#MeToo: Frances Presley

Frances Presley  

 

 

woody woodpecker

 

bills for drilling and drumming          rapid and repeated impacts   protect
the brain      a small brain          repeated pecking       at high decelerations

drum rolls delivered       in under a second

                 O—O    O   O                       O—O—O    O   O

woody woodpecker        drilling the telegraph        drilling holes in electric
poles     drilling   time tables      became   rounder  cuter       less demented

was it necessary to put on weight?    nevertheless     an aggressive   lunatic
no longer did the bird go  insane                   without     a legitimate  reason

he explained rocket propulsion

                       O—O    O   O            O—O—O    O   O

she slipped her voice into his audition              would not be credited  until
pecking a hole in the screen    misguided missile  with no language barrier

world-wide                 pecking out her name

 

                                O—O    O   O                       O—O—O    O   O

 

 

§

 

 

Yew man

Y—Yew man eating his hat—isolation…. The Ego or superego man
& then the madness tailing off

– Lynette Roberts

 

pushed up     push up
work it   work it   work it

got above himself
I am the Übermensch you said

this is not true to the yew
here on the ground is    dull grey green
feather leaves             gentle on eyes

too cold to step out                a roundel

here we go round
the mulberry bush        the mulberry bush

so early           cold and frosty                        morning
join hands and dance              overcoats   broken stove

inside the trunk                      her shrivelled form
holds up                                   ancillary stack
as fern leaf sprouts                  on bark

van man        has driven up the top
hat man so far up    he has disappeared

rubbed by the friction of bird song
forcing      thru      pin     holes
bird taps out     finely drilled

he has pushed out             pushed through
the top   of his hat        pierced    drum

found air clearer          a bald head
and light  eternally       wan

 

Llanfeugan Church, Pencelli


 

§

 

Niki St Phalle

 

Or “The entrance of the only woman in the breast of the group”
(1960 The New Realists)

Saint Sebastian or Portrait of my lover
Shirt with nails banged in
Head dart board, with darts thrown in
Empowering

If you do that
If you knock the nails in
If you shoot the rifle
If you hold the rifle, butt hard against your shoulder
If you shoot the plaster
If the worst meal you ever cooked pours out
Pow   pow   pow

Saint Sebastian
Is it you too?
It’s the menstrual flow
Flou
Femme éclatée

He was a stuffed shirt
“I never shot God only the church”
Christ you pointed a gun at him
and helped Sebastian to die all over again
and properly this time

(1986)

 

 

§

 

 

Carnal Knowledge
 

It ceased to give pleasure
the concave body which made full
became thin
Even the scooping gesture
became blunted and dull

So they held up instead
the poem above their heads
which signalled the transparence of one
for the other a moment to be gone

“This woman is reduced to a line
perhaps not even implied
What do we know of her?
Something of an intellectual bore?”

He did allow a gesture of analysis
for his seed was irretrievable
a cloud-rift of “there might have been”
an adjunct to the morning-after kiss

(1976)

 

§

 

 

Dear Emily

Thanks for inviting me to take part in the online feature you’re editing with Elizabeth-Jane for Chicago Review on the subject of “Me Too.” I’m sure it will be a really interesting and important collection of work.

As you say, I’ve been publishing on feminist issues for decades. “Me Too” is something that’s happening in the present moment, but the issues go back a long way, so I’m sending two recent and also two early poems. If I look at my work and the period it covers, it seems that things were far worse when I was at university in the 1970s, though I was also more vulnerable. If you want overt sexual oppression, both in bed and the tutorial, it exists in “Carnal Knowledge.” The 1980s were for me a time of feminist liberation, both in the workplace and in poetry, thanks to avant-garde women artists, such as Niki St Phalle. Both of these poems were published in The Sex of Art (1987), recently reprinted by Shearsman in a series of selected first books by poets.

“Yew Man” was written in Wales, while I was reading the letters of Lynette Roberts to Robert Graves about his tree alphabet (Graves was not amused). Her remark about the male superego threw me back to the 1970s and something that was said to me, only half-jokingly about the Übermensch.

“Woody Woodpecker” was one of my favourite cartoon characters when I was a little girl – I loved his anarchic violent character. I only discovered recently that “he’”was voiced by a woman, who had to remain anonymous.   This is from a series of bird poems inspired by Ada Lovelace and her desire for flight and freedom.

All good wishes

Frances