The American Century: Literature since 1945 567Sharon Olds (1942–), Olga Broumas (1949–), Kimiko Hahn (1955–), and Li-Young
Lee (1957–). Lorde insisted that she wrote to fulfill her responsibility “to see the
truth as I felt it, and to attempt to speak it with as much precision and beauty as
possible.” That truth, above all, involved the necessity of her power and survival as a
woman, an African-American, and a lesbian. And it compelled her, not only to write
poetry, but to create what she called “biomythography”: to tell the story of herself
and “the women who helped give me substance,” as she put it, in Zami: A New
Spelling of My Name (1982) and Our Dead Behind Us (1986). Di Prima, in such
books as Revolutionary Letters (1968) and Emerald Ice (1988), links bright, particular
accounts of her life to an unabashedly optimistic vision of the political future
(“America is not even begun yet / This continent is in seed”). Wakoski, by comparison,
is more exclusively confessional, following what she terms “the completely personal
expression” in books like The Collected Greed (1984). So, too, is the African-American
poet Clifton, whose New and Selected Poems 1985–2000 appeared in 2000. She has
written spare, unsentimental, and often wry poems about, for instance, her aborted
baby (“the lost baby poem”), her “big hips” (“homage to my hips”), and the loss of
her uterus and one of her breasts in operations (“poem to my uterus,” ‘lumpectomy
eve,’ ” “scar”). The distances between the three of them, or with Lorde, however, are
minimal or peripheral. Like Bidart, whose work, gathered together in such volumes
as In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965 to 1990 (1990), is ignited by the
pleasures and the pains of being a homosexual (“I feel too much, I can’t stand what
I feel,” he declares in “Happy Birthday”), they write, fundamentally, a poetry of the
first person singular.
That stress on the singular presence is just as strong in the work of the later
generation. The subject of the poetry of Sharon Olds, for instance, is the body: her
body, in particular, the space it inhabits, the subjectivity it determines, and the
violations of both that subjectivity and that space. For Olds, the body supplies a
defining sense of self against the psychological abuse of the father; it becomes, like
language, a way of escape from domesticity and dysfunction. And collections like
The Father (1992) and Blood, Tin, Straw (1999) show her proclaiming the power
and privacy of the body, pursuing her selfhood in poems that explore formerly
taboo subjects with blunt, sometimes vulgar language. Broumas, too, is preoccupied
with the body in its various configurations. Rave: Poems 1975–1999 (1999) contains
work that is just as frank and provocative as Olds’s is. Unashamed in her celebration
of lust, and her explanation of the politics of desire, Broumas conflates flesh and
landscape: their common salts lending an ecstatic, feminist slant to her accounts of
coming together with other women. Hahn and Lee are, maybe, less confrontational.
Hahn, in such books as The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006), uses the storytelling
traditions of her Asian-American community to realize a degree of indirection.
That same community, and a sense of family, are at the heart of the poems of Lee,
to be found in collections like Book of My Nights (2001). But the bedrock of this
poetry, too, remains the self, telling its story, treasuring its subjectivity. “I can only
speak for myself,” admits Hahn in a poem called “The Izu Dancer.” This could be
said by any and for any one and all of these later generations of confessionalGGray_c05.indd 567ray_c 05 .indd 567 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM