“Nothing Personal”, by poet Marina Blitshteyn

Mother's Day just passed. I'm interested in the variety of conversations that start among women in our era. No longer a simple holiday of cards, flowers from the garden or making mom breakfast in bed, Mother's Day has become a topic for debate.


This year, I heard among my acquaintances objections to a holiday started by a greeting card company (false: founded as a national holiday in 1914 by Woodrow Wilson; commerce followed); complaints that not all women are mothers; that not every mother is happy to be one or has the means to be one. In short, like every holiday celebrating any occasion, it is as exclusive as it is inclusive. How many people suffer this how to celebrate.


Thus, Mother's Day has entered the new mainstream, which includes a broader and more searching awareness of women's real lives. Women without any type can escape the cultural reexamination of society's traditional gender roles and mores. All women live with daily tests and pressure from outside and inside. Wars are fought over the idea of female empowerment in the US as opposed to that in the developing world. The liberation of the female body is in the news daily—as are issues of family duty, poverty, and proscribed ambition.

nothing personal by Marina Blitshteyn is the first title from Bone Bouquet Books, which extends New York's excellent Bone Bouquet Literary Journal, a small press that publishes women writers. Blitshteyn's volume has nothing to directly tie it to Mother's Day, but everything to do with being the daughter of a mother who, like most, haunts her. His poems implicitly ask parents what they think they are doing and what world they think they are raising their children for. This book constitutes acute confessions of a brilliant outsider woman in the clubby man's world of letters. His dreamlike, primitive, ghostly parents offer little guidance and considerable obfuscation. Have you ever imagined such a woman in such a world? Any of us, raising our girls?


Blitshteyn's world is one we visit, that of a young teacher and poet. It's the Academy, and as her poems demonstrate, it's a world that young women are even less likely to visit, let alone thrive in. Sexism has its particular flavors, and she savored those of literature, to exquisite effect. Using careful word choice and placement, Blitshteyn uses an everyday convention – the call for submission to a literary journal – as a way to bring the reader directly into an emotional situation she experiences daily, one that few of us even imagine:


AMERICAN POETRY MAGAZINE


I would like to ask
YOUR work for your annual
WOMEN'S issue. We are self
reflective enough to publish
the best in criticism and hyper-
critical poetry, in any form,
style or length. SEND US
your best work on the topic
WOMEN, open to your
interpretation, together
with a brief biography and
cover letter, using our
online submission system.


Despite the specificity of the situation, Blitshteyn has written a poem that puts any woman squarely in the position of feeling white-hot rage as her blood runs cold. The magazine dedicates an issue to “Women”, but advertises it in a humiliating way. The editors receive credit for their liberality, while the poet feels a distortion of their deep-seated contempt.


YOUR… WOMEN… SEND US… WOMEN. These words, suggestive of the Neanderthal with club in hand, stand out like the few blades of grass that have not yet been salted on the landscape by withering phrases like “we are self-reflective enough to publish the best in criticism and hyper-criticism…” Editors set the standards; they are the best. But how do we know they are men?


Because women are the “theme” of the edition of your newspaper. The topic is really open to “your interpretation”. Theme has to do with qualities and great concerns inherent to art. Editors feel free to judge anything in their domain of “critical and hypercritical poetry”.


Theme it is the subject itself, which would include the reality of women, their experience, emotion or truth. This is not being asked. Ambiguously then, Blitshteyn shows the editorial door open enough to be closed in a common and terrible provocation. If it comes through the door, editors are automatically authorities, with the power to judge.


“Journal of American Poetry” ends by ironically alluding to another standard practice of the literary profession, getting your poetry to publishers via the submission system, a phrase that Blitshteyn uses brilliantly for her feminist and personal purposes. What is a connected The submission system highlights the permafrost underlying the entire farce of this satirized newspaper's interest in “Women, Open to Your Interpretation.” Send it, Dorothy.


Several of Blitshteyn's poems bring the reader with similar directness into the professional world of an academic. She invokes the misery of any academic conference at the “Club,” where women are scarce and automatically disadvantaged. She tells another woman,


“All the boys here love each other
You'll get the hang of it


At night they go out drinking to talk
They won't invite you


Unless you give them something to flirt with…
…….


They all stay together in a hotel room
But it's not really homosocial


I just want to say everyone stick together
In case there are too many of us here.”


As if there were many women there. But his point is made with a loud, resounding slap. Of course boys avoid women. And it's about more than flirting and sexual objectification. Can anyone talk about the possibility of fearing the woman who actually had to be more polite, have a better strategy, be better dressed and quicker on her feet? By appearing to instruct her colleague on the inevitability of boys' hegemony, she deftly illuminates the deeper issue of protecting power. status quo.


Blitshteyn's daily experience of womanhood, no less feminist, is equally powerful, poignant, satirical, and funny. Trapped with no escape from male inspection and rules as she pursues her academic and literary career, she struggles further with her heritage as a girl raised by parents with acculturated gender expectations. She is influenced by her mother's domesticity and her father's desire for women to be just like that. How do we move from the desires of our parents to the ideals that, in our time, we desire for ourselves, especially if we are at the forefront of our time?


nothing personal opens with the poem, “I’m good,” a title that certainly leaves the reader on edge with any shred of feminist self-awareness. Every little girl is raised to be good. Female kindness can become a chronic disease of adulthood, often passed on to daughters as if it were a gene to be selected for. Blitshteyn communicates the struggle with good in lines that span the entire page, breaking at the middle rather than at the ends and shifting modes as quickly as tired, unhelpful habits keep us from acting on liberating knowledge. Her confessional form leads us to expect certain linguistic registers, and she frustrates this expectation with formidable skill. From the beginning of the poem:


It's about a power dynamic
particularly with regard to sexual politics that man dominates, he communicates
in certain forms of violence, I also occasionally enjoy the feeling of
feeling trapped or suffocated during the act with a woman the dynamic
have not been culturally applied and are more ambiguous, I want to add
that at no point did I feel devoted to a particular type of
domestic existence short of my passion for my teacher, no man ever
made me feel in danger of working in the kitchen my mother still packs clothes for
my father as I am my own woman I believe it is time to experiment
with a particular type of sexual freedom, the loss of virginity is a turning point
point in the development of any young writer, depending on the conditions and
social pressures of her time, a woman may feel abandoned or exposed during
the sexual act…


The wit in this passage (“except my passion for my teacher, no man has ever/made me feel in danger of kitchen work;” “The loss of virginity is a turning point for any young woman writer development“) is winning in any event. But in the big picture, here Blitshteyn brings together an incredible variety of topics. Who would think of putting them side by side, in the open? No doubt it takes years to develop and refine the high level of self-awareness that allows the poet to create so many simultaneous streams—his thoughts about the sexual act, his memories of his parents' relationship, and his fantasies about his teacher as dominator and husband. She confesses her bisexuality; her intimate feelings about the violence of the sexual act and her implicit struggle for power, she tries to separate sex and domesticity, she recognizes the unfortunate connection between her intimate life and her public, professional life. He does Does sex make you more vulnerable to the powerful? Did losing her virginity give her more material or more access?


I think this is a remarkable passage for the way it unties a knot and shows us each thread of a tangle that adds up to something surreal, something that sounds insane. But it also reveals a perfectly logical and not unknown way of being a woman. When and how can it be who is she? How would she know? When is she not in a power relationship, from cradle to maturity and career? How does she keep the powerful voices out of her head? Why can't sex itself be freedom or happiness? Kindness is servitude, defined as from without. Whose poem is this by, anyway?


nothing personal It is unusual in that it is poetry, narrative and sourcebook at the same time. Certainly Blitshteyn speaks to us through characters, but they are so deeply drawn to believable experiences that the whole poem seems transparent.


I suspect that many readers recoil at the very idea of feminist poetry. Without a doubt: this is feminist poetry. And that never deserves widespread attention. It's well-observed, self-aware, funny, and sharp. It's not bad, but it's smart. It asks as many questions of the self as a misogynistic society. Best of all, there are no stereotypes here, but an introduction to a very intelligent and capable artist in whose voice I can hear my own. Many will hear theirs too.

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nothing personal by Marina Blitshteyn, copyright 2015, ISBN: 978-1-934819-52-4, is available from