Moore Are You Judging Me Yet?

Poetry and Everyday Sexism
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78172-688-4
Verlag: Seren
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Five 'lyric essays' exploring the dynamics of performing poetry as a female poet - confronting the implications of being a female on public display, with the connotations of sexual objectification, in a context that traditionally disregards the body. Kim states 'With the strides and gains made through the #MeToo movement, I believe the time is right for a book like this to make an impact. As a female poet, I know there is a need for such a book to examine the intersection between writing, performing, feminism and sexism.?I wish this book had been written when I first started working as a freelance writer and I've had many conversations with other female poets who have also confirmed my thinking - that female poets are navigating these things regularly, and yet nobody is really writing or talking about them.' The book draws on her experiences of writing and performing the poems in her second collection All the Men I Never Married. It is a balance of memoir, academic treatise and poetry, though the author's emphasis is on writing in a popular way and making the subject accessible to a wide audience. To achieve this her models have been Maggie Nelson's?Bluets, Claudia Rankine's?Citizen?and Sarah Ahmed's?Living a Feminist Life.? The book's subjects include heckling at poetry readings and other interactions; problems with the 'male gaze' and what the 'female gaze' might look like in poetry; 'guilty for being a man': how guilt can be useful if it can bring about change; how writing poetry about sexism can shed add meaning to the term; the objectification of men and women, and 'bad faith' arguments. Are You Judging Me Yet?, by Kim Moore, is a remarkable collection of essays and poetry that explore, as the tagline suggests, everyday sexism. - neverintimate '...Moore's work becomes an even more vital tool in the work being done to challenge everyday sexism. Reading her work is not only a window into her own experiences, but may also act as a means of education, and that's something we all need to see more of.' - Wales Arts Review

Kim Moore was born in Leicester and lives and works in Cumbria. Her first full length collection?(Seren) The Art of Fallingwon the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She also won a New Writing North Award in 2014, an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2012. Her second collection, All the Men I Never Married won the Forward Prize. A teacher and facilitator of poetry, she has been a judge for the National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize. Kim Moore is also the founder and organiser of the Kendal Poetry Festival.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Moore, Kim

Leseproben

YES, I AM JUDGING YOU

It’s November, and mist has swallowed the grounds of the hotel. It’s the type of mist that leaves drops of water clinging to your hair and clothes, the type of grey November day that blurs the boundary between sea and sky. I’m here at a hotel in the Lake District as an after-dinner speaker for a luncheon club. Their booked speaker cancelled with only a day’s notice, so instead of a talk about knife crime in Manchester, the unsuspecting luncheon club members will receive a poetry reading, whether they like it or not.

I begin with a poem called ‘All The Men I Never Married’, a list poem which reels off man after man using one sentence descriptions to define their character, their appearance. At the mid-point of the poem, I read the line ‘are you surprised, are you judging me yet?’ An elderly woman two tables from the front, her knife and fork crossed neatly in front of her, shouts ‘Yes!’ People around me laugh. I laugh, and my laughter takes me by surprise, because part of me thinks it is funny, and part of me is mortified. There is something funny and not funny about this moment.

There was the boy who I met on the park

who tasted of humbugs and wore

a mustard yellow jumper

The poem relates the sexual history of a speaker and puts it on public display. It runs the risk of oversimplifying the men included within it through the summing up of their characters with one or two sentences. The white space of the poem, which translates into pauses in the performance, leave room for judgement, for interruption.

John Berger’s insistence that ‘[t]o look is an act of choice’20 runs through my mind every time I perform this poem. I am choosing in this poem to look at men, to be the wielder of the gaze, to make men the gazed upon, which feels risky, which feels dangerous. To look, and not to look away. To look at one man, then another, then another. To let them disappear, which they do as the poem finishes. But they also do not, because once they are spoken of, they are conjured into existence:

the kickboxer with beautiful long brown hair

that he tied with a band at the nape of his neck

After my performance at a festival, another poet tells me she enjoyed my reading, and then says ‘I’m sure you know exactly what you’re doing. Reading poems about men with your legs out.’ She says this in front of another poet, a man, who smirks. I laugh because I don’t know what to say. Laughter is the tool I always reach for in moments of discomfort. Later, I wonder what the moment would have felt like if I hadn’t laughed, if I’d waited, if I’d held myself still. But by the time I consider this, the moment has passed, the conversation has moved on.

In Gendering Poetry, Vicki Bertram argues that women poets, in any performance of their work, have to ‘confront the implications of being a female on public display, with the connotations of sexual objectification…’21. The female body never passes by unremarked, least of all in the space of a poetry reading. No matter how much I wish it, language can’t stand between my body and the world, can’t protect me from being confronted by a person who wants to put me in my place, to remind me I am a body, and not a poet.

the one with a constant ear infection

so I always sat on his left

That evening in my hotel room, I lie in bed and look at the ceiling fan whirring lazily above me. The room is about the size of the ground floor of my house. There are floor-to-ceiling curtains which I’ve only opened once since I arrived, and birds which sound as if they’re living behind the bathroom wall. Every morning I’m woken up by the panicked fluttering of wings, or dull thuds. At first, I thought the birds were trapped – now I think there is a nest there, and fledglings not quite ready to fly.

the trumpet player I loved

from the moment I saw him

dancing to the Rolling Stones

I think about Judith Butler, and her assertion that ‘to be injured by speech is to suffer a loss of context’22. I know she’s talking about hate speech, and I’m talking about a woman commenting on my legs, but I remember my cheeks burning, and how, in that moment, I felt like a body, not a person, certainly not a poet.

At the same festival, there was a male poet who the female poets started to call ‘The Monster’ because of the way he behaved – his hands snaking around you when he’d had a drink in the evening or standing too close at the bar. Every time I finished performing and left the stage, he would be there waiting. Every time he would tell me ‘You are so beautiful!’ After the fifth time I snapped ‘Do you mean my poetry?’ He looked startled that I hadn’t just said ‘Thank you.’ I stomped away, feeling guilty and irritated, and a little wild, all at the same time.

Can any language that causes the listener to suffer a loss of context be deemed what Judith Butler calls an ‘injurious address’? When a book review mentions the author’s photo and the shade of the author’s lipstick in what is supposed to be a discussion of their work, the loss of context is the delaying or side-lining of a meaningful engagement with the work itself.

At a recent reading, the organiser commented on my author photo, on the back of my second collection. I am leaning against a tree, looking sideways at the camera. ‘That’s a bit seductive,’ he said. I replied ‘Only if you fancy trees.’

and the guy who smoked weed

and got more and more paranoid

whose fingers flickered and danced

when he talked

I return again to that grey November day, the mist coming in from the sea and obscuring everything outside so that the drive leads to nothing, to nowhere, a blankness. The mist is so sure of itself I start to doubt there is anything still there inside it. Maybe everything really has vanished. I know if I walk down to the shore I won’t see the signs telling me the sands are treacherous. They have been swallowed up by the mist. I won’t see the gulls, tracing the length of the promenade. Anything in the distance is blurred, out of focus, but close up, each of the benches that line the gravel path are laced with spider webs, and everything glistens.

the one whose eyes were two pieces

of winter sky

What do I say with my body when I am performing? I am writing poems about sexism and female desire. When I read poems about sexism, what does my body say about sexism? When I read poems about female desire, what does my body say about female desire?

a music producer

long-legged and full of opinions

I am speaking about sexism, and maybe my body tells of desire. I am speaking about desire, and maybe my body calls sexism into the room.

and more trumpet players

one who was too short and not him

one who was too thin and not him

I am back there again, halfway through the poem. I have listed the men. I am feeling almost tender towards them. I read the question.

are you judging me yet, are you surprised?

An elderly woman shouts ‘yes’. Something in me delights in her forthrightness, her not-holding-back. Something in me is deeply ashamed. I laugh with delight and with shame. Both of these things can be true. In the corner of the room, a waiter struggles to open a window. Although it is cold and damp outside, the radiators throughout the hotel are locked on full. The combination of bodies, hot food and the radiators have made the air steamy and the windows fog up.

When Butler writes that the body is ‘sustained and threatened through modes of address’23, it is my body and yours she is talking of. The bodies of audiences and readers can be both sustained and threatened by poetry that addresses them directly, that asks them a question.

Let me tell you of the ones I never kissed

or who never kissed me

I did not understand when I wrote the poem that by addressing the audience with that direct question (are you judging me yet, are you surprised?) I was inviting the body of the other to be vulnerable to address. I do not understand or know any of this until months later, through writing about it again. I learn that written into the poem is the possibility and the space to understand something about power, who has it and who does not.

the trombonist I went drinking with

how we lay in each other’s beds

ike two unlit candles

That question becomes a radical act – it destabilises my authority as poet by inviting dialogue with and response from the reader/listener. My question also destabilises the audience because it moves away from the conventional form of a poetry reading, a place where, according to Vicki Bertram, audiences can expect to receive ‘wisdom and perception distilled by the skill of the wordsmith’24 into a place where there is space left for interaction. Performance is realised as a living art form, that will be different every time, dependent as it is upon the audience’s participation in some form.

we were not for each other and in this we were wise

we were only moving through the world together for a time

The question marks the moment the poem turns from addressing an imagined listener...