Post by moira on Sept 13, 2008 14:00:48 GMT 2
This contribution courtesy of Joyce Nower. It is an extract from a much longer essay entitled, The Poetics of Housework published in her column “Intersections” in The Alsop Review. It can be read in full here:
www.alsopreview.com/gazebo/messages/2306/18909.html?1220730386
The Poetics of Housework
Pat Mainardi, in her 1970 classic "The Politics of Housework," observes that "the essential fact of housework" men recognize "right from the very beginning," is that "it stinks." With this cryptic statement behind her, Mainardi lists her Top Five "dirty chores": "buying groceries, carting them home and putting them away; cooking meals and washing dishes and pots; doing the laundry; digging out the place when things get out of control; and washing floors."
In my first essay on domestic imagery, I gave an historical overview of its rise in Post World War II poetry,* and then considered the imagery of food preparation. In the present essay I take a look at what's left: laundry, ironing, dusting, as well as some other activities not accounted for in Mainardi's list. Are they all "dirty chores"? We'll see presently.
Let's start with laundry. The only poem I came up with that has a description of the laundry process itself contains a comparison that is, to say the least, a gross exaggeration; it is Judith Minty's "Making Music" (G 2000). Minty compares the sounds made by the laundry her mother stacked in the basement in front of the mangle, or wringer, with the music she hears on the radio while driving at night. The mother's "music" is the pressed white sheets. Her "instrument" is the wringer or mangle: "her music heaped in a wicker basket beside her" and "with her knee/moved the pedal that made her instrument go." Minty's "sheet" is the "sheet of the highway"; her "instrument," her car; and her music, the hum of the motor, the thump of the bodies of dead animals in the road, and the rock beat on the radio. The inaccuracy and inappropriateness of the metaphor are jarring, at best!
Not only does the comparison illustrate a deep generation gap - this I can deal with - but the metaphor of "music" itself is wrong: it is an extravagant, far-fetched, almost compassionless, conceit. I remember my own mother on Monday laundry days, in the basement laundry room, standing over two hot tubs of water, one soapy, one clear, with the sweat beading on her forehead, her hair obscured by a kerchief tied with a knot on top, and her hands rough and red, her fingernails split from wringing out the laundry.... Music?
But laundry does have metaphoric potential. Its attributes of cleanliness and purity are used by Rita Dove in the poem "Taking in Wash" (T&B). Beulah's mother protects the laundry she washes for other people from the drunken father in the same fierce way that she protects her daughter from the father's drunken sexual attentions. Here the insistence on maintaining the cleanliness of the laundry and, by extension, the innocence of the daughter, are paralleled. A simple domestic chore extends beyond the description of action to a deeper meaning. In this poem, the gap between metaphor and reality is easily and naturally bridgeable.
In Robin Behn's "Whether or Not There Are Apples"(PNC),"laundry" comes in the form of a dress that once belonged to a beloved person and now belongs to the narrator. It hangs drying on the line, evoking for an instant warmth and a smell of apples. At that moment the dress becomes an amulet protecting the narrator against the coldness of death. But the dress quickly reverts to a simple dress, and the "I" wonders if she'll be able to die alone, that is, be able "to cross/the quick blue shift without you." (A nice vagueness in the use of "blue shift.") But if so, how will she go: "... will you be wanting to take me/in colorless windrows of wind/instead of my long brown hair?" The laundry image, extended into memory, comfort, and death - both a past death and the prospective death of the narrator - is let go as the imagined end irresolutely shifts between an aging fragility and paleness, and a robust and youthful physicality.
www.alsopreview.com/gazebo/messages/2306/18909.html?1220730386
The Poetics of Housework
Pat Mainardi, in her 1970 classic "The Politics of Housework," observes that "the essential fact of housework" men recognize "right from the very beginning," is that "it stinks." With this cryptic statement behind her, Mainardi lists her Top Five "dirty chores": "buying groceries, carting them home and putting them away; cooking meals and washing dishes and pots; doing the laundry; digging out the place when things get out of control; and washing floors."
In my first essay on domestic imagery, I gave an historical overview of its rise in Post World War II poetry,* and then considered the imagery of food preparation. In the present essay I take a look at what's left: laundry, ironing, dusting, as well as some other activities not accounted for in Mainardi's list. Are they all "dirty chores"? We'll see presently.
Let's start with laundry. The only poem I came up with that has a description of the laundry process itself contains a comparison that is, to say the least, a gross exaggeration; it is Judith Minty's "Making Music" (G 2000). Minty compares the sounds made by the laundry her mother stacked in the basement in front of the mangle, or wringer, with the music she hears on the radio while driving at night. The mother's "music" is the pressed white sheets. Her "instrument" is the wringer or mangle: "her music heaped in a wicker basket beside her" and "with her knee/moved the pedal that made her instrument go." Minty's "sheet" is the "sheet of the highway"; her "instrument," her car; and her music, the hum of the motor, the thump of the bodies of dead animals in the road, and the rock beat on the radio. The inaccuracy and inappropriateness of the metaphor are jarring, at best!
Not only does the comparison illustrate a deep generation gap - this I can deal with - but the metaphor of "music" itself is wrong: it is an extravagant, far-fetched, almost compassionless, conceit. I remember my own mother on Monday laundry days, in the basement laundry room, standing over two hot tubs of water, one soapy, one clear, with the sweat beading on her forehead, her hair obscured by a kerchief tied with a knot on top, and her hands rough and red, her fingernails split from wringing out the laundry.... Music?
But laundry does have metaphoric potential. Its attributes of cleanliness and purity are used by Rita Dove in the poem "Taking in Wash" (T&B). Beulah's mother protects the laundry she washes for other people from the drunken father in the same fierce way that she protects her daughter from the father's drunken sexual attentions. Here the insistence on maintaining the cleanliness of the laundry and, by extension, the innocence of the daughter, are paralleled. A simple domestic chore extends beyond the description of action to a deeper meaning. In this poem, the gap between metaphor and reality is easily and naturally bridgeable.
In Robin Behn's "Whether or Not There Are Apples"(PNC),"laundry" comes in the form of a dress that once belonged to a beloved person and now belongs to the narrator. It hangs drying on the line, evoking for an instant warmth and a smell of apples. At that moment the dress becomes an amulet protecting the narrator against the coldness of death. But the dress quickly reverts to a simple dress, and the "I" wonders if she'll be able to die alone, that is, be able "to cross/the quick blue shift without you." (A nice vagueness in the use of "blue shift.") But if so, how will she go: "... will you be wanting to take me/in colorless windrows of wind/instead of my long brown hair?" The laundry image, extended into memory, comfort, and death - both a past death and the prospective death of the narrator - is let go as the imagined end irresolutely shifts between an aging fragility and paleness, and a robust and youthful physicality.