Invitation to a Marxist Lesbian Party by Lee Cataldi | Anne Elder Award Winner 1978

I’m not the only one to be drawn in by this striking title, easily the best title out of the 45 years of Anne Elder Awards. Invitation to a Marxist Lesbian Party immediately promises a lot, only increased by Lee Cataldi’s bio stating, “She is a teacher, a mother, a sailor, a book reviewer, and — as the title says — a giver of Marxist Lesbian parties.” While there is certainly marxism, lesbians, and general provocation in this collection, it also reads as a typical debut collection with some wayward, wandering choices and a bit of a collage aesthetic that seems less in-fashion for poetry collection this side of the millennium.

Divided into five titled sections, the collection flows through various themes and forms with Cataldi demonstrating an experimentation and malleability of voice that definitely makes Invitation to a Marxist Lesbian Party a true collection of individual poems that stand more or less on their own.

The opening section, “Invitation to a Marxist Lesbian Party”, eases the reader in with a nostalgic, Romantic tone with poems with short lines, no punctuation, and loose rhyming, making them read like song lyrics. Sapphic romances play out amongst natural imagery and 1970s cultural references, lending the poems a mixed classical quality. Some of the poems in this section, in particular, betray Cataldi’s lack of poetic experience with clunky rhymes, “packing cases line the hall / down comes the wall / it’s time for the tower to fall” (25), and an over-reliance on seasonal metaphor which pushes the pathetic fallacy into angsty melodrama: “spring is almost over” (16) and “winter is over / summer won’t come” (54).

Other poems within this section smack of Gig Ryan’s heady mix of music, drugs and parties, travel, and relationships but with a queer rebellious edge. “Little T.C. 1972” is an ironic feminist critique of a patriarchy that treats women as property and then pathologies them.

“women have sought safety
in their bedrooms
this has resulted in a terrible magnifying of disorders
Freud shakes his head” (17)

“TO THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL A SONG IN TWO PARTS TO BE SUNG AT MY FAREWELL DINNER” also stands out for its direct call-out of an institution of power. Cataldi’s use of dual voices punctuated like a play script is formally playful while also destabilising a central feminist voice in favour of collective expression.

It’s in the second section and beyond, though, that Cataldi demonstrates her darker, more complex poetic voice in criticism and resistance to the patriarchy, capitalism, militarisation and war, environmental destruction, and the British Imperialism behind it all.

Two poems, in particular, seem to provide the thrust of the collection and are thematically linked in their exploration of death and the imagery of suffering. The first “Fool’s Paradise” recalls classical depictions of hell in Milton and Dante with a remarkable use of repetition.

“the grey sunlight moves slowly through a filthy window, somewhere indistinguishably above us, weaves unlovely patters in the indifferent air where we are … here, at the bottom of the world so deep, interchangeable … interchangeable our skin and garments, grey, indistinguishable, skin and garment coarse and rough, not to be distinguished, both grey and grained, dirt and clean, we, skin and grubby garment are here” (50)

People are pressed into an indistinct grey mass that fades further into the drab, dirty urban environment. They’ve been stripped of all identifying objects as well as affiliations of nationality, employment, or religion. Amongst the clear horror of this mass of bodies unable to speak, only able to breathe, there is disquiet and instability in the line “we love, we are love” (50). Love is an innate human quality that allows a possibility of rising above the “bottom of the world” (50). In the poem’s third section, the narrating persona speaks in continuous streams, revealing a recognisable curiosity about self and meaning.

“I know we are only two mounds and something of skull but I need to ask questions I keep asking myself what would happen if I stopped asking them I don’t need to ask for food or sustenance I haven’t opened my mouth for ten years” (51)

The persona circles around consideration of meaning and value, attempting to reconcile the innate qualities of love and curiosity with death and neglect:

“one hardly knows if we are alive — I myself am not at all sure of our status, here at the bottom of the world where there is no status, where we can’t at all distinguish dust and flesh.” (52)

Something about this poem is as arresting as Eliot’s handful of dust. Perhaps it’s the tension between cynicism and hope, or between realism and hope amongst war and destruction. The enormity of discussing love as a universal force at war with war and suffering rings with a powerful sincerity in Cataldi’s voice. It reverberates out from “Fool’s Paradise” in the echoing final stanzas:

“there are times when loving is unwelcome
like rain
from the car
I watch as they pass
bizarre or swift or certain
in long coats they unloose
like a curtain

there are times when loving is uncertain
falling without cessation from a sky
breached by sensation” (53)

“The Poem in the Classroom” imagines more dusty, destroyed scenes but framed by Cataldi as a semi-ironic holy war mapped atop the Industrial Revolution and destruction of natural beauty. The four parts move swiftly through literary allusions across Shakespeare, Blake, King Arthur, and Dracula and religious imagery from the Bible and Taoism. The classroom window forms a kind of prophetic frame through which children get an honest view at the world being created for them. The kids gaze on “a fine view of many factories” (81), “smoking chimneys” and “satanic mills” (82) while, closer to home,

“the train that goes through Tempe
terminates at Mortdale
Tempe whose once sweeping lawns
contained a rich man’s Mount Olympus
now just another station
on a rusty suburban line
ditches overgrown with Crofton weed
a swampy disused reservoir for industrial water known
as the horse paddock
vines covering garbage
tin rooves held down by bricks
the countenance divine
doing the dishes
worn out with overwork and kids
look out on this” (87).

The speaker, addressing a room of children like a teacher, is sardonic, using satire that could have been written today to illustrate timeless class struggles.

“you can see the mills from here
if you look
and you know satan, Dracula, the lord
plotting in his castle on the hill
monstrous perversions of men
Frankensteins for the shop floor
his cellars full of machinery
his Mercedes-Benz he is
the enemy” (83)

But amongst the more humorous mocking of the soulless wealthy, Cataldi slips in a few images with a painful tenderness that reminds the reader of what’s at stake.

“in your faces sometimes
loneliness
sometimes
the solidarity of innocence
sometimes
its readiness to fight
sometimes
spite
and sometimes a face
going rapidly out of reach
like Orphelia’s [sic]
drowned” (84)

In the speaker’s valuation of innocence as fleeting and lose-able, their earnest attempts to save the children and to make them truly see the other side of the window, the poem lets fall the spiky sardonic facade for the more heartfelt and tender belief in love and human connection made manifest in the universal innocence of children.

“The Poem in the Classroom” and “Fool’s Paradise” hold together as the centre of Cataldi’s collection for their shared criticism of an increasingly violent, destructive, and bleak world in the middle of the 20th century. But they also veer considerably away from each other in terms of poetic temperament, revealing the two voices of intellectual irony and affective lyricism that mix and flow through the rest of the poems. Which of the two exemplar poems most resonates with you may indicate a proclivity for a certain approach to Cataldi’s overarching anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-war argument and imagination for the future.

Reading Invitation to a Marxist Lesbian Party as a comprehensive, united collection falls apart fairly early on but to criticise the collection for its disjointedness would be a disservice to the gems of the collection that glow with gutsy power some 45 years after publication.