"Gimme the Beat Girls"

Watching Iain Morrison and Leiza McLeod's "Gimme the Beat Girls" last night at Prototype has made me think. The show presents a series of poems by female Beat poets, which are sung whilst the two performers respond to each poem with props and actions. The female Beat poets have been a marginalised and largely forgotten part of the Beat narrative that focuses upon the genius of the lone, rebellious male. The poems themselves are full of genius and like much Beat poetry they really need to be spoken, better still performed, to be brought fully to life. They are also full of awareness about and rebellion against gender roles of the 1950s.

It made me think especially this morning, listen to radio 4's Woman's Hour, about how, still even the questions that women ask women on a show aimed at women are loaded with an awkward consciousness of their 'Correct Role' you see there was a woman who made shrouds from felt and the interviewer seemed to express a curious and implicit disdain for the physical aspect of the work as if it was somehow inappropriate. The panopticon, as proposed by Foucault, is the prison of society in which inmates surveil one another and maintain the rules with little external coercion.

Here are some of the poems:

The Lady...

The Lady is a humble thing
Made of death and water
The fashion is to dress it plain
And use the mind for border

Elise Cowen

I wanted a cunt of golden pleasure
purer than heroin
to honor you in
doubt bed heart like a
meadow in yosemite
to take your ease in
imagination clear and active as
sunny tidepools
to serve up good talk with dinner
soul like your face before you
were born
to glory you in
breast, hair, fingers,
whole city of body
in your arms all night

Elise Cowen

Hypocrite Women

Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak
of our own doubts, while dubiously
we mother man in his doubt!

And if at Mill Valley perched in the trees
the sweet rain drifting through western air
a white sweating bull of a poet told us

our cunts are ugly—why didn't we
admit we have thought so too? (And
what shame? They are not for the eye!)

No, they are dark and wrinkled and hairy,
caves of the Moon ... And when a
dark humming fills us, a

coldness towards life,
we are too much women to
own to such unwomanliness.

Whorishly with the psychopomp
we play and plead—and say
nothing of this later. And our dreams,

with what frivolity we have pared them
like toenails, clipped them like ends of
split hair.

by Denise Levertov

The Quarrel

You know I said to Mark I'm furious at you.

No he said are you bugged. He was drawing Brad who was asleep on the bed.

Yes I said I'm pretty god damned bugged. I sat down by the fire and stuck my feet out to warm them up.

Jesus I thought you think it's so easy. There you sit innocence personified. I didn't say anything else to him.

You know I thought I've got work to do too sometimes. In fact I probably have just as fucking much work to do as you. A piece of wood fell out of the fire and I poked it back in with my toe.

I am sick I said to the woodpile of doing dishes. I am just as lazy as you. Maybe lazier. The top of my shoe was scorched from the fire and I rubbed it where the suede was gone.

Just because I happen to be a chick I thought.

Mark finished one drawing and looked at it. Then he put it down and started another one.

It's damned arrogant of you I thought to assume that only you have things to do. Especially tonight.

And what a god damned concession it was for me to bother to tell you that I was bugged at all I said to the back of his neck. I didn't say it out loud.

I got up and went into the kitchen to do the dishes. And shit I thought I probably won't bother again. But I'll get bugged and not bother to tell you and after a while everything will be awful and I'll never say anything because it's so fucking uncool to talk about it. And that I thought will be that and what a shame.

Hey hon Mark yelled at me from the living room. It says here that Picasso produces fourteen hours a day.

Diane DiPrima (c) 1961
Taken from No More Masks: An Anthology of Poems by Women