Ophelia by V.C. Myers
Femme Salvé Books, 2023
Review by Jennifer Saunders
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“To erase,” writes Jeannie Vanasco in her 2012 essay “Absent Things As if They are Present,” “is to create a new work out of an existing one: canonical, obscure, wonderful, terrible, it’s the erasurist’s choice.”[1] From this act of literary erasure is born a text so new that “not even the first original writer could have anticipated its creation,” as Robin Coste Lewis said in a 2016 Portland Arts & Lectures talk entitled “The Race within Erasure.”[2] Surely William Shakespeare never could have anticipated V.C. Myers’s Ophelia poems, a poetic sequence that rises out of her erasure of Hamlet and which anchors Myers’s collection Ophelia (Femme Salvé Books, 2023). Unlike book-length erasures like R E D by Chase Berggrun (an erasure of Dracula), Yell by Sarah Sousa (an erasure of The Yellow Wallpaper), or Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager (a triple erasure of the memoir In the Eye of the Storm by Kurt Waldheim), Ophelia interweaves erasure and non-erasure poems to create a thematic whole. As a result, the collection simultaneously enacts and defies erasure in language, form, and history as the Ophelia sequence creates a powerful call-and-response with the collection’s other poems.
Broadly speaking, the poems in Ophelia can be grouped into three categories: the erasures, all of which are titled “Ophelia;” poems interrogating historical, literary, or mythical violence visited upon women (Daphne, Lavinia, the Little Mermaid); and poems written in a contemporary, often first-person voice witnessing and/or experiencing gendered violence. Myers moves between these poetic categories to highlight the constant background of violence or the threat of violence against which so many women’s lives have played out across the centuries. Here sits Ophelia nestled between the Little Mermaid and a girl who, in a poem inspired by the blues of Leadbelly, exists “in a field of negligence”; there sits Ophelia between Ovid’s Daphne and a pair of contemporary Appalachian “backwoods refugees” fleeing an abusive husband and father. Time bends as a misogynistic history plays out; Ophelia is everywhere.
The collection opens with two Ophelia poems and then turns to the first-person speaker in “Papier-mâche,” a poem whose imagery brilliantly depicts the slow encroachment of an abusive relationship. It opens with its speaker
befriend[ing] the red paper wasps
flying around my garden. I sang
as they circled me. I watered the
flowers they pollinated. Such
camaraderie, such peace.
The speaker grows so accustomed to and comfortable among the wasps that she forgets they are even there. The wasps build their nest on her leg, gradually “swaddling all of [her] limbs, creeping / up [her] torso like an invasive vine.” Eventually the nest covers her throat, her eyes so she “couldn’t / see what too much trust made of me.” An initially companionable and symbiotic relationship between gardener and wasp twists and warps as the wasps’ nest consumes her much the way a domestic abuser gradually—so gradually the abuse begins unnoticed and when noticed may still at first seem like a gesture of intimacy—turns the domestic space into a space of silence and control. “Papier-mâché” is followed by “greenhouse, glasshouse, it’s all the same & broken,” another poem in which a present-day first-person speaker recounts daily violences both personal— “I’ll keep drinking / & pretending that my father is alive / & never hit my mother;”—and systemic—
[p]eople keep trying to kill me
with their unvaccinated children & backyard
chickens, their denial of climate change &
affordable healthcare.
Throughout Ophelia, the silences that are a necessary underpinning of the erasure technique become a mode of expression. Many of the collection’s non-erasure poems are responding to traditional stories in which women are rendered speechless, often through patriarchal violence. In “Birds of Prey,” Myers recounts Ovid’s Philomela, raped by her sister’s husband: “He cut so much of me, / ripped out my voice / to silence me”, and in “Labor of Love,” Syrinx becomes “a river reed plucked to serve / as padding for Pan’s lecherous pipes. // Sweet music made of mute women”. Such silencing resurfaces in “Ventriloquy,” a response to the rape and mutilation of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus:
He stole my tongue in Spring to seal
my witness mouth, sawed off
my plaintiff hands, so I’ll not play
the cook nor feast on vengeance pie.
Even Myers’s form on the page, with its use of cesuras and poems which break free of the left margin (especially but not exclusively the Ophelia sequence), reenacts silence and erasure even as Myers’s subjects struggle to find new voices. For “Ventriloquy” continues, “I shall teach myself once more / to speak without my tongue.”
Interlaced with these mythic and literary poems are poems of contemporary witness in which the voice, the throat, and the tongue are highlighted. Myers’s diction pulses with the violence her speakers endure and with the struggle to give voice to the experience. The first voicings are nearly inarticulate—in “Backwoods Bloodletting,” Myers struggles to escape a legacy of violence, “[r]ipping nightshade off / my throat, a scream for clarity” and in “Exile is Not a Street Address,” the speakers wakes up “screaming when nightmares / mimic memories.” Night terrors (a not uncommon experience for survivors of sexual abuse) reappear in “Pulp,” the speaker’s voice ” choking on brambles, / a silent scream.” The cesura, an enactment of choking. In “Whistleblower” the mouth is described as a “sinkhole” and in “Blood Thicket” lips are “sewn by black thread.” But the poems do speak. The entirety of Ophelia is a speaking back to violence, its existence an act of survival. In “Sirens Chorale” a chorus of voices rise up in the #MeToo moment, proclaiming “He cannot touch what we have become.” If “writing is a way to erase the erasure history performs on our lives,” as Robin Coste Lewis suggests, then Ophelia performs both erasure and un-erasure.[3]
Coste Lewis asserts that literary erasure acts as “both an aesthetic and political tool,” and Myers takes full advantage of both edges of erasure’s sharp blade.[4] In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia is often but a pawn in a larger game played by men: her father Polonius and brother Laertes; Claudius; and Hamlet himself. Ophelia is told how to behave (return Hamlet’s tokens of affection, turn Hamlet away) and how to be useful to the men around her (glean information about Hamlet’s state of mind as Claudius eavesdrops). In Shakespeare’s hands Ophelia is pushed and pulled, buffeted by events that eventually drive her mad. In Myers’s hands, however, Ophelia becomes
harbinger
omen
ghost
as Myers slices away at the men’s language, at their advice and directions and suggestions and machinations. Myers’s erasures and the open spaces they leave on the page allow for a new Ophelia to rise. The Ophelia poems are ethereal, hardly embodied at all, in stark contrast to the worldliness of the other poems in this collection. Ophelia lives in the air as a “suspiration of breath”, as “torrent, tempest / whirlwind.” The open field of the erased page—a different approach from Berggrun, Sousa, and Reddy, and an effective one—erases the dutiful confinement that would be expected of Ophelia as daughter of a counselor to the King. The language Myers leaves behind, through its concision and heightened lyricism, erases the tyranny of plot. As Myers’s poems remind us, so many traditional plots enact violence upon women and render them speechless. Myers’s erasures free Ophelia:
the world
a dream
a shadow
your discovery
golden fire
your death
your bounty
mad & free
By slicing away the male voices of Hamlet, Myers leaves us with an Ophelia constructed not by her family’s expectations or Hamlet’s affections, but by language itself. Erasure here is truly an artistic and political tool. Fittingly, Myers ends on an Ophelia poem, the book’s final lines a command: “tell my story.” These poems speak in both language and silence. In the words of Robin Coste Lewis, “… silence, however, as a tool and not a place of powerlessness….silence as agency…silence even as a weapon…”[5] These are poems of survival, of speaking back against sexual and domestic violence and against the very silences enforced by patriarchy. This is erasure as art. Erasure as weapon.
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V.C. Myers is the author of Ophelia (Femme Salvé Books, 2023) and Give the Bard a Tetanus Shot (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019). She is on the 2024 Contest Panel for Sarabande Books and edited for Frontier Poetry, Ice Floe Press, and Barren Magazine. She was a music journalist for Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper The Charleston Gazette. Her work has appeared in ekphrastic exhibits and journals worldwide, including EPOCH, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and The Galway Review. An Appalachian poet, she has lived in Ireland, England, and West Virginia.
Jennifer Saunders (she/her) is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), winner of the Clockwise Chapbook Competition. Her poem “Crosswalk” was selected by Kim Addonizio as the winner of the 2020 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize and appeared in Southword. Jennifer is a Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Orison Anthology nominee, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is also the editor, together with Rachel Neve-Midbar, of Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation (Querencia Press, 2023). Jennifer holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in German-speaking Switzerland. She teaches skating in a hockey school and drives her hockey-playing children to many, many ice rinks.
[1] Vanasco, Jeannie. “Absent Things As if They Are Present.” The Believer. Issue Eighty-Six (January 1, 2012) accessed through https://www.thebeliever.net/absent-things-as-if-they-are-present/
[2] Coste Lewis, Robin. “The Race Within Erasure.” Lecture presented at the 2016 Portland Arts & Lectures Series. Accessed via The Archive Project https://www.opb.org/article/2020/08/12/the-archive-project-robin-coste-lewis/
[3] Coste Lewis, Robin.
[4] Coste Lewis, Robin.
[5] Coste Lewis, Robin.
ID: Cover of Ophelia by V.C. Myers.
Psaltery & Lyre 