woody woodpecker
bills for drilling and drumming rapid and repeated impacts protect
the brain a small brain repeated pecking at high decelerations
drum rolls delivered in under a second
O—O O O O—O—O O O
woody woodpecker drilling the telegraph drilling holes in electric
poles drilling time tables became rounder cuter less demented
was it necessary to put on weight? nevertheless an aggressive lunatic
no longer did the bird go insane without a legitimate reason
he explained rocket propulsion
O—O O O O—O—O O O
she slipped her voice into his audition would not be credited until
pecking a hole in the screen misguided missile with no language barrier
world-wide pecking out her name
O—O O O O—O—O O O
§
Yew man
Y—Yew man eating his hat—isolation…. The Ego or superego man
& then the madness tailing off
– Lynette Roberts
pushed up push up
work it work it work it
got above himself
I am the Übermensch you said
this is not true to the yew
here on the ground is dull grey green
feather leaves gentle on eyes
too cold to step out a roundel
here we go round
the mulberry bush the mulberry bush
so early cold and frosty morning
join hands and dance overcoats broken stove
inside the trunk her shrivelled form
holds up ancillary stack
as fern leaf sprouts on bark
van man has driven up the top
hat man so far up he has disappeared
rubbed by the friction of bird song
forcing thru pin holes
bird taps out finely drilled
he has pushed out pushed through
the top of his hat pierced drum
found air clearer a bald head
and light eternally wan
Llanfeugan Church, Pencelli
§
Niki St Phalle
Or “The entrance of the only woman in the breast of the group”
(1960 The New Realists)
Saint Sebastian or Portrait of my lover
Shirt with nails banged in
Head dart board, with darts thrown in
Empowering
If you do that
If you knock the nails in
If you shoot the rifle
If you hold the rifle, butt hard against your shoulder
If you shoot the plaster
If the worst meal you ever cooked pours out
Pow pow pow
Saint Sebastian
Is it you too?
It’s the menstrual flow
Flou
Femme éclatée
He was a stuffed shirt
“I never shot God only the church”
Christ you pointed a gun at him
and helped Sebastian to die all over again
and properly this time
(1986)
§
Carnal Knowledge
It ceased to give pleasure
the concave body which made full
became thin
Even the scooping gesture
became blunted and dull
So they held up instead
the poem above their heads
which signalled the transparence of one
for the other a moment to be gone
“This woman is reduced to a line
perhaps not even implied
What do we know of her?
Something of an intellectual bore?”
He did allow a gesture of analysis
for his seed was irretrievable
a cloud-rift of “there might have been”
an adjunct to the morning-after kiss
(1976)
§
Dear Emily
Thanks for inviting me to take part in the online feature you’re editing with Elizabeth-Jane for Chicago Review on the subject of “Me Too.” I’m sure it will be a really interesting and important collection of work.
As you say, I’ve been publishing on feminist issues for decades. “Me Too” is something that’s happening in the present moment, but the issues go back a long way, so I’m sending two recent and also two early poems. If I look at my work and the period it covers, it seems that things were far worse when I was at university in the 1970s, though I was also more vulnerable. If you want overt sexual oppression, both in bed and the tutorial, it exists in “Carnal Knowledge.” The 1980s were for me a time of feminist liberation, both in the workplace and in poetry, thanks to avant-garde women artists, such as Niki St Phalle. Both of these poems were published in The Sex of Art (1987), recently reprinted by Shearsman in a series of selected first books by poets.
“Yew Man” was written in Wales, while I was reading the letters of Lynette Roberts to Robert Graves about his tree alphabet (Graves was not amused). Her remark about the male superego threw me back to the 1970s and something that was said to me, only half-jokingly about the Übermensch.
“Woody Woodpecker” was one of my favourite cartoon characters when I was a little girl – I loved his anarchic violent character. I only discovered recently that “he’”was voiced by a woman, who had to remain anonymous. This is from a series of bird poems inspired by Ada Lovelace and her desire for flight and freedom.
All good wishes
Frances