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So, what made me want to write about Margaret Atwood, hmmm….Well, mostly because she is regarded as to be one of Canada’s finest living writer/ poet/novelist/story writer/essayist/ enviromental activist and yet, I have not read one piece of hers in my life! I know right? So I took an oppurtunity to read one of her works during class, and I have to say, it was surprisingly touching and emotional. After reading this poem, I decided to further investigate this writer in the hopes of attaining a possible meaning to this poem and I came to find out that suffering is common for the female characters in Atwood’s poems, although they are never passive victims. I had a sense of suffering from this poem and this is what made me feel pity for the character in the poem. She is also a feminist and tends to involve the suffering of women in her poems. In an interview, Atwood explained the suffering characters in her poems as coming from real life: “My women suffer because most of the women I talk to seem to have suffered”. I found this to be a truly genuine reason to write these kinds of poems and an eye opener to experience the lives of suffering women through literature, especially in poetry. She is similar to other poets I’ve come across in my days such as Nicole Brossard and Eveline Langlois that also incorporate aspects about the human conditon and suffering into their poems. I admire Atwood for being a feminist because I think that most people (although we pretend that we do) aren’t generally aware of how much women reallyseem to suffer and sacrifice in this world. Here is a poems by Margaret Atwood…Enjoy!

          The Landlady

This is the lair of the landlady                  She is a raw voice loose in the rooms beneath me.                                                       the continuous henyard squabble going on below thought in this house like the bicker of blood through the head. She is everywhere, intrusive as the smells that bulge in under my doorsill; she presides over my meagre eating, generates the light for eyestrain. From her I rent my time: she slams my days like doors. Nothing is mine. and when I dream images of daring escapes through the snow I find myself walking always over a vast face which is the land- lady’s, and wake up shouting. She is a bulk, a knot swollen in a space. Though I have tried to find some way around her, my senses are cluttered by perception and can’t see through her. She stands there, a raucous fact blocking my way immutable, a slab of what is real. solid as bacon

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