#feministfriday episode 359 | Handwritten

July 28, 2021

Let's start in the Heian era and work our way forwards. Here's Izumi Shikibu, whose work Fem Fri has featured before: Watching the Moon | Watching the moon / at dawn / solitary, mid-sky, / I knew myself completely, / no part left out.

Jumping forwards about 1000 years (bit of a lurch) here's Marianne Moore on poetry and the functions of poetry: Poetry | I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in / it after all, a place for the genuine. / Hands that can grasp, eyes / that can dilate, hair that can rise / if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are / useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the / same thing may be said for all of us—that we / do not admire what / we cannot understand. The bat, / holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under / a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base— / ball fan, the statistician—case after case / could be cited did / one wish it; nor is it valid / to discriminate against “business documents and school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction / however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, / nor till the autocrats among us can be / “literalists of / the imagination”—above / insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have / it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion— / the raw material of poetry in / all its rawness, and / that which is on the other hand, / genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

Finally, in more or less the modern age ( I don't have a year for it though), the thoroughly charming "Eggs" by Lorna Crozier: Eggs | Your friend, who suffers from despair, sometimes composes a gratitude list that starts with the first letter of the alphabet. Her intention is to make it to the twenty-sixth, but she always stops at e. So far, that's sufficient. “E for eggs” gives her enough good feeling to turn on the light and find some shoes.

Thank you as always for spending this time with me. I hope you have a smashing weekend. Love, Alex. xx. <img .="" accessibility="" advice.="" alt=“PS– For those of you who are into this sort of thing, my pen is a Faber-Castell Grip and my ink is Kawco’s Midhight Blue. Thank you Margo (http://tinyletter.com/threeweeks) for the accessibility advice. 💗.” class=“tl-email-image” data-id=“4287794” for="" height=“310” http:="" margo="" midhight="" src="/images/f2ad5a58-5a51-009b-061d-eff192c0e1cf.jpg" style=“width: 640px; max-width: 640px;” thank="" the="" tinyletter.com="" width=“640” you=""/>