Good morning and welcome to the launch of Nicole Melanson’s new poetry collection “Sirens” published by the esteemed publishing house Calanthe Press. Allen Ginsberg once wrote – All these poems are published in heaven – however poets, readers, fans and lovers of contemporary Queensland poetry, know that all these poems are actually published on heavenly Tamborine Mountain. My sincerest congratulations to the Calanthe team – Jock as Managing Editor, Alison, Lesley, Ruth and Geoff, and to the Calanthe Committee who once again have found a fabulous home for a worthy Queensland poet to live in. To Nicole – welcome to our stable! It’s cosy with a little bit of hay scattered around, high-roofed, and full of light with a touch of a red New England barn! I’m so honoured to launch your gorgeous collection “Sirens” today, and really to celebrate what a brilliant poet, writer, essayist and analyst of the human condition you truly are. I would also like to acknowledge the late Ron Pretty here as well – poet, editor, publisher and mentor, who as with Nicole’s career, had a guiding hand and influence in helping us to find our poetic voices when they were just being birthed.
There is an artistic, even romantic misconception that artists and writers spring fully formed from Zeus’ forehead, the great owl of their genius brandished like Athena wielding her shield and spear in the divine service of a city state. This assumption, which can form when someone finally breaks through with success – negates the truth of the matter, that it’s not necessarily their genius which eventually finds an audience (that helps of course) – but an artist’s perseverance to keep on practising their craft no matter what happens, or which new situations or new countries they find themselves in, and their resilience to keep on going when setbacks occur, or new opportunities arise like Medusa’s snakes rearing from the goddess’ shield.
Nicole Melanson, who is about as tall as Athena and just as lyrically fierce in her new poetry collection, “Sirens, maps out a cleverly abstracted, powerfully symbolic journey around the experiences of mainly female characters in her new book, drawing attention to the experience of both fictional and real women’s lives navigating this culture– and so falls into a powerful feminist poetic tradition characterised by those mythological transformations of mothers, maidens and ingénues from innocent and naïve bystanders into complicated protagonists that Sexton, Atwood and Le Guin most celebrate; as well as the symbolic duty to challenge cultural norms that rob women of their autonomy and identity that Dickinson and Plath fight for; and women reorganising a post-war world bent on division and hatred with kindness, empathy, patience and justice that Bishop and Rich envisage.
A native Bostonian, Nicole sailed away on her own pilgrimage across the sea some years ago to establish a new colony in Australia (first Sydney, now Brisbane), but the colonising roots of 20th century American poetry (Frost, Angelou, Lowell, Bishop, Ginsberg and the aforementioned poets) penetrated most of Generation X’s high school English classes in both hemispheres – poems about the sea, water, ice, snow, forests, woods, paths, waterfalls, seawalls, churches – the cultural superstructure of the last American century transforming the consciousness of a generation now in their fifties – to look at the effects of feminism and gaining and or losing and having to protect human rights, war and technological progress, globalisation – late capitalism’s messy party, human induced environmental destruction, political polarisation of the Cold War and other ideologies like patriarchy and now the newest manifestations of the manosphere. Ha, the manosphere – like the Earth’s atmosphere but with less oxygen due to men using it all up!
So, “Sirens” is a body of work that has taken it’s time to ferment in Nicole’s fervent transcontinental imagination. There’s a little bit of Boston stoicism, some Salem persecution, a bit of Massachusetts, New England, Paris and London, Oxford, England – her work covering emotional landscapes and topography of the soul, as much as these physical places and times. Nicole has certainly inherited Emily Dickison’s patient and powerful eye – with many of her narrators’ souls selecting themselves in opposition to dominant values and beliefs and systems that have always told women who to be and what to do, restricting their ability to speak, and to be seen and heard as characterised in the poem, ‘What Happens to Our Stories’.
We button them down
in something heavy,
something that hangs
below the knee,
something that doesn’t leak.
Thus, women seeking autonomy, self-determination, empowerment and sovereignty over their lives and bodies from repression of self-expression is a significant theme in her work – places are there not for her characters to fit into, to be pressed into parental, religious, societal, gender or economic moulds that restrict them – rather her poems demonstrate the importance of people making spaces (cultures, times, communities) fit their needs and desires foremost – not fitting in, but often changing or challenging the status quo – for society to fit their purpose.
Indeed, it could be argued that the sense of place in “Sirens” is embodied in the various narrators in her poems trying to escape the intense emotional connections to where they’ve come from – grief, pain and love being interchangeable catalysts to get up and leave. Therefore, the sense of place in many of her poems is a shifting psychological foundation, either imagined, abstracted or real where a woman can find herself, or just be left alone, or even just have time to find out who she wants to be. Fundamentally this is a collection about the right to just be human, feel human, to feel loved, be loved, and to love oneself first.
A key idea in her work to achieve this outcome, is that the power of transformation can happen at any time, at any age, in any place, and that it’s great to change things up. Often, the power of transformation is handy to escape negative representations of being female and to move to a more equitable and a fair representation of self. To recover power even if the costs are high is explored in Part 1 of ‘Sirens”.
Here, classical myths, folktales and fairytales are revisited from the perspective of the maligned female ‘monsters’ whose agency and point of view has usually been silenced by millennia of male writers such as Homer and Ovid. So, there are exquisite poems from the seagrass gaze of selkies, the Little Mermaid and her burning feet, Galatea sculpted by Pygmalion who sees stars for the first time, a lonely Loreli – the German equivalent of a Greek siren wanting to leave her river. Rapunzel in her ivory tower and tragic goddesses like Echo, women like Penelope and Helen of Troy’s handmaiden who want more out of life, and nymphs like Daphne remixing the master tapes of their stories – presenting a positive choice for girls and women to select a world that satisfies their souls. To escape the traps of cultural curses and gender expectations like domesticity, obedience to men and marriage.
In the ‘Birth of Echo’ – even though Echo is cursed by Hera only to repeat others’ last words and is wasting away in a cave from Narcissus’ unrequited love (both allusions for female disempowerment), in the struggle to reclaim her identity she must transform her conscious desire to be loved and remembered by the world (her dreams) into a physical power (her breath), that will give her a lasting voice and identity (her sound or echo) even as she fades away. The poet suggesting;
She will find her way
from dreams to breath,
from breath to sound.
Valleys will chant her name
until they ache,
and she will fill them
Echo, even though losing her own identity, reassures women that their voices will fill the world despite structural barriers and curses thrown at them from deviating from the norm. This is a prophetic call to arms for women to find their true voice, because despite what powerful forces such as the patriarchy try to do to disrupt feminine identity, like having gender pay gaps and authority gaps, or being constantly interrupted, or their ideas not respected, no one can deny a woman’s right to speak, to be heard, to be seen and to be remembered in the world. Similarly, in the poem ‘Selkies’ about a female shapeshifter who can transform into a seal, the poet gives the narrator the knowledge, choice and permission to transform when it suits them, to escape one identity (perhaps the wife of a landlubber) for another governed by the sea, a force that is sympathetic for the selkie;
Already you know
there’s a skin
at the end of your bed.
It’s only a matter of time
before you learn
you can swim.
In selkie lore husbands would often hide the their sealskin to prevent her from leaving him – a form of mythological coercion, however ‘skin’ is an powerful symbol of transformation, so the narrator of the poem urges the little girl/ selkie here to be conscious of the power of change in her hands (and skin) to form a new identity whenever she wants to and leave whenever she likes, to experience the thrill of the sea, symbolising something new and refreshing. Permission to be yourself.
However, the poet realises that permission to just be yourself as a girl is not always easy to attain because or powerful cultures that surround them. Sometimes not even easy as an adult. In the poem ‘Collection’ the child-narrator goes to church where conformity is thick as candle-smoke and where;
Ushers pace the back of the church, wolves
in a mahogany pen. Purses crack their jaws
in chorus. Your mother passes you a dime, presses
the tiny brand to your palm.
In “Sirens” Nicole excels at describing the tension and pressure on young women to conform to societal status quo, those ‘wolves’ that stalk non-conformity and the capitalistic ‘brand’ that leaves its mark on a young woman’s identity early on – like religious instruction in ‘Collection’, parental misbehaviour in ‘All Good Girls’, and one’s own bodily function in ‘Surface’, compared to the desire of characters to seek autonomy, self-reliance and self-determination.
In the poem ‘Checkers’ from Part 2, the poet suggests that understanding and challenging those societal structures and values that bind women to complicit normative behaviour like the rules of a game, should be a goal, so that people can advocate for themselves. The poet states;
Destination should be chance,
any map a flux of coordinates
as inconstant as temperature.
Transforming one’s life then must also have an element of transgression to it – like not making firm decisions about where you’re going in life that others expect (adults and parents perhaps), not being fixed to a point in time, or to a rigid sense of self gleaned from the beliefs of others, or to an identity that is dependent on someone else’s relationship with you. Thus, a state of Flux’ then and taking risks should be regarded as beneficial for women – not detrimental.
In ‘The Piggyback’ the narrator’s identity is disrupted by a relative’s funeral, not grieving in the proper way perhaps acting as a source of transgression, leading to flight as a mode of empowerment for the narrator who disobeys normal decorum at the event’s conclusion, supporting her brother;
My brother stumbled under my weight,
then hooked his arms around my legs,
recovered his balance,
and ran.
We ran.
Similarly in a poem about the Salem witch-hunts, ‘Three Sarahs’ the narrator discusses the real reason she is accused – not for being complicit with the Devil, instead, her transgression is for not acting according to the communal values of her pilgrim village, focussing on her own desires first and foremost;
I won’t reveal
which witch I was,
only my crime:
I loved my land
more than people.
Likewise, in “Sirens” the fallout from young love, lost love, transitory relationships, brief love affairs and unrequited love is refurbished by many characters into an opportunity to grow as a person; to gain knowledge about the resilience of the self. In ‘The Other Woman’ sexual transgression/and or the longing for it, is described through reference to Snow White – with songs and singing throughout the collection an ever-present motif for self-realisation, empowerment and either forging or reclaiming identity.
Fairy tales taught us well:
naughty girls are banished to the forest.
The trees are full of them.
They learn to sing like nightingales
The singing nightingale itself being a fairytale motif for transformation and change, even for recovering justice.
In the poem ‘Getting Fired’ the tragic character of Eurydice speaks about the benefit of pursuing her doomed love with Orpheus even through its transgressive nature – relishing in how he looked back for her and not obeying the gods – loss being just as powerful in sustaining autonomy via making your own decisions, even if they’re bad ones;
and I dove in, flared like a martini
with no desire to ever turn back,
trusting the best would come
calling me home,
looking over his shoulder
to be certain I followed—
even if it meant breaking the rules.
This sentiment of becoming empowered through choice to go against the grain and to dash expectations, to transgress if it befits the moment is seen again in the poem ‘Sirens’;
I wait to crash,
all guts and glass
with something indestructible thrown in.
This process of women reconstructing their lives on their own terms creates the ‘indestructible’ nature of a new and powerful identity that resists conformity, complicitness to gender expectations and allows women the freedom to experience the world and share in its glory. As the poets says in ‘Stonework’ as Galatea gains life and a real identity for herself after being created in marble by Pygmalion;
Now she could see
what she had never seen before:
how even the smallest creature
gives itself to ecstasy.
‘Ecstasy’ being the desire to just be free to do whatever you want, whenever you want – a basic want to see things for yourself, a sentiment shared by Anne Sexton when she writes; “Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
Ultimately “Sirens” is a magnificent, polished, powerful, and potent first collection that reflects on the experience of being female; of being human, where permission to change and transform oneself – to shift emotional landscapes and be empowered and have autonomy to make your own choices, often has to be thought-through or fought for, or renegotiated, and sometimes even broken through transgressive behaviour, in order to live anew as a fully realised individual.
As the poet suggests –
It’s what a woman lets loose
that counts.
I now proudly pronounce “Sirens” by Nicole Melanson published on this heavenly mountain!
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