“The witch thinks about what it would be like”: the figure of the witch as a contemporary poetic emblem
Résumé
Following the neoliberal turn of the 1980s, British poetry became more open to marginal voices, and to poetry characterised by a new aesthetics based on a combination of formal innovation, politics and intimacy. One lingering trace of this aesthetics is the recurring use of the figure of the witch in the poetry written by women today. Over the past two decades, what used to be alternative, marginal discourses about feminism, ecology and magical activism have become more widespread in the English-speaking world, both in the USA and in the UK. As historians offered new perspectives on the history of witch trials and ancient religions associated with witchcraft, some feminist theories gradually started to appropriate the figure of the witch as a feminist emblem. In this paper, I would like to study two different poetic approaches to this theme. With the rediscovery of the work of activists like Starhawk, who advocated the connection between womanhood and witchery and their relation to the oppression caused by both capitalism and the patriarchy, many British women poets have in turn adopted the once demonised figure of the witch and used it as a channel through which they could let their own poetic voice run and expand. The publication of Claire Askew’s How to burn a woman and Rebecca Tamás’s WITCH are two perfect examples. Though the tone, style and subject of the collections broadly differ, both poetesses share the same willingness to give a voice to the intimacy of women through the figure of the witch, either using lyric forms or wearing the masks of dead witches from the past to let them speak a story they could never speak themselves, thus merging public political discourses and the privacy of feeling and sensation.