at Mainardi, in her 1970 classic "The Politics of Housework," observes that "the essential fact of housework" men recognize "right from the very beginning," is that "it stinks." With this cryptic statement behind her, Mainardi lists her Top Five "dirty chores": "buying groceries, carting them home and putting them away; cooking meals and washing dishes and pots; doing the laundry; digging out the place when things get out of control; and washing floors."
In my first essay on domestic imagery, I gave an historical overview of its rise in Post World War II poetry, and then considered the imagery of food preparation. In the present essay I take a look at what’s left: laundry, ironing, dusting, as well as some other activities not accounted for in Mainardi’s list. Are they all "dirty chores"? We’ll see presently.
Let’s start with laundry. The only poem I came up with that has a description of the laundry process itself contains a comparison that is, to say the least, a gross exaggeration; it is Judith Minty’s "Making Music" (G 2000). Minty compares the sounds made by the laundry her mother stacked in the basement in front of the mangle, or wringer, with the music she hears on the radio while driving at night. The mother’s "music" is the pressed white sheets. Her "instrument" is the wringer or mangle: "her music heaped in a wicker basket beside her" and "with her knee/moved the pedal that made her instrument go." Minty’s "sheet" is the "sheet of the highway"; her "instrument," her car; and her music, the hum of the motor, the thump of the bodies of dead animals in the road, and the rock beat on the radio. The inaccuracy and inappropriateness of the metaphor are jarring, at best!
Not only does the comparison illustrate a deep generation gap - this I can deal with - but the metaphor of "music" itself is wrong: it is an extravagant, far-fetched, almost compassionless, conceit. I remember my own mother on Monday laundry days, in the basement laundry room, standing over two hot tubs of water, one soapy, one clear, with the sweat beading on her forehead, her hair obscured by a kerchief tied with a knot on top, and her hands rough and red, her fingernails split from wringing out the laundry.... Music?
But laundry does have metaphoric potential. Its attributes of cleanliness and purity are used by Rita Dove in the poem "Taking in Wash" (T&B). Beulah’s mother protects the laundry she washes for other people from the drunken father in the same fierce way that she protects her daughter from the father’s drunken sexual attentions. Here the insistence on maintaining the cleanliness of the laundry and, by extension, the innocence of the daughter, are paralleled. A simple domestic chore extends beyond the description of action to a deeper meaning. In this poem, the gap between metaphor and reality is easily and naturally bridgeable.
In Robin Behn’s "Whether or Not There Are Apples"(PNC),"laundry" comes in the form of a dress that once belonged to a beloved person and now belongs to the narrator. It hangs drying on the line, evoking for an instant warmth and a smell of apples. At that moment the dress becomes an amulet protecting the narrator against the coldness of death. But the dress quickly reverts to a simple dress, and the "I" wonders if she’ll be able to die alone, that is, be able "to cross/the quick blue shift without you." (A nice vagueness in the use of "blue shift.") But if so, how will she go: "... will you be wanting to take me/in colorless windrows of wind/instead of my long brown hair?" The laundry image, extended into memory, comfort, and death - both a past death and the prospective death of the narrator - is let go as the imagined end irresolutely shifts between an aging fragility and paleness, and a robust and youthful physicality.
"To Touch with a Smoothing Iron"(EN), Sandra Alcosser’s lovely and delicate three-stanza poem, shows us the need for perpetual renewal. The poet adapts the haiku principle of disjunction of images, but includes a mediating stanza which directs the meaning of the poem. The first and third stanzas juxtapose the disparate images - a dress and a flying insect. These images reflect two poles of Being: the grossness of the world - the much lived-in dress stained with wine, tears, and sweat laid out on the grass to dry; and a spontaneously natural response of pleasure and joy to the world - the "yellow jacket" or wasp delightfully whimsical and amusing, rubbing "his feet/against the pink blossom" and flying "upside down/at the same time." The mediating stanza characterizes the poet as one who exerts daily effort to coax the "nervous bird" of being "to life each morning" so that she, like the wasp, can participate in the world in a more spontaneous manner. The dress with its stained physical existence can be cleaned and smoothed out, as can the soul, if the "nervous bird" of the Self puts forth a daily effort.
In an age of wash-and-wear, ironing, when needed, is often a task left to paid employees. It figures prominently in Rita Dove’s "The Great Palaces of Versailles" (from T&B, and reprinted in ESEAA), set in the back of a dress shop where Beulah is employed as a presser. Beulah, a black woman, contrasts the offensive personal habits of white women (the smell of perspiration and stale perfume rising from a wool dress she is ironing) with the tricks of delicacy that often hide grossness ("the white girls are all/ wearing shoulder pads to make their faces/delicate.") Beulah remembers reading that French court ladies, lifting their layers of silk, dropped "excrement as daintily/ as handkerchiefs" in the garden, and how the gallant men "wearing powder and perfume" peed "yellow borders knee-high on the stucco/of the Orangerie." She thinks, "Nothing nastier than a white person!" Here ironing is the repetitive act that sparks reflections born of debilitating socio-economic conditions.
Poems on dusting? I found the rhythm of dusting referred to in only one poem, called "Dusting", not in any of the anthologies listed below, but in Rita Dove’s book Beulah and Thomas, in which dusting is another one of Beulah’s jobs. Dove uses dusting as a starting point for Beulah’s reflections on her own life, remembering a boy at the fair years before who kissed her at the rifle booth where she won a fish swimming in a bowl, a fish that later froze, but was warmed back to life, just as the wood under her dust rag comes to life as she strokes the grain. Here the action of dusting, the rhythmic labor required, triggers memory, and the mundane image flashes its metaphor into the heart of this well-constructed poem.
In Susan Clements’ "The Reservation" domestic imagery forges a link with a past that could have been easily lost(UA). As the poet and her mother sit in silence in the woods behind the house "among spring beauties and curled adder’s tongue," the mother unwittingly cultivates in her the wilder life of the imagination by telling her stories about the dramatic life of her non-reservation Indian grandfather. The mother’s domestic role - being a "lady," washing dishes, doing laundry - becomes synonymous in the poet’s mind with the oppressive restrictiveness of the Indian reservation, and imaginatively contrasted with a life "off-the-reservation".
Pat Mainardi doesn’t mention sewing in her article, possibly because it is a skill/art that a woman these days often practices by choice, rather than because it is forced upon her as a housewifely task. The only sewing poem I found is Linda Bierds’ "The Lacemaker’s Condenser"(PNC). In this very precise poem two women are employed as lace makers in what is clearly a cottage industry. Between them sits a condenser, "two globes - clear glass, water-filled, the size of /early melons. And placed between them, a single/burning candle." The light shines on each woman and her work in "egg-shaped ponds." The poem follows one of the women’s contemplation of the circle of the mouth as it forms certain words, such as "noose," the Latin word from which" lace" is derived; the word "bride" in lace making is the thread that connects the ornamental threads: it is the foundation of the lacey network. We are quickly led into a witty association of words, taking advantage of double meanings, as the "bride" is the tether, and the bride is "de-flowered" on her wedding night. The lacemaker laughs at her own spin of words, disturbing the light in such a way that it reminds her of a white ermine caught in a snare, "the body dangling, white, fluttering..." but then pulling free. As the words shift, we are left with a sense of the constant vagaries of existence.
Some minor rituals of daily life escape Mainardi’s vision, perhaps because they are smaller and involve more intense interpersonal relationships, and they are generally not considered, using Mainardi’s words, "dirty chores." Two of them are in poems by men about their fathers. Robert Hayden’s "Those Winter Sundays"(ESEAA), is about a son’s unconscious assumption that his father is sure to perform certain domestic tasks: polishing shoes, for example, and making the fire so that the house is warm when his little son gets out of bed. "What did I know,/of love’s austere and lonely offices?" In "The Gift"(UA), a tribute to his father, Li-Young Lee remembers learning his father’s gentleness and patience while watching him take out a splinter: "I watched his lovely face and not the blade." I found a third example in Nikki Giovanni’s "Nikki-Rosa"(UA) in which the poet fondly remembers having her mother to herself in the evening when she bathes Nikki in one of those "big tubs that folk in Chicago barbecue in."
Why did I find so few poems in the "dirty chores" category? My procedure was the same, I was armed with the same list of chores, and I reviewed the same seven anthologies I had used for my November 2003 article on the kitchen and food preparation. In the anthologies, I found references to laundry and dusting and ironing in around 10 poems out of the roughly 2000 I went through; in other words, in about one-half of one percent of the poems, as opposed to about six percent for anthology poems on food and food preparation. And three of the poems I finally used here are from individual collections. Furthermore, I couldn’t find any examples at all of washing floors and, as Mainardi puts it, "digging out the place."
At first I was surprised by the dearth of "dirty chores" poetry; after all, it has been thirty years since Mainardi’s classic feminist essay "The Politics of Housework" was first carried around the country in mimeographed copies by itinerant feminists, and it’s been at least a decade more during which the number of women poets (as well as men poets) has increased dramatically because of the burgeoning of college writing courses, which, for many years, have had a relentless focus on writing about the world immediately surrounding the poet. Even poets eat, sleep, wash their clothing, and clean up the place once in a while. But they are apparently not given to writing about it.
Mainardi was clearly correct in her judgment. Men got it right: housework "stinks." "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear as it is, infinite," wrote William Blake. But poets don’t spin daydreams over trivial, repetitive tasks - literally the cleaning of doors. Drudgery is seldom a source of inspiration.
The books I consulted for this essay, and their abbreviations, are as follows: Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (UA), edited by Maria and Jennifer Gillan (Penguin Books, 1994); Poets of the New Century (PNC), Eds. Roger Weingarten & Richard M. Higgerson (David Godine, 2001); The Best American Poetry (BAP), Ed. Rita Dove (Scribner Poetry, 2000); The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets (G2000), Ed. William Heyen (Ontario Review Press, 1984); and Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945 (ESEAA), Ed. Michael Harper & Anthony Walton (Little, Brown & Co. 1994). Individual books of poetry included Billy Collins’ Sailing Alone Around the Room (SAAR), (Random House, 2001); Li-Young Lee’s Rose (R), (BOA Editions, 1986); Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (T&B), (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1986); and Sandra Alcosser’s Except By Nature (EN), (Graywolf Press, 1998). My first article on domestic imagery, "Chopping Onions, Peeling Grapefruit, and Braising Shrimp," appeared in INTERSECTIONS in November 2003 and used the same sources.
** To be "put through the wringer" is a metaphor which grew out of the experience of the laundry day of an earlier time. The wringer, or mangle, is a machine with two heated rollers that squeeze the water out of the wet laundry. The person doing the laundry either turns a handle or pushes a pedal with her foot to activate the rollers. Obviously, the above metaphor, connoting abject fatigue and distress, arose from this activity.
© Joyce Nower