The Practice of Poetry

For the last week and a half, I’ve been wandering around with Frida Kahlo’s work in mind. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is currently exhibiting her collection, along with a significant collection of photographs and documents about her life. Kahlo’s paintings are intriguing when viewed individually; when viewed en masse however, her work is as unsettling as an avalanche.

I’m curious about the impact of confinement on Kahlo’s work. She was frequently bedridden as a result of an accident and several follow-up back surgeries. In my mind, Kahlo’s confinement (and extreme concentrations of undiluted emotion in her work) is similar to the storm cloud energy of Emily Dickinson’s self-imposed confinement and work.

Alfred Habegger’s Dickinson biography, “My Wars are Laid Away in Books” cites a letter regarding one of Dickinson’s visitors who gives a raw response to Emily’s presence. Higginson reports after the visit, “I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.” Habegger quotes Higginson further, when “Decades later, in a final attempt to sum up his impression, he availed himself of a newer psychological vocabulary: ‘The impression undoubtedly made on me was that on an excess of tension, and of something abnormal’” (524). Neither Habegger or Higginson acknowledge that part of her tension could have been a result of a mix-up over what day Higginson was to visit; Dickinson had prepared herself to host his visit, but he showed up a day later than expected. In one who accepted guests so rarely–and only under controlled conditions–this social call mix-up could have thrown Emily enough to create an “excess of tension.” But that is tangential; this excess of tension, which Higginson recalls vividly enough that decades later he is still trying to articulate it, is like the palpable, zinging energy one feels standing in a room with Khalo’s paintings. For that matter, it is the electric fence energy that hums underneath all of Plath’s Ariel–again, a woman who distilled the poems into a collection in one brief, intense period when she was living alone with her children in England. We could blame it on something else of course–attribute it to instability or insanity–however, it could be that these women happened to channel creative lightning, and used their confinement to allow it out, unmediated and unapologetically.

Habegger inserts a fairly muscular critique at the end of this Higginson account, and suggests that we should feel (sorry) for Sue (Emily’s beloved sister-in-law) for living next door to Emily’s energy for so many years. Yet, that seems like misplaced sympathy; her creative power wasn’t a nuclear power plant. A river, dammed, may look placid but the salmon can’t run. A river, undammed, is a rough artisan that sculpts with the precision of a scythe. Kahlo, Dickinson and Plath were not, perhaps, the most light-hearted nymphs in all social situations, but social success is often a matter of masking, tricks, evasion and untruths. It is a generalization to group such different women together; however, the ways they harnessed the contained energy of their restrictions–isolation, confinement, physical limitations–is stunning but more importantly perhaps, it speaks to the ways one can gather and direct artistic energy.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS