The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence

WE HAVE Now seen (in Williams and Lowell, among others) characterizations of adolescence in which its qualities—aggressive rebellion, for example, and attempted independence—seemed stereotypically though not exclusively male. We have seen the attractions Marianne Moore found in a women’s college. We have seen Phyllis McGinley depict postwar teen culture from the point of view of a mother of daughters. And we have seen Gwendolyn Brooks (among others) celebrate the vigor she saw in youth of both sexes, to which she attributed revolutionary meanings. What we have not seen at any length are poems grounded in and modeled on young women and girls, in their changing bodies and their changing gendered roles, as other girls and women perceive and remember them.

Such poems are flourishing now. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “adolescence is for a woman” an especially “difficult and decisive moment,” in which “a conflict breaks out between her original claim to be subject, active, free, and, on the other hand, her erotic urges and the social pressures to accept herself as passive object” (Second Sex, 314). Gina Hausknecht has more recently described “a culture that, deeply ambivalent about teen female sexuality, both eroticizes and denies erotic agency to girls” (“Self-Possession,” 23). That conflict informs the poetry about girls’ experience, written from remembered or imagined girls’ perspectives, that this chapter will describe. Though it might be extreme to say, with Ilana Nash, that “American culture has … collectively imagined the adolescent girl as a non-person,” or that “teen girls are celebrated for their double emptiness” as a subaltern “foil for adult men,” we can certainly say that teenage girls in the popular imagination have seemed aestheticized, inconsequential, given to specialized in-group speech—like poets or poems (American Sweethearts, 2–3, 22). At the same time, female adolescence has been, for many poets (and nonpoets) the locus of the traumatic experiences from which one postconfessional paradigm says that poems ought to be made. In many such poems, adolescence (defined, again, as the period after presexual dependent childhood and before the responsibilities and stable identities of an expected adulthood) means both power and danger. These poems incorporate and seek aesthetic equivalents for both glamour and hazard; they adopt dual, even conflicting aesthetic goals, on the one hand acknowledging the allure our culture can attribute to teenage girls (and that girls may attribute to themselves) and, on the other, attacking the roles such girls are enticed, convinced, or forced to play.

As early as 1963, Betty Friedan explored young women’s “terror of growing up,” describing “the terrifying blank which makes them unable to see themselves after twenty-one” (Feminine Mystique, 68, 64). Part of this terror might have looked familiar to Marianne Moore, who found in high schools and in colleges—but not afterward—encouragement to work and think independently.¹ The line of poems about girls’ adolescence from recent decades emphasizes (by contrast with Moore’s poems) not social roles alone but changing and socially visible bodies. Some of these poems take (as Williams and Auden had) adolescent potential as the ground and example for individuation, the moment from which lyric poetry ought to grow. Others, though, focus less on what girls discover as they enter adolescence than on what girls are instructed to leave behind.

This line of poems begins with Sylvia Plath—though not with the fully achieved Plath of Ariel. Plath’s poetry of The Colossus and earlier sometimes demonstrates the discomfort with female embodiment, the queasy resistance to sexual maturity, that Beauvoir and others associate with adolescence (and which the mainstream Freudian thought of Plath’s time would have considered problematic). In “Tale of a Tub,” the poet’s own body surprises and repels her: “two knees jut up / like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise / on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp” (Collected Poems, 25). “Moonrise” associates summer, menarche, and death: “Grub-white mulberries redden among leaves. / I’ll go out and sit in white like they do, / Doing nothing” (98). In “Two Sisters of Persephone” (a parallel in some ways to Brooks’s “Sadie and Maud”) one “barren” sister stays home and does math in the attic, while the other embraces an earthy fertility the poem only just manages to praise, comparing it to poppies’ “red silk flare / Of petaled blood” (31–32).

Other figures in Plath try to put off adolescence indefinitely: the “particular girl” in “Spinster” “longed for winter” and rejected spring, making herself an impenetrable, unwakable Sleeping Beauty, with “such a barricade of barb and check … As no mere insurgent man could hope to break” (49–50). In “Virgin in a Tree”—one of Plath’s last and best poems on this topic—sexual maturity is frightening but refusing it is worse; the virgin Daphne figure, “ripe and unplucked,” has

The language feels as insistently stuck, as contorted, as the girl, who remains virgin and more than half a tree. The rhyme scheme is “stuck” too; the first line of each stanza rhymes with the first line of all the others, and so on through nine stanzas of five lines each. Here female adolescence means resistance to adulthood and sexual maturity, a resistance Plath can neither celebrate (since, in her Freudian framework, it is an illness) nor quite give up.

And yet, even though she once worked for Mademoiselle, Plath never brings into her poetry the settings, vocabulary, or art forms associated, during her lifetime, with teen culture. “Above the Oxbow,” her long locode-scriptive poem about the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts, calls it “this valley of discreet academies” but says nothing more about UMass or Amherst or Smith (87). Plath’s mythic frameworks perhaps require that she leave the signifiers of 1950s teen and collegiate culture out of her poetry. She uses them, instead, in her novel, The Bell Jar (1963). The twenty-year-old narrator Esther Greenwood (whose first name suggests that she needs to attract men and whose last name suggests both inexperience and the Green World of As You Like It) encounters dancing, dating, a radio DJ, Hollywood film, “the most wonderful boy I’d ever seen,” and “the Yale Junior Prom” (The Bell Jar 43, 46).

Like Moore’s classmates, like Friedan’s terrified teens, the studious Greenwood has prepared herself to excel in a role specifically designated for adolescents (as a student, in schools) that will lead her to no clear place as an adult: “The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that was coming to an end” (62). As with Larkin’s Katharine, there is nothing Esther wants to be when she grows up: “I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles … and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would I couldn’t see a single space beyond the nineteenth” (101). Unlike Larkin’s Katharine, however, Esther links her suicidal blankness to the restrictions and conventions of adult femininity in postwar America. Plath made that suicidal blankness into poems. It is perhaps her wholly negative view of the social aspects of adolescence as much as her ambitions to classical permanence that prevented her from building modern adolescence—its peer groups, tastes, subcultures, and argot—into her poems as well.

Less original than Plath in other respects, Anne Sexton may have been the first poet who used teen slang and teen culture to describe, from a girl’s perspective, the dilemmas of maturation and sexuality that feminist psychology would explore. The poems in Sexton’s strongest book, Transformations (1971), which reworks fairy tales, focus on the trials of young women entering (or refusing to enter) adult sexuality. Usually Sexton ruins the happy endings; for her, heterosexual fulfillment is always a poor, guilty, and tainted goal. The experience of physical maturation, new responsibility, or heterosexual desire has no rewards that outweigh its costs; the poems often permit both feminist interpretations (in which the young women fight against or fall victim to patriarchal social structures) and Freudian ones (in which they illustrate neuroses).

Sexton’s prefatory poem tells all her readers that they are, in some sense, like teens, lacking satisfactory answers to questions about how to represent growing up:

“He” gets not answers so much as examples and warnings. Snow White, a “sleeping virgin” at thirteen, grows up to become as vain as her adversary, the wicked queen, “rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut / and sometimes referring to her mirror / as women do” (9). “Rapunzel” depicts (but does it condemn?) lesbian sexuality as a way to avoid adulthood: “A woman / who loves a woman / is forever young” (35). In “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” an intrepid soldier weds one of the princesses by invading and destroying the dream life that their dormitory, and perhaps their virginity, allows them to share: “The princesses were torn from / their night life like a baby from its pacifier”; “never / again would their hair be tangled into diamonds, / never again their shoes worn down to a laugh” (92).

“The teen female body, even more than the mature female body,” Ilana Nash writes, “is constructed as a public spectacle,” organized around a “chrysalis moment” in which the girl becomes a visible (and sexually available) woman (American Sweethearts, 24). This moment of visibility is at once a moment of subjection (as Nash writes) and a moment of attempted self-definition (like a lyric poem); it therefore prompts contemporary poems about vulnerability, often hesitant or stuttering poems about the difficulty of being a woman and about the difficulty of self-knowledge, of being a coherent self.

According to the Index of American Periodical Verse, at least twenty-five poems entitled “Adolescence” or “Adolescent” have appeared in U.S. magazines since 1970. Many, perhaps most, are poems by women about girls and about the fear and risk that Nash (and Friedan) describe. In Mary Graham Lund’s “Adolescence” (1974), for example, the teen years represent a fall into danger and meaning: “Our parents are shouting / warnings”; “It’s important how we walk / and dance and dress.” Alison Seevak in “Adolescence” (2001) (a poem tonally and thematically indebted to Sexton) imagines her thirteenth birthday as a secret and an omen; secretly trying on her mother’s clothes, the poet “saw everything / coming towards me / that I did not want,” from menstrual blood to “the small ways / we would disappoint one another.”²

Typical among these poems in its ideas, but exceptional in its verbal elegance, is Nin Andrews’s prose poem “Adolescence” (1997):

The winter her body no longer fit, walking felt like swimming in blue jeans and a flannel shirt. Everything stuck to her skin: gum wrappers, Band-Aids, leaves. How she envied the other girls, especially the kind who turned into birds. They were the ones boys hand-tamed, training them to eat crumbs from their palms or sing on cue. What she would have done for a red crest and a sharp beak, for a little square of blue sky to enter her like wings. But it was her role to sink so the others could rise, hers to sleep so the others could dance. If only her legs weren’t too sodden to lift, if only her buttons were unfastened by the water she kept swimming through, and she could extract from the shadow of her breasts a soul as soft as a silk brassiere, beautiful and useless, like a castle at the bottom of the sea.

Andrews’s poem looks like a conscious rejoinder to an earlier, male conception of adolescence—and sexuality—as remembered power; the poet recalls, and her anxious, finally counterfactual clauses emphasize, a double deprivation. On the one hand, sexuality itself for young women constitutes a kind of fall: young women succeed when boys tame them or teach them to “sing on cue,” when their bodies become permeable or “beautiful and useless,” like the little mermaid in the fairy tale (not the Disney film) to which the poem refers. On the other hand, Andrews herself (compared to her peers) lacked even the compensatory rewards of sexuality, which turned other young women into lithe bird-girls but made her instead into a slow, un-mermaid-like fish.

Ruth Saxton argues that a “new emphasis on the psychology and development of the girl” emerged from the social sciences into American popular culture during the 1980s and 1990s. Saxton notes the controversial In a Different Voice, by Carol Gilligan; the journalist Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia; The Body Project, by the historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg; and the well-publicized writings of Naomi Wolf (Saxton, “Introduction,” xxii–xxiii). She might have added, even more recently, Emily White’s Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut or Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes (the acknowledged basis for the Hollywood movie Mean Girls). Gilligan posits a “relational crisis” that “occurs for women in adolescence,” when “girls struggle against losing voice and against creating an inner division or split” (In a Different Voice, xxiii). Catherine Driscoll writes that in such models as Gilligan’s, “girls provide a figure for a failure of development and thus a place to engage with the traps laid for the individual by the modern world” (Girls, 303).

Laura Kasischke has made that figure, that engagement, a basis for her poetic art, which depends more than any other poet’s on the duality (glamour and hazard, protest and allure) our culture finds in teenage girls. Both the (sexualized) danger and the (sexualized) power that modern culture attributes to female adolescence find realization in her verse, where even the line breaks sometimes seem to enact the exhilarations and the disappointments of that unstable state. “Spring Break” (2005), part of the sequence “Impressions on Wax Tablets,” begins:

Kasischke did not know, then, that she was getting a sunburn. Nor did she know that she was entering the “burning world” of the Buddha’s fire sermon, the world in which pain proves inseparable from desire. The in-between-ness of this moment—between the “naivete and luck” (her phrase) of childhood and the burden of maturity—prompts poetry both because it is a “chrysalis moment,” and because it is a moment of risk: “Later, the football coach’s son / will carry me to bed / and leave me there, untouched.”

Kasischke’s recent young-adult novel Boy Heaven (2006) includes the same incident—Bahamas, drunkenness, coach’s son, sixteen-year-old girl unharmed (101–2). One difference between the prose narrative and the poetic version is that the poem manipulates verb tense and mood: part 1 of “Spring Break” uses only the present tense, part 2 the future (“will carry”), then the past perfect (“I had been wandering”), then a future tense along with verbs of state—“I’d // never be able to remember a thing, but my / friends would swear … I / lay laughing for a long time” (Gardening, 18–19). Her best poems examine the dislocations of self-conception, in time and space, that such strong identification with one’s own former teenaged self can create. Here Kasischke’s consciousness moves out in several directions from then returns to that one night, which she places (even though she can’t remember it) at the core of her adult self; in the same way, the day of Persephone’s kidnapping would define that mythical figure throughout her life as the queen of the underworld. The poet of “Spring Break” also likens her younger self to Persephone, “wandering in a staticky meadow / for a long time gathering / intangible flowers,” making spring break, with its promise or threat of sexual initiation, into a middle-class American Hades (Gardening, 18).³

If the time described by a lyric poem is (by definition) a single moment, so that pivotal moments in a life become occasions for autobiographical lyric, each poem must fit its cadences to that moment’s—or to that type of moment’s—demands. In Kasischke such moments are pivot points for a specifically female adolescence defined by sexual peril, as in “Bike Ride with Older Boys”:

The ride could have become “the best / afternoon of my life,” with “cute and older boys / pedaling beside me—respectful, awed … as I imagined it would be” (48). It might also have led to a rape: “bits of glass and gravel / ground into my knees,” the violated girl never able to “love myself again” (48). Because neither outcome did happen, both could have happened; the poem takes place at the moment before the thirteen-year-old Kasischke’s decision to skip the rendezvous made both impossible.

The poetry of female adolescence is often, for Kasischke, the poetry of risks not taken; the lyric moment becomes the moment before the “chrysalis moment,” between innocence and experience, when the fate of the body and the place of the self within it is neither settled nor known. Kasischke’s “Ravine” also records nostalgia for a girlhood defined by what had not (quite) yet happened, by the entry into heterosexuality for which the girls would consciously prepare; a onetime best friend

The girlhood friends find—and make a game from—a used condom, “dried-up and open-mouthed / as a baby bird”: “We poked it up with a stick / and whipped it into the air,” a game which “thrilled us as much / as sex ever would” (Housekeeping, 80). Their dismissal of inferior adult pleasure sounds as conclusive, though never as grotesque, as Louise Glück’s famous “I hate sex” (First Four Books, 155).

And yet Kasischke’s teens—unlike Glück’s children and adults—remain invested in qualities we might call sexy. The moment of entry into sexuality—even when refused or postponed—becomes for Kasischke the moment where the poem locates the emergence of the self, not only for Kasischke in particular but for all women, all girls. Adolescence denotes both the quality of inwardness that makes it impossible to describe the embodied self completely and the eroticized demand that the self (through poetry, for example) become known. Set at a sleazy carnival, Kasischke’s “Fatima” asks

This moment of risk and sexual excitement is for Kasischke the experience prior to language from which her poems draw analogies for almost everything else; they treat female adolescent embodiment as a kind of accessible universal, almost as a religious poet might treat a sense of God’s presence in the world or as a Petrarchan lover might appeal to male desire. (Revenge on Petrarchan legacies that take the male for the universal thus becomes one of Kasischke’s points.)

In Kasischke’s early poetry, with its western Michigan, working-class Catholic background, teen sex takes the place of Catholic religiosity, even of Catholic miracles. The girls who drink at the fairgrounds in “Fatima” look to the older poet like the “peasant girls” who saw the Virgin in Portugal. The astonishing tale in “Local Legend” could have come from a 1980s teen exploitation film: “the last real miracle here was when / Catholic Central slaughtered Rockford” in football:

Kasischke’s jagged enjambments, her wildly variable lines (which reject even the approximate regularities of most American free verse) suggest both the sometime urgency of her emotion, and the failure of sequence or measure in her life course. Seeking master narratives of that life course, she finds only the mystery of an inner life permanently associated with her own, and with other people’s teens. In “Quiet” the visual memory of “a boy tapping his pencil on the table / all through Study Hall” (a boy whose attention she could not catch) feels to the poet

Here, perhaps, is Kasischke’s ars poetica: the momentary glance exchanged in high school, the spark of a teen crush, encapsulates (as lyric, a genre of multum in parvo, also encapsulates) the thrill and “disaster” of having a female body and the “disaster” of having a body at all. That condition, or Kasischke’s need to represent it, seems to her like both a thirst and a “fountain,” a source that generates poems.

Other teens in Kasischke’s poetry, the poet’s alter egos and companions, stand for the traumas she, personally, escaped. The “sources of this life,” “The Sorrows of Carrie M.” implies, lie within adults’ bonds to their own youth—in this case, in the poet’s wish to stay in touch with her now-vanished friends, “Margaret of the scarves,” “gentle-haired Clarisse … I email them, but I / don’t think they’ll email me” (Gardening, 39). The titular name suggests (though it may not denote) the protagonist of Stephen King’s novel and film Carrie, whose telekinetic powers let her immolate everyone who shamed her in high school: “Carrie, tower / of fury and glory.” The same poem evokes, with teasingly Freudian metaphors, “my teenage heart a little tear-drenched pillow // a pin-cushion without pins // a souvenir from a place/ I wished I’d never been” (Gardening, 37).

An earlier poem, “Candy, Stranger,” portrays a lost sixteen-year-old girl (either a suicide or a murder victim) as a type of Christ. Amid “the birthday wind and the anorexic / star-song of suburban girls,” this martyred girl becomes important because she has actually faced the sexualized danger that the other girls imagine; Kasischke speaks for the collective of girls her age, making their shared identity—shared dangers, shared desires—the dominant note of the reverent, halting poem (Wild, 22). After the murder (or suicide),

Traumas such as the fictional Carrie’s, such as Fatima’s, such as the kidnapped girl’s in “Candy,” help Kasischke contemplate her own passage into an adulthood less painful than her teen years but numb and uneventful by comparison with them:

Does she mean that reliving her teen years will be “awful”? Or does she dread the “silence” of an afterlife, of failing to relive them? The teen Kasischke was lucky—the coach’s son put her to bed, for example, without committing any depredations. And yet that luck allowed her nothing better than to become mature: “My love, all of it, a life of it, has been / too little” (20). Having evaded trauma, having settled uneasily into an adulthood (and into an uneasy poetic style, and into motherhood as well), Kasischke has become not sweet honey but bland water, not the flower but the wall: “through the years somehow I became / a high brick wall fully expecting / the little blue flowers to thrive in my shade” (Gardening, 23).

Three of Kasischke’s six novels have teenage narrators, and all include traumatized teens. The Life Before Her Eyes (2002) imagines a Columbine-style high school shooting; Boy Heaven, aimed at teenage readers, takes its plot from a scary urban legend about cheerleaders at summer camp. In White Bird in a Blizzard (1999), Kat, the narrator, asks herself how

the younger woman [her mother] was … became no more than a ghost.… Or she became me. Maybe I stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like … an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that’s why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes.

The same anxious envy animates “Spiritus,” in which the poet remembers her own teen social circle: one girl’s “beautiful / pale and drunken mother” always “wanted to dance with the girls / in beige stockings until morning, her / toe nails painted white” (What It Wasn’t, 49). “That girl’s mother wanted / to be us, and we dreaded / being ourselves, our mothers, our friends so much” that the girls in question drank themselves sick (50). The girls cannot stay as they are, but there is nothing they want to become: they would rather remain “drunk // and drowned” (51). If adolescent sexuality in Kasischke’s poetry and fiction frightens adults who have finally outgrown it, adult orderliness can look—both to adults and to teens—like invisibility and vacancy, like a life no longer lived.

Thus far—despite her consistent interest in gender, despite her extremes of enjambment and her urgent tone—Kasischke may seem like Larkin or Auden, who also imagine growing up as loss. The dilemmas and double binds she depicts, however—in which a girl at best becomes a desirable teen, living under the threat of sexual violence and subordination after a “chrysalis moment,” and then grows up to become undesirable, too old, unsexy, established, invisible—are not the dilemmas that male poets tell us they face.⁵ Moreover, Kasischke in her poetry, if not in her prose, wants to envision a more complicated, more rewarding imaginative relation between adults and the teens whom they meet or whom they used to be.

Kasischke can do so (she is almost alone in doing so) by imagining herself convincingly as a grown-up mother and as a teenage daughter in the space of the same poem. “For / a long time I thought / I was the only one,” a recent poem muses. “Then, I got old … I saw a girl today who was // the girl I was” (Gardening, 73). As early as “The Cyclone” (1992), Kasischke portrayed herself simultaneously as a girl yearning for erotic adventure—sixteen and “falling in love with a boy / who’s learning to play the electric guitar”—and as “the mother of the boy who is learning / to play the electric guitar” (Wild, 17). The title poem in Fire and Flower (a book focused tightly on motherhood) begins by comparing the poet as she was—furtive and daring as Juliet—to the poet as she is, a giver of fertile shelter; once, a lover would “climb / the fire escape to me. The sky // was rocket fire.… Now // I sleep beside a child,” “like a swan boat,” “in our bed’s unfolding flower” (3). In “Kiss,” the memory of Kasischke’s first kiss disturbs and saddens her precisely because (once recalled) it actually has the frightening sweetness attributed to first kisses in American popular culture. Kasischke’s present-day children, who have never heard of her first boyfriend,

Remembered adolescence shines, at evening, through adult experience; the latter seems to the poet (“when the light is dim”) merely a stage screen or scrim. Even though she has become a mother, and hence thinks she ought to focus on her children’s future, teen experience for Kasischke here seems to be the foundation, the hidden meaning of the poet’s adult life, more vivid and more important than whatever came next.

Patterns that occur together in Kasischke—and from whose conjunction she gets her originality—turn up separately in other recent American poems. Rita Dove’s two poems called “Adolescence” also portray erotically charged boundaries, thresholds that girls cross as they become women, as types for all knowledge, suggesting that experience will always disappoint. “Adolescence—I” presents a supposed revelation:

That anxious unknowing dominates the more ambitious “Adolescence—II”: “Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting,” Dove begins (43). “Three seal men” out of a fairy tale arrive: “They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl, // One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door. / ‘Can you feel it yet?’ they whisper” (43). What is the young Dove, her “baby-breasts … alert,” awaiting? Maturity? The end of childhood? Heterosexual desire? Evidence that she belongs in this world rather than in the consolingly imagined space of fairy tales and talking animals? Or evidence that she does not? The adult poet will not say, nor does she abandon the point of view ascribed to her younger self: “I clutch at the ragged holds / They [the seal-men] leave behind,” the poem ends; “Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.” Perfective present at the start of the poem, Dove’s verbs by the end of the poem sound instead like recurring (imperfective) present, denoting actions that take place over and over, as if uncertainty and apprehension have rested on Dove’s tongue from that night to this day.

Not so much the uncertainty as the necessarily temporary power in female adolescence offers the chief subject for Angela Sorby’s Distance Learning (1998). If Phyllis McGinley’s regular stanzas connoted reassurance, Sorby’s rhymed forms often convey unease. In “Glossolalia” the fourteen-year-old Sorby’s neighbor “is dying for me // to convert to Pentecostal / Christianity” (11). The neighbor, Rae Anne, who is probably Sorby’s own age, fascinates Sorby for reasons the adult poet knows had little to do with religion:

For Sorby’s Kate Fox, spirituality permitted an escape from the confining roles allotted to most nineteenth-century women and girls. That escape depended, though, on the “tricks” made possible by her growing “body,” which produced no truth beyond itself, could not lead to any stable enlightenment or satisfying adult role: “I was the whole / heavenly host. I was as good as it gets” (25).

Whatever its pleasures, girls’ and young women’s experience in Sorby leads to no truth visible, no lessons usable in later life because it has no anchor and no source except the changing female body. “My Distance Learning poems,” she writes, “suspect that no one ever really grows up, though lately I’m thinking that it’s just some of us [who] can’t/ won’t despite mounting physical evidence to the contrary. My favorite poet in this vein is Laura Kasischke”; “it’s funny,” she adds, “that my poems are so self-evidently in sync” with hers (private communication). Both Sorby and Kasischke see adulthood as a perpetually unfinished project of managing loss, but their nostalgia also grounds a feminist argument: what our culture does to girls’ bodies, what it asks girls to do, creates the risks that the girls in the poems at once anticipate and recall.

“The quality of embeddedness in social interaction and personal relationships that characterizes women’s lives in contrast to men’s,” Gilligan contends, “becomes not only a descriptive difference but also a developmental liability” as teen social pressures and adult expectations encourage girls to abandon their families and their childhood friends (In a Different Voice, 9). Gilligan herself finds this conundrum, along with moving reactions to it, in poems about girls’ transitions from childhood to adolescence by Michelle Cliff and Sharon Olds (“Preface,” 12–14). Such reactions have become a staple for poets concerned (as Olds is not) with bringing into contemporary poetry a specifically adolescent language, a form in some way responsive to adolescent social being. A poet who believes, with Gilligan, that girls “lose voice” as they become women—and who wishes to project and defend that “voice” (however defined)—might think herself logically obligated to find a voice or a style that does not sound “adult.”

Thylias Moss has at times created such a style.⁶ Moss’s “When I Was ’Bout Ten We Didn’t Play Baseball” merges the reflective adult poet with the knowing girl she may have been, not only in its sentiments and identifications but in its choice of nonstandard English:

Though some phrases sound descriptively sophisticated, clearly “adult,” others indicate the persona’s youth even more clearly than they indicate race. The poem assumes as much when it goes on to place its fidgety speaker within her protective family: “The heat does hug. / It isn’t shy and proper. My mother wouldn’t want me / to play with it” (45). Moss’s figures of identification sound younger than Gunn’s, younger than Brooks’s, younger than Kasischke’s, and for good reason: to retain their independence they must remain not just pre-adult but immediately presexual, or at least preheterosexual.

Such poems adapt from recent feminist theory two theses: first, that movement into adolescence represents for many girls a loss of power, confidence, and independence (Gilligan’s argument); second, that there are special properties in “girls’ talk” (as the sociolinguist Jennifer Coates has argued), syntactic, lexical and even phonological features through which “teenage girls negotiate their identity during adolescence as they move from girlhood to womanhood” (Coates, “Changing Femininities,” 123). In her poems of the 1980s and 1990s, Moss’s linguistic choices—her run-on sentences, apparent “chattiness” or digressiveness, and mix of colloquial with academic language—can align her with “girls’ talk,” suggesting ways in which she tries to remain outside both fixed adult and dangerous late-adolescent heterosexual gender roles. Her prose poem “An Anointing” promises to avoid those roles; its italics suggest a manifesto:

Elizabeth Grosz writes that “the female body has been constructed not only as a lack or absence but … as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid,” “as formless flow,” requiring patriarchal or phallogocentric control (Volatile Bodies, 203). Refusing any such control, Moss’s girls punningly refuse to date, decline to “multiply,” and defy adult taboos: “Me and Molly have wiped each other’s asses with ferns. Made emergency tampons of our fingers.” Refusing to “cross the street” into a heterosexual adult space where men might impregnate them, the girls promise instead to give birth to one another, “Molly down my canal binnacle first, her water breaking in me like an anointing” (Small, 143). The “me and Molly” of “An Anointing,” like the girl in “When I Was ’Bout Ten We Didn’t Play Baseball” (who stayed away from a wedding) establish solidarity within a pre-or non-heterosexual world defined in part by its distance from adult speech. Moss’s liminal—and dual rather than isolated and singular—girls replace patriarchy with menarche. By locating a claim about girls’ power at the precise point in girls’ lives when they, supposedly, enter heterosexual and patriarchal dominion, when their flow literally requires control (which the girls here provide for each other), Moss makes her fluid, fluent prose poem at once an unsettling, playful entertainment and a determined attack on the social constraints that girls face.

With characters specified by age or grade, Moss identifies girls’ adolescence as a state of potential resistance to Gilligan’s “loss of voice.” Yet Moss has no use for the sense (so important to Kasischke) of female adolescence as attractive despite its risks, as a source of interiority and passion (so that adult women want to remember it) even if it can also be risky and horrifying (so that adult women are glad they never have to go through it again). The most ambitious single poems about female adolescence do encompass that duality; they belong not to Moss, nor to Kasischke, nor to Sexton, but to Jorie Graham. Graham’s versions of lyric have always portrayed the self as a temporal process, as something one has to discover or become; in “The Geese” (from her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts) “the real / is crossing you // your body an arrival / you know is false but can’t outrun” (Dream, 12–13). Analogies between the self of lyric (as Graham conceives it) and the self of adolescence (as twentieth-century culture has defined it) enter Graham’s work in her most autobiographical volume, Region of Unlikeness (1991). I conclude by describing some of that volume’s best poems.

“Fission,” the first in the book, takes place in a movie theater in Italy in November 1963, when Graham would have been thirteen. As the poem begins, the young poet watches the famous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita in which both James Mason as Humbert Humbert and the viewers first encounter the title character (played by Sue Lyon); Lyon looks back at Humbert (and at us) through her iconic sunglasses. The young Graham then watches as “a man” announces that President Kennedy has been shot; the house lights come up and the theater’s skylight opens. The poet’s discovery that she has one body and no other, that her life story will be the story of that mortal body, is like the discovery that Kennedy has been shot; the poet’s discovery of a new verbal form resembles the adolescent discovery that one’s body has changed, is changing, and that the social form imposed on a girl’s body will involve an imagined or real male gaze.⁷

Helen Vendler writes that “in the autobiographical poems of Region of Unlikeness … memory oscillates … between a past moment … and the same past moment revived as a present-tense moment” (“Indigo,” 14). In “Fission,” this double focus invites readers to compare the two people involved in the memory (Graham the adult poet and Graham at thirteen), asking to what extent those people differ. Yet the poem begins not with temporal but with spatial comparisons: “real electric light upon the full-sized / screen / on which the greater-than-life-size girl appears” (R 3). Sue Lyon’s Lolita looks “greater-than-life-size,” both physically larger (since she’s on a movie screen) and more developed than a real “girl” at Lolita’s age might be.⁸ This Lolita not only accepts a spectator’s gaze but looks back; to become the object of a sexualized gaze seems to Graham here the cost of becoming an agent of any kind—one is seen sexually or else “never … seen.”

This stopped moment of interlocking gazes (Humbert’s at Lolita, Lyon’s at the audience and “the man,” Graham’s and ours at Lyon) creates a moment of initiation, of firstness, much like the moments Graham depicts in earlier poems—the moment, for example, in “San Sepolcro” “before / the birth of God” (Dream, 21). Here, however, it is also a “chrysalis moment,” a girl’s entry into sexuality, like the moment Kasischke postponed in “Bike Ride,” the moment Moss’s girls refuse. As in “San Sepolcro,” Graham will depict our understanding of such an encounter as a journey away from it; we understand innocence or initiation only from a position of experience. But where “San Sepolcro” depicts the moment before a birth, “Fission” (like the film it describes) begins at the moment before a fall:

Since Lolita is a film (and a book) devoted to moments of fall, of innocence lost, Graham can depict such a fall (or separation, “fission”) at once in herself (as she stands in the theater), in the crowd (as they realize that Kennedy has been shot), and on screen (as Dolores approaches her encounter with Humbert). “Like the movie heroine,” writes Laurence Goldstein, Graham’s “spectator … is now abandoned to a fate rushing towards her with the single-mindedness of Humbert himself” (The American Poet at the Movies, 234). She looks back because she is ready to be looked at: “her sun-barred shoulders … accompany / her neck, her face, the / looking-up” (R 4).

As the film fades, “the theater’s skylight is opened and noon slides in”; Lyon appears at once to grow up and to become less visible (to spectators generally as to Graham in particular). Her incipient story gives way to an absence of story; events pile up in apparent simultaneity:

Given her descriptions of the film up to this point, we might expect the young Graham to hope the story would resume, to rejoin in imagination the story about growing up that Lyon’s character seemed about to tell. But such a story (as we know, as the adult Graham knows) has a tragic or at least a traumatic ending. That ending has informed, in different ways, the tonal and linguistic decisions in Kasischke, Sorby, and Moss, and it informs Graham here. The next line becomes a turning point—the first time Graham uses past tense to describe herself and one of only two places where a new sentence coincides with the start of a stanza. Graham seeks not a way to resume the story of becoming a woman but (as in Moss’s “An Anointing”) a way to avoid stories and womanhood entirely. Graham then projects that search onto the Dolores Haze of the film. Recalling “a way she lay down on that lawn / to begin with,” Graham imagines that there must be “a way to not yet be wanted,” “a way to lie there at twenty-four frames / per second—no faster” (R 6). Once admitted to the ongoing plot, there will be “no telling what we’ll have to see next,” “no telling what on earth we’ll have to marry marry marry” (R 6). That last phrase echoes “The Applicant” by Sylvia Plath: “My boy, it’s your last resort. / Will you marry it, marry it, marry it” (Collected Poems, 222). The apparent allusion to Plath (rare in Graham) reminds us to look for Plath’s concerns; what would 1950s or early-1960s femininity do to the young women who embraced it? What “plot,” what “desire” would it make young women accept?

Now this way of thinking about time and narrative, looking and “being-seen”—an initial fascination with its allure followed by a discovery of its dangers and a wish to withdraw or postpone—describes (a) Graham’s thirteen-year-old self as “Fission” depicts her; (b) the adult Graham of Region and of The End of Beauty and many of her mythological alter egos (Daphne, Penelope, Saint Teresa, Eurydice); and (c) girls or female adolescents generally, as depicted by every one of the cultural critics and psychological thinkers this chapter has quoted so far, beginning with Beauvoir:

The “young girl” for Beauvoir wants “to be a child no longer, but she does not accept becoming an adult”; hence she occupies “a position of continual denial,” since “she does not accept the destiny assigned to her by nature and by society; and yet she does not repudiate it completely.” Instead, Beauvoir’s typical girl “limits herself to a flight from reality or a symbolic struggle against it” (314). Such a symbolic struggle appears, in “Fission,” twice: in Lyon’s Dolores (as the young Graham viewed her) and in the young Graham as the older poet remembers her.

“Fission” thus derives power in part from the analogy between Graham’s general resistance to teleology, narrative, closure, and Western history, on the one hand, and girls’ resistance to womanhood, on the other. The poem suggests not only an analogy but a homology (a single source): What if the resistance to narrative time Graham so often depicts derives from a resistance to ways of “being-seen,” to ways of becoming a woman? These suggestions make “Fission” not just one of Graham’s most affecting poems but one of her most effectively feminist. Graham returns (as Gilligan asks women to return) to an immediately presexual (or preheterosexual) moment as a source of power, a chance to resist being told “what to want next.”⁹

That return also looks like a withdrawal from the situations the film depicts—a withdrawal, in turn, for which Graham (once a film student herself) solicits useful analogues in film theory. Laura Mulvey famously discovered the Lacanian mirror phase in the condition of cinema viewing, where “the image recognized is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior” (“larger-than-life-size,” Graham says) “projects the body outside itself as an ideal ego” (“Visual Pleasure,” 241). We might name Graham’s next experience not fission but fusion: as “three lights” (skylight, house lights, movie-projector light) interrupt her reverie by “merging” across her person: “the image licked my small body from the front, the story playing // all over my face my / forwardness” (R 7). She now seems doomed to inhabit the plot of Lolita, moving ahead into history and womanhood, already caressed, obscenely, by filmic light. After this fusion, however, the lights come apart, illuminating Graham’s body as something incomplete, “outside itself”; the lights are “there flaming,”

Emily White compares girls’ adolescence to “a psychological morning, disorienting in its brightness”; “the girl who develops [physically] ahead of time,” White adds, “feels like she is being pulled forward, suddenly thrust into the harsh light of the world’s gaze” (Fast Girls, 24, 51). Kristy, in Kasischke’s Boy Heaven, realizes “that it was possible to feel boys’ eyes on you” (57). Graham’s lines evoke just such feelings and metaphors. Graham connects these concerns about female development over weeks, months, and years to her concerns about how we experience time in minutes, moments, and seconds; her lyric strategies for exploring, stretching out, and dissecting time can therefore come to represent her own (and other characters’) resistance to the limiting, sexist “story” of feminine development. To reenter the social world—to spend “the dollar bill / in my hand”—would be to make a “choice,” and “choice” is “the thing that wrecks the sensuous here the glorious here—/ that wrecks the beauty” of lyric exemption from time.¹⁰ Having contemplated and rejected “choice,” Graham’s poem mirrors many of her generation’s stories of adolescence in refusing any kind of conclusive or satisfying end. It concludes instead on a dash, on a held breath: “Don’t move, don’t / wreck the shroud, don’t move—” (8). The poem thus (like Moss’s work) valorizes a refusal: Graham imagines withholding her consent from the story her culture wants her to tell about her body, her age, and her time.

Graham’s drive against closure and teleology, against systems of all sorts, has precedents in her personal history. Graham attended the Sorbonne in 1968 (aged seventeen or eighteen) along with the protest leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit; she was arrested twice during the Paris upheaval and then “expelled for taking part in student protests” (Casper). Those protests and their associated ideas inform Graham’s work. The sociologist Deena Weinstein writes that while “children are taught to have ideas of what they would like to ‘be’ when they grow up,” “adolescents have the privilege and torment of raising the question of whether they want to be anything that society holds out for them” (“Rock,” 10). Such questions—and the refusals that serve as their answers—pervaded both the protests of May 1968 and the poem from Region which recalls them, “The Hiding Place.”

That poem resembles “Fission” in telling a story about a turning point in public history; in describing a crowded, dark place from which the young Graham emerges into shocking light; and in making that emergence stand for a transition in her life course. Once again, Graham identifies a valuable, even heroic resistance (to narrative and authority) with the stage she feels she has left behind. Where that stage had (in “Fission”) a mute and phantasmatic representative (the “larger-than-life” Lyon/Lolita), here youth and resistance acquire “a certain leader”:

That Whitmanesque leader (perhaps Cohn-Bendit, or a man whose name Graham never knew) represents and unifies the dispossessed Parisians of the poem, whom Graham also encountered in jail: “In the cell we were so crowded no one could sit or lean. / People peed on each other,” and guards beat a “girl in her eighth month” of pregnancy (R 19). These scenes of heroism and horror (like the unrolling film at the start of “Fission”) introduce the longer, more personal part of the poem, which takes place after Graham’s release from jail: walking in Paris, she breathes “air thick with dwellings,” and envisions

Newly released from jail, Graham feels she does not belong (in a repeated pun) to any of the “stories” around her—a foreigner and a defeated student rebel, she has neither a home nor a clear course of action, and in this she stands for all the defeated young radicals of 1968, not so much for their political programs (which she describes vaguely as “claims”) but for their mood: “Was I meant to get up again? I was inside. The century clicked by.” Public history has slipped back into its ordinary, adult-driven course: “They made agreements we all returned to work. / The government fell but then it was alright again.” Graham ends not in that tone of flat dejection but on the exhilarating student leader, a hero of imagination resisting what Stevens named “the pressure of reality” (Collected Poetry, 656)—what Graham might call the pressure of history. At the end of the poem, we see, not the “helicopters” nor “the government” but

“The Hiding Place,” like “Fission,” ends on an em-dash, avoiding (in print) the visible symbol of closure as it avoids (aloud) the tone of voice that might make closure seem apt.¹¹ The student, the girl, in these poems of adolescence wish “to postpone closure” in their own life courses just as the poems “postpone closure” in their grammatical elaborations (Gardner, Regions of Unlikeness, 219). Once again Graham celebrates a youthful figure who appears momentarily able to stop adults’ public time, and once again the poem both valorizes that resistance and shows that it could not last.

Nor are “The Hiding Place” and “Fission” alone in that project; other poems in Region focus on other traumatic moments of adolescence—learning to wear makeup and discovering her father’s affair (“Picnic”), a sexual encounter at age thirteen (“The Region of Unlikeness”). The resistance to time and teleology, the mobilization of long lines, enjambments, and grammar on behalf of such resistance, which characterized “Fission” and “The Hiding Place,” also informs those other poems. In “The Region of Unlikeness,” an early fall into sexual experience prompts self-consciousness about time, a source of solidarity with other women, and (conjecturally) a reason the adult Graham writes as she does:

What was prospective in “Fission” becomes retrospective in “Region,” the sexual initiation having already happened; the poem’s resistance to compulsory heterosexuality, to teleologies of womanhood, appears not as a wish to stop time before a fall, before a “chrysalis moment,” but as an ambiguity between two ways to see the same girl afterward. Both versions rewrite the myth of Persephone, whose spatial path the young Graham’s flight downstairs, into open sunlight, reverses. In one version of the rewritten myth, the girl’s footsteps are “plantings,” destined to root her in one place as woman and mother and wife. In the other version, she remains always in motion, undertaking an incomplete escape: she descends

James Longenbach has critiqued Graham’s “dream of openness” in Region (what we might call her perpetual escape) as politically (or even ontologically) unrealistic; Longenbach suggests that Graham’s more recent poetry views the avoidance of narrative closure more reasonably, as a mere postponement of “patterns and laws” (Modern Poetry, 170–71). We might say that Graham’s poems of adolescence in Region make that concession already; the desires to stand outside history, to avoid shape and story, to avoid the passage of time itself, to avoid the development of the female body into the light of a harsh male gaze all appear in these poems as linked and finally unachievable wishes. Those wishes prove inseparable from what Gilligan calls “girls’ resistance” (“Preface,” xxiii), from what Kasischke and other younger poets have revealed as a partly feminist and hence ethically charged wish not to accept any inherited story about what a girl must become—a wish, in at least one sense, not to grow up.

Recent American women poets find tonal, linguistic, and conceptual fits for difficulties that girls face as they enter their teens. One such difficulty involves sexual risk, dangerous self-exposure; another involves the loss of homosocial girlhood bonds; and a third (which grows out of the first two) has to do with entry into fixed narrative, into a limiting “life story” as such. All three topics can both prompt and represent lyric poetry, understood as the opposite, or the opponent, of a heteronormative, instrumentalizing, confining adult world. Some poets embrace “girls’ talk” as part of a resistance to adult demands. These poets, and others, organize poems around a duality by which teen girlhood means both inward discovery and unwilling self-subjection, and in which teen girlhood inspires both awe and fear. Consciously if not programmatically feminist, such poems—of which we have seen only some examples—represent late entries into the larger twentieth-century project of describing adolescence in poems, of finding verbal forms to fit that life stage.