Katha Pollitt is most often recognized as a non-fiction writer and editorialist, and her regular “Subject to Debate” column in the nationally known magazine The Nation looks at controversial national issues from a feminist perspective. Pollitt is the author of three books of essays:
- Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture;
- Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism;
- Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time.
She has also recently published a collection of stories from her life, titled Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories.
Pollitt's Poems
But many are not aware that Pollitt has written and published many fine poems, which have appeared in several prestigious publications like The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. She’s even published a collection of her poetry, Antarctic Traveller, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983.
To explore Pollitt’s poetry is to come to terms with dangerous questions— about religion, about patriotism, and about America as a nation. Using simple but powerful language, Pollitt is able to re-examine many closely –held American assumptions and beliefs, and in the process forces the reader to re-examine him or herself.
Re-examining Paradise
Pollitt often chooses Biblical subjects, reinterpreting classic stories through a modern lens. Her poem “The Expulsion” looks at the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden through fresh eyes— and from the perspectives of everyone involved, from Adam and Eve to God to the angels to the animals, and finally, to the Tree of Knowledge. In this way, Pollitt turns the story of man’s expulsion from paradise on its head, suggesting that ultimately such a fall from grace may not be about shame and sin, but rather about everything falling into its rightful place in the world.
Rapture and Revelations
Similarly, her poem “Rapture” asks the reader to actually imagine what it would be like if our society really experienced an apocalypse as portrayed in the Book of Revelations. Pollitt paints a rather dismal picture— but for those who are “saved” and transported to heaven, rather than for those left on earth to deal with the coming of the end of the world. The reward of the faithful is only “bland custardy palaces” (6), and “The angels are kind, like waiters, but not very talkative.” (21) Instead of enjoying their experience, those taken up in the Rapture “gather, like exiles/ straining toward faint reports/ crackling up from below” (23-25) having found that “God, it appears, is elsewhere, even here.” (28)
Pollitt has been concentrating more on her columns lately, and so recently the literary world hasn't seen a lot of new poems from her. But her body of work is always a surprising pleasure for any lover of poetry!
