But the tradition of the female poet outlaw goes way back, as far back as Queen Elizabeth, who wrote, in 1589, a poem about how she wanted to chop off the head of her rival, Mary Queen of Scots. And even before this, in 1546, Anne Askew, who was arrested for heresy, wrote a poem that maintained her innocence and was burned at the stake for it. Rebellion is bad enough, but writing a poem about it doubles the crime. A poem is by its nature a public utterance, no matter how reticent the author, and to write one has always been an audacious act for women, especially when their poetry concerned extramarital love and civil war. So it makes sense that an audacious alter ego would have been created from the get-go, to carry the poem on its huge shoulders.
Later, among British poets, we get Aphra Behn’s mid-seventeenth-century take on male impotency and women making love with women, and the globetrotting mega-outlaw (ditcher of husbands, taker of lovers, and introducer of smallpox vaccine to England) Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her 1734 retort to her nemesis Jonathan Swift, in which she — speaking with the voice of a libertine persona who feels wronged by his inability to perform sexually — tells him that his poems will “furnish paper when I shite.”
Now, in this moment: I pull poetry books down from my shelves until I assemble a big stack written by my more-or-less peers. Together we write this poem I call “Bonnie Without Clyde”:
I copped a.22 snugged in a black clutch bag,
an ordinary woman who could rise
in flame.
God I was innocent then, clean as a beast in the streets,
revved up on coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, the sound of my
own voice.
It was almost biblical, driving the midnight burning
highway
to a domed metal diner with seven red stools
where the shadow pimps go hey princess
(my mother’s mouth still saying Slut).
People are afraid of keeping secrets between their legs
(I will be your naked doctor girl).
Those men I fucked when I was drunk: memory is a little museum of miscalculation and haste.*
These lyric confession-outpourings are generally culled from the arenas of sex and crime, often related to drugs. But the mood that my Bonnies want to brew comes from Faye Dunaway’s 1930s component, pre-dating the rock-and-roll music that would complete the famous trinity. The soundtrack of these poems would more appropriately be jazz, preferably performed by a tragic addict like Billie Holiday. For sure my Bonnies would not choose the movie’s twangy bluegrass soundtrack.
Here is my crime confession: I once was a shoplifter of meat. Having been caught smoking pot by the women’s dormitory resident (in Canada, these older students were called wardens), my friends and I announced that we could not be thrown out because we were leaving, ha! The next day we found an apartment on a down-at-the-heels block of downtown Montreal, a city that barely functioned with all the chaos caused by the French separatist movement of the times.
“Steinberg’s” was the name of the grocery, and because we girls were poor — no, only pretend poor, it being part of the outlaw fantasy that we were not bred from the upper middle class — we felt as if we were being shadowed by a holy ghost who would both protect us from arrest and absolve the crime. It seemed outlandish that a person could get into trouble for stealing food (you see: I was such a dope I didn’t even know about Les Misérables, whose plot is set in motion by the theft of a baguette).
I was not a member of the shopping expedition the week my roommates did get caught, one of them a basketball player who easily outran the store guard (since when had Steinberg’s acquired guards?). The other captured roommate had a baby face and gave the guard the phone number of our apartment, where one of us pretended to be her mother. After being reprimanded, she was released. That night at dinner, buzzing with adrenaline, we all ate a celebratory roast that came out of the basketball player’s purse.
When I wrote not long ago about fondling the giant purple slabs of beef, the thrill of slipping one into my purse, I realized that this writing was giving me tremendous pleasure, a childish thrill that came from conjuring my outlaw persona. It titillated me as I bent the real like a welder with a torch — had I ever stolen meat or had it been only the possessor of the baby face, the one who is now an oncologist in St. Louis? The oncologist who caused a strange woman to run up and give me an embrace, because my roommate saved her life?
In fact, I could have had all the meat I wanted, if I’d sacrificed my pride and asked my parents to send more money.
Unlike Bonnie Parker, getting something published has always filled me with shame, despite my having sought publication so avidly. This embarrassment may be congenital, my family having avoided leaving a paper trail that would cement us to any one reality. Had my grandfather come to this country by jumping ship in New York, or had he somehow made his way through Canada? And had his brother Stefan, also a sailor, committed suicide or been murdered at the docks? If I close my eyes, I can picture my mother’s looping script, but my father’s pens left the breast pocket of his suits only when he lost them. To shake my relations off my own trail, I considered using a pseudonym, like some of my friends.
Once when my parents visited me during the Christmas season, the three of us walked around Pioneer Square to look at the gleaming windows. They knew my first book of poetry was about to be published, and so they sent me into the bookstore to see if it had been shipped yet. And when I saw it standing on an end-cap, my breathing stopped and nothing in my body worked except whatever chamber of my heart it was that squirted so much blood into my face. I walked back outside into the snow (see how my memory embroiders the scene; the chance is slim that the clouds over Seattle could have actually dropped any snow).
“Was it there?” my parents asked.
“Not yet,” I lied.
On this issue of whether writers should take the feelings of their loved ones into consideration when they wrote, William Faulkner counseled ruthlessness, saying that “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was worth any number of old ladies. This trade-off — family harmony versus heartfelt expression, once I invented for myself a glitzier heart — worried me a great deal when I was young. Indeed, when my mother read my first book, after she’d spread the news of its imminent arrival, she remarked dryly/angrily/wistfully/shamefully: “I wish you’d told me what it was going to be like.”
Question: What was it like? Answer: Full of much bad writing. I had too much investment in the autobiographical myth, which I thought was necessary because I lacked the inventiveness not to write about actual life, and I thought that actual life required a grand myth to be interesting — what could be interesting about a pasty-skinned girl from the suburbs? I hadn’t gotten wise to Emily Dickinson yet, a poet who derived her outlaw spark from the sly rebellion of her strange punctuation. To put the brigand into the poem itself, not the autobiography, this is the harder trick.