"First Wife," a chapbook by Laura Madeline Wiseman, reviewed by Stacia M. Fleegal

Laura Madeline Wiseman is a busy woman. She edited Women Write Resistance, and she gives great interview (and interview part II), but she's also steadily publishing poems of her own. To cap off our focus on her efforts with WWR, I thought I'd also review her latest collection of poems.

In her chapbook First Wife (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013), Wiseman has done a difficult thing in manifesting the story of Lilith in modern poems chronicling the demise of a marriage.

Difficult because, let’s be honest, you say “Lilith” and some people think antagonizing uber-feminism. They think anger. But though I believe there’s a time and a place for strategic anger, these poems aren’t angry, aren’t based in that time or place. These are solemn poems that make the point that true feminism is more concerned with women’s individual and interconnected lives than in defining us according to our significant others and children—the more “traditional” relationships many of us experience and have in common.

In her identification with the biblical Lilith, who, to quote Alicia Ostriker’s blurb, is “the mythic first wife of Adam, who escaped subservience to her husband and her husband’s God and became stigmatized as a demoness,” Wiseman’s speaker proves without preaching that self-respect is a survival tool in a patriarchal world.

A conversation with Laura Madeline Wiseman, editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, part 1

We recently published a review of an important anthology of poetry called Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gendered Violence.

In addition to that review, co-editor Stacia M. Fleegal recently caught up with the editor of the anthology, Dr. Laura Madeline Wiseman. Here is part one of their conversation:

SMF: You mention the work of Judy Grahn and Chrystos (among others) as catalysts to your interest in poetry as an agent of change in the realm of domestic and gender-specific violence. I adore and revere both of these fierce writers, but they aren't as widely known as they should be. Would you agree with that statement? If so, do you believe their "invisibility" (from the canon and/or popular literary consciousness) to be part of, or symptomatic of, the silencing you speak of in your introduction? What titles by these women would you recommend to those who aren't familiar with them?

LMW: It’s interesting that you ask me about these two writers and the literary canon, because to have a Ph.D. in English and a B.S. in English Literature suggests that I should be well versed in the “literary canon,” have studied it, mastered it, but what a fickle, fashionable beast the canon is, no? It made me wonder how I came to read Judy Grahn and Chrystos, for though I may have read them in some anthology before I started Ph.D. school, as some necessary poem in a women’s literature class, as some required activist profiled in a women’s studies seminar, I don’t recall them, meeting inscription from one woman to another, a note of love, but given that I now had the book, I did wonder if the couple had broken up, parted ways, found new loves to recite poetry to at night. I was drawn to Chrystos’ work and by that point, I had already begun researching the poets and poems I was considering for their poems, if you will, in some well lit library corner. In my first year of the doctoral course work, I took a class in lesbian literature. In that class the professor, Dr. Barbara DiBernard, asked us to read to In Her I Am by Chrystos, a book of love poems, a book that I ordered used and in mine included an Women Write Resistance. Some of the poems in Chrystos’ Not Vanishing astonished me. I felt while reading her work the visceral impact of her words, the way I’d read one of her poems while I studied on the couch on the mornings I did not teach, and feel myself pinned to the cushions, all of my breath gone, the room zeroed in on a line, a phrase, an image.

Judy Grahn also came to me that first year of Ph.D. school.

How women poets can change the world – Review of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, by Stacia M. Fleegal

In the anthology Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, readers learn just how many forms of resistance to female-specific violence there are. 

The answer is: so many that I wrote a damn critical thesis just to tell you how great this anthology is (i.e., settle in for a long-but-worth-it read). Also, four BL authors have work in this collection, and it’s incredibly cool to have published talented writers who also happen to be compassionate and engaged. Congrats on your continued greatness, Grace Bauer (#23), Mary Stone Dockery (#21), July Westhale (#19), and Sarah A. Chavez (also #19).

I realized writing this piece is in itself a form of resistance. To speak at length and in unabashed praise of a collection of poetry written in mouthy backlash to the cultural norms of domestic violence, rape, childhood abuse, verbal harassment and assault on city streets, etc., is to stand with women as they refuse to stand for it anymore. It is to give thoughtful treatment to a problem that is largely being ignored by our lawmakers and our justice system, which is an attempt to extend the work these poets and this editor undertook in participating in the anthology. It is to defy anyone to suggest that these poems aren’t literary because they often sound colloquial, or to dismiss them as therapeutic or confessional or any of those other supposed “critical” terms that condescend to the kind of writing I and others call real talk.  We can do that in poetry. Not only is it allowed, but resistance is poetry’s legacy.