The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Mon 2/11/2008) [View All]

[RetroLounge]

Lives of the Nineteenth-Century Poetesses

As girls they were awkward and peculiar,
wept in church or refused to go at all.
their mothers saw right away no man would marry them.
So they must live at the sufferance of others,
timid and queer, as governesses out of Chekhov,
malnourished on theology, boiled eggs and tea,
but given to outbursts of criesthat embarrass everyone.
After the final quarrel, the grand
renunciation, they retire upstairs to the attic,
or to the small room in the cheap off-season hotel,
and write, Today I burned all your letters, or
I dreamed the magnolia blazed like an avenging angel,
and when I woke, I knew I was in Hell.
No one is surprised when they die young,
having left their savings to a wastrel nephew,
to be remembered for a handful
of "minor but perfect" lyrics,
a passion for jam or charades,
and a letter still preserved in the family archives:
"I send you here with the papers of your aunt,
who died last Tuesday in the odor of sanctity,
although a little troubled in her mind
by her habit, much disapproved of by the ignorant,
of writing down the secrets of her heart."

Katha Pollitt

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Katha Pollitt has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her 1982 book Antarctic Traveller won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have been published in many magazines and are reprinted in many anthologies, most recently The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006).

Born in New York City, she was educated at Harvard and the Columbia School of the Arts. She has lectured at dozens of colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brooklyn College, UCLA, the University of Mississippi, and Cornell. She has taught poetry at Princeton and the 92nd Street Y, and women's studies at the New School University.

More at http://kathapollitt.blogspot.com/

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:hi:

RL