Ashley Judd and Carolyn Heilbrun Kick Ass

Asses are getting kicked.

So as you've heard, actress Ashley Judd is on a steroid medication which causes her fabulous cheeks to do a slight chipmunk thing. And because she's a fabulous looking actress and famous and a woman, the free world and probably the world-in-chains has been abuzz, not with concern about her health but with rumors about cosmetic surgery (not happening) and the like.

Being an IMDB addict I was predisposed to like Ashley Judd. I already knew she had a degree in French literature from the University of Kentucky where she also studied cultural anthropology art history, theater, and women's studies. I am not surprised by her feminism, but I am proud of it, especially of her calling out of women.  Women are major contributors to the problem.

(The problem is constant attention to women's bodies. The two major contributors to this debasing perspective are women and men.)

Lindy West, at Jezebel, is ready (as is any woman worth her vagina) to rename sports arenas and the entire Rose Parade--in spirit--in Ashly Judd's honor. West's is the best analysis and response I've read.

In further support of Judd and in further praise of her assessment of "patriarchy" I quote Caroline G. Heilbrun's essay, "Virginia Woolf in Her Fifties," from Hamlet's Mother and Other Women (Columbia University Press). Heilbrun left Columbia because she would not live with that level of arrogant sexism at work, day in, day out. "Woolf would have liked, one guesses, to have restored to all women what their talents deserved and their sex denied them."


A few sentences later, in a statement I have been trying, for a while now, to work into conversations with writers, women, friends, men, malefactors (hence I have bolded it), she calls out the patriarchy, stressing it ain't just men who are the problem.  Ashly Judd may have read this book and if not this book she has assuredly read other equally clear and subtly outraged statements.  Ms. Judd, you are one brainy, strong sister.

The moment one begins to criticize the destinies of women, even in a less than wholly serious way, the patriarchy (by no means composed entirely of men) feels that art is betrayed.

I  have health issues and find some women as judgmental (but more, fearful) as some men, and sometimes more so. So because I am a woman and an imperfect woman in a cutthroat competitive field (poetry), I gotta again thank the woman for speaking up. All a person can do is accept, and trust there is a vengeful a.k.a. merciful correcting influence in the universe.
 

Helen Vendler, the Godhead, how connected ARE poets

Aren't poets even a little closer to the Godhead than civilians? Freud's famous "Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me" which in my life translates to--Where I go, there I am--has become a truism. The poet as prophet. I love that idea. It's aloe on my extreme sensitivity. Helen Vendler, writing of Charles Simic ("A World of Foreboding" in Soul Says), not Freud, disagrees.

"I am wary of vaguely mystical claims made for poetry and the other arts--as wary as I am of ethical claims and civic claims, and of truth claims."

Okay. That serves as a refutation of the "moral" majority or ugly right-wing claims of closeness to God (as if bigots and haters are close to any form of divinity). She further writes, "Poems, like all human fabrications from straw huts to theology, are made to our measure and by our measure, and are not above or beyond us."

I'm not going to refute her with claims of channeling or a sure insight into God's/Goddess's hand touching Yeats' brow. So very much goes into genius, as into good fortune. There has to be some opportunity; or or or: wealthy parents, a patron, a good school system, a kindly neighbor with a huge library or paints to lend out, an apprenticeship with a master artist, receptiveness, historical timing, race-class-gender good fortune, nature, nurture. (Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers is a book-length description of fate, although he doesn't use that word.)

More Vendler: "Artists make us see many aspects of being, but none of them seem either spectral or metaphysical, nor do I feel admitted to a form of 'clairvoyance,' in the usual occult sense of the word."

Sometimes, when I'm in a poem of my own, I find myself trying to describe a sense of "presence," a sureness I have at least sometimes, and sometimes have to have to continue, of connection. When I posted (here) my poem "Incorporeal" (pub. in Terrain.org) I explained why I put "divine" in lower case. In my one and only poetry workshop, the Pulitzer-prize winning poet opened my little fifteen minutes of attention with a joke--I thought you meant the 300-pound transsexual--and waited for his laugh; then spent the rest of my time sheepishly asking about references. I was too terrified to use upper case; that kind of comment reverberates.

My point in the above, other than ax-grinding which grinds me down more than anyone else, is that even a poet's use of divine-y words can be called into question. Back to Vendler. I'm not sure why a critic needs to explain to an audience of poets and deep readers her belief that poets aren't Supremely Keyed-in, just fabricators, though I appreciate many of her insights, such as writing that James Schuyler is a pastoral albeit urban poet.

I admire her to no end, mind you. A woman born in 1933 excelling in academia which then was--and I apologize for the truth--male, male-centered? It could be that very interchange, struggle . . . influenced her perspective. She made herself what she is.

She's not keyed-in, however. She is insightful.