The Sacking of the Muses
Susan Hawthorne
the Muses have been sacked
their role in the pantheon
sold up for some new
real estate venture
When the Muses are sacked, what are we to do? The Muses who inspire poetry, astronomy, history and daily living bring their song and dance into present-day political struggles. These Muses are for rebellion.
Susan Hawthorne's poems span millennia of resistance by women. The earth itself is implicated. She writes about women's bodies, how they are used, abused and celebrated in birthing, in sexual pleasure, in grief, in imagining. She draws on stories from ancient and contemporary India, from Greece and Rome, through language, storytelling and translation.
we embrace our double lives
like actors and their alter egos
some say śleṣa is unnatural
I've heard the same said about us
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Endorsements
What Susan Hawthorne has attempted should alone win laurels; what she has accomplished - through vision, scholarship, skill, labor, and time - is impressive; and the result of her audacity, is - in both the original and modern usage of the word - 'awesome'.
—Robin Morgan, author, poet, activist and recipient of the US National Endowment for the Arts Prize in Poetry
Susan Hawthorne understands myth, questions myth and then uses the power of myth for her own purposes. That is what poets do.
—Suniti Namjoshi, fabulist and author of Feminist Fables
A poet with a fascination for ancient languages, Hawthorne reads the oracles in these tongues, translating them so that we may raise our shoulders and dance our history, our meanings woven anew into the past. Everything she touches forever after shines.
—Donna Snyder, poet and author of The Tongue Has Its Secrets
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