When women speak truly they speak subversively — they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Bryn Mawr College commencement speech, 1986, published in the essay collection Dancing At The Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, 1989.
Ursula K. Le Guin was a woman with a wonder-full capacity to turn her writing around and over to word the world personally and politically – and perhaps most powerfully, poetically. Some time ago I read an interview with her where she spoke passionately about the poetic form, “villanelle”. Le Guin at once lamented and adored this highly structured form and after trying my hand at several villanelles, I began searching for other structured poetic forms. I found myself returning to my Gaelic roots and stumbled across the ancient Welsh form “Awdl gywydd” – a style purported to be used by a “lesser” order of poets during the 14th century and now returning to popularity. Pronounced “ow-dull gee-youth”, awdl gywydd verses have four lines, seven syllables per line, where the final syllable of the first and third lines rhyme with the 3rd-5th syllable of the following lines, and the second and fourth lines rhyme.
These two awdl gywydd poems turn around my thinking and wondering about writing as a woman in the academy – at once lamentation and adoration.
SheHeading
1.
She decided to resist
Feminist notes from inside
Words heart and crafted with will
Writing shill she plied, untied
Her words yearned to play astray
On her way she stumbled hard
Across this and that which seeks
To bespeak her words disbarred
She brushed away the dust
For she must persist despite
Do your worst! She raged and roared
She explored with great delight
Her words began to soar high
And said bye, so long, farewell
To the Great One-eyed father
To danger she cast her spell
2.
A feminist feeling came
Her name she did sweetly call,
Whispering take hold my hand
And heartland notes we shall scrawl
She grabbed the feeling so tight
It felt right to make a fuss
She stoked the fire and watched
Her words touched on treasonous
She now marched in her own time
Pantomines of patriarchs
She refused to give applause
For this cause, she would light sparks
In delightful disobey
She then may begin to live
That she does always for love
Words thereof, hers now to give