Emily Skillings on the Feminist Epic

Poetry Coalition Fellow Cydni Thompson interviewed poet Emily Skillings ahead of her upcoming Crash Course Seminar “The Feminist Epic.”

Cydni Thompson: What was the first epic poem you read, and how did you respond to it?

Emily Skillings: I'm a child of the 1990s, and so the first time I encountered the Odyssey was through a children's TV show called Wishbone, in which Odysseus was played by a Jack Russell Terrier. When I later read the Odyssey in high school, I couldn't shake the image of Odysseus as a small dog, and it lent the epic a strange levity. I have always been partial to Mary Ruefle's metatextual reinterpretation of this epic in her poem “A Strange Thing,” which begins:

“Maybe I read this, or dreamt it, for my mind wanders as I age, but I have always believed Odysseus, when he heard the sirens, was hearing the Odyssey being sung, and in fear of being seduced by his own story, he had himself bound. And he was in even greater fear of hearing the end, for he could not bear the possibility he might become someone other than who he was now, a war hero of great courage and unexcelled strategy, trembling against the cords of his own mast. Or he might become an even greater man, one without a single fear in the world, one who would balk at a man having to tie himself up in fear of anything, and then it would be revealed that the man he was now was actually a coward." 

I love that Ruefle's slightly irreverent poem reveals how Odysseus’s ideas surrounding masculinity limit and shape the narrative itself. If you read the rest of the poem, you’ll see how Ruefle’s dreamlike misremembering/re-dreaming of the epic ends in mystery and ellipticality, resisting narrative completion.

CT: How do feminist epics transform our conception of epic poetry?

ES: I think there are so many ways! In this class, we will read poems that create their own dialogues with canonical epics, like erica kaufman's INSTANT CLASSIC and Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Anniad,” which talk back to Paradise Lost and The Aeneid, respectively. 

We will also read Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, a formal disturbance of the epic in which the narrator-hero fights an omnipresent force of hetero-capitalist patriarchy. 

Notley called Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, “an epic of the everyday.” This book shifts the scale of the epic from a poem about the dealings of gods, wars, angels, etc., to the choreography of dailiness. This refocusing of the heroic imagination toward an epic cataloguing of the quotidian and domestic, positioning the dreams of the mother–artist at the forefront of a hero’s narrative—I see this as incredibly transformational.

CT: Is there a myth or common misconception about epic poetry that you hope your class will dispel?

ES: I’m not sure! Maybe this is something we will arrive at as a class, or we may resist the notion of arrival altogether.