I had an exceedingly interesting childhood. I have made many stabs at recapturing it in prose, but I have never been satisfied with the results. Maybe because I’m not Proust? [O give me a room/lined with cork…] The closest I’ve come so far is an autobiographical long poem modeled after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh”. It’s all in loose iambic tetrameter and I didn’t get past age 7, but I think I begin in it, despite all its happy mannerisms, to evoke the subcultures of the 60’s and 70’s that nurtured me. I really ought to get back to work on that poem.

One of the many lovely things about growing up in Northern California in the 1970’s was the energetic if simplistic feminism that surrounded me. My freeschool took a trip to an our bodies ourselves-type women’s clinic where we had the option of peering into each other’s specula: “Anyone want to see what a virgin looks like?” In both junior college in grad school I was fortunate to study with two feminist Janets (Janet Thormann and Janet Adelman), both Shakespeare scholars. I still notice in myself sometimes a knee-jerk tendency to blame everything on ” the men” although I know better, that I should think it through. But sometimes that’s just too much trouble.

One puzzling thing about the men poets around me is their compulsion to attacks on the minds. Actually, that’s not what I said, but I’m using my voice recognition software and it recognized ” taxonomize” as ” attacks on the minds”. Hee hee. Texan enemy . my software just won’t get it : (hand-typing) Taxonomy! Feh. I know, fellas, it’s really chaotic out there, but no matter how hard you try * you won’t get a handle on it.* I wonder to what extent the impulse to austerity ( which I associate, perhaps incorrectly, with being male ) comes out of frustration and bewilderment with muchness, disorder, and curlicue. Jordan said in his blog that he scored very high on the Asperger’s syndrome test. Drew says that nearly all guy poets are at least borderline Asperger’s -” little professors”. I’m not that way at all. Although I suck in information eagerly as any boy I know, I don’t retain it unless I can use it for something . And hierarchical taxonomies often either don’t make sense to me or they make me angry, as for example when there’s a 10 best list that I don’t happen to be on (:-)). My simplistic feminist knee-jerk response is to look at the patrilineal system of naming and the doctrine of prima janitorial (that’s *primogeniture* to you) as, oh dear, I’m about to wax slightly ajar domestic (that’s *jargonistic* to you — ooh and a cliche to boot! — gee I love voice recognition): ERASURE of women’s contributions to culture, the family, history, and daily life. But I don’t feel like getting all post-structuralist now about webs of connections vs hierarchical ordering because, duh, we all know about that. But to what extent have we internalized it? I don’t, for example, seen many businesses run on the web model.

So that’s what I meant when I said to a group of poet guys (luminaries! Bruce Andrews, Bill Luoma, Michael Scharf, and Tony Torn, who is not a poet guy but a creative guy) after a reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, “I loathe structure”. They all leapt in to contradict me; “You do? No you don’t! You are very analytical. And what about the outfits?” I mean I love form and pattern and design and connections and responses, but the word “structure” carries with it a very unfeminine prison-feeling — the same one I get when I look at the American flag.

So, about this anger and this prison-feeling. I never feel I can state my poetics, but rather feel I have to defend them, based as they are on this very gendered notion of ornament . Studying Shakespeare with the two Janets , particularly the first when I was 14, made me aware of the kind of misogyny embodied in Hamlet when he breaks a feeling — make that “in Hamlet when he berates Ophelia.” Shakespeare’s works are rife with a misogyny often connected to artifice, decoration, dissembling, and ornament. So for that matter is lots of other literature further and further back in time, but it was in Shakespeare that I first really became conscious of it. Ornament, as a motivating principle for poems (or for life), is just as much under attack, just as trivialized, as it has ever been.

Whenever I hear the collocation “mere aestheticism” I bristle, and not just because it’s an automotized combo of words. Aestheticism (which I am defining here as the impulse to ornamentalize) is NOT (necessarily) decadent, class-based, or culture-bound. Rather it’s a UNIVERSAL human characteristic. “Mere” feminizes (think in FRENCH for a second) derogatorily. I’m looking at a paper by Nikos A. Salingaros called