Denise Duhamel's Satiric Prose Poem, "Scalding Cauldron"

With a Commentary by the Author

May 27, 2024

Queen for a Day: Selected And New Poems (Pitt Poetry Series): Duhamel ...

This post is part of a new series which gives excerpts from an anthology I edited called A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry.

A Cast-Iron Aeroplan That Can Actually Fly

In this anthology I asked masters of the prose poem to choose one of their own poems and to write a commentary about the process of writing it. Not only are these prose poems and commentaries interesting in themselves, but they prove that there really is no one way to write a poem, or anything else for that matter.

Denise Duhamel is one of our most interesting American poets, capable of great flights of lyricism when writing about her personal life, but also a master of take-no-prisoners satire when lampooning some of the false grand narratives we willingly embrace. She is especially superb when poking fun of sexual and social politics, and, in this sense, she embodies the best that feminism has given to us over the years.

Please enjoy her linguistically playful feminist manifesto. “Scalding Cauldron.”

SCALDING CAULDRON

Calling all Cosmic, Counterclock-Wise, Crackpot Crones who denounce docility, doublethink, and the domains of dummies. Our dragon eyes open, we exalt emotion, elixirs, and all elemental spirits. Our Foremothers forecasted the forests would be finished off, that feeble fembots would fall for fabricated fables. And here we are—at the future.
From the fortress of our fury, we begin this gyromancy (a practice in which a poet/witch seeks divination from a walk around the alphabet, taking note of the letters upon which she stumbles). Calling all Goddesses and Goofballs, Glamorous Grammarians, Giggling Gaggles of Geniuses, Gorgons and Gossips, Gyno-centric Gals, Heathens, Harpies, and Hags to come along and make this hexing hike. In this Intercourse of Individual Incarnations, may we intervene and influence junkies (ourselves?) addicted to joyless joists and other junk. On this journey, may we kick-start Kinship, put the kibosh on lecherous leeches and their laws, embrace the labyrinth of our lunacy, smash our mirrors.
May we maze our way through amazement, moon-wise, naming and renaming what has been misnamed. Calling all Nags and Nag-gnostics, Nag-noteworthy Nixes, and Nymphs. Calling all Outsiders, Ogres, those who check “Other,” those from Otherworldly places, those Overlooked, and Old Maid Outercourse Pilgrims. Together we will chant, Piss off—passive voice. (A woman was not raped. Someone raped a woman.)
Calling all Pagans, Pixies, Prideful Prudes, Philosophers, Queens, and Quacks to rage and reverse, writing our Recourse to remember and reinvent our very syntax/sin-tax. Let’s speckle the cracks with our sparkling cackles. Let’s scold and scald. Let’s be Skalds—poets who write of heroic deeds. Calling all Sisters, Sinners, Spinsters, Shrewd Shrews, Seers and Self-Realized Sirens. Calling all Soothsayers and Sinister Sprites, Shape-shifters and Separatists who cast spells. Take a trek through this untidy alphabet. There will be toads and tidal time, the third ear and third eye. Traverse through unconventionality, where virtue and vice collide. Virgins and Vixens may experience vertigo, new to such wanderlust/wonderlust in this Wickedary. XX for kisses, XX for dead cartoon eyes. How we yearn at this zero hour.
(Where did you trip? Where did you fall? Please plan your augury accordingly.)
Our scalding cauldron is an abecedarian aquarium, boundless bubbles be-musing and be-monstering. We needn’t stay one course: Recourse/Shulie Firestone; Intercourse/Andrea Dworkin; or Outercourse/Mary Daly, of course.

COMMENTARY

This prose poem is the title-ish poem from my latest book Scald. It owes quite a bit to Mary Daly’s 1987 feminist classic Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language. Daly’s book is indeed a witchy dictionary, reclaiming and/or redefining language that is often used against women. I was inspired to take a romp through Daly’s definitions, some thirty years later, using an abecedarian prose block. I started with the letter “C” which alludes to cunt, possibly the most egregious of words used to denigrate a woman. I was interested in Daly’s decision to write “gynomorphically” and see this poem as a rallying cry to embrace the English language while also being aware of its socio-political pitfalls. The prose poem is an invitation to unconventional thinkers, so it was fun for me to begin with “Calling all . . .” as a sort of ethical Pied Piper.

“Scalding Cauldron” uses the imperative voice, demanding that the reader follow. Much of the chutzpah of second wave feminism was built on argument and metaphor, just as a poem is built. The prose poem, in particular, is bold in its claims and follows a logic all its own. If poetry can exist in prose, actualized women can exist in language that is seemingly used against them. Poetry and prose are not opposites. Neither are men and women. The prose poem collapses what we think of as binary and instead invites unity. While women are always told they are implicitly included in mankind, isn’t it truer that men are included in womankind? Womankind actually contains the word “man.” The prose poem is a space in which all this can be explored—Prideful Prudes and Sinners can coexist; fembots and Hags can come together. Some purists still argue that the prose poem does not exist, just as some argue feminism cannot save us. I end the poem giving props to Shulie Firestone and Andrea Dworkin, two radicals very different from Daly. I hope the three live on in contentment gathered around the cauldron.

Now here is Denise discussing her history with the prose poem, focusing on one of her favorites by Nick Flynn, himself a master of the form.

The first prose poems I read were by Jane Anne Phillips in her chapbook Sweethearts, published in 1982. I’d bought it as an undergraduate at Emerson College and became obsessed with the title poem, based on the wedding photograph of Phillips’ parents on the cover. It was only in researching the chapbook, to write this, that I learned sections of Sweethearts actually won the “1976 Fels Award in Fiction.” And an Amazon reviewer, in 2017, writes “flash, before flash was a thing?” Indeed! The ekphrasis poem “Sweethearts” rivals Sharon Olds’ “I Go Back to May 1937” and “Sweethearts,” because it is written as a prose poem, gives a nod to the photograph’s shape. I’ve been thinking lately a lot about the shape of the prose poem, how it can look on the page. Nick Flynn’s “Philip Seymour Hoffman” is actually about big feelings (from his 2017 book My Feelings) concerning a “small box”:

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Last summer I found a small box stashed away in my apartment, a box filled with enough Vicodin to kill me. I would have sworn that I'd thrown it away years earlier, but apparently not. I stared at the white pills blankly for a long while, I even took a picture of them, before (finally, definitely) throwing them away. I'd been sober (again) for some years when I found that box, but every addict has one—a little box, metaphorical or actual— hidden away. Before I flushed them I held them in my palm, marveling that at some point in the not-so-distant past it seemed a good idea to keep a stash of pills on hand. For an emergency, I told myself. What kind of emergency? What if I needed a root canal on a Sunday night? This little box would see me through until the dentist showed up for work the next morning. Half my brain told me that, while the other half knew that looking into that box was akin to seeing a photograph of myself standing on the edge of a bridge, a bridge in the familiar dark neighborhood of my mind, that comfortable place where I could somehow believe that fuck it was an adequate response to life.

Philip Seymour Hoffman overdosed in 2014 at the age of 46 after a relapse. Flynn’s title invokes this tragedy, which serves as a cautionary tale for the speaker. Even before reading the poem, one might think of shape of a movie screen and perhaps, more obliquely, a coffin. But we have that “small box” in the first sentence, a real box but also the terrifying “metaphorical” box of addiction. There’s the picture (another square) the speaker takes of the Vicodin contained inside and later an imagined “photograph of myself standing on the edge of a bridge, a bridge in the familiar dark neighborhood of my mind.” Flynn’s tale is a scary one of what we shove deep down into a box. Yet the prose poem has a diarist quality, a plainspoken directness, or even that of testimonial. If a box is where we lock away our memories, we might also admit that our memories are sometimes misremembered. (I would have sworn that I'd thrown it away years earlier, but apparently not.) A prose poem is the perfect vehicle for Flynn’s narrative unfolding, “stashed away in (his) apartment,” yet another box.

In Nick Flynn’s Low (published in 2023), there are three “note” prose poems, including “Notes on a Calendar Found in a Stranger’s Apartment.” In this prose poem, Flynn is invited into the home of a deceased neighbor and offered a flat screen TV. He catalogues the other (squarish) objects he encounters with reverence—a retro calendar, a mysterious Polaroid, and fortunes from cookies. Like Jane Anne Phillips, Flynn writes prose as well as poetry. He straddles storytelling with poetic flourishes. He embraces the shape of the prose poem, while giving a nod to the deep image, making him a fascinating writer.

Old Man Still Howling at the Moon

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