More free than verse

Elizabeth Jennings

On the first night of Channel 4 The Raving Beauties (Anna Carteret, Sue Jones-Davies and Fanny Viner) performed their show In the Pink (The Women's Press £2•95). This show had started in a pub, sold out at the 1982 Edinburgh Festival and won a prize at the Sitges International Festival. As a result of the Channel 4 programme 2,000 viewers wrote to ask where they could p:nd" the poems. This book with many addi- (Mai poems is the result of that request. 'Anna, Sue and Fanny' write a kind of for as an introduction to the verses, _Or very few can be dignified by the name of Poems.

Fanny's contribution gives the unbiased Nader some warning of what is to come in Susan anthology: 'now I love Alton and

Griffin for their courage in sharing their feelings of violence, pain and anger about those early years of child-rearing, and so Putting me in touch with my own

• • • Thus we are introduced to the hate and resentment in which these three women and their chosen poets indulge.

Fanny Viner continues her part of the threesome's colloquy with these somewhat alarming remarks: ' . . To get in touch with (,)1.1e's hatred can be a heady release'

Yes, but is 'a release' anything more than !elf-indulgence? To write effectively of Faired requires the cold passion of a Swift. 1:)r the most part, the verse here is Petulant, shrill and, at worst, hysterical.

Viner goes on, 'None of us is Les- 'an, but we discovered a profound

res. rionse to Lesbian poetry'. This is an odd eLaitri. Is there any specifically Lesbian olettY, apart from the frustrated loathing h.men expressed over and over again in this h7°k? There is no proof, a reliable istorian tells me, that Sappho was a Les- an. There are further statements made by „army

to family

„al?my Viner which are frightening in their

life, alarming because

e?.;:;istigciavie expression to violent and approaches to the upbringing of chi), I dren. There is this comment, for exam- not! • • . though I love my children I will wticisacrifice myself for them ' No wonder, one 'feels, that there are so many One-Parent families and delinquent children today The four-letter words employed by it? Viner are silly as well as significant. 'most every female experience from Zenelstruation to the menopause is ham- de,re,c1 homo us, not as part of the natural or"oPmen e tt of us, all women, but as processes aiovents which are treated as unjust. Thus ratk°4er -v Pause by 'Astra' contains these " unfortunate lines,

• • • I had assumed nlY clockwork periods had come full circle - that I could pacify the goddess otherwise - with poetry perhaps - so I shall offer up this bloody piece to her and pause a while.

Even the plays on words here do not redeem the verse from bathos. And perhaps this is the saddest aspect of In the Pink. There is too little humour, also, no compassion for children or men. It is, too, somewhat out of date. Young husbands do today not only comfort their wives during childbirth but help with the children and housework when they come back from their own jobs. Erica Jong seems to me to be the most violent, angry and coarse poet here. She does the feminist cause a real disservice with her rather silly piece of failed pornography entitled The Long Tunnel of Wanting You which contains these inept and uninten- tionally funny lines, full and juicy as your probing tongue, warm as your belly against mine.

I may well be accused of squeamishness if I do not quote words clearly intended to shock, but this poem is not even successful pornography; it is adolescent and too ob- viously intended to rouse excitement. The poem facing Erica Jong's lays itself open to the same criticism with its half- surrealist opening, An orgasm is like an anchovy, she says, little, long, and very salty.

A more important accusation against the majority of the work included in In the Pink is that very few of the poets represented here have any poetic skill or craftsmanship. Most of them write in what is intended to be free verse, but it is more often free than verse. It was Auden who said that good free verse is far harder to write than verse written in more traditional poetic ,forms such as stanzaic and rhyming poetry. It was also Auden who said that 'lyrical verse operates on a level where pas- sion is general.' There is not much lyrical verse here, but practically none of it generalises personal experience or expresses genuine passion.

Some work here will give great offence to women with firm religious convictions; Magnifica, by Michele Roberts is surely one such poem with its opening, Oh this man what a meal he had made of me how he chewed and gobbled and sucked in the end he spat me out.

The poem ends when we met, I tell you it was a birthday party, a funeral.

It was a holy communion between women, a Visitation it was two old she-goats butting and nuzzling each other in the smelly fold.

This sort of writing condemns itself.

However, this volume does contain a few good poems written by poets who have already established themselves; such writers are Stevie Smith, Elaine Feinstein, Anne Stevenson, and the better poems of Sylvia Plath. The last-named has indeed written 'hate verse', the kind which provoked Philip Larkin's fine essay called 'Horror Poet'. Anne Stevenson's tender Poem to my Daughter moves one with its fine con- clusion, A woman's life is her own Then she is not alone But a part of the premises of everything there is.

A branch, a tide ... a war, When we belong to the world we become what we are.

That line, 'when we belong to the world' sums up all that In the Pink is not. It represents a private world of bad temper and egotism, and finally, it makes one feel sorry for men, which is surely the opposite of the purpose of this rather feeble and philistine anthology.