No More Masks!: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets by Florence Howe, Florence Howe (Introduction)

From the Publisher

A revised and expanded edition of the classic groundbreaking anthology of 20th-century American women's poetry, representing more than 100 poets from Amy Lowell to Anne Sexton to Rita Dove.

June Jordana

This is a fabulous, heavy event: an updated edition of the pioneering and beautiful anthology No More Masks!, which we really needed in our lives back then, and we really, really need in our lives right now.

What People Are Saying

June Jordan
"This is a fabulous, heavy event: an updated edition of the pioneering and beautiful anthology No More Masks!, which we really needed in our lives back then, and we really, really need in our lives right now."

Product Details

• Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

I room at Sodos'--in the little green room

that was Bennie's--

With Sadie

And her old father and her mother,

Who is not so old and wears her own hair.

Old Sodos no longer makes saddles.

He has forgotten how.

He has forgotten most things--even Bennie who stays

away and sends wine on holidays--

And he does not like Sadie's mother

Who hides God's candles,

Nor Sadie

Whose young pagan breath puts out the light--

That should burn always,

Like Aaron's before the Lord.

Time spins like a crazy dial in his brain,

And night by night

I see the love-gesture of his arm

In its green-greasy coat-sleeve

Circling the Book,

And the candles gleaming starkly

On the blotched-paper whiteness of his face,

Like a miswritten psalm . . .

Night by night

I hear his lifted praise,

Like a broken whinnying

Before the Lord's shut gate.

Sadie dresses in black.

She has black-wet hair full of cold lights

And a fine-drawn face, too white.

All day the power machines

Drone in her ears . . .

All day the fine dust flies

Till throats are parched and itch

And the heat--like a kept corpse--

Fouls to the last corner.

Then--when needles move more slowly on the cloth

And sweaty fingers slacken

And hair falls in damp wisps over the eyes--

Sped by some power within,

Sadie quivers like a rod . . .

A thin black piston flying,

One with her machine.

She--who stabs the piece-work with her bitter eye

And bids the girls: "Slow down--

You'll have him cutting us again!"

She--fiery static atom,

Held in place by the fierce pressure all about--

Speeds up the driven wheels

And biting steel--that twice

Has nipped her to the bone.

Nights, she reads

Those books that have most unset thought,

New-poured and malleable,

To which her thought

Leaps fusing at white heat,

Or spits her fire out in some dim manger of a hall,

Or at a protest meeting on the Square,

Her lit eyes kindling the mob . . .

Or dances madly at a festival.

Each dawn finds her a little whiter,

Though up and keyed to the long day,

Alert, yet weary . . . like a bird

That all night long has beat about a light.

The Gentile lover, that she charms and shrews,

Is one more pebble in the pack

For Sadie's mother,

Who greets him with her narrowed eyes

That hold some welcome back.

"What's to be done?" she'll say,

"When Sadie wants she takes . . .

Better than Bennie with his Christian woman . . .

A man is not so like,

If they should fight,

To call her Jew . . ."

Yet when she lies in bed

And the soft babble of their talk comes to her

And the silences . . .

I know she never sleeps

Till the keen draught blowing up the empty hall

edges through her transom

And she hears his foot on the first stairs . . .

I have a dream

to fill the golden sheath

of a remembered day. . . .

(Air

heavy and massed and blue

as the vapor of opium . . .

domes

fired in sulphurous mist . . .

sea

quiescent as a gray seal . . .

and the emerging sun

spurting up gold

over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay. . . .)

But the day is an up-turned cup

and its sun a junk of red iron

guttering in sluggish-green water--

where shall I pour my dream?

Your words are frost on speargrass,

Your words are glancing light

On foils at play,

Your words are shapely . . . buoyant as balloons,

They make brave sallies at the stars.

When your words fall and grow cold

Little greedy hands

Will gather them for necklets.

A black cat among roses,

Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,

The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.

The garden is very still,

It is dazed with moonlight,

Contented with perfume,

Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.

Firefly lights open and vanish

High as the tip buds of the golden glow

Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.

Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,

Moon-spikes shafting through the snowball bush.

Only the little faces of the ladies' delight are alert and staring,

Only the cat, padding between the roses,

Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern

As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.

Then you come,

And you are quiet like the garden,

And white like the alyssum flowers,

And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies.

Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?

They knew my mother,

But who belonging to me will they know

When I am gone.

When I have baked white cakes

And grated green almonds to spread upon them;

When I have picked the green crowns from the strawberries

And piled them, cone-pointed, in a blue and yellow platter;

When I have smoothed the seam of the linen I have been working;

What then?

To-morrow it will be the same:

Cakes and strawberries,

And needles in and out of cloth.

If the sun is beautiful on bricks and pewter,

How much more beautiful is the moon,

Slanting down the gauffered branches of a plum-tree;

The moon

Wavering across a bed of tulips;

The moon,

Still,

Upon your face.

You shine, Beloved,

You and the moon.

But which is the reflection?

The clock is striking eleven.

I think, when we have shut and barred the door,

The night will be dark

Outside.

They brought me a quilled, yellow dahlia,

Opulent, flaunting.

Round gold

Flung out of a pale green stalk.

Round, ripe gold

Of maturity,

Meticulously frilled and flaming,

A fire-ball of proclamation:

Fecundity decked in staring yellow

For all the world to see.

They brought a quilled, yellow dahlia,

To me who am barren.

Shall I send it to you,

You who have taken with you

All I once possessed?

Taking us by and large, we're a queer lot

We women who write poetry. And when you think

How few of us there've been, it's queerer still.

I wonder what it is that makes us do it,

Singles us out to scribble down, man-wise,

The fragments of ourselves. Why are we

Already mother-creatures, double-bearing,

With matrices in body and in brain?

I rather think that there is just the reason

We are so sparse a kind of human being;

The strength of forty thousand Atlases

Is needed for our every-day concerns.

There's Sapho, now I wonder what was Sapho.

I know a single slender thing about her:

That, loving, she was like a burning birch-tree

All tall and glittering fire, and that she wrote

Like the same fire caught up to Heaven and held there.