International Women's Day: Powerful Influences

To celebrate international women's day 2004, Janet Phillips asked some writers to talk about the first woman poet that influenced them. Here are their responses.

Gillian Clarke

Which of the women poets first made me want to be a poet myself? Was it Christina Rossetti, for her beautiful 'In the deep midwinter'? Or Emily Bronte, lonely and romantic on her moor, "The night is darkening round me / The wild winds coldly blow / But a tyrant spell has bound me / And I cannot, cannot go". More likely it was Emily Dickinson, reclusive in her New England house, strolling the garden in her white dress, writing her poems. Sometime in the long ago, I read 'The Snake', or someone read it to me. I caught a grass snake and kept it for a day in a shoe box, reciting her words like a lullaby, a spell, for the music of it, the rhyme, the strange words. "A narrow fellow in the grass / occasionally rides".

Gillian Clarke's new collection, Making Beds for the Dead, is due from Carcanet in April.

 


Julia Copus

The first poetry book I fell in love with was Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems. I'd never come across poems like these before – urgent, insistent, genuine, rhythmically supple – poems it was hard to be away from for long. I've read other books since which have influenced me – probably far more usefully – but none that has provoked quite the same sort of exhilaration. Discovering those first poems is an unrepeatable experience, I think – like falling in love for the first time. It wakes something up inside you which until then you didn't realise had fallen asleep.

Julia Copus won the National Poetry Competition 2002. Her latest book is published by Bloodaxe.

 

Alison Croggan

It's very hard to remember; as a child I read poetry voraciously. However, two names spring to mind. I was hugely influenced by the great Australian poet Judith Wright, in particular the blazing sensuality of poems like 'Woman to Man': her poetry gave me a strong, passionate poetic which was unambiguously female without having to bow to ideas of femininity which disguised their ambition in the diminutive. I owned her Selected Poems, Five Senses, and the book still shows the scars of all that reading, as it is falling to pieces! The other poet who influenced me was Stevie Smith. I had her anthology of Children's Verse, which I still think is a wonderful selection for children, and Smith's own work entranced me with its odd, broken beauty and its lyric steeliness.

Alison Croggan edits the online magazine Masthead . Her most recent book is The Common Flesh (Arc)

 

Elaine Feinstein

The first and most important woman to influence my poetry was the Russian genius Marina Tsvetaeva. I admired her refusal to disguise her emotions, her boldness, her arrogance. And after I began to work on my versions of her poetry, I found a stronger rhythm in the voice of my own poems.

You can catch Elaine reading with Nina Cassian, Carol Ann Duffy and Liz Lochhead on the Great Women Poets tour, 20 April (QEH Theatre, Bristol), 21 April, (Purcell Room, South Bank Centre), 23 April (Oxford Long Room, New College 01865 203901), 25 April, (Library Theatre, Manchester).

 

 

Jules Mann

I'd have to name a triad of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Anne Sexton, because they were introduced to me simultaneously by my university professor (lower levels of work in poetry seemed solely comprised of male poets). Moore for the emotion she was able to corset in formal verse (and I also appreciated her position as a woman-oriented poet who was a mentor to many); Bishop for her clarity and attention to minute detail; Sexton for her power and weirdness.

Jules Mann is Director of the Poetry Society

 

Pascale Petit

When I was at art school, there were a few poetry books circulating around the sculpture studios - Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove and Sylvia Plath were revered by a number of us for the vivid and entire visual worlds they created with words. Here was image-making on a par with sculpting. If this was contemporary poetry, then we art students had better catch up! Plath's work was direct and emotional ­ I'd not encountered that before. She had her own way with language ­ a dramatic and idiomatic address. Most novel of all was the fact that she was a woman and wrote in a devil-may-care fashion about things male poets wouldn't touch. Her style, however, was frustrating to emulate - it was just impossible to write like her. So I'd say her influence on me then was more as a role model - her boldness and originality something to aim for, when I wrote my first "book" of poems as part of my fine art degree.

Pascale Petit's latest book is The Zoo Father (Seren)

 

Meryl Pugh

The first woman poet to influence me was Selima Hill, whose work seemed to create a passionate relationship with its own world without concessions. Although I had read and admired other women poets, she was the writer who inspired me to write in earnest. The diction of her poem 'Cow' also made me realise that you didn't need to adopt someone else's vocabulary or dialect to write poetry - you really could use your own. I took it with me into the school where I worked at the time and used it in lessons to great effect. Even the students who had never really thought poetry was for them started producing these amazing, imaginative responses to it.

Meryl Pugh is a Jerwood/Arvon Young Poet apprentice.

 

Carol Rumens

The first woman poet I cared about was Edith Sitwell. This was mainly because my mother didn't like her. She was on TV a lot in the 50s. But I read her poems in Palgrave's Golden Treasury, and wrote a verse, when I was about 10, which was dedicated to her. As I remember, it went: "Creative as the stars' seraphic host / Words of great feeling from thy lips fall free. / Poet of the age, I love thee most / - Mortal, with thoughts of immortality."

Carol Rumens's latest book is Hex (Bloodaxe). She edited Making for the Open, an anthology of poetry by women.

 

Eva Salzman

Emily Dickinson was the first woman poet to influence me, with her sharp, elliptical voice. Of course there are the endless and intriguing questions we can pose about her life: about the life, the woman, the poet - the life of the woman-poet. Her conflicting feelings about recognition and fame must be familiar to any woman, and certainly to any artist. Any intimidation or humbling she might have felt in the face of her own gift she transformed into the themes of poetry. Even with the Great apparent within her, she knew the value of small things. Everything about her sounds a contemporary and recognisable note, which means that the ongoing – and completely unresolved issues about women's roles – also echo in her work. Of course the work itself sounds so modern to our ear... whatever "modern" means.

Sylvia Plath was nearly as great an influence. Her importance as a poet needs reiterating, partly so as to counter the tedious and persistent misapprehension that she's just a poet for angst-ridden teenagers. Almost equally irritating are those who label her a feminist poet, while it suits others to completely deny her feminist relevance, citing the fact that she was a woman and poet "of her time" - as if feminism hadn't been invented, and would have been a strange notion to an intellect like hers! She often gets represented as being on one "side" or another, which labelling limits how she is perceived as a writer – limits her scope and undervalues her gifts - which is ironic indeed. Although one hears in her the audacity and rage of the powerful yet impotent woman and poet, it's this aspect to her writing combined with an exquisite touch as regards language and image, and a facility with rhythm within the free-verse form, which all together makes her work great.

Eva Salzman's new book, Double Crossing: New & Selected Poems is due from Bloodaxe in May/June. It is a Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation 2004

 

Dorothea Smartt

Sonia Sanchez - african american

Why? I was privileged to see her read in London in the 80s. I was swept away by the topicality of her poetry, she dealt with "issues" and was political, black and conscious and a brilliant mistress of the craft.

Dorothea Smartt's collection, Connecting Medium, is published by Peepal Tree.

 

 

Jean Sprackland

The first woman poet to have a real, tangible influence on me was Carol Ann Duffy. I read Standing Female Nude in 1991 and started experimenting with my own writing the following year. It was a revelation to discover that a woman could write in such tough, muscular language. I also began to understand for the first time the exciting potential in taking on other voices. I particularly loved the fact that she appropriated the voices of men when she felt like it - that seemed wonderfully audacious somehow.

Jean Sprackland's latest book is Hard Water (Cape)

 

Who would you pick? Email your influences to publications@poetrysociety.org.uk and we'll post a selection of responses.

Links: www.internationalwomensday.com

 

Emily Dickinson, how could one ever forget the loner of Amherst, and Virginia Woolf, the narrative writer with the most intense poetry.

Anny Ballardini

In my adolescence, I was deeply impressed by Maria Banus, a Romanian poet ten years older than I, by the absolute freshness of her poems, their approach to life, nature, and love, and by her modern language. Her book was called The Girls' World! In a way, she set me free.

 

Nina Cassian

You can catch Nina reading with Elaine Feinstein, Carol Ann Duffy and Liz Lochhead on the Great Women Poets tour, 20 April (QEH Theatre, Bristol), 21 April, (Purcell Room, South Bank Centre), 23 April (Oxford Long Room, New College 01865 203901), 25 April, (Library Theatre, Manchester).

 

 

Additional responses