18 pages • 36 minutes read
Kim AddonizioWhat Do Women Want?
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: The Self-Sustaining Poet
Addonizio was a child in Washington DC as second-wave feminism rolled through the 1960s. Her parents—a noted sportswriter and a champion tennis player—modeled careers outside of the corporate model. Addonizio moved to San Francisco in early adulthood, and stayed. She resided in the Bay Area through a period of dramatic socio-economic change during which artists were increasingly forced out of neighborhoods of soaring real estate values, making way for the tech workers who were pouring into and out of Silicon Valley. In poems like “What Do Women Want?” and other works, Addonizio includes images of the neighborhood streets and their denizens as she experienced them before extensive gentrification.
All this to say, Addonizio is of a generation of poets who have had to be creative—and resourceful—to make their own way as artists. She had her own author website well before they were considered de rigeur for writers, on which she posted a semi-regular blog about writing and the writing life, among other subjects. Her teaching career—both in university settings and through private workshops—reflects the kind of flexibility that allows a teaching artist to both teach and write without a tenured university position.
Although she identifies primarily as a poet, Addonizio’s oeuvre includes two nonfiction books on writing poetry, including the highly regarded The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (1997), and several works of fiction. She writes solo, and she writes in collaboration with others. While this prolific multi-genre and multi-disciplined approach may be indicative of Addonizio’s personal ethos, it reflects, as well, the stamina and dedication of a poet determined to sustain both a life and her art.
Social Context: Modern Love
Through the lens of Addonizio’s poetry and other writings, modern love is messy, sometimes dangerous, often heartbreaking, and ever compelling. Addonizio’s career and life thus far span the worst of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco and elsewhere, ongoing debate about a woman’s right to privacy regarding abortion, and the slow acceptance of marriage equality across the United States. While “What Do Women Want?” and other of Addonizio’s poems echo the yearning expressed by poets such as Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, they directly respond to contemporary feminist issues of sex and the body.
Addonizio’s poetry has been described as Confessional, but the poet is quick to distinguish between the speaker of a poem and the poet. While her poems deal with sex, violence, addiction, and other gritty issues with insight and intimacy, she resists the criticism that she writes autobiographical poems. It is not reportage; it is art. The writer of an explicit poem retains the right to privacy. This is an important point when considering the red dress in “What Do Women Want?”; the dress is a symbol of the speaker’s desire, not implicit consent. Control belongs to the speaker.
The title of Addonizio’s memoir, Bukowski in a Sun Dress: Confessions of a Writing Life, is taken from a derogatory comment from a male critic. Addonizio responded, “Why not Walt Whitman in a sparkly tutu?” (The Book Report, 2016). The contributors to Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics (2010), edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, would likely appreciate the spirit of the comeback. Freedom of sexual expression, in all its forms, is a core value of the poets of Gurlesque, who offer up, according to poet Joyelle McSweeney, “a juicy volley of some of the most obstreperous, ill-behaved, il-advised, detrimental, dismantling, dismaying poems out there […]” (Gurlesque, 2010).
The speaker of Addonizio’s “What Do Women Want?” wants, above all, to be the captain and champion of her own desire. In the poetics of desire in the modern world, Addonizio continues to contribute to the discussion of what it is to be an autonomous sexual being in a complicated moment.
