First Blood - Critical Essay

Literary Review, Fall, 2000 by Jean Hollander

For most of my poems, I have evidence of the agony that went into their completion, with pages and pages of material crossed out, rewritten, and crossed out again. This poem came easy. Most of the labor that went into the poem occurred before I wrote anything down. Perhaps the fact that I had been working on a translation of Dante's "Inferno" for over a year, perhaps the inspiration of place and the moment--whatever it was, the ideas and words arranged themselves and fell into place with an immediacy I rarely experience.

The only significant change was in the title. The original "Do we not bleed?" with its unenlightening reference to Shylock, was replaced by the much more pertinent "First Blood," with its reference to the blood the mosquito sucks, its first; Eve's coming menstrual flow to which the curse of conception and labor condemn her; and to the blood of sacrifice and slaughter that shall all too soon become our heritage, even in the natural death to which all living things are henceforth condemned.

Beyond thinking of Lavigny as a kind of Eden, and the first mosquito bite as a metaphor for God's curse on man, I had no particular plan when I began this poem. I believe that a poem takes shape out of its own need, determining its stanza form, its imagery, its tone and language as it comes into being. It is only after I have written a poem that I know what I meant to say. Like Flannery O'Connor, "I write to discover what I know."

Jean Hollander has been director of The Annual Writers' Conferences at the College of New Jersey since 1982. Her most recent book of poems, Moondog, was published in the Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Book Series. Her first collection, entitled Crushed into Honey, won the Eileen W. Barnes Award, and was published by Saturday Press. She has published hundreds of poems in various magazines and anthologies, such as The Sewanee Review, The American Scholar, and The Literary Review. Her translations include works by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (Cleis Press, 1995), and a poetic translation of Dante's Inferno, with Robert Hollander, to be published by Doubleday in 2000.