Can you imagine? Mythos and Reclamation in Angela Caravan and Amy LeBlanc
Angela Carravan. Landing. post ghost press, 2018. SOLD OUT.
Poetry and mythos are happy partners, but much of mythology is steeped in patriarchal culture. How do real historical events become folklore, and how does this feedback loop inform women’s real lives? Angela Caravan's Landing (post ghost press, 2018) and Amy LeBlanc's Ladybird, Ladybird (Anstruther Press, 2018) examine how the feminine appears (or is notably absent) in folklore and myths. Can we reclaim the stories and histories in which women are presented as subservient, as villains, or are not present at all? Caravan and LeBlanc answer yes, but approach this response in very different ways.
In Landing, Caravan focuses on the moon landing. The moon is a traditionally feminine symbol, and the moon landing is framed as a metaphorical de-virgining of the moon, an act of sexual violence. But in our cultural memory, the moon landing has become a mythologized tale in which men save a docile woman.
To explore the trope of the masculine conquering the feminine, Caravan writes of this "precious thing called landing." The sexual act is a "precious" conquering, much like the achievements and conquests of men are made precious in the telling of history. As the two women in the poem speak about the moon landing, they reflect how the "satisfaction [of men is] measured always in weight against our own." Caravan shows how this event is interpreted differently by the two women. The friend, Julia, feels "majesty" in it. But the speaker sees it differently:
All I saw was loss & the sad sense on return
to the land of virgins who'd never be popped
[...]
We are unfit incapable
doomed where we landed
The masculine concept of “landing” is domination, and that domination is a crowning historical achievement. In contrast, for women “birth” or “landing” is the initiation into a doomed existence where the feminine is viewed as incapable of committing historical acts worthy of celebration through mythos. Yet Caravan ends the poem with a small hopeful act of the imagination, as if to say that a little footprint can still be left to mark the path forward into reclaiming history:
Can you imagine?
Can you imagine?
Ladybird, Ladybird takes a wholly different approach. LeBlanc asserts the power of the feminine in fairy tales through violent reclamation. She amalgamates the archetypal meek princess and violent witch figures into one, and hands the power back to the women being wronged. And though these female characters do violence, we as readers do not hate them. Their violence is justice.
In the first poem, “Nectar,” the speaker addresses how women's stories are often invalidated and doubted, even by other women. LeBlanc is interested in the ways folklore informs reality, and in this collection the line between the myth and the real is often imperceptible. Though this poem rings with fairy tale language, the implications are real and true — the disbelief of sexual violence and erasure of feminine experience.
Let me tell you a story:
my mother will say
she's a liar
she remembers things that never happened,
but you and I know that isn't true.
The speaker implores the reader to "unhinge the wasps from your insides," to remove the "venom."
Amy Leblanc. Ladybird, Ladybird. Anstruther Press, 2018. SOLD OUT.
Ladybird, Ladybird is rife with women revelling in destructive and even murderous acts, but these acts are imbued with righteous power, not evil. In Powder, boys lower a girl into a "bloody pit," but the ceiling caves in on them. The boys "try to flee" and their nostrils are "sealed with a patch of black ash," while "the girl with the matches just sits and laughs."
LeBlanc skillfully employs nursery rhyme rhythms throughout the collection. Their sing-song innocence contrasts creepily with the gory content. This collection seems to ask, what else can women do but embrace the violence we have historically been surrounded by? Why shouldn't we use it to empower ourselves? In “Afterglow,” Leblanc suggests we can simply make do with what is given:
She doesn't mind ashes
on the back of her dress,
or the numbers on stairs,
or the bones in the grass.
LeBlanc creates her own mythos. “Lustre” reads like a warped creation myth in the form of a cookbook recipe, where the creation of the feminine ideal specially for male consumption and control is glaringly apparent:
Add moulded foundant jewellery,
pearls, flowers, or anything else
that will enhance her. Look at
her, then, and ask: How many
lemons did you eat today?
“Swell “comes after as instructional guidelines for women surrounded by this traditional patriarchal mythos. This is how to cope with being. This is how to live with violence and suffocating expectations. This is how to:
...stop the swelling.
...repair a broken plate.
...pick glass from the carpet.
...lay out dinner.
...stitch a ripped finger.
...stop a bleeding nose.
...avoid bee strings, by staying as silent and as dull as you can.
Similar to Landing, LeBlanc writes on true historical events and the way they become cultural myth, but also in the ways myth has a direct line of impact on women's lives and safety. In “Sickle,” LeBlanc references Bridget Cleary, an Irish woman who was murdered and burned by her husband in 1895. He was convinced that his true wife had been abducted by fairies, and that the person he murdered was a changeling. Thus, the apparently harmless fireside tales about fairies and changelings were transformed into a justification for the murder of a woman. But even now, her death has become a fairy tale. Bridget and her story are now referred to in real life as "The Fairy Wife."
In these musings and re-framings, both Caravan and LeBlanc grapple for a new mythos in which women are present and powerful. They are, in fact, a part of its very creation. It is ongoing. We must mindfully seek it out.
Can you imagine?
Can you imagine?
With the aid of these small but potent collections, we can.
Conyer Clayton is an Ottawa based artist who aims to live with compassion, gratitude, and awe. Her most recent chapbooks are Trust Only the Beasts in the Water (above/ground press, 2019) / (post ghost press, 2019), Undergrowth (bird, buried press, 2018) and Mitosis (In/Words Magazine and Press, 2018). She released a collaborative album with Nathanael Larochette, If the river stood still, in August 2018. She won Arc's 2017 Diana Brebner Prize, performs sound poetry with Quatuor Gualuor, and writes reviews for Canthius. Her debut full length collection of poetry, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, is forthcoming Spring 2020 with Guernica Editions.