Sonnets Uncorseted

1 She was twenty-two. He was fifty-three, a duke, a widower with ten children. They met in Paris, each in exile from the English Civil War. Virginal and terrified, still she agreed to marry him. Though women were mere chattel spinsterhood made you invisible in the sixteen hundreds. Marriage was arranged —hers a rare exception. Despite a dowry a woman never could own property. Your womb was just for rent. Birth control contrivances—a paste of ants, cow dung mashed with honey, tree bark with pennyroyal— all too often failed the applicant. 2 If anything went wrong you bled to death. You bore & bore & bore as you were taught screaming sometimes for days in childbirth. To bring forth was a woman’s fate but not for Margaret Cavendish, childless Duchess of Newcastle. After the head of Charles the First had been detached and the Restoration seated a new monarch, she and the duke returned to his estate where nothing discomposed their paradise. How rare, two lovers scribbling away, admiring each other’s words in privacy. He: polymath, equestrian, playwright. She: philosopher, fantasist, poet. 3 His the first book on the art of dressage, till then an untried humane approach to teaching classic paces in the man è ge, the grace of the levade and the piaffe. Hers the goofy utopian fantasy, The Blazing-World. The heroine is adrift with her kidnapper in a wooden skiff. A storm comes up conveniently, and they are blown to the North Pole. He freezes to death but she is carried to a contiguous North Pole, a new world where the emperor falls in love with her, makes her his empress and cedes her all his powers over clans of wildly invented creatures. 4 Poems, plays, philosophical discourses on Platonick love, a chapter on her Birth, Breeding, and Life and an Apology for Writing so Much Upon this Book about herself, even some inquiries into science… years in chosen isolation the Duchess filled with words, and the Duke with reassurance. Even this outburst did not discomfit him: Men are so unconscionable and cruel … they would fain Bury us in their...beds as in a grave…[T]he truth is, we live like Bats or Owls, Labour like Beasts, and die like Worms. Pepys called her mad, conceited, and ridiculous. 5 Virginia Woolf, in 1928, found her Quixotic and high-spirited as well as somewhat crack-brained and bird witted but went on to see in her a vein of authentic fire. Eighty-odd years on, flamboyant, eccentric, admittedly vain, now she’s a respected foremother among women of letters. Founded in 1997, the Margaret Cavendish Society — “international, established to provide communication between scholars worldwide”— is plumped with learned papers, confabs, dues. She’s an aristocrat who advocates —words worn across centuries—for women’s rights. 6 I went to college in the nineteen forties read Gogol, Stendhal, Zola, Flaubert. Read Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and wrote exams that asked: contrast and compare. Male novelists, male profs, male tutors, not a single woman on the faculty nor was there leaven found among the poets I read and loved: G.M. Hopkins, A.E. Housman, Auden, Yeats, only Emily (not quite decoded or yet in the canon). Ten years later, I struggled to break in the almost all-male enclave of poetry. Here’s a small glimpse in the the hierarchy: famed Robert Lowell praising Marianne 7 as the best woman poet in America, put down by Langston Hughes, bless his egalitarian soul, who rose at the dinner to pronounce her the best Negro woman poet in the nation. Terrified of writing domestic poems, poems pungent with motherhood, anathema to the prevailing clique of male pooh-bahs, somehow I balanced teaching freshman comp half-time with kids, meals, pets, errands, spouse. I wrote in secret, read drafts on the phone with another restless mother, Anne Sexton, and poco a poco our poems filled up the house. Then one of us sold a poem to The New Yorker. A week later, the other was welcomed in Harper’s. 8 But even  as we published our first books the visiting male bards required care. We drove them to their readings far and near, thence to the airport just in time to make their flight to the next gig.You drive like a man, they said by way of praise, and if a poem of ours seemed worthy they said,you write like a man. When asked what woman poet they read, with one voice they declaimed, Emily Dickinson. Saintly Emily safely dead. Modern women poets were dismissed as immature, their poems pink with the glisten of female organs. The virus of their disdain hung in the air but women were now infected with ambition. 9 We didn’t merely saunter decade by decade. We swept on past de Beauvoir and Friedan, and took courage from Carolyn Kizer’s knife-blade Pro Femina:I will speak about women of letters for I’m in the racket,urging, Stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep with editors. If a woman is to write, Virginia Woolf has Mary Beton declare, she has to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door, a sacred space where Shakespeare’s sister Judith might have equaled his prodigious gift or not. She might have simply floated there, set loose in the privilege of privacy, her self unwritten, under no one else’s eyes… 10 Oh, Duchess, come hurdle five centuries to a land of MFA’s in poetry, of journals in print and even more online, small presses popping up like grapes on vines, reading staking place in every cranny, prizes for first books, some with money. Come to this apex of tenured women professors where sessions on gender and race fill whole semesters and students immerse themselves in women’s studies. Meet famous poets who are also unabashed mothers or singletons by choice or same-sex partners— black, Latina, Asian, native American, white , Christian, Muslim, Jew and atheist— come join us, Duchess Margaret Cavendish.