Co-sponsored by the Butler English Department and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies,
A Celebration of Women’s Poetry will open the Conversations @ Efroymson series on September 24 at 4PM. The event is open-mic, so all Butler students, faculty, and staff are invited to attend— and especially to share.
Readers are asked to share a favorite poem written by a woman, prefacing or following it by speaking briefly about the piece; perhaps the poem’s impact, or how it moves them. I reckon it’ll go a little something like this:
I bought Vol. 9 of Ninth Letter on a lark. I had no prior experience with the mag, it was a buy-one-get-something deal that charmed me. Cracking open the magazine, it was gorgeous. I paged through it without actually reading, stopping at what I can only describe as the ‘splash page’ for a series of seven poems by Paisley Rekdal: odes to Mae West. What a neat concept, I thought, so I dug in. I was immediately smitten with Rekdal’s langauge, the risky verve with which she composed, the message behind her work—espousing all that is quintessentially Mae.
The first poem, “You’re,” speaks of young girls emulating West’s mannerisms, but the final poem, “Confessional,” finds a more mature speaker instead internalizing West. It’s frank, free, an unapologetic sort of manifesto. It opens (each poem does) with an epigraph courtesy of Miss West: “The only good girl to make history was Betsy Ross and she had to stitch up a flag to do it.”
What gal is safe from being slut, tether of lies that leash
a pretty girl through life? Shamed in school by those who claimed
we’d each undone the captains of our football teams—
Shunned, despised, how, like dogs, we learned to heel.
How we cringed and whined; how we pissed ourselves
pretending to be good. O, but to insist beneath the artificial rules,
a realer artifice named “I” might thrive, one capable as Mae
of jokes so bright they’d split the world to its brutal truth.
It wasn’t that we were vile; we weren’t sluts enough. Reader:
I should have taken that boy out back and fucked
the life out of him. Forget it. I’ve another forty years to go.
I plan to be filthy. I plan to be low. (Laugh, reader,
so that “I” can last.) I’m writing the story of a life. Listen.
It’s about a girl who lost her reputation. And never missed it.
A Celebration of Women’s Poetry is slated to run from 4-6PM on September 24 at the Efroymson Center for Creative Writing. If you’re interested in reading, sign up with Efro-Master Chris Speckman (cspeckman@butler.edu) as soon as possible. If you’d like to pass around the electronic event poster, it is available here.
