KATHLEEN CROWN

Poetry,
Feminism,
and the Public
Sphere
Lynn
Keller,
Forms
of Expansion:
Recent
Long
Poems
by
Women.
Chicago
and Lon-
don:
University
of
Chicago
Press,
1997. xi + 373
pp.
$45.00; $18.95
paper.
Yopie
Prins and Maeera
Shreiber, eds.,
Dwelling
in
Possibility:
Women Poets and
Critics on
Poetry.
Ithaca, NY,
and London: Cornell
University
Press,
1997. x + 373
pp.
$49.95; $19.95
paper.
Kim
Whitehead,
The Feminist
Poetry
Movement.
Jackson:
University
Press of
Mississippi,
1996. xxiii + 247
pp.
$45.00; $18.00
paper.
op
oetry
has
enjoyed something
of a rebirth in the
public
sphere
over the
past
ten
years, emerging
in new locations-
community
centers,
bookstores and
cafes, festivals,
"slam"
competitions,
and the Internet-where it
responds
to and
creates new audiences. This
striking convergence
of
poetry
with the
public sphere
throws into relief a whole set of
challenges facing
crit-
ics who want to account for
contemporary poetry's
cultural status.
What is the relation of
poetry,
a discourse for so
long
associated with
private
emotions
and-lyric subjectivity,
to civic ideals of
democracy,
equality,
and access? How do
identity-based politics
intersect with
conventional ideals of aesthetic value? What is the
efficacy
of a
"pol-
itics of form" versus a
politics
of social content or context? These
critical
challenges,
which threaten to
deepen
the
already
wide fis-
sures in a
notoriously
factionalized
field,
are
compounded by
the
difficulty
of
constructing
a
socially
oriented
literary history
of an art
form that is resistant to the narrative
impulse,
and
by
a
growing
Contemporary
Literature
XXXIX,
4
0010-7484/98/0004-0644 $1.50
? 1998
by
the Board of
Regents
of the
University
of Wisconsin
System
C R O W N * 645
sense
among
both
poets
and critics of the irrelevance of
drawing
dis-
tinctions between "critical" and
"poetic" writing.
New critical
spaces
for
understanding
the
resurgence
of
public poetries
are
urgently
needed.
One
perspective
for
understanding
the cultural
importance
of
po-
etry
as a
public
discourse is feminist
criticism,
which
through
its in-
terdisciplinary
and culturalist
poetics
has much to offer to a
long
overdue cultural studies
approach
to
poetry.
Several recent
books,
including
the three under review
here,
consider
poetry's
vital role in
reflecting
and
reconfiguring
the feminist movement's
agendas
for
social and cultural transformation.1 These critical accounts of the
dramatic
outpouring
of
poetry by
women since the 1960s
give
us
new and
deeply
historical models for
understanding
this
particu-
larly
decisive
entry
of
poetry
into the
public
domain.
They
also offer
an
opportunity
for
estimating poetry's past
and
potential
contribu-
tions to the construction of a "feminist
counterpublic sphere"
as an
ideal discursive
space,
and for
assessing
how
effectively
feminist
critics have been able to
juggle
the intricate
public sphere questions
of aesthetics and
politics,
access and
context,
audiences and institu-
tions. One of the most difficult issues that has
engaged
feminist crit-
ics is how to balance the ideals of
identity politics
with efforts to cre-
ate a
multicultural,
multiethnic feminism that can
speak
across and
between
competing
affiliations and
hybrid
locations. The
poet
Adri-
enne Rich
gave powerful
voice to this ethical and artistic
responsi-
bility
to foster
diversity
and dissent at the
"Poetry
and the Public
Sphere"
conference held at
Rutgers University
in
April
1997,
saying,
"I want
everything possible
for
poetry.
I want to read and make
poems
that are out there on the
edge
of
meaning yet
can mean some-
thing
to the collective."
Each of the three books under review also wants to make room for
"everything possible"
for
poetry.
In
setting
such wide
scope
for
their
investigations,
the authors and editors
may
bemuse those aca-
demic readers who view the critical
economy
as
operating
on
prin-
1. These books include
Cynthia
Franklin's
Writing
Women's Communities: The Politics
and Poetics
of Contemporary
Multi-Genre
Anthologies
(U
of Wisconsin
P, 1997)
and Carol
Muske's Women and
Poetry:
Truth,
Autobiography,
and the
Shape of
the
Self
(U
of
Michigan
P,
1997),
which looks at this same
period
from the
enlivening perspective
of a
poet-critic.
646
?
C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E RAT U.R E
ciples
of
scarcity
rather than
plenty
and who see the aim of criticism
as the
taxonomy
and classification of
poems
in order to establish a
hierarchy
of value. In
refusing
these familiar critical
conventions,
the feminist
poetry
criticism reviewed here does not avoid critical
judgment
or discard the idea of aesthetic value in favor of a
genial
neutrality;
instead,
it meditates
self-reflexively
on the institutional
and material conditions of aesthetic
response.
To insist on remain-
ing open
to
"everything possible,"
after
all,
is not to
say
that
"any-
thing goes."
No
criticism,
feminist or
otherwise,
can be
all-inclusive;
some work will
always
be selected for discussion while other work
is
inevitably
excluded. But there is in these books an unusual widen-
ing
of critical
scope
and a determined
opening up
to the
variety
and
variability
of women's
poetic production.
Given the current critical
climate,
it is unusual for the same book to discuss or include work
by, say,
Rita Dove and Rachel Blau
DuPlessis,
or to
place
Alicia Os-
triker's work next to that of Susan Howe. In
marking
these differ-
ences and
making
these
connections,
feminist critics are
showing
themselves to be
especially
alert to a whole
range
of
formal,
aes-
thetic,
and
political practices, recognizing
and
valuing
their varied
potential
for cultural
critique.
At a time when some of our most in-
fluential
poetry
critics seem bent on
fostering
divisiveness
by
insist-
ing
on a
purely
formalist vision of
poetic
value,
relegating political
poems
to the status of "victim art" or
narrowly restricting
the defin-
ition of what constitutes a
poetic avant-garde
or
"experiment,"
this
new
body
of feminist
poetry
criticism is
refreshingly capacious.
To-
gether
these books offer a
powerful testimony
to
contemporary po-
etry's
vibrant
public
life and a valuable
analytical history
of
poetry's
involvement in the feminist
movement,
challenging
us to rethink the
terms under which we construct
genre theory
and
literary history.
In Forms
of Expansion:
Recent
Long
Poems
by
Women,
Lynn
Keller
cuts across conventional boundaries and definitions of the
"long
poem"
to redefine the
genre
and to
expand
its canon in
ways
that
can account for the richness and
diversity
of women's
contempo-
rary writing
in extended
poetic
forms. One
gauge
of
poetry's
inti-
mate
relationship
with
feminism,
for
Keller,
is the
growing
number
of women
poets working
in such
"expansive
forms" as
epic-based
poems,
dramatic
sequences,
or
radically disjunctive
series. In fasci-
nating
and
richly
detailed
readings
of a wide
range
of
long poems,
CRO W N * 647
Keller
suggests
that this
resurgence
over the
past
three decades of
women
writing long poems
"follows from
struggles
in the 'second
wave' of feminist activism for
expanded
attention to women's
expe-
rience,
history,
and artistic
powers"
(305).
If women have turned to
the
genre
of the
"long poem"
because it is
particularly
amenable to
the
"sociological, anthropological,
and historical material" neces-
sary
for a
poetry
of cultural
critique
(14-15),
it is feminism that has
helped
them to enter the
"quintessentially
male
territory,"
as Susan
Stanford Friedman has
put
it,
of the
"big-long-important poem"
(Prins
and Shreiber
15).
Keller reads this new
writing by
women to
answer
urgent
theoretical
questions
about
gender's implication
in
the historical
development
of
genre
and the
literary dynamics
of in-
fluence and
intertextuality.
Her substantial
introduction,
entitled
"Pushing
the Limits of Genre and Gender: Women's
Long
Poems as
Forms of
Expansion,"
moves
easily through
several
knotty ques-
tions of
genre theory
and
literary history,
while
suggesting
some in-
stitutional and historical contexts for the
resurgence
of women's
long poems.
Thus
integrating
formal and
generic analyses
with cul-
tural and historical
readings,
Keller
provides
an
engaging
and much
needed
analysis
of
gender's
intersection with
diverse,
though
usu-
ally
male-defined,
conventions of the
long poem.
Although "long poems" by
a few modernist
women,
such as H.D.
and Gertrude
Stein,
have
begun
to receive
attention,
Keller shows
that the
general
consensus remains the same: the
major poems
in the
field,
even in the
contemporary
context,
are
by
male
poets.
Keller's
piercing
review of the critical record demonstrates that this
percep-
tion is
largely
the result of
literary
histories that define the
genre
of
long poem
so
narrowly
that
they
exclude from discussion those
poets,
women
especially,
whose work is marked
by generic hybrid-
ity
or nontraditional themes.
By redefining
the
genre,
Forms
of
Ex-
pansion
becomes the first
full-length
critical discussion of the
long
poem
to
pay
substantial attention to women
poets
and even to ac-
knowledge long poems by
women writers of color.
For the
purposes
of her
investigation,
Keller defines the
long poem
broadly
as
any "book-length" poem.
In
doing
so,
she
"encourage[s]
... a book-based
approach
to
contemporary poetry generally,"
con-
tributing powerfully
to a
growing
critical turn
away
from the isolated
and
easily anthologized expressive lyric
and toward
compositional
648 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E
and critical
approaches
that
emphasize process
and context
(22).
Her
inclusive
generic
definition has the immediate effect of
bringing
into
view a
dazzling array
of works
by
women. In
limiting
her discussion
to work
by
women
poets,
Keller seeks neither to establish a female
countertradition nor to
develop
a feminist
counteraesthetic; instead,
she
surveys
the
genre
in a
way
that "redresses imbalances in
previous
criticism,"
compensating
for
postwar literary
histories that obscure or
render invisible
long poems by contemporary
women and their fe-
male modernist
precursors
(1).
Refusing
"the
imposition
of a
single
model on the whole of a diverse
field,"
Keller's
study represents
a
wide cross section of this
"genre-that-is-not-one"
(2).
The most unusual and
risky aspect
of Keller's
argument
is
pre-
cisely
its critical eclecticism.
Following
the feminist theorist Rita Fel-
ski,
she
clearly rejects
the idea of a
single, identifiably
feminist aes-
thetic and refuses to
privilege any
one
linguistic
or aesthetic form as
more "feminist" or
culturally
subversive than another. Such a stand
is
risky,
because a critic focused on
proving
that there is no essential
or inevitable link
between,
say,
the
re-emergence
of the iambic
pen-
tameter sonnet and the conservatism of the
Reagan-Bush years
(no
matter how correct her
assessment)
may
fail to
pay
sufficient atten-
tion to how
deeply
our formal choices are embedded in and in-
formed
by ideological
choices,
often with
very
real
political
conse-
quences.
Other
dangers
loom. The critic
may
trade
passionate
partisanship
of a cherished
poetry community
for a
lackluster,
"ob-
jective" neutrality.
Or she
may
lack the
ability,
however
willing
she
is,
to make the radical
adjustments
in
reading strategies
that will
allow her to be
equally
articulate in defenses of
widely
different
po-
etries,
so that she ends
up
far more
convincing
about one kind of
po-
etic innovation than another.
Fortunately,
these are not
stumbling
blocks for
Keller,
who
negotiates
this critical minefield with tremen-
dous success.
Perhaps
more discussion of the
ideological
dimen-
sions of formal choices could have been achieved
by longer
transi-
tional sections
connecting
the
chapters
on individual
poets.
It is not
altogether
clear,
for
example,
how to
gauge
the relation between
po-
etic
experimentation
and social
marginalization
in
poets
as different
as Susan Howe and Rita
Dove,
both of whom contend with
ques-
tions of historical "witness." But the critical
readings-never
scien-
tifically
or
neutrally "descriptive"-are
all
articulate,
passionate,
CRO W N * 649
and
compelling.
Keller does not
merely argue
for a critical
approach
able to
employ
different
reading strategies
for different
texts;
she
demonstrates the method's
viability by being just
as
convincing
about
delineating
the
pleasures
and
rigors
of formalist verse as she is at
making
sense of
radically disjunctive poetic language.
To
provide
a detailed
reading
of even one
book-length poem
can
be a
daunting
task. Poems of
very
extended
length
tend to move
through multiple
voices, moods,
and formal
gestures, alluding
to a
broad
range
of cultural and historical
phenomena,
and
meditating
on their own
compositional processes
and
generic transgressions.
Keller nonetheless
ambitiously provides readings
of
eight long
poems
or "focal
texts,"
considering
work
by
Sharon
Doubiago, Judy
Grahn,
Rita
Dove,
Brenda Marie
Osbey, Marilyn
Hacker,
Susan
Howe,
Beverly
Dahlen,
and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Full of
impres-
sive close
readings
of these often
quite
difficult
texts,
Forms
of
Ex-
pansion
feels
weighty, densely compressed,
and
richly
woven. Each
chapter
is attuned
simultaneously
to the
poet's negotiations
with re-
ceived traditions and
particular literary
antecedents,
to her innova-
tions and
departures
from those conventions and
precursors,
and to
the formal and aesthetic
implications
of her
political,
cultural,
and
academic
engagements.
One
problem facing
feminist
literary history
has been the ten-
dency
to
emphasize
the continuities between women's
writings
in
order to consolidate a female
poetic identity
or
tradition,
often at the
expense
of
acknowledging
the
quite
vast and fundamental differ-
ences that can
separate
women. Unlike those
historians,
Keller re-
jects
the traditional model of
literary change
as
continuous,
organic
development
and
emphasizes
instead women's
disagreements
and
discontinuities. The same insistence on
making
evident the
disputes
among
feminist
poets
and theorists is found in Feminist Measures:
Soundings
in
Poetry
and
Theory
(1994),
a volume of critical
essays
that
Keller edited with Cristanne Miller.
Cutting
across
unnecessarily
rigid
boundaries between
poetry
and
theory
and between creative
and critical
writing-and including writing
about and
by
women
with an
impressive range
of affiliations and
positionalities-the
an-
thology,
sometimes
forcibly, brings
into conversation
poets
and crit-
ics often
perceived
as
having
little to
say
to one another. Forms
of
Ex-
pansion
benefits from and continues this
crucially important
work.
650
-
C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E RAT U R E
Although
Keller does not
pretend
to offer a
chronological
account
of the
long poem's
hand-in-hand
development
with feminist
thought,
the book is
organized
in a
way
that
suggests
how
poetry
has reflected and
shaped
the internal
struggles
of second-wave fem-
inism. This narrative
begins
with the feminist movement's
early
in-
terest in the
concept
of
androgyny
in the 1970s
(Doubiago),
which
was to be criticized later in that decade and
replaced
with
gynocen-
tric
perspectives, including separatist politics
within the lesbian lib-
eration movement
(Grahn).
Next comes the locational
politics
of
1980s
feminism,
in which
growing
attention was
paid
to the inter-
sections of
gender
with race and
ethnicity
(Dove
and
Osbey),
often
with an
emphasis
on historical method and a turn to the
powerful
and
popular
forces of narrative and
history
(Howe).
The
story
ends
with the radical
polarization
of the field of
contemporary poetry
in
the
1990s,
which has at its
opposite poles
two versions of "radical ar-
tifice"
(to
borrow a term of
Marjorie
Perloff's):
a "new formalist" im-
pulse
with few
qualms
about
appropriating
conventional forms for
personal
and
political
use
(Hacker),
and a
language-based poetics
that would see little value in
trying
to
develop
a
culturally
transfor-
mative
poetics
out of such structures as the
sonnet, villanelle,
or ses-
tina,
contaminated and commodified as
they
are
by
the values of the
dominant culture
(Dahlen
and
DuPlessis).
Keller's book offers a
way
out of this
seeming impasse.
Without
obscuring
or
denying
the dif-
ferent valences and values of each
poetics,
Keller lifts
poetry
criti-
cism out of its tiresome and
repetitious
debates about whose work
really
"counts" as
important
cultural
critique, asking
instead what
kind of
critique
each
poet
offers and how a
poet's generic
and formal
choices can
compromise
or fuel a feminist
critique.
An
example
of this blend of careful
genre analysis
with
questions
of feminist
poetic strategy
is Keller's
investigation
of Sharon Doubi-
ago's
and
Judy
Grahn's
widely divergent
methods of
negotiating
with the received
category
of
"epic,"
with its masculinist
heroics,
values,
and conventions. Much of the
vibrancy
of Keller's
survey
lies in its
playfulness
in
perceiving
and
characterizing
the various
"models of
relationship"
that women
poets
have invented for
grap-
pling
with dominant traditions of the
long poem.
To describe
women
poets' literary relationships
with their male and female lit-
erary predecessors,
Keller draws on
metaphors
used
by
the
poets
C R O W N * 651
themselves,
which can be
familial,
spiritual,
or
erotic,
even if
parod-
ically
so. Thus the intertextual
dynamic
between Sharon
Doubiago
and Charles Olson is characterized as the woman
poet's
search for
an
equalizing
and
androgynous
"heterosexual
complementarity"
with a male
precursor,
even
though
his
intermittently misogynist
poetics
would refuse the woman
poet's
agency (33).
Keller shows
how
Doubiago's compositional process
is
heavily
indebted to
Olson's antihumanist
rhetoric,
geographical understanding
of na-
tional
identity,
and forceful reinsertion of the
physical body
into the
scene of
writing.
But she
argues
that
Doubiago diverges
from Olson
in at least two fundamental
ways: by insisting
on an
equal
and com-
plementary
relation between men and
women,
and
by occasionally
identifying
with the
oppressed
of our national
history
and
speaking
as the "Other"-from a Vietnamese or Native American
perspec-
tive,
for
example.
Keller
points
out that both
gestures
can be
prob-
lematic from a feminist
perspective.
The idea of a
complementary
"androgyny"
has been revealed to be a
suspiciously
androcentric
concept,
and the
poet
who assumes to
speak
for others risks collud-
ing
with the forces that have silenced those
nonhegemonic
voices.
The
example
of
Judy
Grahn's
engagement
with and creation of an
exclusively
"Lesbian
Sapphic
tradition"
provides
an instructive
counterpoint
to
Doubiago's
more male-identified
epic
(63).
By
con-
trast,
Grahn identifies and
engages
with an
exclusively
lesbian
po-
etic
tradition,
offering
what Keller terms a
"wedding
of
forms,"
in
which the
poetic strategies
of two of Grahn's forebears-H.D. and
Gertrude Stein-are
brought together
in
ways
that
produce
a valu-
able "butch-femme
literary ancestry"
(68).
Whereas
Doubiago
at-
tempts
to
speak
from within
marginalized
and often
painfully pri-
vatized
spaces,
Grahn
aggressively
moves the
margins
to the
center,
confidently assuming
an
"eager politically
conscious
community
al-
ready
in existence
though insufficiently
voiced"
(100).
The
result,
ac-
cording
to
Keller,
is that the more
socially marginalized
lesbian
poet
achieves a
stronger
"collective
impersonal authority"
(101).
Because the
chapters
are
arranged
to
highlight
the differences in
the women's
poetic strategies,
it is
perhaps
inevitable that
they
would end
up underplaying
the
poets'
connections. Keller
gives
lit-
tle
space,
for
example,
to
investigating Doubiago's
indebtedness to
female
precursors,
and she seems at first to
accept
at face value
652
-
C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E
Grahn's own
depiction
of her work as
having developed fully
from
within a
separate
female tradition. A closer look at
Doubiago's
work,
and
especially
at the
book-length poems
she wrote after Hard
Country, might
have uncovered her intimate involvement with
H.D.'s
epics, especially
Helen in
Egypt.
In a
footnote,
Keller admits
that she does "not
explore
[the
speaker's]
search for a maternal con-
nection to the extent that it is
developed
in the
poem," suggesting
that
"[a]n
essay parallel
to this one
might compare
the narrator's re-
lation to the mothers with
Doubiago's
relation to her most
signifi-
cant female
literary predecessor,
H.D."
(314n4). Likewise,
Keller is
aware that Grahn's
poem "everywhere
reflects the
impact
of male-
dominated
traditions,"
but she offers almost no discussion of these
engagements
and
negotiations
(64).
It is difficult to fault this lack of
emphasis
on certain intertextual
negotiations, though,
because
Keller never fails to
acknowledge
the directions that her work has
not taken and the leads she has not followed. Thus Forms
of Expan-
sion
productively points
the
way
for future feminist
readings
of
women's
long poems.
Having
examined two instances of women's
appropriations
of the
"epic,"
Keller moves on to consider women's use of
"lyric sequences."
She
pairs
a
chapter
on Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah and Brenda
Marie
Osbey's Desperate
Circumstance,
Dangerous
Woman
(both
his-
torically
based
"testifying" poems)
with a
chapter
on erotic desire
and
lyric subjectivity
in
Marilyn
Hacker's sonnet
cycle,
Love, Death,
and the
Changing of
the Seasons.
Despite
their immense
differences,
all
three
poets
are notable for the
way they
resist
pressures, coming
sometimes from within their
marginalized
communities,
to write on
particular
themes or to use a
style
that the
community
has identified
as
culturally
subversive or transformative-whether the demand is
for accessible or direct
language,
or for innovative or
disruptive po-
etic
techniques.
The
poet
who
speaks
to or for a
particular
commu-
nity may experience
her
"representativeness"
not
only
as
empower-
ing
but as
constraining,
whereas a reader who lacks
knowledge
about a
marginalized community
or tradition
may
evaluate the work
by inappropriate
criteria.
Showing
how these
pressures weigh
on
poets,
Keller
points
out that "Dove has been criticized
by
some black
critics for not
performing
more
obviously
and
exclusively
as a race
poet"
(104).
The result was that Dove remained a "closet
poet"
for
C R O W N * 653
years, feeling
that she did not measure
up
to
prescriptions
about
what was authentic "black"
writing
(108).
Osbey's
work,
on the
other
hand,
has been misunderstood
"by
at least one white critic"
who failed to
recognize
the
"distinctly
black traditions"
shaping
her
work
(104-5).
Overlooking entirely
the ethnic traditions in which
the work is
embedded,
this critic faults
Osbey's
work for its lack of
the
"speed, cacophony,
and
swirling activity
that
usually
mark
urban
writing"
(140).
For
Keller,
this kind of critical
response sug-
gests
"the
importance
of readers'
recognizing
ethnic traditions and
of their
possessing specific
bodies of historical and cultural knowl-
edge"
(141).
Despite
the shared
"testifying"
nature of Dove's and
Osbey's
work,
which
emphasizes
local
history
and
family
narra-
tives,
Keller
perceives
two
very
different methods of
negotiating
in-
dividual and
group
identities and their interrelations.
Marilyn
Hacker has faced a different kind of criticism for her
choice to write in traditional forms such as the sonnet
cycle.
Influ-
ential
figures
within the lesbian feminist
community
(most
notably
Adrienne
Rich)
have
argued
that traditional forms like the
sonnet,
by
virtue of their
uniformity
and aesthetic
baggage, necessarily pre-
vent the
poet
from
grappling
with crucial
political
issues. These crit-
icisms
persist despite
the fact that
Love, Death,
and the
Changing of
the
Seasons takes
up
an "outlaw" relation to the Petrarchan and Shake-
spearean poetic
models,
creating according
to Keller "almost exclu-
sively
a
(lesbian)
woman's world" that is
fully
"removed from the
forces of
compulsory heterosexuality"
(163).
This
perspective
is also
shared
by poets
of the
expressive lyric,
for whom "free verse"
threatens to become a new
orthodoxy,
and
poets
affiliated with Lan-
guage writing,
who are
suspicious
of the sonnet's
highly
codified
lyric subject
and advocate a
poetics
of
fragmentation
that would dis-
perse
or subvert its influence. Keller would
(somewhat
danger-
ously)
demur,
and she
argues forcefully
in these
chapters
that
"avant-garde" poets
do not "have exclusive claims to
political
en-
gagement"
(184).
In
making
this
argument,
Keller does not
deny
the
operation
of what has been called
"personal
taste." She
notes,
for ex-
ample,
her own
preference
for Dove's
"metaphorical
and
imagistic
density"
over
Osbey's
"more
prosaic
idiomatic lines"
(143)
and
seems more
receptive
to DuPlessis's use of
"empirical
data
per-
ceived in the external world" than to Dahlen's stream of "dictation
654 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E
from her unconscious"
(243).
But Keller never allows debates over
form to be reduced to a
question
of
"taste,"
which is
always
under-
stood as the
product
of historical and cultural
meanings
and loca-
tions,
and she
keeps
a clear focus on the
political
and
ideological
ef-
fects of the wide
range
of
poetic strategies
used
by
women
poets.
In the final two
chapters,
Keller turns
away
from a
poetry
of
per-
sonal
identity, family
narrative,
and conventional forms to consider
work with a
very
different texture: the
provocatively "experimen-
tal" serial
poems
of Susan
Howe,
Rachel Blau
DuPlessis,
and Bev-
erly
Dahlen.
Continuing
to
argue
that "the
Language
movement's
experiments
do not
necessarily disrupt gender
constructions
any
more than the male modernists' did"
(252),
Keller nonetheless finds
that Howe's
"asyntactic linguistic
structures" are
quite
effective at
"incorporating
into
long poems
the silences of women . .. absent
from the
poetic
and historical record"
(186).
She
suggests
that Susan
Howe's historical
investigation
in "The Liberties" of the "uncon-
ventional
arrangement"
between
Jonathan
Swift and "Stella" (his
secretary,
house
manager,
and
nurse)
is mirrored
by
her unconven-
tional
poetics,
which
attempts
to correct the historical record in
part
by establishing
a "noncoercive"
dynamic
between writer and reader
(206).
This
remarkably thorough
and subtle
reading
of Susan
Howe's
immensely
difficult
poem
strikes me as the most successful
reading
of Howe's work so
far,
in its clear and full introduction of
the
poet's
work and its
ability
to
fully integrate
the formal issues
raised
by
her work with the historical and cultural concerns of a
feminist
poetics.
The
chapter
on Dahlen and DuPlessis describes
these
poets'
encounters with the American tradition of the
long
poem by way
of Robert Duncan's
collage poems,
a
powerful
influ-
ence on both
poets.
In this
work, "deliberate,
politicized
reflections
on and of
gender"
also
recognize
and
interrogate
the relation be-
tween a
genre's
erotics and its
politics
(254).
In Dahlen's
case,
Keller
identifies an
immensely
useful
poetics
of "resistance or refusal"
(275)
that can
help
women move
"beyond
the bounds and
bindings
of received culture even if also constrained within them"
(276).
She
identifies in DuPlessis's
poetic practice
a
range
of "voracious and ec-
centric methods" that "succeed in
exploding
inherited
restrictions/
inscriptions
of
gender"
(301).
These methods include
complex
math-
ematical
structures,
talismanic
language, hieroglyphic punctuation,
C R 0 W N * 655
and instances of
breaking
out of what DuPlessis herself terms the
"lyric
ruck"
(288).
Keller
manages
to showcase the
power
of this for-
mally experimental poetry-passionately
and
articulately
defend-
ing
its
importance-without subscribing
to a view that would
deny
the value of
other,
very
different
poetic strategies.
The book's
conclusion,
"This Genre Which Is Not One: A Short
Wrap-up
on
Long
Poems
by
Women,"
reminds us that "all kinds of
experience
and intellectual discourse find their
way
into women's
long
poems" (303).
Reading
these
long poems
as
responses
to the
failings
of the
first-person,
voice-based
lyric,
Keller
argues
that this
new
body
of work has
helped
to move
poetry
out of the cultural
margins
and into the debates of the
public sphere.
To account for
this
"flowering"
of the form
among
women
poets,
Keller concludes
Forms
of Expansion
as she
began, by suggesting
that second-wave
feminist activism was an
enabling precondition
for women
working
in extended
poetic
forms.
Kim Whitehead's 1997 book The Feminist
Poetry
Movement
prom-
ises the kind of
in-depth
historical
survey
of
poetry's
relation to the
women's liberation movement that Keller's
generic survey
does 'not
attempt. Opening
with a
lively
and informative
portrait
of the roots
of the feminist
poetry
movement,
the introduction
provides
an in-
teresting
sketch of the life of the movement from the 1970s to the
1990s. The
remaining
five
chapters provide helpful
close
readings
of
poems by
a number of well-known feminist
poets-June
Jordan,
Judy
Grahn,
Joy Harjo,
and Gloria Anzaldua-as well as
by
two
poets,
Minnie Bruce Pratt and Irena
Klepfisz,
whose work is
only
now
beginning
to receive the wide critical attention it deserves. One
of the most
powerful arguments
Whitehead makes in this book is for
expanding
the definition of a "feminist
avant-garde"
so that it can
encompass
as
"experimental"
those formal
strategies emerging
in
work
by racially
and
ethnically
marginalized
poets.
In
exciting
read-
ings
of
poetry by
Irena
Klepfisz
and Gloria
Anzaldua,
she
pays
heed
to the
"transgression,
or innovation" of their
work,
arguing
that we
must understand "survival" as it own "form"
(113).
In
making
this
argument,
she draws on the work of cultural critic Maria
Damon,
whose book The Dark End
of
the Street:
Margins
in American
Vanguard
Poetry powerfully
redefines the
"avant-garde"
to
encompass
formal
innovations
emerging
out of the extreme
experiences
of the
"guer-
656 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E RAT U R E
rilla verbalists"
(Damon's
phrase)
who inhabit "the front
lines,
or
social
margins"
of our culture and who "must
challenge
established
literary
conventions in order
simply
to write"
(118-19).
In this
way,
Whitehead's book is
truly
the
catalyst
that she wants it to
be,
point-
ing
the
way
to a future criticism that will more
fully
historicize,
an-
alyze,
and
energize
the work of women
poets
and the feminist
movement.
Whitehead is
sharply
critical of feminist
literary
histories that
pursue
a "women's
tradition,"
seek to heal "the
split
self,"
or fail to
pay
heed to the
powerful shaping
forces of the feminist collective.
As a corrective to such
histories,
she
proposes
to write an account of
contemporary
women's
poetry
that is
"grounded
in a sociohistori-
cal
approach
to the women's movement-to its numerous
players,
to evolutions in its
direction(s),
and to different claims for its value"
(52).
Her introduction
suggests
the usefulness for such a
project
of
the
concept
of the feminist
counterpublic sphere
as
developed by
such theorists as Rita Felski. A "feminist
counter-public," according
to
Felski,
would stand in
opposition
to the
larger public sphere,
while
establishing
its own shared values and
serving
as a
space
for
rational
conflict, debate, and,
hopefully,
consensus. To use such a
model for
investigating
the
range
of feminist
poetic
communities
would
require
a sustained critical focus on issues of
equality,
access,
distribution,
and
reception.
For such a critical model to
succeed,
analyses
of collective
strategies
and interventions would need to re-
place
more conventional author-based criticism
(focused
on an in-
dividual
poet's
career)
or
poem-based
criticism
(granting autonomy
to
poems
and
reading
them in isolation from their social
texts).
Whitehead's
introductory
first
chapter suggests
the rich
potential
of
this critical model for a feminist
literary history,
but the author-
based
chapters
(focused
in all but one case on a
single poet's
career)
cannot do the kind of
sociological
work she wants them to do. Al-
though
her close
readings
of
poems
are
fine, detailed,
intelligent
work,
they
are seldom ventilated
by
material from the
larger politi-
cal or sociocultural
(that is,
"nonliterary")
context.
Feminist
poetry obviously
did not
emerge
full-blown in the 1970s
as a radical
departure
from all else that was
happening
in American
poetry.
Whitehead
opens
her
impressive
and ambitious first
chap-
ter,
"The Life of the
Movement,"
by pointing
out some of the femi-
C R 0 W N * 657
nist
poetry
movement's roots in the countercultural
poetries
of "the
explosive
1960s"
(3).
If a feminist
poetics
is
unavoidably
instrumen-
talist-always viewing poetry
as a
potential
tool for
implementing
urgently
needed social and cultural
change-women poets
were not
very choosy,
at least at the
beginning,
about where
they
borrowed
their tools.
According
to
Whitehead,
feminist
poets
took from the
antiestablishment
poetics
of the Black Mountain school a
strong
sense of the
fluidity
and
possibility
available in
"open
form"
(and,
one
might
add,
a lesson in the
community-building power
of
poetic
manifestos).
Like the confessional
poets, they
dared to break down
boundaries between life and
art,
releasing
"the vital
energies
of re-
lentless
introspection
and
honesty"
(5).
From the male-dominated
"hip
counterculture" of the
Beats,
women
poets
took an
"emphasis
on
poetry performance"
and a new awareness of "the
public
role
po-
etry
could
play"
(5).
Politically visionary
antiwar
poets, including
the
Deep Imagists, provided
feminist
poets
with a means of
forging
links between the
deepest
realms of a
solitary
self and the
agency
and resistance available to a collective
understanding
of self. This is
a
crucially important
section,
but it could have been more
compre-
hensive-Whitehead here
overlooks,
for
example,
feminism's debt
to a 1960s "black aesthetic."
Having
examined the "roots" of the feminist
poetry
movement,
Whitehead
proceeds
to consider the conditions of its
emergence
within feminist
workshops, cooperatives,
rallies,
and
support groups.
Here she
usefully
connects the feminist
technique
of "consciousness
raising"
with
poetic
creation,
particularly
with confessional
poetry's
often violent
personal expressions
of
pain
and
anger.
This raises the
interesting question
of the extent to which
consciousness-raising
as
a formal
technique
is linked to women's
public poetry readings
and
to
poetic techniques
in feminist
poetry, although
this is not a vein of
thinking
that Whitehead
pursues
with
any
zeal in the
following
chapters.
The most
significant piece
of
theorizing
and research in the book
is a
section,
"The Feminist Press and
Poetry
as the Medium of the
Movement,"
in which Whitehead documents how
poetry
"became a
dominant mode of
expression
for thousands of women across the
country"
as alternative feminist
publishing
venues
began
to flour-
ish,
if
only
in the form of a
"mimeograph
machine on the kitchen
658
-
C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E
table"
(18-19).
Many began
as
"self-publishing
ventures"-the
lesbian-run Out and Out
Books;
Alta's Shameless
Hussy
Press;
Elsa
Gidlow's Druid
Heights
Books,
and the Best Friends
Poetry
Collec-
tive based in
Albuquerque. Poetry workshops, cooperatives,
and
"support groups"
(for
example,
the Black Maria Collective in Chi-
cago) sprang up
around the
country.
This section is full of fascinat-
ing
historical context and
lively
anecdotes,
including
an
excerpt
from Adrienne Rich's
acceptance
of the 1974 National Book Award
for
Diving
into the Wreck: she
accepted
the award
together
with
"conominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker ... in the name of all
the women whose voices have
gone
and still
go
unheard in a
patri-
archal world"
(20).
Whitehead notes some of the
poems
that were
early
favorites with audiences
(Judy
Grahn's "A Woman Is
Talking
to Death" and
June
Jordan's
jazz-inspired "Getting
Down to Get
Over: Dedicated to
My
Mother")
and which lines from
poems
were
reprinted
on feminist
posters
and buttons.
Relying
on articles from
women's
journals
and
newspapers
of the
period
and on the recol-
lections of women
poets
and
publishers
in
interviews,
Whitehead
pieces together
an
engaging portrait
of
poetry's
various functions
within the feminist movement. One of its most
important
functions
was to
challenge
a
predominantly
white, middle-class,
liberal femi-
nism to
recognize
the often
painfully
obscured differences of
race,
class,
and sexual
preference.
In the 1980s a whole
range
of multi-
genre anthologies
of women's
writing appeared,
in which
poems by
women of color were
among
the most forceful and effective wake-
up
calls for feminism.
The
urgent
and
growing
need for feminist
poets
to find
ways
of
"voicing
difference"
(a
phrase
that at one
point
Whitehead consid-
ered
making part
of the book's
title)
leads Whitehead to conclude
her introduction
by suggesting
the
poetic
and
political efficacy
of
what she terms a "coalitional voice." The rest of her book tries to es-
tablish,
through
close
readings
of individual
poems
and
analyses
of
poetic
careers,
what a
poetics
of coalition
might
look like.
Defining
"coalition" as "a
temporary,
or at least an
always potentially
shift-
ing,
association of various women
and/or
women's
groups,"
Whitehead
argues
that "it is
only
in
speaking
out of the
integrity
of
her own
personal experience
that the feminist
poet
establishes her
relationship
to the
community"
(38).
The insistence here on a
per-
C R O W N * 659
sonal
speaking
"voice" and its
"integrity"
strikes me as
odd,
espe-
cially given
Whitehead's own earlier attack on critics who claim the
healing
of the
"split
self" as the
therapeutic
aim of feminist
poetry.
I
cannot find
compelling
a critical stance that limits
poets
to
only
one
way
of
participating
in a feminist
politics
or the
public sphere.
Moreover,
Whitehead risks
suggesting
that
only
those
poems
that
achieve a "coalitional voice" on her terms are
truly
feminist
(al-
though
I do not believe that is her
intention).
The real
danger,
how-
ever, is that this
narrowly
defined "coalitional voice" will become
precisely
the kind of
teleology
and
orthodoxy
from which women
poets
have tried to
escape
in the first
place.
Because there is little sense of the tensions
among poets
and
within
communities,
the
only
real tension at work in Whitehead's
idea of coalition is between the
poet's personal history
and the
larger pressures
of
history.
Each of Whitehead's
subsequent chap-
ters examines a woman
poet's
career and the
development
of her
"voice,"
and each
chapter
ends
up telling
the same
story
of
the
poet's
"evolution into coalitional
voice,"
in which she
adopts
certain
poetic strategies
and
drops
them in a certain order
(173).
Thus
Whitehead claims that all of these feminist
poets "begin
with their
most
urgent
need-for self-definition-and move outward to resist
form,
genre,
and
linguistic
conventions and
thereby
to
challenge
readers"
(115).
In each
case,
the
fledgling
feminist
poet
takes her
first
step
when,
like
Joy Harjo,
she
begins "developing
a
subjective
presence"
(172) or,
like Anzaldua and
Klepfisz,
she feels the "need
to define a woman-self"
(115). Next,
the
poet
desires "to deal with
her own
experience
and
simultaneously
to interact
with,
to em-
power,
her
communities";
thus she
may experiment
with
genre-
bending by mixing third-person
narratives,
for
example,
with
highly
personal lyrics
(173).
Any
movement
beyond
this
point
to achieve a
"coalitional voice"
(the
effective
blending
of
subjective
and collec-
tive
voice)
requires, according
to
Whitehead,
that the
poets
"return to
the
personal
to assert their identities even more
strongly"
(42).
Whitehead's call for a feminist criticism
fully
attuned to the com-
plex
networks of
institutions,
social
practices,
and beliefs in which
poetry
is
always
embedded is commendable. But I
worry
that her
argument
about the "evolution of voice" in feminist
poetry, espe-
cially
in its insistence on a
final,
inward turn to the
highly personal
660 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E
lyric subject,
ends
up imposing
a
uniformity
of
poetic practice
on an
actually very
diverse
group
of
important
feminist
poets.
Is the re-
verse scenario-a
young
feminist
poet identifying
her first and
"most
urgent
need" as resistance to conventional form and to "sub-
jective voice"-really
so
unimaginable?
H.D.'s
early poems
were
often
quite self-obliterating,
and Susan Howe
began
her
poetic
ca-
reer in the 1970s with
poems
calculated
precisely
to resist
subjective
presence,
if not "voice." It
may
well be that the
pattern
Whitehead
describes is the one most
prevalent among
women whose
poetic
ca-
reers
began
in the
1970s,
due to
pressing
historical, cultural,
and
po-
litical circumstances. But I
suspect
that the narrowness of White-
head's definition of the "coalitional voice"
prevents
her from
considering
feminist
poetic writing
that would extend and chal-
lenge
her own
analysis
of liberal feminism's
bourgeois subject,
of
the limitations of the voice-based
expressive lyric,
and of the insti-
tutional
pressures
on
contemporary
American
poetry.
If "survival"
is itself a formal
construct,
as Whitehead so
provocatively suggests,
then
why
does she overlook
entirely
the richness of a
poetic
com-
munity
like the one that
developed
in the 1980s around
HOW(ever),
a
journal
of feminist
experimental writing
edited
by
the
poet
Kath-
leen Fraser? This
journal
was
clearly
a
nurturing
feminist
space,
one
that
many
women have since credited with their
poetic
survival. In-
deed,
even a brief
glance
at Fraser's
decidedly
feminist
poetic
career
would have
challenged many
of Whitehead's
assumptions
about
poetic
voice. All these reservations
aside,
The Feminist
Poetry
Move-
ment stands as a
highly original
and
tremendously important
con-
tribution to
poetry
studies,
in which Whitehead
points
the
way
to-
ward a whole new feminist
poetry
criticism to come.
In
Dwelling
in
Possibility:
Women Poets and Critics on
Poetry,
editors
Yopie
Prins and Maeera Shreiber intended to
compile
a volume that
would
open
a "conversation between critics and
poets
about the in-
terplay
of
gender
and
genre
in
poetry"
(1).
In
doing
so,
they
have
also
put together
a book that situates women's
poetry
within a
range
of cultural contexts and
traditions,
revealing
that
generic displace-
ments are often consonant with sociocultural dislocations. The
pow-
erful
insight
of this
370-page
collection of women's
writing
is that
the
participation
of women
poets
in the
public sphere
cannot be
measured
adequately
unless feminist
genre theory
learns how to
CRO W N * 661
"open
the borders"-to
recognize
how
generic hybridity
has
helped
to define cultural and
political
movements and to build connections
between academics and other
communities,
as the book itself exem-
plifies. Playing
with the famous Dickinson
lyric
that
slyly
substi-
tutes the word
"Possibility"
for a structure not
quite adequately
named
"Poetry"
("I
dwell in
Possibility-
/
A fairer House than
Prose-"),
the editors seek to construct a feminist
poetry
criticism
with
"many
windows and doors"
(1).
In an
effort,
perhaps,
to reas-
sure readers who
might
balk at
opening yet
another feminist an-
thology governed by
a
metaphor
of "home" or
"dwelling,"
the edi-
tors
immediately
"reclaim the
wayward etymology
of
'dwelling'
not as a
hypothetical
house to inhabit but as a verb that also means
to
go astray, leading
us
away
and
unpredictably
elsewhere"
(1).
Thus the editors
pay special
attention to border
crossings,
whether
national, ethnic, sexual, formal,
or
aesthetic,
and
they
consider all
the contributions to the volume-from
poems
to academic
prose
to
"meditations" on
gender
and
genre-to
be
"essays,"
in the sense of
initial,
tentative tests of these borders.
Assembling
the volume
by principles
of
contiguity
rather than
continuity,
the editors have ordered the
essays
not
chronologically
but
according
to four
general
rubrics that
they
see as
particularly
germane
at this moment in feminist
literary history.
These rubrics
are
paired, essentially dividing
the book in half: the first two sec-
tions offer theoretical
investigations
of the
poetic "subject"
and
"voice,"
whereas the final two sections address
questions
of
form,
literary history,
and revisionist
poetics,
with a focus on women
poets'
transformations of classical and biblical texts. In addition to
its focus on
gender
and
genre,
the book confronts
questions
of
sig-
nature,
authorship,
and
poetic production,
as well as the textual
concerns of
manuscript editing
and
preservation.
One of the
really
difficult
questions
now
facing poetry
and
theory,
as the title of the book's first section
announces,
is "the
Subject."
Be-
cause feminists must
grapple
with the
powerful
and
popular
forces
of
narrative,
history,
and
politics, they
often seek to "authorize" or
empower
a "realist" female
subject
to
participate
in these
public
realms. But feminists also want to take hold of the
power
available
in
poetry's fragmented, disruptive,
and sometimes
destabilizing
language, capacities
often connected with a
"postmodern"
ques-
662 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E
tioning
of
agency
and
identity.
Each contributor to this first section
places strategic emphasis
on one or the other of these
approaches
to
poetic subjectivity.
For Susan Stanford
Friedman,
the
emphasis
is on
how women
poets
have
managed
to
develop
a
strong,
stable female
subjectivity
within a
genre
and tradition hostile to their
participa-
tion and subversive of women's
agency.
Friedman's
essay,
"When a
'Long'
Poem Is a
'Big'
Poem:
Self-Authorizing Strategies
in
Women's
Twentieth-Century 'Long
Poems,"'
rapidly
tours some re-
cent
long poems by
women,
and her
survey
of the field reinforces
Keller's
argument
in Forms
of Expansion
about the
exciting
work
being
done in this area. She launches a
"perverse
attack" on the
generic
term
"long poem"
because its
neutrality
obscures the extent
to which the
genre
has been
inhospitable
and
incredibly alienating
to women
writers,
erecting
"a wall to
keep
women outside"
(13, 16).
Friedman
points
out that the
epic,
for
example,
has been "the
pre-
eminent
poetic genre
of the
public sphere
from which women have
been excluded"
(15).
Although
there is no doubt that the four
poets
Friedman considers-Mina
Loy,
Alicia
Ostriker,
Judy
Grahn,
and
Betsy Warland-engage
in the feminization of a form
they perceive
as
highly
masculinist,
Friedman
may
be in
danger
of
overstating
her
case
by painting
such a dire
picture
of the
long poem
as a
"preemi-
nently
masculine discourse"
(15).
As Keller indicates in Forms
of
Ex-
pansion,
several
aspects
of the
genre
of the
"long poem"
(its
"icono-
clasm,"
for
example) might
be
especially
attractive and
inviting
to
women
poets.
Indeed,
some women
poets may
work in
"epic"
forms without
experiencing
them as
prohibitively
masculinist con-
structs. Sharon
Doubiago,
for
example,
first associated an
epic
sen-
sibility
with what she saw as the
empowering,
"feminine"
writing
of H.D. and
James Joyce.2
Diana Henderson's
essay,
"Female Power and the Devaluation of
Renaissance Love
Lyrics,"
is likewise concerned with the
ability
of
2. Consider
Doubiago's
comments
during
a roundtable
conversation,
"The
Contempo-
rary Long
Poem: Feminist Intersections and
Experiments,"
held at the 1997 MLA Con-
vention:
"Open, large expansive
forms are feminine and
female,"
said
Doubiago, "very
freeing
and
liberating,
and those were the
poems
I read when I first
began.
Helen in
Egypt
was the first
poem
I ever
read,
literally.
But I never used the word
'epic.'
That would have
been
impossible
because I didn't think that
way, heroically"
(521). A
transcript
of this con-
versation
appears
in Women's Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Journal
28
(1998): 507-36.
C R O W N * 663
women writers to authorize an
"overtly
female voice"
(59).
A
prob-
lem of textual
scholarship
arises,
however:
many
Renaissance
women (and men)
used
pen
names or wrote as
"Anon,"
so that it is
sometimes
impossible
to
identify
a sonnet as male or female au-
thored. While
complicating questions
of self and
authorship
in this
way,
Henderson's main
object
is to demonstrate that the Renais-
sance
lyric, despite
its
being
the "site of male self-involvement and
domination,"
was also a source for female
"imaginative power"
(59).
The next
essay, by
Karen
Swann,
argues
in the same vein as Fried-
man and
Henderson,
but from an
entirely opposite
direction. In an
elegant
and
thoroughly
contextualized
reading
of William Words-
worth's "The
Thorn,"
Swann shows how a male
poet
finds in a de-
valued,
feminized
genre
(the
lyrical
ballad)
and sensationalist con-
tent
(alleged
maternal
infanticide)
a means of
authorizing
a male
poetic subjectivity
and
establishing
a
relationship
with the
reading
public
that is beneficial to his career.
By
contrast,
the last two
essays
in this section
(both
inflected
by
poststructuralist critiques
of the
subject)
contest such
concepts
of
"self-authorization,"
which
they
understand as fictional constructs.
Both consider Dickinson's textual
practice
as
dismantling
the
very
idea of an authoritative
poetic subject,
and both
very differently
challenge
"the idea of the author
Emily
Dickinson"
(80).
Susan
Howe's brief
"Postscripts
to
Emily
Dickinson,"
in
lamenting
the do-
mestication of a
poet
whose work was
brutally
edited to conform to
gendered
ideas of
authorship,
does not add
very
much to Howe's
extremely important
but
already published
work on Dickinson.
What is new and
illuminating
here is Howe's claim that Dickinson's
"packets
and sets" can "be read as a linked
series,"
which
appears
alongside
Howe's comments on her own work in series and
frag-
ments
(81). (This
expansive
view of Dickinson as a
poet
of serial
form resonates with Friedman's
provocative argument
for the
pos-
sibility
of
"writing very big poems
inside
very
little ones"
[37].)
Vir-
ginia
Jackson's
essay,
"'Faith in
Anatomy': Reading Emily
Dickin-
son,"
also
pays
heed to the
materiality
of Dickinson's
writing,
although
one
gathers
that
Jackson
would view Howe's insistence on
replicating
Dickinson's marks "as she made them" as
having
identi-
fied
"writing
too
transparently
with
personhood-indeed,
of con-
suming writing
as
personhood"
(102).
Reading against
the
grain
of
664 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E
a
subjectivist
tradition, Jackson's
beautifully
conceived
essay
(full
of
elaborate but
convincing
close
readings
of
poems
and
letters)
con-
siders Dickinson's
"explicit analogies
between
writing
and embod-
iment,"
asking
the
question,
"How do
poems
come to be read as
per-
sons?"
(89).
The contributors to the book's second
section,
"The Voice in
Question,"
are
similarly
divided,
focusing
either on the woman
poet's "finding"
or
"coming"
to her own voice after she has been
previously
silenced
or,
conversely,
on the woman
poet's
deliberate
refusal of the
singular lyric
"I" in order to make audible the extent
to which voices
speak
us. On the one hand is an ownable voice that
is
simultaneously personal
and collective
(much
like Whitehead's
"coalitional
voice").
Joy Harjo
writes about
searching
for "a cohe-
sive voice"
(127),
and Rita Dove
similarly
describes her movement
through
the voices and
language
of others "to find
[her] voice,"
even
if it is
nothing
more than a
built-up "myth
of
herself,
her own
voice,
as a
mystery"
(112).
The
poet
and critic M. Nourbese
Philip,
on the
other
hand,
explodes
or
implodes
the
singular lyric
voice "into
many
and
several-needing
others to
help
in this
expression
of the
many-voiced
one of one silence"
(121).
By
"messin with the
lyric,"
Philip
intends to
point
out the difficulties that "the
anguish
that is
English presents
for all African Caribbean
people"
(120, 117).
De-
spite
their
differences,
all three of these meditations on
poetry-by
Harjo,
Dove,
and
Philip-call
our attention to the
interweaving
of
dominant and
nonhegemonic
cultural traditions that oversee the
"metamorphosis
from sound to
intelligible
word"
(Philip
125).
Sim-
ilarly, Angela
Bourke's
essay
on an Irish woman's lament
ap-
proaches
the
question
of "voice" in Ireland's "vibrant oral tradi-
tion,"
in which "lament and
lullaby...
are identified with women's
voices"
(132, 133).
Arguing
that each woman's lament is a
pa-
limpsest
of
many
voices and
performance
contexts,
Bourke calls for
publishers,
editors,
and critics to
present
women's oral
poetry
not as
a
literary product
but as
performance
and as a
"communal,
public
ac-
tivity"
(145).
Jayne
Lewis,
following
in this
vein,
reads the
poetry
of
Anne Finch not to recover the female voice of
Augustan England
but
to show how Finch's
poetry engages
and dismantles "the lab-
yrinthine
fictions of
authority,
resemblance,
and
transparency"
that
hold
poetic meaning together
(184).
Romana Huk finds in Stevie
C R 0 W N * 665
Smith's
poems
"an alternative
way
of
discovering
her own
agency
and voice in a
language
that
[Smith],
like Gertrude
Stein,
recognized
to be
'speaking
her"'
(149).
Working
at the crossroads of "an 'his-
toricized
poststructuralism"'
and "a
'gendered
Bakhtinianism,"'
Huk stresses the
multivocality
of
any
utterance,
even in the
lyric,
a
genre
that Bakhtin
famously disparaged
as
"monologic"
(152).
But
Huk reads Smith's
poems
as
heteroglossic thoroughfares
of social
discourse,
not as
expressions
of
self,
so that voice for Smith becomes
"the
site,
always gendered, always historically specific,
at which the
struggles
of
language
take
place"
(153).
"I
aspire
to be broken
up,"
writes
Smith,
and her
poems
are vulnerable to
dislocating
forces of
cultural and national
processes
(154).
Huk
suggests
that this
open-
ness to "swatches of familiar discursive modes"
partly explains
Smith's exile from the feminist modernist canon
(151).
The last two
sections,
"Classical Transformations" and "Biblical
Transformations,"
in
turning
the discussion toward formal tech-
nique
and
literary
influence and
intertextuality,
do not leave behind
these
questions
of
subjectivity
and voice. The first two
essays
ad-
dress
questions
of
poetic
form. Eavan Boland's meditation on her
poem
"The
Journey"
describes a
poetic practice
that
attempts
to
make room for material
usually
left outside the
poem.
Boland de-
sires to
bring
these "outside" elements of form "into some relation
with
[her]
own voice"
(189).
Marilyn
Hacker's
very
different contri-
bution delivers on its
title,
"A Few
Cranky Paragraphs
on Form and
Content." As an
editor,
she is irritated with the
increasing
number
of
young poets
who send her sestinas and sonnets for consideration.
As a
poet,
she is frustrated
by
critics and reviewers who
position
her
work within debates over the
politics
of form (as does Keller's
chap-
ter on Hacker's sonnet
cycle).
She is also
unhappy
with friends and
strangers
alike who remark on her
dazzling
skill with the villanelle
and sestina.
Battling
these
pigeonholing perceptions,
Hacker aims
to resituate her work within a tradition of a
"poetry
of witness" (one
that is
"timely"
and "in-the-news"
[195]).
Hacker's two remarkable
poems,
however,
make this
argument
more
eloquently
than her sev-
eral
cranky paragraphs.
Two
poets preside
over this volume:
standing
beside Dickinson is
the
figure
of
Sappho,
whose work was
similarly fragmented
and
distorted
by
editors. The remainder of the
essays
in this section en-
666 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E
gage
the
poetry
of
Sappho
from a number of different
angles.
In an
important
act of historical
recovery, Kathryn
Gutzwiller looks at
two
nearly forgotten poets
of
antiquity
("Erinna"
and
"Nossis")
who
incorporated Sapphic
themes into their work.
Olga
Broumas
and T.
Begley
offer comments on and sections of their book
Sappho's
Gymnasium,
with
especially noteworthy
comments on the
theory
and
practice
of collaborative
poetic
creation and its
"[e]rasure
of
'ego'
and 'muse"'
(253).
Anne Carson's
essay, "Sappho
Shock,"
of-
fers an intense and
jolting reading
of two
fragments
from
Sappho,
showing
how
"Sappho's
ekstasis does not clear the
stage
at the cen-
ter of her
being"
but instead shocks her into a
plural subjectivity
while
remaining
unclear about
"just
how
many people [Sappho]
imagines
herself to be"
(227).
Yopie
Prins writes an
engaging
sketch
of the career of "Michael
Field,"
the
pen
name of two
women,
"aunt
and
niece,
who lived
together
as a married
couple"
and
published
imitations of
Sappho
(229).
Prins shows how "this
performative
space
between
Sappho's
Greek and Michael Field's
English"
offers
a
"metaphorical
field of lesbian
writing, freely crossing
between
genders
without
crossing
them out
altogether"
(241,251).
The last section of
Dwelling
in
Possibility,
dedicated to "biblical
transformations,"
testifies to the
strong resurgence
of interest
among
women
poets
in
reclaiming
and
revising
a whole
range
of
spiritual
traditions and to the sources of this interest in
experiences
of exile
and
diaspora.
Indeed,
it
may
be no
exaggeration
to
say
that the ris-
ing
tide of
poetry
books and
poetry anthologies organized
around
questions
of
spirituality
constitutes the most
significant
trend in
women's
contemporary poetry
over the last five
years.
The critical
climate, however,
has not been
receptive
to this new
body
of
work,
emerging
as it does in "a time bereft of
vision,"
as Alicia Ostriker has
said,
in which "academic business as usual" consists of "all
head,
no
heart. No soul."3 The
long poem by
Ostriker that
opens
this
section,
"A Meditation in Seven
Days," exposes
the contradictions
facing
a
woman who
(dis)identifies
as
Jewish.
Urging
women to enter the sa-
cred tents of male
spiritual privilege,
Ostriker's characteristic blend
3. Alicia Ostriker made these comments
during
the
plenary
roundtable session
"Poetry,
Feminism(s),
and the Difficult Wor(l)d" at the
April
1997
Rutgers
conference
"Poetry
and
the Public
Sphere."
CRO W N * 667
of wit and exhortation
gives courage: "Everyone
is afraid. Do what
you
fear"
(263).
On
entering
those
tents,
one discovers not
only
the
nakedness of the fathers but the
surprising
existence of the
mothers,
who are no less
powerful
for
having
been
repressed.
Eleanor Wilner
links the idea of
"dwelling
in
possibility"
with "the
indwelling
mercy
of the Shekinah"
(319)
and retells the
story
of Sarah and the
proposed
sacrifice of Isaac in a
poem
that offers the
possibility
of a
yet
unwritten,
but
earth-shatteringly
different,
outcome. Almost in
answer to bell hooks's
contribution,
which calls for an academic
study
of the
poetics
of lamentation in women's
biblically inspired
writing,
Maeera Shreiber considers Adrienne Rich's intertextual ne-
gotiations
with the Book of Lamentations in An Atlas
of
the
Difficult
World.
Examining
the
gendered
codes of the Hebrew tradition of
lament,
Shreiber's fresh and
energetic essay points
out the vexed re-
lation between feminism and
Judaism,
in which "the
authority
in-
forming
Rich's claim to lament is not
only
that of a feminine tradi-
tion of
public mourning
but also that of the
paternal
kind,
as
mediated
by way
of the
culturally
entrenched
image
of the
Jew
as
the feminized other"
(304).
Akasha
(Gloria)
Hull's
essay,
"In Her
Own
Images:
Lucille Clifton and the
Bible,"
draws attention to the
"spiritual
consciousness" of several
contemporary
African Ameri-
can women writers and culls from Clifton's work a selection of
poems
that show how "Clifton succeeds at
transforming
the Bible
from a
patriarchal
to an
Afrocentric, feminist, sexual,
and
broadly
mystical
text"
(293).
The last word in the book
goes
to Rachel Blau
DuPlessis,
whose
polemical essay
"Otherhow (and Permission to
Continue)"
challenges
the idea that a
narrative,
"realist" revisionist
mythmaking-rewriting
biblical stories in conventional forms and
language
but
changing
their content-can
change
the "social and
formal
imbeddings
of
gender"
(328).
For her
long poem, Drafts,
she
takes from the Hebrew midrashic tradition a
"quality
of continuous
linkages
of
interpretation"
that enables
"perpetual dialogue"
and
puts conflicting interpretations
side
by
side
(334-35).
In
introducing
these
books,
I
suggested
that current
investiga-
tions of the intersection of
poetry
and the
public sphere
need to look
closely
at the
powerful
and beneficial
interplay
between
poetry
and
feminist
politics.
These books show us how
poets
and feminist crit-
ics alike are
opening up
new critical and
generic spaces,
within
668 C O N T E M P O R A R Y LI T E R AT U R E
which it
may
be
possible
to revive such "faded terms as
'democracy'
and 'citizen'"
(Shreiber 302),
along
with demode terms such as
"voice" and
"subject." They
show us that we can insist on
"every-
thing possible"
for
poetry
and teach us to be
suspicious
of
generic
definitions and taxonomies
unbefitting
the
urgent
ethical demands
of our era. Both
poetry
and
feminism,
emerging
at
points
of
crisis,
seek to transform the world
by altering
the
very
forms
through
which our culture
apprehends, expresses,
and knows itself. Thus
even in
turning
to the
past, poetry
and feminism
always
reorient to-
ward a
yet unimagined
future,
imagining
new terms for the indi-
vidual's
participation
in
public
life.
Rutgers University