Issue 29: Glenda George
On the occasion of a 7th decade completed. Scarlet Openings revealed.
In the early 1970s, two young women from humble backgrounds, alike but different, initially unaware of each other, were working from tangential perspectives: from a strong sense of social justice, from a chafing against continuing paternalism and misogyny that existed despite the apparent idealism the 60s had promised us, from a fascination with folk tales and women’s history and old wives, discovering that many women had wielded powers in the past that were not otherwise well documented save for popular oral tradition.
We published our first writings around the same time and, even though we have rarely met, I always felt a sisterly kinship.
This text explores some of our tenuous, shared history through a collage of cut-up (from our early works, published back-to-back in a Supplement to Split Curtains) and found appropriatisms (sic) with some new words of my own. I hope it creates a personal collision of two lives through historical and more recent popular culture. It is an experimental experience; a workshop puzzle-game, since, for me, the process is as important as the product. Life is fun and a birthday is to be celebrated. Follow the clues.
NB: Phrases from the aforementioned early work of either of us are in italics; “borrowed” or “found” words and phrases from songs are in bold. What remains are new words on a new page of now.
For added fun and to get you in the mood: first, listen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ake5zUALFI or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD25SnxZguQ
Luck be a
Lady tonight
ride on the written track
right
the lack or
want of a nail
just a name
the same
horse, the cart
before
sisters in popular
cultured pearls pose
mirrored
before scissored swines’ ears/
eye of newt – into the pot
Don’t move my pretty
All the pretty horses
My mama told me/if I was goody/ that she would buy me/ a rubber dolly/ But when I told her/I’d kissed a soldier/
Now she won’t…
wants, waits
silently hugging the lisp of words
but listen
a tender song
O lovely pussy, O pussy, my love
what lessons hide,
lurk under doilies or the owl-glass
dally
by the brass knick-knacks on the sideboard?
crawling out from under
the half-truths, myths moan
moon-mother’s light
calculate how distant
the moon to the nearest
square
inch-ing through the tide
that sucks us silently
back/
start over start over if at first
try, try again
compose electronic music for the good doctor
doctor the sick
edit the falsehoods
find the lie
all this we women do
have done
the scarlet opening
between the curtains
is perceived
thus he can no longer
object
She can break out
Let’s go find the tickling ticking
Men split the atom so why can’t we?
Sisters in our skins,
tomboys, skinning our shins,
tree huggers, nature mothers,
motorbike lassies wearing leathers (I wish!)
old wives telling truths:
May blossom stinks when in
the house
though
scenting lovely on the
tree
no wonder it brings bad luck to thee
to cut
and run and run
ring rosy round
in a gaggle rattle
through the thistles and nightshade
We learn how to speak in order to divulge secrets.
But listen, a
tender song
For whom the bell shall not yet toll
**
“ And the book lay open, and my thought flew from it, taking from it
A vibration and implusion to an end beyond its own,
As the branch of a green osier, when a child would overcome it,
Springs up freely from her clasping and goes swinging in the sun.”
from Lady Geraldine’s Courtship – Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Glenda George
Scotland
August 2022
[Glenda George has been writing since 1970 and published widely and internationally in the small presses of the next two decades or more. Her translation work, originally with Paul Buck’s Curtains magazine, began with extensive translations into English of contemporary French literature and ended and extended with collaborative English to French and vice versa texts with various French language exponents. After some 15-20 years, during which she took an unexpected sabbatical, exploring other creative avenues, she reconnected with the modern literary world in 2013 with the long-delayed publication of a retrospective collection A Child in the Playground (BenAiganBooks – self-published).
Contact Glenda – glendageorge@benaigan.co.uk – for details of other work and check out her Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/glendageorgeachildintheplayground
She has spent the last 31 years in the northerly countryside in Scotland.]
Copyright © 2022 by Glenda George, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
