1. Pittsburgh: Motheroot Publications, 1978. Mother , May I ? is printed in its entirety in Appendix C, below.

2. Austin: Place of Herons Press, 1977.

3. In Third Chicano Literary Prize (Irvine, Calif., 1976-77), pp. 85-133. break

4. James Cody, editor of Villanueva's Bloodroot , explains his fascination with her poems, but his reasons distort the issue of why Villanueva writes in the first place. In his introductory comments Cody says (p. i) he likes Villanueva's poetry because she writes like a man: " . . . her poems were of the universal quality, embracing all subjects and passions, that seemed . . . to come almost only from the writings of men. In addition, there was none of the self-pity that is in so much 'feminist' poetry." He continues: " . . . she does not ape men or brutalize her sexuality to escape the bonds that have existed traditionally for women. For her these bonds do not exist. Alma Villanueva is not a feminist, or a female poet, she is a poet."

5. Fernando Alegría, Walt Whitman en Hispanoamerica (Mexico City: Ediciones Studium, 1954), esp. pp. 314-331.

6. On May 24, 1983, Alma Villanueva told me she had not read Walt Whitman before writing Bloodroot . While confirming this in his introduction to Bloodroot , Cody insists that Villanueva's poems resemble Whitman's: "Though Alma had read almost no Whitman before our friendship began, I read her poems as if she were the female fulfillment of those words spoken so long ago [by Whitman in "Poets to Come"]. Cody sees "a clarity of line, a forthrightness, a subconscious and assumed rhythm . . . that seemed to proceed from Whitman" and an "insouciant joy in the crude, the ordinary, the common, while elevating it, or accepting it equally with the rest of life" (p. ii). Had Villanueva read Whitman before writing Bloodroot , I imagine that the unconventionality of Whitman, who allowed practically everything to enter into his poems, employed free verse, used no rhyme, and believed in spontaneous natural song, would have appealed to Villanueva.

7. Alegría ( Walt Whitman , pp. 320-331), in referring to Song of Myself and Neruda's "Ritual de mis piernas" ("Ritual of My Legs"), points to this difference in the way each poet speaks about his legs.

8. See "Cuerpo de mujer," the introductory poem in Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (p. 87), and Poems II, V, VI, and XIII (pp. 87-91, 95-96), in Obras Completas , 3d ed. (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1967), Vol. I. For an English version see Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair , trans. W. S. Merwin, bilingual ed. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969).

9. For views on Plath's and Sexton's poetry and insights into their place in contemporary American poetry, see Gary Lane, Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Charles Newman, The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970); Mary Lynn Broe, Protean Poetic (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980); Karl Malkoff, Crowell's Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1973).

10. Alicia Ostriker, "The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking," Signs 8 (Autumn 1982), 68-90. Ostriker observes that childish language and bawdy are both variants of colloquial language. She notes that Rachel Blau DuPlessis uses "pun- soft

ning baby talk" in her poem "Medusa" to reveal "the power of sexual pain to thwart growth," whereas in Sexton it signals sexual trauma. Ostriker asserts that Erica Jong is one poet who uses bawdy to invade the linguistic preserves of male discourse (pp. 87-88).

11. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 15.

12. Bloodroot , pp. 4-5; App. A, pp. 277-279.

13. Villanueva sometimes uses only a closing parenthesis.

14. Bloodroot , p. 1. The lines cited are the entire poem.

15. Bloodroot , pp. 2-3; App. A, pp. 280-281. The poems "(wo)man," "bloodroot," and "ZINZ" offer a feminine analogue to the myth of Aztlán in Chicano poetry in the late 1960s and early 1970s. According to this myth, Aztlán, reputedly in today's Southwest, was the legendary birthplace of the Aztec Indians. The Aztlán myth posited the existence of a collective unconscious for modern-day Chicanos whereby they retained continuity with their Indian heritage. For some Chicanos, Aztlán made possible a reintegration with their cultural roots. The Aztlán myth represents a unilateral rejection of United States culture.

Villanueva does something similar in a feminine context. Whereas Aztlán is a mythical utopia based on race, Villanueva's mythical matriarchy is based on gender. Like the poets of Aztlán (one example is the early Alurista of the Floricanto poems, 1971), Villanueva, too, criticizes Western culture: men have split the world into mind and body. Her revision is to affirm and celebrate the beauty of the feminine body, which is negated by Western civilization and is therefore the aspect of the human person to be elevated. Alejandro Morales discusses this feminine principle in terms of Mircea Eliade's Earth Mother in "Terra Mater and the Emergence of Myth in Poems by Alma Villanueva," Bilingual Review 7, 2 (1980), 123-142.

16. Bloodroot , pp. 20-21; App. A, pp. 282-283.

17. Roy Harvey Pearce, Whitman (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 6.

18. Villanueva does not use an apostrophe to indicate the possessive.

19. Bloodroot , p. 37. I cite the entire poem. This poem bears a thematic resemblance to Neruda's "Unidad," the fifth poem in Residencia en la tierra I (1925-1931). The concern for the poet's immediate sensory experience, the eternal repetition of natural events (the ebb and flow of the sea), and the subject's experience of time as "intuited pastness" are themes common to both poems. See Lane Kauffmann, "Neruda's Last Residence: Translations and Notes on Four Poems," New Scholar 5, 1 (1975), 122-124.

20. Bloodroot , pp. 49-51; App. A, pp. 284-286. The three poems I mention at the end of this paragraph appear on pp. 27, 29, and 47-48.

21. Bloodroot , pp. 57-59; App. A, pp. 287-289.

22. Bloodroot , pp. 52-54; App. A, pp. 290-293.

23. App. A, p. 293.

24. Indications of a witch-persona in Plath are mentioned by Lane, Sylvia continue

Plath , pp. 13, 144. Ostriker ("Thieves of Language," p. 86) observes that the framing element of Sexton's Transformations is the persona of the narrator-poet, "a middle-aged witch, me."

25. Poems , pp. 117-118; App. B, pp. 301-302.

26. "Of/To Man," Poems , p. 115; App. B, p. 300; "witches' blood," Poems , p. 105; App. B, p. 297; "Of Utterances," Poems , pp. 107-108; App. B, pp. 299-300. In Poems , "witches' blood" mistakenly appears as part of "The Hard Probing Plow." The poem begins with the words "witches' blood" (p. 105) and concludes with the same words (p. 106).

27. Robert Graves espouses this theory of poetry. In The White Goddess (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), originally published in 1948, he argues that a test of a poet's vision is the "accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess and of the island over which she rules," and that "a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living" (p. 12). For Graves, poetry is a magical language that honored the moon-goddess in prepatriarchal times, survived in popular religious ceremonies and mystery cults, and was still taught during the times of the early Christian emperors "in the poetic colleges of Ireland and Wales, and in the witch-covens of Western Europe." He claims that one important difference between the classical and Romantic poet was his attitude to the "White Goddess." Whereas the classical poet claimed to be the goddess's master, the Romantic poet of the nineteenth century was a "true poet only in his fatalistic regard for the Goddess as the mistress who commanded his destiny" (pp. 12-13).

In my conversation with Villanueva on March 24, 1983, she said that in this poem she quoted, not Graves, but Sexton's quotation of Graves. As with Neruda and Whitman, Villanueva seems to come across a source in an indirect way, here Graves via Sexton, since she claims she had not read Graves when she wrote this poem.

28. Bloodroot , pp. 55-56; App. A, pp. 294-296.

29. Numbers in parentheses indicate the page or pages in Appendix C where the passage appears.

30. Norman Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 38-39. Holland's explanation of the phases of child development in a psychoanalytical context is helpful for understanding the character's activities as a little girl (ibid., pp. 32-50).

31. Ibid., p. 39.

29. Numbers in parentheses indicate the page or pages in Appendix C where the passage appears.

30. Norman Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 38-39. Holland's explanation of the phases of child development in a psychoanalytical context is helpful for understanding the character's activities as a little girl (ibid., pp. 32-50).

31. Ibid., p. 39.

29. Numbers in parentheses indicate the page or pages in Appendix C where the passage appears.

30. Norman Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 38-39. Holland's explanation of the phases of child development in a psychoanalytical context is helpful for understanding the character's activities as a little girl (ibid., pp. 32-50).

31. Ibid., p. 39.

32. For comments on Plath's exaggerated hyperboles, see Richard Allen Blessing, "The Shape of the Psyche: Vision and Technique in the Late Poems of Sylvia Plath"; Marjorie Perloff, "Sylvia Plath's 'Sivvy' Poems: A Portrait of the Poet as Daughter," in Lane, Sylvia Plath , esp. pp. 66-67, 173.

33. Villanueva's male characters fall into categories of sexual deviants and innocent wimps. The rapist and the uncle who molest the child are examples of the former, and the Anglo schoolboy with whom the protagonist falls in love is an example of the latter. The only male character in the poem to whom the protagonist seems to continue

relate in a positive way is her second husband, but nothing is known about him. Men do not play a significant role in Villanueva's poetic universe because they do not participate in the creation of meaning. For example, the narrator dismisses sons with a passing reference before moving into her discussion of the mother-daughter bond.

Judith Kegan Gardiner, "On Female Identity and Writing by Women," Critical Inquiry (Winter 1981), p. 356, points out that Anglo women writers describe their male characters in terms of access to power: "they are wimps or brutes." Villanueva seems to share this tendency, for she depicts her male characters as one-dimensional. The tendency is, of course, in keeping with her primary objective of telling a woman's story. As Chicano male writers primarily portray women as either virgins or whores, Villanueva's portrayal of men is a neat reversal of the male tendency.

34. These terms are used by R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 65-77.

35. Morales, "Terra Mater," following Mircea Eliade's discussion of myth, focuses on the grandmother as the contemporary incarnation of the Earth Mother in Villanueva's prize-winning anthology, Poems . Unlike Morales, I am not interested in validating the Eliade model of myth, but I do think that Villanueva consciously knows and uses archetypal conventions. She says in the study of her life and work by Elizabeth Ordóñez ( Chicano Literature: A Reader's Encyclopedia , ed. Julio A. Martinez and Francisco A. Lomelí [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985]) that she has been influenced by Mary Esther Harding's Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modern (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1971). Harding was a disciple of Jung, who introduced her book, originally published in 1935. One of Harding's objectives in Woman's Mysteries is to expose and recover the "feminine principle" represented by Western culture via the presentation of feminine archetypes, such as the Demeter-Kore myth. The intention of making the grandmother in the grave scene a kind of Earth Mother is a buried presupposition of Mother , May I ?

36. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," trans. Alix Strachey, Sigmund Freud on Creativity and the Unconscious (New York: Harper Torch-books, 1958), p. 148, defines the repressed in this way.

37. Ostriker, "Thieves of Language," esp. pp. 72-75.

38. Walter J. Ong, "Literate Orality of Popular Culture Today," in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 289. Also appropriate on formulary devices and their relation to oral cultures are Ong's comments in "Transformations of the Word and Alienation," in Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 17-22.

39. I cite only a few of the many critics who share my view of the literary text as a cultural product in a given situation of discourse. Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 14-16, makes the useful distinction between a "work" and a "text": "the same set of words can be regarded as either a work or a text." A work is "a complete, self-sufficient object, continue

constructed of words on a page . . . seen as free of authorial intention, free of historical necessity, and free from the reader's projections of value and meaning." The major exponent of this method is the New Criticism school of thought. Scholes's preference is for semiotic analysis which takes the same set of words as a text: "open, incomplete, insufficient." He argues that "as a text . . . a piece of writing must be understood as the product of a person or persons, at a given point in human history, in a given form of discourse, taking its meanings from the interpretative gestures of individual readers using the grammatical, semantic, and cultural codes available to them."

Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman, The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 3-4; take as their central premise the notion that "all stories [texts] are implicitly or explicitly addressed to an audience." The audience is an entity inseparable from the notion of artistic texts. The authors present six varieties of reader-oriented criticism and compile an extensive bibliography on questions related to the reception of literary texts.

Peter J. Rabinowitz, "Assertion and Assumption: Fictional Patterns and the External World," PMLA 96 (May 1981), 408-419, says in a note (p. 418) that the "central disagreement in reader criticism is between critics who argue for the individual's freedom to 'create texts' and those who claim that the text imposes restrictions on response." My comments on Mother , May I ? relate more to the second position, or to the way readers are reflected in texts.

40. Daniel Wilson, "Readers in Texts," PMLA 96, 5 (Oct. 1981), 848-863; Rabinowitz, "Assertion and Assumption."

41. Bloodroot , pp. 62-63.

42. Emile Benveniste, "Relations of Person in the Verb," "The Nature of Pronouns," and "Subjectivity in Language," in Problems in General Linguistics , trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Miami Linguistics Series, no. 8 (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 195-204, 217-222, 224-230. Lucille Kerr, in notes to her article, "The Paradox of Power and Mystery: Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra ," PMLA 95 (Jan. 1980), 91-102, comments on Benveniste's theories on the first-, second-, third-person pronouns and the difference among them (p. 108).

43. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1978).

44. Robinson Jeffers, Medea , in Medea: Myth and Dramatic Form , ed. James L. Sanderson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 133.