Over at feministing, Ava Kofman attempts to answer the question why poet Anne Boyer is “so good” by parsing her poem “Not Writing":
But something else is also going on here: the poem mourns, in its laundry list of lost epics, what might be called the lesser, lower, culturally devalued forms of daily writing: “I am not writing Facebook status updates. I am not writing thank-you notes or apologies I am not writing conference papers. I am not writing book reviews. I am not writing blurbs.” In doing so, Boyer values these forms as writing, recognizing them as doing the same cultural work as, say, “writing stories based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s unwritten story ideas.”
In the companion piece, “What is ‘not writing’?” Boyer expands on the relationship between not-writing, on the one hand, and illness, feelings, work, and unpaid work “like caring for others”, on the other. For every someone writing, there is also always a someone not-writing because they are too sick to write, too poor to write. Boyer expresses how often writing is privilege, is power, is “the language of property owners.”
Anne Boyer’s new collection Garnments Against Women is out through Ahsata Press
Thoughts?