of directors of WesternBank and convinced them—I’d made a great business plan. And in six years of business, I’ve never missed a payment.”

She’s less person than dynamo, raising the emotional temperature by several degrees every time she comes into the café. She kisses everyone; she calls out, “Hi, Marc!” from fifty feet away. She’s home-schooling her child or she’s painting one of her poems onto a piece of canvas or she’s busy telling a customer about poetry night, every Tuesday night at 7 PM. She admits it privately—some of the poetry heard there may not last in the canon of Puerto Rican / Latin American literature, but that’s not the point. She’s seen poets grow, as she has; she’s seen self-esteem bloom. It’s a space, a necessary space.

An embracing space. How embracing? The gentleman at the table two doors down is busy working at his computer. He also serves me coffee—and very good it is—when he’s working. How many other workers choose to hang out at their workplace when not on the job? (I except bars….)

Lady dropped out of high school to help in the family business. But it hasn’t stopped her. “Who’s your favorite female poet of the 20^th century,” she once asked me, and we went on to talk about Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore—an army of great poets. I was sweating to hold up my end of the conversation. 

The only resource Puerto Rico has is an amazing human potential. And looking at Lady charge into her café, greet the customers, kiss the staff, give the order to clean the bathrooms, and then take a dirty plate off the table while kissing the customer—I’m convinced.

The two wings can soar upward again.