Hard CountrySharon Doubiago’s first book, the epic poem Hard Country was published in 1982 to the acclaim of a wide number of poets and scholars. Hard Country tells the story of the breakup of a marriage, the meeting of a new love, and the subsequent journey the new couple make across the U.S., climaxing on the Tennessee Valley Authority lake where his mother drowned herself when he was ten. Through the whole journey the narrator is mourning her lost husband. Hard Country weaves the personal, the public, the political, the personalities, the history, geographies, lore and mythologies of the states they move through, going north, east, south, then returning to the Pacific Coast.
The critical study Forms of Expansion/Recent Long Poems by Women, by Lynn Keller (University of Chicago Press, 1997) begins with Hard Country. “Expanding the boundaries of both genre and gender, contemporary American women are writing long poems in a variety of forms that repossess history, reconceive female subjectivity, and revitalize poetry itself... Lynn Keller explores... the diverse traditions and feminist concerns addressed by poets ranging from Rita Dove to Sharon Doubiago, from Judy Grahn to Marilyn Hacker to Susan Howe.” “A quick count reveals that Hard Country,” Robert Peters wrote, “has nearly 10,000 lines, all readable, gripping, and never flagging. What an achievement! A orchestration of modes and themes in the grand Whitmantic Projective verse manner, lavish with explorations of American history (the struggle for the West, the American Civil War, Viet Nam), primitive myths, the poet’s personal and family histories, her restless wanderings after archetypal lost lovers, the subterranean connections of male and female, and these counter culture considerations, pop celebrities, literary figures, ecology and hallucinogenics ...Her writing contains much of the purest free verse written since Robinson Jeffers, D.H. Lawrence and Kenneth Rexroth. One poem, “Sitting Bull,” serves to introduce Doubiago’s talent... ”
The Spring l997 issue of Contemporary Literature (University of Wisconsin) features an extensive interview of Doubiago, focusing on her history and development as an epic poet, by Jenny Goodman. Also by Goodman: "Bearing an Unbearable History: "The Adoption of the 'Feminine I' in Sharon Doubiago's Hard Country," Special Issue on American Women Poets and the Long Poem, ed. Kathleen Crown, Women's Studies 27: 1998, Vol 27; Sharon Doubiago and Muriel Ruykeyser’s long poems, Jenny Goodman, However. Rutgers University, April 2000.
Also H.D. and Poets After, 'The mother is the muse H.D. said': Re-Membering the Reader in H.D.'s Helen in Egypt and Sharon Doubiago's Early Long Poems," Kathleen Crown, edited by Donna K. Hollenberg, University of Iowa Press, June 2000. Also, “On The Road With Sharon Doubiago: A Feminist Poet's Creative Embodiment of the Kerouac Archetype," Aaron Shonk, Western Literature Association, plus four other Doubiago papers presented, Sacramento, 1999. Hard Country is discussed by Bernard Schweizer in Jeremy Down’s Approaches to the Anglo and American Female Epic, 1621-1982, Ashgate Press, London. The March/April 2001 issue of The American Poetry Review features an essay by Alicia Ostriker, "Beyond Confession: The Poetics of Postmodern Witness, Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Forche and Sharon Doubiago." L.A. Blonde
(For barry eisenberg who, on finding a photograph of me at sixteen as a beauty queen parading down Main Street on the hood of a baby blue Thunderbird said, "God, Sharon, you have a lot of karma to work out.") Something of the light on sage there, the light exploding off the ocean. Something of the burning light pouring onto the hills, hurling back down the canyons as flame. And the beautiful stars running into the light, and the beautiful stars running out of the light from reeling earthquake, live oak, and the rampage of ice plant. Shadow and light of the groundswells, the highways and beaches washed clean by Santana, hot Grandmother of God and hard rains in an hour, the danger then in the dry beds of flash flood, the swollen arroyos that undermine every house in the foothills. The danger then of the city pushing you off into the unwatered desert. The way on winter days it's almost light enough to photograph something like angels in the Eucalyptus, the one hundred varieties, and hummingbirds, symbol of resurrection, hovering the cacti gardens. And high over the bird of paradise, palm and poinsettia, vulture that only light has blinded to the secret of bougainvillaea. Marilyn Monroe said she was always running into other people's unconsciouses. You lift the hand from the pale ice of your gown to the dark electricity of air. The sun heats the hood, turns your shoulders red. You wave along the collective stare lining the boulevard. In the blinding light they appear like a negative risen from solution, the skin black, the eyes, hair, teeth, and nails, as they roar Blondie! bleached out. Infant Found Alive At Wounded Knee
1. Something lifts me from her once a warm bath I lay in, now, who shudders in a great blow that goes through me, then grows cold. The white river I suck from her turns to red, bitter blood. A heavy snow begins to fall. Under the blue starlit tipi of night I can see them beneath the drifting snow, huddled heaps, scattered bundles and clots. When the sun returns ice slashes me like knives glistening red in the morning light. The wind comes up and I become a frozen knot that will never be untied. 2. I ride in his arm on horseback across the blinding world. He is a man who sees things that makes his body shudder worse than hers. He cries wounded, our knees are gone now. His tears fall on me, a warm thaw. Later he says Open your mouth. We have no choice. I will let down the milk for you from the father river of my breasts. What we are is what we are. Why else would I have them? I name you Little Mocking Bird for life. Looking For the Melungeon In a past life, Love we crossed the sea in a great wave before it was uprooted Through dreams of water and former cities we came settled these parts with mountains running up like walls, passes to valleys leading nowhere. We told no outlanders our tales. Your hand touched the night. I parted the darkness. Our great blood circulated round a Blond’s face. Our legends scattered the Jews’ lost colony. Now we’re full of strangers, shipwrecked Portuguese, blue-eyed Indians whose ancestors talked in books. Somewhere south of here, divers search for the body. Cold, dumb fish. We could be Japanese. Talking Melungeon. Appalachian African. Mountain-locked migration. Unknown. Song sung. Way low Take your mind clean away. |
|
