Essay in the Boston Review: Smothered to Smithereens: the poetics of motherhood, by Stephen Burt.

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To portray life with small children—so it seemed to Mayer and Notley, to Owen, and for that matter to Olds—one had to break just the standards of form, of closure, of compactness, that Plath (even in Ariel) worked to retain. One had to show language and time as unfixed, uncertain, as in the speech of preliterate children, or in the day-to-day, hour-to-hour reschedulings that children (even older ones, and even given quality day care) require. A poet had to aspire less to immortality than to immediacy, to turn away from made things and toward processes, toward some sense of poems as always—uneasily—shared. Owen called one poem “There Are Too Many of Me.” Notley’s “Three Strolls” encompassed the bleariness, the blurry sense of self, the cuteness, the resistance to cuteness, the sense of confinement, the infinite expectations, and the stretched-out sense of time: “how much of what goes on gets stopped & started.”

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March 8th, 2010 | Category: overheard | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL