KATHLEEN
CROWN
and thePublicSphere
Poetry,Feminism,
RecentLongPoemsby Women.Chicagoand LonLynnKeller,Formsof Expansion:
don: Universityof ChicagoPress, 1997.xi + 373 pp. $45.00;$18.95paper.
Yopie Prinsand MaeeraShreiber,eds., Dwellingin Possibility:WomenPoetsand
CriticsonPoetry.Ithaca,NY, and London:CornellUniversityPress,1997.x + 373
pp. $49.95;$19.95paper.
Kim Whitehead, TheFeministPoetryMovement.Jackson:University Press of
Mississippi,1996.xxiii + 247 pp. $45.00;$18.00paper.
oetry has enjoyed something of a rebirth in the public
sphere over the past ten years, emerging in new locationscommunity 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 critics 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-lyricsubjectivity, 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 "politics of form" versus a politics of social content or context? These
critical challenges, which threaten to deepen the already wide fissures 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
op
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sense among both poets and critics of the irrelevance of drawing distinctions between "critical"and "poetic"writing. New criticalspaces
for understanding the resurgence of public poetries are urgently
needed.
One perspective for understanding the cultural importance of poetry as a public discourse is feminist criticism, which through its interdisciplinary 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 particularly decisive entry of poetry into the public domain. They also offer
an opportunity for estimating poetry's past and potential contributions 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 institutions. One of the most difficult issues that has engaged feminist critics is how to balance the ideals of identity politics with efforts to create a multicultural, multiethnic feminism that can speak across and
between competing affiliations and hybrid locations. The poet Adrienne Rich gave powerful voice to this ethical and artistic responsibility 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 something 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 academic readers who view the critical economy as operating on prin1. These books include Cynthia Franklin's Writing Women's Communities:The Politics
and Poetics of ContemporaryMulti-Genre Anthologies (U of Wisconsin P, 1997) and Carol
Muske's Womenand Poetry:Truth,Autobiography,and the Shapeof the Self (U of Michigan P,
1997), which looks at this same period from the enlivening perspective of a poet-critic.
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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 remaining open to "everything possible," after all, is not to say that "anything 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 widening 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 Ostriker's work next to that of Susan Howe. In marking these differences and making these connections, feminist critics are showing
themselves to be especially alert to a whole range of formal, aesthetic, and political practices, recognizing and valuing their varied
potential for cultural critique. At a time when some of our most influential poetry critics seem bent on fostering divisiveness by insisting on a purely formalist vision of poetic value, relegating political
poems to the status of "victim art" or narrowly restricting the definition of what constitutes a poetic avant-garde or "experiment,"this
new body of feminist poetry criticism is refreshingly capacious. Together these books offer a powerful testimony to contemporary poetry'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 Formsof Expansion:RecentLongPoemsby 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 contemporary writing in extended poetic forms. One gauge of poetry's intimate 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 fascinating and richly detailed readings of a wide range of long poems,
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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 experience, 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" necessary 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 influence 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 questions of genre theory and literary history, while suggesting some institutional and historical contexts for the resurgence of women's
long poems. Thus integrating formal and generic analyses with cultural and historical readings, Keller provides an engaging and much
needed analysis of gender's intersection with diverse, though usually 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 majorpoems in the
field, even in the contemporary context, are by male poets. Keller's
piercing review of the critical record demonstrates that this perception 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 hybridity or nontraditional themes. By redefining the genre, Formsof Expansionbecomes the first full-length critical discussion of the long
poem to pay substantial attention to women poets and even to acknowledge long poems by women writers of color.
For the purposes of her investigation, Kellerdefines the long poem
broadly as any "book-length"poem. In doing so, she "encourage[s]
... a book-based approach to contemporary poetry generally," contributingpowerfully to a growing criticalturn away from the isolated
and easily anthologized expressive lyric and toward compositional
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and criticalapproaches 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
countertraditionnor to develop a feminist counteraesthetic;instead,
she surveys the genre in a way that "redressesimbalancesin previous
criticism,"compensating for postwar literaryhistories that obscure or
render invisible long poems by contemporary women and their female 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 precisely its critical eclecticism. Following the feminist theorist Rita Felski, she clearly rejects the idea of a single, identifiably feminist aesthetic 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 pentameter sonnet and the conservatism of the Reagan-Bush years (no
matter how correct her assessment) may fail to pay sufficient attention to how deeply our formal choices are embedded in and informed by ideological choices, often with very real political consequences. Other dangers loom. The critic may trade passionate
partisanship of a cherished poetry community for a lackluster, "objective" 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 poetries, so that she ends up far more convincing about one kind of poetic innovation than another. Fortunately, these are not stumbling
blocks for Keller, who negotiates this criticalminefield with tremendous success. Perhaps more discussion of the ideological dimensions of formal choices could have been achieved by longer transitional sections connecting the chapters on individual poets. It is not
altogether clear, for example, how to gauge the relation between poetic experimentation and social marginalization in poets as different
as Susan Howe and Rita Dove, both of whom contend with questions of historical "witness." But the critical readings-never scientifically or neutrally "descriptive"-are all articulate, passionate,
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and compelling. Keller does not merely argue for a critical approach
able to employ different reading strategies for different texts; she
demonstratesthe 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 impressive close readings of these often quite difficult texts, Formsof Expansionfeels weighty, densely compressed, and richly woven. Each
chapter is attuned simultaneously to the poet's negotiations with received traditions and particular literary antecedents, to her innovations 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 tendency 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 differences that can separate women. Unlike those historians, Keller rejects 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 FeministMeasures:
Soundingsin Poetryand 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 anthology, sometimes forcibly, brings into conversation poets and critics often perceived as having little to say to one another. Formsof Expansionbenefits from and continues this crucially important work.
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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 feminism. This narrative begins with the feminist movement's early interest in the concept of androgyny in the 1970s (Doubiago), which
was to be criticized later in that decade and replaced with gynocentric perspectives, including separatist politics within the lesbian liberation movement (Grahn). Next comes the locational politics of
1980s feminism, in which growing attention was paid to the intersections 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 "radicalartifice" (to borrow a term of MarjoriePerloff's):a "new formalist"impulse 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 transformative poetics out of such structures as the sonnet, villanelle, or sestina, contaminated and commodified as they are by the values of the
dominant culture (Dahlen and DuPlessis). Keller'sbook offers a way
out of this seeming impasse. Without obscuring or denying the different valences and values of each poetics, Keller lifts poetry criticism out of its tiresome and repetitious debates about whose work
really "counts" as important cultural critique, asking instead what
kindof 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 Doubiago'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 grappling with dominant traditions of the long poem. To describe
women poets' literary relationships with their male and female literary predecessors, Keller draws on metaphors used by the poets
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themselves, which can be familial, spiritual, or erotic, even if parodically 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 national 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 complementary 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 perspective, for example. Keller points out that both gestures can be problematic 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 colluding 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 contrast, Grahn identifies and engages with an exclusively lesbian poetic 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 valuable "butch-femme literary ancestry" (68). Whereas Doubiago attempts to speak from within marginalized and often painfully privatized spaces, Grahn aggressively moves the margins to the center,
confidently assuming an "eager politically conscious community already in existence though insufficiently voiced" (100).The result, according 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 little space, for example, to investigating Doubiago's indebtedness to
female precursors, and she seems at first to accept at face value
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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 connection to the extent that it is developed in the poem," suggesting
that "[a]n essay parallel to this one might compare the narrator'srelation to the mothers with Doubiago's relation to her most significant female literary predecessor, H.D." (314n4). Likewise, Keller is
aware that Grahn's poem "everywhere reflects the impact of maledominated 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 Formsof Expansion productively points the way for future feminist readings of
women's long poems.
Having examined two instances of women's appropriations of the
"epic,"Kellermoves on to consider women's use of "lyricsequences."
She pairs a chapter on Rita Dove's Thomasand Beulahand Brenda
Marie Osbey's DesperateCircumstance,DangerousWoman(both historically based "testifying" poems) with a chapter on erotic desire
and lyric subjectivity in Marilyn Hacker's sonnet cycle, Love,Death,
and theChangingof theSeasons.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
particularthemes 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 poetic techniques. The poet who speaks to or for a particular community may experience her "representativeness"not only as empowering 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 suggests "the importance of readers' recognizing ethnic traditions and
of their possessing specific bodies of historical and cultural knowledge" (141). Despite the shared "testifying" nature of Dove's and
Osbey's work, which emphasizes local history and family narratives, Keller perceives two very different methods of negotiating individual 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. Influential 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 prevent the poet from grappling with crucial political issues. These criticisms persist despite the fact that Love,Death,and theChangingof the
Seasonstakes up an "outlaw" relation to the Petrarchanand Shakespearean poetic models, creating according to Keller "almost exclusively 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 Language writing, who are suspicious of the sonnet's highly codified
lyric subject and advocate a poetics of fragmentation that would disperse or subvert its influence. Keller would (somewhat dangerously) demur, and she argues forcefully in these chapters that
"avant-garde" poets do not "have exclusive claims to political engagement" (184). In making this argument, Keller does not deny the
operation of what has been called "personal taste." She notes, for example, her own preference for Dove's "metaphoricaland imagistic
density" over Osbey's "more prosaic idiomatic lines" (143) and
seems more receptive to DuPlessis's use of "empirical data perceived in the external world" than to Dahlen's stream of "dictation
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from her unconscious" (243). But Keller never allows debates over
form to be reduced to a question of "taste,"which is always understood as the product of historical and cultural meanings and locations, and she keeps a clear focus on the political and ideological effects of the wide range of poetic strategies used by women poets.
In the final two chapters, Keller turns away from a poetry of personal identity, family narrative, and conventional forms to consider
work with a very different texture: the provocatively "experimental" serial poems of Susan Howe, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Beverly Dahlen. Continuing to argue that "the Language movement's
experiments do not necessarilydisrupt 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 "unconventional arrangement" between Jonathan Swift and "Stella" (his
secretary, house manager, and nurse) is mirrored by her unconventional 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 influence on both poets. In this work, "deliberate, politicized reflections
on and of gender" also recognize and interrogate the relation between 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 eccentric methods" that "succeed in exploding inherited restrictions/
inscriptions of gender" (301).These methods include complex mathematical structures, talismanic language, hieroglyphic punctuation,
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and instances of breaking out of what DuPlessis herself terms the
"lyricruck" (288). Keller manages to showcase the power of this formally experimental poetry-passionately and articulately defending 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
Formsof Expansionas 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 TheFeministPoetryMovementpromises 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 interesting 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 readings 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 TheDarkEndof the Street:Marginsin AmericanVanguard
Poetrypowerfully redefines the "avant-garde"to encompass formal
innovations emerging out of the extreme experiences of the "guer-
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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, pointing the way to a future criticism that will more fully historicize, analyze, 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 sociohistorical 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 replace more conventional author-based criticism (focused on an individual 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 authorbased 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. Although her close readings of poems are fine, detailed, intelligent
work, they are seldom ventilated by material from the larger political 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 chapter, "The Life of the Movement," by pointing out some of the femi-
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nist poetry movement's roots in the countercultural poetries of "the
explosive 1960s" (3). If a feminist poetics is unavoidably instrumentalist-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 relentless 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 poetry 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 comprehensive-Whitehead here overlooks, for example, feminism's debt
to a 1960s "blackaesthetic."
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, particularlywith 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 "becamea
dominant mode of expression for thousands of women across the
country" as alternative feminist publishing venues began to flourish, if only in the form of a "mimeograph machine on the kitchen
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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 Collective based in Albuquerque. Poetry workshops, cooperatives, and
"support groups" (for example, the Black Maria Collective in Chicago) sprang up around the country. This section is full of fascinating 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 patriarchal 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 recollections 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 feminism to recognize the often painfully obscured differences of race,
class, and sexual preference. In the 1980s a whole range of multigenre anthologies of women's writing appeared, in which poems by
women of color were among the most forceful and effective wakeup calls for feminism.
The urgent and growing need for feminist poets to find ways of
"voicing difference" (a phrase that at one point Whitehead considered 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 "coalitionalvoice." The rest of her book tries to establish, 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 shifting, 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-
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sonal speaking "voice" and its "integrity" strikes me as odd, especially 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 (although I do not believe that is her intention). The real danger, however, 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 chapters 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 empower, her communities"; thus she may experiment with genrebending 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 collective voice) requires,according to Whitehead, that the poets "returnto
the personal to assert their identities even more strongly" (42).
Whitehead's call for a feminist criticism fully attuned to the complex 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, especially in its insistence on a final, inward turn to the highly personal
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lyric subject, ends up imposing a uniformity of poetic practice on an
actually very diverse group of important feminist poets. Is the reverse scenario-a young feminist poet identifying her first and
"most urgent need" as resistance to conventional form and to "subjective voice"-really so unimaginable? H.D.'s early poems were
often quite self-obliterating, and Susan Howe began her poetic career 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 careers began in the 1970s, due to pressing historical, cultural, and political circumstances. But I suspect that the narrowness of Whitehead's definition of the "coalitional voice" prevents her from
considering feminist poetic writing that would extend and challenge her own analysis of liberal feminism's bourgeois subject, of
the limitations of the voice-based expressive lyric, and of the institutional 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 community like the one that developed in the 1980s around HOW(ever),
a journal of feminist experimental writing edited by the poet Kathleen Fraser?This journal was clearly a nurturing feminist space, one
that many women have since credited with their poetic survival. Indeed, even a brief glance at Fraser'sdecidedly feminist poetic career
would have challenged many of Whitehead's assumptions about
poetic voice. All these reservations aside, TheFeministPoetryMovement stands as a highly original and tremendously important contribution to poetry studies, in which Whitehead points the way toward a whole new feminist poetry criticism to come.
In Dwellingin Possibility:WomenPoetsand Criticson Poetry,editors
Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiberintended to compile a volume that
would open a "conversation between critics and poets about the interplay 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 displacements are often consonant with sociocultural dislocations. The powerful 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
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"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 exemplifies. Playing with the famous Dickinson lyric that slyly substitutes 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 reassure readers who might balk at opening yet another feminist anthology governed by a metaphor of "home" or "dwelling," the editors 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 sections 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 signature, 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."Because 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-
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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 participation 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 recent long poems by women, and her survey of the field reinforces
Keller's argument in Forms of Expansionabout 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 preeminent 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 "preeminently masculine discourse" (15). As Keller indicates in Formsof Expansion,several aspects of the genre of the "long poem" (its "iconoclasm," 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 constructs. Sharon Doubiago, for example, first associated an epic sensibility with what she saw as the empowering, "feminine" writing
of H.D. and James Joyce.2
Diana Henderson's essay, "FemalePower and the Devaluation of
Renaissance Love Lyrics," is likewise concerned with the ability of
2. Consider Doubiago's comments during a roundtable conversation, "The Contemporary Long Poem: Feminist Intersections and Experiments," held at the 1997 MLA Convention: "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 conversation appears in Women'sStudies:An InterdisciplinaryJournal28 (1998): 507-36.
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663
women writers to authorize an "overtly female voice" (59). A problem 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 authored. While complicating questions of self and authorship in this
way, Henderson's main object is to demonstrate that the Renaissance 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 Friedman and Henderson, but from an entirely opposite direction. In an
elegant and thoroughly contextualized reading of William Wordsworth's "The Thorn," Swann shows how a male poet finds in a devalued, feminized genre (the lyrical ballad) and sensationalist content (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 "Postscriptsto Emily Dickinson," in lamenting the domestication 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 fragments (81). (This expansive view of Dickinson as a poet of serial
form resonates with Friedman's provocative argument for the possibility of "writing very big poems inside very little ones" [37].) Virginia Jackson's essay, "'Faith in Anatomy': Reading Emily Dickinson," also pays heed to the materiality of Dickinson's writing,
although one gathers that Jacksonwould view Howe's insistence on
replicating Dickinson's marks "as she made them" as having identified "writing too transparently with personhood-indeed, of consuming writing as personhood" (102). Reading against the grain of
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a subjectivist tradition, Jackson'sbeautifully conceived essay (full of
elaborate but convincing close readings of poems and letters) considers Dickinson's "explicit analogies between writing and embodiment," asking the question, "How do poems come to be read as persons?" (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 cohesive 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). Despite 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). Similarly, Angela Bourke's essay on an Irish woman's lament approaches the question of "voice" in Ireland's "vibrant oral tradition," in which "lament and lullaby... are identified with women's
voices" (132, 133). Arguing that each woman's lament is a palimpsest 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(145).
Lewis,
tivity"
Jayne
following in this vein, reads the poetry of
Finch
not
to
the
Anne
recover
female voice of Augustan England but
to show how Finch's poetry engages and dismantles "the labyrinthine 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 'historicized 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 openness 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 technique and literary influence and intertextuality, do not leave behind
these questions of subjectivity and voice. The first two essays address 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 desires to bring these "outside" elements of form "into some relation
with [her] own voice" (189). Marilyn Hacker's very different contribution delivers on its title, "A Few Cranky Paragraphson 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 frustratedby critics and reviewers who position her
work within debates over the politics of form (as does Keller's chapter 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 several 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-
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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," offers an intense and jolting reading of two fragments from Sappho,
showing how "Sappho's ekstasisdoes not clear the stage at the center 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 "MichaelField," 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 rising 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 "atime bereft of vision," as Alicia Ostrikerhas
said, in which "academicbusiness as usual" consists of "allhead, 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 sacred tents of male spiritual privilege, Ostriker's characteristicblend
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."
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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 negotiations with the Book of Lamentations in An Atlas of the Difficult
World.Examining the gendered codes of the Hebrew tradition of
lament, Shreiber'sfresh and energetic essay points out the vexed relation between feminism and Judaism, in which "the authority informing Rich's claim to lament is not only that of a feminine tradition 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 American 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 investigations 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 critics alike are opening up new critical and generic spaces, within
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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 "everything 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 toward a yet unimagined future, imagining new terms for the individual's participation in public life.
RutgersUniversity