A Woman of Her Day (and Ours) – Else Lasker-Schuler

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artist, author, feminist, poet, women

Perhaps it is appropriate that as our country descends into the absurdity of discussions and worse, legislation, surrounding transgender bathrooms, I profile Else Lasker-Schuler, an extraordinary and enigmatic figure from literary history. Else believed passionately in living as she chose without regard to society’s norms and taking a stand against what she saw as an unjust politic. She became notorious in the circles she traveled, dressing often as boy and filling her drawings with a figure, the Prince of Thebes, whose persona she adopted, signing her letters with the man’s name Yusuf.

I discovered Else as the woman Mamah Borthwick befriends in Nancy Horan’s novel Loving Frank during Mamah’s time abroad translating the works of Ellen Key a Swedish feminist of the era. Else was born in 1869 in Elberfeld, Germany to an affluent German Jewish family. She became a poet, playwright, artist, and avant-gardist who moved among the literati that frequented Berlin cafes during the 1930s. Labeled the Queen of Expressionism, she has been recognized as one of the most important poets of twentieth century German literature.

Else led a troubled life, stuck in customs as we might say today. Her life straddled multiple cultures and was a constant battle, ending in near poverty. She wrote in German while living in Israel and became enthralled with all things oriental, a fashionable obsession of the times.

She gained renown as a poet, received the prestigious Kleist Prize for literature and did poetry readings across the German-speaking world. When the Nazi’s came to power in the 1930s, she fled the country after suffering a beating by a rod-wielding group of Nazis, according to one source. Else emigrated to Switzerland but was visiting Israel when war broke out. She was not allowed to return to Switzerland and lived out her life in Israel. Unfortunately, though Else wrote of her hopes for the destruction of Nazism, she died in 1945 before the end of the war and the collapse of the Nazi government.

Today, Else Lasker-Schuler is best known for her poetry, though some criticize her poems as being overly romantic.

At night I used to steal
The rose of your mouth,
So that no other woman could drink there.

Else’s words could also be sharp in their attack on the status quo of religion or politics.

My motherland is souless.
No rose blooms
in the tepid air.

 

As an artist, Else painted in a striking, hard to define style. Her characters often face left or are in profile as in ancient Egyptian tomb paintings, a popular style of the day.  They are also often of an indeterminate gender.

Else Lasker-Schuler was a woman of her times, influenced as some claim by the “gender-bending” stage performances of Sarah Berhardt, the controversial writer George Sand, and the emergence of Freud’s sexually-infused psychoanalysis and, of course WWI, the depression, and WWII.

If you find the woman as fascinating as I do, read more at the National Library of Israel’s site (nli.org/Lasker-Schuler) or the Jewish Womens Archive (jwa.org/lasker-schuler).  My Blue Piano is the title of a collection of her poetry. On a Triangle Reflected Between Here and the Moon written by Dani Dothan is a historical novel that covers Else’s years in Jerusalem, though I could not find an English-language version.

Much More Than Roses and Violets – Karen Head

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girls, imagery, Karen Head, poetry poem, Sassing, Southern, women

I’ll be honest, I rarely read poetry. Perhaps it’s because reading poetry is hard work. So many words, written and unwritten, are packed into those short lines. You can’t read a poem at breakneck speed as you might flip through a thriller or skim through a novel’s slow paced scene. No, you have to read poetry as if you were savoring a favorite dessert, taking one spoon at a time and holding it on your tongue to make it last, then counting to ten before taking another.
From time to time though, I stumble across works of poetry that make me pause and want to read more — most recently at a poetry reading. What was I thinking? I’m not sure I even knew there were such things. I’d certainly never been to one before and envisioned something out of Jane Austen’s parlor. Instead, the hour proved to be highly entertaining with two poets dueling with their works, each picking up on a word or image or theme from the other’s then reading from their own work.
Karen Head and Collin Kelley were the duelists at this particular reading, and though there were some similarities in their work, Karen’s appealed on a number of levels — the poet’s voice is a southern voice, smooth as molasses with a dark aftertaste and the images ring true, especially those of young girls puzzling the world ahead, and the focus on family, all with a touch of attitude.

Take for example, this excerpt from Southern Gothic in Sassing:

“The best I can offer
is that my granny and papa
lived on a dead-end dirt road
in a single-wide trailer,

that one of Daddy’s sisters
accidentally drank rat poison
stored in an old green wine jug
after a night of cards and drinking,

that Mama and Daddy married,
sixteen and eighteen,
three weeks into his Army Basic Training
and no baby came for over a year, …”

This and so much more (back porches, mill creeks, warts, spells, and black magic) make it worth a look. But read only one or two poems at a time, not too many, just like dessert, they’re special.

See more on Karen Head at:

The accompanying photograph is one I shot of family members on a stroll on a bleak southern winter’s day. A jaunty hip thrust and prancing stride also speak of “Attitude”.

Any Woman – Katharine Tynan

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1900s, grief, poetry, sorrow, Tynan, women

I discovered Katharine Tynan’s poems while researching settings and sentiments of the early 1900s for my novel The Hummingbird’s Cry.  It is set in that period and follows the life of one woman as she experiences and copes or fails to cope with grief.  This poem, Any Woman, like many others of Katharine Tynan’s works seem to be filled with sorrow.

I am the pillars of the house;
The keystone of the arch am I.
Take me away, and roof and wall
Would fall to ruin me utterly.

I am the fire upon the hearth,
I am the light of the good sun,
I am the heat that warms the earth,
Which else were colder than a stone.

At me the children warm their hands;
I am their light of love alive.
Without me cold the hearthstone stands,
Nor could the precious children thrive.

I am the twist that holds together
The children in its sacred ring,
Their knot of love, from whose close tether
No lost child goes a-wandering.

I am the house from floor to roof,
I deck the walls, the board I spread;
I spin the curtains, warp and woof,
And shake the down to be their bed.

I am their wall against all danger,
Their door against the wind and snow,
Thou Whom a woman laid in a manger,
Take me not till the children grow!