Deja vu. I thought I already got here.

Oh I reedit all the time. You already saw my first comment anyway, but good work, I like this.

"When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul - and not just individual strength, but collective understanding - to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard."

-- Adrienne Rich
"Blood, Bread and Poetry"

Ah!

Something about a book of poetry written by men lying across an ephebic poetess' lap as, viewed beyond the train's windows, old, gray statues of men pass by -- maleness blocking the female phallic?

IIR her "Eastern War Time" correctly ---

That's close to how I remember it...

Had to look around for this one to make sure I got it right.

"I truly think that you can’t go and stalk your material, you have to leave the door open and whatever chooses you, chooses you. You can’t go and wrestle it to the ground."

Louise Erdrich

I think that open door is right about fiction/poetry, Flower, which may be why it is so hard to write non-fiction over an extended period of time: 90% of writing non-fiction is little but that process of stalking and wrestling facts to use as substantiating footnotes. (Although the flipside of that tedium is that when you manage to report the facts with any grace of phrasing at all, it does feel like an achievement of sorts.)
The distinction in process between writing fiction or non-fiction is why I still get myself in trouble from time to time on TPM; I seem to be more in the Lessing "skim, scan and move on as interests move one" mode than I am, these days, in the "observe the fair and appropriate protocol of citing links as footnotes" habit.
Sorry, Everyone. Mea culpa. Blame Doris Lessing, ok?

Carol Shields wrote a poem that describes that feeling of disappointment with oneself as a writer:

"nothing she did
or said

was quite
what she meant

but still her life
could be called a monument

shaped in a slant
of available light

and set to the movement
of possible music"

— Carol Shields

"I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind." - Sylvia Plath

A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother burns bacon

From the first it had been like a
Ballad. It had the beat inevitable. It had the blood.
A wildness cut up, and tied in little bunches,
Like the four-line stanzas of the ballads she had never quite
understood--the ballads they had set her to, in school.

Herself: the milk-white maid, the "maid mild"
Of the ballad. Pursued
By the Dark Villain. Rescued by the Fine Prince.
The Happiness-Ever-After.
That was worth anything.
It was good to be a "maid mild."
That made the breath go fast.

Her bacon burned. She
Hastened to hide it in the step-on can, and
Drew more strips from the meat case. The eggs and sour-milk biscuits
Did well. She set out a jar
Of her new quince preserve.

. . . But there was something about the matter of the Dark Villain.
He should have been older, perhaps.
The hacking down of a villain was more fun to think about
When his menace possessed undisputed breath, undisputed height,
And best of all, when history was cluttered
With the bones of many eaten knights and princesses.

The fun was disturbed, then all but nullified
When the Dark Villain was a blackish child
Of Fourteen, with eyes still too young to be dirty,
And a mouth too young to have lost every reminder
Of its infant softness.

That boy must have been surprised! For
These were grown-ups. Grown-ups were supposed to be wise.
And the Fine Prince--and that other--so tall, so broad, so
Grown! Perhaps the boy had never guessed
That the trouble with grown-ups was that under the magnificent shell of adulthood, just under,
Waited the baby full of tantrums.
It occurred to her that there may have been something
Ridiculous to the picture of the Fine Prince
Rushing (rich with the breadth and height and
Mature solidness whose lack, in the Dark Villain, was impressing her,

Confronting her more and more as this first day after the trial
And acquittal (wore on) rushing
With his heavy companion to hack down (unhorsed)
That little foe. So much had happened, she could not remember now what that foe had done
Against her, or if anything had been done.
The breaks were everywhere. That she could think
Of no thread capable of the necessary
Sew-work.

She made the babies sit in their places at the table.
Then, before calling HIM, she hurried
To the mirror with her comb and lipstick. It was necessary
To be more beautiful than ever.
The beautiful wife.

For sometimes she fancied he looked at her as though
Measuring her. As if he considered, Had she been worth it?
Had she been worth the blood, the cramped cries, the little stirring bravado, The gradual dulling of those Negro eyes,
The sudden, overwhelming little-boyness in that barn?
Whatever she might feel or half-feel, the lipstick necessity was something apart. HE must never conclude
That she had not been worth it.

HE sat down, the Fine Prince, and
Began buttering a biscuit. HE looked at HIS hands.
More papers were in from the North, HE mumbled. More maddening headlines.
With their pepper-words, "bestiality," and "barbarism," and
"Shocking."

The half-sneers HE had mastered for the trial worked across
HIS sweet and pretty face.

What HE'd like to do, HE explained, was kill them all.
The time lost. The unwanted fame.
Still, it had been fun to show those intruders
A thing or two. To show that snappy-eyed mother,
That sassy, Northern, brown-black--

Nothing could stop Mississippi.
HE knew that. Big fella
Knew that.
And, what was so good, Mississippi knew that.
They could send in their petitions, and scar
Their newspapers with bleeding headlines. Their governors
Could appeal to Washington . . .

"What I want," the older baby said, "is 'lasses on my jam."
Whereupon the younger baby
Picked up the molasses pitcher and threw
The molasses in his brother's face. Instantly
The Fine Prince leaned across the table and slapped
The small and smiling criminal.
She did not speak. When the HAND
Came down and away, and she could look at her child,
At her baby-child,
She could think only of blood.
Surely her baby's cheek
Had disappeared, and in its place, surely,
Hung a heaviness, a lengthening red, a red that had no end.
She shook her had. It was not true, of course.
It was not true at all. The
Child's face was as always, the
Color of the paste in her paste-jar.

She left the table, to the tune of the children's lamentations, which were shriller
Than ever. She
Looked out of a window. She said not a word. That
Was one of the new Somethings--
The fear,
Tying her as with iron.

Suddenly she felt his hands upon her. He had followed her
To the window. The children were whimpering now.
Such bits of tots. And she, their mother,
Could not protect them. She looked at her shoulders, still
Gripped in the claim of his hands. She tried, but could not resist the idea
That a red ooze was seeping, spreading darkly, thickly, slowly,
Over her white shoulders, her own shoulders,
And over all of Earth and Mars.

He whispered something to her, did the Fine Prince, something about love and night and intention.
She heard no hoof-beat of the horse and saw no flash of the shining steel.

He pulled her face around to meet
His, and there it was, close close,
For the first time in all the days and nights.
His mouth, wet and red,
So very, very, very red,
Closed over hers.

Then a sickness heaved within her. The courtroom Coca-Cola,
The courtroom beer and hate and sweat and drone,
Pushed like a wall against her. She wanted to bear it.
But his mouth would not go away and neither would the
Decapitated exclamation points in that Other Woman's eyes.

She did not scream.
She stood there.
But a hatred for him burst into glorious flower,
And its perfume enclasped them--big,
Bigger than all magnolias.

The last bleak news of the ballad.
The rest of the rugged music.
The last quatrain.

-- Gwendolyn Brooks

ww, I think I love you a little today, in a Platonic way, of course. :)

Cixous, Nin, Woolf, Lessing, Atwood, Byatt!!! Wow. Certainement mes favoris!

I would add Plath, Irigaray and Jeanette Winterson --

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.

And another one, my Winterson fav ----

I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.

And few more, not on writing so much but on the process of being and interactions which produce writing.

Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.

Judith Butler (Undoing Gender)

Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our 'salvation' if we thought it through.

And even though he is a mere man [and I cannot help it, I always read lit/rhet stuff for smut; and in fact don't know any of my previous compatriots who did not... ;)] --

Both the practice and the study of human culture comprise a network of symbolic exchanges. Because human beings are not angels, these exchanges always involve material negotiations. Even in their most complex and advanced forms—when the negotiations are carried out as textual events—the intercourse that is being human is materially executed: as spoken texts or scripted forms. To participate in these exchanges is to have entered what I wish to call here 'the textual condition.'

And one more --

These elective affinities between love and textuality exist because love and text are two of our most fundamental social acts. We make love and we make texts, and we make both in a seemingly endless series of imaginative variations.

Another mere masculine voice (it is Women's Herstory Month, I can say that!)--

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is 'I desire you,' and releases, nourishes, and ramifies it to the point of explosion..

And finally --

Who or what the other is, I never know. But the other who is forever unknowable is the one who differs from me sexually. This feeling of surprise, astonishment, and wonder in the face of the unknowable ought to be returned to its locus: that of sexual difference.

To me that's were writing happens, in the interstices of all that. Just my sense of things wordy.

I'm now going out to feel the sun on my face and to be happy away from all things internet for the rest of the day. I hope you are having a fab day, ww. :)

Ta.

Never read the Golden Notebook. Well, I tried once and it was too mindnumbing for me. I loved her Canopus stuff and her autobiog of her childhood elsewhere.

Thank you, Ellen. Any other quotes or comments you want to contribute?

Desidero: I think there is a real similarity between Gilcrist in prose and Plath in poetry. Fierce intelligence, a determination not to lose touch with the power of observation while experiencing acute feeling. The balance achieved better by Gilcrist than Plath, apparently. And for that, we can feel sorrow for a young Plath, trying but ultimately failing to balance the stresses of being an ex-pat, her desire to work versus the demands of motherhood, etc. -- all under the implacable, if competitive disdain of Ted Hughes.

E: thank you for your references, some of which I knew (Irigaray and Barthes) and others I did not (mcGann and Winterson). You've given me a start on a new reading list. BTW, do you have a Kristeva quote to throw in? My FF books were lost (in tediously aforementioned hurricane) and I can't find what I want on line, other than this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXLUsoEDYPw

PS -- Do you teach? And if so, what?

Thank you for bringing Gwendolyn Brooks into the discussion, Justice -- a real oversight on my part. As was not including writing quotes from Ntozke Shange (Cypress, Sassafras & Indigo), and Toni Morrison. And, of course, Maya Angelou, although I am personally more mezmerized by her voice, saying or reading anything, than I am by her actual writing, with the exception of "Phenomenal Woman" and "I Rise."

thanks for this post. You've diversified my hour.

Love Barbara Kingsolver as you do, Tom, and wonder why I did not think to add her to the list. Her Poisonwood book was astonishing -- not only as a novel but as an exemplar of writing technique.
And then there is David Foster Wallace. The singular male writer who made me question my decision to foreswear yet another entry into the male author canon. (If you are female, and you have gone through school reading twenty men to every woman, you may develop this prejudice, too.)
Thank you for your contributions.
This thread is going to die within minutes, but I would be interested to know why your picks resonate with you. Is it the voice cadence as tied to music? Or something else?

There is plenty of evidence that music induces physical states, (and in the players themselves, variably). We can easily imagine rhythms doing so, and strong harmony does, too. Leaping melodies do feel dramatic, while narrow noodling ones feel cautious, and so on. Some physical analogues might be birds twittering (e.g. flutes at play) which implies peace, no intruders sneaking through the woods. Rumbling drums may invoke waterfalls or arriving caribou, both exciting, and important food issues.

It is possible to "explain" music, but this is ridiculous and cumbersome for doing it. I simply try to find the feeling I intend, and hold it while testing ideas, if writing. If playing, I do trust my body to help focus the delivery, but one is cautious in letting ordinary things like tension cause unintended effects, like thin tone. Safer to, once again, find the feeling the music is speaking, and let that mediate the playing. I just act as my own audience, with reservations for control.

Harder to explain novels. Unlike poetry there is less overt rhythm, but one writer said (wish I could remember) that novels were a way to say with words what one couldn't say with words. It is partly the the arrival of an emotional conclusion that affects me, but the words matter, too. I like Twain saying that the effect of the right word is both electric and prompt, an effect produced by his explanation itself (self-referential fireworks).