Girl in a Forest by Elline Lipkin
A few years ago, during a period of low creative confidence, a workshop instructor mentioned, of all the poems I submitted to his class, how powerful he found my persona poems. I was startled by his words, yet grateful for any recognition in the moment. The subject of the poem was Procne — the sister of Philomela whose voice (then distinct lack of voice) was what I was exploring. I admitted to him that I had recently started a new series of persona poems which concentrated around the figure of Gretel.
Pouring one’s poetic consciousness into a mythical, historical, or literary figure is hardly unique. If anything, I was abashed by my project, thinking it trite. But, as the pandemic raged on, with its daily dose of bewilderment served up through the news, and I watched (with little recourse) both national health disasters befall the population at large and my family within, the figure of Gretel suddenly seemed both timely and urgent. She represented to me a figure who was cast out, lost, threatened, then desperate to find a way back to safety; she began to seem a central controlling metaphor for the time through which I was living, both on a large and a microscopic scale.
In the spirit of ‘once you begin to look, you see it’ I suddenly began to find poems about Gretel everywhere. I knew about Gretel’s cry against a kind of family gaslighting in Louise Gluck’s poem, “Gretel in Darkness.” I found an interpretation online by my former classmate Kate Schmitt, (“Alternate Ending: My Grandmother As Gretel”) in which her grandmother stands in for Gretel. Local poet Kate Durbin, upon hearing of my project, instantly mentioned having written her own Gretel poem and then sent it to me. In her version, Gretel consumes her brother, Hansel, rather than allying with him against the witch.
I was thrilled to pull the wonderful (and now out of print) The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (eds. Jean Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson) off of my shelf once more. While a grad student, I had one of my first publications in this volume, (about the tale “The Maiden Without Hands”) and was astonished to open the book again and see a powerful cluster of poems that centered on this tale — each using a part of the narrative or a character as a portal to the poet’s own vision. Mary Jo Bang’s rendering (“Gretel”) has her conversing with her deceased mother. In Marie Howe’s contribution, “Gretel, From a Sudden Slearing,” the main figure is in dialogue with an unnamed figure (likely a mother) as she gains courage against her circumstances.
The book’s index reveals this Grimm tale (and many others) offering itself as a palimpsest through which various poets inscribe their retellings. There are modern takes in the side-by-side pairing of Sara Henderson Hay’s “Juvenile Court" (in which the children are taken into custody and put on trial), next to “The Social Worker Finds Hansel and Gretel Difficult to Place” (by Enid Dame) in which the two are orphaned again by the social welfare system. And in Robin Morgan’s intriguing, “The Two Gretels,” Gretel is sistered by a kind of doppelganger-other self.
What suddenly felt clear was that there was no shortage of interest in the tale — and other Grimm stories — and their reinterpretation was an evergreen source. There is nothing particularly new in this epiphany, but for me, it was permission-giving. It also led me to think again about the ways in which the persona poem releases the poet from a certain pressure. By pulling a curtain down over the assumption that the “I” in a poem is almost always veiled autobiography, a release into a new tone or kind of courage can emerge. By joining with a known tale or cultural reference point (albeit interpreted differently in various cultures), it was clear how much more able the poets included (counting myself) in the anthology were able to bend or throw their voices so that the power of the story joined with personal imagination or conviction.
Reading through the book once again, I was reminded of how many poets have written suites of poems in which they construct an invented persona and write from behind the mask of that identity and voice. John Berryman’s “Henry” poems are one example. My former teacher Kathleen Spivack’s series “The Jane Poems” is another, or Linda Gregg’s series of “Alma” poems. A post-modern take might be Major Jackson’s poems in “The Absurd Man Suite” in which he writes about a character named “Major” and deliberately obfuscates personae by making a same-named doppelganger his stand in.
But to pull back from a deep dive into the myriad uses of the persona poem, my work with Gretel came to seem in line with the other fairy tale poems I found in the book — useful for both scrim and setting, the pre-set of known characters and scenes — yet the entry point was entirely my own. When fairy tales are updated to modern situations, the reader has a reference point that maps the distance to its contemporary contrast. The gestalt presented by these touchstone figures radiates a kind of cultural flashpoint that can still be molded to a writer’s point of view — sometimes even to shock — so that traversing this territory almost automatically yields great effect.
I’m still writing out this series — thinking about why I was drawn to it, how I wanted to wade into its outline and see if I could create my own mysteries. I’ve no doubt that the timing of when I started this project — 2020 —seeded my interest and, two years later, still in a pandemic, albeit one that looks quite different — it still has a stake. Each part of the story refracts an angle of loss — the mother who can’t save her children as her replacement casts them out. The ways they must grow up without her. The evaporation of their childhood sense of safety and home. Even the witch struck me as a complicated figure in her desire to consume the children — was her desperation to ingest them a kind of suppressed desire for pregnancy?
In the period in which I started considering this story, every aspect seemed like a vehicle for mourning. While I could barely address the grief I was experiencing for my family’s own losses, and the numbers of Covid victims were piling up to the millions, a sense of safe harbor, of home, of before-never-questioned trust, felt far away then long gone. Dwelling in a shared sense of lost-in-a-forest, this tale seemed the perfect way to both metaphorize and metabolize a grief that was both individual and epic; unique and universal at the same time.
I followed the characters in the tale, seeing what they had to say to each other, and to me, and let the imprint of this centuries-old story be the driver of poems rather than having to hold the wheel and see where I could steer. The lack of happy ending in most Grimm stories also seemed a welcome relief, alongside the admission of cruelty, loss, and certainly death, so openly and often included in the tales. The burden of writing from the individual “I” started to lift as entering this script felt like writing with a chorus and sharing the weight of grief rather than the individual voice crying out on its own. I let them speak for what I could not say directly myself and joined in their story.
Pouring one’s poetic consciousness into a mythical, historical, or literary figure is hardly unique. If anything, I was abashed by my project, thinking it trite. But, as the pandemic raged on, with its daily dose of bewilderment served up through the news, and I watched (with little recourse) both national health disasters befall the population at large and my family within, the figure of Gretel suddenly seemed both timely and urgent. She represented to me a figure who was cast out, lost, threatened, then desperate to find a way back to safety; she began to seem a central controlling metaphor for the time through which I was living, both on a large and a microscopic scale.
In the spirit of ‘once you begin to look, you see it’ I suddenly began to find poems about Gretel everywhere. I knew about Gretel’s cry against a kind of family gaslighting in Louise Gluck’s poem, “Gretel in Darkness.” I found an interpretation online by my former classmate Kate Schmitt, (“Alternate Ending: My Grandmother As Gretel”) in which her grandmother stands in for Gretel. Local poet Kate Durbin, upon hearing of my project, instantly mentioned having written her own Gretel poem and then sent it to me. In her version, Gretel consumes her brother, Hansel, rather than allying with him against the witch.
I was thrilled to pull the wonderful (and now out of print) The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (eds. Jean Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson) off of my shelf once more. While a grad student, I had one of my first publications in this volume, (about the tale “The Maiden Without Hands”) and was astonished to open the book again and see a powerful cluster of poems that centered on this tale — each using a part of the narrative or a character as a portal to the poet’s own vision. Mary Jo Bang’s rendering (“Gretel”) has her conversing with her deceased mother. In Marie Howe’s contribution, “Gretel, From a Sudden Slearing,” the main figure is in dialogue with an unnamed figure (likely a mother) as she gains courage against her circumstances.
The book’s index reveals this Grimm tale (and many others) offering itself as a palimpsest through which various poets inscribe their retellings. There are modern takes in the side-by-side pairing of Sara Henderson Hay’s “Juvenile Court" (in which the children are taken into custody and put on trial), next to “The Social Worker Finds Hansel and Gretel Difficult to Place” (by Enid Dame) in which the two are orphaned again by the social welfare system. And in Robin Morgan’s intriguing, “The Two Gretels,” Gretel is sistered by a kind of doppelganger-other self.
What suddenly felt clear was that there was no shortage of interest in the tale — and other Grimm stories — and their reinterpretation was an evergreen source. There is nothing particularly new in this epiphany, but for me, it was permission-giving. It also led me to think again about the ways in which the persona poem releases the poet from a certain pressure. By pulling a curtain down over the assumption that the “I” in a poem is almost always veiled autobiography, a release into a new tone or kind of courage can emerge. By joining with a known tale or cultural reference point (albeit interpreted differently in various cultures), it was clear how much more able the poets included (counting myself) in the anthology were able to bend or throw their voices so that the power of the story joined with personal imagination or conviction.
Reading through the book once again, I was reminded of how many poets have written suites of poems in which they construct an invented persona and write from behind the mask of that identity and voice. John Berryman’s “Henry” poems are one example. My former teacher Kathleen Spivack’s series “The Jane Poems” is another, or Linda Gregg’s series of “Alma” poems. A post-modern take might be Major Jackson’s poems in “The Absurd Man Suite” in which he writes about a character named “Major” and deliberately obfuscates personae by making a same-named doppelganger his stand in.
But to pull back from a deep dive into the myriad uses of the persona poem, my work with Gretel came to seem in line with the other fairy tale poems I found in the book — useful for both scrim and setting, the pre-set of known characters and scenes — yet the entry point was entirely my own. When fairy tales are updated to modern situations, the reader has a reference point that maps the distance to its contemporary contrast. The gestalt presented by these touchstone figures radiates a kind of cultural flashpoint that can still be molded to a writer’s point of view — sometimes even to shock — so that traversing this territory almost automatically yields great effect.
I’m still writing out this series — thinking about why I was drawn to it, how I wanted to wade into its outline and see if I could create my own mysteries. I’ve no doubt that the timing of when I started this project — 2020 —seeded my interest and, two years later, still in a pandemic, albeit one that looks quite different — it still has a stake. Each part of the story refracts an angle of loss — the mother who can’t save her children as her replacement casts them out. The ways they must grow up without her. The evaporation of their childhood sense of safety and home. Even the witch struck me as a complicated figure in her desire to consume the children — was her desperation to ingest them a kind of suppressed desire for pregnancy?
In the period in which I started considering this story, every aspect seemed like a vehicle for mourning. While I could barely address the grief I was experiencing for my family’s own losses, and the numbers of Covid victims were piling up to the millions, a sense of safe harbor, of home, of before-never-questioned trust, felt far away then long gone. Dwelling in a shared sense of lost-in-a-forest, this tale seemed the perfect way to both metaphorize and metabolize a grief that was both individual and epic; unique and universal at the same time.
I followed the characters in the tale, seeing what they had to say to each other, and to me, and let the imprint of this centuries-old story be the driver of poems rather than having to hold the wheel and see where I could steer. The lack of happy ending in most Grimm stories also seemed a welcome relief, alongside the admission of cruelty, loss, and certainly death, so openly and often included in the tales. The burden of writing from the individual “I” started to lift as entering this script felt like writing with a chorus and sharing the weight of grief rather than the individual voice crying out on its own. I let them speak for what I could not say directly myself and joined in their story.
Elline Lipkin is a poet, academic, and nonfiction writer. Her first book, The Errant Thread, was chosen by Eavan Boland for the Kore Press First Book Award. Her second book, Girls’ Studies, was published by Seal Press and explores contemporary girlhood in America. Her poetry has been published in many contemporary journals and she has been in residence at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and Yefe Nof. Currently a Research Scholar with UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, she teaches independent workshops. From 2016-2018, she served as Poet Laureate of Altadena and co-edited the Altadena Poetry Review.
