It is interesting to note the biographical framework to the writing of To Get To You, also, for the reference from which the poem emerged is as rich in imagery in the poem itself. 
     "It was 1980. It was July and very, very hot and sunny. Several months before

     this I had broken up with my husband of 12 years. It had been what we call in

     these days an "amicable divorce" but that didn't mean it didn't hurt."

Wallace had traveled to Vancouver to visit a man with whom she thought she was in love.
     "I had my six year old son with me. He was feeling con­fused. So was I... Chris

     and I spent hours wandering around beaches and the university

     endowment lands and the city of Vancouver, talking and talking and talking

     and drinking cappuccino and eating cheesecake and playing with my son. It

     was like something out of a movie. Falling in love, with the emphasis on

     falling, which is where it usually is. But. Everywhere I went there were

     these red marks. On sidewalks, on bus stops, in doorways, in crowded
     streets, alleys, seats in the park. Everywhere. I asked Chris what they were.

     He told me that a group of women in Vancouver had vowed to put a mark on

     every location in the city where a rape had occurred. And they had. So.-

     There I was. Walking around Vancouver with a wonderful, gentle man...

     there I was falling in love with him in a city filled with this other kind of

     falling, the falling of women's bodies under the weight of some man's

     hatred and disgust." (18)

          This author dares to make her own assertion that rape does not occur only in the violent cities of the 20th Century globe. Rape also occurs in the world's literature, not simply as a story reflecting some actual or fictionalized event, but as the real phenomenon of male-focused concepts and language. To think that women, who are conscious of the atrocities committed on the face of the 20th Century globe, would confine themselves to addressing only the facts of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, or a city splattered with red silhouettes of fallen women... is, absurd. Indeed, the context of biographical detail is both the landscape and the essential springboard for women's language.

 

 

 

 

 

Biography as Poetic Landscape     11

57

 

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January 2008.

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