real sentiment

     Remind me how we loved our mother’s body
     our mouths drawing the first
     thin sweetness from her nipples

     our faces dreaming hour on hour
     in the salt smell of her lap Remind me
     how her touch melted childgrief

     how she floated great and tender in our dark
     or stood guard over us
     against our willing

Women performing traditional roles are no longer to be ridiculed but rather understood as products of an oppressive order, with, even so, valuable qualities. The terms of evaluation chosen here may strike some readers as verging on sentimentality, but definitions of sentimentality are always culturally determined: it is not a timeless, abstract quality. (When the word “sentimental” was coined in the eighteenth century, it was used in praiseful contexts.) Direct expression of tender feelings in these lines is no doubt part of the women’s aesthetic Rich has been searching for; in any case, the poem has renounced most of the irony and intellectual artillery of her earlier work. If writing tenderly means losing some readers, Rich is prepared to do so, on the chance that she may be making available feelings formerly dismissed as unacceptable for art. Any occasion for reexamining aesthetic strictures ought, of course, to be welcomed. Do we go to poetry mainly to sharpen the psychic (or conversational) defenses useful in daily life or to gain access to feelings we haven’t, for whatever reason, acknowledged?

—Alfred Corn, “Contemporary Poetry’s Mother Tongues,” Atlas: Selected Essays, 1989-2007 (University of Michigan Press, 2009)