Where there’s a will, there’s a way. A saying that was documented originally by a woman. And then a man heard her say it, and he started saying it back to her, like whenever the word “will” is used in conversation, this man felt it necessary to explain the concept of “free will,” to people in the room. Like he was a bot programmed for word “will.”. There’s a great “freedom” experienced by this kind of free will. A freedom that can be puzzling, because anyone who’s aware of free will will tell you, it can’t be reasonably conflated with “will.” But the woman documenting will’s and way’s, what’s she supposed to do in the face of a man who’s busy free willing.
We should name the woman “Allison,” “Alisoun,” and “Caroline.” She can be a woman originally born in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where she served a kind of last will and testament concerning womanhood. Or when she sings in Caroline Bergvall’s book Alisoun Sings, she relates the long reach of unheard feminist thinking throughout history. The word “will” has a special place for her, because she was going to make her will known. She wanted a way to explain that conceded to whatever “language” is, but by using different forms. Something language-ish. Like John Chamberlain making sculptures with old cars. You can see the car pieces merging to say something new using a “language” that’s relying on what they were originally. And if you’ve entered a gallery with one of these sculptures, you know how elbow-y the pieces are. Like the sculpture literally elbows you to the wall. It’s like the woman in the above paragraph figuring the best way to make the man listen. “I’m Allison.” She says. And he doesn’t hear her. And she elbows him and raises her voice. “The name’s Alisoun.”
Why aren’t men good listeners? That’s one of the topics of conversation in Caroline Bergvall’s Alisoun Sings. Though it’s not the book’s primary concern. But the first half of the book makes the dynamic of men (not) listening, women making space to talk whether any men might be listening or not, and the general wall of miscommunicativeness that lies between Bergvall (via Alisoun) and men. The essay/poems are overwhelmingly concerned with the not women are up against when they look across the spaces separating women from men. Alisoun is the key to expressing this. Because she represents the time gap between her “time” and now, the deep historical situation that keeps happening.
As Bergvall indicates in her introduction, this book is the third in a series. And I would be very interested to read the other two, because I’d like to see how Alisoun was invented. Perhaps it involved a conversation between Bergvall, the 21st Century poet, and Alisoun, the 14th Century character from Canterbury Tales. It could be a helpful comparison to the poem/essay, “Herte.” Where Alisoun’s singing prompts Bergvall to speak for herself. The turn is especially useful in Alisoun Sings, because it further manifests the anger when generations have been protesting, but not heeded. And, significantly, the turn to Bergvall surfaces her personal story involving queer love. Queer love lost. And her subsequent reach into the written word, which Alisoun communicates through her.
At this late stage in the trilogy project, this reach reads as a big risk. The politics involved when it’s only Alisoun “singing” are tense and distorted. It’s the Chamberlain-like verbal sculptures that protest by protesting even the conventions of language. However, as soon as Caroline speaks directly to political issues, a lot of the tension is lost. And I understand clothing, millinery, and sustainability are underobserved and undervalued in a male-dominated political system. This portion verges on the didactic, though. But even with this slackening tension, these politics fit with the longer arc of the book. Where the “gap” between Caroline and Alisoun is suddenly filled by the jubilant poem, “Declaration.” Where Caroline arrives at the 2017 Women’s March. And suddenly the union of these two women is met by the larger union of millions of women together.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.