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♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ BERNADETTE MAYER: I did wish to be a man, it was better to be one.
Imagine knowing you could not bear children, but could conceive them and they were your own still.
What fun!
I'd go around conceiving them every chance I got.
("March of the Toy Soldiers" playing) I was at my last appointment with my OB-GYN before I moved to Boston, and he says to me, "Here, Nancy, take this pill."
I said, "What's in this pill?"
He came over and tapped me on the head and he said, "Don't bother your pretty little head, just take it."
One of the issues of the early days of the women's movement is that childbirth had become very medicalized.
My mother had anesthesia, and then she said, "And then the doctor brought you to me and it was wonderful."
JUDY NORSIGIAN: Women were drugged.
They were given scopolamine, they were having hallucinations, and they were coming out of these experiences completely disempowered.
So it was wonderful to see an emerging group of women saying, "We're going to reclaim that important act that we as women can perform."
ELISA NEW: During the 1970s, a new generation of women poets emerged, poets who wrote on themes-- sexuality, pregnancy, childbirth-- that women had never dared write about before.
Sharon Olds and Bernadette Mayer were two of these.
♪ ♪ Bernadette Mayer's The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters fr om its very title questions the division of labor that honors male writing as work, while consigning women's subjects to the domain of the personal.
Published in the collection Satan Says, Sharon Olds' lyric manifesto "The Language of the Brag" defends childbirth as a theme worthy of literary attention and declares independence from self-censorship and shame.
OLDS: I got hate mail, a lot of hate mail, some of which was so cruel, it was frightening.
NEW: About this poem?
- About all my poems.
NEW: To understand this pivotal moment in feminist history, I asked Bernadette to read excerpts from her book-length poem.
Meanwhile, Sharon and I explored her poem along with seven feminists from two generations.
DONNA LYNNE CHAMPLIN: I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw, I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms and my straight posture and quick electric muscles to achieve something at the center of a crowd, blade piercing the bark deep, the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the (muted).
I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body, some heroism, some American achievement beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self.
CHAMPLIN: Magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot and watched the boys play.
♪ ♪ EMILY OSTER: I really like that this starts with a knife throw, because it feels so man.
It's such a man thing to throw knives.
The poem begins with knife-throwing-- why?
You watch the Westerns, and they're in there in the saloon.
And after they shot back a couple of whiskeys, shooting and knife-throwing-- how much more American can you be?
And it's a particular kind of American machismo.
"I'm awesome."
And I think some of us just listen to that and think, "Oh, please, spare me," you know?
HAWLEY: She is making a comparison about athletic performance.
Something that we would celebrate and would be public and you would do in front of other people.
This poem is making fun of male braggadocio.
- Yes.
- And trying it on for size.
("William Tell Overture" playing) OLDS: I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms.
I want them to notice my arms are awesome.
OLDS: And my straight posture and quick electric muscles to achieve something at the center of a crowd.
I've wanted accolades.
I've wanted proof of my fantasticness publicly.
OSTER: That kind of doing in front of other people, men are much more enthusiastic about their, their achievements in those realms than women are.
Sometimes when, you know, men do boasts, I think we also go, like... (sighing): "There he goes again."
OLDS: The blade piercing the bark deep, the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the (muted).
I want to throw a knife and have it look like a (muted) in a tree.
♪ ♪ NEW: It was the women's movement of the 1970s that freed women from the obligation to be decorous and feminine, and women poets led the way.
That term "voice," now synonymous with political activism, comes from poetry, and it refers to how tone and word choice can project the attitude of a speaker.
Using taboo language was one way to cut through and dramatize constraints on women's speech.
There are words in this poem that are not ladylike.
This was not what you would expect from a lady girl poet.
She had balls-- excuse me-- to write this.
And I just have an intrinsic Irish Catholic... (giggles nervously): "Oh, you can't say the word (muted)!"
The empowerment that came from using forbidden words...
It's a little counter-phobic.
- Yes.
- Like a person who knows shame just saying, "(muffles) that."
You know, there are some games that say, "Don't cross this line."
Ooh.
I was watching a lot of video of Sharon Olds reading her own poetry, and she is the gentlest, hippiest, metaphysical angel-on-earth kind of energy.
- And I said, "Yes, I have a patriotic poem."
NEW: This poem was first published in a book called Satan Says.
Well, since I was going to Hell anyway, maybe that gave me some mad recklessness.
♪ ♪ MAYER: The way I knew I was pregnant was it wasn't fun to get drunk anymore.
♪ ♪ I stood by the sandlots and watched the boys play.
I have stood by the sandlot and watched the boys play.
I have stood by the sandlot and watched the boys play.
It's funny the way little boys, sometimes little, you know, peewee boys, become the center of attention in the neighborhood sandlot.
CHAMPLIN: That can go either way, where it's, like, "I watched the silly boys play."
"Oh, please, that's juvenile."
Or, "I've watched the boys play with envy."
I was watching the benefits that boys had in high school.
Hockey was a big thing and softball was a big thing.
And they had afterschool teams, and we played in gym, but we didn't have afterschool teams.
♪ ♪ OLDS: And this was in a neighborhood and in a family where God was a boy, Jesus was a boy, the Holy Spirit was a boy, the minister, the bus driver.
HAWLEY: I actually looked up, when did Title IX become law?
It was not till 1972.
♪ ♪ ALI: When I was growing up, um, young girls wanted to out-brave young boys, and I think there is that, "Hey, I can be more brave than a man."
OSTER: The poem starts with this idea of wanting something and the ways in which you could not have it, even as a child, watching something that you couldn't be part of, but then to move into something that only you could be part of is really striking.
♪ ♪ OLDS: I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around my belly big with cowardice and safety.
Stool charcoal from the iron pills, huge breasts leaking colostrum, legs swelling, hands swelling, face swelling and reddening, hair falling out, inner sex stabbed and stabbed again with pain like a knife.
The poem talks about pregnancy not as the glamorous sort of, you go to the movies and there's a little glow and there's a smile, and then you have a pillow and then you have a baby.
It is so shocking to be pregnant when you've never been pregnant.
("The Blue Danube" playing) People don't tell you a lot of things that happen.
Nobody wants to talk about all of the different discharges.
There's the breast discharge, there's the vagina discharge, it's coming, with the vomiting.
WILKERSON: Colostrum, it's kind of a yellow, thick discharge that your breasts expel as you're getting ready to make milk.
I mean, these are new experiences.
♪ ♪ WILKERSON: Your face changes, your hair falls out.
She actually took her iron pills, which most of my patients don't, because her stool actually went black.
ALI: You worry about miscarriage, then you go to the second trimester and you worry about all kinds of genetic mishaps.
MAYER: I only worry all the time, I worry about my cervix, I worry about my uterus, my ovaries, my pleasant vagina.
Subjects like this would be whispered.
Women might share with other women these sort of things in our prior generations.
CHAMPLIN: My mother just had this, like, Leave It to Beaver sheen on her own memory of being pregnant.
She's, like, "I loved being pregnant!
It was the best time," and blah, blah, blah.
I had a difficult pregnancy, and I kept, like, going to her and being, like, "This is hard-- this is really hard.
This is awful, I'm having all these issues."
MAYER: I must admit, the next time this happens to me I'm going to freak out.
CHAMPLIN: I would come back and be, like, "I went to the doctor and they think I have gestational diabetes."
She's, like, "Well, what is that?"
And I'd say, "Well, it's swelling and this and sugar and blah."
She literally would be, like, "Oh, yeah, I think I probably had that.
They just didn't have a name for it."
To use some of these words like "colostrum" to, to sort of take ownership of the medical terms.
What is coming out of your breasts?
It's not just, like, white stuff.
There's a term for that, there's a word, and the ownership of the word has power, in some sense.
NEW: The book that gave women and poets license to use this language was Our Bodies Ourselves, authored by a collective of women, including Joan, Judy, and Miriam.
Our Bodies Ourselves told women what their mothers didn't.
It started with the story of menstruation, which most of us never even heard about.
If you talked to women of my mother's generation, when they started to bleed, they thought they were dying because nobody told them this might happen.
This poem, it was this sort of, the beginning of women being able to give voice to their own, you know, personal experience.
MAYER: My mother said I ought to want to have children but she also said you ought not to do any (muted) and she said it was sex and her children that caused her disease.
We were moving in a direction of saying, "(muted) this, we're working on a book by and for women.
"There have never been books by and for women about our reproductive health and sexuality."
NEW: Did you have the book Our Bodies Ourselves?
I still remember walking into the bookstore at N.Y.U.
and picking up that book for the first time.
I think I sat there for an hour, reading it with my mouth open.
I had never seen anything like it.
We had it under our arm like it was our show of being free.
("Flight of the Bumblebee" playing) CHAMPLIN: I have lain down.
NEW: This is a lying down that isn't passive.
It's a kind of horizontal work.
MAYER: It seems like I've been in labor now three or four weeks, last night I had contractions for five hours winding up with the best one at 2 a.m. CHAMPLIN: I have lain down and sweated and shaken and passed blood and (muted) and water.
All of these words are captured in the English word "labor."
OLDS: You know, you're supposed to breathe and not push sometimes.
These are very hard to control.
You're, like, clawing your face off and they're, like, just... (breathing) MAYER: It finally gets around to the fact that there isn't any special breathing you do in labor like duck à l'orange.
It's labor and you generally pant, the midwife said.
Giving birth is, you know, it's not a breeze.
MAYER: She said a woman who'd been to some fancy classes wound up saying "out" for 14 hours, the mantra out.
Oh, yeah, thanks, thanks very much.
That's really great.
I really appreciate your advice about my breathing.
MAYER: I wish I could try it as a man for once and be the one watching nervously instead of the inhabitant of this always female body.
- I have lain down and sweated and shaken and passed blood and (muted) and water and slowly alone, in the center of a circle, I have passed... MAYER: At least nobody can be saying about giving birth, don't take it so seriously.
(chuckles) - ...the new person out.
Slowly, alone in the center of a circle.
Every time I think of birth, I think of circles.
I think of circles in pregnancy.
Even when you look at the symbol for women in medicine, it's a circle with a little cross underneath it.
Your private parts are basically a circle.
I was thinking about circles.
I was also thinking about...
The head crowning.
- I was thinking about the head crowning and about the dilation.
- Cervix dilating.
CHAMPLIN: You're slowly alone in the center of the circle of the cervix dilating, or you're slowly alone in the center of a circle of pain.
Everything sort of disappears.
ALI: And when the real wave after wave after wave of pain came about, I mean, the physical pain completely obliterated the intellectual, "Oh, I've got to experience that pain."
OSTER: I think about it a lot when I do a lot of running.
And sometimes I, boy, I'm really tired.
And then I think, "Well, remember the time that "an eight-pound baby came out of my vagina?
This isn't really as hard as that."
How often does any of us have an experience of several people helping you?
Because that's what birth is like.
There's you, there's your partner, there's the nurse, and here's the person doing the delivery.
You are literally in a circle.
I like the community aspect of this.
I think it hearkens back, in some ways, to an older way of giving birth.
WILKERSON: My great-grandmother was a midwife, and even back then, she would say there would be this circle around the woman to protect her.
There'd be, be, like, the farmers and the neighbors and the sharecroppers, because she did it back in Texas.
OSTER: This poem is written, I think, in the late '70s.
That was a time in which people were thinking about birth as kind of coming back to when we're all doing this together as a women collective.
The first birth, I was alone in the delivery room.
The second birth, my husband was there.
And the third birth, I wanted to have a home birth.
I had a midwife and there were 15 people in the room.
- I have passed the new person out and they have lifted the new person free of the act and wiped the new person free of the language of blood like praise all over the body.
MAYER: When the baby is finally born you don't know for a moment if you're thinking of yourself or the other.
OSTER: There was this screaming creature with blood on him and the whole thing, with this crazy purple face and smushed-up head.
And I feel that moment in reading this piece of the poem, just that moment of someone pulling him and then having there be a person there who is so close to what has just happened.
WILKERSON: I loved that she didn't go into this syrupy, "Oh, my baby, oh, my baby."
"The person."
"The new person" is more objective, distanced.
MAYER: The baby is a person and it is outside of you and it does turn out to be he or she.
And it would be called that, Max or Violet or Joe and not just "the baby."
My youngest son is six-foot-four.
And I look at him and I think, "You were in my body?"
OSTER: And I remember when my daughter was born, thinking, this person is gonna drive a car and have a job.
I, no joke, will say to myself, "You gave birth to a human."
♪ ♪ OLDS: I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing, I and the other women, this exceptional act with the exceptional heroic body, this giving birth, this glistening verb, and I am putting my proud American boast right here with the others.
NEW: Not only contributing a human to society, Olds is also contributing this poem, covered with (muted) and blood, that ushers a new kind of poetry into the American canon.
Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg and a male pantheon, they find their way into this poem, and you are declaring yourself as a poet.
Their names are there partly as my ancestors, whom I love, and at this point, my best way of looking at myself was that, a kind of outlaw, and they-- they were, also.
ALI: Especially Walt Whitman.
Everyone's reading his work and thinking, "What on Earth have you done?"
It was outrageous, it was provocative, it was controversial.
Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg were actually huge feminists, right?
So I can't imagine that she's got a problem with either Walt Whitman or Allen Ginsberg.
So I think it's, like, "Eh, sorry, guys.
"I eeked you out with my uterus.
My ovaries overruled you."
She really does suggest an analogy between making poetry and making a baby.
Because she hasn't just done this for herself.
It's not my baby, it is for the world.
Walt Whitman doesn't hold on to his poems.
It's out there, he publishes it.
Ginsberg doesn't write his poem and put it in a drawer.
It's out there, and that's what she's done.
♪ ♪ NEW: Do you remember why you decided to write this poem?
I imagine it had something to do with bragging.
- Ah.
- With feminism, and with a desire to brag and say I was bragging, but my freedom 30 years ago to do this boasting came from a lot of class privilege and from being a WASP in America.
And a woman, yes, but a white woman.
You could brag about that in the context where a middle-class woman in the United States of America, with all the things that this particular author has.
I do think, actually, in practice, childbirth sometimes becomes a spectator sport-- people live-tweeting their, their birth, and it kind of, in the way you would with a marathon.
"The contractions are two minutes apart!
Now they're one minute apart."
Now that I'm a mother, my chances are better for sainthood, they say.
(laughing) NEW: Yes, you were a white woman, but there were plenty of privileges denied you.
OLDS: Yes-- in general, whether people showed much respect for childbirth.
NORSIGIAN: This poem is political in the sense that it freed up many women back then in the '70s to speak more openly about their experiences.
Some women were challenging the sexism, the paternalism, the condescension-- all of the socialization to be "good girls"-- and wanted to come into our power as women.
CHAMPLIN: As an actress and as a dancer, my body was always something I fought.
It was never thin enough.
It was never flexible enough.
Until I had my son.
And then I realized, "I've supported an entire being, "a separate being, for, like, nine months.
I am amazing."
MAYER: I can't pretend to be able to account for how anybody else feels when a baby is born, but there is the baby, fraught with the tenderness of the state of the womb, visible and unclothed in the light, about to be wrapped and nursed, there is nothing else like it.
- And so you have delivered how many babies?
I've delivered about 4,000 babies.
I remember almost every one.
Believe it or not, I really do, I remember them.
People do sometimes say, "Well, anyone can give birth."
You know, women are doing it all the time.
Billions of people, obviously, have done it.
But I think that's different from saying it isn't extraordinary every time.
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