edited by Jon Tribble
eISBN: 978-0-8093-8812-7 | Paper: 978-0-8093-2725-6
Library of Congress Classification PS3552.A339L59 2006
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
Women’s voices offering an intimate view into women’s lives
Lizzie Borden in Love, a collection of poems by national bestselling author Julianna Baggott, offers poignant commentary in the voices of women as varied as Mary Todd Lincoln and Monica Lewinsky. The poems often focus on a particular moment in life: Katherine Hepburn discovers the dead body of her brother in an attic, or painter Mary Cassatt mourns the failure of her eyesight. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes ecstatic, the poems in this collection never fail the trust of the subjects of their intimate portrayals
Julianna Baggott's second volume of poetry, the 2006 Editor's Choice winner from the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, is written in the voices of women ranging from Mary Todd Lincoln to Monica Lewinsky. Each poem situates its speaker in a particular historical moment: Lizzie Borden addresses the male jury at her murder trial; Mary Rockwell contemplates her son's fencing injury; Camille Claudel speaks from her studio and from the mental asylum where she was a patient. Whether the speakers in these poems are angry, grieving, desperate, or resigned, they all are armed with eloquence and insight into the circumstances that have shaped their lives, including societal expectations of feminine behavior. Arguing her innocence, Lizzie Borden uses these conventions to her advantage, reminding the jurors:
We ladies only know what we are taught.
We are your creations:
porcelain hands, hearts sublime.
We are not real-that's why
there were no footprints in the dust: We floatIn "Ida Saxton McKinley, the First Lady, Seizes during a Dinner Party," the speaker describes epilepsy as both "stored grief released / violently into the air" and "a secret pleasure." Explaining her illness to her husband, she notes:
The newspapers will call it a fainting spell
How delicate! How ladylike!
But this rugged habit is fit for cowboys.
(Do not look at me with your round eyes.)
Electric, one doctor said.
(Am I now a modem contrivance?)
McKinley values the "comfort" she derives from her seizures and the opportunity to escape her husband's-and the public's-expectations of proper behavior, which extend even as far as diagnosis-fainting spells are deemed more appropriate for a First Lady than epileptic seizures. Both poems highlight one of Baggott's strengths; the women in her poems speak with irony and humor as well as with anger or resentment. They also are well aware of their own complicity and guilt; while several of Baggott's subjects have entered the historical record as victims, the women in these poems do not see themselves as such.
The strongest poems in the collection are those in which the speakers address a specific, rather than a generalized audience; the poems addressed to other women are especially powerful because they allow their speakers to exist apart from the famous men in many of these women's lives. In "Dorothy Day's Daughter, Pregnant with Her Ninth Child, Begs Her Mother for Charity: A Bedtime Prayer," " the speaker confesses:
As a little girl,
I hated the smitten poor who followed you,
hauling their sun-boiled faces and stench.
But see how you have forced me
to become one? How else to be loved by you?
By countering Day's career as a charity worker with the suffering of her daughter's family, Baggott's poem revises the historical record to allow for a more complicated portrait of Day, one that is less flattering but more accurate. Although a few of the poems in this volume are less surprising than a reader might hope, Baggott has crafted a gorgeous collection of poems that succeeds in clarifying and expanding the historical record. "Marie Curie Gives Advice to Her Daughter Irene before Her Wedding" concludes with the lines: "My hope, daughter, is that / what you love doesn't come to kill you, / eye by eye, ear by ear, bone by radiant bone." Baggott's poems succeed in illuminating the interiors of her speakers' consciousnesses and of history itself.
“Baggott's positively oracular channeling of voices as diverse as Camille Claudel and Monica Lewinsky is so canny and artfully authentic that it seems possible that the poet here has truly acted as a spiritual medium for the muted and misrepresented voices she illuminates. This is a brilliant book and an essential read for both lovers of poetry and scholars wishing to understand the inheritance of silence that is the complicated birthright of contemporary women artists everywhere.”—Erin Belieu, author of One Above and One Below and Black Box
“With crispness and casual elegance, Baggott inhabits a startling variety of personalities and idioms. These monologues are always humanist, poetic without being poeticized, and unpreachily feminist.”—Daisy Fried, author of My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again
Julianna Baggott's second volume of poetry, the 2006 Editor's Choice winner from the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, is written in the voices of women ranging from Mary Todd Lincoln to Monica Lewinsky. Each poem situates its speaker in a particular historical moment: Lizzie Borden addresses the male jury at her murder trial; Mary Rockwell contemplates her son's fencing injury; Camille Claudel speaks from her studio and from the mental asylum where she was a patient. Whether the speakers in these poems are angry, grieving, desperate, or resigned, they all are armed with eloquence and insight into the circumstances that have shaped their lives, including societal expectations of feminine behavior. Arguing her innocence, Lizzie Borden uses these conventions to her advantage, reminding the jurors:
We ladies only know what we are taught.
We are your creations:
porcelain hands, hearts sublime.
We are not real-that's why
there were no footprints in the dust: We floatIn "Ida Saxton McKinley, the First Lady, Seizes during a Dinner Party," the speaker describes epilepsy as both "stored grief released / violently into the air" and "a secret pleasure." Explaining her illness to her husband, she notes:
The newspapers will call it a fainting spell
How delicate! How ladylike!
But this rugged habit is fit for cowboys.
(Do not look at me with your round eyes.)
Electric, one doctor said.
(Am I now a modem contrivance?)
McKinley values the "comfort" she derives from her seizures and the opportunity to escape her husband's-and the public's-expectations of proper behavior, which extend even as far as diagnosis-fainting spells are deemed more appropriate for a First Lady than epileptic seizures. Both poems highlight one of Baggott's strengths; the women in her poems speak with irony and humor as well as with anger or resentment. They also are well aware of their own complicity and guilt; while several of Baggott's subjects have entered the historical record as victims, the women in these poems do not see themselves as such.
The strongest poems in the collection are those in which the speakers address a specific, rather than a generalized audience; the poems addressed to other women are especially powerful because they allow their speakers to exist apart from the famous men in many of these women's lives. In "Dorothy Day's Daughter, Pregnant with Her Ninth Child, Begs Her Mother for Charity: A Bedtime Prayer," " the speaker confesses:
As a little girl,
I hated the smitten poor who followed you,
hauling their sun-boiled faces and stench.
But see how you have forced me
to become one? How else to be loved by you?
By countering Day's career as a charity worker with the suffering of her daughter's family, Baggott's poem revises the historical record to allow for a more complicated portrait of Day, one that is less flattering but more accurate. Although a few of the poems in this volume are less surprising than a reader might hope, Baggott has crafted a gorgeous collection of poems that succeeds in clarifying and expanding the historical record. "Marie Curie Gives Advice to Her Daughter Irene before Her Wedding" concludes with the lines: "My hope, daughter, is that / what you love doesn't come to kill you, / eye by eye, ear by ear, bone by radiant bone." Baggott's poems succeed in illuminating the interiors of her speakers' consciousnesses and of history itself.
Acknowledgments
Lori Schappell, a Conjoined Twin, Addresses the Kmart Cashier Who Eyes Her with Too Much Sympathy
?
THE ROCKWELL POEMS
Irene, Suicide, Four Years after Divorcing Norman Rockwell and Marrying Francis Hartley, Jr.
Mary Rockwell, after the Abortion
Mary Rockwell, 1950
Mary Rockwell after Her Son Is Accidentally Stabbed While Fencing
To Mary Rockwell, now dead
?
Mary Todd on Her Deathbed
Marie Laurent Pasteur Addresses Louis in Her Mind While She Scalds the Sheets
Marie Laurent Pasteur Watches Louis Walk to the Kennels after His Stroke
Mary Cassatt, Going Blind, Crosses Her Room
Katharine Hepburn in the Attic with Her Dead Brother
THE BEURET-CLAUDEL-RODIN POEMS
Rose Beuret in a Cool Bath While a Servant Reads the Society Pages to Her
Camille Claudel Bathing in the Lake near Chateau D'Islette
Camille Claudel Does Not Want to See the Baby
Camille Claudel in Her Studio in Quai Bourbon
Camille Claudel Refuses to Sculpt Clay Given to Her by Sister Saint Hildefonse at the Asylum
After a Trip to the Dentist with Sister Saint Hildefonse, Camille Claudel Returns to the Asylum
Camille Claudel Dies after Thirty Years in the Asylum
?
For Sylvia: Come Winter. Come, Winter.
Minna Edison Listens to Her Husband Give a Lecture around the Time He Is Deciding to Disown Thomas Edison, Jr., Minna's Stepson
Margaret Sanger Addresses the Ghost of Ida Craddock
Monica Lewinsky Thinks of Bill Clinton While Standing Naked in Front of a Hotel Mirror
Mrs. Dali
THE BORDEN POEMS
Lizzie Borden Addresses Her Jury of Men
Lizzie Borden in Love
The Night Lizzie Borden Dies
?
The Lion Tamer's Wife after the Lion's Escape from the Motordome
Dorothy Day's Daughter, Pregnant with Her Ninth Child, Begs Her Mother for Charity: A Bedtime Prayer
Marie Curie Gives Advice to Her Daughter Irene before Her Wedding
The Mule-Faced Woman, 1926
Ethel Waters' Mother, Louise-Raped at Twelve-Cannot Listen to Her Daughter Sing 'His Eye Is on the Sparrow'
Ida Saxton McKinley, the First Lady, Seizes during a Dinner Party
?
Helen Keller Dying in Her Sleep
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