Sherry Chandler

A is for Anne

On this date in 1637, Anne Hutchinson was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony “as being a woman not fit for our society,” her heresy that of being a woman who presumed to interpret scripture and to teach her interpretations.

The occasion of this anniversary seems an appropriate time to post a review I wrote but somehow never managed to get placed in a magazine.

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Penelope Scambly Schott. A Is For Anne. Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth. A Narrative Poem. Cincinnati: Turning Point, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-933456-68-3. 140 pages. $17.00

A Is for Anne is the story of a woman and a frontier, a struggle to graft a new society onto the twisted stock of the old, a confrontation with wilderness without and within. Penelope Schott has undertaken a verse biography in the form of titled vignettes, most written in the voice of the 17th century Puritan dissident, Anne Hutchison (1591-1643). Although each of these vignettes resolves, Schott conceives of this work as a single poem.

The narrative moves from Hutchinson’s hornbook primer days, home-schooled on trial transcripts by her dissident father, through her emigration to Massachusetts Bay Colony and her own trials for heresy, to her violent death at the hands of Native Americans when, at age 52, she was living as an outcast in New York state.

The book also includes a chronology of Hutchinson’s life, a prose denouement describing the fates of other characters, and a bibliography. All of this makes quite a bit of weight for a poetry book to carry, but I think Schott pulls it off. She has approached historical narrative in poetry in two previous collections, Penelope: The Story of the Half-Scalped Woman (University Press of Florida, 1999) and The Pest Maiden: A Story of Lobotomy (Turning Point, 2004).

The voice in A Is for Anne is lively, and the formal element of the verse muted. Schott is fond of consonance, internal rhyme, and inconsistent end rhyme.

But I at twenty-one
am old to marry. And plain

and much too tall. Of all
acceptable young men,

not one so tall and clean
as William Hutchinson
— Francis Marbury’s Last Will and Testament

Anne’s voice is often delightfully “saucy.” For example, in “I Like It Well” (p. 38), she discovers the joy of sex: “…It’s a wise God / devised this jointure of the flesh. / I applaud His gentle rod.”

Schott’s lines are short and she leaves space on the page, being fond of couplets and single-line stanzas, using indentation liberally. Hornbook formulae recur throughout: A is for Anne, J is the cross whereon Jesus died, Q is for Question, Z is a barred gate, G is for God Who has never failed me. Some of the poems seem to be taken verbatim from historical sources such as trial transcripts and journals. Other speakers include Hutchinson’s daughter, who was abducted by the Native Americans, and Anne Bradstreet, who came to Massachusetts four years earlier than Hutchinson.

The book was, of course, written with feminist intent. Anne Hutchinson’s was a nonconformist voice in a society established to enforce conformity. She was an outspoken woman and a midwife in a misogynist world. Hutchinson confronted woman hatred at all levels, from James I, who ascended the English throne when Hutchinson was 12,

Now we will get King James
He hates midwives and mystics in churches and kitchens
He says: The more Women, the more Witches.
—The Big News of 1603

to the Puritan ministers for whose spiritual leadership the Hutchinsons braved the new world,

What our Ministers Seem to Think

that the open mouth of a woman
is the womb of foul Error

or:

that the womb of a woman
is a vile mouth of the Devil

But Schott’s Anne Hutchinson is neither a modern woman nor one we would find particularly cuddly. Even Anne Bradstreet steered clear: “She frightens me, this pious scholar I once so greatly admired” (p. 75). Hutchinson found pleasure in the marriage bed but she found ecstasy in God, and she was willing to brave the wilderness, late in her life and with young children, rather than compromise. Schott has given us the thorny complexity of a saint.

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A is for Anne won the Oregon Book Award for poetry. It is a book well worth your attention.

Anne Bradstreet (1612 – 1672)

In 1650, Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America was published in London. If I remember correctly, it was the first book of poetry to come out of North America, certainly of that area which was to become the United States. And it was written by a woman! Bradstreet knew such a publication could be at the least a scandal. At worst, it could get her in real trouble. Anne lived in Puritan Massachusetts Bay, where women were expected to keep their decidedly secondary place. A decade earlier (1638), another Anne, Anne Hutchinson had been exiled from the colony for the heresy of daring to think for herself and teach religion. Penelope Scambly Schott has published an excellent biography in poetry of Anne Hutchinson, A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth.

In an attempt to forestall a similar fate for herself, Bradstreet included this apparently fawning prologue. Irony and satire are not 20^th century inventions. The poem is a rhetorical masterpiece.

You’ll find a nice hypertext gloss here to help in understanding Bradstreet’s complex word play. Obnoxious, for example, has several meanings more than the one most of us are currently familiar with, though I like it here in the modern sense.

The Prologue

To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings,
Of cities founded, commonwealth begun,
For my mean pen are too superior things:
Or how they all, or each their dates have run
Let poets and historians set these forth,
My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth.

2
But when my wond’ring eyes and envious heart
Great Bartas sugared lines do but read o’er,
Fool I do grudge the Muses did not part
Twixt him and me that overfluent store;
A Bartas can do what a Bartas will
But simple I according to my skill.

3
From schoolboy’s tongue no rhetoric we expect,
Nor yet a sweet consort from broken strings,
Nor perfect beauty where’s a main defect;
My foolish, broken, blemished Muse so sings,
And this to mend, alas, no art is able,
“Cause nature made it so irreparable.

4
Nor can I, like that fluent sweet tongued Greek
Who lisped at first, in future times speak plain.
By art he gladly found what he did seek,
A full requital of his striving pain.
Art can do much, but this maxim’s most sure:
A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.

5
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits;
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,
They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

6
But sure the antique Greeks were far more mild
Else of our sex, why feigned they those nine
And poesy made Calliope’s own child;
So ‘mongst the rest they placed the arts divine;
But this weak knot they will full soon untie,
The Greeks did nought, but play the fools and lie.

7
Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are
Men have precedency and still excel,
It is but vain unjustly to wage war;
Men can do best, and women know it well.
Preeminence in all and each is yours;
Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.

8
And oh ye high flown quills that soar the skies,
And ever with your prey still catch your praise,
If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes,
Give thyme or parsley wreath, I ask no bays;
This mean and unrefined ore of mine
Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine.

— Anne Bradstreet