Psychological, emotional and spiritual violence: Carole Langille’s Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems

This essay offers a detailed response to three poems selected from Carol Langille’s Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems (2012), a collection of fifty or so titles which almost all relate to Ophelia in one way or another. Its intentions are twofold: to follow the thread of feminist awareness in her work, and to explore why Robert Delford Brown’s Church of the Exquisite Panic (established in New York City in 1964) is helpful in defining Langille’s vision of the psychological, emotional and spiritual forms of violence which determine Ophelia’s consciousness in her relationships with Hamlet, with other men in her family and with the Danish court. The three highlighted texts are “Cock”, “Andy Warhol Paints Ophelia” and “Church of the Exquisite Panic”. These idiosyncratic and evocative poems are explored to demonstrate the startlingly contemporary possibilities of Shakespeare’s text. The ingenuity of Langille’s subtle discourse is also examined and illustrated. In essence, she makes positive use of the unconventional liturgy of Brown’s church in order to bring insights to bear upon the Shakespearean text. The enterprise places her in an egalitarian and democratic poetic tradition which may be found in much North American poetry, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Carl Sandburg and Audre Lorde.