Customer Reviews

Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Pamela Gemin has gathered together an impressive group of women poets and an astonishing collection of poems. As its subtitle indicates, the collection is a thematic one, focusing on women's work. Rather than being a limitation, this focus allows Gemin to cover a wide range of topics: cooking, cleaning, childbirth, child rearing, putting up preserves, putting up with hard times, making romance, making mischief, writing poetry, and, of course, sweeping. We find poems about grandmothers, mothers, wives, and daughters, and yes, fathers, sons, and husbands. We find poems that take a historical perspective, others set in the here and now, and still others that look forward. We find poems set in all the places where women do their work: the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, cellar, closet, porch, and garden. This collection is not any kind of feminist diatribe or a circling of the wagons but rather a celebration of women and the work they do. Democratically and fortuitously arranged in alphabetical order, the collection begins with Elizabeth Alexander's direction-setting "The female seer will burn upon this pyre" and ends with Carolyne Wright's exquisite "Prayer":

Prayer

Bless my life-its inks
and paperweights and houseplants
fringed with sun.
Give me the quiet, Lord,
I close my eyes
and turn my tongue back for.
Don't feed me too much,
and when I can't decide between love
and what's jammed in the typewriter
or roughed out on the drawing board,
take away the coins I flip
and make me listen: That young man
smiling in my kitchen at me is in love.
With me. That's one door in my house
that opens on more than grief
or dirty sheets or the supermarket
twice a week. It gives on light,
and I, your moth, am beating to get in.
Give us this day, and with no promises
but what we are-two small people
trying to be one-send us out
and say, "That's fine. Light fills your gaps.
Breathe on."

I enjoyed this work, and I think many women who grew up with mothers who had a love-hate relationship with housework would as well. Rather than considering this a work about "whining," I took seriously the idea that housework is something that is expected of women (when a house dirty, most often the woman of the house is seen as responsible). Housework is also something that never ends--the same tasks are done day after day, week after week. Yet housework also makes people feel they can bring a sense of order and pride into their lives, so it can be therapeutic as well. Perhaps there are no male-authored poems because men don't have the omnipresent cultural connection to (seen any commercials for cleaning products lately?)and responsibility for housework. Regardless, the book is a great exploration of the many connections women have to the home and their families.

I certainly do consider this a feminist anthology and plan to use it in a Feminist Theories course I'll be teaching this spring. Its publication is a triumph and a minor miracle in this antifeminist year of 2005: many thanks to Pamela Gemin for accomplishing it. What is documented in this astounding collection of intelligent, articulate, beautifully crafted poems by women is the amazing range and depth of the effects of housework on female lives and consciousness. Resentment of servitude, yes, absolutely. You will find it here, though I would not cheapen it with a word like "diatribe." Resignation is here; joy is here; pride is here; history is here, as women poets make it clear that they cook and sew and clean as their mothers did, and their mothers were harmed by servitude but also possessed a tradition of expertise and knowledge they passed down to their daughters. This is ambivalence and complication; this is humanity at its best. The great lesson of this remarkable collection is that you can limit a population of humans to tasks characterized as menial and kept that way by tradition and politics, exploited; but give those humans a pen and they will prove they never stopped thinking about everything their work, and their lives, meant. Menial work does not destroy art: it only postpones or hides it. And the hand of the artist will make art from whatever is within reach. If the housework doesn't do it satisfyingly enough--and the poems in this collection document both possibility and impossibility there--the poetry about the housework surely will.

Anyone who values fine art, and justice, and is moved by the proof of humanity and its indestructible will to forge beauty from whatever is at hand, has to admire and love this book.

Why anyone would find it suspicious that there are no poems by men in a poetry collection called Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework is beyond me! There are also no poems by children, or aliens. There are no poems about kittens or nuclear disarmament, either. The title says what the book's scope will be, and the Pamela Gemin accomplishes exactly what she has set out to do: compile the best poems on housework by the best women writers around in this highly satisfying, dazzling, and diverse collection.

Although many women do identify with housework, and obviously some women have written poems about it, the very juxtaposition of women and housework is a dangerous one, in my opinion. It is a fine calling, and it is good, hard work, but there is such a negative connotation attached to it- and such a stereotype of only women doing it- that I think this anthology was a poor idea. Many women express themselves in different ways, and we are trying to eliminate such frustrating stereotypes as women + housework, women + shopping, women + babies, not reinforce them.

It's bad enough that Martha Stewart has fetishized housework. Now we get to listen to the smug, precious, navel-gazing "poems" about the life-affirming drudgery that is cooking and cleaning. I find it suspicious that there are no poems from men in this collection. I suppose that is because male poets neither cook nor clean? Or is it that they just can't appreciate the struggle and inner turmoil they face every time they need to choose between Mr. Clean and Mop-n-Glow? And all they care about is steaks anyway. If people choose to read their hospital charts and call it "poetry" that is their right. However, it's no reason to spend money on such narcissistic nonsense. You're better off watching the Lifetime Channel's Afterschool Special "Mommy, Why Are You Crying in Your Latte?"