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The Treasures and the Damage
I came to explore the wreck.The words are purposes.The words are maps.I came to see the damage that was doneand the treasures that prevail.—Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”I think you can hardly be a poet and a feminist (at least of my generation) without holding onto Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Diving into the Wreck” to keep you on the search for what is lost and what is crucial, who or what is unmentioned in the “book of myths,” what tools to use, and how deep to go.Photo credit Joan Guenther
“For women artists—mostly not working-class women—that war opened the opportunity of going to art school, as so many male artists were off in the trenches. Several of these women artists lost brothers or fiancés in the trenches, and these losses are echoes in their art.”
Ever since, as a younger reader, I devoured Pat Barker’s “Regeneration” trilogy of novels, I have been fascinated by the history of World War I, and am often surprised by how many pieces of art take me back to it. In my new collection, Sotto Voce, published by Brick Books, the poem “A State of Undress” explores the art by the group of (mostly) women artists known as the Beaver Hall group in Montreal; this group was formally founded in 1920. Seeing a 2016 exhibit of their work at the Hamilton Art Gallery made me realize how these artists were painting in the shadow of World War I. For women artists—mostly not working-class women—that war opened the opportunity of going to art school, as so many male artists were off in the trenches. Several of these women artists lost brothers or fiancés in the trenches, and these losses are echoes in their art.I was also struck by how critics, curators and judges—and the public—responded to some of these women’s art. In particular, Lilias Torrance Newton’s painting, Nude in the Studio, was removed in 1933 from a Canadian Group of Painters exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto, following public furor over the picture. As the co-curator of the 2016 exhibit, Brian Foss, said about Newton’s painting, “Critics complained the green sandals and lipstick and I-don’t-care-you’re-looking-at-me attitude suggests she wasn’t nude—she was naked and that was a different thing altogether.” Other critics dismissed the painting by calling it “merely a state of undress,” a phrase I borrowed for the title of the poem.“Much of women’s history is left behind, unremembered and under-studied, but when I see the online reproduction of Seiden’s Dora, or Newton’s Nude in the Studio, I am also struck by the whiteness of the artists, and of their subjects.”
This autumn, I’ve been taking a course given by Hoa Nguyen on documentary or investigative poetry, using C. D. Wright’s One With Others about the U.S. civil rights struggle as our text. As a result, I have been considering in more depth who the speaker is in poems about historical events; who is being spoken about; what assumptions the poet is making—in short, the ethics / the voices/ the entanglements, of writing poetically about historical events. Much of women’s history is left behind, unremembered and under-studied, but when I see the online reproduction of Seiden’s Dora, or Newton’s Nude in the Studio, I am also struck by the whiteness of the artists, and of their subjects. These artists represent a narrow slice of women’s history (some—but not all—relatively privileged, white, able-bodied), and still their lives are less than visible.But in Sotto Voce, women’s lives, both straight and queer, present the balancing points between love and loss, danger and safety, observation and action, the lives of those who came before and those alive today, the natural world, and the one we’ve built.Finally, to touch on matters of poetic form and the tension between more allusive, abstract poetry and poetry that is more traditionally direct and clear, there is a quote I like from Gustav Mahler: “The point is not to worship the ashes, but to preserve the fire.” I am drawn to the fire of writers and poets who espouse feminism and critique it as well, who are challenging racism and tyranny, who declare their queerness and their solidarity with marginalized groups, who acknowledge the work of previous generations and aim to go beyond it—in short, artists who are also trying to change the world as well as their own practice.* * *Maureen Hynes lives in Toronto. Her first book of poetry, Rough Skin (Wolsak and Wynn, 1995), won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry by a Canadian. Her second collection, Harm’s Way (Brick Books, 2001), was followed by Marrow, Willow (Pedlar Press, 2011) and then The Poison Colour (Pedlar Press, 2015), which was a finalist for both the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Award and Raymond Souster Award. She is poetry editor for Our Times magazine.Tagged: