JOYCE CAROL OATES her heart laid bare

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Seemingly, Joyce Carol Oates can turn her hand to any subject and inject it with her trademark layered depth. She is well on her way to becoming one of the world’s most abundant artists, having authored, as of this writing, forty- one novels and novellas, twenty-five collections of short stories, eight volumes of poetry, and nine collections of essays (including one on boxing), and has edited thirteen prestigious anthologies, most notably the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction.

 

While she crosses barriers of time frequently in her novels, from postmodern urban settings to the Victorian era and back again, and works in genres ranging from Gothic to realism, she does have one overriding theme: violence. From prostitutes to primordial goddess figures (her novel Blonde, based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, was published to raves in March 2000), her writing fascinates as much as it shocks. She has received a fair amount of criticism for the disturbance in her fiction, but she explains it thusly: “The more violent the murders in Macbeth, the more relief one can feel at not having to perform them. Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.”

She was born in Lockport, New York, to an Irish Catholic family of modest means. Joyce’s intelligence saw her to the head of most classes, and she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Syracuse University before doing her master’s work in English literature at the University of Wisconsin. Her writing talent was noted early—she won the Mademoiselle fiction contest while still in college.

A reportedly excellent teacher, she has taught at several schools, most recently at Princeton, with her husband, academic Raymond Smith, while maintaining her grueling writing schedule. Her body of work averages a novel every two years, beginning in 1963. At certain times, she has published a book a year. As of this writing, her new work ‘Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars’ is expected in 2020.

When asked how she manages to produce such critically acclaimed works so quickly, she told the New York Times, “I have always lived a very conventional life of moderation, absolutely regular hours, nothing exotic, no need, even, to organize my time.” When labeled a workaholic by a reporter, she retorted, “I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of ‘working’ at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don’t think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.”

To read widely and to be open and curious about other people, to look and listen hard, not to be discouraged by rejections— we’ve all had them many times—and revise your work.

Joyce Carol Oates’ advice to other writers

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

LENORE KANDEL word alchemist

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Bold and beautiful, Lenore Kandel’s poetry attempts to bridge the chasm between the sacred and the sexual, between religion and the eroticism of the body. Replete with tantric symbolism, her works reflect Buddhist influence as well as a celebration of the corporeal.

Born in New York City in 1932, Lenore moved with her family that same year to Los Angeles when her father, the novelist Aben Kandel, got a movie deal for his novel, City in Conquest. A minor classic, the film starred Jimmy Cagney.

By the age of twelve, Lenore had decided to become a Buddhist and started writing. She spent the next fifteen years going to school and voraciously reading “everything I could get my hands on, particularly about world religions.” In 1959, she began sitting zazen in New York and had three short collections of her poetry published. In 1960, she moved to San Francisco and met Beat poet Lew Welch at East-West House, a co-op started by Gary Snyder and other Zen students.

Welch was on the scene in the early part of the San Francisco Renaissance, the collection of poetry schools pulled together by Robert Duncan in his efforts to create a poetry community after the fall of Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Lew was intertwined with the Beat and the Black Mountain College scenes, but refused to align with any one school of poetry. He was friends with Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and fellow Buddhist scholar Gary Snyder. Lenore recalls how she ended up in San Francisco, living at the East-West House and studying with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. “I’d been meaning to come to San Francisco, and I decided to come here for a weekend and I stayed. I met Lew and all the people in that whole trip, and when Jack came into town, we all went to Big Sur.”

An omnivorous reader, Lenore was very familiar with Jack Kerouac’s work and was especially fond of On the Road. His poetic style piqued her interest, and she found him to be inspiring to her own work. He too was impressed by her intensity and intellect as well as her physical stature. It would be in Jack’s Big Sur that he would immortalize Lenore as “a big Rumanian monster beauty of some kind I mean with big purple eyes and very tall and big (but Mae West big), but also intelligent, well read, writes poetry, is a Zen student, knows everything.” She was tall, indeed taller and larger than Lew, yet she carried a distinctly female aura, and was described by Carolyn Cassady in Off the Road as a “Fertility Goddess.”

Like many of the other Beats, her work provoked controversy. The Love Book, her most notorious collection of what she calls “holy erotica,” sent shock waves throughout the San Francisco Bay Area when it was published in 1965. After police raids on the Psychedelic Shop and City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, the chapbook was deemed pornographic and obscene. When challenged in court, Lenore defended it as a “twenty-three-year search for an appropriate way to worship” and an attempt to “express her belief that sexual acts between loving persons are religious acts.”

Although Lenore has been incapacitated since 1970 from a motorcycle accident with her then-husband, Hell’s Angel William Fritsch, she still reads voraciously on all subjects, including religion, and writes daily. “It’s important to be a speaker of truth, especially if you put your words out there, they gotta be true.”

Kenneth Rexroth once praised the fluidity and striking austerity of her words, which he saw as delineating the sharp paradoxes of the body and soul. Disregarding convention, she delves into the essence of being, writing provocative poems that intend to stir the heart as well as the mind. The strong Buddhist influence in her work molds emotions into stanzas, giving shape to the ineffable. Lenore Kandel is a true word alchemist.

 

we have all been brothers, hermaphroditic as oysters
bestowing our pearls carelessly
no one yet had invented ownership
nor guilt nor time

Lenore Kandel, from “Enlightenment Poem”

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

SYLVIA PLATH eloquently unfiltered

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Sylvia Plath was one of the most distinguished and potent poets of the last century. Though she lived to be only thirty before taking her own life in 1963, she was by then already known as a literary force. In the years since, her works have touched untold numbers of readers with their wrenchingly expressive treatment of the dark side of the human experience: despair, morbid fixation on death, and turbulent storms of emotion. Plath’s intensely autobiographical poems explore her own inner pain and the difficulties in her troubled relationships with her parents and with her husband, fellow poet Ted Hughes. On the World Socialist website, Margaret Rees said of her work, “Whether Plath wrote about nature or about the social restrictions on individuals, she stripped away the polite veneer. She let her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears. In doing so, she laid bare the contradictions that tore apart appearance and hinted at some of the tensions hovering just beneath the surface of the American way of life in the postwar period.”

In the New York Times Book Review, former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky wrote, “Thrashing, hyperactive, perpetually accelerated, the poems of Sylvia Plath catch the feeling of a profligate, hurt imagination, throwing off images and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open. All the violence in her work returns to that violence of imagination, a frenzied brilliance and conviction.” In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, essayist Thomas McClanahan said of her, “At her most articulate, meditating on the nature of poetic inspiration, she is a controlled voice for cynicism, plainly delineating the boundaries of hope and reality. At her brutal best—and Plath is a brutal poet—she taps a source of power that transforms her poetic voice into a raving avenger of womanhood and innocence.”

Sylvia Plath was the daughter of Boston college professor Otto Plath and Aurelia Plath, née Schober, who had been one of Otto Plath’s students. Young Sylvia lived by the seaside for the first eight years of her life, but when her father died in 1940, financial straits forced Aurelia Plath to move to Wellesley, where she became a teacher of advanced secretarial studies at Boston University. Sylvia was highly successful as a student; she won academic awards, and her poems and stories found publication in magazines while she was still a teenager. She had written over fifty short stories in advance of beginning her studies at college, which commenced after she earned a scholarship to Smith College. While a student there, Sylvia won a Mademoiselle magazine fiction contest; the next summer, the magazine bestowed the plum of a guest editor position on her.
But during her college years, depression began to beset her, and at age twenty, Plath attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills. She survived the attempt and was treated with electroconvulsive (a.k.a. “shock”) therapy in the hospital; this experience provided grist for her sole published novel, The Bell Jar.

In a 1958 journal entry, Plath wrote, “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.” This passage eloquently expresses the sensation of bipolar disorder (formerly known as manic depression), and in the decades of Plath’s life, there was no effective treatment available to stabilize sufferers of this biochemical illness. She did, however, return to Smith College after her hospitalization to complete her degree, going on to study at Cambridge funded by a Fulbright grant. There she met poet Ted Hughes, and in 1956, they married.

In 1960, a volume of Plath’s collected poetry titled The Colossus was published; both The Bell Jar and The Colossus were well received, but recognition could not save her marriage from ending in mid-1962 when she discovered her husband was having an affair. Sylvia Plath was left with two children under three years of age to look after all alone, and less than a year after the end of her marriage, she killed herself by putting her head in a gas oven, after carefully making certain the gas would not reach the room where her children were. She was under the care of a physician who was visiting her daily and had prescribed an antidepressant a few days previously, but most such medications require about three weeks to have much of an effect. Plath had written of the feeling of despair that she was experiencing as “owl’s talons clutching my heart.”

In the months after separating from her husband, Plath had been in a period of inspiration during which she wrote most of the poems which are the foundation of her reputation, including at least twenty-six of the poems published posthumously in the poetic volume Ariel (1965). Noted poet Robert Lowell said of these works in his preface to Ariel that they were poems that “play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.” She had felt that her poetry was a side pursuit and sought success in publishing stories and other prose works, but that proved elusive. She is known primarily for the brilliance of her poetry, which is seen in context with the work of her poetic contemporaries, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Lowell. Many of her later works dealt with what one critic called the “domestic surreal”; Plath took the objects and events of everyday life and twisted the context to evoke a feeling of nightmare in expressing her inner experience. It is notable that she was close friends with fellow poet Anne Sexton, who followed Plath in suicide eleven years later. Sexton later said of their conversations, “We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it.”

Winter Trees and Crossing the Water found publication in 1971 in the UK; they brought to light nine previously unseen poems that had been cut from the original version of the Ariel manuscript. Ten years later, The Collected Poems, which included poems written between 1955 and the end of her life, were published; paradoxically, her former husband, Ted Hughes, edited the volume and wrote its introduction. Her headstone has been repeatedly defaced by people outraged that “Hughes,” her estranged husband’s last name, appeared on it. There have been many attempts to chisel it off and leave only her name on the marker. Sylvia Plath was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Sylvia, a biopic in which Gwyneth Paltrow played the title role, was released in 2003. She is remembered as a groundbreaking poet “whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified,” in the words of writer Honor Moore.

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

ANNE SEXTON sonnets of singular struggle

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Born in 1928, Anne Sexton was raised in Weston, Massachusetts. Her father was a successful businessman, and her childhood was materially comfortable. However, her relationship with her parents was problematic, perhaps even abusive. After attending a boarding school, she went to Garland Junior College, a “finishing school,” for a year. At age nineteen, she married Alfred “Kayo” Sexton II. While he was serving in Korea, she became a fashion model. At age twenty-five, after the birth of her first daughter, Anne suffered from post- partum depression, which led to her first breakdown, and she was admitted to a neuropsychiatric institution. Other hospitalizations followed. She continued to struggle with depression all her life before committing suicide at age forty-six.

During her treatment, however, her therapist encouraged her to write about what she was feeling, thinking, and dreaming. The therapist was impressed with her work and encouraged her to pursue this creative avenue. In 1957, Sexton began to participate in writing groups in Boston; these eventually led to forming friendships and other close relationships with the poets Robert Lowell, Maxine Kumin, George Starbuck, and Sylvia Plath. Her poems about her psychiatric struggles were published in her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960); James Dickey wrote that they described the experiences “of madness and near-madness, of the pathetic, well-meaning, necessarily tentative and perilous attempts at cure, and of the patient’s slow coming back into the human associations and responsibilities which the old previous self still demands.”

Sexton’s work is generally categorized as confessional, together with that of poets like Plath, Lowell, John Berryman, and W. D. Snodgrass. In an interview with Patricia Marx, Sexton revealed, “…[E]veryone said, ‘You can’t write this way. It’s too personal; it’s confessional; you can’t write this, Anne,’ and everyone was discouraging me. But then I saw Snodgrass doing what I was doing, and it kind of gave me permission.” Subsequent books included All My Pretty Ones (1962), the Pulitzer Prize winner Live or Die (1966), Love Poems (1969), and the 1969 play Mercy Street. Her least confessional and most feminist volume was Transformations (1972), in which she retold several Grimm’s fairy tales. In an ironic twist, the last collection of her work published during her lifetime was entitled The Death Notebooks (1974). Posthumous volumes include The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), 45 Mercy Street (1976), and Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978).

Sexton’s writings were extremely popular during her lifetime, and she received many accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the Ford Foundation, and honorary degrees; she also held professorships at Boston University and Colgate University. Despite this literary recognition, critiques of her work usually focused on its autobiographical aspects. For instance, Dickey wrote of her poetry, “Miss Sexton’s work seems to me very little more than a kind of terribly serious and determinedly outspoken soap-opera.” In contrast, Beverly Fields contended that Sexton’s poetry is not as autobiographical as it seems; they are poems, not memoirs. Fields analyzed many of Sexton’s poems, pointing out the recurrent symbolic themes and the poetic techniques that in her view made these works so impressive.

Erica Jong, one of Sexton’s earliest champions, contended in her review of The Death Notebooks that Sexton’s artistic impact as a poet had been seriously underestimated: “She is an important poet not only because of her courage in dealing with previously forbidden subjects, but because she can make the language sing. Of what does [her] artistry consist? Not just of her skill in writing traditional poems…. But by artistry, I mean something more subtle than the ability to write formal poems. I mean the artist’s sense of where her inspiration lies….There are many poets of great talent who never take that talent anywhere….They write poems which any number of people might have written. When Anne Sexton is at the top of her form, she writes a poem which no one else could have written.”

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

KATHLEEN RAINE modern mystic

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Kathleen Raine chose the path of the visionary poet in the tradition of William Blake. Her aim was “to see a World in a Grain of Sand…. Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,” in Blake’s words. She was deeply committed to this life choice and devoted enormous energy to her poetry and her essays in support of her sacred craft. She has garnered a place for herself in the pantheon of scholars of mystical poetry, with fourteen volumes of her criticism published, along with four volumes on William Blake alone and a definitive analysis of Golden Dawn idealist poet William Butler Yeats.

Born in London in 1908 and schooled at Girton College, Cambridge, Kathleen Raine undertook her master’s studies in the field of natural science, using the wild landscape of her youth to inform her poetry, and received a degree in 1929. She was the youngest and only woman among the Cambridge Poets of the 1930s and began to include women’s writing as one of her interests when she read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

Like some of her Romantic predecessors, she had numerous loves and married several times. Unlike others, however, her brilliance was recognized in her lifetime; Raine received many awards for her poetry, her translations—the most memorable of Honoré de Balzac—and her critical work. Her verse was greatly admired by her peers; esteemed poet-critic G.S. Fraser described it as “the poems of a sibyl, perhaps of a rapt visionary, but not of a saint.”

Awards notwithstanding, she was given to the occasional extreme. At one
time, she refused to include any poems containing “mere human emotion.” She explained this shocking and extremely limiting measure for her Collected Poems as a commitment to “the symbolic language of…poets of the ‘Romantic’ tradition.” Her editor and publisher convinced her not to exclude some of her finest works from the ultimate volume of her verse, but her attempt to do so certainly illustrates her radical pledge to uphold her alliance to her mystical roots: “I began as a poet of spontaneous inspirations, drawing greatly on nature and fortified by my more precise biological studies…. I have much sympathy for the young generation now reacting against material culture….. I am too firmly rooted in the civilization of the past to speak their language.”

This too is an experience of the soul. The dismembered world that once was the whole god whose broken fragments now lie dead. This passing of reality itself is real.

Kathleen Raine, from Isis Wanderer

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

Rupi Kaur lyrical lines about love and life

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Rupi Kaur is a bestselling Canadian poet as well as the illustrator of two collections of poetry. Born in the state of Punjab in India, she was raised in Canada from age four; she speaks and reads Punjabi as well as English but writes only in English. She started to draw at the age of five when her mother handed her a paintbrush and told her to draw her heart out. Kaur has said that she sees her life as an exploration of that artistic journey. After completing a degree in rhetoric studies, she published her first collection of poems, 2014’s milk and honey. The internationally acclaimed collection sold over a million copies and graced the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. Her second collection, the sun and her flowers, was published in 2017; throughout these collected works, she explores themes including love, loss, trauma, healing, migration, revolution, and the feminine. Her works have popularized Instapoetry, a new social-media driven genre of short and easily accessible poetry.

it is a blessing
to be the color of Earth
do you know how often
flowers confuse me for home

rupi kaur

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

Amanda Lovelace changing pain to self-worth with poetic alchemy

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Having grown up a word-devourer and an avid lover of fairy tales, it came naturally to Amanda Lovelace to begin writing books of her own. She flipped the fairy-tale script with her 2016 poetry collection The Princess Saves Herself in This One; the collection is a part of Lovelace’s Women are some kind of magic series. She also incorporated the #MeToo movement into the series with the publication of The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One. The lifelong poetess and storyteller lives in New Jersey with her spouse and their ragdoll cats. She is a two-time winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for best poetry.

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

Lang Leav poignant poems of love and loss

Photo by Carolyn Haslett

Novelist and poet Lang Leav was born in a Thai refugee camp as her family fled the Khmer Rouge regime. She grew up in the predominantly migrant town of Cabramatta, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. Leav is the winner of a Churchill Fellowship, a Qantas Spirit of Youth Award, and a Goodreads Reader’s Choice Award. According to Publisher’s Weekly, her first poetic volume, Love & Misadventure (2013), presaged the poetry renaissance that has been in the ascendant in the publishing world. Her later books, including her first novel, Sad Girls, are international bestsellers as well. With a combined social media following of 2 million, her messages of love, loss, and female empowerment continue to resonate with her many readers. Leav currently lives in New Zealand with her partner, fellow author Michael Faudet.

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

EMILY DICKINSON white witch of Amherst

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Emily Dickinson was one of the first female literary “superstars”—a rather unusual fate for a housebound recluse. Her brilliant, intense verse certainly created a legend for the poet, but her eccentricities added to the “glamour” in the original sense of the word, casting a spell that has lasted well over a century. Born in 1830 on December 10 in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson was the second child of a strict and sober lawyer, Edward Dickinson, and a sweet-natured and shy mother, also named Emily. Emily junior also had an older brother, Austin, and a younger sister, Lavinia. By all accounts, the family was happy and prosperous, pillars of the community. Emily also benefited from a good education at Amherst Academy and at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, one of the first women’s colleges in America, located, fortuitously for Emily, right outside Amherst.

It was during her last year at Mount Holyoke that Dickinson showed glimmerings of the qualities that made her so different from her contemporaries. Lavinia, Emily’s sister, relayed an amusing story about Emily bluffing her way through a mathematics test: “When the [geometry] examination came and [she] had never studied it, she went to the blackboard and gave such a glib exposition of imaginary figures that the dazed teacher passed her with the highest mark.” And a classmate reported a shocking instance when the principal of Mount Holyoke, Mary Lyons, asked “all those who wanted to be Christians to rise,” Emily couldn’t “honestly accede” and was the only one of all the women students present who “remained seated.” This independence of will, mind, and imagination would inform her poetry and her life choices from that point on. She left school and returned home. (It is a topic of debate among her biographers as to whether evangelical pressure following this event caused Emily Dickinson to leave, and many believe that to be the reason, although Edward Dickinson also missed his elder daughter.) For the rest of her life, she rarely left the house and is now recognized to have been agoraphobic. She also fell victim to an eye disorder believed to have been exotropia, for which she was treated in Boston; this was nearly the only occasion upon which she would take a trip of any kind, except for a handful of journeys with her sisters to see their father, now a congressman living part of the time in Washington, DC.

 

Emily’s journals indicate that she was aware that the “circumference” of her
life was decreasing, after her lively girlhood of acting as hostess for her father’s important parties and composing original verse for handmade greeting cards for her fellow students. As her daily existence narrowed, she began dressing only
in white and seemingly embraced her new role as a mystical, poetic presence amid family and neighbors. She became such a hermit that she baked treats
for the town’s children and relatives and lowered them in a basket from her bedroom window, refusing to see or be seen by visitors. She only allowed the doctor to examine her as she walked past a half-open door, and wrote in a letter to her mentor, Atlantic Monthly editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “I do not cross my father’s ground to any house in town.” Emily was aware of her bizarre behavior and the effect it had, referring to herself when she did appear as “manifesting” like a ministering priestess with her token offerings of flowers, wine, and sweet cakes.

Since her death in 1886, many literary scholars have puzzled over what events might have driven her to become an invisible wraith, holed up with pen and paper. The most popular explanation is a failed romance with a mystery man, now believed to have been Reverend Charles Wadsworth, a married man she met in 1855 during one of her few outings in Philadelphia. Her letters include several fervent and openly erotic missives addressed to “Master” from “Daisy,” an infantilized, victim-like “culprit” persona with a “smaller life” that she took on in these exchanges. No real agreement has ever come about as to the veracity of the “Master” letters, as they may have been an instance of what she stated to Higginson in discussing her poetry: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.”

 

Dickinson’s and Higginson’s literary relationship began when Emily read
his article, “A Letter to a Young Contributor,” in his magazine and wrote, submitting her poems, asking if they were “alive” and if she could be his “scholar.” Higginson did indeed find her poetry to be living, perhaps overly so, and suggested she tone down her whimsical language and meter. But he was intrigued enough to travel to Amherst in 1870. She made an exception to her general rule and agreed to meet him in person.

Dickinson, despite her lack of exposure to the world at large, had her ambitions. She read deeply the writings of women writers from whom she drew inspiration—in particular, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, going so far as to display their images—and kept up with new writers with whom she identified; the Brontë sisters’ explosively passionate novels were special favorites of hers. Dickinson also studied the Bible and the new Transcendentalism, upon which she based her own female- and nature-centered theology, describing the hills of Amherst as “strong Madonnas” and herself, the Poet, as “The Wayward Nun—beneath the Hill—Whose Service is to You.”

Five years before Emily Dickinson passed away, a young woman, Mabel Loomis Todd, wrote a letter to her family of “the character of Amherst…a lady whom the people call the ‘Myth;’ she has not been outside of her own house in fifteen years…. She dresses wholly in white, and her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.” The poet had indeed captured Todd’s imagination. Four years after her passing, in 1890, Todd published a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, a selection of 1,776 divine and abstruse poems that Emily had sewn into little booklets and tucked into a bureau.

Readers still thrill to the force of Dickinson’s writing and her capacity to evoke the delicate beauty of a bee or a berry with the same scope and breadth of vision with which she addressed the big issues of God and the cosmos and sweeping emotions. The “little housekeeping person,” as she described herself, was in fact one of the greatest poets of all time.

Rearrange a “Wife’s” affection!
When they dislocate my Brain!
Amputate my freckled Bosom!
Make me bearded like a man!

Emily Dickinson, from poem 1737

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

MIRABAI Krishna’s convert

clicked at Delhi Haat

An Indian bhakti or saint-poet, Mirabai (1498–1565) is the best known of all the northern Indian poets of this style. A Rajput princess by birth, she was steeped in literature and music by tutors in the court of her grandfather, Rao Dudaji.

Renowned for her sanctity, Mirabai married the crown prince of the kingdom of Mewar, but her religious feelings caused her to reject a husband-wife relationship with her royal groom. Instead, she worshipped her Lord, the incarnation of Krishna called Giridhara, whose great works included lifting a mountain. Tradition has it that the crown prince’s family tried to kill Mirabai twice, and that she rejected the family’s deities and the proper widow’s rite of immolating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre upon his death.

If these legends hold any truth, they could easily explain why Mirabai began wandering, leaving behind all semblance of a normal life and devoting herself exclusively to worship of her Lord Giridhara. Toward the time of her death, she stayed at the temple compound of Ranachora at Dvarka. Her devotional hymns, prayers, and poems are still sung all over India and have recently found their way into printed form in English.

Only those who have felt the knife can understand the wound. Only the jeweler knows the nature of the Jewel.

Mirabai

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.