Heather: Female Poetry?

answers1: Margaret Atwood actually wrote short stories that changed
the original meaning behind the "traditional children's fairytales"
and made them into more darker and satiryical observations on the
psychological dynamics between men and woman. By transforming the
original fairytale into a different form, the author was challanging
the basic notions of male power (and control) of women's fertility and
women's freedom of choice. 
 
 
Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) the Canadian writer, is familiar to readers
all over the world as the author of some of the finest and most
influential fiction of the last few decades. Titles like The
Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace, and The Robber Bride have won many
awards, sold in their millions and have been made into films. 
 
 
Maybe you wouldnt have to memorise the entire thing, perhaps just an
excerpt: 
 
Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing 
by Margaret Atwood 
 
 
The world is full of women 
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself 
if they had the chance. Quit dancing. 
Get some self-respect 
and a day job. 
Right. And minimum wage, 
and varicose veins, just standing 
in one place for eight hours 
behind a glass counter 
bundled up to the neck, instead of 
naked as a meat sandwich. 
Selling gloves, or something. 
Instead of what I do sell. 
You have to have talent 
to peddle a thing so nebulous 
and without material form. 
Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way 
you cut it, but I've a choice 
of how, and I'll take the money. 
 
I do give value. 
Like preachers, I sell vision, 
like perfume ads, desire 
or its facsimile. Like jokes 
or war, it's all in the timing. 
I sell men back their worse suspicions: 
that everything's for sale, 
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see 
a chain-saw murder just before it happens, 
when thigh, ***, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple 
are still connected. 
Such hatred leaps in them, 
my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary 
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads 
and upturned eyes, imploring 
but ready to snap at my ankles, 
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge 
to step on ants. I keep the beat, 
and dance for them because 
they can't. The music smells like foxes, 
crisp as heated metal 
searing the nostrils 
or humid as August, hazy and languorous 
as a looted city the day after, 
when all the rape's been done 
already, and the killing, 
and the survivors wander around 
looking for garbage 
to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion. 
Speaking of which, it's the smiling 
tires me out the most. 
This, and the pretence 
that I can't hear them. 
And I can't, because I'm after all 
a foreigner to them. 
The speech here is all warty gutturals, 
obvious as a slab of ham, 
but I come from the province of the gods 
where meanings are lilting and oblique. 
I don't let on to everyone, 
but lean close, and I'll whisper: 
My mother was raped by a holy swan. 
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. 
That's what we tell all the husbands. 
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around. 
 
Not that anyone here 
but you would understand. 
The rest of them would like to watch me 
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components 
as in a clock factory or abattoir. 
Crush out the mystery. 
Wall me up alive 
in my own body. 
They'd like to see through me, 
but nothing is more opaque 
than absolute transparency. 
Look--my feet don't hit the marble! 
Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, 
I hover six inches in the air 
in my blazing swan-egg of light. 
You think I'm not a goddess? 
Try me. 
This is a torch song. 
Touch me and you'll burn.
answers2: Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Barett Browning and Emily Dickinson
all have some really beautiful poetry. Just give 'em a Google search
and you can probably find an anthology of all of their poetry, as well
as some other women poets. 
 
Good luck with the assignment! :)
answers3: difficult task. search onto the search engines. that can help!

Heather

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Sunday, 6 October 2019

Female Poetry?

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