SOURCE: “Blood Taboo: A Response to Margaret Atwood's ‘Lives of the Poets’,” in Mid-American Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1992, pp. 111–15.

[In the following essay, Nelson considers the poetic language of Atwood's “Lives of the Poets.”]

I am a poet and represent an interpretive community of poets when I read. When I read the name Margaret Atwood as the author of a story, I know I am about to read words which I will interpret as poetic. I read Atwood's line, “An ice cube would be nice. Image of the Coke-and-ice” (“Lives of the Poets” 183). I will read it to myself aloud creating the poetry I expect. I pick “ice,” “nice,” and “Coke-and-ice.” I recall from the ancient poetry cave a couple lines from Gertrude Stein's prose, “To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays”: “And it was ice and it was so. / And it was dates and it was snow” (23). I interpret Atwood's and Stein's lines as musical pleasure, as an intercourse in my ear. I am a poet and I am always creating sensations from words. I write, “Like hips that part, parts can part like lips that part.” I feel “lips” like snakes in my teeth. I feel the “part, parts can part,” like parts moving together and apart, like lips moving to part. I am a poet and have given myself pleasure with sounds. I project webs of sound patterns over “Lives of the Poets.” I soak on the sounds of the words, “balled at the back” (183). I tease myself with the “i” sounds in, “Inn? Instead it's this” (183).

I represent an interpretive community of poets when I read. I project patterns. I took creative writing classes on how to pattern. I teach creative writing classes on how to pattern. “Pattern” is a poetic pattern here. I project a blood pattern on “Lives of the Poets.” Here is my pattern: “bloody nosebleed,” “nosebleed,” “bloodstain,” and “blood” (183). As I read, “blood” is the unifying drumbeat among the jazz of improvisation. I literally swing on the sounds of syllables. My blood beats in my ears. My blood flows behind my nose, down my legs.

I am menstruating. I represent the interpretive community of women. “Lives of the Poets” is about a woman who happens to be a poet. She could be an artist, housewife, welder, politician or Black. What is important is that she is a woman, and that the story is also written by a woman. As a representative of the interpretive community of women, I feel I can give a more valid reading of Atwood, the woman writer. The story opens with Julia lying on the bathroom floor with a “bloody nosebleed” (183). The first thing I think about is that a nosebleed is always bloody. I recall my bloody menstruation. Menstruation is always bloody. I think about blood. It is not a mere drumming in a poetic ear. Blood is what makes women. “Soon you will become a woman. You will know when you find blood in your panties. Here is a Kotex to wear when it happens.” (A white towel—the bloodstain spreading through it.)

At Edison Junior High I ran out of class, a red stain on my skirt, and a red streak down my leg (“Horrors, an accident”). My nickel jammed into the sanitary napkin machine—the safe blue box dropped down.

Menstruation was frightening when blood-loss always meant something was wrong. Womanhood still carries this in it. Throughout the world menstruating women are often set apart as if menstruation were an illness. “Don't pay any attention to her; she's on the rag.”

The metaphor of blood has personal meaning for women. It is the advent of menstruation when people are transformed into women (the opposite sex). In Atwood's story Julia is opposite, or not male. In Julia's presence the men make “furtive glances at one another, young beardy faces, one pipesmokes, they write footnotes, on their way up, why do we always get stuck with the visiting poet,” they ask (184). I interpret this to mean, “Why do we [men] get stuck with a woman? Women are opposite, and talk crazily about the moon and cycles.”

“Julia moved her head. The blood trickled gently down the back of her throat, thick and purple-tasting” (184). I imagine myself as Julia, turning from the other, and swallowing down the difference. Yet it is her poetry, her womanness, her blood that they have paid her for: “she would rise and move to the microphone, smiling, she would open her mouth and blood would start to drip from her nose. Would they clap? … Would they think it was part of the poem?” (184). Or would they “pretend not to notice” while she fumbled through nickels, Kotex and Kleenex in her purse?

A warm slug of blood like a salty tear crawled toward her lip. To be a woman is to always be a woman, with everything that means. We are reduced from humans to giant aquatic insects, puking like dogs on the car rug. “Just wait till we get tenure,” think the men who can't wait to dismiss women completely.

But women know they can never really be dismissed, and that the ones who are trying to dismiss them are afraid of them. Of course women were burned; all girls are taught that in grade school as a reminder to obey. But blood doesn't obey. Menstruation arrives as unexpected as Julia's sneeze. “She'd sneezed and the page in front of her had suddenly been spattered with blood. Totally unprovoked” (184). Blood is fearsome, horrible to look at. The teacher in Atwood's story had her teeth outlined in blood like a vampire. Julia says, “We were all so afraid of her none of us said anything and we spent the afternoon drawing three tulips in a vase, presided over by that bloodthirsty smile” (191). Julia reminds herself that blood has that power over others. If she were bloody she “might be disturbing to the audience” (191). The audience might fear her because of her blood.

Audiences often fear the California poet Alta, who writes about menstruation, and the fear men have of this mystery. In her poem, “I Don't Have No Bunny Tail On My Behind,” I read the lines, “i don't have no bunny tail on my behind. / i'm a sister of the blood taboo” (47). I see Playboy Bunnies and I know I am no bunny, but I am a woman who bleeds every month. It feels like a taboo to be a woman and bleed. At home my father refused to take out the women's personal trash. As a torture in high school, boys attached used Kotex to other boy's windshield wipers. The boys said, “That was the lowest thing anyone could do.”

My husband fears period blood as much as girls are supposed to fear snakes. When I show him the object of power, a used Kotex, he nearly faints, “Oh my God—all that blood—you must be dying.” He rubs his forehead painfully. I often leave bloody tissues floating in the toilet for him to discover. I picture his shocked face and then hear the flushing sound. I'm not worried about leaving bloody tissues around; he has no idea what bad things he could do with them yet (he does no outside reading).

Alta's poem curses all the men who oppress women. One of her curses is the curse of bleeding: “in my cunt is blood & i always want it to be your blood. / i hope you bleed 5 days every month. i hope your strength / drains down the toilet” (48). It is amazing that the curse of menstruation can be such a frightening curse to some. To be made a woman is indeed horrible.

As I read “Lives of the Poets,” I see Alta, Diane Wakoski, Sylvia Plath, and all the other women poets who share the blood taboo. When I read Atwood I see Sylvia Plath after her second failed suicide talking about performance and audience: “And there is a charge, a very large charge / For a word or a touch / Or a bit of blood” (8). Atwood asks of her audience, “Would they clap? Would they think it [the blood] was part of the poem?” (184).

As a poet I play it safe. In readings on campus I avoid the poems about menstruation, abortion, fucking, and all other functions that take place in that area. I never feel disturbed, because I read only the soothing poems about trees and fishing. I don't want to disturb anyone. I want them to say, “Sandy is such a nice girl; let's keep her on.” But I feel they distrust me anyway. When I look at the few tenured women on the faculty, I know every one of us is marked with blood.

The ending of “Lives of the Poets” is marked with blood. There is red snow, a solid red wall, a stomach full of blood, head full of blood, all burning red. Julia is a woman, and the full meaning of it has surfaced. I see Julia transformed into Alta. I see the room fill with the unsoothing poetry that is the real Julia. I see her exposed up there, but with the power and fire of Alta's last curse: “the curse of every wicked witch be upon your heart. / i could not hate you more if hatred were my bones” (49).

Sometimes I read something that blows away every theory as I know it. Last time this happened was when I read Alice Munro's short story, “A Royal Beating.” It occurs most often when I read stories written by women, about women. The theories seem to drop away and I experience the writing as if I'm in an intimate conversation with a close girlfriend, hearing her story which is also mine. This happened when I read “Lives of the Poets,” and encountered Bernie.

So here is the story: I am a poet married to the poet, A, who has made almost no money now for six years. At first he had Federal and State grants to help with the bills, but in the last two years he had none. I have kept a part-time job, as a T.A., and have supplemented that income with various portrait jobs (bronze busts) that have come up. I am also responsible for supplying a car, and keeping one running. My holidays consist of rebuilding carburetors, replacing water pumps, soldering radiators, etc. A has borrowed money from me to pay for graduate school where he enjoys composing poems and sharing them with his classmates.

“Why don't you try for one of those big government commissions?” A asks. “You could bring home maybe $400,000 for a couple of bronze veterans holding up a flag on a hill or something.”

“I already have too much to do: the house, car, food, school, my job.”

“But it would be for us,” he says, “our future.”

“Well you could. …”

“No way, I need my time to write.”

There is no other woman; there is no Marika. That I am thankful for. But then there is no liquid pool of flesh, or furry pleasure.

“I get no pleasure out of French kissing,” A told me. “I get no pleasure from eating a woman either. That's why I don't do these things.”

“Oh,” I said. “What do you do?”

“I do it,” he smiled. “That's it. Nothing kinky.”

It is up to me to be ready for him to do it to me. I'm really tired of doing it. I mean, he could do it himself much faster with less mess. I used to have lovers before A: exquisite men who slid me along the razor of sensation until I shook everything away. I find it odd that some men would rather not know these kinds of things. Perhaps if one is too beautiful he never needs to learn how to make someone love him.

Often I feel my whole purpose is work. I feel like an outsider who supplies a service—cash. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I was temporarily out of service. Would he trade roles, or trade women?

When I come to the end of “Lives of the Poets,” I read, “she will open her mouth and the room will explode in blood” (195). I try to forecast my own future from this, but I'm stumped as to whose blood it should be.

Works Cited

Alta. “I Don't Have No Bunny Tail On My Behind.” A Geography of Poets: An Anthology of the New Poetry. Ed. Edward Field. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.

Atwood, Margaret. “Lives of the Poets.” Dancing Girls: And Other Stories. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.

Plath, Sylvia. “Lady Lazarus.” Ariel. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.

Stein, Gertrude. “To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays.” Alphabets and Birthdays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.