Thank

you Juliette Greco, your

image was taped to my wall

when I was fourteen, with a

scissor, ready to cut my

bangs like yours
-Patti Smith 

 On failure and success, fiction and autobiography I turn towards  women and their hair 

Below are excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ 

And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought. But it would be well to test what one meant by man-womanly, and conversely by woman-manly, by pausing and looking at a book or two.

Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. 

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THINKING BACK THROUGH OUT MOTHERS 

Virginia Woolf declares that “A woman writing thinks back through her Mother’s” and she seeks female muses for women writers to think back through : both “the real women who mothers my mind” and the fictional women she creates as sources of inspiration. 

III The Ouse (A poem by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett )

The site of Virginia Woolf’s drowning. Poem performed at increasing speed.

“The simplest method of determining the velocity of a current involves an observer, a floating object or drifter, and a timing device.” – U.S Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

One by one the horses come.

Breath’s soft shuffle through
water foams open and out
purrs a language
I am learning

through the body
I am learning
through the fact
of my being here
haunch in water
standing
head in hedge
standing
with everything I’ve got.

The simplest method of determining the velocity of a current involves a horse,
a floating object or drifter, and a timing device.

One by one the horses come purring
me open I stir and shake
shivers jolt in parts
of the body yet / to be discovered
I ache in the hedge
of the water
is forcing me open
the horses are dark as the earth
darker than earth
deeper
their flanks rise from the pit
of the word the gut of the word
the ditch the dust the ear
the éar the eard
the native soil or land
deeper than that is the horse
that purrs me open
in water
in open
in open water

the simplest method of determining the velocity of a word involves a horse,
a girl, and a timing device.

One by one the horses come stirring me open
into water into open water
I bend and purr
from rib to hip is a rich loaming
I flank and fall
and purr in the water I am learning
that the simplest method of determining the velocity of a word involves a horse,
a girl, and a poem.