Poetics - VIII

VIII

Paternal authority has been distinguished by its absence during this century, which has made it possible for women to be active in new spheres. But the world of art is paradoxically saturated in myths and prejudices, with the result that creative women are still marginalised. Even when the most recent generations are studied, again and again one sees women being given a peripheral existence in relation to the ‘real’ one. It is men’s activities that emerge as respectable and valid, their experiential world that has priority in the question of an accepted public form, while women’s works are viewed by many as not inspiring.

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The term ‘women’s literature’ has been used partly in order to make visible works that have been ignored, and partly in an attempt to provide women with access to a number of institutions. This was needed, but at the same time the term has become an encumbrance, as it points to a deviation from a norm. The concept is clumsy and discriminating. It makes women’s books into a subsection of literature. What one might wish is that they receive a worthy treatment, and be read and evaluated according to the same criteria that are applied to literature written by men. What one might further dream is that these problems may soon be a chapter in the past. So that the concentration can focus on the thing that matters: the works.

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It is no good issuing bans on hypotaxis or any other phenomenon for one sex. It is the same words that are available, the same syntactic possibilities, the same techniques.That female and male poets sometimes use language differently is another matter. If their works are different, it is because now and then the two sexes choose to focus on different areas. The themes are important for aesthetics, but so is the point of view, the eyes that see.
Close studies alternate as a rule with narrow vision, but to zoom in on what is close is not the same as to say that the larger perspectives are absent. To assert, as some do, that details are to a special degree the domain of women, is likewise false. Proust’s work is a denial of this point of view; his works demonstrate precisely what can be attained with absorption. The posing of major problems is not in itself coincidental with artistically more successful poems. If linguistic energy is not present, the poem loses its strength. The small things can point to the larger ones, just as a stone from a mountainside consists of the same material and has the same colour and structure as the mountainside. In the individual stone is contained the whole mountainside.
The concepts of female and male aesthetics must be strongly muanced if they are to have meaning. Material and point of view give birth to their own special artistic techniques, but aesthetics is above all an individual matter. A personal staging of the script.

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As much poetry written by women has revealed, the blood’s secret desires are in all probability quite identical in both sexes, but the stereotyped image still distinguishes between a female and a male sexuality, in which the woman, in spite of her seductive qualities, is perceived as the one who submits, the man as the active and acting one. As human beings are to a high degree defined by sexuality, this is one important reason why many people find it hard to ascribe the same authority to female art as to male art. Women with power and self-awareness are often destructive of men’s sexuality in our cultural latitudes. Or powerful and demanding women invite and egg on men’s aggression.
How much men’s sexual images of women mean for women’s self-comprehension, attitude and way of behaving, and for men’s perception of women outside the sexual sphere, cannot really be measured, but it is obvious that many sexual fantasies are still a barrier to the viewing of female art. Woman is not an image. She is a living being. But very few men are able to see that a woman can be passionate and a thinking individual at the same time. That she can have a wish to be the one the man dreams of, partly because she has a desire and a longing to be it, partly because she has pride and strength for it - and be in possession of a high degree of awareness. That she has the ability to abandon herself and at the same time master a staging, and that she can do other things besides be an object for man’s lust and desire. Or make him into an object for that kind of thing.That in other words she is a composite being. On the other hand, women who emancipate themselves have also been had a tendency to squander their humility. Freedom is not to make men weak. That is either tyranny or great stupidity.

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The body is articulated in poetry. I can write neither without my sex nor my history. The point of view in my poems wants to reveal that a female I senses and speaks, but to relegate art created by women to an autonomous counter-world is the same as letting it degenerate into a ghetto.
The problem is of course somewhere else. In the sexual porosity and the ability to empathise with the other are all-important. In the inception of a poem receptivity is a necessity, but so without doubt are discharges associated with male sexuality. Both parts are present in the process of any poem.
One state is common to both men and women when sexuality and art are involved: the moment when integrity and personality are broken down. In sexuality, when one aproaches the animal, in art the place where the writing I is saturated and completely filled, where the I has no face.

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In the poem’s inception process I am not a sexually determined being. I do not think of myself as sex in the moment of writing, there I am simply absorbed. I am bi-sexual, androgynous or hermaphroditic – which is by no means demonic, but in the poem one can see that explicitly or implicitly a female sensing subject appears. In my poems there are traces of female perfume.

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In poetry the sexes are related as brother and sister.