The Other Voice, an essay by Judy Wells

I am a child of the 50s.  That meant, of course, that the sex roles were firmly in place.  I was the third of three girls, followed by my baby brother. Recently, while cleaning out my mother’s house, we found a copy of a letter my dad had written at the birth of my brother:  “The crown prince has arrived!  Melvin Thomas Wells, Jr.”  I was interested in writing and poetry as a child, but one day the crown prince wrote a poem, and it was published in a local newspaper.  O.K. I thought.  That slot is filled.  And I didn’t think about being a poet again until much later.

 I studied French in college:  Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé.  Here’s Baudelaire:

                        Mon enfant, ma soeur,

                        Songe à la douceur

                        D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble!

                        Aimer à loisir,

                        Aimer et mourir

                        Au pays qui te ressemble!

Photo by Marjorie Young.

“My child, my sister, think of the sweetness of going beyond to live together.  To love leisurely, to love and die in the country which resembles you.”  Well, it looked as if I could be a child/sister/mistress, a muse for male poets, and resemble a country in their minds.  Uncertain of my destiny, I went off to grad school in order to teach the great male poets. 

Then something happened—the Berkeley Literary Women’s Revolution!  In 1969, at the same time a feminist movement was sweeping across the United States like wildfire, Marsha Hudson was putting up notices across the U.C. Berkeley campus and Berkeley proposing a feminist literary salon.  She wanted to discuss women’s literature, since female writers were largely ignored in the classroom.  I was on the U.C. Berkeley campus—in the right place, at the right time to benefit from Marsha’s Salon, which she moved from her apartment onto campus.  We were now the Comparative Literature Women’s Caucus, a group of vibrant, extremely intelligent, multi-lingual graduate student women who would challenge the entrenched sexism of our “beloved” institution and professors.  I would never be the same again. 

Our activism included establishing a women’s studies course in comparative literature, initiated and taught by grad students, which concentrated on fiction and poetry written by women.  Many of us wrote feminist dissertations on women writers, and another group of translators created the first three groundbreaking anthologies of women’s poetry in languages from around the world. 

The first of these anthologies was called The Other Voice:  20^th Century Women Poets with a foreword by Adrienne Rich.  Although I wrote my dissertation on the theme of madness in 20^th century women’s fiction, this idea of “the other voice” began to overtake me after I finished my Ph.D. 

Perhaps I too was part of “the other voice.”  I was just beginning to find my voice through the women’s movement and my activities as a feminist teacher.  I had begun to keep a journal during my years at grad school à la Anaïs Nin, whose now famous diaries about her incredibly rich literary life in Paris were just beginning to appear.

A wonderful older woman pointed out to me that my journal writing sounded like poetry—and that was my beginning as a poet.  “The other voice,” a voice very different from my purposefully stilted, academic voice, began to arise.  It was a shocking and exhilarating revelation to me.  I wasn’t an imitation French writer, nor English nor Spanish— the other literatures I had studied.  I was an American writer, a Californian, and more specifically, for a time at least, a Berkeley poet.

I had the opportunity… or should I say, I was desperate for work, but after a stint at Contra Costa College teaching English composition, I was thrilled to be handed their Creative Writing course and taught poetry and prose.  My experience culminated in my first underground best seller, the prose/poem collection, The Part-time Teacher. 

At Contra Costa College, I found other California voices, and again “the other voice,” the woman poet, not abroad, but right here at home: 

THE PART-TIME TEACHER HAS A SELF-EFFACING GENIUS IN HER CLASS

She is a woman.  She is overweight and crippled and she creeps to class on canes, but her mind soars over the universe for subjects.  She’s been Jack London and Beethoven and the smallest atom in the atmosphere.  She’s been a prehistoric turtle and she’s made love to the stars. 

She’s too good for the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly; perhaps that’s the reason she will not publish.  The part-time teacher sees her as the Emily Dickinson of Richmond, the belle of San Pablo, while her other students scratch their heads.

THE PART-TIME TEACHER HAS A PET

The part-time teacher’s favorite student is a re-entry woman with coal black hair.  She wears a different colored outfit to every class:  yellow sweatshirt, yellow pants, and yellow tennies; red sweatshirt, red pants, and red tennies.  She sends the part-time teacher notes in orange envelopes on turquoise, red and purple squares of paper.  Once, for a party, she boiled eggs and colored them red, blue and purple, and set them in matching nests of pink. 

She writes perfect sonnets on her word processor and ballads.  She never speaks except to read her poems, but her eyes say more than all the mouths in the class.  She likes Anne Sexton, has survived several husbands, numerous religions and sons, cancer, and a secretarial stint.  Her new man, 14 years younger than she, lets her stay home and write.

            I taught new Americans:

THE PART-TIME TEACHER IS HUNGRY

The part-time teacher has an older woman student from Nicaragua in her English IA class.  She is shocked by American schools where the students say “Fuck you” to the teachers.  She tells the story of how teachers are respected in her country.  She says when she was a little girl her mother made her carry a stinky chicken to school every Friday for her teacher.  The part-time teacher is hungry.  She wants the Nicaraguan to bring her a chicken every Friday even though she is a vegetarian.  But the Nicaraguan woman gets a punk haircut, begins wearing bright red sweatshirts, and is busy buying a house in Pinole. 

In the 80s at Contra Costa College, I taught Nicaraguans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Chicanos, Panamanians, Filipinos, African-Americans, Caucasians, and students of mixed race: Japanese/Caucasian, Black/White.  I taught native Californians and others rapidly becoming Californians.

In the early 90s, in this sea of California ethnicities, I began to ask my own question again:  Who am I?  My mother was in her 80s—it was time for us to explore her Irish roots, her Irish grandparents who had had a farm in Pleasant Hill, California, and her own Irish-American mother.  My mother Irene was born in San Francisco, not in the Irish enclave of the Mission district, but on Russian Hill where her father was a cable car gripman.  I guess you can’t get more San Franciscan than that—my mother, Irene, daughter of a cable car brakeman, catching rides with her dad as he screeched down the hills of San Francisco.  My mother became a San Francisco school teacher, made a good salary, designed her own clothes, and wore flapper outfits, hats, furs, and gloves on the weekend. 

After all  my early years of studying French literature, going to France, and trying oh so unsuccessfully to look like a sophisticated French girl (with the face of an Irish washerwoman),  I was now coming closer to my own roots.  My poetry book, Everything Irish, explores my identity as an Irish-American: my Irish-Catholic girlhood (oh those nuns!), my own re-creations of Irish myth after studying Irish lit and visiting Ireland three times, and my work with adults at the college which eventually hired me full-time:  wouldn’t you know it, a Catholic college, Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California.  I was trying to avoid my Catholic roots for years, and there they were again, with bells ringing every hour outside my office, just like at St. Catherine’s in Martinez, my grammar school.

I think what we most avoid writing about as poets is what often produces our deepest (and most heartfelt) work.  For me it was my Irish mother.  My siblings told me she always worried I was writing about her, so I never really did.  But after she died, I did write about her and produce what I think may be my most American collection, my most California poetry collection, Call Home.  The locale is the small town I was raised in, Martinez, where my mother moved from San Francisco to marry my father, and more specifically, the locale is the house in which I was raised on Willow St. 

In this book of poems, Call Home, I reconstruct my childhood home in Martinez, room by room, and then I dismantle it, literally, with my siblings Melinda, Nancy, and Mel, as we sort through 60 years of my mother’s pack ratting.  We eventually find the top of her wedding cake in a box—the little 30s bride and groom with a piece of fruit cake underneath still intact!  I find my first childhood drawings, perhaps my first poem, my letters to Santa, a plastic cast of my overbite, and my orthodontic retainer!  In this archaeological dig, my siblings and I rediscover our childhoods and our love for each other. 

I come back full circle to my 50s childhood.   When I first started writing poetry, I hoped to be cool, following the hip legacy of our California beatnik heritage, but other than my rhythm, that was not to be.  (I should have realized, unlike Allen Ginsberg, I was neither Jewish nor male).  I am part of “the other voice” in California, the voice of an ordinary woman who has learned through poetry to express the only self she can be:  herself.  The discovery is not yet over, and perhaps new California archetypes may arise in my psyche.  I wish all of you similar rich discoveries on your own unique poetic journeys.    

Judy Wells

Speech given at the Chaparral Poets Banquet on April 24, 2005

Asked by Poet Laureate of Alameda, Mary Rudge, to give a talk on “the other voice.”

  Judy Wells was interviewed by Julia Piper, a University of California student, in 2008. 

1.  How were you first introduced to poetry? 

Probably in 6^th grade at St. Catherine’s School by Sister Anne Denise.  She had us memorize poems and recite them in front of the class.  I do remember verses from back then like “Abu Ben Adam, may his tribe increase/ awoke one night from a deep dream of peace/ and saw within the moonlight of his room….” and “Up the airy mountain and down the rushy glen, we daren’t go a hunting for fear of little men.”  Actually, though, I think I learned more of the rhythm of poetry from memorizing Catholic prayers and chanting them.  I couldn’t be an altar boy and didn’t have to memorize Latin, but we girls (and some boys) sang the Latin mass in the choir, and I liked to chant parts of the mass like: “Introibo ad altarei dei…” and  “Agnus dei, qui tolis peccata mundi,” etc.  In public high school, M. Poirier introduced us to the French poetry of Verlaine (without details of his semi-sordid life!)—“Il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut sur la ville.  Quelle est cette langueur qui pénètre mon coeur.”  “Les sanglots longues des violons en automne/ blessent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone.”   The sounds affected me strongly and are still in my memory. 

I was a French major in college—M. Poirier’s influence—and in my senior year studied in Nantes, France, where I took several courses in French poetry.  One stands out, a complete course on Apollinaire’s Alcools.  I think it was the first time I read an entire collection of someone’s poetry, rather than just excerpts.  I still remember the opening lines of the book:  “A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien/  Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bèle ce matin.” 

When I got to grad school at UCB, the Beats were reading in the Bay Area, in Berkeley and SF.  I heard Ginsberg, McClure, Snyder, William Everson (Br. Antoninus), Ferlinghetti.  What was wrong with this picture?  Hardly any women! I had taken a poetry writing course from Josephine Miles around 1967.  She was a great teacher and mentor for some, but I wasn’t particularly inspired.  A turning point for me was when I heard Alex Zwerdling read Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” from Ariel in his modern poetry class.  Plath’s was a strong woman’s voice I could relate to.  The whole class was electrified, women and men, by this spectacular poet who had so recently committed suicide.  Then feminism burst on the scene in 1969, and very alive, strong, local women poets emerged.  I particularly remember hearing and being influenced by Susan Griffin and Judy Grahn, but I didn’t take up writing poetry seriously until I finished my Ph.D. in 1976.

2.  Were you always interested in the exploration of your Irish heritage, or has this been a more recent focus in your work?

I’ve been writing poetry since 1976, so yes, the exploration of my Irish heritage has been more recent.  I began working at St. Mary’s College, full-time as an Academic Counselor for adults, in 1988 and was on the campus in Moraga everyday.  Being at a Catholic school really reminded me of my childhood schooling at St. Catherine’s School in Martinez, the bells ringing on the hour, a chapel attached to the school.  That provoked memories of my Irish-Catholic upbringing.  Also, in 1991, I decided to go on a “Goddess Pilgrimage” to Ireland with Padraigin McGillicuddy, a KPFA radio personality who had been raised in Ireland.  I talked my two sisters, Melinda and Nancy, into going with me, and we reconnected with our Irish roots on this rollicking tour and gained knowledge of Ireland’s sacred Neolithic sites, like New Grange.  After the tour, my boyfriend, Berkeley poet Dale Jensen (now husband), met me,  and we went up to Northern Ireland to my ancestral home town in Country Tyrone, a small village called Gortin, which means “little field.”   It was a very emotional experience for me to connect with the land and lanes my ancestors probably walked on.  I also realized that where the Rodgers brothers ended up, Pleasant Hill, in Contra Costa County, looked very much like the rolling green hills they came from.  They came to America during the Famine years, what the Irish now call, “The Great Hunger.”  Probably more important, I found that exploring my Irish heritage was a way to connect with my mother during her last years; we found something in common we could talk about, and she could tell me stories about what she knew of our Irish ancestors and I could tell her and show her pictures of what it was like in “the old country.”

3.  Are you full Irish? If not, what is it about your Irish heritage that attracts you so strongly to it?

I’m really only a quarter Irish.  My great-grandmother, Letitia Kinney, was full Irish, born in Philadelphia.  She married Edward Rodgers, from Gortin, County Tyrone, after they both came out to California.  Among their children was my grandmother, Anna Rodgers, full-Irish, who married an Anglo-Canadian, Robert Smith, and they lived in San Francisco.  So my mother, Irene, their daughter, was half-Irish, and she married my father, Mel Wells, who has strong New England forebears.  So we’re down to me and my 3 siblings, all a quarter Irish, but a full Irish person if you add us all up!

The attraction?  I was always told I “had the map of Ireland on my face” when I was a child.  So I grew up thinking I was Irish, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the map was.  What I learned after exploring the Irish culture and what I’m attracted to is the Irish love of language, a good story, humor, wit, poetry, music, and mythology.  I feel proud knowing that one of the greatest authors of the “English” language, James Joyce, comes from my people!

4.  Has writing about your heritage changed the way you think about it?

Yes, definitely.  My Irish heritage is vastly richer than I ever imagined.  When it first dawned on me that my ancestors probably spoke Irish before English, that they had their own original language, I was astonished—such was my ignorance!  I bought an Irish language tape and tried speaking some Irish, and was amazed by the sound of the language.  I also listened to some of the Irish bands of the 90s (Clannad, Altan, Enya) and loved hearing them sing Irish, keeping the language alive.  I read about the Irish Bardic tradition, the well-respected and even feared poets who composed for the Irish aristocracy, until the aristocrats fled the country, and the poets had to take to the lanes to sing for their supper.  The poets also memorized great bodies of knowledge, history, laws.  I delved into the medieval Irish myths and stories which I used in my poem, “What We Forgot” in Everything Irish.  I read about the Spanish Armada, the wreck of the ships on the coasts of Ireland, and that knowledge got incorporated into my poem, “Black Irish.”  From Vivian Mercier’s book, The Irish Comic Tradition, I learned about Irish Wake games and used information I gleaned from him in “Waking the Dead/ Peig’s Funeral.”  I learned that the Irish people were very spiritual and very witty, sometimes both at once!  In my poem “Warp Spasm,” I imagined myself an early Irish monk, a woman who still believed in Brigit, Celtic Goddess of poetry and healing, and the sun God Lugh, as well as Jesus.    

5.  What have you changed least about your poetry as the years have gone by?

I think of myself as a narrative poet.  I’ve always loved a good story, and so my poems often contain short stories.  After I wrote Call Home, the story of my relationship with my mother in her last years, and the often comic story of dismantling, with my three siblings, our family home in Martinez, filled with 60 years of  belongings, I was at a loss as to what to write next.  I casually started to write haiku—to get outside myself and look at the natural world.  Now, I have a year’s worth of haiku, and even my haiku often contain people and stories.  I can’t get away from story.  I also think humor in my poetry is a constant.  I have a recent little chapbook called Little Lulu Talks with Vincent Van Gogh.  Little Lulu is an old comic book character from the 50s, a proto-feminist you might say, and she converses with some of the giants:  St. Augustine,  Plato, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,  Jung, Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, Sylvia Plath.

6.  Is there anyone who is not a poet whose writing, speech or way of thought has particularly influenced you?

I’m sure the way my mother spoke and her wit influenced me, but I don’t always recognize it.  I see it more in my siblings when we all get together and talk, and they probably see it in me.  My brother is an incredible oral storyteller and wit, but he doesn’t write anything down.  Passing on “tales of Martinez” is a big topic when we all get together.

I'd like to say Shirley Lovejoy Hecht, a psychologist at the UCB counseling center, was another strong influence on my becoming a poet.  It seemed as if the whole Comp Lit Department—the graduate women at least—went to see her during the 70s as we faced our horrendous Ph.D. exams, dissertations, and eventual graduation.  She recognized the poetry in some of my writings I showed her and encouraged me in that direction, and she was right!

7.  A good deal of your poetry deals with family situations and the search for your family’s past.  Is there anything else in particular that you would say influences your poetry? 

Yes.  As my husband likes to say, I work by the project.  All my poetry books, even my earliest ones, are thematically based:  I Have Berkeley (Berkeley poems of identity), Albuquerque Winter (New Mexico poems), Jane, Jane (women’s mythology and suicide) The Part-Time Teacher (tragi-comic saga of teaching in the Bay Area), The Calling (poems on 20^th century women visual artists), Everything Irish (Irish themed poems), Call Home (family poems), Little Lulu Talks with Vincent Van Gogh (conversations with “the greats”).  I’d eventually like to do a French-themed book when I have enough poems to make that work.  When I write poetry, I don’t consciously think about a theme, but eventually a group of poems start coalescing around a theme, and I realize I have a book in progress.   

8. Where is your favorite place to write?  Is there a particular time of day that you feel especially poetic?

I usually write on my bed!  Late at night, early in the morning.  I always feel uncomfortable with the question about my writing routine because I don’t think I have one.  I am actually surprised when a body of poems emerges at all because I don’t remember how I possibly could have written them.  I do know with the haiku I write them in my head as I’m taking my daily walk—my theme is my neighborhood and the Berkeley Marina.  But I’ve also written haiku about Vincent van Gogh and Balzac.  I’m sure the haiku purists wouldn’t like that!

9.  I’d like to make a final comment about my ethnic identity.  On my first trip to Ireland in 1991, I learned about the 800 year enmity between the Irish and English and the rancor that still remained in many of the Irish.  I experienced this bizarre split that the Irish side of me was supposed to hate the English side of me (from my father’s ancestors), something I had never experienced at home.  My parents got along fairly amicably despite their being raised very differently in Catholic and Protestant households.

Now I’m exploring my New England forebears on my father’s side, the Dickinson sisters, from Northfield, Massachusetts, who came out to California in the 1860s.  The oldest of the three sisters, Phebe, my great-grandmother, saved all her letters from her family back East, from her brothers, her girl cousins, and from her two school teacher sisters, Abbie and Delia, and their husbands, out here in California.  The several hundred letters read like a novel, and my cousin, Webb Johnson, and I are editing them in hopes of publication.  And yes, the Dickinson girls are contemporaries and distant cousins of Emily Dickinson.  They adventured, taught, married, and bore children in California  while Emily cultivated her genius for poetry by staying home.  But it’s great having a poet in the family even if she is a very distant cousin.         

ESSAYS & ARTICLES

"Daddy's Girl," was published in The Borzoi College Reader, Alfred A. Knopf, 3rd and following editions, and prior to tha  “Daddy’s Girl” was published in Libera, Winter 1972. 

Numerous articles were published in Sister Lode, Daily Lobo, Albuquerque Journal, and The New Mexico Teachers' Review including interviews with poets Joy Harjo, Paula Gunn Allen, and Judy Grahn, 1979-81.

An essay: “The Green hat,” Chameleon 9, Autumn, 1986.

An essay: "A Vegetarian in Ireland," in Kameleon 14, 1992.

An essay: "The Sheela-na-Gigs," in Travelers' Tales Ireland, 2000 Co-editor and essayist, The Berkeley Literary Women’s Revolution:  Essays from Marsha’s Salon, McFarland, 2005. 

Essay entitled:  “Daddy’s Girl Goes Mad:  10 Years at U.C.Berkeley.”

Irish Voyage of St. Brendan, Mural in Ireland