Girls in Poems with Emily Berry's 'Sweet Arlene' and Wanda Coleman's 'Letter to My Older Sister 5'

Trying to materialise

Francesca Woodman. From Space 2 Series, 1976

Here’s a question I like to think about: how can a woman live in a poem? And when I think about this question, mainly between seasons of MAFS Australia, a phrase from Emily Berry’s poem, ‘Sweet Arlene,’ plays in my mind,

Trying ‘to materialise’ describes very well the action of a poem. It feels to me as if a poem is energy trying to materialise. I think this is why so many writers have a caffeine problem. We need something to sharpen the edges. We are in the business of crystallisation.

Sweet Arlene

‘Sweet Arlene’ is an anxious, gothic, novelistic poem. It’s set in a ramshackle house where ‘we live above the mutilated floor’ under the questionable care of ‘Arlene’. You can listen to Berry reading the poem here. And here are some short extracts.

In Arlene’s house we live above the mutilated floor.

Arlene tells us: This is what you do. This is what you don’t.

We keep watch over the reddening ivy.

We’ve confessed to Arlene: knees to our chests

in the usual position, we repeated our ritual of shiver, breathe.

We recited our mantras but they came out crooked and strange.

I said: We’re afraid of Arlene’s house and we’re not safe in our bones.

We rattled and kept ourselves awake. We knocked and knocked.

Arlene gathered us up. She cradled us and shook us till we made

a sound like a rain stick and we tried to materialise: I tried to be

cheeks and hips and everything you need in a woman.

Sometimes ‘I’, sometimes ‘we,’ this might be the story of an individual, a group of girls or sisters, or a cluster of traumatised, disassociated selves. Berry’s fragile girl(s) have difficulty speaking and moving under their own volition. Having a voice (a vote, a say, the power to take a stand or make a complaint) is one way to tell a woman from a girl, or a subject from an object. The girls cannot quite round themselves out into a three-dimensional woman with ‘cheeks and hips’ and voices of their own. They speak in mantras, confession, gratitude or supplication, but even these received forms of speech are poorly executed and ineffective. They knock and knock like disembodied spirits at an Edwardian seance.

Materialisation seems to be the answer to the girls’ prayers, but the prayers fail and exhaust them. They make ‘a sound like a rain stick,’ which is to say, a sound like a sound that sounds like rain. It’s hard to imagine a dryer, more lifeless image. All the shamanic power that a rainstick ought to signify is emptied out. Without its elemental magic, a rainstick just announces the absence of water.¹

Georgia O’Keefe. Dry Waterfall 1943

Bodies and sonnets

White women have long been hyper-visible in poetry (providing the ‘cheeks and hips’), while lacking agency and voice. Think of any old sonnet. The celebrated woman (sometimes a feminized younger man) gets muddled up with gilded monuments and besmeared stones and all manner of austere memorials. ‘My verse your vertues fair shall eternize,’ says Spenser.² What about the unvirtuous bits, what happens to those? And who decides what’s virtuous and what must be kept out? There’s a heavy price to pay for poetic immortalization. I’m not sure I’d want to be eternized. It sounds noxious and deadly, too close to ‘etherized’ (Eliot’s ‘patient etherized upon a table;’ Plath’s ‘fumes’ and ‘opiates’). Putting a person into a poem is a hazardous business.

Berry’s anxious girls are a contemporary dicing with this eternizing tradition. They are manifestations of a nerviness I hear in contemporary women poets like Kate Kilalea and Sophie Collins as well as Emily Berry. Women poets have always made strange and interesting accommodations with the tradition that relentlessly turns them into beautiful objects and momento mori. Emily Dickinson’s speakers are ‘adjusted in the tomb.’ They have ‘marble feet,’ and ‘Nerves’ that ‘sit ceremonious like tombs,’ or they speak to us from beyond the grave (‘I heard a fly buzz when I died’).

Christina Rosetti sometimes uses the voice of a dead woman, too, and it blew my mind when I discovered that this was a thing Victorian women poets did. It’s as if they are compelled to figure inside their poems the deathly objectification they have historically been subject to. Here is Angela Leighton on this odd and pervasive tendency,

The subject of these poems cannot withstand the assumption from the ‘antique’ that a woman belongs on a vase, or perhaps in a poem.

‘Perhaps in a poem’ is the sucker punch.³ I’d only add that the woman who belongs on a vase or in a poem is a white woman and the women poets I am talking about, here, are white women poets. Poets of other identities have been much more radically diminished in the conventional Western canon. This is what Terrance Hayes’s ‘American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin’ has to say about the torturous price on the body of achieving lyric ‘song.’

I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat

Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.

The enjambment of ‘meat’ and ‘Grinder’ across two lines lets us know that this ‘disposal of the body’ is an absurd, sadistic process that takes place over time. There’s no tidy, euphemistic ‘eternizing.’ Sometimes a euphemism only piques the grisliness of what it conceals. In the HBO series, Succession, Tom eats an entire protected songbird. The etiquette of a napkin over the diner’s head only makes the act of consumption grosser and more ridiculous. There is no palatable or reasonable answer to the question of how a bird might be separated from its song, but something about the sonnet form brings into play this bizarre procedure.

Hayes’s poem uncovers the ‘something else: pain, ethics, economics, ideology’ where we might have been sold ‘pure aestheticism’ or effortless ‘lyric song’.⁴ ‘Meat’ and ‘bone’ prominently placed at the end of consecutive lines, gives us the sonnet as a machine for song and butchery, or song by means of butchery. The cartoon-violent conceit of bodily mutilation is required, because what I think this poem is taking on, formally (has to take on), is the wholesale white-out that is the conventional sonnet. The dominant tradition into which Hayes is writing (or the dominant tradition by way of which I am reading Hayes) tells white women subjects, ‘you must be quiet and still and virtuous to be here.’ For Hayes’s speaker, I imagine the mandate is something more like, ‘sing for us, but your body is incompatible with this space and must be removed by any means.’ The ingenious answer to this catch-22 situation is for the speaker to turn jailer and torturer. It’s as if the sonnet form itself is speaking without any anthropomorphized subject.

Letter to My Older Sister 5

It seems to me that white women’s bodies are expected in a lyric poem, because they have historically ‘meant’ beauty and virtue and other aesthetic values. A white woman knows she ‘belongs’ ‘in a poem,’ (Leighton) but must negotiate for volition and voice. In a sense they are already in there, part of the furniture. That baseline of presence does not seem to be a given for black and brown speakers in the same way. There are many traditions, of course, and poets make their own canons. Hayes has cited Wanda Coleman and her formal innovation, the American Sonnet, as a defining influence on his own work.⁵

Among Coleman’s twenty books of poetry and prose are several epistolary poems to an older sister who died between birth and christening. As her sister did not live long enough to be given a name, Coleman’s speaker ‘will gladly lend her one of mine.’ — ‘Georgiana.’⁶ Here, again, is a trade-off between the living and dead, girls and women. ‘Letter to My Older Sister 5’ starts like this,

dear Georgiana,

                 trying to do something to shake off this

                                 post holiday boohoohoo.

as you know I’ve been poking baby sis again.

she looks like

                 strawberry shortcake, but watch the hardtack

                                  underneath.

The register could not be further from the neuroticism of Arlene’s charges. Depression is dismissed as a ‘post holiday boohoohoo’ the speaker can’t ‘shake off’. Nurturing a friendship with her youger sister would take more ‘vital stuff than i have to bleed. put that on hold.’ Her mother’s lipstick canister is a ‘butt’ from which the ‘stick rose for duty’ in a faintly pornographic, sniggery manner. This is not a speaker who feels into her own unease. I feel she is working against time — ‘besieged and collapsing under the weight / of my gift’ — as if she has to thrust herself into the poem and keep it moving and get the hell out.

‘Letter to My Older Sister …’ presents itself as a simple recollection of biographical vignettes organised around a motif of red. We hear about a cute but vicious baby sister; the sting of ‘Mercurochrome’, an astringent red antiseptic; and the speaker’s mother applying make up. The reds are embodied — tasty, messy, painful, tender and bloody. ‘Baby sis’ looks sweet as ‘strawberry shortcake’ but with ‘hardtack / underneath’ that can ‘crack teeth.’ Mercurochrome smells cool and soothing, but applied to an ‘open sore’ it delivers a ‘stabbing burn’ that leaves an ‘ink-red splotch.’ ‘Mama’ has ‘rose-brown lips’ underneath her favourite lipstick in ‘sultry / red violet’ that fades to the ‘hue of sangria.’ And in the last stanza, there’s a lacerating coral reef where ‘rent flesh, first red / turns salt white.’ ‘First red’ sits there, shredded and bloody, hived off by the enjambment, evoking all kinds of painful transitions — menstruation, loss of virginity and childbirth all come to mind.

Betye Saar. Record for Hattie 1975. Assemblage of items belonging to the artist’s aunt. Photo: Tim Lanterman for Scottsdale Msueum of Art

It would be easy to read this poem as overly personal or straightforwardly confessional (whatever that means), but our feisty speaker gets the dig in first. She has a name for her own approach, almost a catchphrase — the ‘pangs-n-thangs of girlhood.’ The poem turns on this funny, acerbic-tender phrase, like the volta of a sonnet.

The pangs-n-thangs of girlhood are foremost on my

agenda of items suppressed.

they form the Barrier Reef of my consciousness

​​​​​​​                 ​​like shipwrecked

​​​​​​​    swabbies, drunk with trauma, washed inland to

                 ​a grimmer death

​​​​​​​ against the shore where rent flesh, first red, 

                 ​turns salt white.

‘Pangs-n-thangs’ is a marvellous phrase of tight rhyme, so tight as to have the effect of a guitar string strummed. It buzzes with connotations of all things teenage and pop culture — music, sex, fashion, rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a formal catalyst, too, setting off an explosion of internal rhyme that runs back and forth through this final stanza. ‘Girlhood’ calls in ‘shipwrecked,’ ‘washed inland’ and ‘first red.’ ‘Foremost’ brings ‘suppressed’, ‘consciousness’, ‘washed’, ‘flesh first,’ ‘salt white;’ and ‘form the Barrier’ gives us ‘trauma,’ ‘grimmer,’ and ‘shore where.’

It’s impossible to hear this profusion of rhyme and not think of the sonnet, a form which Coleman reinvented as her own. I read ‘Letter to My Older Sister 5’ as a kind of concealed or expanded English sonnet. Like a sonnet, it’s in four parts. The first three stanzas are variations on the theme of childhood memory and the colour red. The shorter final section takes the poem in a different direction, revising everything that has gone before. In another nod to the conventional sonnet, the first three stanzas hover around the fourteen-line mark. And there’s structural circularity, too, in those ‘swabbies’ foreshadowed, we now see, in baby sis’s ‘hardtack,’ a subsistence food for sailors. And ‘Swabbies,’ (not ‘sailors’ or ‘seafarers’) remembers the childhood wound ‘swab[bed]’ with antiseptic.

The poem has sometimes been read as simple memoir with an awkward switch of tone and focus in the last stanza. I think that is to miss the formal dynamics. The seascape / mindscape gathers up the established themes of family, memory and history and pushes them out beyond the personal, or locates the personal in a broader generational and communal context. The sea is, of course, an immeasurably potent trope in African American literature. As I read that last stanza, the previous vignettes shift. Those bitter-sweet memories and characters now appear as doomed survivors of a shipwreck glimpsed over a barrier reef of trauma-induced amnesia. It’s as if the speaker’s sisters, mother and child-self are bobbing in the shallows. Any attempt to bring them in to land will dash them on the reef. It’s worse than that: the reef is made of broken bodies the way ‘salt white’ coral is made of the calcified skeletons of dead organisms.⁷

What fascinates me about ‘Sweet Arlene’ and ‘Letter to My Older Sister 5’ are the formal and strategic manoeuvres the poets make to deal with irresolvable problems of subjectivity and voice. For Coleman’s speaker, the effort to ‘materialise’ is an embodied, bloody, fleshy fight. The poem’s structure, that treacherous reef of half-submerged land, is incompatible with her physicality, and with bodies like hers. And I’m not sure Berry’s girls really do want to incarnate, ‘to materialise.’ They know they are ‘not safe in [their] bones.’ It strikes me, now, that one connotation of ‘materialisation’ is the apparition of a ghost. It’s one of those words that can turn itself inside out.

Another slippery issue is where that urge to materialise originates. Berry’s speaker tries to ‘be’ the bodily markers of womanliness, the ‘cheeks and hips’ that ‘you’ need, and that ‘you’ includes the reader,

Though poems “obviously” do not have selves, it is fair to say that in our tendency to anthropomorphize them (as happens if we think about their “speakers” or their “voice” or if we deem their supposed confessions shamefully narcissistic), they become subject to shame that is not, so to speak, theirs.

(Gillian White, LYRIC SHAME.)

As Gillian White says, I should know better than to look for a living woman in a poem.⁸ A woman ‘obviously’ cannot live in a poem. But a poem might be a place where an experience of being a woman can be dramatized, or can live, in a way that isn’t possible in other modes (even if that experience is the experience of being a woman writing a poem).

Terrance Hayes. Hand drawn timeline of American poetry.

1. The rainstick, in this uncanny domestic setting, reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s ‘stick that rattles and clicks, a counterfeit snake’ in ‘Totem.’ In the notes to the Plath Collected Poems, Ted Hughes explained that the snake referred to ‘an articulated toy snake of scorch-patterned bamboo joints.’ Like Plath’s totemic snake, a rainstick is a shamanic object that has been repurposed (perhaps appropriated) as a child’s toy.

2. Amoretti LXXV (Sonnet 75)

3. On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Legacy of a Word. OUP 2008. (49).

4. Angela leighton, On Form (47).

I wonder if there is a spin on Yeats’s golden singing-bird automaton in ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’

5. Here’s Hayes on Coleman in The Paris Review

6. ‘Letter to My Older Sister 2.' Wicked Enchantment. Penguin 2021.

7. I’m thinking about my own analogy of writing as ‘sharpening the edges’ and ‘crystallization’ in a whole new and unsettling way.

8. Lyric Shame: the “Lyric” Subject of Contemporary American Poetry. Harvard UP 2014.