{"id":887,"date":"2021-11-10T12:54:57","date_gmt":"2021-11-10T18:54:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/?p=887"},"modified":"2021-11-10T13:21:23","modified_gmt":"2021-11-10T19:21:23","slug":"a-widows-walk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/a-widows-walk\/","title":{"rendered":"A Widow’s Walk"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Cindy King, whose poem “Capacitor (Be Mine)” appears in <\/i>SRPR Issue 46.1<\/a>, speaks to the social image of the widow and how poetry might <\/i>serve as a site of its interrogation. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Widows, widowers, those who\u2019ve lost their partners\u2014they exist in the borderlands, the margins: seen and unseen, heard but not, both dead and very much alive. \u201cCapacitor (Be Mine)\u201d was born of this place\u2014on the edge, at the fringe, between sanity and madness, coherence and chaos. In a larger sense, the poem attempts to grapple with and potentially subvert stereotypes and received ideas about widowhood, and by extension sexuality and romantic love. By calling attention to these misconceptions through the appropriation of their accompanying clich\u00e9s and tropes, I wish to continue exploring the consequences of being removed\u2014sometimes suddenly, violently\u2014from the context of what is for most of us a major part of our identity: our life partners, in both the literal and figurative sense, our home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In probing the socially-constructed concept of \u201cwidow\u201d as it is shaped and reinforced in the popular imagination through mainstream media, of particular interest to me is the trope of husbandless women: sexually starved, and as a consequence, presumably licentious, undoubtedly perverse. Despite some movement towards the acceptance of expressions of women\u2019s sexual appetites, there remains a degree of taboo, particularly as it applies to those who have lost their partners. Short of throwing themselves on the proverbial funeral pyre, what constitutes acceptable behavior for widowed women involves eternal faithfulness, loyalty, and consequently, lifelong celibacy. To carry the black parasol, to forever wear the shawl, the expectation is to quietly, solitarily settle into tragedy, to take on \u201cwidow\u201d as one\u2019s new mantle. Real or imagined, to whatever extent, there exists a stigma surrounding widows\u2019 outward expression of happiness or pleasure\u2014particularly as it comes from remarriage, dating, or sexual encounter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poem\u2019s rapid shifts and its frequent lack of smooth transition reflect a particular viewpoint, the way those who have lost must often process memory and experience\u2014through the selective and severed thinking required to suppress triggering landmines. Survival necessitates living in the moment, that liminal space without past or future. It is in this space that the poem alludes to the performance of romantic relationships on social media platforms, performances that include not only high points, but also the low. With the shift to \u201cworkers at fulfillment centers,\u201d I hope to reveal how our preoccupation with romance and the pursuit of romantic relationships serves to obfuscate things such as the exploitation of human capital. The beginning of the poem\u2019s final stanza serves as a comment on how often the value of simply being in a relationship supersedes the quality of the relationship itself. Here the poem also confronts the social expectation and pressure to be \u201ccoupled\u201d in our culture, exposing how ironically it leads to alienation from others\u2014and ultimately ourselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I engage with received language at various points in the poem, and particularly with those words we often encounter at the end of fairytales\u2014especially those that end in marriage: \u201c\u2026and they lived happily ever after.\u201d These words, as they are referenced in the penultimate stanza and echoed as the poem\u2019s last lines, represent a breakdown of this trope, an interrogation and dismantling of the construct. That from a young age we are steeped and situated in this language serves to inform and solidify our expectations of romantic love and relationships as adults. Again, the last lines appropriate the \u201clove mythology\u201d of our childhood in the image of Cupid’s arrow, but here it appears in our own hands. While we have agency to aim and throw it (however desperately, without a bow) at our potential lover, all attempts are futile. That in fact, the prospect of finding\u2014or retaining\u2014the proverbial \u201csoulmate\u201d for an imagined ever after constitutes nothing more than an illusion. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Cindy King’s most recent publications include poems in The Sun<\/em>, Callaloo<\/em>, North American Review<\/em>, Prairie Schooner<\/em>, Antioch Review<\/em>, African American Review<\/em>, American Literary Review<\/em>, TriQuarterly<\/em>, Crab Orchard Review<\/em>, Gettysburg Review<\/em>, River Styx<\/em>, Cincinnati Review<\/em>, and elsewhere. You can hear her online on American Weekend<\/em>, a production of National Public Radio, at weekendamerica.publicradio.org, rhinopoetry.org, and at cortlandreview.com. Her work has also been chosen by former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith to appear on NPR’s The Slowdown https:\/\/www.slowdownshow.org\/episode\/2020\/05\/08\/379-february-my-love-is-in-another-state<\/a>.Her book-length collection of poems, Zoonotic,<\/em> is forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions. Her chapbook, Easy Street<\/em>, was released by Dancing Girl Press<\/em> in March 2021.<\/div>\n
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Cindy was born in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up swimming in the shadows of the hyperboloid cooling towers on the shores of Lake Erie. She currently lives in Utah and is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at DSU and faculty advisor of The Southern Quill<\/em>. She also enjoys serving on the artistic board for the Blank Theatre in Hollywood, California and screen scripts for their Living Room Series.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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You can order a physical copy of 46.1 on our website<\/a>, or purchase a 2-year subscription.
And if you want to keep up with us on social media, you can follow us across
Instagram<\/a>: @srpr_news
Twitter<\/a>: @srpr_news
Facebook<\/a>: SRPR (Spoon River Poetry Review)<\/p>\n

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Cindy King, whose poem “Capacitor (Be Mine)” appears in SRPR Issue 46.1, speaks to the social image of the widow and how poetry might serve as a site of its interrogation. Widows, widowers, those who\u2019ve lost their partners\u2014they exist in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[275,274,263,12,266],"class_list":["post-887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogpost","category-poe","tag-a-widows-walk","tag-cindy-king","tag-issue-46-1","tag-poetics-of-emplacement","tag-srpr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=887"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":890,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887\/revisions\/890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}