The Olive Press Review

Tag: poetry

  • (no title)

    Sometimes, briefly or as though I know what it means to dream, the leaves begin to shift each time I am near, as if the tree could fathom the soul of my name. There was time spent defining energy (the soul gliding amongst tissues and muscles and nerve endings as my mouth once did on the rim of a wine glass; purely intentional in the mark I left behind). A familiar tug of war, as death mechanically hovers over the ankles (and family corners the home of the soul), that one’s eyes, saturated in hunger, blink toward their rife separation. A dilemma which begins at a curve, disjointed by laws in physics and treehouses, till the breath begs to touch the calcium of carved bone.

    I suppose my chatter toward energy is valued at the notion that it cannot be destroyed; therefore, the remnants of my smile could be altered, but not erased. So, my laugh should follow alongside the crooked shape of my eyes with each wink… (and I am finding it hard to believe in an afterlife, when your smile still exists). Maybe, it is the wind I mentioned previously?

    Anyway, I can tell you that the light, which arguably reflected off the leaves at 5 PM last Tuesday, was proof enough.

    Fuck the wind. Let’s share this fantasy together?

    Please.

    Three days ago, a surface-level cavity had to be filled, yet when they drilled away such brief remains of bone and decay, I wondered if you would see my smile clearly in the trees. Should we let this hope extend amongst the row of ants captivated by the rich, dense roots of this oak tree we buried our catastrophic fingerprints upon?

    What should we do about the winter due to arrive soon?

    Where will your smile go then?

  • Crisis, Intellects & Love.

    Editor

    to Me

    Re: ‘Crisis’

    Amanda,

    Carry the child-like wonder of possibility on your left hip, graze fingertips upon a melting, egregious split your lips are capable of — that which holds back weathered teeth and a home to hold laughter.

    Imitate the dictionary upon your dresser — be malleable and forget the definition of a monster and the act of surrendering; become corrosive or generous, watch how the sun falls first, then decide. Capture a big word, then use it, like a header or a new name. Don’t carry it in your sodden wallet, let the syllables shatter amongst the[ir] cheeks. Smother. Recollect. Strategize. Become abbrasive.

    Then, define “‘Crisis’”.

    Trace the freckles, drowsy in winter sun, until an opening gives. Fit the body between the slim carving of wasting vessels, seep between the bone, re-define oxygen, carbon, the blood from your mother. Sleep deliciously, past noon, till dinner must hold the stomach accountable, breath then, I suppose.

    Return back to your arbitrary question. Simmer, dwell, practice hand gestures and whimsical movements of your hips, align your back, breath, send an email to your therapist.

    Leave the answer for tomorrow morning.

    Best,

    Editor

    —

    I contemplated the subjection of my mind / my teenage years / the pressure behind my eyes / the swell of my stomach / the political atrophy of global governments / starvation and homeless populations / the plummeting of human rights / coral reefs succumbing to bleaching / the metal detectors at the school entrances / my first period / the right to love / carry the fetus / hold the blood in your hands / eighteen with five credit cards / tasers, rape whistles, pepper spray, the word fire / how expensive plan B is / productivity to guilt to profit to neglect to capitalism / modern slavery and child labour / rampant ecological devastation / food deserts / carbon emissions / therapy cost / the wealth divide / femicide / death.

    The skin has stretched from the crushed liquid of my spine to the gruesome perspiration upon fingertips — I had no control, the weather was harsh, annual blood test have become far to weekly. [I could not exist without crisis, or disaster and the far too many lists that developed from anxiety-riddled midnight catastrophes. Here would be the proper time to imagine, dedicate a paragraph, the journal four years old and barely reputable in terms of cohesiveness. I did this to spare your imagination and my blood pressure levels, but might you read this and insert your own crises, laid bare, as you remember to unclench your hands.]

    Your crisis will continue through flying spaceships, snow-covered summers, a ferocious PMC, the awkward conversations of paper straws, an incarcerated womb, everyone starving – furiously, desperately, unconsciously. Crises cannot be wretched from you — for this, you must make this a positive, generous, even holy belief.

    Doubt. Become your own religion. Demand crisis to submit to your uncertainty. Re-name the holy practice of ‘Crisis’, to begin with.

    Breath.

    —

    “We are here and we have to do something nurturing, that we respect before we go. We must. It is more interesting. More complicated. More intellectually demanding and more morally demanding to love somebody. To take care of somebody. To make one other person feel good. Now the dangers of that are the dangers of setting up as a marytr or as you know the one who without whom it would not be done. That is the problem of the human mind and the soul but we have to try that. We have to try that. We have to do that, and not doing it is so poor for the self. It’s so poor for the mind. It’s so uninteresting to live without that and it has no risk. There’s no risk involved, and that just seems to make life not just livable but a gallant, gallant event. If you want to hang onto your sanity or hang onto yourself, don’t live anything, it’ll hurt… It’s so risky. People don’t want to get hurt, they don’t want to be left out, they don’t want to be abandoned, you see? It’s though love is always some present you’re giving somebody else and it’s really a present you’re giving yourself.”

    Toni Morrison

    It felt realistic, at least once the morning meditation, coffee, teeth-brushing, mind-numbing warmth of a second-hand turtleneck — would provoke a decency among me, should I have forgotten it the night before, slumped upon wilted sheets and questionable philosophies toward lust. I became attracted to the possibility of love without the necessary lesion of trauma. It was intellectually stimulating to demand more, to perform heartbreak ritually (each six-month job, friendships constructed around an hour each week, forgetting the take the trash out before Friday morning), to be unrealistic.

    There is the prosperity of fantasy, the out-of-date requests copied over by generations, the odd cliché of brushing your teeth each morning lest you both stare into the mirror at the same time(?). I could use love to explain my failures, dilemmas, sorrows, pleasures, lack of writing in my journal (as Ha Jin wrote best…)

    My notebook has remained blank for months
    thanks to the light you shower
    around me. I have no use 
    for my pen, which lies
    languorously without grief.

    Nothing is better than to live
    a storyless life that needs 
    no writing for meaning -- 
    when I am gone, let other say
    they lost a happy man, 
    though no one can tell how happy I was.

    Ha Jin, Missed Time

    Yet, yet, yet. […]

    I should become the easy assurance produced by love. (I could) Submit to the individuality the connection offers, allow it to re-define its bruising meaning, and as (I)/you turn to arbitrary paths of drugs and lust, might someone provide sufficient evidence (I)/you can one day embroider on a pillow or smoother across your lips.

    DEBTS AND LESSONS: (taken from Zadie Smith’s Intimations, Six Essays)

    CONTIGENCY:

    “That my mother had no hatred for her own skin, hair, nose. backside, nor any part of her… That I was considered ‘ugly’ young and ‘beautiful’ later. That by the time the external opinion changed it was too late to create any real change in me… That I met a human whose love has allowed me not to apply got love too often through my work — even when we’ve hurt each other desperately”

    Within these parts of Zadie Smith, I wish to reconcile love with crisis and love with stimulation — that of the present and future events. A brief moment where the application of style, in which this reference is subjected to the style of ones existence, their youth, the presentation which is of ‘little protection against catastrophe’ and therefore can wilt if caressed enough. Such style works through the mechanisms of love, the defiance birthed from mechanical list of attributes and baby names, a vacuum of desperation, of despair, with the hopeful nature that your crisis of a lover is synonymous with a crisis amongst yourself, your intellect. Now, realistically, I am using the same language of ‘Crisis’ I mention later, yet it is valuable when you are also situated in this vacuum of society, and so, I prefer to be liminal and harsh.

    So, here must I must lay out some ground rules if you are to love amongst crisis.

    1. Redefine desperation to a characteristically holy adventure rather than the submission of despair.
    2. Respect the ability to nurture, and only nurture. Love does not need to follow this sentiment. It is simply okay to hold.
    3. Present yourself to risk (and while you are at it, redefine the cautious nature of this word, or someone else will do it for you.)

    —

    Carrying multiple conversations between intellects alike, The Voices: Writers and Politics offer differing opinions to establish a multi-perspective narrative, as the fluid line of questioning sparks debates on the many central crises arising socio-economically and politically. I aim to include four brilliant writers in this segment: Umberto Eco, Stuart Hall, Nadine Gordimer, Susan Sontag.

    Crisis no longer cuts the hands or bruises the shins. It became fluid, capable of a literary construction, and a necessity that must punish the blood that hides under your fingertips. It matched your breath, and therefore it must be here, in text, on paper, carried upon the skin as it pushes the air around you. It is “biologically, physically, culturally speaking, a permanent state”. By such details, you might want to conclude your own sovereignty, barren of complex governments and contesting relationships, but what if the acceptance one arguably grasps is necessary. What if this grey, liminal space, where the detriment of such definitions, does not need to solve, coddle, simmer as brilliantly as you deem it to be worth?

    “And that is what I mean by crisis, the incapability of a society to recognise the real historical process and movement. My interpretation doesn’t solve your problem.”

    I appreciate the candour, how inflexible the mouth can be when you expand upon personal uncertainty — (a constriction a father imposed on your sixth birthday). Is it a problem then? If we relinquish our crisis of identity, of belief, of love, to satisfy a rectification on its our own language? Then malleability must rest upon tone, mood, to the proper insert for quotations, instead. It is no longer a crisis nor a division of circumstances, but character with enough weight for enunciation and storytelling.

    “Something is dying, and what we’re seeing is that something, the new that we hoped for, doesn’t seem to be being born”

    It is a dying act. Reconstructing, trusting, forgetting. Historically, the alteration of language was made to be simplistic, louder, held. Yet, its lack of success birthed our own crisis to be heard. Our own genesis, an origin of longing, a consequences of urges — we become creators with enough sustenance to breath life into movements with enough action, that reaction is our plight. Should this revelation spark empathic urges to nurture your words, learn to reinforce, to modify your sensibilities, to enlarge your sympathies. The stretch you fear, (of doubt, of forceable expansion) does not render the lung deficient. The skin will fold, the bones will shift, what has crisis ever shaped between your breastbone?

    “[…] but I realize that my writing comes out of a deep pessimism and I think that we do live in a time that we all experience in some way as a time of crisis, as a time in which much has been destroyed and much has been lost and much more is going to be lost”

    I am not fond of conclusions, nor summaries. My expansions are sacrificial enough and I prefer to not situation such meaning to broad, social understandings. I believe I have bared enough words for now.

    Allow your poor mind to re-define crisis, quickly enough, that sleep does not have to keep waiting.

    References:

    Zadie Smith, Imitations: Six Essays (2020)

    Channel 4 Series, The Voices: Writers and Politics

    Toni Morrison, On Love and Writing: Bill Moyers Interview (1990)

    Ha Jin, Missed Time

  • Temptation and Excess in ‘Goblin Market

    Temptation and Excess in ‘Goblin Market

    Preface: This essay stirred self-doubt and questionable career paths due to its final grade. While I have made a few tweaks to this paper, I felt it was necessary to release a piece that invoked excitement and curiosity within my work at university. My relationship with criticsm has mirrored a complexity of my love for literature in general, so as a way of letting go, i felt it was necessary to uplift a voice not understood, or markedly seen as wrong.

    “The evil of [her] self-indulgence, the fraudulence of sensuous beauty, and the supreme duty of renunciation[1],” delivers Rossetti‘s conflicting dispositions in her fairy-tale world of the “sensuous, […] ascetic[2],” and religious. On reading Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’ sexual desire permeates the text of the fairy-tale world of the poem yet, I argue, we should go further and examine the eroticism of the mouth in maidenhood, to capture consumption through a lense of temptation and excess, eventually altering the body.

    Christina Rossetti’s brother, Dante and his painting, The Annunciation, cited as Image A, composed the Virgin Mary, cowering in the corner of the bed, leaning away from archangel, Gabriel, to capture inciting fear of an approaching holy figure. Yet, the psychological realism confronts the young maiden through a forceful motherhood. Hilda Koe’s painting, referenced as Image B, introduces similar implications as Dante’s piece, of white gowns, biblical references from golden circles to tempting apples, fearful eyes as the man imposes into female spaces. The condition of the women merges here, as she is now tempted by possibility, of the taste of fruit or the holy summoning, yet unaddressed by the sexual nature of the offering, that which is the social insistence of motherhood.

    Laura approaches the Goblin men, by “stretch[ing] her gleaming neck[3]” like a ‘poplar branch,’ an gesture of intrigue, until “[her] last restraint is gone[4].” Desire is initiated by the maiden until the temptation compels her to cut a lock of golden hair; “’Buy from us with a golden curl’ / She clipped a precious golden lock[5].” Her virgin maidenhood shifts to female eroticism, transactional is relingquishing a piece of herself, notably her youth, until the emodiment of seductress follows the expanse of her mouth. Eventually a physical rupture of Laura’s virginity hungrily commences when, “She dropped a tear more rare than pearl / Then sucked the fruit globes fair or red[6],” till the “mouth-watering urgency[7]” she trembles with, incites a realm of perversion. It is through this desirable loss of innocence, her mouth becomes a sexual orifice, filled with, “hunger and satiation[8]” and as a result, temptation becomes animalisitc as her oral state is transfixed on consumption for, “She sucked and sucked and sucked the more / … / She sucked until her lips were sore[9].” Must she bite into the fruit, a mirror of Eve who held the red apple, the ‘fruits that thy soul lusted after[10]’ leave the maiden to be consumed by an erotic madness, which now sustains her body. A hunger which can no longer be satiated by the forbidden fruit “sweeter than honey[11].” The temptation in now embedded within the lining of her stomach and the taste lingering in her mouth, until she must return for more, utilizing such a mouth to speak, kiss, and desire: “’Nay hush, my sister: / I ate and ate my fill, / Yet my mouth water still: / To-morrow night I will / Buy more,’ and kissed her[12].”

                Noted in religious text as the “Fall of Man” with Eve’s temptation of the apple, to the “Fallen Woman” during the pre-Raphaelite era, biblical interpreations begin to center the sexual corruption of women. Sharon Smulders’s, Christina Rossetti Revisited, reimagines Laura’s actions toward that of Eve writing, “Indeed, while the sisters’ temptations double on Eve’s temptation, the fruits multiply outrageously. If the first fruit of the goblin as well as Satanic temptation is the allusive apple, the second fruit (the quince) and the twenty-first (the pear) belong to the apple genus.[13]” Precisely, the relationship between the mouth of a biblical, virginal, or maiden women consume a ‘sinful’ fruit, prescribes her ‘fallen’ stature and immoral standing with God, until the hunger which riddles temptation can only be led by the mouth of a man.

    From this moment, the decay of Laura unfolds. She becomes an “all-giving, all receiving womb[14],” yearning to embrace the taste and the sensuality to suck upon the fruit which fills her mouth, dependent on the pleasure she is to receive. Marsh conceives this phenomena arguing, “This is also the essence of desire: once attained, it ceases to satisfy, vainly driving the sensual urge to repetition, seeking to regain the first, orgasmic joy[15].” As a result, the animalization of Laura recenters the mouth to hold her forbidden carnality, while also supplying bestial gestures as eroticism reconstructs her previous maiden identity: “She gnashed her teeth for balked desire, and wept / As if her heart would break[16].” 

    Correspondingly, Victorian history alongside prostitution produced conversations on venereal dieases, leaving women to become the center of another social illness. Eager to consume only the body of women,[AS1]  their mouths produced the sexual desire, the necessary tempation, to leave the women are their “…hair grew thin and gray: / […] dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn / To swift decay , and burn / Her fire away[17].” The mouth now rids her of vitality, sprititually depleting the maiden, and a site once fit for eroticism fades swiftly as, “Her tree of life drooped from the root[18]:” until she can no longer serve, nor consume eagerly as a biblical woman.

    As I divulge into ‘excess’ in ‘Goblin Market,’ the maiden’s peverse actions are analyzed through the lens of, “violence of passion[s]; extravagant or rapturous feeling; [and] unrestrained manifestations of grief[19].” Arthur Rackham’s illustration as Image C, drowns Lizzie in the “Cat-like and rat-like, Ratel- and wombat-like[20]” creatures, tearing at her white dress, as their hands force sinful fruit into the maiden’s face. Otto Greiner’s sketches seen as Image D, attracts a desirable comparison between the poised women: the body is malleable, desirable, corporeal as its skin holds the hands of those below them, each head turned purposefully, the mouth shut and unwilling to concede, skin wrapped with pure intention. Sap-filled pastures, blooming lilies, to the maiden’s milking the cows, the intersection of nature within Rossetti’s poem expands Dijkstra’s thoughts, “Thus, the eroticized body of woman became the late nineteenth-century male’s universal symbol of nature and of all natural phenomena. She sat, a flower among flowers, a warm, receiving womb and body, waiting patiently for man, the very incarnation of the spirit of the rose[21].”

    The development of Lizzie from a cautious, untouched maiden insistent of the deviant sexual nature the goblins present to excessively urging her sister to lick upon her face, is no coincidence. A rational, modest maiden who “churned butter, whipped up cream, / Fed their poultry, sat and sewed[22]” to:

    “Come and kiss me.

    Never mind my bruises

    Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices

    Squeezed from goblin fruits for you

    Goblin pulp and goblin dew.

    Eat me, drink me, love me[23]; “

    captures the sexual sacrifice explored by Rossetti, through an excessive, ‘unrestrained manifestations of grief” of Laura’s declining state. A transitionary moment for both sisters, the exploration of excess expands with the rape of Lizzie as the goblins forcefully invade her body with the forbidden fruit. Moreover, Freud’s construction of hysteria, the breach of the mind can develop from, “[…] any pains, whatever their cause, reach maximum intensity and that any afflictions are ‘terrible’ and ‘unbearable’[24]” accompanies the demanding, desperate tone to present her face covered in the ejaculation of the goblin men. Even further, Dijkstra argues alongside Albert Von Keller painting as Image E, of feminine submission as “[…] sadistic pleasure [is felt from] the representation of a vulnerable, naked woman tied to a cross[25].” Mirrored alongside Image C, the subjection of Lizzie as the goblins constrain her body against the tree, in possession of her vulnerable nature, displays the carnality she exhibits as the poem ends.

    As a result, the self-sacrifice must become transactional – Lizzie “put[s] a silver penny in her purse, / Kiss’d Laura” while the carnal desires of the goblins were “unrestrained[AS2] , erotic”, and held that penny to exhibitionism of her now hyper-sexualized body[26]:

    “Tho’ the goblins cuffed and caught her,

    Coaxed and fought her,

    Bullied and besought her

    Scratched her, pinched her black as ink.

    Kicked and knocked her,

    Mauled and mocked her[27]”

    It is in the rape of Lizzie, that her new role is to indulge in Laura’s lasting sexual temptations, and most notably, the desperation that inhabits her dying sister’s eroticized mouth, as excess constructs her body to a palatable feast. In the midst of her assault, Lizzie sealed the opening of her mouth, a distant allusion to the virginal qualities that can be physically penetrated, and specifically, Rossetti emphasizes the sacrificial nature of the maiden to relinquish her body instead, “Lizzie uttered not a word; / Would not open lip from lip / … / But laughed in heart to feel the drip / Of juice which syruped her face[28].” An offering, a face covered in forbidden juices, delievers her skin, ripe in sexual pleasure to her sister, until she allows herself to be ruined, perfect for her starving mouth: “Kissed and kissed and kissed her: / Tears once again / Refreshed her shrunken eyes, / Dropping like rain / … / She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth[29].” Thus, a promiscious mouth, riddled in ‘raptuous feelings’ of her self-sacrifice, Lizzie transforms her body to capture the erotic desires of Laura’s previously penetrated mouth, until the latter knows of hunger again.

                Altogether, an examination of the mouth is pertinent to grasping the inclusion of eroticism within the poem, and more specifically, in the realm of temptation and excess. Returning to Image D of Greiner’s ‘Gaia,’ the supporting quote, ‘The woman is the man’s root in the earth[30],’ illustrates the sensual relationship between Laura and Lizzie, as each supply their bodies – and more specifically their mouths – to confront maidenhood.

    Bibliography

    Bram Dijkstra (1986). Idols of Perversity. Oxford University Press, USA.

    Breuer, J. and Freud, S. (2013). Studies in hysteria. Digireads.com Publishing.

    Marsh, J. (2012). Christina Rossetti : a literary biography. London: Faber Finds.

    Mermin, D. (1983). Heroic Sisterhood in ‘Goblin Market’. Victorian Poetry, [online] 21(2), pp.107–118. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/40002024.

    Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “excess (n.), sense 9,” June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/4381276791.

    Rossetti, C. (1862). Goblin Market. [online] Santa Clara University. https://webpages.scu.edu/ftp/lgarber/courses/eng67F10texts/RossettiGoblinMarket.pdf [Accessed 1 Nov. 2024].

    Smulders, S. (1996). Christina Rossetti Revisited. Hall Reference Books.

    [Image A]: Rossetti, Dante. ‘The Annunciation’, 1849-50. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rossetti-ecce-ancilla-domini-the-annunciation-n01210 [Accessed 20 November 2024].

    [Image B]: Koe, Hilda. ‘The Goblin Market’, 1895. < https://theharvestmaidsrevenge.com/2023/04/05/revisiting-christina-rossettis-goblin-market-an-early-folk-horror-classic/ [Accessed 19 November 2024].

    [Image C]: Rackman, Arthur. ‘Goblin Market,’ 1933. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goblin_Market_032.jpg [Accessed 20 November 2024].

    [Image D]: Greiner, Otto. ‘Gaia’ [Mother Earth],’ 1912. http://www.symbolismus.com/ottogreinerg228a1912.html [Accessed 21 November 2024].

    [Image E]: Von Keller, Albert. ‘In the Moonlight,’ 1894. http://www.symbolismus.com/albertvonkeller2.html [Accessed 20 November 2024].

    [1] Mermin 1983: 107.

    [2] Ibid.

    [3] Rossetti 1862: l. 81.

    [4] Rossetti 1862: 86.

    [5] Rossetti 1862: 125-6.

    [6] Rossetti 1862 : 127-8.

    [7] Marsh 2012: 231.

    [8] Dijkstra 1986: 62.

    [9] Rossetti 1862: 134, 136.

    [10] Ibid.

    [11] Rossetti 1862: 129.

    [12] Rossetti 1862: 164-8.

    [13] Smulders 1996: 35.

    [14] Dijkstra 1986: 85.

    [15] Marsh 2012: 233.

    [16] Rossetti 1862: 267-8.

    [17] Rossetti 1862: 277-80.

    [18] Rossetti 1862: 260.

    [19] Oxford English Dictionary 2024.

    [20] Rossetti 1862: 340-1.

    [21] Dijkstra 1986: 87.

    [22] Rossetti 1862: 207-8.

    [23] Rossetti 1862: 466-71.

    [24] Breuer and Freud 2013: 241-42.

    [25] Dijkstra 1986: 34.

    [26] Rossetti 1862: 324-5.

    [27] Rossetti 1862: 424-29.

    [28] Rossetti 1862: 430-4.

    [29] Rossetti 1862: 486-9, 492.

    [30] Dijkstra 1986: 85.

     [AS1]come back to cite

     [AS2]“These images were expressive of men’s dreams of generous, unrestrained inclusion; of nature as simultaneously receptacle, fertile soil, and comforting breast” (85)