garde-Bienvenue-
cyndi lauper's skirt
and... pants?
avant
garde
D4T
2y=16
jennie tripped. now she oozes blood.
JEDEDIAH
lost his SKAGEN
Rich's third book Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), which was eight years in the writing, stands as a watershed in her poetic development. For the first time, in language freer and more intimate and contextual, she situates her materials and emotions against themes of language, boundaries, resistance, escape, and moments of life-altering choice. As the poem "The Roofwalker" states, "A life I didn't choose/chose me," while "Prospective Immigrants Please Note" rhetorically asserts that the safety of enclosures and illusions must be abandoned for the claims of a risky but liberating reality.
The critical reaction to Snapshots was negative, with objections to its bitter tone and the shift away from her hallmarks of formalism and emotional control. Tellingly, feeling she had "flunked," Rich wrote Necessities of Life (1966) with a focus on death as the sign of how occluded and erased she felt when her own sense of coming into her rightful subject matter and voice was denied. Necessities, personally and poetically, was less a retreat than a pause. Coinciding with her personal and poetic evolution was the tremendous force of the historical moment. Rich's earlier, inchoate feelings of personal conflict, sexual alienation, and cultural oppression were finding increasing articulation in the larger social/political currents gathering force throughout the sixties, from the civil rights movements to the antiwar movement, to the emergent women's movement.
Yvon, who had thought his dying day had come, woke up in a marvellous sub-marine palace. Bright-finned fish lived there and service was made by octopuses. The chef was an enormous crab and the palace guards were morays, led by a shark.
T-Birds Walk Like Me