"Would I burn palaces?"

8 February 2025: Re-reading the book during this last round of proofing has me stopping again and again in amazement of how strikingly relevant nineteenth-century American women's writing is for our moment. This isn't surprising, given how much of it emerged in moments of national crisis, but some of the parallels are especially poignant. Today it was "The Palace Burner," by Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt. 

Would I burn palaces? I'd like to think so, but I sure don't know for certain. 

524...

21 December 2022: Along with a bunch of smaller tasks, I had a goal of writing 500 words of my Piatt entry today (modest, I know) and by golly, got 524 done. In my defense, that included the first paragraph, which is always kind of a bear to get right. Hoping to knock out double that or more tomorrow. But for now, I'll be happy with 524.

"theorizing the maternal"

10 December 2022: "Motherhood remains an anxiety-laden subject for feminist critics wary of grappling with an issue so susceptible to essentialist arguments. We must acknowledge, however, that the individual, social, and political aspects of mothering form a central concern for women writers, and so theorizing the maternal is imperative. The study of Piatt’s poetry affords us an excellent opportunity to do so" (Wearn 164).

This passage from Wearn's article really stuck out to me, perhaps because of thinking about She Said's depiction of motherhood and its intersection with a woman's career. 

It's been interesting to revisit Piatt this week. I had forgotten how rich and fascinating her work is.

Work Cited

Wearn, Mary McCartin. “Subjection and Subversion in Sarah Piatt’s Maternal Poetics.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 23, no. 2, 2006, pp. 163–77. Project Muse. 

"it implies more sympathy than she is likely to obtain..."

8 December 2022: Working on my entry on Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt and found myself laughing at this 1880 Scriber's review of her work:

"[Piatt] is nothing if not dramatic, and nothing if not subtle. Her method is a profound one, in that it works from within outward, and a faulty one, in that it implies more sympathy than she is likely to obtain, and more intelligence than is possessed by one reader in a hundred. Her conceptions are no doubt clear to her, but they are frequently obscure to others. Her situations may be striking from a psychological point of view, but they are not such as to commend themselves to the eyes of common men; the stage upon which her tragedies are played is of the soul, not of the senses. She not only demands an apprehension which is denied to the many, but she demands also that they forget the language which is natural to them, and learn the language which is natural to her..." (qtd. in Giordano 28-29)

We love a take-down that doesn't realize it's a compliment. Look, I am not a defender of incomprehensibility or inaccessibility for their own sake or as a definitive measure of value, merit, or skill, but to call her method "faulty" seems a fundamental distortion of what poetry can and should do/be (which is many things!). 

Work Cited

Giordano, Matthew. “‘A Lesson from’ the Magazines: Sarah Piatt and the Postbellum Periodical Poet.” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, vol. 16, no. 1, 2006, pp. 23–51. EBSCOhost.