Contemporary Poetry

lyric subjects 45

existential. In a comic interlude the poet comments on her daugh-
ter’s love of black – her insistence that her hair ‘is black, black – /
not brown’ (p. 31 ). At the close of the poem, Bhatt returns to the
opening image of Kahlo and places black in a context of female
creativity and self-knowledge. She emphasises how Kahlo found
so ‘many different black strokes’ in order to ‘pull out every shade
/ of blackness / from your hair, your self’ (p. 32 ). Using the fi gure
of the female painter, Bhatt is able to draw an extensive cartogra-
phy of cultural references and global artistic practices. In this way
she creates a sense of connectivity between generations of women.
Bhatt admits:

Part of the reason I have poems about women’s experiences

... is because I tend to write out of my own life – it is my life
that I am trying to understand. In many poems I’ve changed
things or put in a lot of fi ction: often I have a female character
who is not me, but an imagined woman in a different time
and a different place. Of course, in some way these imaginary
women are connected to me.^38

Bhatt’s focus upon women’s experience, particularly in this case a
female painter’s reputation and life, enables a process of aesthetic
self-interrogation.
Similarly, Jorie Graham’s early poetry depicts a fascination with
representing paintings, including icons and frescoes. A sampling
of poetry titles from her fi rst volume Erosion ( 1983 ) illustrates this
preoccupation: ‘Still life with Window and Fish’, ‘The Lady and
the Unicorn and other Tapestries’, ‘Two Paintings by Gustav
Klimt’ and ‘Massacio’s Expulsion’.^39 The publication of The End
of the Beauty ( 1987 ) marked a notable rupture of the single-voiced
lyric in her work.^40 Critical accounts of Graham’s poetry register
the shift in her poetry during this period, as a movement from
ekphrasis to iconoclasm. Moreover, the scrupulous ‘painterly’
representations of her early work are forcefully broken down to
focus on the scrutiny of perception, and its mediation through a
certain linguistic textuality. The rupturing in the text is often seen
through gaps, spaces and questions. In ‘Self-Portrait as Hurry and
Delay (Penelope at her Loom)’ from The End of Beauty, Graham