How Important Are Poets Afterall

My husband doesn't think so but all the same, he has trended over the twenty-seven years I have known him towards supporting what I am called to do. It wasn't always so and in fact, he woke me up to a startling conclusion about art in general very early on. He dismissed the idea that I was somehow special or knew special things that set me apart and literally, above, others.
It was clear and simple to him and now that I understand him, I have to agree. I didn't agree then and it put a wedge between us for many years. My kidnapper was an artist and a pretty good one albeit, a lazy one. Therefore, my husband's assumption about it, made when he was merely a boy (who originated from peasants in another country, the fellahin) wasn't based on his knowledge about art or artists, but it was a type of jealousy that I didn't understand then. My self esteem was so low that it never even occurred to me that someone might be jealous on my behalf. I was the jealous one I thought.

He was jealous of a ghost that simply wouldn't go live in his netherworld. He was jealous of a crime and a sin that masqueraded as a love affair. Most of all, he knew he had hold of a person who was beautiful and naive, wise beyond all possibility and flukishly so and he knew our marriage was completely out of his ordinary. Not mine of course because I was trending towards being a gypsy anyway. My particular wisdom always was a wisdom. It was bred of the communication of my mother's way of thinking, the Catholic church and my chubby, impoverished childhood. I understood people. I loved people and animals and had a tremendous ability to tolerate defficiency of means and looks, and very little ability to tolerate arrogance and cruelty. I was always the consummate underdog. Still am. Perhaps the reader will at once recognize what I recognized much later on in the story and that is, I was born a Shia. I just didn't know it but luckily, I recognized it just in time. Just in time to hope to make some sense of it to the world which is still in a drowsy and disillusioned state. Still ignorant of the inherent laws of the Creator and how that matters whether one knows it or not or agrees to it.

What would Alice do?

She would have left the situation because it seems to me that whatever Alice doesn't agree with, she leaves aside or behind. I don't know her perhaps, not well enough to say that, but the way she communicates her core beliefs leads me to believe that she would be smarter than to let some dumb guy hold her back. It is a feminist rationale in my opinion. Free the whales, global warming and the inherent laws of feminism that make it essential that a poet have a gender from which to speak.

What does that mean? I'll tell you.

When I began writing poetry in earnest...I say in earnest because I've written poems for more than a quarter century but not like I've written them in the past ten or so years....I knew right away that in order to succeed, a woman could choose a variety of paths. Competing with the menfolk, agreeing with the menfolk, abusing the menfolk, appealing in a sexual way to the menfolk, write only for women or simply close one's eyes to the fact that being a woman stipulates that they are using one of those tactics. In short, I resisted being a feminist and lo! my first actual published poem was published in one of the most feminist of all the ezines during that era. Hurly Gurly of Lunatic Park and the professor soandso poem in which I cite a fake speech given by a fake professor who comments on feminism. I couldn't help but supress my disappointment that the best I could do was a feminist journal. I also harbored a secret criticism of the editor who had selected the poem, that she missed the fact that the word "itch" could mean (to an unfriendly reader) a state of being infected with yeast organisms below in the girl parts of the body. Hurly Gurly though, isn't as self conscious as me apparently.

What is feminism exactly? I have my theories you know, as a muslima. In my estimation and because of my marital history and mostly my in depth study of the Quran, feminism is the unavoidable state of society in which women take control because men are failing in their role as designated leaders. I know this from my own experience as well as having been a witness to society for a certain period of time and in various cultural mileaus. Men are designated by Allah to execute and lead anyone in their care towards pious, knowledgable submission to inherent laws that we cannot change and ought not to ignore. One could say that in the field of poetry, poets like Alice Notley not only deserve praise but would be hard pressed to avoid it because their male counterparts are failing to produce work that makes a difference either historically or currently. Ignoring these laws (and feminism would arch her eyebrows and smack me in the face parts to hear this) doesn't give success to either side, male or female. It simply turns into a never-ending power struggle i.e. the gender gap and gender war we are all so accustomed to dealing with in political speeches (Sarah Palin to Hilary Clinton) and in our daily lives. It is an unresolved tug o'war that has turned not only nasty, but violent (especially in the West).