Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse

Lyric interventions linda a. kinnahan Lyric interventions feminism, exper imental poet ry, and c o n t e m p o r a r...

Author: Linda A. Kinnahan

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Lyric interventions

linda a. kinnahan

Lyric interventions feminism, exper imental poet ry, and c o n t e m p o r a ry d i s c o u r s e University of Iowa Press

iowa c it y

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2004 by the University of Iowa Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Design by Richard Hendel http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The publication of this book was generously supported by the University of Iowa Foundation. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kinnahan, Linda A. (Linda Arbaugh) Lyric interventions: feminism, experimental poetry, and contemporary discourse / by Linda A. Kinnahan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. isbn 0-87745-873-1 (cloth) 1. Feminist poetry, American—History and criticism. 2. American poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. English poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Experimental poetry, American— History and criticism. 5. Experimental poetry, English— History and criticism. 6. Feminism and literature— United States. 7. Feminism and literature—Great Britain. 8. Women and literature—United States. 9. Women and literature—Great Britain. 10. Lyric poetry—History and criticism. I. Title. ps310.f45k56 2004 811⬘.54099287— dc21 2003054892 04 05 06 07 08

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5 4 3 2 1

For Tom and Chloe

Contents Acknowledgments and Permissions ix Introduction xiii 1 Lyric Conversations and Interventions 1 2 Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde: Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser in the Sixties 41 3 “Our Visible Selves”: Visual-Verbal Collaborations in Erica Hunt, Alison Saar, and M. Nourbese Philip 80 4 The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics: A Poetics of Public Discourse in Carol Ann Duffy 132 5 Theory and the Lyric “I”: Feminist Experimentalism in Britain 180 Notes 223 Bibliography 247 Index 265

Acknowledgments and Permissions To my mind, communities make books possible. Writing this book has been less a singular effort than the result of many efforts by many people, and I am grateful for the generosity, enthusiasm, expertise, and goodwill directed toward this project in all of its stages. I want to thank, in particular, all of those scholars working at the interstices of poetry, poetics, and feminism who have directly or indirectly guided me. The scholarship, conversations, and sharing of ideas that characterize this community have been invaluable. As a group, the editorial board and contributors involved with the online journal HOW2 exemplify how a scholarly community might work to enable creative, collaborative thinking, and I thank them all, especially the founding editor Kathleen Fraser. Her commitment to expanding conversations about poetry, gender, and language has had a tangible impact on many scholars and poets, and I feel fortunate to have experienced Kathleen’s gracious willingness to support and engage many levels of conversation. I would also like to thank those scholars who have read part or all of this book at different stages, including Jeanne Heuving, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Cristanne Miller, Lynn Keller, Romana Huk, Terrance Diggory, Stephan Paul Miller, Elisabeth Frost, Cynthia Hogue, Laura Hinton, Alison Marks, Deryn Rees-Jones, and other anonymous readers whose suggestions I value. Numerous colleagues and friends have helped in ways they may not even know, and I especially must thank Dan Watkins, Wallace Watson, Elizabeth Savage, Anne Brannen, and Magali Michael. The graduate students at Duquesne University have been a gift from the moment I stepped on campus twelve years ago, and they have not only tolerated my obsession with poetry and feminism but consistently energized me with their intellectual explorations and open minds. A number of graduate research assistants have labored over arduous tasks with good cheer as I’ve worked on this project, and my thanks, thanks, thanks go to Ellen Smith, Kara Mollis, Mindy Boffemyer, Amy Gallo, Megan Jewell, and Laurie McMillan. The institutional support of Duquesne University enabled me to

conduct the research and writing necessary for this study, especially grants through the Presidential Scholarship Awards and the McAnulty College NEH Awards. Dean Constance Ramirez of the McAnulty College of Liberal Arts and Graduate School has never ﬂagged in her support for my scholarship and teaching. I am deeply appreciative of the work done by the editors and staff of the University of Iowa Press in bringing this project to completion. They have shown patience and humanity as this process has unfolded, and I thank Holly Carver, Charlotte Wright, and Sara Sauers. Prasenjit Gupta deserves an especially heartfelt thanks for his enthusiasm with this project and his help in keeping me sane in the face of deadlines. Mary M. Hill has been amazing as a copyeditor, cleaning up all my messes with her precisely thorough eye and pencil. I’ve been more than lucky to share my life in Pittsburgh with my husband, Tom, and my daughter, Chloe. They keep me grounded and laughing, and I love them dearly. This book is for them. The following chapters, often in different form, have been published previously: Portions of chapter 2 in The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets, ed. Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller (Oronoa, Maine: The National Poetry Foundation, 2001), and HOW 2 1.5 (March 2001); chapter 3 in We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics, ed. Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002); chapter 4 in Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism, ed. James Acheson and Romana Huk (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996); and in Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice, ed. Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones (London: Macmillan Press, 2000); chapter 5 in Contemporary Literature 37.4 (Winter 1996). I am grateful to the editors of these books and journals. Grateful acknowledgment is given to the following for permission to quote from copyrighted works: Excerpts from works by Kathleen Fraser, reprinted by permission of the author: In Deﬁance of the Rains, copyright © 1969; il cuore: the heart, Selected Poems 1970 –1995, copyright © 1997. Excerpts from She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, copyright © 1989 by M. Nourbese Philip, reprinted by permission of the author. x

Acknowledgments

Excerpts from Dry Air, copyright © 1991 by Denise Riley, reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpts from Mop, Mop Georgette, copyright © 1993 by Denise Riley, reprinted by permission of Reality Street Editions. Excerpts from Arcade, copyright © 1996 by Erica Hunt and Alison Saar, reprinted by permission of Kelsey Street Press. Excerpts from works by Carol Ann Duffy, reprinted by permission of Anvil Press: Standing Female Nude, copyright © 1985 by Carol Ann Duffy; Selling Manhattan, copyright © 1987 by Carol Ann Duffy; The Other Country, copyright © 1990 by Carol Ann Duffy; Mean Time, copyright © 1993 by Carol Ann Duffy. Excerpts from The Selected Poems, copyright © 1995, by permission of Sun and Moon Press. Excerpts from The Sway of Precious Demons, copyright © 1990 by Geraldine Monk, by permission of North and South Press.

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Introduction Resistance surely ﬂexes itself linguistically. —Kathleen Fraser, HOW(ever) 3.4

As a reader of the experimental, innovative feminist lyric, I am drawn simultaneously to the texture of linguistic surprise and the risky strategies of social intervention interactively energizing such lyrics as a form of public engagement. All these terms, certainly, are tenuously problematic. What is experimental? public? lyric? feminist? While I can claim no monolithic deﬁnition for any of these terms, their possible permutations and constellations direct and motivate the discussions that follow. The enormity of these concepts weighs upon me as I enter ongoing discussions conducted across various camps for sustained periods of time, diversely focusing on such matters as the marginalization of women poets in literary history and current formulations of poetics; the relationships (or conﬂicts) between feminist and avant-garde practices; the oppositions of experimental and mainstream or expressive poetics; the ostensible extinction of the lyric; the reclaiming of the lyric through problematizing it and/or identifying a new lyric or late lyric; and the cultural labor of poetry within this late capitalist era. Imagining these discussions, and others, as a web of interconnections that can be traversed through multiple and multiplying strands, this study of something called experimental feminist lyric enters the web through a focus on lyric subjectivities that engage distinct social discourses and rhetorics of the self. Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse explores linguistically innovative poetry by contemporary women in North America and Britain that enacts and generates feminist reconsiderations of the lyric subject. The works treated here reanimate the lyric subject in relation to the social rather than removed from it, positing a multiply located “I” as product of social discourse and potential conductor of its change. Contributing to discussions of language-oriented poetries through its focus on women writers and feminist perspectives, this study examines alternatives to the banishment of the personal and of the “I” encouraged by much contemporary avant-garde practice. Signiﬁcantly expanding discussions of in-

novative writing to include British women poets, this study of lyric experimentation encourages attention to cultural contexts of nation, gender, and race as importantly shifting the terms by which the experimental is produced, understood, and deﬁned. The experimental poetics variously identiﬁed within this expanded range allow for reconsiderations of oppositional terms like conventional and experimental or expressive and innovative while nonetheless working to foreground and unsettle identity categories, particularly race, class, and gender, and the scaffolding of their linguistic architectures in examining rhetorics of self. This study focuses upon lyric intervention in distinct but related spheres as they link public and ideological norms of identity. First, lyric innovations with visual and spatial realms of cultural practice and meaning, particularly as they naturalize ideologies of gender and race in North America and the postcolonial legacies of the Caribbean, are investigated in the works of Barbara Guest, Kathleen Fraser, Erica Hunt, and M. Nourbese Philip. Second, experimental engagements with nationalist rhetorics of identity, marking the works of Carol Ann Duffy, Denise Riley, Wendy Mulford, and Geraldine Monk, are explored in relation to contemporary evocations of self in Britain. And third, in discussions of all the poets but particularly attenuated in regard to Guest, Fraser, Riley, Mulford, and Monk, formal experimentation with the lyric “I” is considered through gendered encounters with critical and avantgarde discourses of poetics. Throughout, attention to the lyric subject’s relation to the production of the social body and identity as culturally discursive formations illuminates and challenges how visual and verbal constructs function to make readable the subjectivities historically supporting white, male-centered power, be it power within the world of art, poetry, social locations, or national policy. Contemporary women experimentalists actively exploring the lyric subject from distinctively feminist positions are joined by feminist critical discourse generated from poets themselves and critics identifying, discussing, and theorizing varieties of innovative feminist poetics. Noting the centrality of the “dissemination of ‘the subject’” in studies (from the late eighties and early nineties) of recent poetry, Hank Lazer points to this “pivotal consideration of contemporary American poetry . . . accomplished variously by formal innovation, theoretical argument, and multicultural studies” (223). Feminist perspectives run parallel to, in advance of, or in response to xiv

Introduction

heated debates over the status of the lyric subject during the past twenty years. However, the recognition of feminist perspectives has largely occupied the margins of ongoing discussions of the lyric subject, particularly as they have been formulated around the challenges leveled by poets and critics associated with Language writing (see below). In part, this marginalization developed as conversations about experimental feminist poetics became positioned—and thus recognized—in primary relation to expressive or mainstream feminist poetries.1 At the same time, feminist experimentalists and their critical treatment ﬂuidly converse with ideas clustered around Language writers and the literary narratives charting contemporary avant-garde poetics. Furthering this critical reciprocity encourages a richer, fuller conversation among various camps. The bracketing of feminist thinkers and histories from narratives of language writing has occurred in both overt and more subtle ways.2 The theory-driven discourse typifying male-centered language writing, particularly in its foundational texts, had the effect of privileging discussions conducted in clear relation to contemporary theories of poststructuralism and Marxism. Feminist discourse of the late seventies and eighties occupied a tentative relationship to high-powered displays of theoretical agility, skeptical of the use of the “father’s tools” and the authority invested in theory, replicating hierarchical forms of power. More precisely, many feminists, particularly those involved in gynocritical projects, sought to construct “theory” on different terms, with different language, and in ways framed by gendered materialities. Accusations arose, however, that academic feminism was not sufﬁciently theoretical, and during the eighties, relationships between feminism and theory were debated among feminist critics and explored by feminist poets from myriad angles.3 However, the impression of “real” theory being a masculine domain persists and colors the foundational narratives of language poetry and its engagement with contemporary theory. In a general sense, women’s experimental poetry has often been overlooked as too untheoretically aware or sophisticated. In speciﬁc instances, women’s theorizing about poetry—women’s insertions into conversations about poetics—have been dismissed as insufﬁciently rigorous. Linked to this perception of a lack of theoretical awareness has been a perception of women’s (retrograde) attachment to the personal and to Introduction

xv

the lyric. To some degree, an equation (even unconscious) of lyric emotiveness with a feminized voice still holds sway, as does the formulation of the lyric poet and the “poetess,” a denigration of both lyric practice and women as cultural makers. Indeed, Denise Riley’s work famously drew criticism for registers of lyric voice, emotional expressiveness, and feminine interiority seen (by the critic) as fundamentally at odds with a linguistically alternative poetics (see chapter 4). An anxiety over the “I” rather than a sense of authority in its dismissal informs the work of the women in this study, ampliﬁed in the lines of one of Kathleen Fraser’s poems, referencing “this / lyric forever error.” To be lyrical, in relation to particular avant-garde formulations, is to be feminized, and to retain residual links to identiﬁably lyrical impulses is to be in “forever error.” I think here of Charles Olson’s injunction against the “lyrical interference of the ego” and the ways in which his poetics (so aptly dissected by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and discussed in chapter 2) relies on gendered categories. To be a man is not to be lyrical. Moreover, the lyric has become the province of a particularly feminist expressiveness since the 1960s. Perhaps the resistance to forms of stable identity and to the personal claimed in major expressions of Language poets causes a too-automatic preconception of something called “feminist,” whether experimental or expressive. David Kellogg suggests as much in a 1996 essay on the work of Marjorie Perloff, whose unstinting efforts to advance formally innovative writing have had a tremendous impact on the ﬁeld of contemporary poetry, when he comments that “[o]f late, she seems to have reached the conclusion that opening up the canon to neglected women and minority authors— or even employing gender, race, and ethnicity as major axes of understanding—leads to the exclusion of writers she values” (83). Far from claiming an opposition between feminist and Language debates, I am interested in their overlaps and in how they amplify one another. This interest joins and is sustained by recent feminist critics and poets working to complicate the contours of debate over the lyric “I” through bringing newly acknowledged poetic practices and textual experiments into the conversations. Introducing us to conversations that actually have ensued for quite some time out of the limelight, this critical-poetic work reveals crucial ideas about how women have been positioned and have positioned themselves in relation to the lyric subject. Critically engaging debates about the lyric subject xvi

Introduction

and poetically reconﬁguring lyric practice, a feminist history and praxis intent upon discursively contextualizing the subject emerges. This work intervenes into and expands the terms of the debate set in motion, most prominently, by manifestoes, statements of poetics, and critical commentary on and by the group of poets most closely associated with the historical formation of L⫽A⫽N⫽ G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E (as a discrete set of publications and conversations at a particular moment of history in the seventies) and the more generalized term “Language,” which has come to stand for almost any experimental poetry while still centralizing the ideas of the historically speciﬁc discourse on poetics issuing from a particular group of poets. Current discussions of language-oriented writing often recognize the danger of bracketing a fuller range of poetic practices through an overdetermined use of paradigms and theories derived from L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E, valuable and provocative as those ideas might be. Such efforts extend beyond work on women poets (for example, Aldon Nielson’s or Nathanial MacKay’s work on African American poetics), although the focus on women has valuably opened up the diversity of linguistically innovative poetry. Much recent work on women’s innovative poetry issues from poets themselves, often tracing a poetic genealogy enabling their own poetics that offers new histories and ideas about language, gender, and poetics. These works by poet-critics provide both archive and theory. Kathleen Fraser’s recent collection of essays valuably opens onto gender-inﬂected contexts for the production and reading of poetry, the development of poetry communities, and the dissemination of poetic theory. Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s ongoing engagement with the experimental essay itself becomes occasion for complex considerations of self, subject, gender, and writing. M. Nourbese Philip and Erica Hunt speak to the intersections of gender and race in relation to a politics of innovative writing. Susan Howe’s hybrid essays (what Perloff terms the poessay) continually explore lyric-driven impulses of language utterance. These join other works that expand and complicate notions of avant-garde feminist poetics through disrupting the categories of experimental and conventional. Productive attempts to problematize the mainstream-experimental binary include Lynn Keller’s Forms of Expansion, which looks at the contemporary long poem by women, as well as her recent articles on both mainstream and experimental women poets such as Alison Fuller, RoseIntroduction

xvii

mary Waldrop, and Kathleen Fraser. Lesley Wheeler’s The Poetics of Enclosure seeks to reconsider the (denigrated) relation of lyric poet and woman as she identiﬁes diverse relationships to the lyric tradition explored by women poets from Dickinson to the present day, considering how poets/poems distinctively “work in reference to this . . . mode” (2) in ways that literary criticism has tended to overly simplify and generalize. Since I began writing this book in the early nineties, a number of full treatments of women experimentalists have emerged after a string of male-centered books on language-oriented writing. Elisabeth Frost’s The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry breaks new ground in tracing feminist interventions in twentieth-century avantgarde poetries. Megan Simpson’s study of language theory and feminist writing offers the ﬁrst book-length study of women’s innovative poetry in relation to contemporary theories of language and epistemology, placing gender in the forefront. Ann Vickery’s genealogical study, Leaving Lines of Gender, offers alternative (to customary malecentered) narratives of innovative poetry through archiving and analyzing clusters of feminist activity in writing, reading, and publishing women’s experimental poetry since the 1970s. Most recently, Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue have brought together essays in We Who Love to Be Astonished to offer “for the ﬁrst time a series of critical essays devoted to American women’s postmodern writing, a collection which contiguously places writings about women’s works now well acknowledged alongside writings about women’s works previously overlooked” (“Introduction” 6). The editors of this diversely rich collection, which brings together debates too long separated under the nominal categories of “innovative,” “multicultural,” and “expressive,” see these essays as constituting a needed intervention into discussions of postmodern poetics. Noting that “creative and critical interest in experimental women’s writing is growing,” they claim that “[h]istorically, we have needed a volume that critically evaluates women’s speciﬁc contributions to the burgeoning tradition of postmodern experimentation” (Hinton and Hogue, “Introduction” 6). Evidence of this growing interest and the signiﬁcantly felt need to focus attention on the production and reception of women’s innovative writing includes recent anthology publications and conferences devoted to this cultural formation. The publication of Margaret Sloane’s groundbreaking anthology, Moving Borders, collects works and statexviii

Introduction

ments of poetics by a plethora of contemporary American women to demonstrate the vitality and persistence of innovative experimental traditions. In England, Maggie O’Sullivan’s Out of Everywhere promotes radical innovations in form by North American and British women writing since the 1970s. And, electronically, the journal HOW(2) offers a rich site for women’s innovative writing, visual experimentation, critical scholarship, and hybrid modes of exploring/exploding generic modalities of poetry, criticism, and theory. Resurrecting its earlier project as the print journal HOW(ever), published in the eighties and early nineties, HOW(2) is committed explicitly to a project of intervention into critical and poetic discourse still experienced by many as privileging the words and practices of men. Indeed, intervention is a key thread within these various projects as they seek to articulate new relations of production and reception shaped by feminist proclivities. My choice of poets to include in this discussion is both theoretically tied to issues of intervention and pragmatically motivated by a desire to advance a number of related critical tasks. North American poets Barbara Guest, Kathleen Fraser, Erica Hunt, and M. Nourbese Philip (who is Caribbean Canadian) aid me in thinking through the positioning of women poets and gendermarked subjectivities in relation to homegrown avant-garde poetics and visual experimentation. British poets Carol Ann Duffy, Denise Riley, Wendy Mulford, and Geraldine Monk help me pursue the positioning of women poets and gender-marked subjectivities in relation to nationalist rhetorics of identity and national contexts for deﬁning and producing “experimental” poetries. The critical tasks underlying these chapters (which I will summarize more fully at a later point) include to add to recent and much-needed discussions of women avant-garde poets within a critical discourse largely centered upon men until the past ﬁve or so years; to call attention to innovative women poets advancing a feminist sensibility, many of whom have been ignored even in the recent spate of attention to women experimentalists; to consider a history and conceptual notion of experimental alternative to (although not separate from) the male-centered narratives and theorizations of language writing that have become dominant; and to broaden discussions of women’s innovative poetry to include the British context, a vastly understudied area in poetry studies in America. Though dividing the book between North American and British poets, I hope to suggest both bridges and imporIntroduction

xix

tant national differences between them, keeping in mind that crossAtlantic lines of inﬂuence and activity have vitalized alternative poetic communities on both sides, while a tendency to collapse discussions of British innovative writing within American theorizations of poetics runs the risk of ignoring the distinct national dimensions shaping discursive activity. Chapter 1, “Lyric Conversations and Interventions,” surveys recent discussions of the lyric subject and contemporary lyric practice, considering the relation of these discussions with two concurrent and often overlapping contexts operating since the seventies: the foundational ideas of Language, as a historically speciﬁc group of writers and writings, which serve to banish the “I”; and the formulations of the “I” across different camps of feminist debate, which coincide with divisions between expressive and experimental poetics. While by the late nineties the dominance of Language’s dismissal of the unmediated or essentialist self had developed powerful currency in treatments of contemporary poetry, simultaneous efforts to problematize and complicate earlier stances against the “I” had arisen. Looking at these efforts, chapter 1 insists upon the interventional work of feminist thought and practice within critical conceptualizations of the lyric self, work that has been conducted (like Language) since the seventies but often omitted from the dominant frames for discussion. As a case in point, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the 1980s journal HOW(ever), considering how its project of supporting experimental poetry by women helps reframe the contours of debate over the lyric “I” and contemporary innovative poetry. Chapter 2, “Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant Garde,” turns to the early work of Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser from the sixties, examining how both poets textually and linguistically engage the gender-marked “I.” Their poetic struggles with the lyric reﬂect protofeminist challenges to norms of womanhood and of women’s poetry, enacting formally innovative approaches to reconﬁguring the lyric voice as female. Predating the spate of conversations arising out of Language theorizing, such efforts by women who understood and challenged the uniﬁed voice of lyric in particularly gendered terms offer differently nuanced genealogies of lyric practice in relation to dominant critical discourses, avant-garde discourses, and feminist discourses. Chapter 1 frames these early experiments as incipient feminist interventions into discourses of the poetic and the visual xx

Introduction

marking avant-garde painting and poetics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The lyric subject becomes site for contesting the masculinization of poetic and artistic theory as well as preﬁguring the conﬂicts within feminist poetries over lyric subjectivity that arose in the 1970s and 1980s. In this regard, the chapter explores Guest’s textualization of the speaking “I,” leading to charges of unreadability within critical frames assuming the uniﬁed lyric speaker, and Fraser’s visual experimentation with the page as a way of encouraging new ways to “read” the female “I.” Fraser’s work of the late sixties is read in relation to the visual innovations of artist Joan Mitchell, a New York school painter whose canvases both impressed Fraser and offer an analogue for her own developing sense of graphic and spatial treatments of the page as alternatives to conventions of interior expression. The turn to visual experimentation and to ways of apprehending visual orders of meaning links this chapter to chapter 3, “ ‘Our Visible Selves’: Visual-Verbal Collaborations in Erica Hunt, Alison Saar, and M. Nourbese Philip,” which extends a discussion of the visual to theorizations of race and the role of the specular in constructing racial identity through considering the work of Philip and the collaborative efforts of poet Hunt and artist Saar. Investigating the implications of a culture privileging the visual as a mode of organizing, locating, and shaping the body, these texts speculate upon the production of the visual body to signify racial and gender identities within capitalist and colonialist economies. Philip’s formally radical text, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, insistently considers the visual as a register for linguistic operations of control and power and, through textual attention to visual spheres (including the visual page), reveals processes and systems that involve historical, aesthetic, and scientiﬁc discourses to produce a body comprehensible and, hence, visible within racial codes. Arcade, which includes Hunt’s verbal texts and Saar’s woodcuts, brings together two media to question the role of the visual in assigning racial identity in American culture and its relationship to historical discourses of race. In thinking about the role of the visual in relation to the lyric in both chapters focusing on North American poets, I consider various manifestations and deployments of the visual both within the poem and the social discourses evoked by the verbal-visual collusions. In part, I look at verbal texts working in relation to visual media. For both Fraser and Hunt, varieties of visual media model alternatives to Introduction

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the conventional lyric “I” for expressivity; moreover, the interactions of language and visual media such as bringing together verbal texts and visual texts creates a dynamic between word and image that extends the possibilities for meaning. Importantly, this dynamic moves to explore the function of specularity in constructing social concepts of identity and organizing knowledge. Philip’s work with the visual page reinforces the focus in many of her poems on spatial, visual constructions of public knowledge, power, and readability. For both Hunt and Philip, the readability of race and gender enforced by visual practices and systems of specularity relates to the production of social identity and the social body; they look to the visual to understand the material speciﬁcities of how these get produced and how they are experienced. In this sense, the visual’s role as a social mechanism shaping the body’s movement through public space attends this chapter’s focus on specularization, discursive histories, and the black woman’s body. In the works of Hunt, Saar, and Philip, which explore visual practices and specular systems, the lyric “I” becomes a site of public production of self and a possible site of resistance through engaging those visual practices. The ﬁnal two chapters, focusing on British poets, pursue systematic relationships of public discourse, theoretical discourse, and lyric practice linked to material changes in postempire Britain. Chapter 4, “The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics,” looks at the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy in relation to discourses of immigration, ethnicity, free-market economics, and nationalism in postempire Britain. A Scots-born poet, Duffy tests the concept of experimental through an adherence to relatively regular conventions of prosody and form in the lyric and dramatic monologue that nonetheless interrogate underlying ideologies of those very conventions, particularly through foregrounding the self’s positionality within social discourse. This chapter examines Duffy’s treatment of national identity as a strategically constructed and disseminated rhetoric situated within ideological contexts (particularly relevant to nation, class, gender, race/ ethnicity) and material conditions developing in Britain in recent decades as a result of economic shifts toward free-market embrace, reconsiderations of British identity in the postempire period, patterns of immigration, and reactions to nonwhite immigration. This chapter explores how Duffy’s poetry tactically engages the rhetoric of self xxii

Introduction

emerging from the language of economic individualism and nationalism marking Britain’s postempire shifts. Chapter 5, “Theory and the Lyric ‘I’: Feminist Experimentalism in Britain,” considers the politics of form and genre through looking at the work of three British women poets, Denise Riley, Wendy Mulford, and Geraldine Monk, whose experiments with the lyric investigate discursive formations of self, identity, and experience, including gender and national identity. As necessary context for its study of the lyric within the distinctions of contemporary poetic practice in Britain, this chapter charts the intersection of two understudied areas in American mainstream academic writing: a strain of innovative and alternative poetries developing among small presses and little journals in Britain in the past twenty-ﬁve years and the participation of British feminists in this alternative scene. The British context for such women, both politically and artistically, reveals important appropriations of and reactions to modern theory in their work with language and subjectivity, in their reactions to the masculine domain of British poetic tradition, and in their negotiations with both the socialistmaterialist bent of the British intellectual Left and the capitalist conservatism of the Thatcherite Right and its legacy. The status of the gendered self and its lyric expressions within these contexts and discourses occupies the attention of these three poets, whose work explores the possibility of a poetics derived from encounters between material culture, contemporary theory, and feminist politics.

Introduction

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Lyric interventions

chapter one Lyric Conversations and Interventions In 1983 we felt unfamilied, without a place in which to ﬁnd or assert our own particular hybrids. Unpredictable by deﬁnition, “the new” seemed to have become quickly over-prescriptive in journals shaped by various male-dominant poetics or a feminist editorship whose tastes/politics did not acknowledge much of the poetry we felt to be central to our moment — the continuously indeﬁnable, often “peculiar” writings being pieced together by women refusing the acceptable norms. . . . We were interested in how works were freshly constructed and language reanimated within the experience of “female”-gendered lives. — Kathleen Fraser, “continuous, indeﬁnable”

not random, these crystalline structures, these non-reversible orders, this camera forming tendencies, this edge of greater length, this lyric forever error, this something embarrassingly clear, this language we come up against Upon ﬁrst encountering the poem that these lines conclude, “re: searches” by Kathleen Fraser, I was struck by the phrase “this / lyric forever error” in a way that remains unshakeable.1 What is the error of lyric? In what context is lyric an error? In what discourse? In whose poetics? Later, in 1990, I would meet the poet, and, without referring to this poem, she would mention in conversation her struggle as a woman poet experimenting with language and form but regarded as somehow “too lyrical.” What did this mean? I thought at the time. Who is setting the terms of the discussion? In the poem, dedicated to Emily Dickinson, evocative fragments suggest an answer that literary history and its central narratives give us:

he cut out of her, her name of each thing she sang each letter she hung, on line (divine) One can read into these lines Dickinson’s textual history; equally, the lines interweave the female-marked voice who “sang” and the lyric subject who is erased, extinguished (“cut out”), unmarked (ungendered), and yet overmarked. The gendered overmarking of lyric — as emotive, personal, descriptive, nonintellectual — has a long history, one that this poem registers in fragmentary glimpses as a kind of pressure on both lyrical impulses and gendered speech. With marvelous grace, however, the poem points to its own risk in courting “this / lyric forever error” while claiming the error as poetic ground. This is not to say that the poem embraces traditional lyric form or convention; on the contrary, it explodes the lyric while exposing gendered underpinnings of lyric condemnation. It relocates the lyric within “this / language we come up against,” suggestively retaining but revising lyrical possibilities. The feminist vision of this poem, beginning with its evocation of Dickinson and ending with an embrace of the “error” “cut out” by “he,” illuminates a collusion of language and lyric that animates this book’s interest in the work of feminist experimental poets. The work with the lyric subject, the gender-marked “I,” of the poetry discussed in this book shares strategies and effects of intervention, much as Fraser’s poem intervenes into a dismissal of female-voiced lyric both in literary history and, arguably, in the avant-garde discourse surrounding her own poetic production. This ﬁrst chapter seeks to provide an overview of this discourse as it framed challenges to the lyric subject and of selective feminist challenges to both the lyric and the discussion setting the terms about lyric. I begin with a brief reminder of the conﬂicts among feminist poets over issues of form and expressiveness; I then move on to outline some of the major points of debate about the lyric subject arising from the Language movement and developing to the present moment. Finally, I turn to the feminist project of HOW(ever), a journal of experimental writing by women 2

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begun and edited by Fraser in the mideighties expressly to intervene in the discursive formulation of feminist and avant-garde poetics and the relations of production and reception supporting them. As a feminist project, the journal insisted upon the signiﬁcance of the female “signature” in opposition to theories and practices of experimental writing (variously equating feminine with experimental, despite the gender of the writer, asserting the evacuation of the subject, etc.) that Nancy Miller in 1986 warned had produced a seemingly “postgendered” poetics that actually privileged the male signature while eliding women (in DeKoven, “Male Signature” 77). HOW(ever), as a textual space hybridizing critical, theoretical, autobiographical, and poetic forms, responds to the discursive contexts of poetic production affecting women experimentalists and, in stressing “woman” and “text,” performs the error of lyric as a revisionary poetics of the “I.” Feminist Debates

The very term feminist poetics asserts a public role for poetry and, more radically, poetry’s potential to intervene into the public sphere. Fostering the power of poetry’s intervention into social norms, practices, and ideas, many contemporary women poets have labored to make explicit the link between poetic expression and social change that carries forward the work of innumerable earlier poets, whose social motivations may or may not have overtly charged their poetry but whose work nonetheless unsettles the structures of gender marking their historical moments. In other words, feminist poetics is not a formulation distinctive to the late twentieth century, but, as an articulated concept linked to the social progress of women, its emergence in the 1960s and 1970s provided a systemic framework and vocabulary for varieties of poetic practice, past and present, that insistently probed relations of gender and power and that speciﬁed the materialities of women’s lives. Particularly under the inﬂuence of the women’s movement in these years, even the most personal of poetic forms, the lyric, could be seen and enacted as a charged site of public utterance. While the feminist poetry that dominated during this era, supported by publishers and circles of feminist poets central to the movement, relied upon a coherent, accessible idea of voice and authenticity derived from the lyric tradition, alternative approaches to the lyric subject arose that questioned the viability of the uniﬁed “I.” Exemplifying general divisions among poets identifying themLyric Conversations and Interventions

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selves as feminist and doing feminist work, two contemporaneous essays by Adrienne Rich and Rae Armantrout reveal different sets of assumptions and questions about a socially engaged feminist poetics. In her well-known essay, “Blood, Bread, and Poetry,” from the late 1980s, Adrienne Rich would follow the banner cry of “the personal is political” to argue for a “crossover between personal and political” and applaud the efforts of her fellow women poets to “write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a woman’s body and experience, to take women’s experience seriously as theme and source for art” (182). The “I” of the lyric poem, for Rich and others, draws upon selfknowledge and experience to alter the ideological and material structures of patriarchy. Asserting a voice for women, the feminist lyric “I” that Rich and others envision grounds itself in material history and public engagement disallowed by the template of transcendent, private utterance characterizing the modern inheritance of the Romantic lyric. At the same time, while the “I” is radically altered through its regendering, the lyric subject popularly supported by the poets of the women’s movement nonetheless retains primary conventions inherited from a patriarchal tradition or allowed to women by that tradition: the unitary “I,” often autobiographical, expressing experience (present to the self ) through accessible language. While exploding the distinction between private and public that bolstered the tradition of the lyric as private utterance, the mainstream feminist approach to the lyric nonetheless valued qualities of authenticity and directness of voice drawn from that tradition. Indeed, a disruption of the lyric subject’s accessibility was seen to endanger the political labor of the poem. Claiming an aesthetic of direct reportage for the feminist cause led Rich to be especially wary of more experimental alternatives and avant-garde difﬁculties, asking in the face of radical formal innovation, “ What toll is taken of art when it is separated from the social fabric?” (“Blood, Bread, and Poetry” 185). A question of necessary urgency, intended to encourage widely accessible and readable poetry, its underlying assumption nevertheless locates feminist activity within content more so than form or at the very least reads “social fabric” as a matter primarily of topic and content that can be brought into the poem through the lens of an identiﬁable, authentic, and uniﬁed lyric subject or voice, a voice “readable” to its audience.2 For other women poets, however, these conventions of the lyric “I” were seen to obstruct rather than enable social transformation. 4

Lyric Conversations and Interventions

Identifying the conventions of voice and authenticity as constrictive rather than liberating, poet Kathleen Fraser recalls from that time her “struggle . . . at least in part, to escape the unitary ‘I’ and to reach beyond the known, demotic ‘self’ into less predictable areas of witness” (“Interview with Boland” 393). Rae Armantrout, in a late 1980s essay positioning her work outside of the “conventional or mainstream poem,” which she characterizes as “a univocal, more or less plainspoken, short narrative often culminating in a sort of epiphany,” wonders whether such a poem (the type most valorized by feminist critics) is “the best equipped to raise feminist issues” (290). Rather than viewing readability as an inherent social value for poetry, Armantrout wonders whether our conventions of reading the lyric allow “[o]nly information tailored to the controlling code” to be admissible in determining the readability or clarity of the poem. Applying pressure to these terms and assumptions, however, leads Armantrout to “raise some questions”: “ What is the meaning of clarity? Is something clear when you understand it or when it looms up at you, startling you? Is readability equivalent to clarity? What is the relation of readability to convention? How might conventions of legibility enforce social codes? Does so-called experimental writing seek a new view of the self ? Would such a view be liberating? Might experimental writing and feminism be natural allies?” 3 Whether natural or not, the alliance between experimental writing and feminism animates this study and the myriad conversations about such a conjunction emerging in the 1990s and opening years of the new century. The conversations are far from over, I hope, as new ways of formulating both experimental and feminist generate enriched possibilities for the cultural labor of poetry. Terming the “emergence (or more accurately speaking, the reemergence) of a feminist avant-garde poetry and poetics in the years since 1970, a phenomenon that simultaneously renews and transforms our thinking about feminism, the avant-garde, and poetry,” Steve Evans recently introduced a special issue of differences (entitled “After Patriarchal Poetry: Feminism and the Contemporary Avant-Garde” [Summer 2001]) by deﬁning this phenomenon as a “feminist counterpublic sphere” (1, 2). As such, Evans references and highlights an intense discussion running from the 1980s onward among clusters of feminist-identiﬁed poets who saw their work as experimental or formally innovative and whose poetic practice, prior to the eighties, evLyric Conversations and Interventions

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idences feminist innovation. In such publications as HOW(ever), begun in the mid-1980s as a journal devoted to experimental writing by women, relationships between theory, poetics, politics, and gender occupied center stage, although a stage that only recently has gained a spotlight among poets and critics and readers alike, as the special issue of differences attests.4 Thus in 2001 Evans valuably summarizes a set of issues recognized and energetically debated for at least ﬁfteen years, although primarily in contexts supported by women avantgardists and largely ignored otherwise: The terms . . . contemporary poetry, feminism, avant-gardism, poststructuralism — do not settle easily into any stable constellation with one another, and that is precisely why they have been chosen. . . . [T ]he pitfalls of considering these practices in isolation, or even in pairs, are familiar enough. . . . We know very well, for instance, that discussions of avant-garde poetry can carry on for entire generations without ever seriously confronting the question of gender; we know also that poststructuralist theory can sustain a decades-long debate about feminine poetics while seldom betraying more than a vague awareness of the actual shapes assumed by contemporary poetic practice; and we know as well how the feminist poetry that has been institutionalized within women’s studies programs and teaching anthologies can be restrictively organized around a normative concept of “experience” that renders all but the most tentative formal innovations by women inadmissible and anathematizes theoretical reﬂection on poetic practice . . . as an overly intellectualized interference with the immediate pleasures afforded by cathartic identiﬁcation. (1) These very issues underlie the groundbreaking collection of essays, Feminist Measures, brought together in 1994 by Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller to consciously intervene into numerous critical and poetic contexts: feminist criticism that ignored poetry; poetry criticism that ignored theory; criticism embracing theory and poetry but ignoring women’s work; feminist poets and critics who ignored formally innovative work; publishers and editors who ignored women/ experimentalists/poets. This volume followed in the wake of other attempts to bring an innovative feminist poetics into more prominent view within critical discourse such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s 6

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The Pink Guitar (1990); Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs’s essay collection, Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, which, while focusing on ﬁction, offered signiﬁcant cross-genre theorizations (1989); or a number of women-produced journals from the 1980s and early 1990s. Many women poets deemed experimental in the past thirty years, while ostracized by the feminist movement’s main circles of poetry in the 1970s and 1980s, perform a feminist-inﬂected theorized poetics of language and form that interrogates naturalized codes for reading the social fabric and for judging “art.” In the late 1980s Rachel Blau DuPlessis argued that “cultural rupture” involves “cuts to the deepest assumptions of plot, of voice, of closure, of meaning, of languages, of authorities in the author and the reader,” observing that “content and theme have been sites of cultural change in recent years” without a necessary investigation of the ways in which “a naturalized set of language strategies, or nice, normal presentations of material seemed to partake of the same assumptions about gender that they would seem to undermine” (Pink Guitar viii). The shaping power of aesthetic criteria derived from ideas of language transparency and a fully known self expressible through a true voice is similarly critiqued by the poet-critic Joan Retalleck, who argues against a notion of language as “mediator, ﬁlter, translucence,” advocating a feminist attention to “a practice of theory and literature that . . . takes the primary force of language to be the way in which its uses are enactments, rather than portrayals, of forms of life” (375). For Retallack, the empathetic response encouraged by a poetry of portrayal renders the reader passive through appearing to “reveal (rather than construct) a world” through a “series of images strung together in a rhythmically unbroken narration” (352, 351). Conversely, she argues for the feminist potential of “poethical form”: form following from a theory of meaning that “locates the making of meaning in a collaborative engagement with interdynamically developing forms . . . allows exploration of the medium of language itself” (355) and produces a reader who “conspire[s]” with the poem to “participate in the construction of a living aesthetic event,” a process requiring the reader “to behave as fully empowered participant” (357). Calling into question the democratic claims prescribing a feminist poetics of accessible readability, both Retallack and DuPlessis imagine the poetic Lyric Conversations and Interventions

7

text as a social activity that draws, in its very strategies of form and rhetoric, upon “public knowledge” to actively re-form the public sphere (Retallack 349). This insistence upon textuality as socially encoded resonates with the appearance of a loose formation of North American poets that, in the 1970s and 1980s, generated radically innovative poetry and discussions of poetics under the label or rubric of Language poetry. While various women poets such as Lyn Hejinian actively worked within this grouping, others who would embark on an exploration of gender critique and feminist thought were not materially linked to the Language movement or its various publications and activities. Ann Vickery’s recent longitudinal study of feminist experimental poetic communities, organized primarily around publication venues variously related to or completely apart from Language poetry’s modes of production and interaction, speciﬁes the most apparent overlaps between Language writing and feminist innovation, as both sought to undermine “interpretative codes by self-consciously playing against ingrained habits of reading” and critiquing “the boundaries of the poem” (7). Concerned “not so much with describing the world as with interrogating the possibilities of the social,” Language writing resists the idea of the reader as passive consumer, involving the reader actively in the production of meaning and seeking to “understand how relations of power that inform the everyday are disseminated and veiled through language” (Vickery 6, 7). Despite this overlap, the tendency on the part of literary critics to centralize the work of male Language poets creates a narrative of contemporary poetry that places women’s poetic production on the margins and virtually ignores the feminist trajectory of much experimental work. Vickery’s comments highlight a problem in the construction of theoretical frameworks and critical categories that have sustained and valorized “mythologies of genius and hierarchized participation in terms of sexual difference” (11): In the study of literary movements, the fetishizing of theory has enabled critics to contain innovative poetry and neutralize it along canonical lines. This has certainly been the case with Language writing. Throughout the past two decades a select number of male Language writers have had their critical work published by eminent university presses. Although their own poetry would some8

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times be overshadowed by the authority invested in these volumes, the poetry of their female counterparts remained an object of study through these same theoretical frameworks. . . . The critical reception of Language writing has therefore tended to represent women as secondary participants or its passive benefactors. From an alternative angle, feminist critics have also overlooked their work. (12, emphasis added) Vickery’s point is worth stressing, for the framing term feminist poetry has not historically admitted avant-garde/experimental/innovative approaches, while the framing term Language writing has generated a history built up around men from which linguistically innovative writings by women functioning outside of this frame are not brought into the constructed literary history that dominates (12).5 The Lyric Address and the Feminist Response

Within American avant-garde poetics, the challenge to the lyric self and conventions of the genre have loomed large in theory and practice. Although, as Perloff admits, the evacuation of the lyric self is a “given” in poetic-critical discourse in American avant-garde poetics, and although, as Huk persuasively argues, the distinct “national imaginaries” of America and Britain yield different “national /cultural models of selfhood” that cannot be fully collapsed in comparisons of American and British poetry, it remains a truism that the emergence of an American discussion around issues of self, language, and poetics remains centrally inﬂuential on both sides of the Atlantic (“In AnOther’s Pocket” 23). Therefore, I want to rehearse the major arguments about subjectivity that remain in many ways foundational to critical discussions of experimental poetics; subsequently, I will map some of the recent challenges to the assumptions of these earlier debates.6 The terms of this argument proven to be most inﬂuential initially emerge in the writings found in various seminal Language projects such as the L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E Book (edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews), In the American Tree (edited by Ron Silliman), the Poetics Journal (edited by Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten), and the lines of critical discussion following in the wake of the early critiques of the lyric “I,” the personal, and the subject.7 Since the late seventies and eighties, critiques of autobiographical modes of poetic expression have most insistently read the lyric as a genre authorizing the self’s primacy and in doing so, carrying a parLyric Conversations and Interventions

9

ticular history, entering the twentieth century burdened by the romantic discourse deﬁning and privileging it. Occupying a central voice in such readings, Perloff would assert in the late eighties that “lyric poets still tend to regard their ‘trade’ as one requiring a permit from the appropriate authority, which is to say, in the case of English and American poetry, from the Great Romantics, whose terminology — ‘the spontaneous overﬂow of powerful feelings,’ the ‘esemplastic imagination,’ ‘the willing suspension of disbelief,’ ‘negative capability’ — casts a shadow on virtually every attempt to Make It New” (Poetic License 1).8 As a mode of intense self-expression, the lyric inherited from this tradition posits a uniﬁed self as the “primary organizing feature of writing,” wielding language transparently to communicate experience through a central consciousness or voice (Bernstein, “Interview” 41). The sincerity and expressiveness of voice provide what Paul de Man terms the “principle of intelligibility” in the lyric, which depends upon the “phenomenalization of the poetic voice” (55). The individual ﬁgured as a private but universal voice is thus positioned outside of a reality that he or she can communicate through language, which is also external to reality yet capable of transmitting the truth about it. In contrast, poetry stressing the operations of language places that self in question, at the very least, and moves toward an extinction of the lyric “I.” The impact of poststructuralist theory upon contemporary conceptions of poetry, noted by Perloff, among others, has played an important role in the reconsideration of poetry as “that species of writing that foregrounds and insists upon the materiality of the signiﬁer, the coincidence between enunciation and enounced” (“Lucent and Inescapable Rhythms” 31). Marked by its pronounced “absence of the pronoun” (Perloff, “Lucent and Inescapable Rhythms” 37), such a species of writing dethrones the subject and its claim to prepoetic experience, working to expose what John Koethe terms “the illusory nature of the notions of the prelinguistic given and the subjective self”; moreover, this writing rejects the equation between “truthfulness,” or authenticity of voice, and “good poems” that continues to carry great force with contemporary readers and commentators, revealing the power of the lyric mode’s assumption of the humanist self as autonomous, self-aware, and coherent (69, 70). Just as much contemporary theory undercuts the metaphysical and naturalized basis of this self through revealing its 10

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constructedness in language (rather than existing before and in control of language) or its ideologically mediated access to experience (as opposed to a natural, “true” empirical access), the challenges to the lyric that Perloff and Koethe highlight take place through reconsiderations of the self’s construction and authority enacted by poetic forms and conventions.9 That the lyric has taken up a signiﬁcant place in discussions of innovative poetry signals a movement from private utterance to textuality. Questioning the viability of the uniﬁed Enlightenment subject, American poets often included under the loose label of Language poetry position themselves against the lyric convention and “repudiate a whole tradition of writing about remembered experiences of the lyric self, turning attention instead to the ‘tense-less’ condition of language as medium” (Nicholls 120).10 Norman Finkelstein remarks upon the “unprecedented abutments of literary theory upon poetic practice . . . and the tendency to simultaneously broaden and subvert the traditional domain of the lyric poem through various dissolutions of genre and work into ‘text’” (3– 4). These poets characteristically create work, claims Perloff, that operates “precisely to deconstruct the possibility of the formation of a coherent or consistent lyrical voice, a transcendental ego” (Poetic License 12). The traditional lyric voice is undercut through a recasting of language “less as a means of representation than as the very object of representation” (Perloff, Poetic License 12), enacting a “scrupulous avoidance of the [conventional] rhetorical strategies . . . , including the use of the ﬁrst person (with its implications of reportage and communication), narrative voice (with its suggestions of causal and temporal coherence) and the heightening of affect at closure” (Koethe 71). A poet like Charles Bernstein, whose poetry and essays play a central role in discussions of Language poetry, often rails against the “primacy of the individual voice, fanned by a gentile inspiration” (A Poetics 2), and argues that “normative discursive practices need to be read in terms of the political meaning of their formal strategies” (“Comedy” 238). Convention, working to conceal political meaning and material mooring, provides “a central means by which authority is made credible”: in the case of the lyric, a “Romantic poetics of sincerity” evokes “the poet’s lyric address to the human-eternal, to the Imagination, what seems to allow the poem to appear to transcend the partiality of its origin. Thus the poet is able to speak for the ‘human’ by refusing markers Lyric Conversations and Interventions

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that would pull against the universality of ‘his’ address” (“Comedy” 236, 238).11 While powerful in its critique of humanist subjectivity, a banishment of the lyric “I” has been problematized on many fronts, including within the very Language community that played a key role in formulating the ouster of the subject through a theoretically informed poetics. For example, Perloff, a critic central to narrating a history of American Language poetry, recently asserted that while “the cardinal principle . . . [of ] the dismissal of ‘voice’ as the foundational principle of lyric poetry” and the “demise of the transcendental ego, of the authentic self . . . are now taken as something of a given,” the present moment calls for a moving beyond this “given” (“Language Poetry” 405, 409). Querying “ What matter who’s speaking?” Perloff proposes in her 1999 essay, “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject,” that “[p]erhaps it is time to reconsider the role of the subject in lyric poetry” (411). In effect, she is echoing, although in different terms, an imperative articulated at least from the early nineties by feminist critics and poets (Clair Wills, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Caroline Bergvall, Romana Huk, myself, to mention a few) who have wrestled with the “given” of subject banishment as a closed model for reading a range of works positioning themselves differently in relation to the masculine, white, and Western model of subjectivity that underlies the “transcendental ego” cast off by avant-garde poetics. Indeed, a plethora of critical reassessments of the lyric appeared in the mid- to late nineties. Reﬂecting a range of theories and methods, the broadening discussion of the lyric responds variously to efforts to rescue the lyric from its diminished status, to explore possibilities for a lyric of historical engagement, to dispute the deﬁning generic terms for lyric underpinning its critiques, to seek to undo or complicate oppositions between conventional lyric and language writing. Many of these reassessments begin by pointing to a slipperiness of meaning encoded by the term lyric — is it about voice, about sound and song, about interiority, about brevity, about epiphany, about transcendence? Moreover, where does our contemporary sense of lyric derive — from ancient rhetoric, Sappho, the Romantics — and how must these sources themselves be historicized in taking account of the contemporary uses of lyric convention? And, in an increasingly hall-of-mirrors effect, criticism about lyric talks back to criticism about lyric that talks back to criticism about lyric, with the partici12

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pants often in revisionary dialogue with their own earlier readings of the lyric. To generalize, however, central strategies include identiﬁcation of the conventional lyric with “a consistent, identiﬁable lyric voice and stance” that is problematized by various poetic and cultural formations that include experimental/ language writing, multiculturalism, environmentalism, oral traditions, intertextuality, interdiscursiveness, and national imaginary, among others. The issue increasingly addressed is not whether lyric subjectivity (or variant traces of voice, interiority, self-history, etc.) is evident but how it is deployed and what that deployment assumes about poetry’s function. The impact of Language writing’s early dismissal of the lyric subject runs through these reconsiderations of lyric and its use, particularly evident in the evocation and documentation of this narrative (which I’ve replicated in this introduction as well) of lyric’s demise as necessary to formulating a critical position on the issue. As one result of a densely referential critical circuit of conversations about the lyric, the Language critique takes on the specter of a transcendental signiﬁer, for meaning seems impossible to construct except in reference to the ﬁgure of Language. Nonetheless, as the nineties unfolded, the academic prominence of Language writing, its practitioners and supporters, maintained a conspicuous place on the map that had to be navigated, and, in many respects, the recent discussions of lyric highlight this necessary navigation even while casting Language critiques as either a central or stable source of meaning (an irony, no doubt). Much critical energy seeks to unpack the terms of opposition or division between nonlyric experimentation and lyric tradition, such as Elizabeth Willis’s contention that “the lyric voice, being ﬁgural, is potentially multiple and that in producing a phenomenal world it is not reducible to the realm of single-subject epiphanies”; therefore, lyric “overlaps with, rather than opposes, the aesthetics of ‘language’ or ‘post-language’ writing.” For Willis, the overlap is most evident in the works of poets labeled Language who are “primarily lyrically driven — Susan and Fanny Howe, for instance, or the recent work of Barbara Guest,” or in the “shift within contemporary lyric practice, whereby the overall structure and strategy of the lyric is overlaid or mixed with other inﬂuences, forms, and rhetorical sampling, often in signiﬁcant ways” (228). The very emphasis on voice as ﬁgural, for Willis, leads her to assert that the “work of the modern and contemporary lyric is not to unify or commodify or even represent human Lyric Conversations and Interventions

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experience but to stress language in such a way as to evoke an alternate experience for its readers. . . . It overwhelms, captures, and resists the mind” (229). Evoking a similarly Stevens-like role for the lyric, Leonard Schwartz’s redemption of the transcendental lyric seeks “a kind of poem that would reclaim, in as contemporary a way as possible, much of the ground that it is presumed poetry has lost to sophistication and to social science — a kind of lyric in the mode of Stevens’s tune beyond us yet ourselves,” “an art in which language is used in such a way as to produce at least the illusion of the presence of regions of being outside personal experience” (97–98). He sees the “residue” of the lyric practice Language poetry hopes to negate nevertheless irrupting throughout the poetry and actually prominent in the critical writings of such poets. Charles Altieri reasserts the power of a lyric “poetry of affect” that explores “aspects of the emotions” to “understand the personal and interpersonal dynamics that circulate around affective energies” (“Intimacy and Experiment” 55). Such attention to affect and emotion within “experimental” texts relates to Altieri’s criticism of the dismissal of emotion within models of agency he associates with contemporary avant-garde theories of poetic form, which privilege “a commitment to locating ‘content’ for poetry primarily in terms of the qualities of linguistic materiality, internal and social, that the text foregrounds” (“Some Problems” 210 –11). Relevant to Altieri’s desire to insert lyric affect into discussions of experimental poetics, other critics relate rather than oppose the strategies of Language writing and lyric tradition, and newly nuanced readings of experimental and mainstream torque the categories themselves. Lynn Keller’s work on the long poem and on Alice Fulton takes issue with the dominating paradigms of experimentalism as foreclosing women’s experiences of language, and she develops new historical narratives of the experimental in relation to gender in her work on Rosemarie Waldrop and Kathleen Fraser (“just one of the girls”). Dorothy Nielsen’s ecocritical analysis of the “ecological implications” of the lyric subject reads a challenge to the autonomous subjectivity in environmentally concerned poetries that “constellate an ecological subject” who “exists in a difﬁcult-to-name-realm, somewhere between a more markedly postmodern poetry that fully decenters the subject and a nostalgic neo-Romantic lyric” (128). Her poets of choice are Levertov and Merwin, both of whom occupy a 14

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conspicuous presence in the neoromantic camp declaimed by Language critiques. Allison Cummings argues that the mainstream lyric mode in the eighties and nineties has undergone “subtle and still evolving” shifts in response to “both criticism of the lyric in the 1980s and poststructuralist challenges to the subject in language,” and she identiﬁes how “trends” in “narrative poetry, multicultural poetry, and meta-poetry . . . deliberately modify the subject positions of the 1970s free verse lyric” (152).12 Cummings detects the inﬂuence of theoretical discourses of subjectivity and language on so-called mainstream lyric practice, and she employs the frameworks of contemporary theory to discuss the complication of the lyric subject in works by Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, and Susan Mitchell. Attentive to the use of lyric convention in poetries associated with experimental poetics, other commentators focus on the lyric as a way to distinguish different experimental practices and, especially, to weaken the term Language as an umbrella term for all formal experimentation. Writing about Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s ongoing poetic sequence, Drafts, and the formation of “the social or communal context of [her] poetry” (Lazer 35), Hank Lazer astutely points to a more complex mapping of lyric deployment than easy categories like Language and postmodern admit: While DuPlessis’s writing manifests certain tendencies in Language Writing, her writing also helps us to understand the ﬁctitious or reductive nature of such a term — Language poetry — as that term seems to imply a ﬁxed or narrowly speciﬁed thing. Her at times thematized version of feminism, her myth-orientation . . . and her particular variety of lyricism are somewhat atypical of Language Writing. Her disturbance of syntax, her assimilation of a broad range of theoretical writing, the distribution or multiplication of subjectivity, and the variety of her uses of the page (as a ﬁeld for innovative layout) — especially overwriting and doublewriting — situate her work within an experimentalism for which the term Language poetry, like the term postmodernism, is becoming a fuzzy but well-entrenched metonym. (34 –35) The complication of both lyric and experimental within public or communal contexts extends to other poets in commentary focusing on distinct cultural formations, subject positions, and technical strategies. Taking up the issue of oral performance embedded within Lyric Conversations and Interventions

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African American expressive traditions, Kathleen Crown examines the spoken-voice poetics of Tracie Morris as a shifting relation of “voice” and “community.” Citing a “popular demand for a return to ‘voice’ and ‘presence’ as fundamental principles of lyric poetry,” Crown explores political tensions surrounding Morris’s increasingly experimental style, posing the question of “whether and how poetic ‘voice’ might be detached from its baggage of transparency, presence, authenticity, and identitarian claims to representativeness without losing its ability to invoke communal participation and meaningful political response” (“Sonic Revolutionaries” 216, 217). Kevin McGuirk, examining the British scene, similarly looks to a voice-based, communal lyric practice in assessing the cultural work of black British poetries emanating from postcolonial migrations. The interstice of personal and community evidences lyric’s encounter with history. Susan Howe’s “communal lyric,” argues Susan Vanderborg, emanates from the “fragmenting, parodic techniques of palimpsest” that bring marginal voices into public space: “In its emphasis on individual voice, the palimpsest is a cogent reminder that subject positions have not yet become entirely arbitrary in avantgarde poetics” (100).13 Receiving generous critical attention over the past decade in discussions of experimental poetries, Howe is described in the ﬁrst book-length treatment of her work as “an avantgarde writer located ﬁrmly within an age-old tradition of lyrical poetry, even as she subverts many of the premises of that tradition,” combining the cultural work of the chronicler with “an equally intense and ﬁerce preoccupation with understanding and investigating the personal, the autobiographical, and the highly intimate” (Back 15). Howe’s prosodic explorations, her visual radicalization of the linguistic mark and page, and her own critical essays reconceive the lyric as simultaneously marked by the historical and the unrecoverable, utterance that is both gendered and uncategorizable. Whether understood as transcendent of history or immersed within it, the lyric’s potential, enacted, or utopian relationship to public spheres and discursive communities prompts debate. Mark Jeffreys, editing a collection of essays that address the question of “poetry’s cultural responsibilities” in relation to history, queries: “Does lyric poetry inevitably attempt to transcend history? Does it ever succeed? Can lyricism be reinvented as a historically engaged mode of writing, or could a lyric poem’s resistance to engaging its historical 16

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moment be ﬁgured as a genuinely subversive act within an oppressive culture?” (ix). Assembled to respond to debates over the lyric in the 1980s and 1990s, New Deﬁnitions of Lyric: Theory, Technology, and Culture (1998) traces what Jeffreys categorizes as “three broad critical paths” that radiate from questions over possible reinventions of lyricism as “a historically engaged mode of writing” (ix). One approach argues for overturning the traditional lyric, seeing it as inherently ahistorical and insular and impossible to redeem with a “radically different poetics that is effectively and directly engaged in undermining the dominant, oppressive cultural formations of this historical moment” ( Jeffreys ix). Questioning whether a text can really ever be ahistorical, a second argument emphasizes new ways of reading to discern historical engagement. Jeffreys presents a ﬁnal approach that valorizes the lyric’s “resistance to history and/or the traditional lyric ﬁction of the single ‘overheard’ voice” as a potential “oppositional stance” allowing “marginal position[s]” to be overheard (ix). The arguments in this volume point toward different visions of a new lyric, including the new lyric of Language writing, which “advocate[s] a poetic language which in its very ‘otherness’ acts as a critique of dominant discourse” (Golston 6). This new lyric performs its critique as a form of “epistemological inquiry” (Bernstein in Golston 6). Golston’s new lyric exempliﬁes a shift in the discourse of the Language-writing community to reconsider the personal and the lyric subject, particularly in relation to public spheres. Perloff’s 1999 essay on Susan Howe and Ron Silliman offers a retrospective look at the twenty-year-old manifestos against the self leveled by Language writers, and she ﬁnds these formulations no longer ﬁt the diversity of avant-garde poetries that engage with self-writing. She suggests a concept of “signature” as “a mark of difference that separates one identity from another” and, while unstable and shifting, can be taken seriously “in practice . . . as markers of a particular individual, a cultural practice, a historical period, a national formation, a convention, and so on” (“Language Poetry” 412–13, 414). This mode of self-writing in which signature operates does not assume the “authority ascribed to the speaking voice” that Perloff (among others) identiﬁes with the workshop lyric; instead, the subject is “located only at . . . interstices” of discourse, and “language constructs the ‘reality’ perceived” (“Language Poetry” 432). While Perloff’s shift toward the concept of signature is astutely accomplished and useful in its retrospective of Lyric Conversations and Interventions

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Language debates on the self, to the reader of feminist experimental poetics its conclusions seem familiar and echo poetic-critical engagements with self-writing explored in counterdistinction to and contemporaneously with the deauthorizing strategies expounded in Language circles. In 1996 Jonathan Monroe edited a special issue of Diacritics entitled “Poetry, Community, Movement.” Gathering together a truly stunning group of writings by poets, critics, and poet-critics, the issue’s “primary intent is both to engage and enact contemporary poetry’s current relation to theory and the project of learning” (Monroe 3). The issue devotes itself in large measure to the parallel and overlapping practices of contemporary poetry and theory, and the contributors seek to reinvigorate a sense of poetry in relation to community, investigating the “positionality of poetry in relation to other (competing) discourses” (Monroe 15) and favoring forms of “tactical engagements with diverse public spheres” (Bernstein in Monroe 18). Introducing the issue, Monroe immediately signals its project’s alignment “in fundamental ways with what Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman have termed respectively ‘anti-absorptive’ or ‘over-genred’ writing” (3– 4), and he stresses the potential for this writing as social critique : [T ]he antigeneric, antiabsorptive, overgenred kinds of writing that have come into prominence over the past two decades — often though by no means always associated with the names language writing or language poetry — have revitalized important questions concerning contemporary poetry’s relation to questions of community, interdiscursivity, normativity, interdisciplinarity, and the international, multicultural, multilingual forces that have increasingly come to shape the cultural role of the university in the 1990s. In the context of what I am calling the culture of distraction, recent antigeneric texts share an understanding that innovations at the level of formal syntactics may have an antinormative force at least equal to if not greater than that of texts that count on having their effects through even the most polemical contentual stances articulated in more normative, instrumentalized modes. (4) Although not the sole objective of these essays, reconsidering the lyric subject and the role of the personal threads through many of the writings, reﬂecting Monroe’s observation that “language poetries 18

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tend to be less interested in impersonality than in staging what is called the personal in ways that invite us to inquire into the range of its possible modalities. . . . Not a reduction of the personal, then, but a complication of it” (13). Charles Bernstein, in a round-table discussion included in the issue, dismisses the “public assumption about what poetry’s supposed to be” that assumes the poet’s “ahistorical subjectivity,” and he comments that “anyone who looks historically at what poetry is would say poetry is a form of rhetoric, not a form of subjectivity” (Bernstein et al. 199). Identity, for Bernstein, “isn’t something I’m against, but there is this . . . [conception that] if you’re not absolutely ﬁxed and easily consumable in terms of an identity formation, a self-formation, that you’re against those things. I think that’s a misunderstanding” (Bernstein et al. 209). These comments reiterate long-standing resistances to traditional lyric subjectivities, but it is only Rachel Blau DuPlessis in her contribution to the issue who seeks to contextualize the self both in terms of avant-garde poetics and the history of their theorization in relation to gender. Again, it is left to the “feminist” of the group to carry on the gender part of the conversation, leading one to wonder whether men have gender or, at the least, how it remains so invisible in considerations of the “I.” Feminist Critiques and the Lyric

The challenges that women might make to lyric conventions and the possible value they might ﬁnd in reconstituting elements of the lyric involve a politics of form manifesting experimental reformulations of theory and feminism, of literary history and gendered subjectivity. That such reformulations have occupied the work of both American and British women poets has begun, since the mid- to late nineties, to generate critical discussion on what Isabel Armstrong terms the “release of the lyric ‘I’ from the trap of a narrow identity politics” without dehistoricizing and re-erasing the gendered (or raced) self into a newly transcendent and universalized nonsubject (xvi). Romana Huk, among other feminist literary critics studying contemporary experimental poetry, has argued that the subject in avant-garde poetic theory is “too often preemptively dismantled or deconstructed as being from the get-go a shifting, pronominal illusion that vanishes into the larger cultural text” in a process that eliminates the (Romantic) idea of the “self as a particular site . . . [but engenders] a new culturally-speciﬁc-yet-universalized conception of Lyric Conversations and Interventions

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(non)selfhood” that ignores (or at least diminishes) the “historical functioning of the subject” (“In AnOther’s Pocket” 26, 27). Huk calls instead for “at the very least” a study of the subject as “a functional illusion connected to and productive of particular material conditions” (such as a nexus of nationality, gender, and race, in her argument), and her engagement with what has become a somewhat hegemonic discourse on subjectivity emerging primarily from American Language poetry pushes toward alternative ways of considering an experimental poetics that must take into account a particularized, historicized subjectivity banished by this discourse. Feminist poets and critics interested in language-centered poetry ask questions of the lyric self, authority, and form while investigating the foundational cluster of gender narratives underlying the lyric. Beginning in the mid- to late eighties and continuing into the nineties, DuPlessis’s studies of modernist women develop an ongoing critique of the lyric’s ideological encodings of gender in genre. The positioning of woman, particularly in the traditional Romantic lyric, as a “silent, beautiful, distant female object of desire” upon which the male poet gazes and from which he gains his inspiration to write, marks the female as a cultural object upon which the male operates to create both masculine self and art (DuPlessis, “Corpses of Poesy” 71). This authorizing strategy, feminists like DuPlessis, Homans, Friedman, and others argue, underlies the voicing of the “I” in poetry and the assumptions (derived from the Romantic tradition in particular) of the expressive self. As a genre, “poetry activates notable master plots, ideologies, and moves fundamentally inﬂected with gender relations,” constituting a “cluster of foundational materials with a gender cast built into the heart of the lyric. The foundational cluster concerns voice (and silencing), power (appropriation and transcendence), nature (as opposed to formation and culture), gaze (framing, specularity, fragmentation), and the sources of poetic matter — narratives of romance, of the sublime, scenes of inspiration, the muse as conduit” (DuPlessis, “Corpses of Poesy” 71). Within the love lyric, conventionally focused upon relations between the two sexes, the gendered narratives bolster not only the notion of love but that of the self, the poetic “I” who speaks the lyric. To engage the lyric “I,” to call upon the lyric form of self-expression, is to encounter the masculinebased notion of subjectivity most obviously enacted in the love lyric 20

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but underlying the voicing of a true, sincere, unitary self lodged within the center of the lyric derived from the Romantic tradition. This feminist analysis of the lyric’s cultural operations reveals the ideologies of power compelling certain formal operations, coinciding to a degree with critiques of the unitary self by Bernstein or Silliman but importantly locating the genre’s authorizing strategies within structures of gender. General descriptions of American Language poetry advanced, for example, by Perloff or Bernstein that identify the “disappearance of the private, and with it the lyric voice, and the selfhood on which it depends” are complicated by the historicizing of women’s access to this selfhood in Western culture and by perceptions of the woman lyricist in literary history (Wills 41). Further nuancing the issue of such access, racial and national histories require differing modes, questions, and reading practices, as Romana Huk’s discussions of black British women poets like Grace Nichols and Jean “Binta” Breeze make clear the insufﬁciency of a singular American notion of individualism, or of “race,” in reading the radical poetics emerging from a distinctly different national imaginary and relationship to history (“In AnOther’s Pocket”). In regard to these issues (and holding the issue of the woman lyricist in momentary suspension), the nineties saw many feminists question whether the lyric “I” has ever been available to women and whether it should be forsaken. The issue of “telling one’s story” that occupied center stage in women’s poetry of the seventies is currently being renewed in more nuanced and theoretically informed ways by both critics and poets. Susan Stanford Friedman, discussing the use of narrative and lyric in women’s long poems, concedes that the poststructural concept of language as an endless play of signiﬁers and an unceasing deferral of reference “is richly useful for the deconstruction of representation” but serves little purpose as an “end point” for groups whose subjectivity has been historically denied and “whose survival depends upon the reconstruction of their own histories, the reclamation, through language, of their experience of the ‘real’” (Mappings 24 –25).14 Under the pressure of the lived histories of nonwhite, nonmale groups, the lyric “I” emerges in critical conversations as a necessary formulation for asserting a suppressed or erased identity. Shelley Sunn Wong, for instance, cites the dual consciousness of many Asian American poets who acknowledge “the claims of poetic works that valorize the deLyric Conversations and Interventions

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centered subject and observe a radical skepticism concerning the referential function of language” while pointing out “the problems of universalizing the liberatory effects of that decentering” (64). Indeed, perceptions of poststructuralism as positing the feminine in such a way that material women disappear have prompted, for numerous women poets, a rejection of or ambivalence toward even the theories of feminine writing that would seem to enable a project of women’s poetry.15 Yet critics like Caroline Bergvall and Clair Wills have valuably argued that an experimental and theoretically informed poetics does not of necessity abandon either the self or the materiality of women’s lives, a recognition leading Wills to disclaim a divide between expressive and experimental poetries by women, arguing that both categories preserve a private or interior realm while exploring its reconﬁgurations within the contemporary “invasion” of mass culture of the “private sphere of individual experience and family life” (39). Drawing a gendered counterdistinction to Perloff’s identiﬁcation of Language poetry’s banishment of selfhood, Wills observes that “experimental women poets seem to be engaging instead in a complex negotiation between ideas and experiences of the individual and a sense of their disappearance in mass-culture”: “[E]xperimental women poets seem less concerned with reﬂecting in their work the absence of interiority in contemporary culture . . . than with exploring the ways in which the relationship between the individual is mediated. Much of this poetry reveals not the absence of a sphere of privacy but the ways in which that private or intimate realm of experience is constructed ‘through’ the public, and therefore elements of ‘expressivity,’ though radically divorced from notions of authenticity, are present” (41– 42). Similarly, Bergvall points toward the “ambiguity involved in remaining at all times acutely aware of both the ideology behind any sense of identiﬁcation and of the difﬁculty of doing away with it altogether,” emphasizing the experimental explorations of the self’s construction she sees in a poet like Nichole Brossard (35). Megan Simpson’s recent study of women’s language-oriented writing takes up the issue of the self’s construction in and by language, claiming that the “question of what constitutes knowledge and knowing cannot be separated completely from the question of what constitutes a knower” has particular resonance for “women writers who investigate by entering into and engaging the discursive pro22

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cesses by which subjectivity, gender, and sexuality are constructed.” 16 For the contributors to Hinton and Hogue’s We Who Love to Be Astonished, it is the unseen or unreadable constructs and processes of gendered subjectivity that thread through the different essays: “[T ]he women writers whose works are considered in this volume reveal what we call a feminist proclivity: to astonish by presenting what previously remained not only unseen but unlooked for in mainstream culture. In their verbal innovations, these writers investigate racialsexual differences in material society that dominant constructs cover up, creating women’s texts that proffer ways of seeing the unseen, looking at the unlooked at” (“Introduction” 5). Further describing their intent in bringing together the discussions that make up their collection, Hinton and Hogue express a hope that the “contiguity” of approaches and ideas can provide suggestions as to how one might conﬁgure many varieties of feminist thought — and, likewise, the way in which such varieties of feminist thought form words and letters on a page for the particular women writers whose works we discuss. Promoting dialogue, realigning and also shifting borders of all kinds, we seek to break, and play within, the once irreconcilable divide between those who theorize about women’s writing and those who focus purely upon its formalist concerns. It is never easy to read gendered awareness into what are, necessarily, formal-linguistic structures. (4) This project of simultaneous recovery, intervention, and theorization focused on reading “gendered awareness into . . . formal-linguistic structures” belongs to a lineage of critical awareness advanced by the feminist project of HOW(ever). In the ﬁnal section of this chapter, I turn to this journal to supply a piece of literary history signiﬁcant to the development of a reading community for innovative feminist work, a community of gendered awareness that foregrounded that awareness as debates about Language writing and the subject were conducted, in many ways, in what seemed parallel universes. “A Peculiar Hybrid”: The Feminist Project of HOW(ever)

Viewing the interchanges of theory and poetics marking the eighties and contemplating the positioning of “feminine” and “self” within such interchange, Marianne DeKoven insisted at the end of that decade that the gendered signature is crucial for a feminist-informed Lyric Conversations and Interventions

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but linguistically oriented poetry: “[W]e must appropriate avantgarde/experimental style . . . [and] connect it simultaneously to an exclusively feminine Other of discourse and to texts written under a female signature, and suppress once again the question of a possible theoretical-historical convergence of the female and avant-garde traditions” (“Male Signature” 77). DeKoven’s comments coincided with the increasing visibility of Language writing as a theoretically engaged endeavor, but one in which “the more overt theorizing itself was left, with rare exceptions, to the men in the movement,” as many commentators concur (Perloff, “After Language Poetry” 4). Nonetheless, “theorizing” by women was taking place in other contexts and forms, albeit often a theorizing that did not ﬁt the dictates of the intellectualized, specialized investment in particular theories of language toward which these “men in the movement” gravitated. Thus it is possible for these efforts to slip out of the picture if the picture is framed within the theoretical lineages and projects of “movement” men.17 Against such framing, HOW(ever) asserts itself as an important part of literary narratives of contemporary experimentalism in its efforts to interactively bring together discourses of avant-garde poetics, academic-theoretical approaches, and feminist histories and politics. Crucial to its insistence on the female signature was its publication of poets ignored by other venues and its encouragement of dialogue between poets, critics, and theorists that invoked the authority of female thinkers and writers in the production of avant-garde theory and practice rather than inserting women into the more prominent male-centered discussions and histories. As such, the journal constitutes a narrative that intervenes into literary history and interjects a feminist trajectory of thought and community of readers/writers. In part, this intervention is accomplished through the distinctive format of the journal, which was envisioned as a structural means for lessening conventional boundaries (and hierarchies) between poetry and criticism. Additionally, in opening interdiscursive spaces that came to include the visual, critical, theoretical, and poetic, the status of theory was challenged and theorizing reformulated as an interactively textual process. With the goal of creating a reading community for experimental poetry by women, HOW(ever)’s form and content suggest how changing relations of production and reception were necessary for (re)reading the gender-marked experimentalism of its contributors, both critics and poets and their modernist prede24

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cessors. Expanding notions of how to read became a key impetus for the journal’s feminist project. HOW(ever) occupies an important textual space for historicizing and theorizing the public, political possibilities of an avant-garde feminist practice.18 Emerging in the early 1980s, the journal responded to a male-dominated avant-garde culture and a perceived gap in feminist networks of publication and critical discussion for women’s experimental poetry. Insisting upon the material consequences for women innovators of this doubled exclusion, Fraser’s own experience served a case in point. With acknowledged lineages to such diverse ﬁgures as Barbara Guest, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Charles Olson throughout the sixties,19 and having published and read in both avantgarde venues and mainstream establishments (such as the New Yorker and Poetry), Fraser claimed by the seventies to have begun to feel very unfamilied in the literary world. The more my work changed and pushed off from the familiar cadences and containers, the fewer publication venues seemed appropriate, desirable, or interested. I’d become both wary of and annoyed with the prospect of submission to high-powered, often patronizing (though well-meaning) male editors representing both the mainstream and more avant-garde publications. . . . It was equally uncomfortable to send work to the few woman-edited magazines, because their poetry tastes seemed too essentialist and their sexspeciﬁc agendas did not appear to be welcoming. (In Hogue, “An Interview” 17) The concept of a feminist reading community receptive to innovative language work propelled Fraser to investigate possible ways of creating community through the seventies and eighties, culminating in HOW(ever) as a journal seeking to broaden the notion of feminist cultural work through resisting male editorial control and creating a female-based writing community more open to innovative writing than the early eighties challenges to the androcentric canon had produced. Disheartened, Fraser saw that feminist recovery projects excluded formally innovative works; consequently, “the male power structure we’d learned to recognize and analyze as the basis of the canonforming profession of literature suddenly had its able female counterpart” in such publications as the 1985 Norton Anthology of Women’s Literature. Despite recovering a history of women’s writing, that hisLyric Conversations and Interventions

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tory nonetheless ignored experimental writing and “was not any less stiﬂing” than the male canon making it sought to challenge (Fraser, “The Jump” 43): In 1985, a Bible-size debut, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English, arrived in hundreds of university mailboxes of teachers of English literature and Women’s studies. . . . [Women modernists and innovative writers from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were absent or underrepresented.] Perhaps, the most conspicuous absence of all — because it is so total — was the erasure of on-going and recent experiment in poetry and prose. In 711 pages of contemporary writing by women, not a single representation of current innovative practice is in evidence, no reference to the more than 100 women writing and publishing in English, radically opening up the terrain of contemporary literature since the late Sixties. It must be noted that at least half of these living writers had published three to ﬁve books by the time the Norton Women’s was being assembled. The message: don’t wait around to be discovered. Get to work and make your own. Billie Holiday said it best. (Fraser, “ Without a Net” 136–37) Conﬁrming the need to “make your own” as a form of creating a reading community, Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt would write in one of the ﬁnal issues of HOW(ever) that the “sense of companionship” supplied by the journal “is all the more appreciated as, at least here, the work of those of us who are writing, for lack of a better term, feminist post-modernism, continues to struggle against misreading, ignorance, disinterest — even from other women writers” (13). While not seeking to oppose the explosive interest in women’s writing of the late seventies and early eighties, Fraser “felt determined to make a place for women poets who were writing outside of dictums suggested by either the Gilbert/Gubar/Rich/Lourde approved models of ‘common language.’” She described her goal — and that of fellow editors such as Susan Gevirtz, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Francis Jaffer, Beverly Dahlen, and Carolyn Burke — as favoring “innovative work, both in language/syntactical use and compositional strategies. . . . We were perhaps more interested in notations/structures/vocabularies of the private, fragile, partial, instable and fragmented than the already replicated forms of certainty — the traditional, more public forms of address and rhetoric” (personal cor26

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respondence, April 1997). In its commitment to both innovation and feminism, the journal featured a “range of contemporary writing” that “undid the presumption that there was merely one tradition or politics of practice,” bridging hitherto disparate poets across lines of innovative practice: “Black writers and poets from ethnic minorities — such as Sheila K. Smith, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Myung Mi Kim — were presented alongside British writers like Wendy Mulford and Pamela Stewart. For the ﬁrst time, working projects by both Canadian writers of the feminine (écriture au féminine) and Language poets could be presented in the same forum” (Vickery 125). The six volumes of HOW(ever)— twenty-four issues that span the years 1983 to 1992 — bridge various facets of feminist expression enacted textually, intellectually, and aesthetically while also bridging generations of poets. In these ways, the journal developed an instructional importance, teaching its readers not only about current and past poets but about how to read them, how to shift reading practices, reexamine standard practices of reading and writing, reenvision expected roles of reader and poet, and reconsider accepted modes of discursive and material authority.20 The ﬁrst issue of HOW(ever) envisioned its potential role as a “bridge between scholars thinking about women’s language issues, vis-à-vis the making of poetry, and the women making those poems.” 21 Fraser opened the issue with these remarks, noting the sense of displacement and isolation she felt as a woman poet “writing experimentally,” sentiments echoed by associate editor Frances Jaffer’s remarks that a “vehicle for experimentalist poetry” is needed to be “read side-by-side” with the feminist poetry most often supported by feminist publications, to ﬁll in a gap left by decisions and practices arising from the belief that “now is the time for women to write understandable poetry about their own lives, and with feeling, with the heretofore undeveloped self in prominent display.” Jaffer articulates, in this ﬁrst issue, a notion of the experimental that will guide the journal’s development while refusing a strict or narrow deﬁnition of the term: “[T ]he myths of a culture are embodied in its language, its lexicon, its very syntactical structure. To focus attention on language and to discover what can be written in other than traditional syntactical or prosodic structures may give an important voice to authentic female experience” (“ Why HOW(ever)?” 1). In the second issue, in response to a letter from Dodie Bellamy (who designed the journal’s Lyric Conversations and Interventions

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logo) expressing concern and “confusion over the issue of dividing women’s writing into the categories of avant-garde and non-avantgarde, and supporting only one side of what seems to be a rather arbitrary division,” Jaffer reemphasizes the journal’s task: “ We’re trying to ﬁll a gap, not create a split . . . If we’re successful, it’s possible that in the future there will be feminist magazines in which experimentalist and more formally traditional writing will be published together” (1.2, 15). In the ﬁnal issue of HOW(ever), in 1992, Jaffers expresses some disappointment over the amount of impact the journal has had on mainstream publications and criticism, rearticulating a desire not to divide but to encourage interaction among plural feminist poetics. For such interaction to occur, however, the work of experimentalists needed to be acknowledged, both as a contemporary practice and as a long-ignored tradition. Such acknowledgment had not taken place in the realm of the male-dominated avant-garde or within the purview of feminist criticism and poetry. Remembering the poetichistorical moment of the journal’s inception, Fraser remarked that in 1983 “we felt unfamilied, without a place in which to ﬁnd or assert our own particular hybrids. Unpredictable by deﬁnition, ‘the new’ seemed to have become quickly over-prescriptive in journals shaped by various male-dominant poetics or a feminist editorship whose tastes/politics did not acknowledge much of the poetry we felt to be central to our moment — the continuously indeﬁnable, often ‘peculiar’ writings being pieced together by women refusing the acceptable norms. We wanted to make a place for these writers” (“continuous, undeﬁnable” 15). Fraser’s invitation to both poets and scholars to engage in dialogue about women experimentalists created a space for recovery and discovery, for what Susan Gevirtz termed a “sanctuary in which to hone, ﬂex, inquire, from which to venture out” (6.4, 14) or Rachel Blau DuPlessis described as a “bridge between modernist women and ourselves . . . a space for heterglossias, for conﬂictual discourses . . . a space for a sisterhood of exploration” (“Postcards” 14, 15).22 Fraser, noting that HOW(ever)’s “peculiar hybrid of innovative poetry with feminist critical writing” (“ Why?” 14) limited its potential funding, dissemination, and audience, remained committed to shaping a “place in which to ﬁnd or assert our own particular hybrids,” an alternative to “journals shaped by various male-dominant poetics or a feminist editorship whose tastes/politics did not acknowledge much 28

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of the poetry we felt to be central to our moment — the continuously indeﬁnable, often ‘peculiar’ writings being pieced together by women refusing the acceptable norms” (“continuous, undeﬁnable” 15). Evidencing the resistance to these “peculiar” writings, a review by Robert Peters of one of the early issues attests to the gender-based hostility reacting against the recovery and promotion of women’s innovative writing: “I have yet to meet anyone who has been able to sit and read Gertrude Stein for more than one hour at a stretch (Kenneth Rexroth alone has had the balls to say so in print), or to remain excited by H.D. after twenty pages or so. These seem the primary goddesses behind this sort of writing. A poem is not a dictionary. A poem is not a set of easy metaphysical speculations on the nature of grammar, guilt or the primal ﬂood. . . . Let’s not keep the trope ﬂying let’s strangle the little creature in his crib before he soils his pants and screws up our life” (Gevirtz, “Doctor Editor” 54).23 Gevirtz, in quoting from this review, attributes its venom to the “alive-and-well embodiment of high anxiety about women’s relation to writing in our own cultural midst,” an anxiety heightened by the “excess” and messiness of language-oriented experimentation (“Doctor Editor” 54). True to Fraser’s initial vision, the journal leveled a feminist counterpoint to such extremes while continually addressing a number of blatant and subtle gaps in publishing practices and discussions of experimental poetry. Through both its format and its content, the journal invited commentary on the relationship between poetic structure, female experience, and feminist politics while bringing to light and publishing the work of contemporary women working innovatively with language. From its beginning, each issue contained discrete but interactive components intended to connect its various critical and poetic objectives. These components included creative work, author’s working notes, short critical commentary, editor’s notes, and correspondence that sought to establish women’s experimental writing as a signiﬁcant tradition in the twentieth century and as an integral part of the contemporary poetic scene in America (primarily), Canada, and England. In these pages, while a separation of poetry and critical commentary seems assumed by the journal’s format (the placement of short critical commentary, letters, and editorial notes after the “creative” pieces), the thematic, theoretical, and structural relationships between poem, critical essay, and notes form an integral part of the journal’s feminist project. In the process, the textual space Lyric Conversations and Interventions

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of HOW(ever) both comments upon and puts into practice strategies of writing and reading geared toward exploring the relationship of language structures and female experience. Such exploration takes place as a process of sharing materials and ideas, of teaching new concepts, of recovering forgotten ground, of producing new knowledge, of producing a reading community. In conceiving the journal, Fraser recognized that an audience would need to be encouraged to expand its reading practices beyond traditional methods, and she insisted upon the working notes that accompanied each creative piece as an important way for each poet to provide “a brief but precise context for what she had attempted to do in the work featured.” Using the notes to educate readers about “unfamiliar” and “uncommon” language practices, the journal’s textual arrangement was intended, in part, to confront a “problem [that] was clearly about reading” (Fraser in Hogue, “An Interview” 18). HOW(ever) remained throughout its publication a slender, stapled sequence of some sixteen to twenty-ﬁve creamy, yellowish, eight-byeleven-inch pages, resembling a community newsletter more than either an academic or a literary journal.24 The deliberate limitation on length allowed the subscription cost to remain low (ﬁve dollars when it began), enabled publication within a severely restricted budget, and, most signiﬁcantly, invited the reader to consume the entire issue. The physical dimensions of a given issue suggest a concern that the reader actually be able to read, and perhaps reread, its pages — to not be overwhelmed or overburdened. The format of the journal reinforces this concern, for the constituent parts of each issue are compressed in their function, focus, and presentation. At the same time, these distinct sections or parts — variously devoted to poetic works, literary criticism, and correspondence — illuminate one another. The simultaneous impulses of compression and interaction compel signiﬁcant reformulations of poetic expression and literary criticism, evidenced through looking at the various parts that make up the textual space of each HOW(ever). In the poetry section of the journal, usually the ﬁrst two thirds, various writers are presented, each receiving a couple of pages. Usually a work is preceded by working notes, which range from a poet’s comments on sources and motivations for her work, to aesthetic and philosophical speculations on the gendered dynamics of language and form, to contextual marginalia (Susan Howe precedes a set of po30

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ems in one instance with verses from scripture). These notes, usually the equivalent of a paragraph, introduce the poems by providing a contextual and critical lense for reading them, often offering the reader a guide to understanding the poet’s process and to developing engaged reading practices. For example, Daphne Marlatt describes the poem “departure” as part of a travel journal from a trip to England, “written in a series of layers, almost archeological the urge to dig deeper in, to the hidden [not yet verbalized] series of connections that underlay, like root systems, like bone-seeds, the obvious data of our trip. Writing/traveling a series of intersections, two kinds of speech as my Canadian tongue found its way around the remnants of my British one” (2, brackets included). Or notes from Rachel Blau DuPlessis: “ Writing from the center of, the centers of, otherness. . . . Understanding formal marginality. Marginalization. Setting the poem so there is a bringing of marginalization into writing. Putting that debate right in the piece by making several sayings or statements be in the same page-space” (“ Working Notes” 1). Fraser has described the working notes as “brief descriptions of the project’s germination and how that was translated into its formal making,” evolving as a way of engaging productively with the “hostility,” “wary bafﬂement,” or “resistance” among scholars and critics in the face of this poetry, hoping that the notes will help “certain of the puzzling pieces . . . fall into place, or, at the least, alert an active curiosity” (“Editor’s Notes” 15). The working notes, then, seek to create a public space for tracing and exploring acts of reading and writing as working processes — to let the seams show rather than distance the process from the product, the writer from the poem. They shape reactions and readership, show choices happening, build voice. Such a construct contradicts what we might expect in reading a literary journal, where usually a biographical note is all that might be appended, or within the still powerful legacy of New Critical practices, approaching a poem as a hermetically sealed artifact (i.e., should the poet be telling us how to read the poem?). Defying notions of poetic autonomy, detachment, transcendence, and polish, these notes not only register women’s experiences (often relating details pertinent to the poem having to do with gendered lives) but also compel unconventional modes of reading. The notes interact with the poems as textual eruptions into the usually silent/silenced space of the page, the space within which the isLyric Conversations and Interventions

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sue of gender’s impact upon syntax, form, or word arrangements resides but is not acknowledged. In Fraser’s words, the notes were meant to invite a “particular valuing and experiencing of the fragmented and marginal” (personal correspondence, May 13, 1997). By including notes and acknowledging a potential textual component of “creative work” customarily omitted, HOW(ever)’s format foregrounds the possibilities of such extratextual material in a way similar to Susan Howe’s description, in a letter in the January 1989 issue, of discovering in the Beinecke Library drafts of extensive notes by H.D. accompanying her manuscript of The Gift: “Most interesting [in addition to gross mis-editing of the work] to me were the Notes — three drafts — She did three drafts (50 pages each) of notes— so careful, so lovely, a new way of thinking about notes — rather akin to Dickinson’s variant readings for me — that open the text to new possibilities — only here no one even mentions there were (are) notes!” (15). The notion of notes as variant readings is often reinforced by the ﬂuidity with which these notes (and the poems that follow) move between a kind of discursive “essaying” and a more associative “poeticizing.” For example, Meredith Stricker writes in introducing “The Queen Bee”: “These pages are from a gothic romance called The Queen Bee, by Edna Lee, sent to me in the mail by Daren Ganz, a painter living in Seattle. We draw and paint into a series of books, glue in scraps & pictures to ﬁnd/erase our text. Reading as a way of writing, then. Speaking not exactly English — more like a bee hum — paint speaking & torn edge & white space speaking” (5). On an ideological level, confounding the traditional conﬁnes of something called “literary criticism” and its masculinist assumptions and precepts, these notes insist not that the author’s reading is “right” but that claims to truth promulgated by notions of objectivity and neutrality are skewed by their relentless dismissal of exactly what these notes explore — that aesthetics, form, language usage are intimately bound up in positions and constructions of gender and power. More overt and directed encounters with traditions of literary criticism that have silenced women take place in the section entitled “alerts(”— usually including two or three short (one half to two pages) essays on past or present poets — as well as in the correspondence section, entitled “postcards,” and the editorial notes and bibliographies that end each issue. These sections operate to recover and introduce poets, to provide bibliographical information on studies 32

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and new works, to engage in dialogues, to work through conﬂicts, to combat a sense of isolation, to develop a community of voices, and to reﬂect upon the responses, both negative and positive, to the journal’s emphasis upon innovative writing and gender. The compressed essays in “alerts(”— usually two or three that focus on women writers of the twentieth century — alter categories of literary history while enacting certain reformulations of the category of literary criticism. A certain abandonment of mastery evolves from the formal pressure of space but also from the effort, it seems, to develop an energetic set of conversations in these pages rather than encouraging a dominant voice. “alerts(” invites the input of poets and scholars, announcing itself as “informal commentary and information,” presented “in brief letter, journal or notation form,” intentionally considered “not complete in the scholarly sense, with the hope of removing prohibitions linked with thinking/writing critically.” Such writing, however, was not easy to recruit from academics, and the “most difﬁcult task” of Fraser’s “editing tenure” proved to be “to convince scholarly types to let go of partial or unﬁnished (in the sense of incomplete) studies, or analyses of poems or critical reception of or provocative speculations about unpublished writings/ letters/ journals etc. of modernist women’s texts recently dropped/erased from the canon . . . to just let go into print a partial, unfootnoted riff” (personal correspondence, April 28, 1997, ellipses included).25 Bound up in the reluctance of scholars to “let go,” of course, were material issues of career promotion, tenure, and the like as well as the internalized values of an academic training that stressed a very different form of writing. As Fraser claimed, “I was not trying to undermine academic training but, rather, to open up the space of ‘in-process’ thinking, to catch the ‘risky,’ incomplete-but-fascinated engagement with the provisional before it got sanitized and standardized by the academic rubber stamp” (personal correspondence, April 28, 1997). This “rubber stamp” implicitly carries gendered connotations, suggesting a “more heavily-weighted set of histories to stare down, a male style of logic and argument with its conﬁdent and enlightened pressures always there to negotiate” that the “alerts(” and “postcards” sections attempted to dissuade (Fraser, “The Jump” 45). These sections, in effect, most strikingly call attention to relationships between gender, power, and literary criticism/theory underlying academic critical practices. Preﬁguring a contributor who in 1989 Lyric Conversations and Interventions

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asks, “Can we practice criticism without reproducing the . . . struggle for mastery?” (Kerry Edwards 10), the “alerts(” section from its very inception was modeled in resistance to such authority. Whether or not a piece is excerpted from a longer essay, as some are, there is a sense of excerptedness about them and, for the reader, a sense of entering the conversation midway, of being swept up by voices at their highest, most impassioned pitch, jumping beyond the preliminaries to get right to the point. Just as the space of these essays is compressed, so is their discursive operation, leading to essays that are like small gems, full of a focused light aimed at a particular issue. They are full, also, of gestures toward larger structures, like literary tradition or contemporary theory or feminist epistemologies, without the need to logically or systematically engage these structures, to call up all other critics with whom one then wants to disagree. Like the poetry that precedes them, the essays in the “alerts(” section challenge conventional structures through reacting to compressed space, employing gesture and elision, foregoing critical mastery, and creating in their rapid juxtaposition a collage of essaying voices, enacting a “peculiar hybrid” of poetics and critical discourse. Moreover, it is worth stressing, many of these small essays are among the ﬁrst discussions from that time of poets ignored by a mainstream literary apparatus. Stressing the need for continued attention to the gendered systems of power that the recovery of such elisions exposes, one of the ﬁnal issues of HOW(ever) included an excerpt from Johanna Drucker’s 1990 MLA talk, “Contemporary Women Writers and the Legacy of the Avant Garde,” addressing the task of a feminist critical reception: The ways in which work gets seen, distributed, accorded signiﬁcance and deemed worthy of critical recognition continues to divide along gender lines. . . . If one of the features of the modern avant-garde was to pretend to the autonomy and self-referential value of the work, then one of the most signiﬁcant projects of the contemporary scene has got to be the undoing of that mythic autonomy in recognition of the complicity of (still male dominated) power relations as they structure the ongoing production of literature as its own critical history. If I am interested in anything with regard to that “legacy,” it is with overturning its controlling lineages and traditions, the need to be positioned within a canon which 34

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was never mine either in my formation as a writer or in my presentation of my self socially. . . . Unfortunately, the legacy of the avant-garde, such as it is, has been to perpetuate, rather than change, the very terms of canon formation and evaluation so conducive to a male-dominated and masculinist scene — now all the more perversely fashioned as it mistakenly represents itself in the name of the “feminine.” (13–14) Over the course of its six volumes, the journal participates in the Anglo-American feminist project of literary recovery and revision, so important to the 1970s and 1980s (and now). The journal — as exempliﬁed by this quote from Drucker — records the energetic interaction between American women’s poetry and theories of language and subjectivity entering American intellectual circles in that time period.26 While the journal remains grounded in explorations of women’s voices and experiences, these very terms are questioned as poetics and theory interact, as boundaries between forms and practices shift. Blurring into the correspondence that takes place in the “postcards” section of each issue (as dialogues, as informational, as questioning), the essays provide in many ways a primer on feminist theory, a deliberate toning down of abstraction, mastery, and power that one usually associates with the authority of “theory” — a discussion of feminist theories in ways that are understandable to a wide audience and enacted in the poetry itself. In this way, theory is conjoined with poetry, each making the other accessible, intelligible, or at least enterable. Fraser writes of HOW(ever)’s concern with “the structural re-invention of the poem’s terms, as well as the range of female experiences informed by those structures,” a concern that develops through commentary on Cixous and Irigaray, on Marianne Moore and Mina Loy, and through the practice of Susan Howe, Theresa Cha, and many others. Particularly at a time when the notion of feminine writing was being advanced to talk about male writers of the avantgarde, HOW(ever) plays an important role in identifying the dangers of (once again) ignoring the gendered signature — the signature that the journal’s format continually insists upon.27 As the journal develops over its six volumes (the last volume was edited by Myung Mi Kim and Meredith Stricker), submissions begin to deﬁne the focus and range of the individual issues, which include such areas as boundaries, bodies and knowledge, the paraLyric Conversations and Interventions

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graph, erasure and restoration, the visual page, the politics of poetic form, textualization. Rather than preordained, the special topics issues emerged from “the tissue of the writing sent to us — themes that wanted exploration,” that encouraged the editors “to look further among the already selected or newly arrived manuscripts for work that would, in some serendipitous way, speak to the aesthetic/ compositional/spiritual/psychological space we wished to further explore and bring attention to” (personal correspondence, April 28, 1997). Increasingly, the verbal opens up to other realms, as visual works, sound collagists, oral traditions, and multiethnic legacies are brought into the evolving text of HOW(ever). In reading the issues sequentially, one notices how often a postcard might mention a concern that is then addressed an issue or two later, for example, the need to include more ethnic perspectives or the need to acknowledge performance art. As the journal develops, it — like the working notes and the essays and the poetry — chooses to let the seams show, to foreground the process of editing and selecting, to enlist the reader, and through these choices to work to transform ideas about feminist practices and dichotomies. Taken as an interactive text, HOW(ever) in its entirety engages the politics of process, enacting “text” as a “literary passage, that is to say, a place of transition, an area which either leads to something different or a space where change is occurring” (Furman, HOW(ever) 4.1, back cover). This notion of transition or passage bespeaks the various passages enacted by the journal, both within its issues and beyond them. One might muse further upon the importance of the visual in relation to the verbal, increasingly emphasized in HOW(ever) after the ﬁrst issue. Including visual accompaniments to the writing provided by the poets, visually oriented uses of language and page, and linguistically interested visual works, these inclusions orient the reader toward a materiality of language and an awareness of its systems and structures. Many of the art works “focused on alphabets, words, decomposition,” creating a visual aesthetic Fraser describes as moving on a “parallel track with [the] evolving conversation” stimulated by the “process-oriented” working notes in providing a “way into the poet’s thinking about the formal problems she’s set for herself — her methods, stimuli, after-thoughts” (“The Jump” 44). The ﬁrst use of graphics, taken from Maureen Owen’s AMELIA EARHART, appeared on the cover of the second issue, breaking the page into a col36

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lage of sharp-edged shards of a cut-up image of a woman, a plane, and what appear to be bits of a runway and sky. Accompanied within the issue by excerpts from Owen’s piece, the graphic was intended as a “kind of visual lure — to pull in otherwise habituated or overbooked readers.” The next issue opened with a graphic from Daphne Marlatt’s How to Hug a Stone, a blown-up map section “containing the tissue or texture of names of towns, rivers, counties in England, traveled through at the time she was writing” the volume, which is composed as journal entries. “By then,” comments Fraser, I couldn’t imagine NOT having an accompanying visual of the GRAPHIC kind to begin each issue of H(er). . . . I tried, whenever possible, to ﬁnd pieces of original art by women who were in some way working with type or language in their collages/drawings. . . . [T ]hese “illustrations” were a separate element yet very much connected to, even suggestive of, a theme that would begin to emerge for each issue — coming out of the texts selected from both solicited and unsolicited poems and critical texts & visual cues. Thinking about it now, I was beginning to track and thus to understand that the visual expression of alphabet and word was a thoughtful and pleasurable part of “writing” for many of the women poets whose work intrigued me and spoke for me, in addition to their increasing attention to the entire page as “the canvas” or “screen” on which the words were composed or projected. (Personal correspondence, April 1997) Thus, as Fraser’s early work began to consider the visual page, the poetic-critical-visual space of HOW(ever) both revealed and generated multiple “passages” between the visual and the verbal ongoing in women’s innovative poetry, often as investigations of linguistic operations of gender, power, and difference. Although its policy of accepting only work by women generated a degree of criticism, HOW(ever) remained committed to “the assertion of editorial choices by women” in a space devoted to women’s work (Fraser, “The Jump” 44). As others have remarked, the example of this journal inspired other women-edited magazines, including the Canadian journals ( f ).lip and Motel; 6ix (out of Philadelphia); Big Allis and lipstick (out of San Francisco); and Chain (edited by former students of Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein). The role of HOW(ever) in stimulating conversation about and promoting readership of womLyric Conversations and Interventions

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en’s innovative poetry continues through its own resurrection as an online journal, HOW2, ﬁrst appearing in 1999. Fraser’s goals for the journal are articulated in the “editor’s notes &” that serve as an introduction to the inaugural issue. Noting that “fuller representation as writers and editors” had beneﬁted innovative women poets since the eighties, she nonetheless asserts that “we still had serious work to do in assuming our share of choosing and shaping the dialogue focused on what and how we read.” Remembering that the “urgency” of the earlier HOW(ever) was “two-fold: empowerment through editorial choice and the creation of a community of shared scholarship and innovative poetries being written by contemporary women,” Fraser’s editorial remarks in the new online journal reﬂect a concern with “the public community of literary conversation” and the “language and model of discourse used in the public critical arena” as “too narrowly cast . . . stuck in the repeating grooves of a worn record” (ellipses included). Seeking to ﬁnd “more registers and vernaculars in which to speak [this public discourse]” and more opportunities to “practice” a public dialogue, Fraser squarely places the project of HOW2 within an agenda to develop a “critical mass” capable of speaking alternatives to the “predictable [gender] dynamic” of literary discourse (“ Why HOW(ever)?”). Continuing the earlier journal’s concern with the female signature, HOW(2) places this issue squarely on the table in its ﬁrst issue, debating the necessity of such a project by the end of the nineties, when women’s writing had clearly received more attention than a decade earlier. As a way of exploring issues of public discourse, gender, and women’s writing, Fraser posed a question to the editorial board, taken up in the forum section of the issue.28 She queried: “In 1983, there was clearly a need for women poets to take responsibility for bringing attention to the neglected pursuit and development of innovative poetic practice followed in both modernist and contemporary writing by women. HOW(ever) was born out of that need. Is a genderspeciﬁc journal, edited by women and focused on works of modernist and current innovation, still relevant? If so, why? If not, what problems do you see and what alternatives do you propose?” (Fraser, “ Why HOW(ever)?”) In the forum responses that followed, the members of the editorial board — all women, all poets and/or critics working closely in relation to innovative poetry by women — echoed 38

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Fraser’s sense of creating a “critical mass” attentive to particularities of gender in discussing practices and histories of experimental writing. Kornelia Freitag comments that “[w]hat I ﬁnd in my reading of criticism with regard to ‘language-centered writing’ is still a predominance of talk about male experimentalists and an occasional call upon women who are then treated (a) as if not different at all from their male counterparts or (b) read in a very superﬁcial manner as displaying traces of women’s writing.” Cynthia Hogue follows up Freitag’s insistence upon the “cultural positioning of women” with the lament that “[t]oo often, when I hear arguments that we’ve gotten beyond gendered issues, or that attention to gender widens the gender gap, it seems simply an elegant way of eluding the issues altogether.” Hogue further encourages attention to difference or to “the ways women variously culturally position, enact or inscribe difference(s).” My own comments urged that “we think continually about the implications of gender in relation to publication practices, to contemporary theory, to poetic traditions, to social history, to process of writing and reading, to communities of readers” in order to offset an “obscuring of these relations [which has] produced, in the past, obviously masculine-centered readings of innovative writing in this century, whether intentionally or not.” Hannah Mockel-Rieke, emphasizing the “political rather than . . . aesthetic decision” to focus upon women’s writing, introduces the idea of HOW2 as “an archival space” that can “disturb, disperse, and distribute” the power of knowledge production and control, a power that Meredith Stricker alludes to in asking, “ What happens if increasingly diverse work by women is available, but no one can ﬁnd it?” In unﬂinchingly gendered terms, Meredith Quartermain also addresses the issue of power, asking, “[D]o we encourage women to clamor in the male way, in the culture of male dominance that we are accustomed to, where shouting the loudest the oftenest obtains the most heed, or do we try to develop a style of community and interpersonal relations different from that culture of hierarchical dominance?” Ann Vickery sees the customary division of the “discourse of poetry and the discourse of criticism,” which HOW2, like HOW(ever), works to undo, as helping to perpetuate hierarchical systems of power within literary discourse. Both Vickery and Linda Russo amplify the role of difference within such systems, calling attention to “other identity formations” brought into Lyric Conversations and Interventions

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focus, for example, by the work of queer theory and postcolonial theory and asking how they “inﬂuence who gets heard and what gets heard and by whom” (Vickery). In glossing the editorial comments, I intend not to create a utopian picture but to stress the multivoiced emphasis upon systems of literary production and reception in relation to discourses of literary history, aesthetics, and privilege that oscillate within the variegated rubric of “gender.” 29 In opening this discussion and in practicing alternative formations of poetic-critical discourse, the “peculiar hybrid” of HOW(ever) continues to unfold and reshape itself in the continuing experiment of HOW2. In this way, the “public community of literary conversation” is deepened and elasticized, while a necessary skepticism about “public” conversation as a discursive production opens it to renewing disruption, to a praxis of feminist reading. Such praxis, as both HOW(ever) and HOW(2) stress, has a history, although that history can seem elusive in prefeminist or protofeminist contexts. In the following chapter, I trace the incipiently feminist registers of the lyric “I” that emerge in the early works of Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser. This turn to the pre–women’s movement sixties illuminates the critical and avant-garde discourses circulating at the time to shape the lyric “I” attached to a gendered signature and attitudes toward its emergence in linguistically and visually unconventional treatments of interiority and emotion.

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chapter two Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser in the Sixties I like to take my gender questions subtle, intricate, formal. In narrative — point of view, telos, meaningful sequence. In language often the nature and level of resistance to smoothness and ‘normalcy’ of poetry: the deformations in (un)grammatical, in (non)word ‘play,’ in (mis)spellings, in investigation, in investigation even unto the syllable, unto and into the letter, the mark. And in form — line breaks, page canvas, the use of space/silence/silencing the piercing of whiteness. . . . All of the luminous greeny white sap-ﬁlled core of the lyric. — Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “The Work of Susan Howe”

Looking back at her poetry from the sixties, poet-critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis pinpoints in her 1996 essay, “Manifests,” a problem having to do with gender, voice, and a prefeminist consciousness. Describing a period of blockage in her poetic development, she describes her midsixties poems, and the “I” writing/speaking them, as “diminished all the way down to a scant handful of one-line poems, and to gnomic statements, barely effective. The kind of development they needed was not rhetorical but historical” (DuPlessis, “Manifests” 31). Her use of the term historical encapsulates a multitude of systemic shifts necessary for the inclusion and recognition — within literary, social, and cultural structures — of women as makers rather marked upon, made into, gazed upon. “Historical” development also references the need for languages and analytical frameworks for thinking about gender, frameworks later to come through second-wave and academic feminisms. Nonetheless, this textual look back in time argues for reading such fragmentary gestures as incisively protofeminist, of locating in the elisions, ﬁgurations, and formal decisions an incipient feminist encounter between gender, language, and genre. DuPlessis sees these fragmentary lines pondering constructions of “female authorship” through the age-old ﬁgure of the Lady, who is mirrored back to the poem’s “I” as herself, whereupon the fragment

“stops, startled, where the cultural problem began. Authorship was compromised and almost aborted; in any event, these issues [of female authorship], which seemed to me, in my (then commonplace) ignorance of female cultural production, to have no analogues, pointed me toward total blockage” (“Manifests” 31, 32) — or toward fragments and one-liners. DuPlessis’s point, in retrieving a poetic fragment she had drafted thirty years earlier, is precisely to retraverse the fragment as a “cognitive act,” probing “questions of gender” and poetry before the poet possessed the “cultural apparatus” (i.e., social and theoretical feminism) to recognize them as such: this “fragment knew and represented issues, points of political and cultural contradiction about the construction of authorship and the poetic career before their maker could see them as such” (“Manifests” 31). Resurfacing the 1966 fragment in her essay, DuPlessis dissects how it “issues directly from, and is a preternatural reminder of a passionate problematic — questions of gender, in relation to an engagement with poetry, poetry ﬁgured as a set of psychosocial and intellectual institutions imbuing a practice of writing in lines” (“Manifests” 31). Particularly in registering the gender narratives and struggles embedded in poetry, the fragment functions as a probe of the overlapping ﬁelds of social, literary, and historical conﬁgurations of “woman” that merge within poetic production. To probe the fragment itself — to reread it in 1996 — is to reenter the ﬁelds at play in those years and to imagine the ﬁelds as arenas within which poetic production cannot help but register the boundaries and fences thrown up around gender. It is also to assert the necessity of feminist cultural and intellectual frameworks in “reading” what has been unreadable under male-centered theories of avant-garde poetics. This chapter pursues this necessity to make readable the early genre experimentation of Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser as feminist texts working through issues of gender and language and to consider the elison of such feminist efforts from contemporaneous and contemporary formulations of mainstream poetry, avant-garde writing, and feminist poetry. Friends and fellow poets in New York during the early sixties, hailing from different generations, these two poets have shared a lifelong interest in language innovation and women’s writing. In part, the pairing of these poets in this chapter supplies a piece of literary history left out of male-centered renderings of contemporary avant-gardes and to illuminate how such poets have been 42

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doubly marginalized through exclusion from mainstream feminist histories. Such gaps, as Fraser’s recent essays explore, limit understandings of innovative language practice and the multiple cultural contexts (including literary lineage) out of which such practice emerges. The textual experiments of Guest and Fraser, as read in this chapter, help point us toward contested paradigms of gender, aesthetics, and lineage. Exploring alternatives to conventions of voice and authenticity associated with the lyric “I,” the textual innovations of Guest and Fraser locate feminine subjectivity within cultural and linguistic constructs, particularly as they collude with romance narratives. I have chosen works by Guest and Fraser from the sixties, written and published prior to or early in the years of the women’s movement (1962 and 1969, respectively). Both poets tackle the lyric of romance, speaking with a distinctively feminized voice but eschewing standard tropes and conventions of interior revelation. Guest’s “Belgravia,” from Poems, and Fraser’s poetic sequence In Deﬁance of the Rains inhabit the narrative and semantic structures of the love poem only to tactically dismantle the cultural scripts of gender embedded therein. Writing concurrently with confessional and, for Fraser, protofeminist evocations of a woman’s voice as the instrument for reporting women’s experience, Guest and Fraser detour from the uniﬁed lyric subject and notions of transparent, utilitarian language. What is of primary interest to me, however, is how these innovations respond to and/or are received within various ﬁelds of poetic discourse shaping their moment. In the discussions that follow, the deviations from and alterations of the lyric “I” will be traced in particular relation to various poetic and aesthetic discourses that shaped reception of women’s poetry among diverse reading communities of the era. Examining critical attitudes of skepticism and even disdain in response to Guest’s ﬁrst book, a close reading of “Belgravia” considers its resistance to the valuing of voice inherited from New Critical practice and later internalized by central feminist poets and critics. The feminist encouragement of a poetics of self-expression — and of a prefeminist confessional model offered in the works of Plath and Sexton — is both incorporated and confronted within the textual innovations of Fraser’s 1969 book, In Deﬁance of the Rains. This confrontation, played out in poems exploring interior states and emotional experience, also marks a deﬁance of masculinely gendered Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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discourses of avant-garde poetics and art prominent in the ﬁfties and early sixties. To a signiﬁcant degree, this deﬁance can be located in Fraser’s use of the visual page and visual materials, ﬁnding an analogue in the paintings of women abstract expressionists such as Joan Mitchell. Contextualizing Fraser’s work within the visual experiments of New York school women painters, the chapter explores how the visual/spatial page bodies forth lyric possibilities attentive to gender but not bound by its inherited scripts. Barbara Guest and Lyric Reception Miss Guest abolishes relationship, and consequently abolishes value. . . . Where Miss Guest abolishes relationship, Miss Plath asserts it as central. (William Dickey, 1962) While O’Hara’s energetic celebration of the whole of life, in its dailiness, was a great permission giver, it was Guest’s linguistic mysteries that lingered, composed and collaged from the precise fragments of her painterly witness and her skeptical wariness of language’s conﬁnement and oversimpliﬁcation. (Kathleen Fraser, 1988) [W]e don’t know her. (Rachel Blau DuPlessis, 1995) 1

Barbara Guest’s prodigious output since the 1950s has met, until recently, with too little attention, despite her prominent involvement with poets and artists associated with the New York school, her erudite and wide-ranging inventiveness with form and language, and her textual explorations of the visual as a poetic mode. Since 1996, new assessments of Guest’s work have proliferated, spurred in large part by the interest her poetry holds for a younger generation of experimental women poets and for critics (and poet-critics) theorizing feminist and gendered poetics, retrieving women’s innovative poetry, and encouraging reading communities attenuated by a feminist sensibility. Poets like Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Barbara Einzig, Susan Gevirtz, Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Welish, Wendy Mulford, and Molly McQuade have recently penned tributes to Guest and offered keen commentary on her work’s radical trajectories; the online journal Jacket devoted its August 2000 issue to Guest, followed in more conventional journal format by a special issue of Women’s Studies devoted to her work; a collection of essays on the New York school poets, appearing from the National Poetry Foundation in the winter of 2000, 44

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includes a substantive section on Guest with essays by DuPlessis, Lynn Keller, Sara Lundquist, and myself; 2 Lundquist’s forthcoming critical study of Guest (the ﬁrst book-length treatment of the poet) has bodied forth a number of groundbreaking essays on her work’s involvement with the visual arts, her signiﬁcance to the New York school, and her contribution to American poetry. As a mark of this contribution, the prestigious Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal was awarded to Guest in April 1999, prompting Robert Kaufman’s essay on Guest in the more mainstream American Poetry Review, crediting her with continuing a critical lyric modernism. Thus, while in 1995 DuPlessis’s comment that “we don’t know her” is entirely accurate, and a panel on Guest that year — perhaps the ﬁrst ever — at the National Poetry Foundation Conference on Poets of the Fifties could begin with the remark (also by DuPlessis) that one could count on one hand the number of essays on Guest, the critical landscape is shifting even as I write. My interest in reading Guest within this chapter is in considering the critical landscape that, for so long, omitted Guest from serious consideration, locating my attention at the moment attending the reception of her 1962 volume of poetry. At issue here will be the shaping impact of academic discourse in relation to expressions of female subjectivity within language in the protofeminist sixties, concentrating on the gendered underpinning of mainstream academic reading practices that extend into divisions within second-wave feminist poetic production and reception, often labeled as “expressive” and “experimental” poetics. The extension of mainstream ideologies of language and gender, unwittingly and ironically, into a popular feminist poetics of transparent reportage arguably holds a critical landscape in place that continues to thwart readings of Guest; consequently, the encouragement of alternative reading and writing practices enacted within diverse feminist experimental poetics cracks, as it did in the late nineties for Guest, such a landscape open. Certainly, such a feminist project has already recast the scope of twentieth-century poetry, although Guest’s example has remained relatively recalcitrant within the remarkable retrieval of linguistically experimental women writing in the twentieth century, which led us to such poorly remembered ﬁgures as Mina Loy and Lola Ridge, to renewed considerations of Laura Riding, Marianne Moore, H.D., to revised notions of such “personalities” as Gertrude Stein and Amy Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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Lowell. The labors of feminist critics, particularly those working in the ﬁeld of modernism (Carolyn Burke, Marianne DeKoven, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Stanford Friedman, to name just a handful), have enriched our literary histories while challenging their very parameters and deﬁning narratives. Likewise, contemporary women practicing innovative poetries, especially those writing from the 1960s and 1970s to the present, have sought to “reconstruct that preexisting tradition of modernist women” and to conduct a “‘dig’ for a female tradition of language inventiveness” (Fraser, “Tradition” 26). The work of Barbara Guest, who began writing in the 1950s and continues until the present day, generationally bridges modernist and contemporary poets but has still suffered from decades of neglect despite an extraordinary career as a poet, novelist, essayist, biographer, and art critic (Fraser, “Tradition” 23).3 Indeed, despite her centrality within the New York school, “Guest remains unnarrated, and unappropriated to the uses of criticism and literary history,” as Sara Lundquist argues in her efforts to renarrate Guest’s early career in relation to this group of more prominently known (male) poets.4 Although a body of academic literary criticism is only now being developed to help us “know her,” beyond her label as the only woman poet of the New York school of writers and artists, the initial impulse to resituate her work arose among women poets interested in her formal innovations and particularly in a “feminist understanding of poetic innovation” exhibited in her work (DuPlessis, “Manifests” 23). Reviews by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Barbara Einzig, responding to Guest’s 1995 Selected Poems, describe a poetics of both radical form and politics, a “new perspective on what linguistically-foregrounded poetry is about, suggesting that concentration upon the ‘word-assuch’ may offer a way of expressing within poetry the tension and violence of our time” (Einzig 7). Locating Guest’s work within a line of women experimentalists in the twentieth century whose work with language probed constructions of gender and culture but has been customarily marginalized for that very focus, DuPlessis sees in Guest “a test case of the crossings and vectors in contemporary poetry: the feminist understanding of poetic innovation; the approaches to proto-feminist analysis made by women innovators; the cavalier attitude to women artists sometimes evident in artistic groups” (“Manifests” 23). These “crossings and vectors” emerge from and within an interactive history of literary discourses and cultural ideologies con46

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textualizing Guest’s initial reception, her subsequent marginalization, and the hopeful signs of a current reevaluation. I am particularly interested in the gendered ideologies attending the cultural moments of Guest’s earliest work and her recovery by women poets of the nineties. In part, this section looks to the reception of Guest’s work as a way of suggesting broader relationships between literary stature, formal innovation, and constructions of gender. Prior to the recent reviews by DuPlessis and Einzig and beginning in the 1980s, the poet Kathleen Fraser has taken issue with the “benign critical neglect of Guest’s work” and has devoted attention to Guest in essays and editorial efforts.5 Fraser positions Guest within what she terms a “tradition of marginality,” a tradition revealing the cultural, historical, and gendered dimensions of women’s experimental writing. Mapping some of these dimensions in a 1988 essay, “The Tradition of Marginality,” Fraser tellingly describes her own experience in the 1960s of a dual marginality: developing an increasingly linguistically foregrounded poetry hybridizing both feminist politics and avant-garde practice, Fraser found herself nonetheless excluded from emerging mainstream feminist poetries (and their “call for the immediately accessible language of personal experience”) and from male-dominated avant-garde poetries (24). This marginality typiﬁes for Fraser the status of the woman experimentalist in twentiethcentury American poetry and is furthered by the historic practice of the erasure of women from narratives of literary history and the mechanisms that support them — critical attention, anthology selections, editorial networks, and so forth. Witnessing these erasures in her own education and her life as a poet entering the New York scene in the sixties, Fraser developed what she later recognized as a “political/historical understanding of literary ‘malpractice’ (lines of power excluding/erasing both unknown and heretofore highly established women writers as well as experimental practice, in general . . . favoring the ‘known’/conserving impulse” (personal correspondence, April 28, 1997, Fraser’s ellipses). The case of Barbara Guest provided Fraser’s ﬁrst “in-person encounter with this common historic practice,” while simultaneously, for the young woman poet in the early sixties, Guest offered Fraser her ﬁrst model of the woman poet embracing “linguistic mysteries” and a questioning of the notion of self (“Tradition” 24). A “major ﬁgure in the poetry and painting scene through the ﬁfties and sixties” Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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and “the only woman poet in the ﬁrst generation of the New York school,” Guest was nonetheless excluded from the ﬁrst major anthology representing the different generations of the school (with the work of twenty-six men and one woman), An Anthology of New York Poets, edited by David Shapiro and Ron Padgett and published in 1970 (Fraser, “Tradition” 24).6 Recounting the “shocking erasure” enacted by this exclusion from a “deﬁning anthology,” DuPlessis also notes that Guest’s work suffered similar erasure from a deﬁning anthology of women’s feminist poetry, No More Masks! (edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass in 1973 and revised by Howe in 1993), which also omitted this copiously published poet, “probably because none of her work was felt to be readable, then or now, by feminist thematics” (“Manifests” 23).7 The question of readability, of course, begs the question of who is reading and from what position. Excluded from the reading communities shaping and shaped by anthologies such as Shapiro’s and Howe’s, Guest’s work and its reception suggest the necessary revisions of aesthetic expectations and of reading practices that must be undertaken as part of an interactive poetic-critical project to establish the validity of women exploring the cultural work of language and the territory of gender’s relation to formal innovation. Such a project necessarily looks to dominant forms of literary, poetic, and critical discourse and attempts to trace both their impact and their ideological foundations. In this respect, Guest serves as an ideal test case of the gendered intersections of aesthetic and critical values, particularly as these take shape in a decade encouraging cultural containment and homogeneous norms, the ﬁfties. In a twofold manner, I want to linger upon the moment of the late ﬁfties and early sixties in America as a way of suggesting these gendered intersections, ﬁrst, through a 1962 review essay of Guest’s work, and second, through Kathleen Fraser’s autobiographical comments on the New York poetry scene at this time. In her early twenties, with most of the decade of the ﬁfties still ahead, Barbara Guest moved from California to New York City, where she began working as an editior for Art News. In 1955, having published a poem in the Partisan Review that caught the eye of a group of writers and painters, she met John Meyers, Frank O’Hara, and Jane Freilicher, beginning her involvement with the literary and visual artists who came to be called the New York school, including also 48

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John Ashberry, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. When Delmore Schwartz left the Partisan Review, Guest was invited to ﬁll the post as poetry editor, and she encouraged the publication of O’Hara and others. As the ﬁfties drew to a close, Guest, at that point the only female poet associated with the New York school, gathered together her ﬁrst book of poems, The Location of Things, published as the decade ended (1960). Guest followed with Poems: The Location of Things, Archaics, the Open Skies (1962), which was promptly reviewed by William Dickey in the (magisterially male) Kenyon Review. In this review, Dickey denigrates Guest’s poetry as incoherent, irresponsible, and capricious, complaints clustering around his perception of an uncertainty of voice and self within the work. His criteria for evaluating “good” poetry demonstrate the unease or “discomfort with women who do not assert the self in writing, who instead write in part to bring into question the very notion of the self” that Carolyn Burke has identiﬁed as common among critical responses to women experimentalists — even if, as in this case, they are not identiﬁed as such (in Fraser, “Line” 165). In the review, commenting on six new books of poetry, Dickey includes two women, “Miss Guest” and “Miss Plath,” amidst four men: John W. Clark, Christopher Middleton, John Hollander, and Frederic Will, none of them a “Mr.” On the whole, he is disappointed, experiencing “tedium” and “irritation” at the “failure of some of these poets to show a sense of responsibility to the reader. They expect the reader to work devotedly for them to solve conundrums, to supply transitions, to make, out of a haphazard assortment of building materials, a habitable dwelling. The poets will not trouble to be intelligent or exact. They will be satisﬁed with fragments of thoughts, melanges of images, comparisons which have no basis in similitude, phrases whose sonority disguises a lack of meaning.” (Dickey 756). A surpassing, if unwitting, description of language-oriented poetries, Dickey’s comments disdain the inaccessibility of the poet who refuses the transparency of language, who offers the reader a collaborative role, or who obscures the poetic voice as primary vehicle of authenticity and expression. Plath stands in opposition to Guest in particular: while Miss Guest “is herself . . . that self seems curiously without coherence,” a disunity evident in a poetry that “abolishes relationship” and refuses “a sense of intelligible structure” or “meaningful sequence” (Dickey 758, emphasis added); Miss Plath, in the pre-Ariel and formally polLyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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ished Colossus, constrasts the verbal arbitrariness of Guest, for in her poetry no word is “arbitrary. The words are there because they can be used, and for purposes of revelation, not concealment. Finally, each passage establishes a consistent, personal tone of voice, which contributes to the individuality and unity of the poem” (Dickey 762, emphasis added). In gentlemanly fashion, Dickey implicitly allows that women — so carefully marked off by the modest, girlish “Miss” — can write poetry, but only rarely can they escape the irrational and incoherent female self to transcend to the perfect unity and control of revelation. It is against the continuing power of this kind of critical discourse that Kathleen Fraser, among others, has more recently questioned the articulation of the subject or self in women’s poetry: “[I]f the subject is yet to be brought into focus, what learned prohibitions have women poets worked against to uncover and catch partial knowledge, fragmentary perception that disappears almost as fast as it arrives? what if the subject, itself, is resistance, vulnerability, seeming lack of will, the conditioned self-denial that creates uncertainty, unsteadiness in the world? How can the line [or form in general] be made to reﬂect these states?” (“Line” 165). In large part, languageoriented poets like Fraser taught us in the 1980s and 1990s how to read back into this critical moment of 1962, a moment bearing the weight of sexist ideologies dominating the postwar ﬁfties of which Fraser, as a young poet entering the ﬁeld, became acutely aware. On a fundamental level, Dickey’s strategy of counterpointing Guest with Plath reveals a larger pattern, one that would repeatedly position Guest outside the mainstream of women’s poetry in the 1960s and 1970s; the Plath/Guest opposition manifests a general critical division between the experimental (those concerned with the coded play of language) and the expressive (those advocating the accessible voice of female experience) that has become standard in literary criticism.8 However, for the literary establishment of the late ﬁfties and early sixties, the division boiled down to good and bad, uniﬁed and fragmentary, coherent and irrational, serious poet and “Miss.” During this pre–women’s liberation movement moment, Kathleen Fraser encountered Barbara Guest and her poetry in New York, but only after experiencing some signiﬁcantly gender-informed poetic practices and assumptions that set up particular models of female poetry we ﬁnd echoing through Dickey’s review. A recent college 50

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graduate (having, incidentally, studied no women poets or authors at Occidental College), Fraser arrived in New York in the early 1960s to work as a journalist and ended up joining poetry workshops with Stanley Kunitz and Robert Lowell. With Kunitz, Fraser read the poems of Elizabeth Bishop — presented as good because genderless — and then, by 1962, began hearing through these men of Sylvia Plath: “In 1962 we read her poems; by 1963, she was dead. Plath was my ﬁrst female role model in poetry. The male poets and editors were in love with her. Lowell read her poems at his reading. Not only did she have the superb craft and ear, but there was something seductive for the male literary world in her ‘madness’ and her tragic end” (“Tradition” 23). Yearning for a “female role model, for a teacher who could show how one might attempt to be in the world, as a woman poet, without choosing nervous breakdown, total isolation, or suicide as a solution,” Fraser registered for a workshop by a woman poet unknown to her, Daisy Alden (“Tradition” 23). Illness prevented Alden’s appearance, and she was replaced by Kenneth Koch, who taught Fraser many “healthy” things (a skepticism about sentimentality and high seriousness, an embrace of playfulness in language), but, she remembers, “I watched uneasily as he divided us into male poets and female sex objects who wrote poetry” (“Tradition” 23). Presumably, Fraser faced the prospect of becoming a “Miss Fraser,” although Koch did introduce the young poet to Barbara Guest. Risking oversimpliﬁcation, I want to emphasize a primary and obvious division between the regard attributed male and female poets in these narratives of critical and poetic attitudes, but further to suggest that a gendered set of aesthetic values exempliﬁed by Dickey or Lowell or Koch becomes mirrored in the categorizations created by female poets themselves in the sixties and seventies, even as they discard a poetics of male identiﬁcation through strategies of emphatic feminization of self-expression (Plath, Sexton) and/or assertion of a feminist politics (Rich, Levertov). The establishment’s valuing of voice (initially perceived as genderless) in the late 1950s perceptions of poets like Plath, Rich, and Levertov is carried over into the feminist privileging of a female voice of authenticity in the 1960s celebration and growth of women’s poetry. My point is not to diminish this feminist accomplishment but to note parallels between Dickey’s dismissal of Guest, Fraser’s feelings of marginality, and, some twentyﬁve years later, a continuing stress upon identifying Guest’s work Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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against the “political ardors of Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich or . . . the confessional intensity of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton,” with whom she would have “no truck,” the ﬁrst essay on Guest included in the Dictionary of Literary Biography tells us (Manousos 296). 9 As Fraser’s memoir-essay testiﬁes, the experiencing of this division was (and remains) acute as poets of female experience demanded a language of reportage and transparency and voice, skeptical of women like Guest and Fraser whose work investigated the assumptions of language’s access to truth and experience. This oppositional division, taken up and experienced by women poets, seems sustained by an unfortunate resistance to examining its contradictory connections to male-derived discourses already set up in the late ﬁfties and early sixties that led to expectations about women’s poetry, particularly with respect to the role of voice and self.10 In what seems a deliberate swerving of these oppositional categories (useful as they can be), Guest’s response to a 1992 interview question —“Did you go for confessional poetry?” — is telling: “I think all poetry is confessional” (Hillringhouse 23). While this assertion validates a basis in the autobiographical that her carefully crafted poems often obscure, on another level it speaks to a concept of self and experience that opens beyond the conventional assumptions of unity, authenticity, and voice that circumscribe Dickey’s review and, by extension, a whole tradition of reading the lyric. As Lundquist remarks, Guest’s comment on confessional poetry “uniquivocally expresses the idea that all artistic representation functions as autobiographical projection and necessarily tells a story of self, [while] her routes are subtle, abstract, and oblique rather than confrontational and conspicuous” (“Barbara Guest” 164). Bernstein further connects the notions of self and lyric in “Guest’s aversion to the lyric” as meaning that “her work is not an extension of herself — herself expressed — that is, not a direct expression of her feelings or subjectivity, but rather is deﬁned by the textual composition of an aesthetic space — herself (itself ) deﬁned” (“Introducing Barbara Guest” n.p.). More pointedly, Guest’s poetics exhibit a concern with structures of female subjectivity that Fraser describes as the formal project of many contemporary women poets interested in language operations: “[T ]he frame of the page, the measure of the line, has provided . . . the difﬁcult pleasure of reinventing the givens of poetry, imagining in visual, structural terms core states of female social and psychological 52

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experience not yet adequately tracked: hesitancy, silencing or speechlessness, continuous disruption of time, ‘illogical’ resistance, simultaneous perception, social marginality” (“Line” 153). What Dickey might read as incoherent or arbitrary, Fraser instructs us to think of as structural responses to female socialization and psychology, or what Susan Gevirtz terms the “interrogation of the structures of making, of meaning,” that within the norms of poetic discourse will seem deviant (“Belief’s Afterimage” n.p.). (Bernstein’s and Gevirtz’s essays are part of a special issue of Jacket focusing on Guest. This issue includes essays by Guest, Sara Lundquist, Wendy Mulford, and others. Jacket, an Internet journal, can be found at www. jacketmagazine.com/10/index.html [accessed April 20, 2003].) Dickey’s displeasure with Guest’s 1962 volume might well have been provoked by the poem “Belgravia,” which situates itself within conventions of love poetry while demonstrating the gendered constructions shaping voice, subjectivity, and language in these naturalized (i.e., masculine) rules of reading. The poem commits numerous sins for a reader like Dickey: an enfolded and veiled use of image (“fragment of thoughts, melanges of images”); an anticipation of expectations of the love lyric that are not carried through (a lack of “meaningful sequence” or “intelligible structure”); a speaking “I” that seems deferred and buried (“curiously without coherence”); a discursiveness characterized by limpid, passive, and open-ended structures (a refusal to be “intelligent or exact”); a generality and musicality of diction (“phrases whose sonority disguises a lack of meaning”); a movement toward variability and ambiguity rather than revelation (“a failure . . . to show a sense of responsibility” and a “haphazard assortment of building materials”). Indeed, the poem conveys a peculiar sense of absence or disembodiment in its representational choices of image and diction or syntactical conﬁgurations, all of which dwell upon a “man” who, nonetheless, remains elusive, unspeciﬁed, yet omnipresent and a female speaker whose subjectivity is located in relationship to the construction of masculinity enacted by the poem’s formal and linguistic moves. The poem opens with an obvious gesture toward the love lyric — the ﬁrst line and continuing refrain is “I am in love with a man” — while simultaneously reconsidering the genre in the ﬁrst stanza’s refusal of speciﬁcity, offering a generic man who is never personalized or directly addressed. The poem displaces the love relationship with Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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a relationship between this man and his house while suspending any direct comment upon the “I” and the man: I am in love with a man Who is more fond of his own home Than many interiors which are, of course, less unique, But more constructed to the usual sensibility, Yet unlike those rooms in which he lives Cannot be ﬁlled with crystal objects. There are embroidered chairs Made in Berlin to look like cane, very round And light which do not break, but bend Ever so slightly, and rock at twilight as the cradle Rocks itself if given a slight push and a small Tune can be heard when several of the branches creak.11 As the poem’s seven stanzas develop, the metaphor of the house clearly tells us much about this man; the arrangement of the house suggests a controlling subjectivity that is privileged, composed, reﬂective, distant, analytical, and orderly. An elaborate conceit develops in the poem, but the poem’s deliberately discursive arrangement of the female “I” extends the conceit into the arena of linguistic constructions of gender norms. Rather than the authentic “I,” the speaking voice signiﬁes a construction socialized to exist in support of masculinity and of a particular set of ideologies privileging masculine rationality, speech, and power. Simultaneously, however, the poem’s formal operations void the masculine subject or, more precisely, reveal the naturalized masculine subject as a carefully constructed self that depends upon a singularity and unity of perspective, a regulated viewpoint of gender within our culture. These ﬁrst two stanzas establish a pattern of the lyric “I’s” deferral and nonemergence. A characteristic syntactical doubling in the opening lines sets this pattern in motion, playing with our expectations of lineal development in the love poem: “I am in love with a man / Who is more fond of his own home.” This “more-than” structure, following as it does a statement of love, initially suggests that the “I” or “me” will be the object of comparison and, hence, the source of the love lyric’s distress. After all, who would want to be in love with a man who loves his house more than his wife or lover? Instead, the 54

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“I” is displaced with the generalized word choice, “interiors,” so that we are encouraged to think literally of other houses while also retaining the trace of the expected “me.” Furthermore, passive constructions bury the agency of the “I” while also seeming to disembody the “man”: objects in the poem are put into action, but the syntax consistently refuses to identify the actor. Thus rooms are “ﬁlled with crystal objects,” “There are embroidered chairs,” “the cradle / Rocks itself if given a slight push,” and “a small / Tune can be heard”— and yet the agent doing the action is carefully omitted by the grammatical structures. In gendered terms, as the poem continues, this elimination of grammatical agency has duel effects. Certain actions coded as feminine (as in rocking the cradle), when presented in passive terms, increase the passivity of the speaking “I” as if demonstrating the way female subjectivity is continually deﬂected through the discursive structures of our culture (women are nurturing, etc.) in a way that negates female agency. At the same time, the passive structures deemphasize the masculine body to demonstrate the hierarchical privileging of (masculine) mind over (female) body. The next stanzas in the poem pointedly reference physical activities only to relegate them to serving the superior workings of the “thinking” man: Many rooms are in his house And they can all be used for exercise. There are mileposts cut into the marble, A block, ten blocks, a mile For the one who walks here always thinking, Who ﬁnds a meaning at the end of a mile And wishes to entomb his discoveries. A singularly nonmuscular diction and controlled calmness mark this retreat of the body into the mind, a deadening process that makes use of the body only to ﬁnd and “entomb” “meaning.” The body is never present (except in the generalized “one who walks”) in these linguistic structures of passivity that disembody the masculine subject while recording the material effects of his subjectivity as it leaves evidence of its arranging and measuring mastery upon the environment: “There are embroidered chairs,” “There are mileposts cut into the marble,” and the rooms “can all be used for exercise.” The sense Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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of the “man” who transcends body but nonetheless leaves the marks of his agency chillingly deﬁnes the role of the speaking “I” in the next stanzas: I am in love with a man Who knows himself better than my youth, My experience or my ability Trained now to reﬂect his face As rims reﬂect their glasses, Or as mirrors, ﬁligreed as several European Capitals have regarded their past Of which he is the living representative, Who alone is nervous with history. I am in love with a man In this open house of windows, Locks and balconies, This man who reﬂects and considers The brokenhearted bears who tumble in the leaves. The female “I” is arranged within this masculine structure as carefully as the chairs and crystal objects, serving to reﬂect back to the man his masculine identity. Within this structure, the feminine role of “mirror” keeps the masculine subject from being alone with history, allowing him to transcend the historical and social through a ﬁxing of gender subjectivities. In this house of locks and windows, the man “reﬂects and considers” the activity on the lawn rather than engaging with the “brokenhearted bears” (his children?), removing himself through mental contemplation from the messiness of materiality associated, in this image of the bears, with the feminine role of maternity. Thus the feminine saves him from history by mirroring a contained and uniﬁed masculinity, a universalized vision of a civilized, rational self and past (“ﬁligreed as several European / Capitals have regarded their past”); at the same time, the feminine embodies history, the maternal body, the one who bodies forth generations, the body denied the ability to reﬂect and consider so that men may do so. As a “living representative” of a Western narrative of history and self, “ﬁligreed” as though needing a shiny veneer, the man is “nervous with history” or with the threat that the veneer might be stripped or 56

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peeled away to reveal the representation as representation. To reduce the naturalized image of the uniﬁed and privileged masculine self to a ﬁction constructed through history is to leave the “one who walks” necessarily “nervous with history” if facing it “alone.” The feminized mirror, the “other,” supports the place of man in history. The poem’s attention to ideological foundations of masculinity takes on additional resonance when considered within the context of the ﬁfties and early sixties in America, a time of rigid attempts to homogenize and deﬁne gender identity in ways that supported the privileged status of men. Guest’s poem, like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, responds in part to the postwar retreat into domesticity, privacy, and tradition that relegated women (at least in the ideal) to subservient positions, both in the home and in the public sphere. The dominance of gender norms encouraged in the ﬁfties depended, of course, upon a denial of the performative and constructed quality of gender, encouraged by a regulated view of masculinity or femininity as natural rather than historically circumscribed, as universal rather than culturally scripted. The poem’s ﬁnal stanzas, set in a garden outside the house, emphasize the careful arrangement of perspective shaping apprehensions of both self and other, signaling the careful construction of subjectivity within the gendered space of the conventional love poem and the culture it inhabits: In the garden which thus has escaped all intruders There when benches are placed Side by side, watching separate entrances, As one might plan an audience That cannot refrain from turning ever so little In other directions and witnessing The completion of itself as seen from all sides, I am in love with him Who only among the invited hastens my speech. Subordinate clauses defer, for an entire stanza, the grammatical subject and verb of the main clause — the “I am” of the ﬁnal “I am in love.” This accumulative syntax, pushing the “I” further from our view while also enclosing it with a verbal density, incrementally builds Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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an image of enclosure and performance, wherein the garden is set up in such a way as to insure the “audience” has the proper perspective and to discourage the audience from turning their gaze upon themselves — from “turning ever so little / In other directions and witnessing / The completion of itself as seen from all sides.” It is within this structure, within this directed gaze, that the “I” loves, a love progressively deromanticized by the poem’s emphasis upon the constructions of gender scripting this performance. The ﬁnal lines enact a linguistic doubleness in their grammatical ambiguity: does the “him” hasten her speech “only among the invited,” suggesting that he permits her to speak in front of the audience he has chosen and is directing; or is he himself among her “invited,” a circumstance hastening her to speak of the conditions of masculinity, a speaking that suggests an assertion of her agency (being the one to invite) and voice (her choice to speak) that emerges from such exposure of the structures relegating her to object status? A palimpsistic layering of textual meaning, what Barbara Einzig calls a “syntactic mobility,” offers us both readings at once, allowing them to interact and resonate through the poem’s various constructions and deconstructions of gendered subjectivity (8). Kathleen Fraser has described Guest’s work as an “overlaying” of details and thoughts “like bits of ﬁne coloured tissue used in collage” and quotes Honor Johnson’s delineation of Guest’s “techniques of abstraction and methods of composition that might be applied to words and their reinvented relations inside the poem” (“Line” 162). Similarly evoking a painting analogy, Marianne DeKoven describes the “palette” of Fraser’s own writing as made of a “nonreferential combination of precision and generality. . . . [P]articular expressions of emotion . . . [are] combined with both rigorous refusal, in the abstract diction, of specifying context or narrative coherence . . . and also diction which establishes very precise, very speciﬁc actions or objects” (“Gertrude’s Granddaughters” 14). That Fraser has learned from Guest something about “the mysteries of language” takes on a historically meaningful signiﬁcance within postwar avant-garde practice, for both women, in generational sequence and overlap, have conducted careers “in relation” to speciﬁc “reading communities” (various avant-gardes, feminist, New Critical, confessional, etc.) and to the “socio-poetic forces they represent,” as DuPlessis describes the history of Guest’s reception (“The Flavor of Eyes” 23). In the 58

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next section of this chapter, I will take up the “case study” of Kathleen Fraser and her early work from the 1960s for the purpose of examining the impact of the avant-garde as a sociopoetic force shaping the gendered page and the ﬁeld of production. Lyric and Visual Fields: Kathleen Fraser’s Early Work . . . to invent a visual shape for one’s interior life.—Kathleen Fraser, “Uncontainable” My page sense was also being informed by New York school painters and poets. . . . Barbara Guest’s discrete and visual perception seemed very important to me. My writing process as a lyric poet began to seem very limited to me.—Kathleen Fraser, “An Interview”

During the 1960s and early 1970s Kathleen Fraser published her ﬁrst poetry collections: a number of books as small press limited editions and one collection of poems through the publishing house Harper and Row. Emerging out of close contact with the New York school of poets and particularly inspired by Barbara Guest’s example, Fraser’s little-examined work of the 1960s begins to explore a particularly feminist approach to linguistic and formal innovations that later emerge in more explicit fashion in the 1980s and 1990s. Looking at In Deﬁance of the Rains (1969) and drawing upon her recent essays and interviews that comment upon the sixties, I hope to examine the early development in Fraser’s work of a feminist-inﬂected experimentalism — a deﬁance that nonetheless takes part in the ﬁeld or nexus of innovative poetic activity in the 1960s that offered liberatory possibilities while too often casting itself in masculine terms. I want to locate this deﬁance in the space of the page, remembering that Charles Olson claimed, “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America,” and thinking about how the page space of a woman writer might respond to the openness of this declaration, while at the same time rework his manly (some would say misogynist) stance. At issue in this discussion is the predominance of a masculine discourse of creative production, inherited from long traditions in the arts but intensiﬁed in the ﬁfties and sixties in particular American avant-gardes and in the critical apparatus shaping the story of these avant-gardes, centering upon the male body of action as paradigm for Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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the artist, the hero, the new Adam. In the midst of masculine rhetoric, does the poem as a visual ﬁeld register an awareness of the gendering of the ﬁeld? This question extends naturally to the visual arena of painting and to the intermingling of the literary and visual arts energizing the avant-gardes of the ﬁfties and sixties. Fraser points to the visual work of women artists of the New York school as having a profound impact upon American poetry in the sixties, and the example of Joan Mitchell’s work with the canvas as visual ﬁeld will be called upon in this chapter’s gendered reading of the visual/textual signs of the page/canvas amidst claims to a masculine art and poetics promulgated alongside the encouraging freedom of the “new.” In effect, I’m interested in how we read the visual uses of space in relation to gender in the mutually inﬂuential worlds of art and poetry in the New York avant-garde of the sixties. Describing the New York scene she entered in the early sixties as a young woman, Fraser recalls a ﬁeld dominated by male poets, editors, and publishers: “Through the Sixties, various movements emerged and ran parallel courses, all sharing two observable similarities. They each had male theorists setting forth the new aesthetic dogma, usually asserted in published correspondence or theoretical repudiation of other’s existing poetics. Each poetics constellation or school had its token woman poet” (Translating 30 –31). In New York in 1962 (the year of Guest’s second book), Fraser’s encounter with Plath’s work offered possibilities for a woman-centered writing but within a reading encouraged under the tutelage of Kunitz and Lowell ultimately left her looking elsewhere. An aesthetics of confessional female subjectivity validated by the masculine stamp of approval but unexamined for its interest in linguistic complexities dissatisﬁed Fraser.12 The confessional poetic, as deﬁned at the time by conventions of lyric expression, offered little respite for her longing to “locate” a “counterpoint on the page,” or, as she describes elsewhere, to record the “grafﬁtti of inner drift and disruption” and “to invent a visual shape for one’s interior life” (Translating 202, 203). As her recently published essays attest, Fraser’s early sixties encounter with various alternative poets and poetics, but also artists and paintings, provided possibilities for realizing a visual shape in her work through a changing page sense. Reading Olson’s essay on ﬁeld poetics, “Projective Verse,” written in 1950 and made widely available in Donald Allen’s 1960 The New American Poetry, she “responded 60

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to his emphasis on the visual ﬁeld of the page” as an “intriguing invitation,” enriched by Duncan’s “open use of the line in The Opening of the Field,” leading her to become more “visually and syllabically aware.” “At the same time,” she remembers, “my page sense was also being informed by New York school painters and poets. I was reading Frank O’Hara, and Barbara Guest’s discrete and visual perception seemed very important to me. My writing process as a lyric poet began to seem very limited to me” (in Hogue, “An Interview” 11). In rethinking the lyric and the writing process, the impetus toward the visual gains energy from numerous sources in Fraser’s work, and, without disregarding her recent articulations (and awareness) of her debt to Olson’s emphasis upon the page, I want to suggest the implications of Olson’s discourse upon her production in the sixties in light of its “exclusive address to ‘the guys’” and his “belittling, misogynist views towards certain younger women writers around him . . . [toward] the woman as creative agent” (in Hogue, “An Interview” 12). Although Fraser later claims to “get beyond” the “boy-talk” of Olson and appreciate his permission-giving impact, such “talk” would undoubtedly have profound effects on how she placed her words upon the page, on how the page could offer a space for poetic utterance. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis convincingly argues, the FULL PAGE for Olson is articulated, in his manifesto’s very title, “as a space (a ﬁeld of action) for the project(ive) to enter in order to make ‘verse’” (“Manifests” 44); space is virgin territory to be occupied through an “inseminating” or “thrusting outward” of “masculine discourse” (“projective,” “percussive,” “prospective” are Olson’s terms). Embracing his “brothers” and poets-as-men in rhetoric that “rings with its own homosocial enthusiasms,” Olson’s inﬂuential manifesto seeks to make “poetry safe for men to enter, making poetry a serious discourse of assertive, exploratory, and sometimes aggressive manhood,” a “postwar” poetics that reclaims the masculine (DuPlessis “Manifests,” 46, 44 – 45). Within such an authoritative moment in alternative, avant-garde poetics, DuPlessis asks, “Is there a female Olson” (“Manifests” 44)? As analogue, New York school painter Joan Mitchell’s canvases can be situated in relation to a macho, expansive, inseminating rhetoric and approach to the canvas as a ﬁeld of action. By the time Mitchell showed her ﬁrst paintings in New York, the abstract expressionist movement had been clearly articulated in masculine terms, emphaLyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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sizing a subjective, interior self that reveals its movements through a body deﬁning itself as active, forceful, expansive through an allover claim to the canvas. Reminiscent of Olson’s aesthetic, Jackson Pollock’s ﬁrst solo exhibition in 1943 was described by James Johnson Sweeney as an intensely orgasmic masculinity: “Pollock’s talent is volcanic. It has ﬁre. It is unpredictable. It is undisciplined. It spills itself out in a mineral prodigality not yet crystallized. It is lavish, explosive, untidy” (quoted in Kraskin 6). Such discourse would formulate a notion of abstract expressionism as energetic and violent, and the emphasis upon action painting would exclude — among many other aspects — what Holland Cotter (in discussing forgotten New York school painter Anne Ryan) calls an “intimist sensibility,” an “expressive reticence” presenting an “alternative esthetic self to the Nietzschean prodigy the art world had by 1950 taken to its art” (182). In more material terms, Mitchell recalls that in the “macho 50s,” “the galleries wouldn’t carry more than, say, two women. It was a quota system” (in Westfall 114). Lucy Lippard, commenting in the midst of seventies second-wave feminism, points toward the “very physical nature of art — particularly of large canvases and sculpture,” as “used to discourage women all along” from considering themselves artists, and she quotes Mitchell as remembering that “there were times when I really got discouraged and thought why am I doing this, because I’m a woman and women can’t paint” (182). The material and rhetorical boundaries of gender informing the New York school of painting in the 1950s are undeniable, despite the active involvement of numerous women, and lead one to question how Mitchell’s paintings encounter the masculinized ﬁeld of the canvas erupting in Pollock’s wake. Mitchell herself resists the notion that her paintings ever went allover, as did Pollock’s — and indeed there is always a “subtle emphasis on the central area” in her post-1956 paintings (Bernstock 38). Although disliking Pollock’s work when ﬁrst viewing it in 1947, saying “It was too much gesture for me at the beginning,” Mitchell would claim in 1967 that his “enormous generosity and lyricism of feeling” inﬂuenced her: “Much of Pollock’s painting, almost all of it, I would say, is excessively lyric, and I think he thought of it as violent. They were extremely lyric paintings. Whether they’re beautiful or not, they’re lyric, which is now a dirty word” (quoted in Bernstock 38). This mention of lyricism is interesting in relation to a layered, his62

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torical gendering of associations with the lyric that the more masculinized thrusts of avant-garde rhetoric seem bent on dismissing. However, for both Mitchell and Fraser, encounters with the visual ﬁeld draw from the lyrical possibilities renewed yet simultaneously crossed out by the material handling of language and page, paint and canvas, suggested by the inﬂuential models of Olson and Pollock. For both Mitchell and Fraser, the encounter with the ﬁeld of the page/canvas differentiates itself from the allover (Pollock) or the projective (Olson) through an attention to the white space, the margins, the interweaving of foreground and background, the lyric reﬁgured through the unreferenced, the incidental, the tangential. Entering the ﬁeld, they are nonetheless in deﬁance of its gendered subtexts and exclusions. In turning my attention to Fraser’s 1969 text, In Deﬁance of the Rains, published by Kayak Press after Fraser’s move from New York to San Francisco in 1967, I want ﬁrst of all to remark upon the physical and visual makeup of the original text and consider how the material qualities of the text suggest modes of deﬁance. Measuring eight and a half by eleven inches (as does Olson’s much thicker volume, The Maximus Poems), the book’s oversized pages allow each poem (one to each page) a generous margin, an enclosure of white space that often gives the poem the impression of ﬂoating. The size of the volume, originally unplanned by Fraser but turning out to be necessary for the inclusion of etchings by Judy Starbuck (now known as Judy Lureschi), carries consequences for our reading despite its unintentional rationale.13 A slender volume, it contains twenty-three poems ordered to suggest the narrative of a dissolving relationship, interspersed by nine of Starbuck’s etchings. The incorporation of the etchings bespeaks an integrative effort, as the visual images — all involving female bodies — resonate complexly with the poems to push forward questions of representation and female subjectivity. A layered correspondence between visual image and verbal text accrues as the volume progresses, both in the thematics of the poetry and also, signiﬁcantly, in the functioning of the visual page in relation to the text written upon it/within it/as part of it.14 These material aspects of the book — made possible through publishing with Kayak, a small San Francisco press — get lost in the later appearance of these poems in a selected volume published by Harper and Row in 1974 under the title of What I Want. The move to a major Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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publishing house results in a loss (no surprise) of the page as the book dimensions follow the conventional paperback-sized ﬁve by seven, and each poem obviously and covetously takes on more authority than the margin in the space of the page. The etchings are also omitted, and the order of the poems has been dramatically altered. These changes, although both routine and justiﬁed within establishment publishing constraints, eliminate the emphasis upon the visual page that the original volume investigates. The physical dimensions of the original text are important to recall, for they gesture toward what Fraser later calls the “dimensionality of the full page” and its invitation to “multiplicity, synchronicity, elasticity” invited, in part, by Olson and taken up by other poets in their “use of the page as a four-sided document” in poetry that “focuses on the visual potential of the page . . . [and the] language and silence that surrounds it” (Translating 175). At the same time, the timidity of retaining the “dominant Flush Left” of the majority of poems in In Deﬁance resists the kind of expansion in to the FULL PAGE of Olson’s model, and, except in a few overt cases, the space within the poem remains predictable, undisrupted, and linear, except in extremely nuanced pulls away from these qualities. At the same time, I would argue that the page in Fraser’s 1969 volume both embodies and counterpoints Fraser’s own sense of debt to Olson (for providing “a major alternative ethic of writing for women poets who resisted the ‘confessional’ model for their poems” [Translating 176]) with a resistance to the masculine “subtext” of “conventional gender ideas” (DuPlessis, “Manifests” 44) that Fraser’s poetry works to defy on levels of both form and content. Despite the seeming adherence to spatial regularity of many poems in the volume, they appear to ﬂoat within the open, airy white space of the page, suggesting the page as a site for the “simultaneous presence of light waves and particles” (Fraser, “The Uncontainable” 203), where language moves within and amidst the page as “a topos of silence and emptiness, a briefest hint or suggested nuance,” visually manifested through the generous margins, the parenthetical asides, the increasing insistence on the surface of language, and the encounter with the “unsaid, as in a line drawing where the minimal number of strokes may open to immensity” (Fraser, Translating 198). These “visual encounters,” a term Fraser develops in discussing Guest’s poetry, rework the lyric in tangent with a textual absenting of 64

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narrative (despite a narrative frame) and a proliferation of the “I” (rather than a reliable, singular “I”). In Deﬁance involves the page in an effort to admit the lyrical without following familiar and constraining scripts of voice, emotion, and self. Following Fraser’s example, I want to introduce what she describes as an important “visual source at work here,” a “vanguard community of women visual artists whose originating graphic sense made a subtle but pervasive impact on American poetry” (Translating 178, 198): In parallel time with Olson, a handful of women painters variously associated with New York abstract and expressionist movements were helping to shape and advance the 1950s/1960s graphic imagination. I refer to the innovative paintings produced by Helen Frankenthaler, Nell Blaine, Elaine DeKooning, Grace Hartigan, Agnes Martin, Jane Freilicher, and Joan Mitchell. In this context, one cannot help but rethink those ﬁrst delicate grids of Agnes Martin’s, pencilled over space. One is further reminded of Joan Mitchell’s series called “Champs” (or “Fields”), which seem to be composed of pure energy, the brush strokes laden with luscious color, applied again and again, often with many layers of underpainting; or other “Between” series (worked on, between the larger canvases of the “Champs” sequence), small pictures in which each initially empty canvas isolated and captured a detail up-close — as in a lens marking arbitrary boundaries within which a small part of a larger, perhaps more complex and amorphous landscape can be looked at in blown-up detail. These ideas continue to nourish and to illuminate the making of those language constructs we link to “Champs” or to ﬁeld composition. (Translating 178) Fraser’s own history brought these parallels into play in the early sixties as she encountered both the ﬁeld that Olson and others explored as well as the visual structures employed by women painters within the New York scene. In 1961 the journal Art News featured the painting Skyes by Joan Mitchell on its cover and included a short essay on her retrospective show of that year. In the article, Eleanor C. Munro leads toward a question that would be posed about and to the artist repeatedly: how to be a woman artist in the “macho” ﬁfties in the male-dominated New York art scene. Munro doesn’t pose or answer the question directly but, in choosing to compare Mitchell only with Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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other women, suggests a gendered dimension to her painting style while dismissing familiar connotations of the “feminine”: “[H]er manner of painting is thus at once more complex and also more decisively original than, for example, the rather softer, perhaps more ‘feminine’ manner of Helen Frankenthaler, or the energetic, brightcolored, semi-realism of Grace Hartigan” (39). The denigration of “feminine” painting exempliﬁes an obvious structuring of aesthetic discourse along gender lines while ignoring a possible alternative reading of a “feminine” reaction to abstract expressionism in Mitchell’s use of space. Commenting on Mitchell’s paintings of 1960 and their spatial characteristics, Munro points out, like numerous critics, that “the forms act in the center of white space and often much of the canvas is uninvolved,” a formal choice that saves Mitchell from the “feminine” as it is articulated by and through the discourse of abstraction Munro draws upon. However, this very choice signals a resistant pressure to such discourse, registered within Mitchell’s paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s as they consistently work with large white borders or margins, surrounding and often ﬂowing into a concentrated central area of activity. As described by Judith Bernstock, a “distinct stylistic breakthrough took place in Mitchell’s paintings of 1955. Areas of more full-blooded color interweave with dense webs of horizontal lines and ﬂoat across the centers of white ﬁelds. . . . The image is at once both more personal and more indicative of external reality without ever literally translating it” (39, emphasis added). A 1994 catalog for the exhibit Reclaiming Artists of the New York School describes the “large, open, airy ﬁelds of white upon which linear markings form a latticework, activated by drips, smudges, and wiped areas. . . . [T ]he works are gestural and often exuberantly lyrical” (Kraskin 47). How do we read these “open, airy ﬁelds” and their “lyrical” impulses in the midst of valorizations of the masculine in 1950s avant-garde art? Similarly, how do we read the lyrical impulses within Fraser’s text across the diverse mainstream, protofeminist, and avant-garde communities her work traveled at this time? Certainly, “Little Joy Poem,” which follows a letter sequence ending the romantic relationship at the center of In Deﬁance, kicks in with an exuberance “ﬁlling me up,” with its emphasis upon a tiny, incidental moment rendered in exclamatory, bright language that moves toward lyric closure: “Like a shiny bus in the snow, / I feel good this morning.” Published by the 66

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New Yorker, this poem’s crafted lyric voice and hopeful closure marks its intersection with a mainstream poetic, while within this volume as a whole, it seems to speak itself as one of many voices put on to trace the interior experience of reemergence from a relationship’s demise. There is a slightly distracted quality to the poem, a pull to the incidental and the marginalized, for example, in the parenthetical aside that reﬂects an instant’s departure from the tiny moment’s narrative: The snowplow came at 2 a.m. last night on its lonely task and I looked from the window waving my toothbrush. (At night, the snow changes color.) Here I am, two legs a new morning and joy like the whiteness of cold milk, ﬁlling me up. (33) Centered like a column, the poem works within a familiar lyric push toward epiphany and closure, conveying visual and formal containment in its placement and lyric convention. At the same time, the airy space of the white page relays itself as possible layers of underpainting upon which the poem is visible or larger views that the intimacy of the poem gestures toward. Amplifying the interaction between the place of the poem and the possibilities of the page’s white space, the poem momentarily suspends its movement to indulge in the parenthetical observation, to allow an “incidental” observation (likened to Mitchell’s “drips and smudges”) within the ﬁeld of the poem, trying out alternatives to the “I-centered” narrative with a “quasi-hidden, sotto voce aside,” picked up again in the volume’s title and its title poem, “In Deﬁance (of the Rains)” (Fraser, personal correspondence, June 2000). Indeed, the volume’s use of cultural narratives of gender, particularly narratives of romance and the maternal, collude with the visual encounters with white space, etched space, absent space that the formal, dimensional site of the page encourages. The order of the poems suggests a temporal narrative in which a female self experiences a roLyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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mantic relationship punctuated by giving birth and ending in the lover leaving; hints of betrayal are scattered throughout, and the sequence of poems moves toward an emergence of the writing self enabled by an exploration of self and feelings in relation to poetic expression. Certainly, the sixties saw such narratives of female selfhood proliferate, and perhaps the example of Adrienne Rich’s 1963 Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, with its analysis of “A Marriage in the ’Sixties” (the title of one of its poems) through a narratively suggestive sequence, stands as a model. Indeed, Fraser’s reading of a poem by Rich from this sequence published in the Nation in the early sixties registered as a moment of protofeminist awakening for her. The poem, “The Roofwalkers,” identiﬁes the dynamics of power and vulnerability within the culturally enforced structure of marriage, claiming A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do. (Rich, Poems [1975] 63) 15 In Deﬁance of the Rains suggests similar sentiments but questions the “tool” of the lyric “I” in ways that complicate thinking about the text as enabling a uniﬁed voice, a self-reporting “I” speaking in transparent language about unmediated experience. The ﬁrst poem situates us in relation to “my life,” anticipating a narrative or self-reporting that is rather quickly denaturalized. The volume opens with “Just Beyond Sight,” a poem full of visual detail almost surreal in its associative linkages. It is unclear where the speaker is (a forest? a jungle? her mind?), but it is clear that she sees her life falling apart: “My life is turning its back on me / abruptly. / With David I cry out / in the dark / and bind myself with silken threads / hoping to hold me together” (5). “Notes for a Voyeur,” the third poem in the volume, clearly references experiences of betrayal and pain within a love relationship, but the plot is backgrounded, and the core of the “story” is absent. We get pieces of narrative but no clear connectives or causes, and the pronouns “I,” “you,” “she,” and “he” suggest any number of triangulations, but their refusal to identify the characters of the story also suggests a splitting or fragmenting of selves. As a romance nar68

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rative, the poem oddly absents the narrative itself, opting for overlays and veiled pieces of plot. This at-oddness with the familiar narratology of romance reﬂects a suspicion of the “tools” given to women poets to express their experience: “[W]riting about the needs and doubts and paranoid suspicions around romantic love — its old doxology of sexual images and expectations conﬁned by the very structure of love-language as we knew it — proved to be an enormously awkward and inhibiting task” (Fraser “How Did Emma Slide” 39). Indeed, the poems in this volume continually register a sense of awkwardness about emotion, about how to allow it into the poem without embarrassment or conventional cliché. To register emotion, in part, the page offers a space for nuances of the repressed to come forward. The visual tightness of “Notes for a Voyeur,” occupying the middle column of the large white page, reads as a kind of enforced constraint, a silencing that the poem itself suggests through its gaps in narrative. At the same time, the wide margins variously promise possibility, other versions, other spaces for comprehending the language on the page — the silence can be read as a social dynamic, a formal register of the vulnerability of the speaking “I” within a relationship mapped by an active, visible, male “you.” The poem is followed by the ﬁrst of Judy Starbuck’s etchings, depicting a nude, partially covered male and female couple on a mat in an empty room that recedes back in space to an arched doorway, through which we view clouds that are inside and outside the frame of the arch. The man is curled on his side, while the woman sits clutching her knees, and both look directly at the viewer. The woman’s left eye is erased in this frontal view, an absence or white space rhyming the white margins of the facing page. The page as a place of incomplete representation lingers, echoing “[t]he secrets we cannot give up” that “equal that many lost poems” (Fraser, In Deﬁance 11). The silence of the page, like the lost poems, is not exactly absence but a textual presence informing the emotional tensions of the poem that remains, creating a kind of intimacy without full disclosure. In a similar vein, art commentators have routinely discussed Mitchell’s work in terms of emotion and lyricism, linking these qualities to an absence of clear reference. A reviewer of the 1973 triptych Les Bluets emphasizes its “ﬂavor of intimacy” despite its grand size of nineteen by nine feet, and, like others before him, he quotes Mitchell’s intention to “deﬁne a feeling” in each of her paintings. Although Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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“one may not be able to pin down the referent” in a painting, the ﬂoating masses of paint and central passages of brush strokes open up “a pictorial space through which other shapes and textural passages can range with improvisatory vigor” (Ratcliff 36). Mitchell’s “ﬂoating masses of paint and central passages of brush strokes” evoke the physical look of Fraser’s poems as well as their centering of overdetermined gender narratives (romantic loss and maternity) simultaneous with emptying them of referential content and reanimating them through “other shapes and textural[/textual] passages” inessential to the customary frame. The page offers the option to give “visual body,” as Fraser puts it, to the “absence of reliable matter (as it represents meaning)” (Translating 188). Opting for a sense of the page as a “screen” for projecting usually unarticulated sentiments, Fraser’s ﬁrst poem in a series dealing with pregnancy and birth gestures toward the doubt and ambivalence that can accompany this change, indicated rather glumly in the title “Gloom Song”: The gloom queen rides by with THE FUTURE HANDS AND FEET tucked in her belly her horse is a rocking chair that makes her dizzy with small white words click-clicking against her teeth “ What I want oh I want it, tho I don’t know what I want.” (12) Unlike the tight columns of preceding poems, this poem moves more ﬂexibly across the page, occupying different positions and leaving white gaps in the lines, the margins, and even the very center of the 70

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poem. A poem about a woman’s body containing an unknown other body, signiﬁed by the intrusive horizontal band of capital letters that rides across the top of the poem, “Gloom Song” visually holds the white open page in tension and/or communication with the verbal reference to the maternal body (her belly), suspended under the visual weight of the FUTURE HANDS AND FEET. The visual emphasis upon the body of an other, inside the female body, created on the page by the band of capital letters, is intensiﬁed by the retention of generous margins surrounding the poem, as though the ﬁeld of the page encloses rather than passively receives; as though the ﬁeld itself has a presence altered by the HANDS AND FEET but not occupied/obliterated by it; as though the absent space of the page moves within and through and under and around the newly aggressive force, creating shifting levels of perception and an interaction between the white page and the black print. The weaving of white space within the poem animates the presence of the margins, the space or “absent text” — the words lost, the poems not written, the lines thrown out — as part of the poetic space or ﬁeld. This feminized ﬁeld seems to me radically different from the FULL PAGE as something extensive or maximizing, pointing to how the page reveals what the poet herself may not have recognized at the time; the visual ﬁeld operates as a “cognitive act” that “functioned as a probe of a situation then almost invisible and always underacknowledged” concerning the problematics of male theorizing and female authorship in the 1960s, in much the same manner that DuPlessis (whom I’ve quoted here) rereads her own truncated fragments of verse from the sixties. The poem’s interaction with the page — the feminized ﬁeld it evokes — communicates an “undermining sense of otherness” that Fraser later describes as lurking beneath her relationship to male-dominated literary production (both canonical and new) as well as her recognition that this otherness stemmed in part from the notion of “female thought and perception” as “inessential” and “incidental.” 16 However, the possibilities for tracking the “complex world” of interiority, for rendering “the bifurcated, elaborate, interruptive speech of my own company of selves” through structural means in the poem, on the page (Translating 93) resonate within the contemporaneous example of Joan Mitchell’s ﬁeld work, which, as Fraser remarks, seems “to be composed of pure energy, the brush strokes laden with luscious color, applied again and Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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again, often with many layers of underpainting” (Translating 198). In Deﬁance of the Rains develops similarly, with lyric bursts and reapplications of verbal and visual layers, so that the “underpainting” resonates within the page, unspoken but nuancing the colors we see. The etching that follows “Gloom Song” conveys this multiplicity of self through a sketchy, gestural set of poses, overlaying numerous women within one body. At least four seem enfolded within a single torso, the proﬁles staggered in an arc above the shoulders, echoing one another, while another two proﬁles lean forward out of the torso, and another body seems to split off the back of the multiheaded ﬁgure. Engaging the quick and shifting lines of gesture drawing, the etching conveys movement, layering, and shifting moments of identiﬁcation as we ﬁnally cannot distinguish one proﬁle entirely from another, although we see the simultaneity of their existence. Similarly, the poems that follow the etching layer themselves with “Gloom Song” to suggest a “company of selves” occupying and negotiating the maternal body. “Poem Wondering if I’m Pregnant” overlays the earlier and more ambivalent poem with a brighter, inquisitive voice, asking “Is it you? Are you there, / thief I can’t see, / drinking, / leaving me at the edge / of breathing?” (15). The images of nature, the anticipatory excitement of the poem, counterpoint the “gloom queen” self and, no surprise, was the kind of reassuring poem that the mainstream Poetry would publish. However, followed by “Lost,” a poem about a miscarriage written in all lowercase letters with no periods, the “narrative” of the maternal increasingly bifurcates, thwarting our cultural expectations, as does “Poems for the New,” which merges the erotic and pregnant body in a celebration of voluptuous becoming. Ending the sequence, “Soundings,” dedicated to Denise Levertov and Mitch Goodman, offers up a birth announcement: “a child called David. / Six months of breath / and already he is himself” (20). Arranged in regularized quartets, the poem replays the sense of otherness found in “Gloom Song,” but now the baby outside the body “doesn’t require me / or care that I care. / He is all of him urge,” and by the end of the poem “he” is “it”: “It wants. It wants” (21). Although marking a joyful occasion and including much celebratory language, the poem nonetheless works its way to this rather ominous last line — a line accurate in registering the sense a new mother feels in being absorbed, devoured by this needy, greedy 72

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creature. The stillness and regularity of the quartets, efforts of containment on the page, nonetheless become starker and starker against the backdrop of white margins and the unspoken questions about what the maternal “I” is or becomes. Although poems of pregnancy and birth experiences proliferated in the liberatory sixties and seventies, Fraser’s gestures toward reconﬁguring the “I” who is the main character and reporter of these experiences invite a multiple, bifurcated, and even unreliable (by conventional terms) structuring of selfhood. The visual contexts invited by the volume resonate through the more obviously experimental sequences that end In Deﬁance of the Rains, particularly in their evocative yet resistant positionings of the lyric self. Against “society’s frame for the ideal relationship” in the sixties, a frame Fraser experienced as the need to be “as impeccable and beyond question as a well-cut silk dress — a little swish to the skirt, but no threads hanging from the hem” (“How Did Emma Slide,” Translating 39– 40), this “unreliability” of the lyric self also marks resistance to the “pride-of-ownership that the modish confessional dangled in all the mainstream journals” of the time (Fraser, personal correspondence, June 2000). As Fraser comments, the “early conviction of unreliability in the narration of my own ‘voice’ shifted more radically as my exposure to the peculiar and various dictions of American poetry created a stimulating havoc in my forming poetics” (“Faulty Copying” 78). What I have been calling an absence of narrative within the volume — the foregrounding of incidental, inessential, backgrounded space around and within the ghost story of a marriage — evokes a writing self-conscious of the interplay between what is constructed on the page and the “literal agenda” depleted from its telling, drawing the writing self to “code language and the hermetic place in which . . . [to] look at (and puzzle through) these emotionally-laden materials and understand them in the larger context of a social landscape and a history” (Fraser, personal correspondence, June 2000). A series of poems entitled “Letters” explores the process of leaving a relationship and healing from it, considering the old cultural narrative without denying feelings (“Feelings stick to me like expensive glue”) but questioning how to write of “these complications / of love” without duplicating predetermined emotional maps and subjective structures (Translating 26, 22). The ﬁrst poem, Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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“Letters: to him,” imagines “his” letters to “her,” the “words lost in your head” that constitute an absent text, unrecoverable but interweaving the text at hand. Ambivalently, the speaker claims, “I know you must be writing me,” a double-edged reference to the literal letters he may be writing but also to the “writing” of “her” that the volume as a whole seems designed to resist, the ideal relationship/ wife/mother/poet that the sixties impressed upon women. The poem that follows, “Letters: to her,” captures through impressionistic strings of images the at-oddness (a term Fraser often uses to describe the writing self ) of a consciousness shaking off cultural inscriptions of romance: “Your clothes will no longer ﬁt you / and your hair may fall into the lake. . . . you want to change your mind / but the river goes one direction / and you have entered the rapids” (25). The etching separating these two “Letters” shows a lone woman, isolated in an empty landscape and crossed over with layers of hatching strokes. The woman develops as an image from layers of strokes that extend into the background, across the page of the print. Her image is echoed in “Letters: to Barbara,” in which the speaker imagines “myself above the page” contemplating “[m]y life . . . as obvious as glue” but sensing in the “plenitude / of silence . . . [and in the] fullness and emptiness” a “stranger who moves wherever I move” (26). As readers, we are asked to think about the poem as a collage of writing self, words, and page — a glued construction, a hermetic set of signs that gesture toward the “stranger” and leave the full text absent. Here, the self evoked is akin to the page, the intimate form of the letter occupying the center of whiteness with a concentrated physicality and an emotional tautness. Playing off this tautness, “Nasturtiums” follows these three letters with opening and closing lines that open the poem to the white spaces of the page, suggesting both a tension and a breaking of tension: All the muscles of my forehead lean in and lock to grip you now that you’re leaving. Why? . . . 74

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Will you burn there, our words throw out lines to the sea? (29) The interrogative framing of the poem, arranged in staggered levels down the page, stretches out the word and line contained and compressed in the preceding letters, moving the line visually closer to edges and toward a kind of unknown that the question form invites. The weaving of white space within the poem animates the presence of the margins, the space or “absent text” — the words lost, the poems not written, the lines thrown out — as part of the poetic space or ﬁeld. Like Joan Mitchell’s paintings of the period, the intertwining of white space within the color ﬁeld of the painting animates a reoriented sense of foreground and background, allowing space to be reconﬁgured in communicating distance, intimacy, presence, absence. The energy of the ﬁeld feeds the writing self, who claims in the ﬁnal letter that “[m]y pen feels glamorous with energy” (“Letters: to J and D” 30), suggesting that the stage in the narrative of leaving has entered a kind of healing and self-regeneration. This self becomes more and more conscious of its textuality (and intertextuality) as the series of poems making up In Deﬁance of the Rains incrementally dissolve the “I” in the face of cultural scripts meant to deﬁne her. At one point claiming, “I am running from poem to poem / wanting to be all your feelings,” the speaking voice discovers the multiple constructions that create the text of self she experiences, as she is “unfolding herself like a set of trick playing cards full of faces” (Fraser, “To a Boat, Streets Have No Feelings,” In Deﬁance 37). Pointedly exploiting the popular romance narrative, the two-section poem entitled “poems from TRUE ROMANCES” frustrates the syntax and content of the mass-produced medium, interrupting the language and forms that customarily narrate a seamless story of love, a seamless self in love. Each section takes the title of a character in the romance (Davis and Joby), but the poem refuses to provide information that would develop them as characters. Instead of concrete descriptions of who and where these characters are, the poem develops sequences of tangents, atmospheric ﬂotsam that deliberately fragments our perception of wholeness through deleted words, Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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incomplete sentences, disjunctive word sequences, and the sudden appearance of unexplained, unexpected characters. “Davis” begins with a character named Jenny: When Jenny awoke, it was summer. A dew spang! And poppies. She could see it laying spokes upon the voices of children. But mostly she could door-banging. Her warm and plaintive evoked suddenly without warning. (34) At this point, “Davis” enters the scene, but it is a scene that has been rendered to us through gaps and omissions, most notably foregrounded through the dropping of words at the ends of lines. (“She could” what? Her “plaintive” what?) Such incompletion continues in the next section, “Joby,” making us aware of the line as a material, visual structure and not a transparent instrument of voice or self or experience: My most unforgettable character Will never, ever. Or wear shoes. It is dusk. On either side of him stand the famously picturesque. (34) In this poem, Fraser’s use of the line develops as a visual encounter with the marginal, the left-out, the overwritten elements of a “romance text.” Approaching the overdetermined script of “true romance,” the poem turns toward a “project of language textures and syntactive invention” that Fraser claims to have always interested her: “ Whatever I was drawn to, there was always something compelling about the particular research of the language. How it placed itself on the page” (in Hogue, “An Interview” 23). Taking on a similar investigation of placement, the etching following this poem reads as a kind of surreal conglomeration of iconic images, as two large but vaguely delineated breastlike shapes hover above a set of American symbols ﬂoating in the lower portion of 76

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the page: the eagle, the Masonic temple found on paper currency, the snake of “don’t tread on me.” Between the breasts is a devillike mask, sitting atop a solid mass of textured designs that create the side proﬁle of a bearded man, as if the breasts and devil are erupting from the head of a man. Just below the proﬁle, the patriotic icons ﬂoat to the left; in the right corner above the head, a small female ﬁgure (in a long dress), vaguely rendered, seems to walk on a mountain indicated only by a line. A large butterﬂy splays across the proﬁle’s jaw, under which a hand holds a lit match. As viewers, we are left to piece together relationships between these visually disconnected and narratively disjunctive images as they ﬂoat upon the page. Certainly, a tension between icons of feminine and masculine can be read here in terms of the power — national, moral, intellectual — that the more masculinized images suggest, while the recognizably feminine imagery is barely inscribed on the page, sketchy and vague in counterpoint to the heavy delineation of the eagle and snake, the massed blackness of the proﬁle, the assertive leer of the masked demon. The next etching also is composed with a great deal of white space and a series of images that ﬂoat within this expanse, but this time all the images are female. In the foreground, the largest ﬁgure reclines, nude, as if dreaming; to her right and just above, a woman in a bathing suit plays with a dog; just beyond her, an older-looking ﬁgure in a long black dress stands and reads a book; behind her a range of mountains echoes the curves of the reclining nude, and a small darkgowned ﬁgure ﬂies a kite. This etching directly precedes the titular poem, “In Deﬁance (of the Rains),” which ampliﬁes the conceptual sense of white space through allowing onto the page a series of broken sentences, pieces of narratives, and parentheticals that seem almost withheld. As Lynn Keller has remarked, the pun on “Rains” in the title, alternatively read as “reigns” or “reins,” immediately sets up a gendered resistance within the poem, which pits a feminine and “quiet” “she” against a demanding “he” as a matter of power, of constraint, of control.17 The “she” is revealed through enigmatic absences: So very staunch. So. Quiet. Solidly, her. (the essence) Except that to conceal like a little cup Lyric Discourse, the Arts, and the Avant-Garde

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of sanity, she is careful. Domesticity, how white! (43) Within this “old / expensive fabric,” this text of domestic femininity and maternity, the male ﬁgure — a child, perhaps, but suggestive certainly of the “reign” of masculinity within this text — “wants his way”: “[H]e brings me a dandelion gone to seed / and wants me to blow it and wants his way.” These two lines are set off as a separate couplet, echoed in the ﬁnal one-line stanza of the poem: “He wanted her pen to write poems in the grass” (44). The woman reveals her awareness of a masculine construction of her role, remembering in a tangential bit of narrative how the male gaze gives her value. Veering from the situation at hand, the poem enfolds a fragment of memory: They said when the diamond merchant loved me my skin sparkled authentically. . . . . . . . . . . She said “They seemed to glitter just because his eyes were wide upon me in thirst. And I could afford to be well-manicured.” (44) Against these instances of male power, aimed at circumscribing the woman’s desires and actions, the poem imagines making “a loud tear” in this fabric/text, “unplanned and desperate of course / but bright as in wit, / as in blade” (43– 44). This ripping is associatively linked to the language on the page, the “how” of syntax and form that can produce a textual eruption, a tear in the “old / expensive fabric”: Yet the awareness, and under it a further cluster of words like a dab of paint you watch your hand place with the brush (not used enough) and the paint drying in tubes. To explode. All the new ﬂash. (44) This explosive potential conﬂicts with the line that follows its description, the poem’s ﬁnal line asserting, “He wanted her pen to write 78

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poems in the grass,” allowing a kind of “deﬁance” of the text of what “he wants.” At the same time, the poem’s refusal to consistently identify its participants through pronoun reference creates a lingering doubt as to how to read these ﬁnal inscriptions. Who is the “you”? Is it the woman of the poem (which is the reading chosen here) who imagines an alternative text for female creativity, possibly involving the body in the process rather than concealing it in “white” domesticity? Here, one thinks of the analogues of the New York school women painters, of Joan Mitchell’s translation of action painting into a meditation between whiteness and color, emptiness and mass, painterly materiality and ﬁguration. Or is the “you” also the “he,” perhaps a child painting with his mother, using his hand as often as his brush, learning the explosive ﬂash of creativity and yet wanting to control his mother’s? Reminiscent of Barbara Guest’s ambiguities of language and form, “In Deﬁance (of the Rains)” arguably remains unresolvable, an unrecoverable narrative that hints at its larger context through gestures, feints, parenthetical asides, unspoken terms, tangential moves. To coin Lynn Keller’s term in discussing Fraser’s work of the sixties, there is a certain “betweenness” evoked by the poem’s handling of narrative, language, and line placement.18 We can read this in-between in terms of the poem’s ostensible tension, between male and female, between roles of mother and of poet. We can also read the structural devices employed by the poem as in-between the lyric mode still marking this text and a growing interest in the “particular research of the language” that a poem can perform. The tentative but signiﬁcant “in-betweenness” of the visual page as site of interchange between graphic marking, spatial evocation, and lyric innovation ﬁnds full exploration in later works by Fraser as well as Guest, whose textual collaborations with artists evidence a particular interest in verbal and visual interchange. The next chapter looks at visual and verbal collaborations and interchanges in the works of Erica Hunt, Alison Saar, and M. Nourbese Philip to further consider the role of the visual in ordering cultural meaning and organizing frames for readable identities.

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chapter three “Our Visible Selves” Visual-Verbal Collaborations in Erica Hunt, Alison Saar, and M. Nourbese Philip [T]he female body continues to be severely circumscribed in its interaction with the physical surrounding space and place. . . . How then does this affect the making of poetry, the making of words, the making of i-mages if poetry, as I happen to believe, “begins in the body and ends in the body”? — M. Nourbese Philip

How does the body operate to unsettle the lyric subject? How is the body understood within and shaped by historical discourses of race and gender? The “i-mage” evoked by poet M. Nourbese Philip pulls into its semantic folds a history of the “I” bound to the body with a belief in poetry as a transformational place to bring the body into the “i.” As “mage” suggests both making and magic, the “i” suggests selfmaking as an integral part of a feminist commitment to remaking relations between language and identity, disclaiming the “I” for the “i,” a commitment here focused upon the body.1 For women of African descent in the Americas, a history of the self’s deﬁnition — or erasure — is intimately linked to apprehensions of the black female body. As “image” is visual, “i-mage” engages, undoes, and remakes the visual body inherited from racialized discourses shaping ideas of selfhood in Anglocentric culture. History gives us endless examples of how the visual has operated within social discourses of race and gender. Writing about the mass migration of African Americans to the northern states in the years surrounding World War I, Hazel Carby incisively illuminates the relationship of a “discourse of black female sexuality” to the material experience of black women entering urban areas at this time. Documenting the interaction of “discursive elements” deﬁning black female urban behavior as pathological with the emergent policies of the 1920s intended to police the bodies of migrating black women, Carby provides a striking historical example of the relationship be-

tween public discourse and the regulation of the movement of bodies through public/social space, or between discursivity and the material realities of raciated bodies (124). The public “reading” of the black female body incited by the Great Migration saw this body as deviant, promiscuous, foreign, and dangerous. That such a reading comes out of centuries of law and custom is no new revelation; rather, it is an old story that reveals the “deadly distinction between ‘blackness’ and ‘humanity’ — or ‘universality’” that poet Harryette Mullen observes “is still imposed on black human beings” (“Poetry and Identity” 89). The power of this distinction depends upon the concealment of racial privilege granted whiteness, a making invisible the white body. The elevation of voice as universal, in part, must deny the construction of material bodies, accomplished through historically speciﬁc visual orders. What M. Nourbese Philip calls the “universe-all” voice of poetry — and of Western culture — depends in part upon the production of the visible self or the reading of the physical body through various lenses shaped in modernity. For Philip and Erica Hunt, whose poetry this chapter explores, identity is distinctively linked to the visual processes and practices that descend through the histories of African presence in the Americas to render the African body (un)readable. Occupying the subject positions of race, gender, and nationality for the black female in the Western Hemisphere inherently deﬁes the dictates of the “universal” while risking illegibility within its still powerful terms. The regime of whiteness in North America that has regulated, produced, and trained the recognition of “blackness” perpetuates this distinction, in part, through attributing a natural order to visual markers of racial identity that are socially produced (and identiﬁable) within a binary system of white and black, a process of naturalization that is in itself a form of sociohistorical regulation disguised as essence. The regulated body ironically makes manifest the “disembodied and anti-body formations” that have dominated Western culture since Greek philosophical thought and underscored the “social practices, discourses, and power relations of empirebuilding and colonialism,” situating New World settings as “theatre for the cruel enactment of regulated bodies: unnaming and renaming, censoring, and managing those inscribed as corporeal commodity” (Carr 88). “Our Visible Selves”

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Within these sociohistorical contexts, the corporeal body becomes a particularly charged site for explorations of subjectivity in a wide range of poetry by women of African descent. Exploring connections between visual orders, the corporeal body, and identity, the textual innovations of Philip and Hunt (the latter in collaboration with the artist Alison Saar) undo the “universe-all” of the lyric speaker through insisting on the relation of “our most visible selves” to discourses of race and gender (Hunt, Arcade13). Resisting an identity politics of essence, however, these texts insist not on a fully present, knowable body but on how the body is read through sociohistorical and visual orders. Asking what “I” is available in the wake of the silencing of voice and personhood pursued under slavery and its enduring legacy of racism, a simultaneous critique and reinvisioning of the lyric subject in these works pushes us to think about the control and meaning of identity not only through language but through its collusion with the visual. Indeed, Erica Hunt and Alison Saar’s Arcade and M. Nourbese Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks share an interest in investigating the ordering mechanisms of the visual to then appropriate the transformative possibilities available through visual means. Diversely insisting upon the visual experience of the page, Hunt and Saar position language and visual images (woodcuts) in conjunction, overlap, and simultaneous relation, while Philip manipulates the physical arrangement and look of words and space on the page. In both cases, the visual operates as a register for linguistic operations of power and control, illuminating the specular registers of the body and the ideological complexity organizing vision within the visual regimes that operate to signify race within a New World legacy of enslavement and colonization, informing the continuance of Western racism. Investigating the superimposition of the visual and the linguistic as a mode of codifying bodies and subjects, these two works make use of the visual to denaturalize race as a specular phenomenon, signiﬁed by biological signs that can be seen. Particularly concerned with relations between language, history, and the visual that contribute to the organization of the social body and its public specularization, Hunt, Saar, and Philip create texts that variously interrogate a web of meanings attached to the black female body on the basis of the visual, seeking to uncover relationships between the symbolic order and the body’s visual marking. 82

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To discuss poets and artists of African descent within the rubric of the body is both risky and necessary within the context of this study. The risk involves what might be seen as an appropriation, by a white critic such as myself, of the black female body to give substance to theory. This risk leads Brenda Carr to warn, “in reading for the female African body . . . we must uphold the caution against fetishizing the black woman as a sign of ‘re-embodiment’ by historicizing the endemic construction of ‘woman’ and ‘black’ as closer to the material, the body, and animality.” The deployment of a “racially-marked history as an enabling category” for a white, Western “critical formation” has been criticized as marking the development of a dominant white feminism, and much debate ensued through the eighties and nineties claiming that the positioning of black women and their cultural production by white feminists — despite intentions to the contrary — often reiterates structures of otherness by “embodying” theory through the ﬁgure of the black woman (Carr 77). As Margaret Homans has noted, “black women have been required to do the cultural work of embodying the body for white culture,” including “the use of black women writers by white feminists (as well as black men) to represent the ground of experience, or as [Valerie] Smith puts it, ‘to rematerialize the subject of their theoretical positions’” (“‘ Women of Color’ Writers” 407).2 At the same time that I acknowledge this risk and hope to negotiate it through maintaining a self-reﬂectiveness about my critical position, the necessity of examining visual categories of race and, more generally, the mechanisms through which vision is trained to identify meaning seems particularly called for in these texts, which insist upon the body as an interface of the discursive and the material. Thus, rather than mining the body to substantiate a disembodied theory, this project considers the works of Hunt, Saar, and Philip as they pose questions about the relationship between Western formulations of knowledge and the organization of our visual perception to both recognize and exclude types of knowledge, identity, and value. The emphasis on the visual as a way of making meaning bridges the aesthetic strategies of these texts to the ideological dynamics of the visual as it functions in modern Western culture, having particular consequences for thinking about race and experiencing the raciated body. The speciﬁcity of sociohistorical conceptions, uses, and manifestations of the visual in relation to theorizing, categorizing, “Our Visible Selves”

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and naturalizing race informs an understanding of the “experimental” aesthetic of these texts, encouraging readings of innovative form as socially, politically operative. The visual experiments of Arcade and She Tries Her Tongue are compelling in part because they explore how constructions of the visual infuse systems of power and meaning. As such, these texts cannot be categorized or discussed as purely formal, although they are exquisitely and necessarily attentive to formal operations upon the page as vehicles of meaning. Commenting upon visual poetics of the twentieth century, Johanna Drucker asserts: The visual properties of a written work carry value, whether that value is directly translatable into linguistic or semantic equivalents or not. This is the effect of expressive means, the optically perceptible information of material form whose impact varies from insigniﬁcantly incidental (merely bearing some trace of the historical circumstances of production) to manifestly integral to the work (the very stuff of the piece itself, inseparable from every aspect of its poetic function). Such materiality is never an excess, never a surplus, never an addition to the work. It is the performative instantiation of the work, its condition of being as a thing, a piece. (“Visual Performance” 159) That these “visual means perform the work as a poem that can’t be translated into any other form” (Drucker, “Visual Performance” 131) underscores this chapter’s analysis of these two texts and their respective collaborations of the visual and the verbal.3 Working with the text in such a collaborative sense, extending beyond the boundaries of the verbal, both Hunt and Philip associate themselves with certain strains of experimental, innovative, and avant-garde poetics in North America, placed within the category of what Harryette Mullen terms the anomaly of the “formally innovative black poet.” As Mullen meditates upon her own “experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and marginality” as a fellow poet in this category, she concedes that the marketing tactics of the publishing industry give a “distinct advantage” to “minority poets who work in recognizable and accessible forms, and thus can be marketed to the broadest possible audience of readers” (“Poetry and Identity” 85). As a result, the “assumption remains, however unexamined, that ‘avantgarde’ poetry is not ‘black,’ and that ‘black’ poetry however singular its ‘voice,’ is not ‘formally innovative’” (Mullen, “Poetry and Iden84

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tity” 88). Mullen’s comments provide a partial motivation for this chapter, which is to further questions about the demand for something called accessibility as a requirement for entering public spheres of interaction. Justifying the textual difﬁculty of her text as “resistant to the all consuming maw of consumerism,” Philip identiﬁes the fallacy of equating innovative form with elite separation from the social and a consumable form with political efﬁcacy (“The Habit Of” 213). For Philip, whose work in many ways continues a formal legacy of modernist experimentation, it is nonetheless necessary to disabuse the poem of the aesthetic presuppositions dividing the formal and the social advanced by modernism’s most powerfully canonized voices: To take the poem one step further and re-embed it, re-encrust it within its context — to put it back in the mire of its origins. . . . The next step is for me to de-universalize it — make it speciﬁc and particular once again. Eliot talked of the objective correlative — the arousal in the reader of the exact emotion the poet felt as he wrote. This assumes the existence of certain universal values that would or could prompt the reader to share with the writer his emotions. This assumption is never articulated and the so-called universal values were really a cover for imperialistic modes of thought and ways of acting upon the world. (“The Habit Of” 212) For Philip, as for Hunt and Mullen, whose texts seek to locate the formulating impact upon race and gender of “imperialistic modes of thought and ways of acting upon the world,” formal experimentation involves creating new forms of accessibility and understanding that resist the interconnected ideas of the readable (consumable) text, the authoritative I, or the autonomous reader.4 Moreover, the question of an audience attuned to the singular lyrical voice that renders the poem “accessible” (which, as Mullen’s comments testify, has material consequences for the formally innovative black poet) assumes a reader modeled on Enlightenment subjectivity, a model deployed for centuries to justify various forms of oppression. Challenging the idea of the autonomous reader whose interpretive powers are honed through reason and experience, the kind of poetics enacted by these texts encourages instead a necessary community of readers. In fact, what is perceived as unreadable by the autonomous reader performs differently within a communal context, “Our Visible Selves”

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which is in part a recognition of the “polyvocular” content and context of a text that includes many voices, as Philip describes it: It took me fully one year of readings to understand how completely I had subverted the individual lyric voice. . . . Much of the poetry in She Tries . . . has become unreadable, in the sense of one person getting up before an audience and reading. . . . On one occasion, when asked to read a certain poem (Universal Grammar), in desperation I call on a student to assist me — the work immediately becomes a mini-drama. Constantly changing depending on who is reading it. Along with me. The polyvocular. The multiplicity of voices. That is the New World — and it was a new world, in a time so new, for the Africans who were brought here forcibly. Here: ﬁrst to the Caribbean then to the Americas. Site of massive, traumatic, and often fatal interruptions — for aboriginal peoples, for the African, the Asian, and even the European. To “write” about what happened in a logical, linear way is to do a second violence. To the experience, the memory — the remembering — hence the work becomes unreadable in the traditional way, but truer to its origins — less universal and, therefore, more particular. But the potential for the universal — if there is such a thing — is to be found only in the particular. (“The Habit Of” 211–12) The yielding of authorial control, the encouragement of a multiplicity of voices that undoes the individual lyric voice, is here part of an engagement with public discourses and their histories rather than a retreat from them. In this sense, such a poetics calls upon nonWestern ideas of text, author, and audience, generating a particular resonance with communal forms of storytelling, call-and-response, and understanding characteristic of African traditions shaping and infusing American culture. Moreover, just as the value placed upon readability reﬂects an Enlightenment notion of the autonomous, self-knowing reader, the dismissal of the unreadable text reﬂects a particular Westernized notion of understandability, predicated upon belief in the individual’s capacity to control and possess meaning. Mullen, commenting upon her own fragmented, fractured forms in Muse and Drudge, points toward an alternative relationship between language and meaning, manifested for her in the speciﬁc “folk representations, popular culture representations, self-representations of black women” where 86

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“there is a whole set of codes, a whole set of images that we really don’t control as individuals. They are collective and they are cultural.” (in Hogue, “Interview” 14). Concerned with “what creates coherence and what is felt as incoherent,” Mullen’s work as scholar and poet is useful in rethinking the terms experimental and accessible as themselves constructs premised upon the Western humanist subject. For example, in her work on African cultural systems and their inﬂuence on American forms of slave expression, Mullen identiﬁes an historically embedded system of African reading (nature, textiles, etc.) that “valued a script for its cryptographic incomprehensibility and uniqueness, rather than its legibility or reproducibility.” For Mullen, to rethink “a cultural and material history of African-Americans’ embrace and transmutation of writing technologies,” one might ask how writing and text functioned in regard to non-Western practices of textual reading and particularly how the “uniformity of print [was] received by a [slave] folk culture in which perfect symmetry and straight, unbroken lines were avoided, [evidencing] an aesthetic preference for irregularity and variation” (“African Signs” 672). This kind of imagined encounter lingers within the formal innovations of Hunt and Philip and, I would argue, motivates a necessary openness to the unreadable while questioning that very classiﬁcation. The unreadable, perhaps, changes in valence and value as the notion of audience shifts from the individual to the communal. Lynette Hunter, discussing a group of three black Canadian poets that includes Philip and that works out of a modernist formal tradition, articulates the layered complexities of bridging an innovative practice to a reconceptualization of audience and of reading community: “Each is at least partly concerned with writing for a broad audience. . . . so each is also concerned with an audience for whom conventional representation is, complicatedly, both profoundly habitual, universalizing, and essentialist” (257). As well, Erica Hunt’s text imagines an audience brought out of the “retreat” of habit to form a more communal sense of interaction: people “make” the people around them and they write to write the reader “Our Visible Selves”

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out of retreat, out of distant austerity concealing this same fragile activity people make each other part by part then whole into whole. (“Science of the Concrete,” Arcade 32) In part, it is the work of the text to disturb and resist an understanding of audience based upon the autonomous subject and to encourage an enactment of audience that is communal and polyvocular within a culture of dispersed codes and discourses, unowned and unrecognized by any one individual alone. An aesthetics that reimagines audience and community has been associated also with Alison Saar, whose woodcuts interact with Hunt’s poetry. Describing an installation of Saar’s work in a Baltimore exhibit, art critic Susannah Cassedy O’Donnell characterizes Saar’s work as “dealing with communities in a public space,” and she quotes Saar’s own expression of the artwork’s communal completion: “ ‘It really needs the community to participate in order for it to be ﬁnished,’ she says. ‘I think of it as a catalyst’” (27, 28). The visual is always implicated within cultural codes and discourses of self, although naturalized to a degree that its discursive constitution seems often invisible. This is the case, historically, with race in America, and the turn to formal innovation as a way of making visible such a process bespeaks a deeply political aesthetic that resituates the lyric subject in relation to a public realm and its production of social bodies. “Bodies Written Off”: Economies of Race and Gender in Arcade

This section looks at the verbal and visual collaboration of Arcade by Erica Hunt (verbal texts) and Alison Saar (woodcuts), exploring how this collaboration undercuts the insularity of the lyric “I” through posing questions about the social organization of the body. This collection focuses, both through its artwork and its poetry, upon representations and codes of race and gender as they interact within 88

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a modern commodity culture. As a part of this project, the formal disjunctions, ellipses, and paratactical qualities of Hunt’s poetry investigate discursive mediations of experience, calling into question the “experience” of race or gender as a pure or precultural (presigniﬁed) category. Simultaneously, creating interesting tensions, Saar’s woodcuts make use of signifying elements that are customarily attached to racial and gender identities within an economy asserting the primacy of the specular, a primacy marking the operations of consumer capitalism. Consequently, the text performs a continual interplay between the visual and the verbal that speculates upon the production of the visual body to signify identity within a capitalist economy and the processes by which language both sustains and disrupts such representational systems. Developing an analysis within the framework of what Robyn Wiegman calls “the economy of race,” this discussion focuses upon the relations between visual and discursive productions of the raced/ sexed body and the economic arrangements of capitalism (21). In particular, through variously evoking the body’s movement through social space and the organization and textualization of that body, Arcade considers the implications of a culture privileging the visual as a mode of organizing, containing, locating, and shaping the body; additionally, the text considers the public realm as spectacle that, within a commodity culture, absorbs, recirculates, and co-opts oppositional models of identity. Part of the task of this chapter will be to pursue the commentary upon identity politics, based upon visual markers of race and identity, that Arcade performs, in many ways upsetting the status of the visual (through making use of the visual) in signifying identity and in attaching meaning to the raced/sexed body. As a collaborative volume, Arcade enacts a hybrid process of composition described by Hunt and Saar as “two years of exchange, short, long, short lengths of sun, strips of fog, show and tell leads to drafts and drafts jiggle pictures, pictures snap back, ﬂames curl ﬁgures of speech, shapes recall shadows, shadows box”(Hunt and Saar 53).5 Saar, a sculptor, printmaker, and installation artist who has exhibited work at the Hirshhorn Museum, the Oakland Museum, the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, and the Whitney, combines images of men and women with simple but potent symbols (hearts, ﬂames, ropes, etc.) in woodcuts that signify in multiple directions within each composition and in relation to the verbal passages pro“Our Visible Selves”

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duced by Hunt. Noting that Saar’s work “fuses traditional academic study of art” with her “own aesthetic experience of folk art traditions,” bell hooks highlights the artist’s treatment throughout her work of the “black female body” in relation/resistance to its depiction within “sexist and racist iconography” (13, 16–17). Within Arcade, Saar’s ﬁgures — most often female but at times male — call up this iconography to interrogate its systemic power, an oppositional project born out of the conjunctions of image and word in the text. Hunt, whose ﬁrst volume, Local History, reconﬁgures genre boundaries in its “reworking of prose,” joins Saar in Arcade to resituate language’s relationship to the social through reworkings of the visual and verbal that extend beyond the text to involve the organization of the social body.6

the natural body and identity Encouraging a reading practice attentive to relations between the visual and the verbal, particularly as they relate to race, social experience, and language, the volume actively interrogates what bell hooks terms foundationalist or “essentialist assumptions about black identity,” an interrogation that engages “in an act of decolonization that empowers and liberates” (11).7 Hunt’s earlier essay, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” similarly questions the efﬁcacy of oppositional politics/poetics based upon naturalized difference while acknowledging their historical necessity. Claiming that in “communities of color, oppositional frames of reference are the borders critical to survival” and that “treatment as an undifferentiated mass of other by the dominant class fosters collective identity,” Hunt goes on to complicate this identity: “In a sense, then, oppositional groupings, be they based on class, race, gender or critical outlook, have traditionally been dependent, in part, on external deﬁnition by the dominant group — the perceived hostility of the dominant class shapes the bonds of opposition. And that quasidependent quality extends even further: we get stuck with the old codes even as we try to negate them.” This concern with codes and opposition to them occupies the collaborative interchange of Hunt and Saar in Arcade, emerging from the textual practice of contiguity, a “reading and writing practice . . . [that] suggests new synthesis that move out of the sphere of a monoculture of denial” of the “codes of containment” simultaneously containing and carried by us (Hunt, “Notes” 205, 200).8 Encouraging “in90

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sights based on language as a mediation of consciousness” through engaging contiguous systems of visual and verbal representations, Hunt and Saar’s hybrid text strives to help ﬁll the “void in which visionary culture confronts power” (Hunt, “Notes” 198). Arcade opens, after the table of contents listing the poems, to a full-page image of a mature female ﬁgure (the sex identiﬁed by the breast), curled in a fetal position within a red sphere. The womb image, accomplished in red and brown woodcut on white translucent paper, situates the visual as a register of textual beginning, and the idea of beginning is echoed on the next page by the initial poem’s title, “First Words.” While the womb can be read as introducing us to a feminine space before the “ﬁrst words” (the visual/feminine as prelingual), such a relation of visual and verbal is immediately complicated by the physical manipulation of the materials of the page. The translucent paper allows the words of the poem that follows it on the next page to seep through in partial visibility; indeed, the clearest words are those of the poem’s title, occupying the upper left corner of the visual image with “First Words.” Bits of the poem can be read, particularly through the areas of white in the woodcut; the body, language, and the visual are immediately held in relationship as the text begins, dissuading a customary reading of the visuals as subsidiary illustrations of the (more important) verbal texts, or as separate entities. As one turns the page to the poem, the back side of the image shows through the translucent paper now facing the poem, the colors subdued as if the image is veiled by gauze. Now the ﬁgure curves in toward the poem, the faded womb image balancing (or counterpointing?) the facing page of words. As the image and the title of the poem imply, the question of origins is taken up by the poem’s rearticulation of the Genesis text by an “I” who is transitorily “the Sunday / company / glad to be a passenger / slumped / on a wobbling planet,” and who claims “I stray from my lines” in awakening “nude” into language: “Awake nude to match reality / where words ﬁll the future / with mental muscle / and facts ripen into the clauses / waiting for them — ” (10). A triadic relation between an “I,” “words,” and an implicit body develops, although without clear resolution. Evocations of the originary moment, the state of coming “awake” that the poem repeats in varying formulations throughout its ﬁrst half (“Awake nude to match reality”; “awake / nude to grief”; “awake, just as I am”) structurally encounters a con“Our Visible Selves”

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cern with the self-in-language, of “words leading from one thing to the next” that “shift as you enter” (11). The poem’s initial focus on the “I am” who awakes transﬁgures into a focus on the “words,” a phrase repeated like a mantra beginning each of the eight short stanzas ending the poem. The embodied “I” as the origin of meaning gives over to a nuanced sense of the body marked by and produced within language, “the words in bones / stand for what they are part of” (11). The “natural body” is rendered suspect as a category of identiﬁcation or originary meaning; the female body within the womb, clutching her own knees, is overwritten by the text’s physical and conceptual interplay of visual and verbal that points toward the text’s continuing investigation of the body and “the words that give nothing / beyond the marks carried in ourselves” (11). A visual shift in markings brackets this poem. As the ﬁrst image uses a sphere shape to enclose a female body, the image following “First Words” repeats while lengthening the womblike sphere, holding within its oval shape the upside-down ﬁgure of a woman hanging by her ankles. She holds her breast with one hand and covers her pubic area with the other. This body, unlike the ﬁrst, which signiﬁes itself in terms of gender only, begins to register itself visually within a category of features Robyn Wiegman calls the “visible economy of race,” the corporeal signs that, within “the logic of race” in U.S. culture, “anchors whiteness in the visible epistemology of black skin” (22). Although the face moves toward a stylized identiﬁcation as African, it remains ambiguous within an economy equating identity with visible signs; in short, the ﬁgure’s seeming ambiguity frustrates the visual logic of a binary system of race, particularly in the ﬁgure’s placement within a context of referents to the impact of that system on the body marked as raced. The ambiguously marked body of the woodcut exists within quite speciﬁc specular references to American experiences of race and gender; most obviously, the hanging rope echoes a history of lynching in which the spectacle of the body becomes a vehicle for disciplining a population and cohering “white” identity. Moreover, for black men this disciplining often included castration, a genital mutilation resignifying black men to the white community as feminized, as not-men. The woodcut’s insertion of the female body into this scenario allows a double vision of the feminization of the black male body attending post-Reconstruction America along with the marking of the black female body in terms of his92

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torical violence. The hands that hold the breast and genitals call our attention to the particular “visual regimes” deﬁning black women in American history: nineteenth-century science and its interest in the genitals of African-descended women to prove their hypersexuality and their closeness to animals; slavery’s use of the black female body as a breeding site in support of the economy; long-standing intersections of race and maternity; past and present modes of policing black female sexuality.9 Indeed, the prose piece that follows and faces this hanging image, “Coronary Artist (1),” ponders the relation between “our most visible selves” and the naturalizing of the self through cultural customs and scripts. In this poem, an awakening again takes place, but this time located within the ordinary and everyday as a woman awakens to her household roles within the family. Struggling “[t]o promote sunshine to my daughter while surviving my own ferocious will to sleep,” the speaker thinks of domestic details: “[T ]he dirty clothes are crying and want to be washed. Piles of clothes begin to mount from the sky down.” Later, after awakening, she muses, “Custom has it that a woman gets up ﬁrst to solve the dilemma of the burning moment” (13). There are scripts to be followed, as “[o]ne becomes an adult without knowing the details of how it is to be done, only knowing which team you’re on, which hat corresponds to your glands.” These “sexual politics” (enforced by an unnamed “they”) forbid “passion outside the parentheses,” and yet moments of recognition of “the sources of our hunger” can occur “in the center of our most visible selves” (14). This sense of being within a physical set of glands and bodies that result in identity assignments nonetheless raises the question, at the end, of how the “visible” self can appropriate the system’s mechanisms to satisfy its hungers; moreover, an understanding of how the “visible selves” are constructed offers potential for reapprehending the self and its experiences. Experience, like the visible self, has been constructed in white, Western cultures as a naturalized arena, an unmediated source of selfknowledge. “Coronary Artist (2),” the next piece in the sequence, places the “I” in relation to discursive classiﬁcations that produce or frame experience and, implicitly, a subject ideologically shaped by the disciplining of the “managed impulse,” the body organized for economic, industrial efﬁciency. This is the body that has “lived through the glory of numbers” and watched “fate bleed uncontrol“Our Visible Selves”

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lably through a vast chain of explanatory footnotes”; who has “peered through a keyhole into that narrow room, history, where it is happening to someone else upstairs overhead” (15). The role of science, history, mathematics — of constructs of modern knowledge based upon notions of objectivity and observation — colludes with language to enforce a “path of managed impulse,” and the speaker yearns “to become an alien” in her own language, “for a moment to lose the feeling of being both separated and crowded” by her “own experience” (15). The self splits in the ensuing fantasy, one self running off and the other remaining in her “body armor,” resisting the “urge to reconﬁgure paradise with perfect weather and regular elections.” Instead of reinscribing the “managing impulse” over experience, the speaker ends with an ambiguously embodied, ambiguously voiced claim: “ Where I stand now, I shout out of my body armor. I whisper parts of the roar” (16). What is the “I,” and what is the “body armor” in which she stands, and what is the “experience” that language both crowds her with and separates her from? Facing the page ending the poem is the third woodcut, again on translucent paper, but this time the page is covered with more color so that the words behind the page are less readable. The image is of a kneeling woman, her head bent to her right side, her hair cascading from the top of her head in a semicircle that continues under her knees. The hair is held on the other side of the body by her left hand, the left arm a straight line from the shoulder. The linkage of curved neck, head, hair, hand, arm, and shoulder meeting the neck echoes the circular motif of the ﬁrst two woodcuts, the womb now hair in a transﬁguration of images that the text continues (hair later becomes like a rope, for example). The woman’s face, more so than in the earlier images, incorporates corporeal signiﬁers of race in American culture, particularly through a widened nose. This image, calling attention to the gendered body through curved breasts and nipples that show through a short dress, also takes part in a tradition of representing the female body, especially the black female body, in so-called primitive positions. The angles of the legs and feet, the ﬂat-footed bare feet, recall a visual history that both sought to contain and mark black women while also providing them with a visual mode to be appropriated in asserting control over negative stereotypes, as in the instance of the dancer Josephine Baker.10 Such a speaking through “the body’s armor” necessitates a rejec94

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tion of the body as naturalized and a negotiation of forces mediating the body. The prose piece that follows the image (and faces its reverse on the translucent page) ends the “Coronary” sequence. “Coronary Artist (3)” plunges us into the process by which the body’s parts are organized under pressure of capitalist and racist collusions. This piece, broken into verse lines, links the production of the raced body to the production of the commodiﬁed body necessary for capitalist systems. Structured upon complicated layers of racial history rendered through the visual, the poem iterates the role of the visual in organizing Western concepts of race. The poem in full follows. In a dream I go to a room of spare parts. We apply porcelain to our hair. There are special scholars who study temples. Someone sweeps shoulder-length tresses across the ﬂoor. Arms in varieties of salute beckon, bent and dimpled. I have one leg up. I’m not fast enough and they take the other. They hand me costume lips. My ears are festooned. What remains after my waist is whittled is little more than a functioning crease. I bat my eyes to practice fascination. But of particular concern is my hair, my hair, my hair. So dry it crackles, as it is french-twisted and lacquered bright vermillion. With this hair I stop trafﬁc, eliminate the inconvenience of passageways, duration between signiﬁcant events, for something is always happening, I travel through mirrors, I’m on the subway platform and the train comes, an ind. I get on. (17) The organization of the body as “spare parts” underlies the disciplinary demands of industrialization, which Jonathan Crary discusses in terms of early-nineteenth-century physiology and the rise of human sciences. Striving, for example, to understand the eye and nerve struc“Our Visible Selves”

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ture, science worked in concert with industrial aims of mass production and consumption through breaking down the body to better understand how its component parts could most efﬁciently be coordinated and worked.11 The “body,” reorganized as a compendium of mechanized parts, itself became an expendable commodity. At the same time, the rise of biology and its classifying systems began to postulate race as stable and primary, and various pseudoscientiﬁc discourses arose to offer body “parts” as proof of racial difference that is both “evolutionary and hierarchical” (Wiegman 32). Hunt’s poem locates the raced body within what Wiegman identiﬁes as the “historical production of race” developing out of the “economy of the visual that attends modernity” and transforms “western knowledge regimes,” an economy that Philip’s text will also investigate in its implications for the raced, sexed body (Wiegman 10). For both poets, the rise of scientiﬁc discourses in the nineteenth century provide an important resource for understanding the organization of knowledge to support white, Western supremacy. In Hunt’s poem, the rhetoric of nineteenth-century phrenology and craniology (the “special scholars who study temples” who theorized lower intelligence for women and blacks based upon skull size) interweaves with contemporaneous discourses of black female sexuality. The “one leg up” and the other spread by a “they,” the “costume lips,” the “festooned” ears, the “whittled” waist all reference an “economy of parts that enables the viewer to ascertain the subject’s rightful place in a racial chain of being” citing the “body as the inevitable locus of ‘being,’” an economy shaping the cultural, scientiﬁc, and social terrain of the nineteenth century in ways that remain foundational to thinking about race. The particular body parts mentioned in the poem suggest a raced and gendered body produced through discourses signifying the black female body in ways exempliﬁed by nineteenth-century science’s interest in viewing and measuring body parts, particularly the genitalia and buttocks of African-descended women, to pursue a construction of the hypersexualized primitive. The case of Saartjie Baartmann (Sarah Bartmann), who was exhibited through Europe from 1810 to 1815 as the “Hottentot Venus,” demonstrates the visual emphasis upon body parts to characterize “for scientiﬁc and public communities alike the voluptuousness and lasciviousness of the black female,” whose sexual organs were deemed hyperdeveloped. Alleging a “mutilation of body parts” underlying this racialized sexualization, 96

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bell hooks links this process to the ﬁctive construction of “black female sexuality . . . in popular rap and R & B songs solely as commodity — sexual service for money and power, pleasure is secondary” (“Selling Hot Pussy” 117). The web of meanings attached to the black female body on the basis of the visual extends, quite obviously, to the material body of the female slave, which “became the commodiﬁed technology of the slave economy’s reproduction” (Wiegman 12). In the ﬁrst half of the poem, the body is acted upon; however, after the speaker relates that “what remains” of her waist is “little more than a functioning crease,” the “I” returns as agent, performing the gendered, raced body: “I bat my eyes to practice concentration,” she says prior to turning attention to “my hair, my hair, my hair.” The hair becomes part of a self-conscious spectacle of the body, perhaps mockingly appropriating the hair of “whiteness” and the practice of “passing” while asserting them within a different conﬁguration of the body: “[F]rench-twisted and lacquered bright vermillion,” the hair allows the “I” a degree of control, mobility, and agency: “ With this hair I stop trafﬁc . . . I travel through mirrors . . . I get on.” What I ﬁnd interesting in this poem’s ﬁnal lines is not only the suggestive recalling of a kind of trickster/passing/mask derived from a long tradition of African American writing, collapsed into a more contemporary feel (vermillion hair), but also the way in which the identity asserted at the end resists the naturalizing impulse of an identity politics that, as both Wiegman and hooks, among others, have argued, can be easily reabsorbed into contemporary capitalism’s increasingly diversiﬁed forms of consumption. Instead, a politics of identity is performed in the poem through a textual layering of historical mappings of the body, negotiated by the poem rather than “reinscribing the logic of the system it hopes to defeat,” the system that spread the legs of black women to view the “proof” of their culturally assigned status within a white-privileged hierarchy, that spread their legs to economically sustain such hierarchy through producing slave bodies (Wiegman 6). The poem, drawing upon a range of scientiﬁc and historical rhetoric on race in American culture, engages race as a “discursive construction with real effects” (Lowe 103). Moreover, in specifying the primacy of the specular in this construction, the poem joins other parts of Arcade, both visual and verbal, in considering the relation between mappings of the body and the importance of the “seen” while identifying the operative role of the “unseen” in a visual regime. In a “Our Visible Selves”

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Foucaultian scheme, the “modern panoptic regime” relies “on a visual production that exceeds the limited boundaries of the eye”; within an application of this framework to race, the body regulates itself in relation to a “racial script that precedes and instantiates the subject in a relation of subjection” (Wiegman 41). The power of this script to shape both experience and knowledge registers as a systemic mechanism of careful codes and deliberate elisions in “Magritte’s Black Flag” and “Starting with A.” Both poems, following immediately upon “Coronary Artist (3),” deal explicitly with the exchange or movement of information in public spaces and how this information affects social bodies. “Magritte’s Black Flag,” a compilation of instructional prose detailing commuter train routes, delays, and alternate routes, reads as a neutral, precise set of directions to commuters awaiting morning trains, although as train routes and lines are displaced by other routes and lines, the precise categories of labeling (“the Number 6,” “the LL trains,” etc.) prove disorienting in their displacement: Passengers are advised to take alternate routes to their destination, such as the N or R lines. The N & R lines have been switched to the LL tracks to make room for additional 5 & 6 trains making all BMT stops. The LL trains have been moved to the Number 1 line. The Number 1 is on the 2 and the 2 is on the Three. (18) Although the precise and quantiﬁable transmission of information suggests that a careful listener will avoid getting lost, the very precision of the information is confusing without a fuller knowledge of why and how such decisions are made. In other words, the logic of context is removed, leaving the listener dependent upon pieces of information but concealed from any overall structure of knowledge. Moreover, this process of ﬁltering information abrubtly halts in the ﬁnal lines: “Passengers wishing to continue to Long Island City are advised that there are buses at the 59th Street Bridge. Bus schedules have not yet been made public” (18). Suddenly, movement and access seem threatened by a withholding of public information, an inaccessibility to the organization of knowledge clearly controlled — as all the route changes suggest—by authorities who guide bodies through social spaces but need not explain why particular routes are chosen 98

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or banned or where alternatives might take us. The implicit commuter, the body moving through public space, is faced with a choice to move only as knowledge is available to her or through uncharted, bewildering routes where nothing is as it seems: the Number 2 train is not the Number 2, and all lines have been switched to the point that a guiding structure is hidden from view. Learning the names, codes, and systems, then, facilitates the body’s movement, although this movement is without knowledge and at a cost to experiences not recognized by the given code. “Starting with A” ponders the “routes” “approximately marked” for racial interaction, offering a glimpse of stepping off the route, of abandoning the representational alphabet that “give[s] to every terror a soothing name.” An unnamed girl walks down a street as the piece begins, and “[s]he passes through pockets of warm air in a cold season, assailed by night noises, sounds in a correspondence based more on bravura than the contents of this failing world.” This movement through public space puts into play codes of behavior based upon visual signiﬁers of race, and, indeed, her movement and speech become a “correspondence based . . . on bravura” as she comes upon and greets a white boy, refusing the self-effacement and silence expected in this racialized encounter. According to the code making up the “contents of this failing world,” her act is equated with death: “Death is a white boy backing out a lawnmower from the garage, staring down the black girl’s hello, silently re-entering the cool shell of his house.” Going against the scripts of race and gender with her hello, “she is working without quotes, never looking down” in a submissive gesture. In this night walk, “the shortest moments rustle in their chains; the invisible blends in,” an image suggesting America’s racial history and its varied manifestations of chains; signiﬁcantly, as emphasized in these ﬁnal words, the “correspondence” based on visible signs (of race and gender) between death and inappropriate (code-defying) behavior depends as much upon the “invisible” or “unseen” forms of (self-) regulation enacted within and furthered by the white boy’s response and the black girl’s infringement (19). The next of Saar’s woodcut images calls our attention to the relations of self, seen, and unseen. As viewers, we see a blackened ﬁgure’s shoulders and head from behind while we gaze with the ﬁgure into the mirror held in front of the face and reﬂecting a “white” face with “black” features. Perhaps a trick of the woodcut (its design necessi“Our Visible Selves”

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tates the contrast of the white face within the blackened mirror), this reﬂected image nevertheless registers as starkly white. Does the ﬁgure wish to be white? Is the coalescing of “black” features and “white face” a deliberate suggestion of racial identity as a category of ambivalence? of performance? Certainly, the poem facing this image, “Motion Sickness,” concerns itself with relations of identity, race, and language, alerting us in the ﬁrst stanza to the “brain /arranged to ﬁt / the stories plus / new slogans” (21). The poem’s movement is word generated, as sound and rhyme give rise to word sequences without sequential logic: The round trip supplies the proof of a last word tune tin tongue ritual spoon spin spun pinned on words (21) A cacophony of sounds, repeated words and phrases accumulate down the poem’s quick listing of short lines and, as though acknowledging the permeating affect of (seemingly) random-ﬂung but (actually) systematically constructed verbal arrangements, the speaker ﬁnally confesses, “can’t help it, / can’t help listening / as in incriminating / myself / can’t help this” (23). This blur between what one hears and how one perceives oneself evokes the process through which discourse ideologically produces the social subject to selfregulate her position within the social order. However, this process provocatively interrogates identity politics as the poem progresses: ray charles instead of face to face talk erase talk race talk erases race chases thought 100

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down disowned alleys of envied sports ﬁgures (24) Such a spare but suggestive movement of words offers multiple possibilities for reading, but the claim that “race talk / erases race” seems intent on locating the dynamics of racial construction along lines other than a naturalized identity politics. Like Saar’s preceding woodcut, identity formulations based on the visual remain problematic here, in danger of producing bodies as commodities. The “sports ﬁgure” as emblem of black identity suggests the complex mechanisms of late consumer capitalism to appropriate identity formations and to reproduce them as bodies performing a commodiﬁed function within a freemarket system (see hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy”). Elsewhere, Hunt deﬁnes the danger of co-optation as “the reinscription by dominant discourse on conceptual advances made by oppositional groups into the terms, values and structures of dominant ideology” (“Notes” 201). The poem ends by presenting an alternative model, “out of control” because unbound by what another poem calls “the reasonable grip of stock behavior”; in effect, this alternative to naturalized identity politics rejects models of self-regulation that accommodate “the sense of purse” and thus sustain a commodity culture (“After Baudelaire” 41). the corridor awaits leading out of control over the bridge made of common sense, the ﬁgure in the woods. (24) The “ﬁgure in the woods” ﬂees the “bridge” of “common sense” to unravel the discursive layers of identity, complicating the seen with the unseen to disempower the realm of the specular. This realm forcefully reasserts its power to assign categories of racial identity within the woodcut following “Motion Sickness.” One of the few masculine images, Saar’s three-color woodcut foregrounds a pin-striped male with a hand-tilted fedora, his eyes obscured by the hat brim’s shadow and his nose and lips widened, full. In the upper left-hand corner of the composition, behind his shoulder, hangs the “Our Visible Selves”

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body of a nude woman by her wrists, her body the white of the paper except for the darkened pubic triangle and circular shadows beneath her breasts. Behind his other shoulder arise red, ﬂamelike shapes that accentuate the red of his lower lip and suit tie. Rich with references to the circulation of images and roles layered upon black masculinity, the visual image recalls a range of social myths and taboos regarding race and sex in this country while also raising the specter of intraracial misogyny through “lynching” the woman (whose “race” is ﬁnally indistinguishable) as background context for this construction/composition of visual references to the black male. In other words, the woodcut suggestively holds in relationship the denuded, hanging female body with the male ﬁgure, as though questioning how the foregrounded construction of masculinity depends upon the backgrounded and bound feminine. Further registers of the visual are enacted through the image of the hanging ﬁgure, recalling the feminization of the black man through lynching and the regulatory role of such spectacle. As the subsequent poem, “Squeeze Play,” states, “The culture beats the brow with equal parts spectacle and punishment,” depending upon reciprocal powers of the seen and the unseen to shape the social subject (25).

capitalism and the body’s production A few pages later, Hunt writes in “Science of the Concrete” (30 – 32) that “the unseen part / is a controlling force / over bodies written off / as repetition of the already seen” (30). The intertwining of the specular (what is “already seen,” such as lynchings, minstrel shows, the Venus of Hottentot) with the unseen to regulate the body and the subject is rendered visually by Saar’s woodcut adorning the cover of Arcade. This image reoccurs in the text within a sequence of poems particularly attentive to the uses, organizations, and inscriptions of the body within systems of exchange alternatively inﬂected by bodily pleasure and capitalist ideology. Before discussing the cover image itself (a full-length depiction of a woman whose body is superimposed by a mapping set of images related to race and gender), I would like to look at the series of poems and other images that precede and follow it in the text. The mapped body that appears in this powerful woodcut ﬁnds echoes throughout the poems and images surrounding it, particularly in their attention to the regulation of the 102

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body within late capitalism. The ordering of space and time necessary for capitalism’s success makes the body cohere (and coherent) within its economic systems, reducing the body to spectacle or performance within capitalistic structures of labor and exchange. In the title poem, “Arcade,” the movement of the social body through space and time as mapped by capitalism is one of “[b]listering routine,” a routine so omnipresent that its mechanics and consequences become transparent. No one notices the “gagged angels of liberalism burying the hatchet in the social body, leaving it for dead,” or “the clock, cartwheeling its way to the end of the millennium,” or “the tense freedoms we don’t miss” (26). The poem, which speaks of this routine as an integral part of the workday that indeed sustains its own ability to continue as routine, ends with a damning but unresolved coda: “Against the complete dark, against bureaucratic seizures of the possible, against the body buckling itself against the irregularities of desire, the multiplication of parallel lines meet over the fold in the mind, just past the point where a thought can be followed, where the curve is constant, motion displacing motion, checkers in black spaces and ﬂuctuating light . . . ” (27, ellipses in text). This coda is followed immediately by the poem entitled “the voice of no” as well as a black-and-white woodcut that rather surrealistically ﬂoats three body parts on the page: a black male head, an open-palmed hand, and an anatomical heart. As Hunt’s ﬁrst poem in the book retells Genesis, this woodcut recasts the iconography of Christ by changing the racial markers of his identity, a change that effectively emphasizes, among other things, the corporeal body. The head and hand are connected by a thickly streaming ribbon, suggesting blood, which ﬂows out of the opened mouth and through the cut-off neck to descend and then curve upward through the opened wrist of a hand. The stream then reemerges through a stigmal hole in the center of the palm. Above the stigma hovers a heart, as though cut from the body’s cavities and placed on display. In relationship to the poems that precede it, this image not only comments on religious iconography and race but also insists upon making visible the body erased by capitalism’s appropriation of Christianity.12 The ﬁrst stanza of “the voice of no” points toward the virtue extrapolated from a refusal of the corporeal and the appropriation by capitalism of said virtue in the name of “freedom”: “Our Visible Selves”

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No need to be contrary, I put on a face. No use for muscle, the workers stand on line for hours. No need to read, 24 hours of the shopping channel. No ﬁre, we have the illusion of doing what we want. (28) Passing a “litter of drifting bodies,” the speaker blames conformity to a consumer ethos for society’s abandonment of them. Such conformity effectively refuses the body by breaking it into parts, regulated for efﬁciency of work; as well, the lifestyle of consumption encouraged by late capitalism “reconﬁgures racism in several ways,” in that “those with less income and education are more vulnerable to packaging, marketing, and advertising, i.e., the semiotics, of new commodities. Since higher percentages of African Americans are in the lower income groups, they are more likely to be victimized, by succumbing to repackaged, advertised needs” (Lowe 110 –11). In general but with particular material effects for identiﬁable groups (low income, women, African American, etc., and the myriad overlaps), “commodities produce bodies,” a sentiment voiced here by bell hooks and echoed in Hunt’s ﬁrst line, as the speaker puts on “a face” (117). The proliferation of images engendered by the late twentieth century’s visual and media culture creates a “new mode of cultural surveillance,” argues Wiegman, in which “the circulation of representational images partake in a panoptic terrain by serving up bodies as narrative commodities detached from the old economy of corporeal enslavement and situated instead in the panoply of signs, texts, and images through which the discourse of race functions now to afﬁrm the referential illusion of an organic real” (41). Citing a post– civil rights “ascendancy of a visual regime” of natural race, Wiegman sees danger in the “proliferation of circulating images” that renaturalize race, advancing the gesture of the late-seventeenth-century shift in natural science to classifying human difference and identity on the basis of the skin and body rather than geography (41). Indeed, capitalism builds upon the discourses of racism accruing over the centuries, for, as Lowe argues, “[c]apital does not operate as a pure logic . . . [but] always utilizes existing values in the social terrain. Thus, racism is a complex of signs to be utilized for late-capitalist production, consumption, and social reproduction practices” (111). In this sense, capitalism fulﬁlls the “historical production of race” marking the transformation of Western organizations of knowledge 104

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attending modernity, in which the body is disciplined across a range of speciﬁcities and “in which scientiﬁc and aesthetic approaches to vision, as well as philosophical delineations of (dis)embodiment, assume prominent roles” (Wiegman 10). Arcade’s next sequence of poem and image read almost as a gloss on the disciplining of the visual to produce categories of identity, as “Science of the Concrete” begins with an emphasis upon sight and skin, questioning how skin signiﬁes within an economy of race: At ﬁrst you see only its description the skin a container of its umber its beauty folded into the carved surface then you don’t know what you are seeing whether it is the object you see or the shadow you see falling completely before the body stops falling in its dream that hangs there. (30) The ambivalence about how to interpret what is seen — what the skin means — points to the shaping of vision in modernity, in which “what the eye sees is not a neutral moment of reception but an arbitrary and disciplinary operation, one in which experience is actually produced in the subject” (Wiegman 37). The second stanza of the poem suggests the role of language in classifying and positioning the body within this vision: it seems by this point that we are looking at a statue, “its ‘back’ away from you / so you ‘know’ which way / to face, and with what /attitude / in the language of backs / to regard as complete” (31). The body and the knowledge produced by this visual ac“Our Visible Selves”

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counting, however, are neither natural nor pure, as the “unseen part” or that which the body means, “is a controlling force / over bodies written off / as repetition of the already seen” (31). These lines iterate the concern raised by both Wiegman and hooks concerning the power of visual culture to reinscribe “counter-identity formations” and “markers of difference” as inherent markers of subordination within the “heightened propulsion to diversiﬁed consumption” of contemporary capitalism. What Wiegman describes as the need to intervene in the “decontextualized and specular incorporation and absorption of identities that now characterize the popular visual realm” (5) is registered in “Science of the Concrete” as a need to investigate and deconstruct the constructions of identity classiﬁcations, as “degrees of sex / and color” are “to be held against / backed / against / the wall / and halved / unrecognizably / halved” (31). To defamiliarize and denaturalize sex and color, the poem’s ﬁnal lines suggest, offers a potential for a poetics attentive to how “people ‘make’ / the people around them / and they write / to write / the reader / out of retreat” (32). In this process, the body’s parts are realigned into a new “whole,” a potential coherence of body possible only by denaturalizing “how to see.” The woodcut that follows “Science of the Concrete” displays a woman from the waist up, her skin tone brown and her face bearing Africanized features. The left arm is bent over the head, the hand seeming to cradle a red, shadowlike ﬁgure behind her. The other hand cups the left breast, the breasts accentuated with reddened nipples on the ﬁeld of brown skin. The enigmatic relation of the female ﬁgure to the shadow — is it her shadow? another ﬁgure? is it menacing or embracing? — tests our visual assumptions while visualizing, in a sense, the notion of the unseen. As the woman holds her breast, we are asked to think of the body’s parts and how they signify within raced and gendered economies. At the same time, the image recalls ancient and folk images of female divinity, a power associated with the body that competes with the circulation of images of black female sexuality as deviant, the insistent “repetition of the already seen” through which such bodies are read. This sense of hearkening to alternative signiﬁcations of the female body is enhanced by Saar’s woodcuts that follow, which draw upon or quote folk representations more forcefully than earlier images. These woodcuts include the to106

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temlike ﬁgure of a woman bracketed by two brooms, facing the poem “Madam Narcissist” (36), which recalls conjure traditions through its imagery, and the woodcut (used on the cover as well) depicting the mapped body of an African woman, which seems particularly indebted to African mask traditions (between 40 and 41). These images are counterpoised by a series of brief poems remarkable in their evocation of economic systems and vocabularies. “Focus,” in a litany of long, associatively related lines, speaks of “[m]erchandising mines culture quagmire for transparent glory,” commenting that “[t]he kindness of months replaces spirit of unlimited demand for sacriﬁce, / so that men in business suits may grow fat,” while “[o]ne ‘I’ too many betrays the just balance” (33). “Fortune” imagines winning lots of money — “we’ll break the bank and go from one to the other, sweepstakes winners, lotto lovers, zero demons”— while deﬂating this American dream of material success with the wry realization that “[w]e wake up to make ends meet — to make ends meet,” a more accurate description of American reality despite the dream’s mythic power (34). The speaker of the creedlike “Madame Narcissist” claims, “I see my ideas everywhere, on the brink of worldwide acceptance and potential proﬁt” (37), an equation of intellectual value with monetary value that informs the subjectivity instructed by the speaker in “after Baudelaire’s ‘The Muse for Hire’”: “Don’t violate the sense of purse or secondhand pleasure / recalled or lamented / that ring of truth and other / undetonated hazards” (41). The body regulated by the values of classiﬁcation, efﬁciency, calculation, objectivity, and abstraction underlying the “sense of purse” is most incisively sketched in “Risk Signature,” which describes a woman intent on order: She likes to organize with her bare teeth. Walking the wire with her baskets between full and empty, she erects scaffolding for her critiques then isolates her objects with a deft twitch of the knife. There is a high tech cool efﬁciency in what she achieves “Our Visible Selves”

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what she is willing to store — the whopping calculations of the mutest reality where assertion is an omnivorous open bracket . . . abstraction quantiﬁed and baked into mufﬁns; She stores the accidental in the breach between shame and satisfaction, almost workless demiseconds of emotional itch noted faster than the hurry to scratch it. (43) Like the natural scientist ordering reality into a set of classiﬁcations, the woman’s calculations are “entries” that “list the blood counts” as “little / deaths [are] conﬁgured into road kill / specimans collected, dried snake / smashed turtle, white bird skull” (43). This is the body of “Economic Man,” the rational, calculating, autonomous market agent of capitalism, whose very subjectivity forecloses the contingencies of race or gender, whose whiteness assumes transparency and universality supported by modern discourses of science, economics, and race. These discourses occupy the visual ﬁeld of the woodcut adorning the cover of Arcade and found just before the poem “after Baudelaire’s ‘The Muse for Hire.’” A full-length portrayal of a woman whose hair, wide lips, and nostrils not only signify visual markers of “race” within American culture, this image maps the body through other visual signiﬁers of historical discourses, practices, and systems that have shaped the production of race and gender while also drawing upon forms of racism and sexism within particular historical contexts. As though revealing the unseen within the body, a motivation of nineteenth-century science, the image implicates the representation of the unseen with forces and discourses affecting the material black female body: here is science — a set of tubes and ﬂasks graces the clavicle area, emptying into (or drawing from?) the heart; here is nature — the exotic butterﬂy, ﬂowers, the seductive poppy, the African okra all over the body; here is labor — the saw making up the calf bone; here is sexuality — the mistletoe over the pubic area, promising passion and poison; here is empire — the white British queen on one thigh contrasted by a dark African noble on the other; here is the 108

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conﬂation of logic and accident — the casino wheel in the midsection that reads eerily as a bull’s-eye. The body’s interior, the unseen, is the “already seen,” topped by the ﬁgure’s head, stylized like an African mask. The logic of the mask in African American tradition — to resist the seen by appropriating its markers, to manipulate the scripts of the unseen — melds with the ritual power of the mask to “body forth” meaning. As in this image, the relations between the seen and unseen, visual and verbal, multiply as an “arcade” of meanings attached to bodies. Such an arcade is echoed in the poem that precedes this woodcut, entitled “so sex, the throne whose abrasions we crave,” which imagines a body differently organized from that produced by the visual economy of race within modern capitalism. Envisioning a body merging with other bodies, valuing touch and surrendering control, the poem reads almost as a utopic alternative yet made realizable by the deconstructive moves of the text as a whole: Today or tomorrow I will shove the books off my bed and pick up my lap and go somewhere where I have longed to go. I will make myself narrow and let another body pass through. I will let go of the wheel for a moment. Sing road hymns over the bumps. Chat over the table feeling the heat rise. I will let the odd curve merge. I will be the ﬁrst to touch. I will be the touch, before it is dry. (40) I like to think that the gesture of this poem and of the collaborative work by Hunt and Saar in Arcade is encapsulated not so much by the line, “bodies written off,” but from a line in the ﬁnal poem, “Variations.” Imagining “raising bodies from the text” (50), this poem suggests a process of reconsidering “identity” much like the one the entire volume has enacted, in which re-presented signiﬁers of “race” unveil the “production of signiﬁcations attached to the body,” the body raced and the body gendered within the eye of the Western world (Wiegman 4). “Our Visible Selves”

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Reclaiming the “I-mage”: The Racialized Body and the Visual Page in M. Nourbese Philip

Dislodging the eye of the Western world becomes a pressing concern for the postcolonial project of Marlene Nourbese Philip, a project that explodes the visual categories of race and gender to reexamine the narrative discourses asserting themselves as “history.” About the African woman’s experience of slavery, Philip writes in the introduction to She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks that to “reclaim and integrate the experience required autonomous i-mage makers and therefore a language with the emotional, linguistic, and historical resources capable of giving voice to the particular i-mages arising out of the experience” (15–16).13 In this text, Philip’s conception of the “i-mage” involves rearticulating and re-presenting relations between language, history, and visual registers to investigate what she terms the “linguistic psyche” or racial and generic memory of diasporic Africans. Key to this effort is a recontextualization of the African body that navigates historical layerings of words and images produced by the master culture for the purpose of rendering that body a signiﬁer of nonbeing. Rather than evacuate or ignore these layers, Philip’s text seeks to reclaim image-making power — as “i-mage” or the transformational making of “I”— through “the profound eruption of the body into the text,” particularly, the female African body, which under slavery “became the site of exploitation and profoundly antihuman demands—forced reproduction along with subsequent forceful abduction and sale of children” (24). Asserting that “the female body continues to be severely circumscribed in its interaction with the physical surrounding space and place,” Philip poses in her introduction the central question of this volume of poems: “How then does this affect the making of poetry, the making of words, the making of i-mages if poetry, as I happen to believe, ‘begins in the body and ends in the body’?” 14 Through its focus on the body and on ways of organizing the body, She Tries Her Tongue insistently considers the visual as a register for linguistic operations of control and power. To claim the “I” in “i-mage” unfolds in the text as a process of infusing the image with a subjectivity shaped and reshaped through material, historical, and specular means; more precisely, the production of the racialized body is explored as a process through which the historical and the material have been specularized— have been made to register meaning through sys110

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tems and constructions that work to produce a visible body comprehensible, and hence visible, within racial codes. Exploring how the visual signiﬁes race through language, the text “erupts” the visible body that is organized and understood within racial codes that themselves have a deep and layered history intimately bound up with the body. This eruption translates as an exposure of the sociohistoric discourses mediating the Anglo Western gaze as it constructs the racialized body, the “cultural seeing by skin color” that orders difference (Spillers 387). If, as Robyn Wiegman argues, “we take seriously the notion of race as a ﬁction — as a profound ordering of difference instantiated at the sight of the body,” we can begin “to jettison the security of the visible as an obvious and unacculturated phenomenon” (24). For Philip, the visual page offers a space upon which the denaturalizing of race as a specular phenomenon can take place, to consider “what the eye sees, and how we understand that seeing in relation to physical embodiment and philosophical and linguistic assumptions” (Wiegman 24, emphasis added). Born in Tobago, Philip has spent most of her adult life in Canada as a student, lawyer, and writer.15 Her poetry and essays variously explore the intersections of racism, postcolonialism, language, and identity from a position shaped by her Caribbean upbringing in a former British colony as well as her North American condition of separation from the West Indies. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, which won the Casa de las Americas Prize in 1988, evokes the legacies of slavery and colonialism through a fragmented, layered, circular but often lyric expression of the female body within these legacies.16 However, a reconﬁguration of the “i” in “i-mage” alters the traditional lyric “I” through stressing the linguistic, social, and historical exclusions of a subjectivity marked as different or other within a visual economy dominating Western concepts of race. As Brenda Carr incisively argues, “Philip’s complex and disjunctive text” enacts a “material manifestation of her hybrid location between axes of identity, geographic spaces, linguistic and cultural traditions, and histories” (73).17 She Tries Her Tongue takes on this project structurally as well as in terms of content and theme, continually retraversing words, linguistic structures, and visual arrangements in the ten titled sections that make up the volume, each comprised of a number of short poems. For the purposes of considering the relation of the visual and the verbal that the text undertakes to explore, this discussion looks at “Our Visible Selves”

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two groups of sequential sections while readily acknowledging that the volume as a whole moves through modes of layering and palimpsest that enrich and complicate any kind of identiﬁable linearity. The ﬁrst group, made up of the ﬁrst four sections, introduces speciﬁc visual modes of organizing and codifying the body, including photography, the museum, and the maternal body. My interest is in determining how the poems investigate the ideological complexity shaping these material means of organizing vision. The second group, the ﬁfth and sixth sections, emphasizes the visual page and its organization as a means of apprehending the specular registers of the body. As in the book as a whole, this pair of poems involves the intertwined history of racial ideology and visual economies in producing a “grammar” discursively organizing the black female body.18

visual organization of the body Each of the ﬁrst four sections, “And over Every Land and Sea,” “Cyclamen Girl,” “African Majesty,” and “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones,” centers upon a mode of visually mapping the African female body within a colonial legacy. Contesting the organization of the body through visual means is an imagined capacity of the body to overlay these visual categories with a bodily speech, a “tongue,” a reclaimed language that reembodies the regulated subject. Each of these sections considers a visual regime that orders the body in terms of its parts and their function within Anglo-phallic systems, beginning with the maternal African body in “And over Every Land and Sea.” The racialized mother’s body produced through and for slavery involved a visual specter of maternity necessarily opposed to white ideologies of motherhood. The black maternal body signiﬁed economic production and erotic availability; rather than continuity of family lineage, the maternal body represented its disruption at the same time that it insured the social identity of the offspring, for it promised new slaves who could be sold without regard for familial bonds. Commenting on the “ways her body was erotically dominated in slavery,” Lauren Berlant observes that the regulation of the maternal body offered a way for the dominant culture to attain “control over movement and sexuality, over time and space, over information and capital, and over the details of personal history that govern famil112

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ial history” (938). As visual image, the black maternal body suggests absence and loss of generation, a severing of the “image” of mother from daughter that concerns “And over Every Land and Sea,” which retells Ovid’s myth of Ceres and Proserpine, beginning and ending at the “Adoption Bureau.” The mother, speaking Caribbean demotic, searches for her daughter, who seems to have traveled north and whose own speech in the poem is identiﬁable as standard English. A visual absence, the daughter displaced from the maternal body, opens the poem: “ Where she, where she, where she / be, where she gone?” asks the mother, who “must ﬁnd she” (28). The search of mother and daughter for each other is an attempt to resignify this maternal space, to reread the “hieroglyphs” and “inscriptions” marking the maternal body of African descent: the wide of open mouth blood of rush hieroglyphs her red inscriptions her name up-above sky (34) Through calling upon the historical construction of the black maternal body in slavery as a site through which the master culture disrupted lineage, language, and identity, Philip’s deployment of the body enacts a point made by Spillers’s admonition to “think of the [slave] ﬂesh as primary narrative . . . its seared, divided, ripped-apartness”: “These undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the ﬂesh whose severe disjunctures came to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color. We might well ask if this phenomenon of marking and branding actually ‘transfers’ from one generation to another, ﬁnding its various symbolic substitutions in an efﬁcacy of meanings that repeat these initiating moments” (387). Spillers’s comments complement Philip’s notion of a “linguistic psyche” and its attention to the symbolic order as reenacting moments of the visual body’s marking. A division of the body into parts has historically operated to specularize the body for economic and social purposes, developing, as discussed in relation to Arcade, by the nine“Our Visible Selves”

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teenth century as a “visible economy of race, an economy of parts that enables the viewer to ascertain the subject’s rightful place in a racial chain of being” (Wiegman 21). The compartmentalization of the black woman’s body in Western discourses of slavery, morality, and science are complexly intertwined, and the breaking down of the specular body to signify inherent qualities is well documented in discussions of nineteenth-century race theory, for example.19 Philip’s text attends to and comments upon this “visible economy of race” through specifying the mother’s tie with the daughter as the “oozing wound” that is “in her groin.” Specifying what Philip, in an essay of the same name, calls “Dis Place,” or the space between the legs of the black female body, the “oozing wound” or “dis place” has historically provided the means of controlling/deﬁning/oppressing that body for the beneﬁt of the “outer space,” the dominant culture. In the slave system of the New World, rape as “management tool” and forced breeding render the black female body as a “thoroughfare,” as inner space (groin) becomes a public space open to all (oozing wound): “Dis Place: the result of the linking of the inner space between the legs with the outer space resulting in ‘displacement’”; “dis place” is the “fulcrum of the New World Plantation” and is “where the inner space is deﬁned into passivity by, and harnessed to, the needs and functions of the outer space — the place of oppression” (Philip, “Dis Place” 289–90). In the ﬁnal two parts of the poem, “dis place” is reimagined as mother and daughter each speak of a set of markings that come from the mother’s “blood-rush”: Blood-cloth wide wide i open my mouth to call the blood-rush come up ﬁnish write she name in the up-above sky with some clean white rag she band up my mouth nice nice 114

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Blood-cloths (dream in a different language) sand silence desert sun the wide of open mouth blood of rush hieroglyphs her red inscriptions her name up-above sky sudden clean of white cloths wounded mouth broad back hers to tie carry bear (34) In the ﬁnal poem of this section, “Adoption Bureau Revisited,” the mother imagines that the daughter, who she realizes is lost to her, may nonetheless continue to pursue the “trail” of the mother, the “betrayal and birth-blood / unearthed” through rereading the maternal body as a historic and discursive site of “dis place”ment. The ﬁnal stanza references “dis place,” “her groin,” claiming that “the oozing wound / would only be healed on sacred ground / blood-spoored” (36). Inserting visual images of maternity that contradict and complicate that regulated by the master culture under slavery, the images of pregnancy, menstruation, birth, and lactation supply “i-mages” of what is lost and a trail for the daughter to follow. This effort redirects how the body is organized by a slave legacy, an ordering of the body that, for the female mother or daughter, has historically enforced itself through a “displacement” of lineage, of inner space, of body that is imaged as the “displacement of the genitalia, the female’s and the male’s desire that engenders the future” and that ensures the “Our Visible Selves”

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“enslaved person’s access to the issue of his/her own ﬂesh” (Spillers 395). The complicated nature of this “dis place”ment and of the legacy of the slave woman involves the continued coding of the body within racial terms that privilege whiteness in part through denying its own racial speciﬁcity. As recent studies of whiteness argue, “the ‘logic’ of race in U.S. culture anchors whiteness in the visible epistemology of black skin,” the “discursively, if not always materially, violent equation between the idea of ‘race’ and the ‘black’ body” results from a “cultural training that quite literally teaches the eye not only how but what to see” (Wiegman 21, 22). Institutional and aesthetic structures encouraging such cultural training have succeeded through concealing the ideological work they perform through claiming an objective detachment and/or a transcendent authority in relation to the sociohistorical. In Philip’s ﬁnal three sections of this ﬁrst cluster of poems, the visual organization of the body through photography, religion, anthropology, and language is revealed as profoundly bound up in the effort to train the eye to see the black body as racially embodied and other, to see the white body as racially transparent and normative. The “bro- / ken body” marked by the discursive violence attenuating this process provides the central image of “Cyclamen Girl,” a series of poems focused upon a “photograph circa 1960” of a young girl in her conﬁrmation dress, “black girl white dress” (“The Catechist” 38). Immediately, this visual image suggests the specular markers of difference by which the body is broken/broken down/made unwhole and within which the orders of religion, science, and racial ideology intersect. Structured upon the conﬁrmation stages of the young girl awaiting communion, the poem reinforces the visual lens of the photograph through an emphasis upon the black body as a visual contrast to whiteness and therefore unassimilated within its terms. However, particularly in identifying the legacy of racial miscegenation that is erased or made invisible by the specular economy of race that deﬁnes whiteness in opposition to blackness “at the sight of the body,” the image in the photograph offers a starting point for bringing into view all that the camera’s composition (i.e., technological objectivity) cannot capture. Suggestively contesting the neutrality of scientiﬁc objectivity and citing its complicity with racial ideologies to produce/compose/frame the black female body, the poem reads a doubleness to the photographic text, the 116

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double-imaged doubly imagined dubbed dumb can’t-get-the focus-right reality of mulatto dougla niggerancoolie that escaped the so-called truth of the shutter. (“Eucharistic Contradictions” 39) The “focus-right reality / of mulatto” evokes a historically speciﬁc framing of racial identity for women of mixed heritage, layered with assumptions of sexuality and desirability derived from the white male gaze. Under the gaze shaped by the “sexual economy of white erotics,” the “speciﬁc sexual malignity black women have been forced to experience in public [operates] as a form of white pleasure and a register of white power” (Berlant 933). The visual difference in skin color, however, between the dark-skinned African and the lightskinned mulatto has manifested varying forms of exploitation, argues Berlant, within the dynamics of white male desire. The visual signs of miscegenation, deﬁned as black within this economy as a means of maintaining ﬁctive narratives of legitimate white paternity, nonetheless provide “material for white men’s parodic and perverse fantasies of masking domination as love and conjugal decorum,” a visual framing of “a woman who signiﬁes white but provides white men a different access to sexuality” (Berlant 935, 936). The tension between sexual signiﬁcations produced by this economy and those produced within the Church shapes the “focus” of the photograph in Philip’s poem, the young girl’s “[e]arly-blooming brown legs” showing beneath the “conﬁrmation dress crinolines stiff.” “Images blur,” and the “photograph of the cyclamen girl” shows her, adorned in white communion dress, as somehow “caught between / blurred images of / massa and master.” The blurring of the slave “massa” and the “master,” interchangeably a white God, a white father, a dominant culture, suggests a blurring of systems of authority that have ordered the girl’s body. The 1960 photograph merges past and present as the “massa” of the colonized slave body who viewed the black female body as open territory, breeding ground, and capital proﬁt blurs with the “master” of religious morality. This blurring “conﬁrms the contradictions of the church” (“Eucharistic Contradictions” 39), which include training the young girl to “Our Visible Selves”

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regard her body from the constructed view of “whiteness”: “ White / satin ribbons / White / cotton sox / White / Bata shoes / White / Book of Common Prayer / White / satin-cotton conﬁrmation dress / White / Soul” (“Vows” 41). To learn this visual code demands learning a catechism through which morality is signiﬁed as and through whiteness, a code that complexly organizes the body as other while protecting it from predators assuming the black body as erotically available. Thus, the cyclamen girl’s mother is complicit with the code, fearing the “lurking smell of early pregnancy” and teaching her daughter to be as white as possible, to follow “the code of Victoria — / no sex before marriage / no love after” and “the code of mama —/ ‘now you’s a young lady / you can press your hair’” (“The Catechism” 40). Against the historical context of the “sexual economy of white erotics,” the mother’s prohibition of blackness and of sexuality can be read as protective intervention, “the Mothers knowing the outer space controlling the inner space which in turn inﬂecting and affecting the interpretation of the outer space. The Mothers therefore intervening. . . . For their daughters. . . . So the Mothers teaching fear. Naming the space. Between. The legs — the young girl’s legs. The mustn’t do” (Philip, “Dis Place” 305). Against this code of whiteness, the young girl enacts a “Transﬁguration” in a poem thus entitled, reimagining the body under the aegis of Mothers who offer empowering readings of “dis place.” Resonant of ancient female initiation ceremonies, this poem interweaves Christian, classical, and African goddess traditions as the girl evokes the names of Aphrodite, Ave Maria, Atabey, Oshun, and others in a ceremony of self-naming. Both grieving and celebrating the passage of the “blood / of her ﬁrst menses,” the transﬁguration of child into woman admits rather than denies the body. The woman-centered ceremony, which signiﬁes “her newly arrived wound,” suggests an alternative to the visual meaning of “blood” within the male-dominated Christian tradition. Teaching girls that “His blood” signiﬁes salvation, while the menstrual “badge of fertility” is also the failed “badge of futility,” an andro/Eurocentric Christianity reads the female body as the “body bro- / ken” (“The Communicant” 44); conversely, the experience of transﬁguration allows the ﬁnal “Epiphany,” a rereading of the “photograph circa 1960” in the ﬁnal poem that “returns” the cyclamen girl “[t]o her own”: “The great stone-bird mother / Sweetbalmed with honey” (45). 118

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The focus on the photograph as a visual medium that composes a reality in accordance with the cultural codes works to reveal the racial and gendered ideologies underlying religious systems and signiﬁed through specular means. In African Majesty: From Grassland and Forest (The Barbara and Murray Frum Collection), the museum similarly orders the African body through specular means that support and shape Western ideologies of the “primitive.” The visual display of African culture in the “museums / of man — / Berlin, London, Paris, New York” reorganizes the African in terms of European forms of expression and contexts, necessarily removing the artifact from its African context. Thus, the “wisdomed wood / stripped of reason” is “restored to ‘living / proof’ of primitive aesthetics: / ‘the African inﬂuence’ on — Braque, Picasso, Brancusi” (49). The poem insists on the loss of embodiment, the abstraction of cultural particulars, that the museum display engenders as a mode of visually organizing cultural values: the museum display represents a culture mined to abstraction; corbeaux circle circles of plexiglass death; circles of eyes circles for the eyes — wanderers in the centuries of curses the lost I’s (48) The movement of the body is elided in this specular system: “In the elsewhere of time / head knees eyes drop/ earthward — they would have . . . / not now” (49). The “plexiglass of circle” abstracting objects through a visual system of display relegates the African primitive to its role in enhancing Western “culture,” whiteness, progress. Language operates through the same abstraction, as a museum that classiﬁes, organizes, and directs the body and its parts. The next section, “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones,” links the visual production of the raced body with grammatical functions through the trope of declension, a grammatical form or class inﬂuenced by association while also a ma“Our Visible Selves”

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terial form of marking difference through visual means. Spillers, for example, recalls the organization by Portuguese slave traders of West African “types” by skin color as a form of declension: white/mulatto/black: “[T ]here is in this grammar of description the perspective of ‘declension,’ not of simultaneity, and its point of initiation is solipsistic — it begins with a narrative self, in an apparent unity of feeling, and unlike Equiano [the captured slave who later authors a slave narrative], who also saw ‘ugly’ when he looked out [at Europeans], this collective self uncovers the means by which to subjugate the ‘foreign code of conscience,’ whose most easily remarkable and irremediable difference is perceived in skin color” (391). Philip’s poem begins by interrogating the relation of subjectivity to a “grammar of declension”: If not If not If Not If not in yours In whose In whose language Am I If not in yours (52) This feeling of otherness and abjection is located in the visual signiﬁers of race established by the system of declension that perceives and marks difference in skin color: She is I am Woman with the behind that drives men mad And if not in yours Where is the woman with a nose broad As her strength If not in yours In whose language Is the man with the full-moon lips Carrying the midnight of colour (53) The poem ends with a suspended question about the “I” that the remainder of the text takes up: “In whose / In whose language / Am 120

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I / If not in yours / Beautiful” (53). The naturalization of racial difference, “implicit in the equation between skin color and enslavement, is part of the late-ﬂowering racist discourse in the Anglophilic West,” a discourse inscribing a “logic of the visual” (Wiegman 24, 25). It is this logic and its discursive construction through language that concerns the increasingly visual texts of She Tries Her Tongue.

the visual page Although evident in earlier poems in the text, the sections of She Tries Her Tongue beginning with “Discourse on the Logic of Language” emphasize the visual page as a way of exposing how the visual and linguistic are superimposed as a mode of codifying bodies and subjects. This section, together with “Universal Grammar,” which follows it, makes striking use of the page layout to investigate visual systems of racialized identity and, in particular, to implicate Western discursive structures in the production of the racialized, feminized body within a specular economy of race.20 Through the manipulation of the page, these sections consider the relation of linguistic positioning to meaning and identity within this economy. “Discourse on the Logic of Language” consists of two sets of paired pages. Each verso page is broken into three visual parts, distinguished by different discourses that organize uses of language within a history of slavery, each discourse occupying a consistent place on the page and an individualized typeface that underscore the competing voices and subjectivities assumed and shaped by each discourse. Each recto page faces this juxtaposed arrangement of discourses with an example of an historically layered arrangement of knowledge through visual means. Thus, in effect, the conjunction of verso and recto pages that occurs as the book is opened to each pair of pages laid ﬂat places these various discourses of language and body into visual and linguistic relation with each other, suggesting the interaction of specular and discursive realms in creating (and resisting) meanings of race, body, and voice. Philip describes the space of the page as “creating circuits . . . rather than linearity,” “the authorial voice yielding to others”: [B]y cramping the space traditionally given the poem itself, by forcing it to share its space with something else — an extended image about women, words, language and silence; with the edicts “Our Visible Selves”

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that established the parameters of silence for the African in the New World, by giving more space to the descriptions of the physiology of speech, the scientiﬁc legacy of racism we have inherited, and by questioning the tongue as organ and concept, poetry is put in its place — both in terms of it taking a less elevated position: moving from centre stage and page, and putting it back where it belongs — locating it in a particular historical sequence of events. (“The Habit Of” 212) The cramped space that Philip describes brings together distinct discourses, signiﬁed on the two verso pages by a visual division into three columns. The middle column, appearing as standard type and running the length of the page in recognizably consistent stanzas, identiﬁes itself as “poetry” and posits an “I” speaker. This speaker is concerned with her diasporic position in language, considering English as both a mother tongue and a father tongue: English is my mother tongue. A mother tongue is not not a foreign lan lan lang l/anguish anguish — a foreign anguish English is my father tongue. A father tongue is a foreign language, therefore English is a foreign language not a mother tongue. (56) The speaker then goes on to ask, “ What is my mother / tongue / my mammy tongue / my mummy tongue / my momsy tongue / my modder tongue / my ma tongue?” As the repeated m’s move down the page in this transﬁguring discourse, the speaker concludes, “I have no mother / tongue,” and “I must therefore be tongue / dumb / dumb-tongued.” This central column is ﬂanked by two other discourses, each reso122

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nant of a mother tongue and a father tongue.21 To the left, a bold typeface in all capitals begins a story of mothering: “ WHEN IT WAS BORN, THE MOTHER HELD HER NEWBORN CHILD CLOSE; SHE BEGAN TO LICK IT ALL OVER.” The mother’s tongue cleans the infant, who grows silent under the attention. Signiﬁcantly, the reader of this passage is reminded of her own body’s engagement in the act of reading, for the page must be turned sideways to read these words, arranged as a horizontal passage across the vertical length of the page (as determined by the middle column and the layout of the book in general). Opposing this column of the “mother tongue” is a short example of the “father tongue,” entitled “EDICT I” and printed neatly in italics. It presents an edict to slave owners mandating the disruption of African languages among slaves: “Every owner of slaves shall, wherever possible, ensure that his slaves belong to as many ethno-linguistic groups as possible. If they cannot speak to each other, they cannot then foment rebellion and revolution.” The “father tongue,” an instrument of control and division, enforces the English language as a way of insuring the diminished agency of the slave. Language takes part in deﬁning the racialized subject as less than human; for Philip, the continued legacy of slavery inheres in the language used to police identity and agency. This legacy permeates discourses of race, the facing page suggests, and complexly reshapes itself within a range of discursive contexts across history and disciplines. This next page, taking on the clinical and objective language of science, presents three short prose paragraphs describing the work of two nineteenth-century doctors who identiﬁed the parts of the brain “chieﬂy responsible for speech.” The ﬁrst paragraph tells us that these parts take on the names of these doctors, the “eponymous Doctors Wernicke and Broca respectively.” The third paragraph describes the functioning of each of these areas of the brain, objectively relaying that “[u]nderstanding and recognition of the spoken word takes place in Wernicke’s area — the left temporal lobe, situated next to the auditory cortex; from there relevant information passes to Broca’s area — situated in the left frontal cortex — which then forms the response and passes it on to the motor cortex” (57). This seemingly neutral physiological explanation, however, is prefaced by contextual information provided in the second paragraph that identiﬁes the racial agenda behind Dr. Broca’s scientiﬁc studies “Our Visible Selves”

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of the brain: “Dr. Broca believed the size of the brain determined intelligence; he devoted much of his time to ‘proving’ that white males of the Caucasian race had larger brains than, and were therefore superior to, women, Blacks and other peoples of colour.” Within the physical boundaries of the two-page layout, this revelation sets scientiﬁc discourse into relationship with slave edicts and the positioning of the “I” within racially inﬂected linguistic orders. As well, the dominance of white space surrounding the three short paragraphs on nineteenth-century race science suggests the body silenced by dominant discourses, the body awakened by the “mother tongue.” For Philip, the silent space around white, Western discourses of race is the text of the African body in the New World, both inscribed by and inscribing this “place”: “The Body African henceforth inscribed with the text of events of the New World. Body becoming text. In turn the Body African — dis place — place and s/place of exploitation inscribes itself permanently on the European text. Not on the margins. But within the very body of the text where the silence exists” (Philip, “Dis Place” 303). These silences “around the text” signify a feminized space, for “[b]lackness was feminized” by the hierarchies of race theorized by comparative anatomists like Broca, while at the same time “in the anatomical assessments of the brain and skull, the black woman was signiﬁed only indirectly” through the discursive focus on the black male brain’s relative size similarity to the white woman’s, further eliding the black woman (Wiegman 54 – 55). Arguing against this elision, Philip asserts that “[w]omen have . . . left their mark on the many silences that surround language,” and to read these silences, one must possess “the space between the legs — the inner space — uncompromisingly — as the outer space” (“Dis Place” 297). Philip’s contention points here to an underlying connection emerging in “Discourse on the Logic of Language and Universal Grammar”: the historical production of the black woman’s body over a range of disciplinary, popular, and institutional discourses has involved a simultaneous and public specularization of that body’s material parts with a silencing of her voice through a linguistic evacuation of subjectivity. As the poem continues on the following pair of pages, the “I” of the central column — the speaking subject of the poem — moves from the predicate case in relation to linguistic control (“I have / a dumb tongue”) to the objective case, acted upon by 124

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language. In this movement of the subject through language, the mother tongue is ﬁgured as a process by which the “anguish” of the father tongue is made visible as a deployment of power: “tongue mother / tongue me / mothertongue me / mother me / touch me / with the tongue of your / lan lan language / l’anguish / anguish english / is a foreign anguish” (58). In contrast, “edict ii,” positioned to the right of the column as on the ﬁrst page of the poem, legislates physical mutation — the removal of the tongue — as punishment for slaves who continue speaking in their native languages. Moreover, the removal offers a specular means of organizing and controlling the black slave body: “The offending organ, when removed, should be hung on high in a central place, so that all may see and tremble.” Again bordering the edge of the page in opposite direction to the vertical arrangement of the dominant text and the speaking subject, the mother tongue passage offers an alternative organization of speech: the mother then put her fingers into her child’s mouth — gently forcing it open; she touches her tongue to the child’s tongue, and holding the tiny mouth open, she blows into it — hard. she was blowing words — her words, her mother’s words, those of her mother’s mother, and all their mothers before — into her daughter’s mouth. Emphasizing body parts, Philip’s text evokes the disabling “dismemberments” of the black female body to signify aberrant sexuality in the work of nineteenth-century comparative anatomists. However, here the “scientiﬁc” fascination with body parts, particularly the buttocks and genitals, of African women marking this “narrativization of blackness as both feminine and aberrantly sexual” is reversed to respecularize the body’s relationship to language (Wiegman 56). The tongue, erotically and maternally empowered, becomes in this threeway juxtaposition of texts the body part most threatening to the regime of power, most transﬁguring to the subject inscribed by that regime’s discourse of race. The role of conceptual frameworks, codiﬁed through racial and gendered ideologies, in making the body visible is suggestively undone on the ﬁnal page of the poem. Structured as a set of four multiple-choice questions, the page visually insists upon multiplicity while verbally refusing the singular answer. Thus the use of a con“Our Visible Selves”

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vention of testing knowledge that assumes an organization of knowledge around a singularity of perspective and position undoes itself as the series of questions is followed by answers that comment upon each other rather than displace each other as right or wrong. Moreover, this series insists upon showing the binding together of the discursive and the biological in “deployments of power [that] are directly connected to the body” and, more precisely, connected to the organization of the body’s parts within specular economies (Foucault, qtd. in Philip, “Dis Place” 301): A tapering, blunt-tipped, muscular, soft and ﬂeshy organ describes (a) the penis. (b) the tongue. (c) neither of the above. (d) both of the above. Although this organizational scheme requires a single answer, no single answer is possible without bracketing off (silencing) other discourses of knowledge. So, “[i]n a man, the tongue is” at once “the principle organ of taste” and of “articulate speech” while also “the principal organ of oppression and exploitation” (59). Recalling the interpenetrating discourses of science and slavery (the father tongue), the ﬁnal question posits again the resistant possibilities of the mother tongue: Air is forced out of the lungs up the throat to the larynx where it causes the vocal cords to vibrate and create sound. The metamorphosis from sound to intelligible word requires (a) the lip, tongue and jaw all working together. (b) a mother tongue. (c) the overseer’s whip. (d) all of the above or none. With this ﬁnal series, the poem ends by gesturing toward the “analysis in which the biological and the historical are not consecutive to one another, as in the evolutionism of the ﬁrst sociologists, but are bound together in an increasingly complex fashion in accordance with the development of the modern technologies of power,” so that 126

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“far from the body having to be effaced, what is needed is to make it visible through an analysis” of this complexity (Foucault, qtd. in Philip, “Dis Place” 301). Throughout She Tries Her Tongue, the use of the visual page to make the body visible illuminates the relation of personhood to the positioning of the body in and by language structures. In a grammar of declension that marks difference through culturally and historically mediated specular categories, the dominant language or “syntax,” as Hortense Spillers remarks, operates to prohibit “liberation for African-Americans.” Thus, “two passionate motivations” must compel a project for liberation: “1) to break apart, to rupture violently the laws of American behavior that make such syntax possible [a grammar denying personhood]; 2) to introduce a new semantic ﬁeld/fold more appropriate to his/her own historic movement” (Spillers 402). Philip’s “Universal Grammar” focuses on linguistic positioning and grammatical functioning of words in this light, considering the “ﬁeld” or format of the page in relation to the structuring of racial difference through verbal orderings. Repeating the twinning or pairing of pages seen in “Discourse on the Logic of Language” and continued elsewhere in the volume, “Universal Grammar” is made up of three pairs of pages, creating a kind of mirroring of the unseen or unwritten as the eye moves from verso to recto. The three verso pages are organized as a series of deﬁnitions that foreground the grammatical function of a word, as though we are reading a glossary or grammar text. The ﬁrst page contains six words and deﬁnitions, and the layout, reminiscent of a writing manual or textbook, and the dry, technical language of the deﬁnitions almost invite the reader to skip over them: Parsing —the exercise of telling the part of speech of each work in a sentence (Latin, pars, a part) The —distinguishing adjective, imitating the noun, cell. smallest —adjective of quantity, superlative degree, qualifying the noun, cell (unsuccessfully). The page continues, with deﬁnitions of “cell,” “remembers,” and “O,” the last of which deviates from the standard form established by its predecessors on the page: “sound of exclamation as in O God! “Our Visible Selves”

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Made by rounding the lips; ﬁrst syllable of word name of African goddess of the river — O/shun” (62). Here, the body is acknowledged in the production of language, as is a nonmale and non-European order of meaning, the African goddess. The facing page, however, confronts us with the order of meaning determining the language of deﬁnition and structure denying personhood to the nonwhite, the nonmale. Organized as three distinct sections, identiﬁable by differing fonts and uses of lineation, this page incorporates and, in a sense, redeﬁnes through repositioning the words deﬁned on the left: Man Man is The tall man is The tall blond man is The tall, blond, blue-eyed man is The tall, blond, blue-eyed, white-skinned man is many factors affect and determine the order of words in a spoken sentence: the state of mind of the speaker; the gender of the speaker; his or her intentions; the context of the speech; the impression the speaker wishes to make; the balance of power between speaker and listener and, not least of all, the contraints of universal grammar The tall, blond, blue-eyed, white skinned man is shooting (63) What follows on the page is recognizable as a poetic text, positioned on the page away from the left margin and pushing words as if up out of white spaces through extreme enjambment: the smallest cell remembers a sound (sliding two semitones to return home) a secret order among syllables 128

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Leg/ba O/shun Shan/go heart races blood pounds remembers speech This visual segmentation of the page by differing discourses, genres, and verbal/visual orders underscores the hierarchy of grammar as it is translated onto racialized orders. The second pair of pages continues in similar fashion, arranging a series of deﬁnitions on the left and a set of three different discourses on the right, which continue the modes of language set in to play on the earlier page. The poetic text grows increasingly fragmented and collagelike, evoking (or remembering) the “tongue on the brink of,” the tongue silenced and mutilated, the silence that leads to “forget.” The ﬁnal pair of pages identiﬁes this silence as a form of “parsing,” a word redeﬁned on the left page: “Parsing— the exercise of dis-membering language into fragmentary cells that forget to re-member” (66). Only one other deﬁnition joins this one, but it is found at the bottom of the page margin, separated from (or joined to) the ﬁrst deﬁnition by an expanse of blank page: “Raped—regular, active, used transitively the again and again against women participled into the passive voice as in, ‘to get raped’; past present future — tense(d) against the singular or plural number of the unnamed subject, man” (66). The italicized text, describing the “man,” appears only brieﬂy in the second pair of pages, in an as-yet incomplete sentence signifying the “man” as subject of the sentence, capable of active agency (he “is shooting”) and masculine by virtue of his visual markers of identity: “blond, blue-eyed, white-skinned.” The grammar of the sentence supports the visual categories of identity within Western, racialized orders, continuing onto the next and ﬁnal right-hand page. This is the page that faces the pairing of “parsing” and “rape” and the white space between them. Here, the italicized text reexpands to restate the same sentence about the white man shooting, repeating the same refrain in six different Anglo-European languages before ﬁnally ﬁlling in the object slot of the sentence with a list of seemingly interchangeable “objects.” Forming a tight block of type on the page, in striking “Our Visible Selves”

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contrast to the blank space facing it on the opposite page, this list of statements in different languages suggests a “universal grammar” supporting the subjectivity of the white man and the objectivity of all that is “other”: O homem alto, louro de olhos azuis esta a disparar El blanco, rubio, alto de ojos azules está disparando De lange, blanke, blonde man, met der blauwe ogen, is aan het schieten Le grand homme blanc et blond aux yeux bleus tire sur Der grosser weisse man, blonde mit bleuen augen hat geschossen The tall, blond, blue-eyed, white-skinned man is shooting an elephant a native a wild animal a Black a woman a child somewhere (67) Hovering above this list of refrains is the poetic text, positioned away from the hard left margin of the refrains, asking us “when the smallest cell remembers —/ how do you / how can you / when the smallest cell / remembers / lose a language.” The refrains, which complete the sentence begun two pages earlier with the singular word “Man,” visually slice through the poetic text and the lost language through occupying a denser span of the page, which is then opened again as the objective case — the list of objects — is introduced. The appearance of the physical page questions how we are to “read” the empty space hanging beneath the syntax positioning the white man as subject, his subjectivity dependent upon positioning the “Black,” the “woman,” and so on as subordinate, as less than human, as nonexistent? The page, and the poem, ends with a “recipe” for language that hearkens to the mother tongue. On the page, a line is drawn beneath the italicized text, and the following instructions appear, signiﬁcantly positioned to face the deﬁnition of “rape” on the verso page: Slip mouth over the syllable; moisten with tongue the word. Suck Slide Play Caress Blow — Love it, but if the word 130

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gags, does not nourish, bite it off — at its source — Spit it out Start again From Mother’s Recipes on How to Make a Language Yours or How Not to Get Raped. This recipe glosses, in a sense, the project of She Tries Her Tongue, which continually and complexly involves the visual and the verbal in a process of ingesting words, examining their multiple layers, and spitting out what does not nourish. In attending to the body and the visual modes organizing it, Philip’s work insists, like Hortense Spillers, that the racialized African body “focuses a private and particular space at which point of convergence biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes join” (387). For Philip, unraveling the convergences of “dis place” compels a “profound eruption of the body” through the “reacquisition of power to create in one’s own i-mage and to create one’s own i-mage” (24, 25) a power deeply invested in retraversing the visual and verbal structures of race, identity, and gender.

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chapter four The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics A Poetics of Public Discourse in Carol Ann Duffy Turnover. Proﬁt. Readies. Cash. Loot. Dough. Income. Stash. Dosh. Bread. Finance. Brass. I give my tongue over to money. — Carol Ann Duffy, “Making Money”

For Carol Ann Duffy, writing in Britain, the decade of the 1980s seems to have been disheartening. In a poem written on the cusp of the nineties, she lists in serial form items that “may be prosecuted for appalling the Imagination,” including quick jabs at emblems of rightwing ascendancy in Western capitalism: “President Quayle,” “British Rail,” “The Repatriation Charter,” “A Hubby,” “Bedtime with Nancy and Ron,” “Eating the weakest survivor,” “Homeless and down to a ﬁver” (“The Act of Imagination,” The Other Country 25). Signifying the shift in Britain from a postwar collectivism to a free-market economy (including the deregulation of the British Rail, a celebration of market individualism, and a retreat from social forms of responsibility), concurrent with a call to traditional family values (the heterosexual family as the primary unit of both society and the market) and a renewed nationalism (eliciting arguments over immigration and repatriation), the poem’s juxtaposed soundbites place issues of economic policy, social control, and national identity in close relationship. The individual subject dissolves under the pressure of such discursive bombardment, and the metonymic foregrounding of the social discourses of late-eighties culture thwarts the “lyric tradition in which a single and singular voice struggles to express and defend an authentic ‘personality’ that stands over against an inauthentic world” (Naylor 7). With its reference to the imagination, the poem sets into play a romantic paradigm of self punctured by the litany of references that follow, “appalled” by the encroaching social world. Signiﬁcantly, however, that social world is itself rendered through a particularized rhetoric of self that actually advances, in radically conservative fashion, the values of the authentic, autonomous, and uniﬁed lyric self

coexisting with “traditional” values of social life. These soundbites within the poem, paratactically enjambed and without narrative linkage, suggest the ease of a rhetoric of self produced within the public domain that values individualism while concurrently limiting its legitimacy in terms of gender, nationality, race, ethnicity, and class, signaling discursive formations tied to speciﬁc political and social contexts of a postempire Britain. Duffy’s poetry responds to these discursive formations, questioning how the individual is imagined within economic, nationalist, and socially conservative discourses. Exploring the contours of a contemporaneous rhetoric of self, Duffy’s work of the eighties insists upon the “situatedness in discourse” of both the poem and its lyric subject (Huk, “In AnOther’s Pocket” 33). At times dissolving or scattering the self in a paratactic display of public rhetoric, as in “The Act of the Imagination,” her poems most typically draw upon recognizable forms of lyric, in particular, the lyric subgenres of the dramatic monologue and the personal love lyric. Her handling of formal elements of line, syntax, prosody, and page are similarly recognizable and, some would say, conventional. Certainly, compared to the other poets discussed in this book, Duffy’s poetics seems the least formally innovative. However, Duffy’s example pushes to the forefront the problematic framing of “innovation” through American Language writing and in particular in ignoring the different national contexts for women poets and for feminist poetics. The British poetic tradition and contemporary practice have arguably marginalized women even more so than in American contexts; moreover, an “experimental” poetics has a less sustained tradition in Britain than in America, leading one to speculate that “experimental” looks quite different within the lineages, histories, and communities available to the British woman poet. The formation of British “alternative” or avantgarde poetry communities is discussed at length in the next chapter, which focuses on the ambivalent position of feminist poetics within such communities self-consciously constructed as alternative to “mainstream.” In an effort to question the divisions of experimental and mainstream, I spend a full chapter on Duffy ﬁrst to unsettle notions of conventional form as ideologically suspect and second to establish a clear sense of social and discursive contexts in postsixties Britain that affect the innovative strategies of the experimental poets discussed in the next chapter in ways that bridge Duffy The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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to them. It is the texture of social discourse that these poetries each mine and undermine through formal experiments with discourse. Such considerations necessitate a differently nuanced category of the experimental. In Duffy’s case, the use of recognizable conventions calls attention to them as functioning within discursive, ideological, and historical systems, emphasizing the “situatedness” of poetic conventions such as voice and self-utterance in discursive history, particularly in relation to speciﬁc social and economic forces shaping contemporary Britain. A Scots-born poet who attended Liverpool University in the seventies before moving to London and then to Manchester, Duffy draws upon these urban, industrial environs to reﬂect the impact of changes in ﬁscal policy of the 1980s, the increase in racial, ethnic, and class tensions attending debates over immigration, and the rhetoric of family, gender, and individualism that underscored monetary shifts under Thatcher. Duffy’s poetry explores the concepts and the language of economic individualism and nationalism that developed in relationship to the emphasis upon free-market economics formulated most forcefully during the years of Margaret Thatcher’s control (1979– 82) but that also attend the process of New Right ascendancy prior to her election. Duffy’s attention to the shaping power of words draws in many ways upon a feminist politics inﬂected by poststructural interrogations of language; moreover, her poetry’s concern with the voices and positions of “outsiders” — what Ian Gregson calls “the desire to give a voice to those who are habitually spoken for ” (99) — may be motivated, in part, by her own experiences of marginality as both lesbian and Scottish.1 However, the voices that speak in her poetry (especially evident in her preferred use of the dramatic monologue), rather than assuming a true or uniﬁed self capable of transparent expression through language, are inevitably intersected by discourses of national and cultural identity as they shape concepts of self and other, of afﬁnity and difference, of belonging and exclusion. Drawing upon poems included in the four books Duffy published during or just after the Thatcher years (Standing Female Nude, 1985; The Other Country, 1990; Selling Manhattan, 1987; and Mean Time 1993, this chapter examines Duffy’s treatment of national identity as strategically constructed and disseminated rhetoric, intertwined with economic rhetoric and policy, and situated within ideological contexts and material conditions developing in Britain in recent 134

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decades that shape a public discourse of gender, ethnicity, and the individual. The poem opening this chapter, like others of Duffy’s, situates the lyric self (the “appalled Imagination”) in relation to the emphasis upon individualism underlying policy and shaped through particular rhetorics developed during and prior to the years of Thatcher’s three governments. Brieﬂy stated (and expanded upon throughout the chapter), encouraging free-market activity and a culture of individualistic enterprise, the Thatcher years were characterized by cuts in government spending, reductions in forms of welfare support, privatization of nationalized industries, deregulation of business, and diminishment of labor unions. Culminating in the rise of the New Right in Britain, Thatcher’s election in 1979 set in motion strategies of economic renewal that “entailed a moral revolution: a return to individual responsibility, free market entrepreneurialism and British nationalism” (Anna Marie Smith 3). The term “New Right” refers here to a cultural, political, and intellectual shift in British conservatism away from a collectivist ideology toward a laissez-faire concept of market freedom, combined with a stress on moral authoritarianism. As an ideological formation, the New Right references a broad range of populist, academic, and state discourses. Encompassing Thatcherism while not restricted to it, the New Right includes both the overt racism of populist groups like the antiimmigration National Front and the nationalist promptings of conservative political leaders without a material connection between them. While important not to conceive of Thatcherism and New Right as entirely synonymous, cultural analysts nonetheless recognize Thatcherism as “the most important variant of New Right discourse,” constituting a “particularly complex mixture of imagery, rhetoric and policies which was constantly redeﬁned in response to strategic circumstances” (Anna Marie Smith 5).2 In its resistance to the “discursive continuities and overlaps” created across New Right discourse, Duffy’s work enacts an innovative exploration of the discursive constructions of “self” surrounding the issues of economics, gender, immigration, and nationalism in 1980s Britain (Seidel 114). Language and Discourse

Unlike her fellow poets associated with small press publications such as the three women discussed in chapter 5, Duffy’s visibility, pubThe Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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lication and award history, and critical reception place her squarely within the realm of public recognition so often referred to as “mainstream.” Since she won the National Poetry Competition in 1983, Duffy’s stature has increasingly risen, marked by publication of her Selected Poems by the major publishing house Penguin (although she has remained with the smaller Anvil Press for individual collections) and a monograph on her from the Writers and Their Work series issued by Northcote House Press in association with the British Council (see Rees-Jones).3 Duffy’s name was raised as a possible choice for poet laureate to follow Ted Hughes, and she has been given prominent feature in critical appraisals of the “New Generation,” poets whose appearance in the 1980s is claimed by some to have signiﬁcantly changed the poetry scene in England through reafﬁrming “art’s signiﬁcance as public utterance” (Hulse 16). In her monograph on Duffy, Deryn Rees-Jones claims the poet as “one of the key factors in this change” (1), a change deﬁned by the anthology The New Poetry (Hulse et al.), devoted to introducing the New Generation, and the accompanying critical study of these poets in David Kennedy’s New Relations.4 Of course, as Keith Tuma most convincingly argues, Kennedy’s formulation of a New Generation and a changed poetry scene willfully ignores the activities associated with an “alternative” scene, those poets writing out of the modernist and British Revival movements who currently constitute a small-press locus of emphatically nonmainstream poetic activity (see chapter 5).5 As well, the notion of feminist poetry in Britain (as in the United States) has depended upon an oppositional set of categories and exclusions exempliﬁed by a well-known British feminist anthology edited by Linda France, Sixty Women Poets (“mainstream,” as Huk reminds us, because it is “published and distributed by big publishers”), which remains committed to retaining “the integrity of the line as well as of the speaking voice” and thus “insures . . . against the appearance of any ‘linguistically innovative’ or experimental poems” (“Feminist Radicalism” 228).6 As Huk and others have stressed, however, the opposition between mainstream and alternative is problematic, particularly in regard to women — and speciﬁcally feminist women — writers. Rees-Jones, cognizant of the limitations of this opposition, claims that “Duffy’s work marks a transition between a mainstream and a more experimental aesthetic” (2), a sense of transition that Lynn Keller further 136

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complicates (in discussing American poet Alice Fulton) through gendering the categories of debate in an effort to disabuse “the widespread assumption that genuinely ‘experimental,’ ‘oppositional,’ or ‘alternative’ writing necessarily takes the radically disjunctive forms associated today with Language writing”: “The mainstream and Language categories — inevitably simplifying monoliths — are a particularly uneasy ﬁt for many feminist poetries. Indeed, although there are numerous feminist practitioners within each mode, some feminists would see the presumption of individualized speaking subjectivity in mainstream lyric and its rejection in Language poetry as inverse reﬂections of the privilege accorded to (white) male subjectivity . . . [underscoring] the androcentric dimensions of the dominant categories” (“The ‘Then Some Inbetween’” 311, 312). Although poets like Denise Riley, for example, and Carol Ann Duffy are rarely considered in the same venue or in relation to one another, this chapter seeks to unsettle the oppositional terms of the debate that keeps them apart, in part through illuminating shared discursive and material conditions of their work. Admittedly, the term language-centered begs many questions, for to look at a page of Duffy’s poetry, one would not initially (or perhaps ﬁnally) associate it with the disjunctive, typographically disruptive structures one comes to expect in opening a book by Susan Howe, for example, or Lyn Hejinian. Upon a ﬁrst reading, the poems seem to remain within fairly regular conventions of prosody and form, drawing particularly upon traditions of the lyric and the dramatic monologue. However, Duffy’s poetic forms continually interrogate themselves, asking questions of language structures that reﬂect current theoretical concerns and intersect with language-centered poetries in America. At the same time, her adherence to a more accessible form marks a signiﬁcant engagement with social discourse in a way that emphasizes layers of “mediation between particularities and the state,” which British poet-critic David Marriot sees too often lacking in a “language poetry” that disavows the signiﬁer “of its representational function” to the degree that an “overly symbolic investment in signiﬁcation excludes its own historical-political inscription” (in Huk, “In AnOther’s Pocket” 32–33). Strategic uses of convention — of poetic form, line, and signiﬁcation — in Duffy’s work reveal an attention to situatedness within “discursive history” that Huk identiﬁes in Marriot’s own poetry: “In recent poems [Marriot] emphasizes the The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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issue [of signiﬁcation] by signaling his re-examination of discursive structures of history through lines that seem too fully syntactical — even residually metered — to be immediately recognized as ‘experimental,’ though the sensibility that informs them is fully cognizant of its (non) situation in discursive history. Such a situation is a situation, however, which differentiates it from dogmatic experimental work; it is not erased or transcendent but historically impacted” (“In AnOther’s Pocket” 33). Duffy’s adherence to poetic conventions both reaches an audience and enacts deeply unsettling linguistic experiments. Such work exempliﬁes the postmodernism described by the British cultural critic Janet Wolff as a “notion of the postmodern as informed, critical cultural practices which engage with tradition in order to subvert it,” an engagement she sees as particularly characteristic of “postmodernism in feminist art practice” (94). While Keith Tuma sees work such as Duffy’s as “more or less faithful to the canonical forms of British tradition, with a distinct preference for the shorter, self-sufﬁcient lyric or dramatic monologue” (Fishing 199), Huk makes the point that both “traditional” and “experimental” take on different valences within the localities of production and reception in Britain: “Many have noted that Irish and U.K. experimentalists . . . appear less ‘radical’ to Americans because they most often foreground recognizable discourses rather than textual/ semantic fragments, a tendency that can be understood in part as arising out of a group-oriented social mythology built less powerfully on early models of individualism, transcendence and agency” that historically have shaped American ideas of subjectivity (“In AnOther’s Pocket” 28 –29).7 Within British contexts of race, class, and gender, especially, Huk insists on complicating an assumed delineation between mainstream and experimental poetics, using the recent anthology of “alternative” British poetics, Others, as a case in point. Noting the inclusion of mainstream or visible poets like Grace Nichols in an anthology proclaiming itself as “other,” Huk questions not the inclusion itself but the silence on what this inclusion signiﬁes, stressing that “nothing is said in the long introduction . . . about how these works ﬁt into our conceptions of a developing aesthetics for experimental writing in general; no critique of the going aesthetic is investigated through their differing” (“In AnOther’s Pocket” 30 –31). “Differing” from the poets clearly associated with British alternative scenes, Duffy’s poetry nonetheless obscures the alternative/main138

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stream divide and — like the example of Grace Nichols but for different reasons — asks us to rethink our “conceptions of a developing aesthetics for experimental writing in general.” Duffy has been no stranger to contemporary discussions of language and subjectivity that intersect with “experimental writing in general.” A student of philosophy at Liverpool University in the mid- to late seventies, Duffy brings questions of modern philosophy to bear upon her poetic medium and its forms and functions. As a feminist attentive to divisions of power along lines of gender, class, race, and nationality, she writes a poetry that continually contextualizes this fusion of the poetic and philosophical within the social. Jane E. Thomas provides the most extensive reading of contemporary theory’s impact on Duffy’s poetry, both of which investigate “the extent to which language constructs rather than reﬂects meaning” (78). At the same time, her work is deeply “concerned with the interrogation of gender norms” and “also confronts racial intolerance, religious bigotry, the nuclear nightmare and the political indifference exhibited by the Thatcher administration toward the unemployed and the underprivileged” ( Jane E. Thomas 78). This social emphasis, I would argue, not only is intrinsically connected to the communicable forms of dramatic monologue, narrative, and lyric she often chooses but more fully involves the experimental interaction between these forms and the deconstructive notions of language that Duffy’s poems investigate. Her poetry often insists upon the contextuality of meaning, exploring language’s role in the production and maintenance of dominant ideologies and charting the complex interdependence of signs and structures of authority linked to regulatory practices of race, gender, class, and nationalistic or religious belief. Within these structures, produced through language, the individual consciousness or subject is shaped. As Jane E. Thomas explains: Any individual who seeks to participate in the social order into which it is born can only express and deﬁne itself using the particular language system formulated by that social order if it is to become recognizable both to itself and to other members of that order. In this way language can be said to construct or “speak” the individual rather than the other way around in that the terms the individual uses to deﬁne itself, or the subject positions it adopts, are pre-existing socially constructed signs with particular ideologThe Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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ical implications. They dictate the terms of the individual’s subjectivity. (79) Arguably, Duffy’s poetry suggests a possible model of agency — as developing in the interaction between individual and structure — that this brief explanation of poststructural subjectivity disallows in its focus on exterior structures; nevertheless, the status of the self within the discursive production of cultural structures is a major concern in Duffy’s poetry. Additionally, her work’s refusal of language transparency emerges as a continual and self-conscious attention to the subject’s position within language, to meaning’s contextual production, to experience’s discursive formation. Discussing Duffy’s poetry, Kennedy describes a postmodern poetic practice aware of discursive operations that highlight “the conventions within a text” through “self-reﬂexiveness” (New Relations 217). Thus, a form like the narrative is used to reﬂect upon its own assumptions of pure experience, present through language; in this way, notions of a prediscursive experience or representational truth inhering in form are problematized by the manipulation of poetic form to question itself. That the “mediation of experience” is a “central preoccupation” for Duffy and that the “conception of language as something that appears to correspond to the world but in fact constructs it is at the heart of Duffy’s work” has been noted by Kennedy and a number of critics preceding him.8 Duffy’s attention to the subject’s positionality in language marks the lyric “I” and the subject of the dramatic monologue, although, as this chapter argues, Duffy’s strategies involve explicitly referential encounters with ideological discourses of the 1980s (what Huk calls “recognizable discourses”). In general terms, however, as Jane E. Thomas argues, for Duffy it is clearly “language which constructs the individual’s subjectivity in ways which are ideologically speciﬁc. The positions which are available to us to identify with — even the sign ‘ Woman’ itself — structure our sense of selves” (85). This positionality in language becomes more explicitly explored in The Other Country through poems asserting an increasingly self-conscious linkage between acts of language and operations of power within authoritative structures. The emphasis in this volume, as in the earlier books, is on the relationship between meaning and dominant forms of power; however, the intensiﬁed focus upon singular words, syntactical pat140

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terns, and contextual meaning more blatantly highlights the ideological constituents of discursive systems that conventional forms help to conceal. Rather than disrupting language structures at the level of syntax or line, Duffy draws upon and disrupts the ideological basis of the forms she employs, as in “ Words, Wide Night,” which counterpoints the shaping of experience by language with the lyric’s assumption of private expression. The poem begins with clear reference to the lyric tradition — the isolated self, mourning distance from a lover: “Somewhere on the other side of this wide night / and the distance between us, I am thinking of you. / The room is turning slowly away from the moon.” This third line suggests a hyperbolic lyric self. As central consciousness, its movement (signiﬁed by the room) predominates. Yet this hyperbole is suggestively silly in its effort to poeticize or to construct the poem around the self. The next stanza reveals the construction of desire through language, a constructedness the room/ moon line has moved us toward considering: “This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say / it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing / an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear” (sic). The grammatical play of the second line positions the “I” and its “singing” adjacent to a grammatical term, “tenses.” Which tense of “I” sings in the lyric? How does the particular tense of I sing “desire” that can arbitrarily be labled pleasurable or sad? The ﬁnal lines refuse the lyric equation of self-expression and truth: “For I am in love with you and this / / is what is like or what it is like in words.” Experience is never prediscursive or entirely present; how we think we experience and how we represent experience is always “like,” always in language, always ideologically mediated. This recognition of positionality within language and within convention and tradition continually attends the question of meaning. “River” (The Other Country 85) asks us to think of what Jane E. Thomas calls “the disparity between our individual interests and the discourses available to us.” The poem envisions a woman “[a]t the turn of the river” where “the language changes,” where the river crosses into a different country. The “sign / in a new language brash on a tree” alerts the woman to linguistic shifts, and “[s]he feels she is somewhere else, intensely, simply because / of words.” If a sense of self is contingent upon words, what happens when their meanings shift; how is subjectivity altered through a destabilization of transparent The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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norms of language? “ What would it mean to you if you could be / with her there, dangling your own hands in the water / where blue and silver ﬁsh dart away over stone, / stoon, stein, like the meanings of things, vanish?” In Steinian fashion (an allusive meaning generated by the contextual wordplay), the meanings of things vanish as meaning is shown to depend upon context and position, so that the material word attains meaning only within a system of difference.9 Such awareness does not annihilate the self but suggests the self who can “write on a postcard,” cognizant of its particular position and of the regulatory discourses impinging upon that position: “If you were really there what would you write on a postcard, / or on the sand, near where the river runs into the sea?” Language, like the postcard, is an act of communication and needs forms or containers so that communication can occur; at the same time, the place of inscription, the position of the inscriber, makes language subject to the waters of change and erasure. Matters of context and position, in relation to meaning and representation, take on complex resonance within Duffy’s consistent turn to economics — as trope, system, and discourse — to chart the discursive and ideological components of the “self” as gendered, racialized, or nationalized. As shifts in economic policy, discourse, and philosophy engendered real-life changes for British subjects during the Thatcher years, Duffy’s poetry increasingly critiqued the ideas and language promoted by a New Right celebration of individualism and “traditional values,” particularly in their link to economic visions of free-market ascendancy. Duffy’s poetry questions the meaning of self within this process, and a particularly striking example of her engagement with economic issues is revealed in the title poem of her ﬁrst book, published midway into Thatcher’s rule, “Standing Female Nude.” Before moving on to consider a range of poems located in more particularized relationship to state and public discourse of the time, an extended reading of this poem will help to clarify the general questions spiraling off from the intersecting dynamic of economics, representation, and identity, with continuing attention to the issues of poetic form, language, and genre that the previous section began. As a dramatic monologue, “Standing Female Nude” features a single speaker, an artist’s model, speaking within the speciﬁc situation 142

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of readying to leave the studio after six hours of posing, being paid, and being shown the painting.10 Through the course of the poem, we learn details of the lives of both painter and model: both are poor, they seem to be in France, he is being heralded as a “genius.” The key feature of a dramatic monologue insists, however, that we learn more than mere details. We should learn also of the speaker’s private, distinctive character and temperament, inadvertently revealed through her speech. The focus should be, in good Robert Browning fashion, upon this lyric speaker or self whose essence is revealed in the arrangement of her words, her tone, her silences. In Duffy’s hands, this arrangement serves to actually undermine the assumption of a distinctive, essential self through locating subjectivity within socioeconomic and linguistic networks. The main feature of the conventional dramatic monologue — the speaking lyric self — undergoes a dismantling that reveals the ideological foundations (particularly in class and gender) of the idea of the private self. The poem follows in its entirety: 11 Six hours like this for a few francs. Belly nipple arse in the window light, he drains the colour from me. Further to the right, Madam. And do try to be still. I shall be represented analytically and hung in great museums. The bourgeoisie will coo at such an image of a river-whore. They call it Art. Maybe. He is concerned with volume, space. I with the next meal. You’re getting thin, Madame, this is not good. My breasts hang slightly low, the studio is cold. In the tea-leaves I can see the Queen of England gazing on my shape. Magniﬁcent, she murmurs moving on. It makes me laugh. His name is Georges. They tell me he’s a genius. There are times he does not concentrate and stiffens for my warmth. Men think of their mothers. He possesses me on canvas as he dips the brush The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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repeatedly into the paint. Little man, you’ve not the money for the arts I sell. Both poor, we make our living how we can. I ask him Why do you do this? Because I have to. There’s no choice. Don’t talk. My smile confuses him. These artists take themselves too seriously. At night I ﬁll myself with wine and dance around the bars. When it’s ﬁnished he shows me proudly, lights a cigarette. I say Twelve francs and get my shawl. It does not look like me. The poem involves several levels of representation: the poem’s representation of the model; the model’s representation of her experience; the artist’s representation of the model; the museum’s representation of the painting — or, as the poem tells us, of Art, with a capital A. The initial stanza brings these levels into our consideration. The “self” presumed by the dramatic monologue is dispersed here within various discourses: economics and class, the body, Art. She is deﬁned by the bourgeoisie who “coo” at her image, interpreting her as a “river-whore” and deﬁning themselves through difference from her. To the artist, her body is a site conﬂating commodiﬁcation and desire; we learn that he sometimes loses his concentration and “stiffens for my warmth.” Unable to possess her physically (for, she tells us in a moment of economic determination, her arts are unaffordable to him), “He possesses me on canvas.” Whose “self” is this? His possession, of course, becomes the possession of the museum and the middle class; Art as commodity is an extension of middle-class ideology. Artistic representation objectiﬁes the woman just as patriarchal economic structures objectify her as a commodity to be bought, sold, possessed. She will be “represented analytically and hung / in great museums”; her body is translated into “volume, space.” In a particularly ambiguous set of lines, the distinction between the human individual and the representation is deliberately and complexly confused: “In the tea-leaves / I can see the Queen of England gazing on my shape. Magniﬁcent, she murmurs / moving on.” The tea leaves suggest, on the one hand, that she is imagining the future, when the queen will view her “shape.” The representative act has rendered her 144

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a “magniﬁcent” shape to be possessed, even by the power of the gaze; it has also exoticized or romanticized her through distancing the material conditions of her life from the work and world of high “Art.” The image is “magniﬁcent”; the woman would most likely be scorned in such an environment. The tea leaves also suggest, in a more literal fashion, that the queen herself becomes such a shape within the milieu of popular culture. The queen’s image is customarily reproduced on the inside bottom of teacups and mass-marketed as a souvenir.12 The image of the queen gazes upward from the teacup at “my shape” — is this the model or the painting? This confusion of reproduced images and individuals makes it impossible to locate the self here or to ﬁnd a self free of representation, mediation, or commodiﬁcation. For women, whether poor models or queens, this confusion is particularly apt given a long tradition of the exchange of women in patriarchal societies and the regulatory structures that “represent” women, even to themselves. (Such a tradition, as the following discussion will enumerate, continues to haunt contemporary New Right discourse on gender.) In these lines we also see the collapsing of high and popular art, for the painting becomes an object for the marketplace just as the cup has been. The myth of the individual genius and the unique creation (“They tell me he’s a genius”) helps to keep the boundary between the high and low intact, but the poem illuminates the illusion of this boundary through suggesting its participation in bourgeois institutions. The speaker’s representation is bought, sold, possessed, gazed upon. As well, the speaker herself is a literal commodity, selling her body for the money to survive. Society condemns her way of selling while celebrating the artist’s; in this way, a morality that seeks to control women’s bodies also conceals the ways in which the marketing of women is institutionalized — in this instance, through Art. But the convention of the dramatic monologue pushes us to ask, How does a commodiﬁed object then “speak”? The poem suggests that the self and its language are always grounded in material circumstances and that representation only creates the illusion of a uniﬁed, autonomous speaking subject. In the ﬁnal lines, the nude model comments upon the artist’s representation of her: “ When it’s ﬁnished / he shows me proudly, lights a cigarette. I say / Twelve francs and get my shawl. It does not look like me.” The poem ends with a clichéd response, so familiar that we are apt to overThe Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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look its possible complexity. It is tempting, from a humanist perspective, to read this ﬁnal line as a triumph for the speaker, an assertion of a self, a “me” that the artist and the system cannot assimilate and possess, a “me” that escapes the tyranny of representation, a “me” that is essentially unique and coherent and cannot be replicated. A closer look at the line, the word choices, and the structure encourages an alternate reading. The penultimate line breaks on “I say,” seeming to emphasize the self as speaker. But in the ﬁnal line, the ﬁrst words, “Twelve francs,” and the ﬁnal words, “like me,” call to each other through their mirrored placement. Bracketing the last line, a monetary amount and a personal pronoun act as reﬂections across the line and back through the poem. The “me” of the poem is a self shaped by economic systems of exchange and by a set of discourses (moral, aesthetic, etc.) that keeps this system in place. Rather than evoking an essentialized self or enacting a reiﬁcation that excludes the material and discursive constituents of the self, the dramatic monologue subverts its own conventional expectations and assumptions through dispersing the self. The ﬁnal “me” remains re-presented and commodiﬁed even by the poem itself, a self-conscious maneuver implied by the emphasis upon representation in the ﬁnal three words. The speaker’s earlier comments, such as “I shall be represented analytically,” initiate this emphasis long before the ﬁnal line. And so we come back to the poem’s form and to the self represented in the dramatic monologue, the assumption of a speaking subject the form assumes. Just as the poem insists upon the arbitrary nature of language (the painting is art because “They call it Art”), it also links the process of labeling to authoritative status. The speaking subject of the monologue is positioned within this process, ultimately a process of power that seems to rob her of speech and subjectivity: the female nude is written/spoken/painted/represented through this process, her body deﬁned by the material value it attains. And yet, for the spoken or represented subject, the act of speaking assumed by the form of the dramatic monologue creates the possibility of a certain refusal of representation through subversion, not escape. This suggests a claim to subjectivity or agency, a “me,” at the same time that the subject’s construction is placed within socioeconomic forces. The dramatic monologue enacts its own dependence upon an ideology of representation while pointing to its origins in material systems of economic and sexual power: Art with a capital A is not transcendent 146

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but absolutely immanent in origin. The objectiﬁcation of the female body is positioned within these ideological structures, but the speaking subject remains suggestively cognizant of the discourses (of art, economics) that shape her representation. Agency is possible through the conscious negotiation of the structures within which she is situated, a process involving conﬂicting and multiple positions for the self at once. This reconﬁguration of the dramatic monologue’s representation of subjectivity suggests the possibilities for reconﬁgurations of the female self arising from recognition of the ideological investment within any “representation” of the subject, including one’s own self-representation. The Lyric Self and the Language of Economics

Complicating and enriching the issue of subjectivity that “Standing Female Nude” takes up, Duffy’s poetic insistence upon economic contexts intertwines linguistic processes with historically speciﬁc discourses implicated in the growing conservatism (economic and moral) of the public arena in the late seventies and eighties. Revealing the “workings of language in history,” the poems develop a signiﬁcant focus on socioeconomic developments spanning the era of postwar Britain as they are effectively harnessed in support of rightwing causes that variously reimagine the “individual” as a market agent (Huk, “In AnOther’s Pocket” 28). On a simple level, many of Duffy’s poems are directly about money: poems like “Like Earning a Living,” “Money Talks,” “Making Money,” “Selling Manhattan,” “ What Price,” “Debt,” and the symbolically reductive “$.” More complexly, however, such poems engage with the ideas underlying the shift in economic policy and rhetoric marking the demise of the collectivist, Keynesian economic model constructed in post-1945 Britain but dismantled in the seventies and eighties through an embrace of market values and privatization. The material conditions of postwar Britain are important to understand in their relation to discursive shifts in rhetorics of self and nation that Duffy’s poetry interrogates. Following World War II, British economic policy developed under the inﬂuence of leading Liberals like Keynes and Beveridge, who argued for “an extension of public intervention in particular areas,” including the “state provision of welfare services” and the regulation of industry (Gamble 28). Supported to varying degrees by a consensus of Conservative and LaThe Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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bour Parties, this mixed-economy model allowed for private enterprise while strengthening the state’s welfare functions and solidifying public ownership of major industries in an attempt to insure full employment and an equitable meeting of needs on the part of the citizenry. Under the terms of this “new social contract,” trade unions were expected to “forgo ‘excessive’ militancy in return for a stable economy” and the construction of a social democracy (Anna Marie Smith 136). Beginning in the 1960s, particularly through the efforts of Conservative MP Enoch Powell, and culminating in the 1979 success of Margaret Thatcher in regaining Conservative control of the government, challenges to this collectivist model gained populist support and political power. As studies of British politics have made clear, “Thatcherism’s radical departure from previous political regimes consists in its total rejection of the consensus model for an individualist, monetarist and free market approach to the economy” (Anna Marie Smith 2). In material terms, the free-market approach changed the relation of the state, commerce, and citizenry. Economically, the Thatcher years (1979–90) were characterized by cuts in governmental spending and intervention, reductions in forms of welfare support (including cuts in social security entitlements and the sale of council housing), privatization of nationalized industries, deregulation of business, and diminishment of labor unions. Individualist values of self-reliance and self-support were encouraged over collectivist values of communal responsibility in public discussions of Britain’s postimperial economy and sense of nationhood, evidenced most famously perhaps in Thatcher’s claim that “there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families.” Within the rhetoric of Thatcherism, argues Anna Marie Smith, economic renewal “entailed a moral revolution: a return to individual responsibility, free market entrepreneurialism and British nationalism” (3). These intertwined imperatives of individualism and market freedom called upon values of competition, ownership, and material success in deﬁning the nation’s strength and, subsequently, the patriotic subject’s duty. The notion of the “individual” assumed within the market framework harked back to earlier formulations of the self-interested, autonomous, rational “economic man” theorized in neoclassical economics beginning in the late 1880s and inﬂuencing Western forms of capitalist growth throughout the twentieth century.13 In Britain, the development of 148

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Keynesian economics displaced neoclassical ideas after World War II, but Thatcher’s return to key elements of neoclassical economics overrode the socialist impulses of the postwar state. The individual, as theorized within a free-market framework and encouraged by Thatcherism, is a market agent; subjectivity derives from the choices one makes as a “self-interested, utility-maximizing and hence rational individual” within a context of scarcity (Gamble 26). As both feminist and cultural critics have argued, this notion of the individual claims an objective, ahistorical neutrality while in actuality following the contours of the (Western) wage-earning, property-owning male who is the head of the household, thus excluding other groups from economic agency and individual subjectivity.14 This “individual” in Britain, while a powerful ideal gaining wide populist support, actually remained in a select group; as unemployment, inﬂation, and taxation rose under the strain of Thatcher’s reforms, the slow economic recovery following the reorientation to the free market produced increasing distances between the rich and the poor amidst admonitions to increase individual self-reliance and private enterprise. Taking on the language of economics as a form of self-creation, Duffy’s poems on money both parody this notion of the individual while also suggesting the ominous dimensions of such a rhetoric of self. In “Talent Contest” (The Other Country 19), “You’re a contestant” who performs for those “who have paid to come in” to see a circuslike act; the crowd of “plonkers with day-jobs” is pleased by tawdry performances that make “you sneer,” but then “Poweran moneyan fame you say / to yourself / like a blessing, then you’re into the act. Make ’em laugh.” As the self becomes performance, the line between the money-seeking agent and the exchangeable commodity blur within this market “act.” The performance of selfhood within an economic context also informs “ What Price” (Standing Female Nude 52), in which the autobiographical expression of self is valued in a conﬂation of “truth” and monetary value. The poem begins with a conventional notion of the genre as a form of transparent access to the truth: “These were his diaries. Through the writing we may ﬁnd / the man and whether he has been misjudged”; “ We have all evening to peruse / the truth.” The poem’s middle stanzas suggest the ideological frames through which the “truth” of self-expression presents itself as the speaker of the poem, clearly an older British citizen, considers his own life in relation to the Jewish author of the diaries but can do so The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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only within the bounds of a nostalgic nationalism: “It takes me back. I always saw some sense / in what he tried to do. This country should be strong.” The Anglo-centered focus continues with glancing reference to the Holocaust overshadowed by a pride in British roses and the Falklands triumph, which signify (to the speaker) the regeneration of British identity: Of course, one had to ﬁght. I had a wife. But somewhere here I think you’ll ﬁnd that he’d have joined with us. More wine? I know the Sons of David died, some say atrociously, but that’s all past. The roses are in bloom. Look at the way we claimed the islands back. My grandchildren are young and pink and make me proud. The subtle linking of self-construction to nationalistic impulses in effect denies the history and validity of a self outside of that nationalism or, rather, renders that self valuable and “real” only in terms of monetary value: “These journals will be his chance to explain, / I’m certainly convinced that they are real”; “I admit that it was hell to be a Jew, but how much / do you think they’ll fetch? One million? Two?” The irony of the poem rests in the speaker’s insistence upon the “real” self in the diaries, oblivious either to the ideological processes attending a construction of self (which the poem performs through the speaker’s own musings) or to the equation of a “real” self with its monetary value — a reﬂection, in many ways, of both a commodiﬁcation of subjects within a market economy and a validation of the individual self as he who produces wealth. It is this latter notion of self, the self who is economically free and hence productive, that resides within New Right attempts to redeﬁne “freedom” in economic terms. The “broad philosophical and theoretical discourses about the nature of the economy and its relationship with the state” include “the doctrine of economic individualism which has always ﬂourished so vigorously in the USA. This is traditional laissez-faire economics which assumes without question that markets are beneﬁcial and governments harmful and that individual freedom and government action exist in inverse ratio to each other” 150

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(Gamble 30). As Ruth Levitas, among others, notes, this concept of freedom is “entirely negative . . . the absence of restraint, deregulation; although ironically many proposals [to enhance market freedom] involve an increase in centralized power.” Citing the publication of the Omega File, an inﬂuential economic document proposing market reforms for Britain that was produced in the early eighties by the conservative Adam Smith Institute in London, Levitas identiﬁes a telling deﬁnition of freedom: “[E]conomic freedom is the essence of personal freedom,” the report states as a way of justifying the elimination of state regulation and restraint (91).15 For Duffy, in a poem like “Selling Manhattan” (Selling Manhattan 34), individual freedom has been historically constructed within a system of exchange equating possession with power and economic freedom with dominance over the dispossessed. The Native American speaker addresses the original sale of Manhattan Island, responding to a white man who gloats, “All yours, Injun, twenty-four bucks’ worth of glass beads, / gaudy cloth. I got myself a bargain.” Emblematizing a different economic order from the white man’s and a different notion of freedom, the speaker asserts, “[Y]ou can no more own the rivers and the grass than own / the air. I sing with true love for the land.” Within an order that organizes selfhood in relation to possession, “a boy feels his freedom / vanish, like the salmon going mysteriously / out to sea.” Freedom, the pivotal American ideal, is problematized within this clash of economies that stands metonymically in this poem for the development of capitalist and colonialist enterprises: is freedom dependent upon economic power rather than innate equality? Analyzing conservative economic ideas of freedom inﬂuential in Thatcherite Britain, Andrew Belsey notes that “[t]here is only freedom to obey the market. . . . A person, then, is free to the extent that she or he lives in a free [capitalist] society. To be in a disadvantageous position in the market society is not a limitation of freedom, so long as the disadvantage is a result of spontaneous order” of the market (186). In other words, as long as an individual resides within a free-market society (as opposed to a state-controlled one), even “the homeless, destitute dosser on the Embankment [in Britain] is as free as the aristocratic revellers in Park Lane” (Belsey 185). The “extensive use” of the “ﬁction of the autonomous subject” provided a “strategic weapon” in Thatcherite discourse, which “deployed the myth of the self-sufﬁcient and freely choosing individual who was responsible for her own impoverishThe Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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ment. . . . Thatcher’s dramatic claim that ‘society does not exist’ only served to strengthen this individualistic negation of the socio-political conditions of oppression” (Anna Marie Smith 112). The ideological power of this idea of individual freedom is registered in Duffy’s work, such as in “Politico” (Selling Manhattan 35), which alludes to the populist support of conservative ideas in the seventies and eighties by the working classes that had traditionally supported Labour.16 In this poem “men cheered theirselves out of work as champagne / butted a new ship,” and “Socialism? These days? There’s the tree that never grew.” Thatcherism’s strategic promotion of economic individualism to the working and middle classes, as in this poem, “allowed even the most unlikely groups to identify with its enterprise culture and these identiﬁcations were often contradictory and highly unstable” (Anna Marie Smith 45); what Stuart Hall and others term the “Conservative hegemony” consolidated by Thatcher’s rise required “the containment of working-class politics within the logic of capitalist development” so that capital “appeared to sustain, rather than eat into, working-class living standards” (231). Within the freedom of the market, material conditions such as class differences are abstracted and elided at the very same time that the market operates to reinforce disparities of wealth. The capitalist dollar is given voice in “Money Talks” (Selling Manhattan 33), claiming, “I am the authentic language of suffering . . . I buy and sell the world.” This poem reacts to formulations of the market put forth, for example, by F. A. Hayek, who claims that the “abstract order of market society, being a spontaneous order, is not an agency in [the sense of individuals, organizations, and governments] and therefore cannot be coercive” of individual freedom (Belsey 185).17 Duffy’s poem renders this order, while indifferent to human agency, as certainly coercive of it in the sense of shaping human outcome. Money’s voice claims, “My million tills / sing through the night, my shining mad machines. / I stink and accumulate,” issuing a siren call to possessive desires (“I got any currency / you want, women and gigolos, metal tuxedos”) while demanding allegiance: with the command to “Love me” from the “jealous God, $-stammering / my one commandment on the calculator,” this omnipowerful presence suggests both its indifference to human freedoms and its ultimate power over their lives: “I am / the big bombs, sighing in their thick lead sheaths OK.” The impotence of the individual within this devastating order sug152

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gests a paradoxical devaluation of the individual that takes place within the doctrine of economic individualism. The poem “Fraud” (Mean Time 43– 44) presents a dramatic monologue by an “I” who constructs himself through economic means that demand human indifference to the suffering his market agency ensues. To become “my own poem,” to “change from a bum / to a billionaire,” he must ﬁrst learn the rhetoric that will actualize him: “Poverty’s dumb. / Take it from me, Sonny Jim, / learn to lie in the mother-tongue of the motherfucker you want to charm.” He speaks himself and is inscribed through denial of human context; he is the self-interested, utilitymaximizing, rational “economic man”: So read my lips. Mo-ney. Pow-er. Fame. And had I been asked, in my time, in my puce and prosperous prime, if I recalled the crumbling slum of my Daddy’s home, if I was a shit, a sham, if I’d done immeasurable harm, I could have replied with a dream: the water that night was calm and with my enormous mouth, in bubbles and blood and phlegm, I gargled my name. As the self-made man following a “dream” of success, the speaker of “Fraud” represents an extreme case of competitive entrepreneurialism, a parody exposing the concealment of visceral bodies that the rhetoric of the market performs. Similarly, the language of the market overtly structures the consideration of selfhood in “Making Money” (The Other Country 17–18), while the poem works to dismantle its claims to value. Four of the ﬁve stanzas open with lists of words signifying money, then present scenarios in which the question of value becomes complicated in relation to competing systems of value, primarily, personal, cultural, and monetary systems. The poem begins as though rehearsing the language supporting this system: “Turnover. Proﬁt. Readies. Cash. Loot. Dough. Income. Stash. / Dosh. Bread. Finance. Brass. I give my tongue over / to money” (17). By the poem’s end, it is difﬁcult to discern what value human life holds when a monetary system of value dominates: The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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The boys from the bazaar hide on the target-range, watching the soldiers ﬁre. Between bursts, they rush for the spent shells, cart them away for scrap. Here is the catch. Some shells don’t explode. Ahmat runs over grass, lucky for six months, so far. So bomb-collectors die young. But the money’s good. The expendability of life in this system calls into question the vaunted freedom of the individual; moreover, this particular poem points toward the complex relationships between patterns of and attitudes toward immigration in Britain at a time when the market economy is being promulgated, as will be discussed in the ﬁnal section of this chapter. However, the regard for the body as an item of exchange links this poem — and the deauthorized (thus feminized) status of immigrants within the British imaginary of national identity — to the workings of gender advanced within the hierarchies of male privilege typifying New Right discourse. The rise and triumph of the Conservative Party and its free-market emphasis involved recodings of gender, particularly in relation to the family. Overlaying neoclassical economics and its notion of the selfinterested, rational “economic man” with Victorian values, Thatcherism advocated freedom of the market individual alongside a traditional and restrictive set of moral codes that located the individual within the heterosexual nuclear family and viewed the family as crucial to the free-market economy: the cohesion of the family supplies the male head of the household with his main incentive for economic enterprise, and a “free economy” for Thatcher meant “networks of families — self-reliant, hard-working, living within their means, independent, patriotic and respectable” (Gamble 48). As Andrew Gamble argues, “The ‘individuals’ in New Right economics turn out not to be individuals at all but households represented by the male, wage-earning, head of the family. In supply-side texts like George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty, patriarchy is defended as normal and inevitable and the basis for psychological and economic achievement. The ‘individualism’ of the New Right is not a creed of universal opportunity for all individuals whatever their sex or age or race. It is primarily a creed of opportunity for male heads of families who receive the rewards of enterprise and in return are made responsible for their 154

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dependants” (47). Parodying the masculinist individualism of New Right discourse, Duffy’s 1985 poem “You Jane” (Standing Female Nude 34) articulates a version of masculinity, employing the dramatic monologue to emphasize a rhetoric of manhood that speaks itself through private ownership and power over women. The self-declared “Man of the house. Master in my own home” boasts a hard body, a constant hard-on, and a wife who does what he wants through performing as passive body for his physical needs. The brutishness of this representation, which deliberately echoes the “natural” values of the heterosexual nuclear family envisioned by Thatcherism, renders those values as base and perverse, founded on essentialist notions of the body that privilege masculine power: At night I fart a guinness smell against the wife who snuggles up to me after I’ve given her one after the Dog and Fox. It’s all muscle. You can punch my gut and wait forever till I ﬂinch. Try it. Man of the house. Master in my own home. Solid. Look at that bicep. Dinner on the table and a clean shirt, but I respect her point of view. She’s borne me two in eight years, knows when to button it. This head of the household, rendered through distinct working-class references, translates the abstract (and seemingly classless) rhetoric of economic individualism into the bodily material forms of exchange that sustain the speaker’s sense of himself as “Master.” His system of exchange is largely homosocial (“Pints / with the lads, a laugh, then home to her”) and dependent upon demonstrating phallic power (“I wake half-conscious with a hard-on, shove it in”), enabled by a sense of possession of house and wife. This depiction of family and husband both embodies the “Man of the house” through his obsession with his body and points to the homosocial construct concealed by a naturalizing of the traditional family for market purposes. The woman’s mute body, as perceived by this speaker, occupies a subordinate place within the family hierarchy described as natural by such right-wing philosophers as Roger Scruton, whose inﬂuential work in the 1980s postulated women’s subjectivity as “pasThe Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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sive, moderate, non-assertive, incapable of re-occupying sexual discourses on their own terms” (Anna Marie Smith 209). Theorizing that the woman usefully moderated the man’s libidinal drive, Scruton claimed that “a woman’s body has a rhythm, a history and a fulﬁllment that are centred upon the bearing of children: this is what it means to be a woman” (Levitas 95).18 The masculine role of provider, constructed by New Right discourse as a primary motivation for men to enter the market, renders the family all the more signiﬁcant in sustaining the market since without it men might not be so motivated. Unlike the body-obsessed ﬁgure in “You Jane,” the speaker in Duffy’s poem “Debt” (Standing Female Nude 33) suggests the disembodied and distant ideal supposed by economic individualism, especially in regard to the provider as father. The fatherhood ideal encouraged by Thatcherism, Miriam David asserts, requires “the act of procreation and more distant economic responsibilities” rather than close relationships (139); in the poem, a man is “all night sleepless over money,” obsessed with the debts he owes while his wife sleeps next to him. Their children, upon ﬁrst mention, are referred to as the abstracted result of his procreative function: “[W]hat had emerged / from them dreamed in the next room, safe.” He imagines “men in suits” who appear through the walls to take all that he owns: “They wanted the video, wanted the furniture. / They wanted the children.” The children are now listed in a sequence of possessions. Consolation comes only through a memory of a more modest but distant time, when he would wait for his love on payday “with a bar of fruit-and-nut,” or when relationship rather than earning seemed central; now, his sense of masculine identity comes through what he owns and distributes: “pearls for her and ponies / for the kids.” Unable to maintain the “rewards of enterprise” (Belsey 47), he is a “ghost,” no longer a man or a father, unable to pass on to his children the possessions he has garnered. The poem highlights the importance in the patriarchal vision of the family of inheritance as an “experience of continuity across generations” of both privilege and property (Levitas 95). What a man is able to pass on has been entangled, in New Right discourse, with nationalistic policies and rhetoric in Britain. Until 1981 a child’s citizenship derived from her father only; the mother’s status was irrelevant in establishing a child’s statehood. In that year Enoch Powell argued for maintaining this patrilineal descent, claiming that men were 156

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naturally more connected to the nation: “Nationality, in the last resort, is tested by ﬁghting. A man’s nation is the nation in which he will ﬁght”; women provide for “the preservation and the care of life.” 19 Ironically, while denied legal rights of descent, the maternal role was thus viewed as signiﬁcant in passing down the moral and social training required of a good British citizen. In general, the “particular emphasis . . . on redeﬁning women’s place within the family, especially as mothers,” has permeated New Right ideology in ways “intimately intertwined with economic and social policies” (David 136, 137). Strategically resisting the gains of women made in the sixties and seventies, the Thatcherite appeal to a nostalgic vision of a form of motherhood existing prior to these permissive decades celebrated a self-sacriﬁcing, dependent, nurturing woman who attended to the emotional and spiritual needs of the family while also consuming goods and services in the market for their beneﬁt. The traditional nuclear family, envisioned as disrupted by both the cultural revolution of the sixties and the economic model of collectivism, became newly hailed as central to free-market activity and economic prosperity.20 The production of this image of the mother informs both the content and formal strategies of Duffy’s poem “ Whoever She Was” (Standing Female Nude 35), which, interestingly, follows the parody of masculinity in “You Jane.” The ﬁrst two lines point out the populist appeal and the media involvement in creating the idealized mother: “They see me always as a ﬂickering ﬁgure / on a shilling screen. Not real.” A ﬁgure produced and then consumed for a “shilling,” the mother is an object of exchange. Echoing the metaphor of ﬁlm, the poem’s lines break into short, scenelike sentences that string images and phrases associated with this mother: A row of paper dollies, cleaning wounds or boiling eggs for soldiers. The chant of magic words repeatedly. I do not know. Perhaps tomorrow. If we’re very good. The ﬁlm is on a loop. As with this reference to the ﬁlm repeating itself, the poem constantly insists upon the constructed quality of this ﬁgure. Yet the constructed image is received as natural by those who watch the “ﬁlm”: “ When they / think of me, I’m bending over them at night / to kiss. Perfume. The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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Rustle of silk. Sleep tight.” The poem builds toward an alienating dichotomy between the self as culturally scripted and the self as interiorly perceived (“My maiden name / sounds wrong. This was the playroom”); by the poem’s end, this dichotomy is signiﬁed through a switch between pronouns as the ﬁnal stanza introduces a “she” into the ﬁrst-person monologue: Whoever she was, forever their wide eyes watch her as she shapes a church and steeple in the air. She cannot be myself and yet I have a box of dusty presents to conﬁrm that she was here. The “Mummy” who is “never wrong,” who pretends to be strong and to care for the “little voices,” portends a form of death. The ﬁnal lines shift into an italicized address to both Mummy and reader: “You open your dead eyes to look in the mirror / which they are holding to your mouth.” The death is in seeing the self as the “ﬂickering image,” the “Mummy,” the Victorian rustle of silk and maternal self-sacriﬁce that the market demands. The disruption of this image in other poems often comes through a use of language that severs the rhetorical construction of “mother.” In “Litany” (Mean Time 9) a young girl listens to the “soundtrack” of mothers as consumers: The soundtrack then was a litany —candlewick bedspread three piece suite display cabinet— and stiff-haired wives balanced their red smiles, passing the catalogue. Pyrex. Figuring the role of the wife and mother as the consumer who sustains the household’s material needs, the poem overlays their roles as consumers and as moral, spiritual guardians. The interdependence of one role upon the other in the traditional family results, as in the poem, from an intersplicing of discourses of the maternal, but one that must be policed through strict boundaries to keep out resistant or disruptive discourse. The conversation is contained within the boundaries established by their roles as caretakers of the material and spiritual needs of the family, although clearly their own spiritual 158

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needs are unattended: “The terrible marriages crackled, cellophane / round polyester shirts.” Because “[l]anguage embarrassed them,” the women talk in code, “the code I learnt at my mother’s knee, pretending / to read, where no one had cancer, or sex, or debts,” the code that the girl breaks through when she speaks up: “A boy in the playground, I said, told me / to fuck off; and a thrilled, malicious pause / salted my tongue like an imminent storm.” The mother must reassert her position as moral authority and washes her daughter’s mouth with soap, although both are muted by their gendered positions in the family and language: “My mother’s mute shame. The taste of soap.” Within a system attributing to women the role of moral housekeeper, the circumscription of language requires a self-regulatory mechanism in keeping with cultural values. The female subject of “Mouth, with Soap” (Selling Manhattan 44) has learned the mother’s code well: She didn’t shit, she soiled or had a soil and didn’t piss, passed water. Saturday night, when the neighbours were fucking, she submitted to intercourse and, though she didn’t sweat cobs then, later she perspired. Jesus wept. Bloody Nora. Language! This distancing from the body echoes Victorian ideals of the maternal, and “Thatcher’s appeal to Victorian values is about the bourgeois family in its traditional form” (David 158). Ironically, the woman’s body, while necessary to silence, is what marks her in the division of sexual labor, both in the nineteenth century and in the discourse of the Thatcherite family, as exempliﬁed rather startlingly by the words of Patrick Jenkin, secretary of state for social services following Thatcher’s election in 1979. In a television debate that year on working mothers, Jenkin proclaimed, “Quite frankly, I don’t think that mothers have the same right to work as fathers do. If the Good Lord had intended us to have equal rights to go out to work, he wouldn’t have created man and woman. These are biological facts” (in David 158). The appeal to both nature and to God as ordaining the rigid boundaries around women’s place in the family is an appeal to an authorizing discourse that Duffy’s poem mockingly iterates: “In the beginning was The Word, and close behind, / The Censor, clackThe Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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ing a wooden tongue.” Dominant discourse lays claim to authority through constructing and concealing its mechanisms and boundaries, through naturalizing its “wooden tongue” and calling it Truth. These poems, registering a form of bodily surveillance, speak to the morality campaigns being waged in Britain in the 1980s and particularly to a form of “authoritarian populism” developing in opposition to the perceived permissiveness of the 1960s and 1970s (Campbell 183). Issues of parental control, particularly over the bodies of young girls, reached a high pitch through the campaign of Victoria Gillick, who fought against sex education and guidelines of the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) that allowed access to contraceptives without parental consent for girls under sixteen. Presenting herself as a “concerned mother,” Gillick appealed to the High Court to reinstate parents’ knowledge and control over their daughters’ sexuality. Rhetorically, Gillick’s self-portrayal, echoed in the media, as a lone mother embarked on a crusade to save the daughters of England drew upon traditional images of authority (and truth) invested in motherhood and parenthood: “Like Victorian women, mothers today know all too well that what we need in our present state of sexual delinquency is ‘wiser teaching’ — and wiser parents!” (Campbell 185).21 Her own ideological position, concealed beneath the appeal to a natural and true maternal wisdom, reﬂected the centrality of parental control to right-wing formulations of the family; indeed, her campaign against the DHSS and against sex education in schools argued that “both constituted state interference in mothers’ prerogatives to protect their daughters from the fall” (Campbell 185). Although opposed by Thatcher’s government, Gillick’s campaign nevertheless echoed its language of family and traditional values, presenting state intervention as negative and coercive while celebrating the heterosexual family unit.22 Central to this construction is the denial of female self-determining sexuality, speciﬁcally to young girls but by extension to all females, which discursively shapes her arguments, founded upon a concept of desire that is always either “dependent” or “self-destructive” (Campbell 189). Ironically, as Campbell contends, such discourse nevertheless remains “obsessed with the body of the girl”: “It is the girl, of course, who is the primary object for the crusaders obsessed with sex — like the predators from whose seductions they seek to protect her. They’re all obsessed with the body of the girl: they watch her, they guard her, they talk about 160

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her all the time. They all want to possess her. In the name of antistatism Gillick even went so far as to mobilise the authority of the state against her own daughters’ desires. Daughters, unlike sons, were to be compelled to confess their desire, to make their private lives public to their parents, and thus to be purged of their sin” (186). The “good mother’s” control of her daughter’s sexuality constantly reinscribes the female body as a site of desire, thus necessitating more control. In this system, the female body signiﬁes the danger of disruption, the threat of desire articulated through body and language. Perceptions of such threats — whether in the populist campaign of a Victoria Gillick or the philosophical arguments of a Roger Scruton — compelled a “deeply misogynist strategy, namely the erasure of the very possibility of any autonomous female sexuality” in New Right conceptions of the family, gender, and sexuality (Anna Marie Smith 209). The representation of the girl-child as without sexual desire — as innocence in need of protection — provided a rationale for increasing parental control and for educating young girls about future motherly duties, as changes in the vocational curricula advocated for British schooling in the 1980s. Similarly, the representation of the woman as naturally inclined toward motherhood demanded a desexualized notion of the feminine. Within the context of these representations, both popularly and intellectually advanced, Duffy’s attention to the female body reveals a sexuality transgressive in its depictions of childhood desire as well as lesbian desire. Parental control, in Duffy’s poems, results in the suppression of language that, in turn, operates to shape the apprehension of reality. As previous discussions of poems of this nature suggest, the rhetoric of family hides the potential for abuse within a hierarchical system that silences the disempowered. “ We Remember Your Childhood Well” (The Other Country 24), for example, presents the authority of family as a site of negation and control, working to revise the child’s memories (“impressions”) into narratives of family love: “Nobody hurt you. Nobody turned off the light and argued / with somebody else all night.” Moving through negation, the poem repeatedly disclaims unspeciﬁed accusations: “No, that didn’t occur,” “Nobody forced you . . . The whole thing is inside your head.” Speaking in the voice of the “secret police of your childhood,” the poem addresses the child (or the bearer of the child’s memories) ﬁrst to claim access to the truth but then to claim shaping power over the truth: “ What The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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you recall are impressions; we have the facts. We called the tune. / The secret police of your childhood were older and wiser than you, bigger / than you.” In Gillick’s version of the patriarchal family, any abuse — especially sexual abuse — that occurs is the result of society’s permissiveness and unrelated to a structure of power privileging masculinity. Thus, like the poem’s parodic claim, the family remains unassailable as an idealized repository of wisdom, love, and discipline: “No, no, nobody left the skidmarks of sin / on your soul and laid you wide open for Hell. You were loved. / Always. We did what was best. We remember your childhood well.” Taking issue with a kind of collective “remembering” of childhood as a time of asexual innocence appealing to populist campaigns against sex education and contraception in the name of upholding the family, both “In Mrs. Tilscher’s Class” and “Girlfriends” (The Other Country 8, 43) evoke adolescence as a time of sexual discovery and inchoate desire. The ﬁrst poem imagines a young girl at school, which is “better than home,” partially because “Mrs. Tilscher loved you.” The incipient homoeroticism, the crush of the girl upon her teacher, is backdrop to the girl’s education about sex: “Over the Easter term, the inky tadpoles changed. . . . A rough boy / told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared / at your parents, appalled, when you got back home.” In the ﬁnal stanza, the girl’s own sexual stirrings seek articulation that is institutionally denied: That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity. A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot, fractious under the heavy, sexy sky. You asked her how you were born and Mrs. Tilscher smiled, then turned away. Reports were handed out. You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown, as the sky split open into the thunderstorm. “Girlfriends” explores adolescent sexuality in explicitly homoerotic terms through its depiction of two girls sleeping naked “in a single bed” on a “hot September night”: “I reached out my arms / and you, hands on my breasts, kissed me. Evening of amber. / Our nightgowns lay on the ﬂoor where you fell to your knees / and became ferocious, pressed your head to my stomach, / your mouth to the red gold, the pink shadows.” 162

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While not dominant in Duffy’s collections, poems depicting lesbian desire and lovemaking are connected to a re-presentation of the female body that typiﬁes much of her work. These poems, often lushly sensual and lyrically sound-laced, suggest a lyric self oppositional to dominant rhetorics of self. Through their very emphasis upon qualities of voice and personal utterance, these lyrics position a self elided within public discourses against the self-authorizing mode of the lyric to create an instructive tension. Poems like “Till Our Face” and “Oppenheim’s Cup and Saucer” (Standing Female Nude 22, 48) suggest a woman-centered exchange of pleasure that counterpoints the muted and acted-upon female body supposed by male speakers in other poems. Unlike the desire of the “Master” in “You Jane” or the taxidermist in “Stuffed” (Mean Time 42) who fantasizes a naked, kneeling woman like his animal creations (“Tame. My motionless, my living doll. / Mute. And afterwards I like her not to tell” ), the representation of lesbian eroticism in Duffy’s poems envisions a reciprocal, sensually charged exchange between two active agents: “ Whispers weave webs amongst thighs. I open / like the reddest fruit”; “Your mouth laps petals till our face / is a ﬂower soaked in its own scent.” As self and other blur, the woman’s body offers a place “[f ]ar from the loud laughter of men” where “our secret life stirred,” as the speaker in “Oppenheim’s Cup and Saucer” recalls. The body is endlessly multiple in the exchange of pleasure, self- and other-love mirrored back to one another: “As she undressed me, her breasts were a mirror / / and there were mirrors in the bed. She said Place / your legs around my neck, that’s right. Yes.” The instructions to the speaker to position her body, unlike the command to kneel motionless in “Stuffed,” are directed toward pleasuring that body — more precisely, toward an act of mutual pleasure. Such exchange is impossible to imagine or to represent within a discourse erasing autonomous female sexuality while also either erasing or demonizing the lesbian, as Anna Marie Smith argues political and legislative policy attempted to do in the Thatcher years.23 Immigration and Discourses of National Identity

Demonized as well within nationalist rhetoric is the immigrant, as an iconic representation of “alien” suffuses the rhetoric of individual and national self. The language of national identity and the discursive production of British citizenry during the postwar years are held up The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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to us in Duffy’s poetry of the eighties and nineties as a strategically constructed and disseminated rhetoric that poetry’s attention to language can help to denaturalize. Accompanying the “revolution” encouraged by the New Right in the 1960s and 1970s and realized with the election of Thatcher, a rhetoric of British nationalism sought to redeﬁne the British identity and state as ethnic rather than empire; in effect, the language of populist discourse and of legal policy articulated new national boundaries to exclude previous subjects of the empire, often on the basis of their ethnic difference and in response to new immigration patterns.24 Part of a larger crisis of national identity brought on by the decolonization process following the Second World War, debates over immigration both cloaked and revealed questions of race, national identity, and social order. In postempire Britain, the developing discourse of the New Right and of its most important variant, Thatcherism, increasingly associated nation with ethnicity, shaping a nostalgia for a “true” Britain in danger of being completely “swamped by an alien culture,” effectively casting (nonwhite) immigration as an economic, cultural, and even moral obstacle to free-market prosperity.25 A review of British immigration policy and its impact upon the deﬁnition of the British subject is useful. The 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act conferred British subject status on all the inhabitants of the British Empire, although prior to 1948, the number of immigrants of color to arrive in England was slight. However, attracted by relative prosperity in Britain and enabled by the 1948 British Nationality Act and its open-door policy toward immigration from British Commonwealth countries, unprecedented numbers of West Indian and Asian newcomers entered the country as British subjects or their descendants. To supply the needs of Britain’s postwar boom, immigrant workers were often recruited in this decade to ﬁll low-end labor needs; however, amidst slogans of “Keep Britain White,” racial conﬂict had developed by 1958, when an estimated 210,000 immigrants of color were living in Britain. The violence perpetrated against blacks in Nottingham and Notting Hill by a group of “teddy boys” (who called themselves “nigger hunters”) in this year marked the growing intolerance of racial and ethnic difference within which “issues of racial discrimination, immigration control, and police conduct” would be debated for the next thirty years (Briggs 310).26 164

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By the early sixties, restrictions on immigration aimed at Commonwealth citizens began to alter the concept of British subjecthood. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act set up an entry system based on work vouchers and effectively restricted the ﬂow of immigrants from the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent. Moving toward a “process of racial categorization [that] lay at the heart of these measures” and those to follow, a second Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1968 limited the entry of Commonwealth citizens to individuals who could demonstrate a close ancestral relationship with the United Kingdom and thus a predominately white heritage (Holmes 61). Under the terms of the 1971 Immigration Act, any applicant for immigration was required to furnish evidence of “patriality,” that at least one grandparent had been born in the United Kingdom, thus relating “citizenship and immigration in a manner that had not hitherto been done” and denying automatic entry even to people outside the United Kingdom who held British passports by virtue of Commonwealth citizenship. These acts targeted nonwhite Commonwealth countries, which came to be referred to as the “new Commonwealth,” despite the fact that many of these countries had been settled by Britain as early as the sixteenth century (Goulbourne, Ethnicity 115). The state’s powers of expulsion were also strengthened in ways that made possible and permissible the division of families through deportation. These policies were not unconnected to publicly prominent rhetoric on race and nationality. The 1967 formation of the National Front, a nationalist organization urging white superiority, operated as a populist pressure group urging the need “to preserve ‘our British Native stock’ by ‘terminating non-white immigration’” (Holmes 57, quoting from Clause 8 of the NF’s program). As Holmes notes, the controls enacted in the sixties and seventies “created and projected an image of Black and Asian immigrants as a social problem” (56); moreover, the policies of the sixties “invented the black immigrant because they legally constituted the Asian, African, and Afro-Caribbean peoples from the former colonies as outsiders” in an effort to redeﬁne the limits of the British nation (Anna Marie Smith 23).27 The rhetoric of Powellism, a phenomenon spurred by the public prominence in the sixties of Enoch Powell and his speeches on immigration, combined concepts of race and nation through focusing upon the “alien” and culturally incompatible nature of ethnic and racial minorities (even those British-born), spreading restrictionist sentiment The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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and urging repatriation policies. As the antiimmigration movement took hold in the 1960s, its discourse was often overtly racist and apocalyptic, inciting fears of racial violence (such as Powell’s famous prophecy of “rivers of blood” or common references to a “black invasion”) 28 and of racial mixing, disseminated not only through populist vehicles like the National Front but also by the words of conservative politicians: Sir Cyril Osborne, for example, warned that “the English people have started to commit race suicide” (Hall et al. 240).29 At the same time that images of miscegenation evoked the demise of racial purity, the enforced or self-imposed segregation of immigrants was perceived as evidence of their inability to assimilate, a condition threatening the “plain fact that the English are a white nation,” as Powell (speaking here in 1970) continually claimed (in Anna Marie Smith 166). The immigrant family was perceived as a particular problem, an entity preserving the “alien” culture. Norman A. Pannell, a Conservative Liverpool member of Parliament in the 1960s whose opinions would inﬂuence Powell’s antiimmigration stance, surveyed the demographic changes in his industrial, urban environs and argued that the fact of difference posed dangers to health, morals, and population and social control within traditional British society. For Pannell, assimilation necessarily required intermarriage, a mixing of bloods that he deemed an “unfortunate” and unacceptable choice facing the country (and its constitution of “family”) if the ﬂow of nonwhite Commonwealth immigrants continued (in Goulbourne, Ethnicity 116). This period, numerous cultural critics argue, evidences a movement from empire to nationalism driven by the need to deﬁne and limit who is “British”; moreover, the racial and ethnic implications of immigration policy culminate in Thatcherism’s development of an ethnic understanding of the British nation.30 By the 1970s, Conservative opinion displayed a “growing interest . . . in deﬁning a coherent nationalism which often associated nation with race,” a nationalism “discursively theorized by right-wing intellectuals and think tanks while popularly expressed through the issue of immigration” (Holmes 63).31 Thatcher appealed in 1979 to the popular vote on this issue as a way of discrediting Labour, and in part, her promise to further restrict immigration aided the Conservative rise to power. Recoding the issue of race as an issue of cultural and ethnic difference, 166

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Thatcherism attempted to distance itself from past (and especially populist) formulations of racial prejudice by claiming that cultural disparity (rather than notions of cultural superiority or inferiority) were at issue.32 Thus, in the same 1979 speech that markedly advanced her campaign popularity, Thatcher could criticize the racism of the National Front while claiming that Britain was being “swamped by an alien culture” without a sense of paradox in her own choice of language (in Seidel 114). Signifying a “breakdown in toleration” (Holmes) or a “new racism” that insisted upon difference as a rationale for ethnic exclusions (Anna Marie Smith), the rhetoric and policies of “ethnic nationalism” emerged alongside intensiﬁed racial conﬂict and discriminatory practices, despite the series of Race Relations Acts passed by Labour in the seventies to deal with social problems of discrimination. Upon Labour’s defeat in 1979, issues of racial and ethnic difference became further focused upon questions of national identity and the possibilities for free-market prosperity for a “true” Britain, principally through Thatcher’s passage of a new British Nationality Act in 1981. Fully in effect by 1987, it nulliﬁed the open-door policy of the 1948 British Nationality Act, already disabled through legislation of the sixties and seventies. Restricting immigration ﬁnally meant redeﬁning British nationality to exclude the “new Commonwealth” through replacing a single citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies by three separate citizenships, only one of which maintains the right of entry and settlement. Displacing the long-standing bestowal of subjecthood to those born on British soil or in territorial waters, British citizenship now required the ancestry of a parent or grandparent born or naturalized in Britain.33 Hence, the “alien” born in Britain remains alien, as does the Commonwealth citizen (most often nonwhite) without ancestral links to the United Kingdom.34 Within these discourses, the words “home” and “alien,” “origin” and “identity” become charged as and by identiﬁable markers of belonging or exclusion, further attenuated by the position from which they are spoken. A cluster of Duffy’s dramatic monologues, spoken in the voices of immigrants, explores the relationship between positionality in discourse, meaning in language, and constitution of self. Included in volumes published toward the end of the 1980s, “Originally,” “Foreign,” and “Deportation” take on public issues of imThe Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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migration as their subject matter while enacting, linguistically, a questioning of ideologies underlying these issues. “Originally” opens The Other Country with the voice of a child who has emigrated from “our own country”— a longed-for “Home, Home”— to a city where “[y]our accent wrong” (7). Longing for that home country seems to diminish as the child identiﬁes with the new culture: “But then you forget, or don’t recall, or change, / and, seeing your brother swallow a slug, feel only / a skelf of shame. I remember my tongue / shedding its skin like a snake, my voice / in the classroom sounding just like all the rest.” Within a British identity predicated upon “native stock,” however, even the speaker’s conformity of tongue will not dissuade the cultural identiﬁcation of him/ her as alien, prompting the question, “Do I only think / I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of ﬁrst space / and the right place? Now, Where do you come from? / strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate” (OC 7). In part, this hesitation suggests the range of cultural resonances investing the phrase “our own country” in postcolonial Britain. While the claim to “my country” echoes through the mainstream discourse as a way of identifying a British identity that is “native,” the immigrant’s attachment to his/ her country of origin is perceived as a threat to successful assimilation. Advancing a popular argument against immigration in the 1960s, Enoch Powell warned that nonwhite immigrants “still look to the countries whence they came as home,” a cultural allegiance that he argued would inhibit their ability to assimilate as British.35 Thus, for the immigrant to speak of “our own country” threatens the idea of “my country” preferred by Anglo-ethnic nationalism. The concept of a “nation” or a “we” that draws upon a shared “continuity with its past” and “rootedness in its homeland” (Powell in Seidel 110) is a “very particular and characteristic focus of the British New Right’s ideological and discursive function” that enacts an “elision of nation, culture and race, and the emphasis upon ‘rootedness’” (Seidel 110).36 Discursively, the claim to “our country” circulates simultaneously as a sign of British nationalism, when spoken from the position of the native, and a sign of unassimilable ethnicity, when spoken from the position of the immigrant. Registering these dual signiﬁcations, Duffy’s poem ends by suggesting the difﬁculty of answering the question of national origin (“Where do you come from? . . . Originally?”) without entering the vocabulary of ethnic nationalism. 168

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The material stress of operating within this discourse, of perceiving oneself through the “word” offered as “alien,” surfaces in the tellingly titled “Foreign” (Selling Manhattan 47). The reader is asked to imagine inhabiting dual languages even after “living in a strange, dark city for twenty years,” segregated into “dismal dwellings on the east side.” 37 Segregation resulting from discriminatory housing practices in Britain extends to language: “On the landing, you hear / your foreign accent echo down the stairs. You think / in a language of your own and talk in theirs.” To hear oneself as foreign accompanies the apprehension of the self through words naming it as other, alien, undesirable: Imagine one night you saw a name for yourself sprayed in red against a brick wall. A hate name. Red like blood. It is snowing on the streets, under the neon lights, as if this place were coming to bits before your eyes. Recalling the rise in white violence in the late 1950s and reintensifying in the 1970s, commonly accompanied by grafﬁti by groups such as the White Defence League in the Notting Hill area, the poem marks the violence of the deployment of language denoting otherness and alienness, whether as sprayed on a wall or spoken in Parliament. To exist in otherness is to “not translate” except within the language constructed to identify that otherness, to be “inarticulate” within the dominant articulations of selfhood: “And in the delicatessen, from time to time, the coins / in your palm will not translate. Inarticulate, / because this is not home, you point at fruit.” Learning “their” language does not gain one entry into the discursive constitution of selfhood: in “Deportation,” for example, the speaker notes, “Now I must leave, / the words I’ve learned for supplication, / gratitude, will go unused . . . Now I am Alien” (Selling Manhattan 59).38 The word “alien,” in this poem, reveals the recategorization of national subjecthood and its impact on a sense of self. The poem’s “I” speaks from the position of the New Commonwealth subject, whose status is changed by the series of immigration restrictions and laws that redeﬁned the British citizen to exclude many prior subjects. The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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I used to think the world was where we lived in space, one country shining in big dark. I saw a photograph when I was small. Now I am Alien. Where I come from there are few jobs, the young are sullen and do not dream. As Anna Marie Smith emphasizes, “[T ]he status of entire black populations was abruptly changed precisely at the time of decolonization. Although they had been British passport-holders with full legal rights to settle in the United Kingdom, they became foreign immigrants who were subjected to extensive immigration controls” (130). As the colonized became immigrants and outsiders, the history of their contribution to the making of Britain was denied: the “‘known’ colonized became ‘unknown’ ‘strangers’ in the land of their own making” (Anna Marie Smith 130). Not only had the formerly colonized contributed to the wealth of the nation and hence been a part of the economic system for hundreds of years, but they often had been acculturated to think of England as the “mother country” and of themselves as belonging to her: “After all, a disproportionate large part of their schooling had been dedicated to nurturing an understanding of the glory that was England’s” and to the notion of a “common British enclosure” (Goulbourne, Black Politics 107), or, in the poem’s terms, “one country shining in big dark.” From the perspective of many immigrants who ﬁrst arrived in the 1950s and 1960s, “ We had every right to move, for although we had worked hard in our former communities, generating wealth in the Caribbean over hundreds of years, we had been left poor . . . We came to share the wealth that we ourselves had created, claiming what was legitimately ours.” 39 Nevertheless, the “wealth” was not about to be shared; the need of the poem’s speaker to learn words for “supplication, / gratitude” suggests the prevalence of low-paying service and unskilled labor positions available to immigrants who met with intense job discrimination upon entry to Britain. The poem suggests the erasure of the immigrant’s perspective, of his or her account of Britishness, as opposed to the dominant discourse aimed at containing Britishness within particular boundaries. Such language of containment sustains the “Building of Exile,” where the speaker must go to register: “They are polite, recite ofﬁcial 170

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jargon endlessly. / Form F. Room 12. Box 6.” Categorized as “Alien” within the “ofﬁcial jargon,” the speaker is denied his family and faces deportation, pointing to the doubled meaning of “family” within the rhetoric of ethnic nationalism. The speaker in “Deportation” clearly imagined that this family would join him to make a home: “My lover / bears our child and I was to work here, ﬁnd a home. In twenty years we would say This is you / when you were a baby.” 40 However, the issue of immigrant families became charged in the 1960s as more arrived in Britain; indeed, concern over immigration policy in Britain heightened measurably once the initial groups of primarily male immigrants (such as this poem’s imagined speaker) were joined, by the late ﬁfties, by wives and families, leading to Enoch Powell’s denunciation of the immigrant family in 1968 as (re)generating cultural difference, a problem in need of containment. Indeed, by the late 1960s the attention of the antiimmigration lobby focused particularly upon the entry of dependents of immigrants already settled in England, fueling allegations that false claims to family relations were common, particularly among individuals from the Indian subcontinent, and leading to the introduction of “entry clearance” for dependents, a long and complicated process making it “increasingly difﬁcult” for them to join a family member (Bhabha, Klug, and Shutter 48). The state’s expanded power over the expulsion of immigrants after 1971 and the redeﬁnition of British citizenship in 1981 attenuate this poem’s consideration of “family” in relation to its rhetorical conﬁguration in public discourse during the Thatcher years; while family and family values are being newly celebrated by the Conservative Right, the ethnically or racially marked family is a site of cultural difﬁculty in reproducing cultural difference from “Britain” and in bringing more “aliens” (now legally so even if born in Britain) into the country.41 As in “Foreign” or “Originally,” being at “home” or within the familial boundaries of the postimperial nation cannot happen within discursive and material realities labeling one as alien. The delimiting quality of terms central to a discourse of ethnic nationalism is revealed through such maneuvers in Duffy’s poetry as a rhetorical shiftiness, an instability of word arranged to seem stable in the face of the intersecting and unsettling complications of ethnicity, race, class, and gender. Interestingly, the rise of the Conservative Party and its reign in the eighties meant shifting class and party allegiances, partially through rearticulating the interests of the industrial The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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classes in terms of the “immigrant problem.” The migration of members from Labour’s traditional social base (unionists, workers) to Conservative support marked the success of Thatcher’s populist appeal and effected what Stuart Hall terms a reconstruction of the “social order.” Hall describes the ideological shift attending Thatcherism’s endorsement of free-market economics, possessive individualism, and competition as opposed to social need: “Far from one whole uniﬁed class outlook being locked in permanent struggle with the class outlook of an opposing class, we are obliged to explain an ideology that has effectively penetrated, fractured, and fragmented the territory of the dominated classes, precipitating a rupture in their traditional discourses (laborism, reformism, welfarism, Keynesianism) and actively working on the discursive space, the occupancy or mastery of which alone enables it to become a leading popular ideological force” (“The Toad in the Garden” 42). Within this discursive space, traditional class lines are rhetorically manipulated through invoking images of an England that purportedly existed before population diversity and a collectivist economy altered the country’s “essence.” The cross-class power of this ideal, stipulating Britain as white, Christian, and civilized, helped Thatcher to gain support in the 1979 election. In poems like “The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team,” a male voice yearns for the culture of his youth through remembering fragments of popular culture, of school learning and competition, of a nation no longer there: “My country. / I want it back” (Mean Time 7– 8). As the poem moves between quick phrases referencing the 1960s, the speaker’s sense of national pride arises out of a collage of British accomplishments ranging through history and the pop scene of that decade: the British invasion of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones bumps up against “the capitals, / the Kings and Queens, the dates” of history. As captain of his “Top of the Form” team, his command of knowledge and his ability to answer questions earn him prizes, popularity, and prestige; he is the “one with all the answers.” And herein lies his sense of loss — as “my country” has changed, his answers are no longer right, his historical knowledge no longer sufﬁcient, for both have been shaped by an understanding of England as the colonizing force, whether in music or empire. Reﬂecting a postcolonial crisis of identity subsuming the nation, the speaker cannot reconcile his conception of a world in which Britain’s relation to the world, and particularly to its prior colonies, no longer ﬁts the 172

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structure through which he had learned to interpret that world and his country. Although he criticizes his wife as “stale” and his kids as “thick,” his own clinging to an outdated narrative of nation betrays itself in the ﬁnal lines: “My thick kids wince. Name the Prime Minister of Rhodesia. / My country. How many ﬂorins in a pound ?” The question he recalls from his 1964 competition makes no real sense to his children, who know of Zimbabwe rather than Rhodesia; rhetorically, the language of this question reinforces the British-centered structure of the world that the man longs for, a time when Britain’s ties to its colonies or former colonies was clear and hierarchical, its relationship to its colonized subjects proper and orderly. In other words, “Rhodesia” signiﬁes a history of empire (an African country named for the British Rhodes who mined and colonized it) and a system of British subjecthood in which everyone had a proper place — emphatically, the place for colonized or Commonwealth subjects (particularly nonwhite) was not in England. In the midst of political rhetoric that referred to immigration as a kind of “ﬂood” or “swamping,” many working-class individuals felt their job security and way of life threatened by the inﬂux of nonwhite immigrants. As urban neighborhoods changed rapidly in combination with growing economic hardship for the working and poor classes, the immigrant became a target of blame.42 In public rhetoric during the 1960s, associations developed between what Powell called “excessive” numbers of immigrants of color and “undesirable social problems” (in Anna Marie Smith 139); in reality, while these immigrant communities “had to bear the brunt of socio-economic hardships themselves,” they were “deﬁned in racist discourse as the most potent signiﬁer of the post-colonial national decline” (Anna Marie Smith 146– 47). A classic example of this process, and one that Duffy’s poem “Mrs. Skinner, North Street” (The Other Country 12) directly engages, resides in a populist strategy employed by Enoch Powell in speeches of the late 1960s. Reading from representative letters, Powell claimed to voice the true experience of his white constituents, who feared what he called the social disorder of immigrant “strangers.” 43 In Duffy’s poem, the voice of an older woman, poor and bitter, speaks in halting, broken lines about her life in an urban neighborhood altered by social neglect and ethnic diversity. Isolated, she feels she lives among a “terrace of strangers” (emphasis added): The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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Scrounger. Workshy. Cat, where is the world she married, was carried into up a scrubbed step? The young louts roam the neighbourhood. Breaking of glass. Chants. Sour abuse of aerosols. That social worker called her xenophobic. When he left she looked the word up. Fear, morbid dislike, of strangers. Outside, the rain pours down relentlessly. Recalling one of Powell’s most notorious representations of populist sentiment, the poem echoes a letter quoted in his famous “rivers of blood” speech, which told a supposedly true story of an elderly white woman whose neighborhood transforms until she is the last white person on the street, which has declined into “noise and confusion” populated by sinister outsiders. The woman retreats into her home, afraid to go outside among the “wide-grinning piccaninnies” (Anna Marie Smith 154 –55). As Smith analyzes this speech, the woman’s “retreat dramatically symbolizes white Britons as a besieged minority, “threatened by the “black [immigrant of color] invader,” a truth naturalized by the use of the letter form in a political speech (155–56). The woman in the poem, like the woman in Powell’s letter, fears “young louts” as disorderly invaders; however, unlike the feminized victim Powell represented as the epitome of Britain’s vulnerability, Mrs. Skinner is depicted less as a victim than as an unaware participant in discursive constructions of the immigrant that work to conceal the economic forces materially affecting her life. Powell, and others prior to Thatcher’s success, linked antiimmigration issues to free-market advocacy through the image of a restored Britain; in effect, they paved the ideological way for the massive changes in economic policy enacted under Thatcherism. Rather than restoration, by the mid-1980s a recession brought on by government cutbacks, declines in heavy industry, and economic reform had resulted in inﬂation and high unemployment, especially among the minority populations in low-skilled and low-wage jobs to which they had been restricted. Youth response turned particularly volatile in the summer of 1981, when young black and white people “rose up in anger across the country at their treatment by police, politicians, and society” (Bryan 52). As market forces distanced the poor from the rich and the state eliminated forms of social welfare, living conditions deteriorated for the poor, both black and white, and their environs. In 174

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an extreme image of urban isolation perpetuated by these economic forces, Mrs. Skinner imagines that no one will look in upon her until “the day the smell is noticed / . . . the day you’re starving, Cat, and begin / to lick at the corpse.” However, for Mrs. Skinner, whose retreat echoes that of Powell’s pensioner, the change in her neighborhood and “the world / she married” cannot be seen except through the metonymic signiﬁcance of “the Asian man next door.” The representation of her xenophobia, particularly in its engagement with Powell’s discursive framing of immigrant invaders and their victims, exposes the ethnic nationalism shaping her perspective. Just as “xenophobia” is a word she does not know, the concept of “foreign” is shaped from within the discourse she encounters most prominently, encouraging the perception that the “foreign” is not British and not of her world. Indeed, the “Asian” may well be a British citizen, but he or she cannot be incorporated into the frame or discourse of British identity within which Mrs. Skinner has been shaped. Such was the situation facing many East African Asians, in particular, following the decolonization of African colonies. Descendants of Asians brought by the British to help build the African colonies, these individuals were offered the choice of British citizenship when the colonies in which they resided declared independence. During the 1960s, approximately seven thousand Asians a year immigrated to England from East African colonies declaring their independence, beginning with Kenya in 1963. Represented as a “national emergency” resulting from a “ﬂood” of “foreigners,” the entry of East African Asians (although legal citizens whose numbers were slight in comparison to net emigration from Britain) helped stimulate immigration restrictions requiring work vouchers or proof of British ancestry for entry while providing a context for Powell’s emergence as an antiimmigration spokesperson. This immigrant group represented both the colonial transactions of the imperial past and an antipathy toward its consequences; regarded as essentially non-British, they nonetheless faced the prospect of being denied citizenship in African countries and therefore existing without a state if Britain did not grant citizenship to colonialized subjects it had displaced to enrich the empire.44 Such complexities of the postcolonial state suffer elision within a nationalistic discourse appealing to both nature and common sense as arbitrators of a native British essence. While a rhetoric of identity The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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and nation is most effective when presented as seamless, Duffy’s poems formally enact identity as a collision of words and discourses. Duffy’s dramatic monologues, so often composed of cataloged fragments and sound bites that are harshly enjambed and juxtaposed, belie the “natural” or unitary self outside of language. Often, as in “Translating the English” (The Other Country 11), a claim to selfhood is revealed as an effort to elide (or refuse to articulate) what cannot be contained within the terms of self-naming. That which cannot be contained keeps breaking in on the ofﬁcial narrative of the British, in effect “translating” the narrative of national selfhood: Lloyd-Webber. Jeffrey Archer. Plenty culture you will be agreeing. Also history and buildings. The Houses of Lords. Docklands. Many thrills and high interest rates for own good. Muggers. Much lead in petrol. Filth. Rule Britannia and child abuse. Electronic tagging. Boss, ten pints and plenty rape. Queen Mum. Channel Tunnel. You get here fast no problem to my country my country my country welcome welcome welcome This process of “translation” suggests, through the juxtaposed fragments, that a discourse or narrative interweaves with and depends upon the discourse it purports to oppose or erase. For example, the ideology of domination underlies both “Rule Britannia” and “child abuse,” although the former cannot recognize the latter and remain an idealized narrative of nation and history. Moreover, paratactic positioning calls attention to the codedness of naturalized phrases (like “Rule Britannia”) and the claim to common sense assumed through such coding. The economic medicine of “high interest rates” cannot be separated from the rise in crime, the poem suggests, nor, signiﬁcantly, can the dominant representations of either “muggers” or market forces be disentangled. Attributing high interest rates, unemployment, and other economic downturns to a need to discipline the economy and particularly the working class (and unions) (Hall et al. 264), Thatcherism cast its economic policies of enterprise as supplying the corrective to a sick national economy, recoding economic deprivation as medicine for a wayward patient. Duffy’s insertion of this rhetoric into the poem calls up the series of socioeconomic changes brought on by Thatcher’s government as well as the rhetoric 176

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of Thatcherism that justiﬁed them. As David Edgar argues, “the crucial role of the free market” within Thatcherism “is not to emancipate the entrepreneur but to chastise the feckless, an instrument not of liberation but of discipline” (75). Similarly manifesting a concern with disciplining an unruly element, the word “Muggers” hangs in overly determined fashion at the end of the line, just as it hangs within the public consciousness as a nexus of race, immigration, crime, and nationalism. What Paul Gilroy ﬁrst argued was a “policing of blackness,” the linking of blackness (and hence immigration) with criminality developed as a “policing discourse” in the 1970s that accompanied repressive law-and-order practices targeting the nonwhite communities (Anna Marie Smith 123, 98). “Mugging,” used to refer to types of crime associated with America but not experienced in Britain on any scale until the 1970s, began to appear within the popular media, who “conjured up images of black ‘crime waves’” that resonated through the term “mugger” (Anna Marie Smith 98). Although the 1970s and 1980s brought an increase in racial attacks and breakdowns in police and community relations, blackness is aggressively “policed” through discourse situating blackness as “outside” the boundaries of nation, thus omitting the abuse suffered by minorities while furthering the construction of the foreign invader, the dangerous excess of British colonization, the mugger.45 In Duffy’s denaturalization of these various narratives, the disciplining of the economy and the immigrant each depend upon a rhetoric of nationalism supporting the directives of Thatcherism. Like “Translating the English,” “Comprehensive” (Standing Female Nude 8 –9) offers an interweaving of discourses within a nationalistic capitalism. As Kennedy notes in his discussion of this poem, the “relations between language, consumption, the condition of England and English culture and society as particular kinds of texts” are of central concern (New Relations 229).46 The poem breaks into distinct stanzas spoken from ethnically marked positions that, to varying degrees, reveal the tension between assimilation and cultural plurality underlying debates over Britain’s changing demographics. There is the African immigrant who claims, “I like Africa better than England,” to be told by her/his mother that home ownership will bring a sense of belonging; the fourteen-year-old Wayne who supports the National Front, enjoys “Paki-bashing,” and asserts, “I don’t suppose I’ll get a job. It’s all them coming over here to work. Arsenal”; the The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics

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young Moslem who almost eats pork until another stops him, and they become friends; the boy whose “sister went out with one. There was murder. / I’d like to be mates, but they’re different from us”; and the teenager from Jhelum whose family members bear the name of Moghul emperors but who can’t get milk in school because “I didn’t understand” the teacher’s words, pointing toward debates over multicultural education in Britain. This ﬁnal stanza, situated in the British classroom, connects multiple issues organized around language and identity that emerged in discussions over education in the 1980s. While the children of early immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s met with an educational system unprepared for and often hostile to their presence, by the late 1970s debates over multiethnic education developed largely in response to the efforts of immigrant and minority groups demanding more equitable education for their children. The notion of a natural and right British education, what Seidel calls “an organic view of education within a larger, untroubled, white vision of culture and tradition” (116–17), was harnessed to argue against the use of “mother-tongue teaching” (or instruction in the native languages of the students) and other multicultural initiatives. In effect, these debates promoted the ideology of the unassimilable immigrant through claiming that an expression or support of (nonwhite) ethnic identity was essentially non-British. In public forums, conservative educators like Ray Honeyford criticized multicultural projects in the name of preserving an authentic and natural British education.47 A rhetoric of authenticity disguising an institutional racism within a concept of Britishness would instruct its white children that the nonwhite is “different” and to be avoided and that “all them” must be defended against. It teaches its nonwhite children to remember a homeland and a sense of home in stark contrast to the conditions in Britain and to the promises that “everything was easy here.” Complex things happen in this poem (almost every stanza deserves close attention), but I will conclude by pointing to the tension between diversity and separation that the polyvocal poem sets up, a tension reﬂecting a duality of ethnic consciousness and communalism. Harry Goulbourne, analyzing the development of ethnic nationalism around the issue of immigration in Britain, recently voiced concern that the varied peoples of Britain enjoy “only a market relationship” resulting from the pressure of concurrent emphasis upon cultural pluralism and cultural conservatism (231). Similarly inter178

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ested in the dynamics of a “communal model” in which elements remain separate except in a market relation (Goulbourne 231), the poem gathers multiple voices that remain distinctly identiﬁable within ethnic parameters (and class and gender to an extent). At the same time, the interplay of the voices — how one offers an alternative discourse to the other, how one seems tied to another, how one seems dependent upon but blind to another — suggests the “comprehensive” plurality of space that is shared but not acknowledged. For Duffy, the discursive space of a British identity constructed partially in reaction to growing diversity and nurtured by Thatcherism’s linking of race, family, free market, and nationalism in both policy and public utterance slices up the “comprehensiveness” of a plural nation and inserts spaces of silence between the voices of the British society around her.

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chapter five Theory and the Lyric “I” Feminist Experimentalism in Britain The work is e.g. to write “she . . .” It’s not that our identity is to be dissipated into airy indeterminacy, extinction; instead it is to be referred to the more substantial realms of discursive historical formation. The concept of the I’s linguistic alienation can only get so much done, and an unhappy mess soon overwhelms its efforts at housework. Despite Wittgenstein’s notion of philosophy as a broom and its task as sweeping-up, I’d prefer to stand by this stubborn heaped untidiness of unease attached to writing in the ﬁrst person.1

Wearing the hat (or carrying the broom) of poet and theorist, Denise Riley, who is quoted above from three different texts and genres, exempliﬁes the intertextual, interdiscursive dynamics of a feminist strain of experimental writing currently in Britain. The subject of this chapter, this line of feminism encounters modern theory within formally challenging poetry that interrogates the textual and discursive construction of “she” and of the “I” who is also a “she.” As with their American fellow feminists, British women writers interested in language as a material, mediating force, unsettle modes of expressivity and authenticity assumed by a direct access to woman’s experience through language; rather, language and its representational norms and structures become sites of investigation, putting the authentic self under question, so that “she” can only reside within quotation marks, as mediated and determined by the linguistic and cultural codes available. As a recent review of Riley’s Selected Poems notes, the poem quoted above “uses the language of a collective re-articulation of identity while questioning that re-articulation’s espousal of essentialism” (Kennedy, “Undoing the Work” 59). What is of interest to me here, however, are the oscillations between the “re-articulation of iden-

tity” and the various forms of interrogation, repositioning, and reenvisioning marking a feminist poetics emerging within the context of an alternative poetics in Britain characterized by its theoretical inﬂections and a strong aversion to the lyric subject. What is the “stubborn heaped untidiness” of maintaining an alliance with the lyric “I,” and how does a skepticism about the “I ’s linguistic alienation” emerge from within the nexus of feminist poetics, theoretical orientations, poetic communities, and public discourses in contemporary Britain? These questions lead to the works of three poets who have been active participants in what is called the “alternative” British poetry scene, which self-consciously sets itself apart from mainstream venues through small-press publishing, formal experimentation, and often theoretical alignments with socialist-Marxism and/or varieties of poststructural thought. Within this milieu, Wendy Mulford and Denise Riley have published work since the 1970s, bringing distinctively feminist strategies to the alternative scene that need to be more fully recognized. Geraldine Monk, a second-generation poet and performance artist included under the “new British poetry” (i.e., countermainstream) umbrella, joins with Riley and Mulford in feminist efforts to investigate the positioning of the “I” within linguistic and discursive structures. The focus on these three poets takes to task the framing mechanisms organizing discussions of contemporary feminist poetics and contemporary experimental poetics in Britain. As in America, although to a more severe degree, the work of women in general and feminists in particular has suffered marginal status and treatment; moreover, the dominance of male-centered formulations of “experimental” have left a range of feminist-oriented poetries — and the possible links between them — unaccounted for within these rubrics. By concluding this book, this chapter serves as a bookend to earlier discussions of American poets such as Fraser and Guest. Dwelling with issues of genre in direct relation to formal innovation, this discussion of current writing in Britain brings forward many of the issues facing the earlier works of these American poets in a pretheory and protofeminist moment. Tracing the development, from the seventies forward, of explicitly feminist and theoretically interested poetics, these readings of Monk, Mulford, and Riley purposely intervene into the literary histories of avant-garde practice and feminist production in Britain, bringing to the forefront a much-ignored culTheory and the Lyric “I”

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tural labor on the part of innovative feminists. Moreover, through explicit focus on the gender-marked lyric genre and the lyric subject as discursive formations, a poetic continuum to a “mainstream” poet like Carol Ann Duffy displaces a strict opposition, bringing into contact varying modes of feminist work exploring the speaking subject in relation to social, public discursive structures. Denise Riley, in her landmark book theorizing the categories of “woman” and “women” as discursive formations, offers a useful frame for bridging the three poets discussed in this chapter but also for imagining a diversely rich continuum for the discursive work of feminist poetics: So a full answer to the question, “At this instant am I a woman as distinct from a human being,” could bring into play three interrelated reﬂections. First, the female speaker’s rejections of, adoptions of, or hesitations as to the rightness of the self description at that moment; second, the state of current understandings of “women,” embedded in a vast web of description covering public policies, rhetorics, feminisms, forms of sexualisation or contempt; third, behind these, larger and slower subsidings of gendered categories, which in part will include the sedimented forms of previous characterisations, which once would have undergone their own rapid ﬂuctuations. (Am I That Name? 6) Attentive to the question Riley poses, this discussion of Monk, Mulford, and Riley traces various intellectual, social, and aesthetic interactions enriching a feminist-identiﬁed poetics that begins, for the latter two of these poets, in the 1970s. Emerging as a particularly feminist encounter with theory and poetic production that stands in tension with an emphatically male-dominated poetry scene in Britain in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the feminist poetics explored in this chapter has been occluded by recent discussions of experimental/postmodern/Language poetries in general and contemporary British poetry in particular.2 Given these critical omissions, this chapter is intended to help expand the limited reception of contemporary British poetry in America by looking at intersections of two areas that remain virtually ignored within American mainstream academic writing: a strain of innovative and alternative poetries developing among small presses and little journals in Britain in the past twenty-ﬁve years and the participation of women in experimental poetics informed by feminist politics.3 The British context for such women, both politi182

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cally and artistically, reveals important appropriations of and reactions to modern theory in their work with language and subjectivity, in their reactions to the masculine domain of British poetic tradition, and in their negotiations with both the socialist-materialist bent of the British intellectual Left and the capitalist conservatism of the Thatcherite Right and its legacy. The status of the gendered self and its lyric expressions within these contexts and discourses occupies the attention of the poets chosen here: Geraldine Monk, whose explorations of the positionality of the signifying mark comment upon linguistic and cultural positionings of “woman”; Wendy Mulford, who as poet, editor, small press publisher, and commentator on women’s experimental work in Britain and the United States, reveals an absorption of feminist poststructuralism in relationship to a Marxist-feminist stance, particularly in considerations of a gendered self; and Denise Riley, who as poet, theorist, and editor investigates constructions of sex and gender through attending to language as a material aspect of the world and its power structures. British Alternative Poetry and Feminist Poetics

The discussion of these poets needs to be situated initially within a number of overlapping critical conversations around issues of feminism and experimentalism, on the one hand, and the status of the lyric subject in avant-garde poetic theory, on the other hand. By the eighties, the new and energetic ﬁeld of feminist criticism, enabling discussions of histories and issues previously neglected, needed nonetheless to be encouraged in the direction of experimental poetry. As chapter 1 elaborates, Kathleen Fraser’s journal HOW(ever) called attention at this time to the lack of cross-fertilization between feminist criticism and experimental writing by women. One goal of the journal was to gather together poetry and critical discussions testing possible interactions between feminist politics, poststructural theory, and women’s innovative poetry in a way that was not happening at the time. As recently as the mid-1990s, such discussions had still not reached a wide audience or a mainstream academic venue, in part because of a constructed set of oppositions between “expressive” and “experimental” feminist poetries and poets.4 While the division of contemporary women’s poetry into an expressive strain (claiming an authentic voice through transparent language and access to “true” experience) and an experimental strain (questioning the status of lanTheory and the Lyric “I”

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guage to report either selfhood or experience) may ultimately be a reductive and even inaccurate move, it has forcefully informed the mappings of the ﬁeld by both critics and poets to the point of subduing, until the last few years, discussion of poetries that register a “rejection of dominant expressive modes” (Wills, “Contemporary Women’s Poetry” 35).5 Productively, the polarization of the terms experimental and expressive have come under question, particularly in broadening conceptions of the lyric “I.” British critics Alison Mark and Deryn ReesJones introduce their recent collection of essays on and by British and American women poets by noting how many of the critics and poets contributing to the volume “seek to interrogate” the division “between the expressive and the discursive constructions of the poetic subject, articulating the ﬁctionality of the poetic ‘I,’ even at its most biographical, while closely examining contextual material which attests to the historical, social, and political speciﬁcity of the ‘I’” (xxiii). In her essay on Fanny Howe included in this volume, Clair Wills, for example, claims that recent “critical discussions of contemporary poetry have suggested the implausibility of any straightforward distinction between the traditional lyric — dominated by the notion of the authentic personal voice — and avant-garde work which strives to disrupt or even eliminate the role of the ‘I’” (“Marking Time” 119). Under the rubric of examining the “historical, social, and political speciﬁcity of the ‘I,’” Mark and Rees-Jones bring together poets previously positioned oppositionally along the expressive/experimental range, creating a rich sense of connections among poets like Duffy, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Denise Riley, and Adrienne Rich that supports, in practice and theory, the thrust of Wills’s comments. Working to unsettle divisions within feminist discussions of poetics, critical projects such as these obviously face a broader and more traditionally sanctioned series of erasures and elisions characterizing critical treatments of contemporary poetry and marking an emerging body of scholarship on experimental poetry in Britain, that (as the old story goes) seems to be more often by men about men. Particularly in British discussions of radical uses of form and language, most attention has clustered around men, and while American criticism has more overtly embraced the work of women poets, the primary narratives of experimentalism often remain male-centered, including women poets at the exclusion of a feminist reading.6 Arguably, while 184

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more attention has begun to be paid to women poets in recent years, it is due in large part to the pioneering efforts of women poets themselves to foreground discussion of their experiments and to consider both the gendered and feminist dimensions of language innovation. At least this seems the case in America. In Britain, the contributions of women poets in general receive minimal recognition. Attempting a corrective with their collection of essays by and on contemporary women poets, Mark and Rees-Jones could claim in the year 2000 that “within the ﬁeld of contemporary poetry, women’s work tends to be far less proliﬁcally interpreted, mediated, and analyzed than that of men. It is worth the evident risks of reinscribing gender divisions or perpetuating the category of ‘woman poet,’ in order to provide a critical perspective on the work of a range of women whose work is in the main critically neglected” (xxii). Within this general realm of gendered neglect, experimental poetics remain especially difﬁcult to discover, especially from this side of the Atlantic, prompting one (American) reviewer, who is also a poet and feminist scholar, to draw a comparison between the status of women’s language-oriented work in America and Britain: “It may be that in the UK, as in the USA, non-mainstream, non-hegemonic poetries have it tough enough without raising the (divisive? or what?) question of gender; this was once, if I am not mistaken, the argument of certain of the women afﬁliated most decisively with language poetries” (DuPlessis, “Knowing” n.p.). Further complicating the position of “woman” enfolded within “experimental,” DuPlessis’s contention that experimental or “small press poets” can be thought of “in a place analogous to women cultural producers: feminized, disparaged, unread, marginalized, erased” echoes Kathleen Fraser’s earlier concerns by raising the “stubborn question” that remains: “[W]hat about small press women?” 7 One answer is supplied by the editors of New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible, an important essay collection exploring alternative poetries developed since 1960 in England. Peter Barry and Robert Hampson note, in their introduction, the overwhelming focus of the essays upon men, claiming that “one striking feature of small press poetry in England [the site of much alternative work since the sixties] . . . is the relatively minor role of women: very few of the poets were female.” 8 The editors echo a perplexing tendency identiﬁed a few years earlier by one of those “few poets,” as Wendy Mulford, in Theory and the Lyric “I”

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an essay on American women experimental poets, raised the issue of “small press women”: “why the work produced by women writing in the British Isles should be less formally adventurous is the subject of a book waiting to be written. There is a lot of very good poetry in traditional modes . . . which is still largely tied to a familiar poetics, in which language is not seen to be problematic. By and large, poets in Britain do not choose to submit to the ‘play of language,’ to resisting the authority of the individual poetic voice” (“Curved” 261– 62).9 The “book” Mulford envisions, in taking into account the complex reasons for the “minor role” women have played in the small press, alternative scene in Britain, would certainly involve issues of support (or lack thereof ) by editors, publishers, and fellow poets that are intertwined with the history of experimental poetry in England and with traditions of poetic authority that undoubtedly have been gendered male even in the radical lines of (British and American) poetry to descend from Pound’s twentieth-century impulse to “make it new.” When confronted with a generalized milieu of “I aversion,” as male British poet chris cheek characterizes the alternative scene in Britain, women poets interested in questions of language and radical form have been faced with the task of rethinking the lyric self while retaining the potential for subject constitution that the speaking “I” opens. As Wills remarks, it is “not surprising” that women poets “have played a prominent role” in questioning a “notional opposition between the lyrical and the anti-subjectivist or experimental” marking claims to postmodern, avant-garde, or Language poetics to the point of constituting a powerful discursive institution (“Marking Time” 119). The following section considers the gendered assumptions of this discursive institution, considering its implications for agents situated outside of the models of subject formation that arguably are “too often preemptively dismantled or deconstructed” in avant-garde poetic theory (Huk, “In AnOther’s Pocket” 26). Because critical commentary and academic instruction about and even physical access to contemporary British poetry is scarce in America (with the exception of poets like Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney), the ﬁeld remains generally underdiscussed in this country, prompting one of the most vocal American readers of British twentieth-century poetry to bemoan that “British poetry is dead” in the United States (Tuma, Fishing 1). Moreover, the sheer diversity of activity characterizing British poetry since the sixties is little under186

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stood in this country, particularly the diversity that occurs in spite of a recent conservatism of the British poetry establishment — supported by networks of publishing, distribution, critical attention, and government support — and resides in a range of small press and little magazine venues. Reﬂecting these venues, the late-eighties appearance of The New British Poetry (edited by Gillian Allnut et al.) was among the ﬁrst anthologies to provide a good sense of this diversity, collecting and arranging poems within numerous “alternative” groupings such as feminist poetry, black poetry, and experimental poetry (Monk, Mulford, and Riley are included in this anthology). More recently, Iain Sinclair’s Conductors of Chaos provides an anthologized mapping of alternative poetries, and editors Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain strive to reach an American audience by publishing through an American university press with Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970. Both anthologies claim positions antithetical to British “mainstream” norms and stress British and American links.10 Alternative poetries, in this broad-ranging sense, are positioned against the reigning orthodoxies in poetic taste to have followed World War II in England, characterized by the antimodernist impact that the Movement of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, and Donald Davie has had upon subsequent generations of British poets and readers. Most recently, this impact has been newly argued by David Kennedy’s critical study, New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry, 1980 –1994 and his coediting of a companion anthology of “New Generation” poets with Bloodaxe Publishing Company, both of which have served to construct a “constellation” of contemporary poets descending from the Movement through three generations in a lineage of “continuity” that, Kennedy argues, “represents a ‘reoriented consciousness about poetry’” (Tuma, Fishing 193).11 Tracing a “ﬁrst generation” (Larkin), a middle generation (Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Anne Stevenson), and a “new generation” (including Selima Hill, Jo Shapcott, John Ash, Carol Ann Duffy, Glyn Maxwell, and Simon Armitage, among others), Kennedy’s narrative seeks to deﬁne a mainstream cohering around “a number of deﬁning ideas” about British culture, poetry, and nation while highlighting what he sees as an internal diversity among the poets (New Relations 14). However, as Keith Tuma points out, Kennedy’s neglect of any poetics falling outside the foundationalism he claims for the antimodernist Movement necessarily omits a ﬁeld of Theory and the Lyric “I”

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small press, alternative poetry developing since the sixties in Britain.12 Primarily among those elided are the poets of the British Poetry Revival of the sixties and early seventies, represented within The New British Poetry, who reacted against the Movement’s aesthetic strictures and nationalistic insularity. Commenting upon the dominance of the Movement and its dampening impact upon the reception of alternative aesthetics, Andrew Crozier, poet and coeditor of a collection of British poets associated with the British Revival, A Various Art, emphatically identiﬁes the legacy of the 1950s as manipulating an altering of taste through the “means of a common rhetoric that foreclosed the possibilities of poetic language with its own devices.” Poetry was not to be technically difﬁcult but accessible in style and content, and “language was always to be grounded in the presence of a legitimating voice — and that voice took on an impersonally collective tone” (Crozier 12). Anthologies of the time, according to Crozier’s account, stressed a relationship between “good” poetry and nationalism, promoting a familiar and provincial subject matter: “[T ]he frame of reference of national culture and the notion of quality have been brought into uncomplicated mutual alignment” as a result (11). Promoted by large publishing houses and by weekly periodicals such as the Spectator, the Listener, and the New Statesman, the widely distributed poetry of the Movement created the perception of an insular, antimodern, and empirical British orthodoxy that resonated into subsequent decades. In 1983 Peter Middleton began a review essay on the “alternative” poetry of Wendy Mulford by observing that conservative attitudes toward language and poetic form have persisted in the mainstream of British poetry: “It has seemed a dilemma for our laureate poets [later referenced as Hughes and Larkin] that language was such an imperfect window, refractive with wartime rhetorical excess and political demands, smudged with mythic allusion that diverted attention from the real just beyond the glass” (“Breaking the Perspex” 3). The role of commercial publishing houses in promoting such poetry and the “compensatory function carried out by the small presses during the last twenty years” are reviewed tellingly by Nigel Wheale, who offers the “contentious” argument that “the poetries written and disseminated through the small presses are different in kind from commercially circulated writing and so are unrecognizable to the gatekeepers of established critical/commercial publication” 188

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(“Uttering Poetry” 16). Eric Mottram, in an essay in Barry and Hampson’s volume, traces publication practices in Britain since World War II, paying particular attention to the politics of severe reductions in state funding for magazines, presses, and activities supporting alternative poetries in the seventies (especially through the Arts Council of Great Britain).13 Remarking upon Mottram’s essay and the “devastating” consequences of these cuts, Keith Tuma’s review of this volume concurs with the editors’ position that the critical establishment has operated in concert with publishers, educators, and editors in “aggressively” defending an “empiricism . . . as the essence of British tradition” that, in comparison to American poetry and criticism, “has been harder to dislodge in England, less vulnerable to varieties of literary theory, and either uninterested in or willfully opposed to often difﬁcult poetries that might more or less challenge it” (“ Who” 723, 722).14 Staking a strong claim to the “British tradition,” the defenses of empirical and provincial poetries so powerfully advanced by the Movement’s example covered over the diversity of British poetry evidenced in the work of an older generation of poets like Basil Bunting, David Jones, Geoffrey Hill, and Hugh MacDiarmid, all writing in the ﬁfties and sixties. Involving, according to Crozier, the “virtual suppression of parts” of the “history of modern poetry,” the “redeﬁnition of taste in the 1950s” invoked a cultural nationalism that denied signiﬁcance not only to modernism’s difﬁculties but also to its international scope (12). The continuation of a modernist strain in Britain has, to a large degree, drawn upon or interacted with the work of American poets. Tracing the British Poetry Revival of the sixties and seventies, Eric Mottram claims that the “stimulus of American poetry is a constant factor in the new poetry” (“The British Poetry Revival” 39). Crozier locates the energizing effect of American poetry upon British poetry during the 1960s within the “wider context of English interest in the 1960s in American music, painting, and writing” and groups the poets collected in the anthology he is introducing as commonly holding “an interest in a particular aspect of post-war American poetry, and the tradition that lay behind it — not that of Pound and Eliot but of Pound and Williams” (12). As Robert Hampson notes, the more recent introduction of American Language poetry in England in the late 1970s and early 1980s (particularly, Hampson claims, through the work of Ken Edwards and Adrian Clarke and the publication of American experimentalists in Theory and the Lyric “I”

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small British journals) culminates a pattern of British interaction with the American “radical modernism” of Williams, Pound, Zukofsky, Olson, Oppen, and so on that had fostered the poetry of earlier generations of “alternative” British poets (144, 154 –55).15 The additional recognition that women have participated in such an interchange, despite the impression created from the litany of male writers most often cited as signiﬁcant, suggests the need to more clearly foreground the issue of gender in mapping out relationships (of support, publishing, poetics, etc.) between American and British avant-gardes. For women like Wendy Mulford the American scene has proved important, as demonstrated by her interest in and communication with the editors of HOW(ever) in the mideighties, or her writing on American women poets, or her editorial interest in them (her press published Alice Notley, for example, and the Virago Book of Love Poetry by Women, which she edited, includes much American work). Denise Riley, in a recent interview, talks about the importance to her of American writers, including Anne Waldman and Alice Notley. American poets like Kathleen Fraser have maintained relationships with British poets through correspondence and collaborative readings; Rachel Blau DuPlessis has written on Riley; Fanny Howe has sponsored publication of both Riley and Mulford in the American journal Five Fingers Review (Howe 34 – 44). One culmination of these interactions, the anthology Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK, published by Wendy Mulford and Ken Edwards at Reality Street Editions, represents for the ﬁrst time in one place the diversity of American and British women pursuing what editor Maggie O’Sullivan calls “explorative, formally progressive language practices” (9).16 Despite the activity of women that these examples point toward, when critics like Hampson and Mottram valuably identify a tradition of interaction between American and British (male) poets working with a “dislocated linguistic surface” (144), little attention is paid to the cross-Atlantic transmission of ideas about poetry, language, and gender characterizing the work of contemporary women. Positioning the “I”: Lyrical Practice and Geraldine Monk

Another way of thinking about the lyric and women, of course, comes down to us through the margins of literary history. For women 190

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aspiring to be poets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the lyric offered a culturally sanctioned space for expressions of emotion, inspiration, and interiority. However, the lyric as practiced by women has suffered diminutive status alongside the more “universalizing” and philosophical high lyric modeled by the male Romantics. While the lyric has traditionally been offered as an appropriate poetic form for women, the circumscription of subject matter, language, and form for the woman lyricist has produced a body of poetry routinely collapsed under such derogatory labels as sentimental, trivial, narrow, domestic — the domain of the “poetess.” 17 The critically debased history of women’s lyrical practice continues to inform attitudes toward self-expression in women’s poetry, so that to be too lyrical for a woman means too feminine, too emotional, too solipsistic rather than too humanistically uniﬁed and coherent. Contemporary women’s experiments with the lyric are weighted with this history of negative and gendered associations, as exempliﬁed by the reaction of John Wilkinson to Denise Riley’s Mop Mop Georgette, reviewed in the British journal Parataxis. Recognized by feminist critics like Wills and DuPlessis and Huk as a textual engagement with the lyric, this collection stands accused by Wilkinson of an essential narcissism, a “reﬂexivity which is paraded” through a “working with the narcissistic grain which cannot divert or obstruct its pathological logic” (“Illyrian Places” 68). Nowhere does Wilkinson attribute such narcissism to gender, but the associations developed between self-reﬂexivity, narcissism, and pathology converge within the (unspoken) construction of Woman generalized in Western metaphysical and philosophical thought and particularized, in psychological discourses, as deviant, undeveloped, narrow, selfinvolved. This deviance translates into “arch” feminism in James Keery’s comments on Riley in a review of “British postmodernist poetry,” to which Wilkinson’s review is responding (11). For Keery, Riley’s poetry is “hampered by a self-consciousness” tied clearly and negatively to feminism, leading to a “fatal reﬂexiveness: ‘These sentences come fast, give me no grief. . . .’ The quote feminism unquote ranges in tone from the arch — ‘I found some change in my trouser pocket, like / a man’ — to the mordantly cynical — ‘and when her belly swells into an improbable curve / the she-husband will think Yes, it was me who caused that’ — though there are some digniﬁed Theory and the Lyric “I”

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images in between” (13). The opposition of a (familiar accusation of ) feminist solipsism to “digniﬁed images” is followed by the quoting of extremely tender, nonthreatening lines to exemplify Riley’s poetic potential.18 These critical reactions suggest to a British readership, even if unwittingly, the danger to Poetry of the poetess turned feminist. The burden of literary history and its attendant construction of feminine subjectivity adds a telling layer to the multiply interlocking layers of nationality, poetic practice, sponsorship, publication, and distribution leading to the virtual absence of British women experimental poets from discussions of British or experimental poetry, at least until only recently.19 Positioned on the margins, it is no surprise that linguistic experimentation by women takes up the issue of positionality. The concern in Geraldine Monk’s poetry with the placement of the word within linguistic structures and, by extension, the placement of the “I” or self within boundaries and structures suggests the claim made by the American poet Ron Silliman that “each of us is positioned. The question of politics in art can only be how conscious we are of the multiple determinations that constitute position, and the uses to which these understandings are put” (Scalapino and Silliman 68). Born in 1952 in Blackburn, Lancashire, Monk has been publishing and performing her poetry since the 1970s, pushing beyond the boundaries of the written text that, on the page as well, investigates the conditions of its own textuality. Included in a grouping of younger British poets in The New British Poetry, Monk belongs to a second generation, roughly speaking, of innovative poets in England whose exposure to the works of the British Revival and “a body of speciﬁcally British but non-parochial writing” has enabled their own verse (Edwards, Introduction 267). While Mulford and Riley entered the avant-garde scene somewhat earlier, Monk’s radical approaches raise issues that, explored through a predominately formalist analysis, will be taken up in the more socially and politically contextualized discussions of Mulford and Riley in considering the degree to which an avant-garde practice offers political possibilities. Monk’s own insistence upon feminist resistance through textual innovation underlies a manifesto, coauthored with Maggie O’Sullivan, in which they claim that “ultimately, the most effective chance any woman poet has of dismantling the fallacy of male creative suprem192

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acy is simply by writing poetry of a kind which is liberating by the breadth of its range, risk and innovation” (in Edwards, Introduction 269). Marked by difﬁcult moments of inaccessibility, Monk’s poetry uses formal aspects of language to interrogate the workings of seemingly naturalized and invisible organizations of linguistic expression. Although the poetry’s content is often unidentiﬁable as “political” in terms of topical concerns or ideological stances, the formal experimentation with meaning production involves the interplay of language, social materiality, and subjectivity. The poems in Monk’s 1992 selected poems, The Sway of Precious Demons, concentrate on words as marks on the page.20 Line breaks or spatial constraints fragment words, often seemingly arbitrarily, suggesting the relationship between structure and unit and the production of meaning ensuing from that (even arbitrary) relationship. “ Dream Two *** Corridor” (8), for example, appears as a perfectly consistent structure, a rectangle on the page, with each line the same length, allowing nineteen spaces to be ﬁlled with letters or left blank. Some letters are missing from words in a generally paratactic progression. Words that begin at the end of a line may end on the next if the space runs out: Squares black white black white surroun D unrelen T jumped and rolled through eyes pulsate ﬂicke red grew isotropic The juxtapositions of words and spaces emphasize not only each word but each letter and space as productive of meaning — meaning that is altered by the arrangement of words, letters, and empty spaces within this arbitrary but rigid structure. Monk employs numerous textual devices to further this sense of the impact of structure and its boundaries upon meaning while also demonstrating the unﬁxability of meaning even within the most rigid structure. The empty spaces, which we almost automatically ﬁll in, nonetheless promote a process of defamiliarization set into play by the poem’s refusal of linear synTheory and the Lyric “I”

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tax. Even as we anticipate, however, the missing parts or the next part of the word, as with “surroun” in the second line, we are continually surprised by the poem, as when a capital “D” follows or the word is left incomplete. At times, line breaks force part of a fragmented word to register as a word in itself, as with the play of “ﬂickered” and “red” in the lines “eyes pulsate ﬂicke / red grew isotropic.” Here the enjambment allows “red” to read as both the color and as the end of “ﬂickered.” More than just a clever literary trick, the breakage of the word alerts us to the tension between the word’s relationship to the thing (redness) and the word’s materiality as a set of markers or signs — a tension, in other words, between the habit of regarding language as a transparent and referential medium and the awareness of language as a system of signs whose arrangement, placement, and positionality all mediate/unﬁx /destabilize “meaning.” The social subject or the “I” experiences language in both ways at once, for to function within the material world an extensive degree of referentiality must be practiced, while at the same time the slippage of meaning attends one’s every utterance. How are we to conceive of the “I” within these linguistic interactions, within this corridor of recognizable black-and-white squares suddenly defamiliarized by the “ﬂicke / red” eyes? Who controls meaning, and what kind of subject is possible? The poem suggests a notion of subjectivity in its visual emphasis upon the repeated word “ALONE” in the lines below, particularly in the arrangement of linguistic marks surrounding the word in each of the two lines in which it appears: desolation not tech nicoloured carnival black white T.V. O. K no two three one fa ncy dress not givin g prizes for elepha feet slap and echoe s tunnel wet sounds plash ALONE drips i n front who behind ﬁnd no go or one t 194

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wo tidy shadowy orn eat ﬁgure ALONE co ncrete in this whit e black and corridor A single and lower case i dangles at the end of the poem’s ﬁfteenth line — “plash ALONE drips i” — but is then transformed into part of the word “in” by the next line: “n front who behind.” The subject, already lacking the authority and singularity suggested by the capital I form, rhetorically alters function — subject becomes preposition. The “ALONE i” — the solitary and delineated speaking subject typifying the lyric — remains marked as such by the line’s enjambment while also functioning as a syntactical indication of placement (“in front”). Subjectivity and linguistic structure interact so that the i is given to us as a position within a structure that is variable and contextual. The i is also “in,” the subject a place. The interactive nature of this notion of subjectivity is suggested by the second capitalized appearance of “ALONE,” four lines prior to the poem’s end: “eat ﬁgure ALONE co / ncrete in this whit / e black and / corridor.” The paratactic movement of the line demands that we consider the contradictory implications of “ALONE” and “co” or with another. The individual is “co” — infused with others — although this is also a matter of positionality and structuration as the enjambment of co / ncrete implies. It is “co” because the line has reached its nineteen syllables, the boundary of its structures. The subject emerges from a negotiation of word and structure made possible by an awareness of the role of positionality and arrangement in producing meaning. This discursive negotiation involves gender implications, as in the two poems that face one another at the end of the volume, “MOLECULAR POWER PROGRESSIVES” and “WHERE?” (44, 45). In the ﬁrst poem, lines placed with irregular margins march down the page, offering a litany of “boys” who have achieved “STATUS,” the singular and boldly capitalized word opening the poem. Conformity to cultural myths of power deﬁnes this status, for these “boys” are both “CULT HUGGERS” and “BOOT CRUSHERS,” acting in conformity whether they be Theory and the Lyric “I”

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Leather boys strategically studded Soldier boys swallowing uniformity Heavy boys banging blue denim metallics City boys pin striped and tied Law boys robed and wigged Holy boys cassocked and collared The poem’s lineation funnels down the page, accompanied by a progressively regularized pattern of syllabic stresses that suggests the normalization in social structure taking place as these masculine ﬁgures “progressively” and powerfully occupy the ﬁeld of culture, the ﬁeld of the articulated text, although the insistent use of white space alerts us to unarticulated or erased social spaces positioned among — and also working to position — the masculine references. In the ﬁnal, centered lines FIngers Waggers

THumb Screwers RanK MEN TALITY

The break in the ﬁnal lines of the word mentality into “MEN / TALITY” and the double meaning of “RanK” (hierarchy and smelly) calls attention to the work of language and the assumptions of language transparency in supporting a unitary view of the world that empowers the masculine. Moreover, if one agrees with Keith Tuma’s observation that “most of the techniques employed in this poem are available to Monk on ﬂyers advertising rock shows and in the music they advertise,” then his further contention that “in this sense . . . massculture enters her work . . . not as allusion but as material form” gestures usefully toward the possibilities for considering her feminist handling of mass culture’s valorization of masculine power (Fishing 232). The poem’s techniques — a truncated advertising collage, a breaking of referentiality — do not automatically alter the world but ask us to be aware of the power dynamics attending language systems and their uses as they crisscross both mass and high culture, deﬂating distinctions between these realms while illuminating their coextensive investment in masculine power. In respect to the language of the poet, this point is underscored by 196

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the subsequent poem “WHERE?” which recalls the Romantic lyric speaker (“a man speaking to men”). The poem and its placement ask how the lyric “I” is structured as masculine by romantic discourse and to what degree this masculine “I” depends upon a referential notion of language and a speaker who controls meaning. The poem begins with a verb, the “I” suggested but grammatically omitted: Went to mountains everyone on a tidal washy waving crest of High up there! The scenario not only recalls but is labeled in Romantic discourse, after which the “I” appears in duplicate, pushing the syntactical sense of the lines forward and backward at once: ROMANTICISM and SUBLIME headshakings of I and I don’t know what or not happened next The symmetry of the two “I’s,” appearing above and below the conjunctive “and,” divides the poem into two halves: the upper half positions the “I” in a lyric discourse, while the lower half reads like a parody of Romanticism, the Romantic “I” suddenly brought down to the mundane: except we roly-polied back down again to DROWN in a tidal washy wave of celluloid soap. (All of a sud.) Theory and the Lyric “I”

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The ﬁnal line, in parentheses, ends the poem by punning on the double meaning of the phrase: did this reversal of the “I’s” sublime transport occur “All of a sudden,” or does it leave the “I” “All soapy”? The doubleness of meaning and of discursive contexts — “sud” as both a slang shortcut and a kind of TV commercial lingo for the housewife — brings the sublime to the level of laundry detergent while also signifying a relationship to and within language that stands in counterdistinction to the Romantic lyric’s “I.” A move obviously haunted by cultural gender difference, this reversal posits an “I” as part of the celluloid fabric of the world, traversed by interactive discourses that include but revise the Romantic heritage. The associations of the ﬁnal images with female work simultaneously ground the “I” in social conditions while also revealing the shaping force of discursive systems that thwart the “I’s” sublime access to singular meaning. The poem’s parodic lyricism employs an interventional strategy developing from “the way the work situates itself in the context of . . . the history of its medium” to reveal the lyric’s gender coding (Bernstein, A Poetics 98 –99). Disentangling masculinist assumptions of the expressive self from a tradition of poetic authority, Monk’s poem engages the materiality of language to examine the positionality of the gendered self. Wendy Mulford and the Gender Politics of Writing

Arguing a tangible relationship between textual disruption and social or political change, Wendy Mulford has written forcefully that “for the writer revolutionary practice necessitates revolutionary practice in the ﬁeld of the signiﬁer” if one understands language as “the crucial signifying practice in and through which the human subject is constructed and becomes a social human being” (“Notes” 32, 33). For Mulford, as for Monk, women occupy a different relationship to language than do men as the result of multiple historical and cultural factors: “[T ]he question for the woman writer appears to be how can she through her writing subvert that language which is the instrument of the Law? What in practice does it mean for her to talk about the revolutionary violation of the Law? What is its potential for the ‘transformation of the actual world?’” (“Notes” 33). While in Monk’s work we can trace the formal implications of these questions, Mulford’s autobiographical writings, critical essays, and editorial projects conjoined with her poetry can help to contextual198

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ize the social and intellectual conditions underlying her feminist experimentalism. In 1979 Mulford’s “Notes on Writing,” signiﬁcant as one of the earliest attempts to articulate a feminist experimental poetics in Britain or America, identiﬁed subjectivity as central to her writing project, a project she carefully maps out through tracing the interacting inﬂuences of feminist politics, Marxist class analysis, and poststructural theories upon her sense of her self as poet and the status of the subject in her poetry. Foregrounding connections between her politics and her literary activities, she begins by claiming, “I’ve been writing for about twelve years, running a small press, Street Editions, and for eight years I’ve been in the Communist Party and been an increasingly bloody-minded feminist” (“Notes” 31). Born in 1941 in Wales, Mulford was educated in Cambridge and by the early 1970s had founded Street Editions, a small press publishing “key modernist texts” by contemporary male poets who have come to be associated with the Cambridge school — J. H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Andrew Crozier, John James. (Street Editions has now merged with Ken Edwards’s Reality Studios to become Reality Street Editions.) Mulford knew little of the “new directions happening in the US, and no more of what other women poets were doing” when the press was founded in 1972 (“Curved” 264). Claiming that “[m]y ﬁght to discover my independent self as a woman is enmeshed in my mind with my ﬁght to believe in my voice as a poet,” Mulford cites her involvement in the women’s liberation movement with creating the “greatest processes of transformation” in her life and writing (“Notes” 38). At the same time, Mulford, like other poets in Cambridge at the time, began reading in contemporary theories then starting to inform American poets and British writers like Tom Raworth — readings complicating her feminist conceptions of “self” and “voice.” Encountering Cixous and Irigaray along with Lacan and Derrida, Mulford also began to meet or read other women writing innovatively, publishing the English poet Denise Riley, the Scottish poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson, and the American poet Alice Notley under the Street imprint. By the mid-1970s she was questioning how gender mediated her engagement with language, her sense of poetic authority and placement, her sense of a speaking self: “That was the time when the whole question of the ‘construction’ of the self started to form mistily on the skyline. Who was this ‘I’ speaking? What was speaking me? How far did the Theory and the Lyric “I”

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illusion of selfhood, that most intimate and precious possession, reach? How could the lie of culture be broken up if the lie of the self made by that culture remained intact? And how could the lie of capitalist society be broken if the lie of culture were not broken?” (“Notes” 31). Clearly, this reconsideration of the “I” reﬂects what Mulford describes as her struggle “to fuse together the apparently contradictory practices of a modernist poetics and a Marxist/Feminist politics,” involving a critique of certain masculinist aspects of modernism and Marxism from the perspective of a distinctly gendered subjectivity alongside a broadening of feminism through Marxist resistance to capitialist structures and poststructural perspectives on language and subjectivity (“Notes” 40).21 Citing Cixous as a signiﬁcant model, Mulford writes that the engagement of self involved countering “the particular lie of the universal transcendent nature of art and of art’s function to ‘coax on stage’ the truth known already elsewhere. . . . I have been concerned to produce meaning across and in deﬁance of the repressive codes of everyday, communication-ready language. I haven’t been concerned directly with either expression or representation of meaning, although I would not go so far as to say I have had no ‘relation of obligation to the law of legibility’” (“Notes” 31–32). Nor is she willing to forgo the subject, insisting instead upon a distinctly gendered subject that is neither lyrically authentic nor deconstructively banished but draws upon “links with the Coleridgean ‘I’ in its perception of itself as moral agent and as in part imaginative creator of its world” while remaining grounded and engaged in the “actual world” (“Notes” 39). Mulford’s evocation of the Coleridgean “I” signiﬁcantly rejects its transcendental capacity, ideologically linking its masculine prerogatives to capitalism’s structures of power and reformulating it through gendered speciﬁcity and linguistic positionality. Mulford claims an “I” as “active and desiring subject, [and] that ‘I’ being speciﬁcally gendered” as a necessary condition for exposing and refusing an “acutely reactionary concentration of power we face in the ruling male capitalist class” (“Notes” 39, 40). Two volumes of Mulford’s poetry published in the late 1970s centralize the issue of the female “I,” reﬂecting the impact of the feminist movement and her evolving, theoretically modulated ideas about the gendered “I.” Her ﬁrst book, Bravo to Girls and Heroes (1977), containing poems written between 1968 and 1976, sets out to challenge 200

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the “dictator language.” As she writes in a hand-penned postscript: “[T ]hese poems indicate some of the problems facing a poet today . . . [and] they include some of the strategies I’ve used to confront those problems, or to attempt to ‘reclaim the language,’ for myself, as a f” (n.p.). Mulford’s poems in this volume speak of and to women’s experiences — of love, desire, eroticism, fear — while experimenting with the way in which these experiences are told. An associative and paratactic piling up of clauses creates a cumulative, careening verse. An “I” speaks throughout, but the poems never provide a clear context for positioning or viewing the speaker and instead combine the “I” with a myriad of sensual details. “Reclaiming the language” involves an exploration of the self’s relationship to language, implicating the issue of the poet and her authority that extends to Mulford’s 1978 collaborative project with Denise Riley, No Fee: A Line or Two for Free. Individual poems are not identiﬁed by author, creating a composition of blended voices that textually confuses conventions of autonomy and ownership of voice that underlie the terms “Poet,” “Poem,” and “Poetic Tradition.” Linking the uniﬁed lyric subject to a capitalist ideology privileging men, Mulford’s 1979 essay evokes these terms to criticize the notion of the artist’s separation from the social world as “tied to and legitimated by society [because] precisely in its hierarchical and elite nature it reinforces the ideological hierarchy of aspiration and remains the property of the few” (“Notes” 35). The collaborative experiment with Riley evidences an alternative mode, necessitated by the conviction that the conventions of a gendered hierarchy do not support women’s artistic practice.22 Mulford’s Late Spring Next Year contains selected poems from individual volumes and chapbooks published in the early eighties.23 Mulford has commented that her project during these years was to “ground my work in the multiple voices of my life,” a project that by Late Spring Next Year “conducted an oscillating provisionality against traditional lyric voice” (“Curved” 264). This growing attention to voice and resistance to its traditional poetic dictates needs to be cast against the backdrop of Mulford’s intellectual, critical, and editorial endeavors through the 1980s. During these years Mulford’s readings of French theorists like Irigaray and Cixous entered into the poetry as sources for inquiry into sexual difference and language. Additionally, Mulford’s growing awareness of American women writers led her to the journal HOW(ever) and to experimental poets like Susan Theory and the Lyric “I”

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Howe, Rae Armantrout, Lynn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, Leslie Scalapino, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Bernadette Meyer, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Rosemarie Waldrop, and Kathleen Fraser, whose work she terms “stimulating, useful or necessary” in considering questions of gendered authority in poetry; in essays on American women poets published in 1990 (Armantrout, Hejinian, Fanny Howe) and 1993 (Susan Howe), she looks to their innovations to consider “some related ideas about the questioning of the individual poetic voice” (“Curved” 261, 264). While surveying the contemporary scene for experimental women poets, Mulford’s projects during the 1980s also included the retrieval of a history of women writing poetry out of a politically committed experimentalism, as in her work on Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, whose political commitments particularly during the 1930s are brought into relationship with their poetry; and her 1982 essay, written while teaching at Thames Polytechnic, on literature and first-wave feminism, which seeks to justify a socialist-feminist critical methodology and pedagogy. By the end of the decade, Mulford’s editorial work included The Virago Book of Love Poetry, which she describes as a necessary corrective to a tradition of male editing, a feminist act or “necessary politics” amid “increasingly desperate forms of reactionary closure” (Introduction xix) holding sway during the Thatcher years. The poems in Late Spring Next Year join these enterprises, exploring the “I” that is placed within cultural slots for women, implicitly including the lyric appropriation of the feminine as “inspiration” and the objectiﬁcation of women as sites for enacting creative aspirations. The traditional lyric voice participates in this ideological process, a poem like “Bathed in Air” suggests. The opening lines evoke the private lyric voice, talking to itself while we as listeners are allowed to overhear its musings: “Being alone with my own loneliness / dreams of society drop away.” The social is relegated to a slot separate from the lyric “I”; however, this “I” is problematized through syntactical and line arrangments that abandon linearity for paratactic placements of words: “daughters friends lovers no longer I / & only the other I / think we should put mountains here else / is impossible / like the lump on your back / you don’t know is there” (19). The “I” here is multiple, at times “I,” then “no longer I,” then the “other I” — is the “I” a “you”? Aggressive enjambment positions the “I” as both subject and object, disallowing the “I’s” control of the poem and “leav202

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ing the desire for the certainty and security of the created self, the ﬁxed ‘I,’” as Peter Middleton observes about Mulford’s poetry in the 1980s and its engagement with the questions she poses in “Notes on Writing” on women writers’ subversion of language (“Breaking the Perspex” 7). Both women’s speech and the insertion of the body into discourse suggest possibilities for subversion, drawing, for example, in “how do you live” on Hélène Cixous’s theorization of écriture feminine, or writing the body (54). The poem ﬁrst appears in The A.B.C. of Writing, which Ken Edwards identiﬁes as Mulford’s “most overtly theoretical” text; indeed, the composition is dated 1979– 83 and reﬂects the poet’s efforts over those years to bring together a Marxist-feminist perspective with poststructural theories of language and subjectivity, a poetic exploration of the female body’s textualization (“ Wendy Mulford” 686). The body is not imaged as an essential feminine site (as French feminism is sometimes accused of encouraging) but rather is ﬁgured as an ideologically constructed discourse, supported by economic systems that divide the private from the public, relegating women and their bodies to the private while obscuring the economic framework through naturalizing woman’s “place.” The ﬁrst few lines of the poem follow a dedication to Cixous, “who gave me the question”: no clear answer, ambivalently. reciprocally. in oscillation. lurching in surprise & wonder. an after-effect of too much pricey delegation, herein described as daringly / close to disaster, danger’s cousin. I said you can No “I” appears until the eighth line (and even then, its identiﬁcation remains uncertain); instead, compressed phrases, singular words, emphatically halting periods, empty gaps, and awkwardly enjambed lines, deliberate in their singularly dangling prepositions and their feminine stresses, “lurch” down the page, recalling Cixous’s classic description of a woman talking whose body expresses what her oppressed voice (the suppressed “I” of these lines?) cannot. An attempt Theory and the Lyric “I”

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at communication, suggested by words like “answer,” “reciprocally,” and “delegation,” devolves into a “disaster,” a danger linked to “pricey” effects that the next lines take up: disaster, danger’s cousin. I said you can drop a mile or two before the bank-rate rises then lie back my sweet & take it, a curt remedy after too much attempted The “I” enters abrubtly, preceding and speaking a line that aggressively thrusts itself across the page, a penetration of the white space predominating up until this point. A voice linking economic and sexual power through an image of rape (“lie back my sweet / & take it”), it seems to surface as part of the social text that voices “woman,” whose submission is both expected and enforced through the “curt remedy” of economic, sexual, and physical dominance: “a hot needle to the index tip, tags / of clipped hair shed from the nape in instant dispersal the broken sump / evenly coating the labour we unevenly perform.” The ideological division of public and private discourses conceals the mechanisms of gendered structures of power while naturalizing the constructs of female subjectivity at their core: while there is “so much talk,” it is “shared in timid / in timid recoil” as “ultra-private / accommodations between person & / politics negotiating survival while / the sea rises hold on for what you can.” Breaking sequential lines with “private” and “person,” the poem momentarily highlights the interiority of the self, another conventional voicing of the “feminine,” only to assault it with “politics negotiating survival.” The ﬁnal group of lines is introduced by another “I,” but this time the speaker’s words are in quotes, emphasizing their discursive rather than empirical or authentic grounding: I said, or ‘a woman’s place behind the home everywhere & nowhere fear of placeness, hold on for what we can, cradling cuddling care, home love tucked body refuge will satisfy what part?’ 204

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Suggesting through fragmentary lines the pieces of discourse that deﬁne this female “placeness” and its conventional rationale as a kind of biological destiny —“home,” “cradling cuddling care,” “home love,” “tucked body refuge” — these lines seem to ask what parts of a woman’s subjectivity will the experience of body as refuge “satisfy,” a question dually directed toward patriarchy’s use of women’s bodies and toward Cixous’s exhortation of the female body as source for subjectivity. The syntactical breakup of the ﬁnal line, following such familiar, cozy images and cooing sounds (cuddling care, home love), offers no resolution (“no answer”) while posing the multiple textualizations of female subjectivity colliding within the poem. Registering an ambivalence with any collectively empirical notion of “female,” a poem like “how do you live” subverts the Law to show its operations, revealing the potential of a “feminine” writing described by British theorist Janet Wolff as interventional “guerilla tactics” that destabilize dominant representations (87). As the poem’s unidentiﬁable voices and collections of discourse suggest, the private, self-representational lyric is impossible in what Clair Wills identiﬁes as a post-1945 “reconﬁguring of the relationship between public and private spheres,” so that the “private” and “public” are emmeshed, largely through the changing cultural role of women who no longer function primarily as the domestic guardians of the private, the internal life. Such a reconﬁguring unsettles the self as a ground of representation and “opens [the lyric] out towards rhetoric” (“Contemporary Women’s Poetry” 39). What Mulford’s poems are doing, however, is exploring not only the permeation of the private by the public but the simultaneous intensiﬁcation of a rhetoric reasserting the ideals of a private/public divide, maintained through traditional family structures and values that insure a space for individual autonomy — a sovereign space for emotional, interior, private experience. Political rhetoric accompanying the political conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s, shifting from the social vision of the 1960s, emphasized a retreat in British politics from government involvement to privatization, from social welfare to individual enterprise; as Vincent Sherry points out, Thatcher’s claim that “there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families” reinforced “imperial standards,” resulting, one might add, in the empowerment of governmental authority and a sense of nationalism (the “false we” observed by Ken Edwards in Thatcherist discourse) through relegating certain funcTheory and the Lyric “I”

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tions to the private sphere — a move not without the weighty force of traditional gender deﬁnitions (567). The status of expressivity, then, for women in 1980s Britain is complicated by the political use to which women’s interiority could be put. Against this backdrop, Mulford’s exploration of interiority in the 1992 The Bay of Naples— an internalized, meditative sequence in its evocations of light, color, and texture that heighten our sense of individualized perception — seems particularly provocative in its simultaneous attention to framing. Framing is manifested through literal references, through the use of the smallish square-shaped page as a frame for each of twenty-six small poems, through the unexpected verbal juxtapositions that continually upset the “frame” we at ﬁrst adopt, through line breaks that radiate in multiple directions. Indeed, as a sequence, the poems reframe a series of paintings by Howard Hodgkin, exhibited in 1985: the book jacket tells us that the “poems do not describe the paintings but are inspired by and have a variety of direct or tangential connections with them,” including the sharing of most titles. Edwin Morgan’s review of the poems tells us that Hodgkin’s “pictures are usually small, often painted on wood, and often incorporating the wooden frame into the scene, so that you are invited simultaneously to look at and to look into, to be thoroughly aware of the thingy ﬂatness but also to peer and ponder through frame or window or door into layers of room or garden or beach or sky” (82). Like the paintings, color dominates the poems, creating an emotional richness that nevertheless is not clearly grounded in a particular individual or experience. Rather, the verbal devices frame and reframe our perceptions and the emotional valence of the poems so that we are watching the frame of language dissolve into the subject of language, the workings of the representational medium. An “I” moves through the sequence, the active and desiring subject Mulford claimed in “Notes on Writing,” but “she is nowhere constituted and bits / hang off her all the time,” the opening poem observes (The Bay of Naples 3). Signiﬁcant in introducing the sequence, “Valentine” turns our attention to the “jostle” of words, the inaccessibility of meaning, the rhetorical positionality of the (female) self — all in collision with the “old-fashion burble” that “procreates” the “she,” the object of the conventional valentine, the conventional romance narrative (The Bay of Naples 3). The ﬁnal lines give us reading instructions 206

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for the rest of the sequence, derived from a sense of narrative and self revising the sweet “sherbet vanilla praline nuts” version of the valentine’s constitution of subjectivity that begins the poem. Having experienced the poem’s disjunctive movement — “elastic limits speeches slide collide” — and been warned that authentic experience is neither recoverable through nor prior to language — “where our present is strictly speaking / irredeemable” — we are told in the last three lines that “it happens here, / arrow, cobalt, bullet-bunch / no other valentine” (The Bay of Naples 3– 4). Just as the poem’s lines often break on words that move in multiple directions at once, often verbs or prepositions, these last lines both dismiss old formations of a feminine “I” and open up to a “valentine” in language. Interiority and expressiveness mark the sequence but are reﬂexively handled as frames and framed, replicating the impulse of the poetic sequence as a response to paintings that problematize the boundaries and functions of frames, including the frame of subjectivity. The formal rationale for the sequence, the interaction of painting and poem, the dialogue of visions, suggests a necessary intwinement of subjectivities in the production of artistic expression. This reformulation of the lyric subject, compelling what John Wilkinson’s review of Late Spring calls “unmerited exchange” (93), underscores Mulford’s textual invitation to the reader ( just as she is the viewer of paintings) to take part in an “intransigent composing activity,” elicited by the poet’s “realizing her own battles with her medium, language, as the body of the text. Without this composition, this work of reconstruction by the reader, the poem remains uncreated” (Mulford, “Curved” 266). Denise Riley and the Lyric Person

The weight of the lyric tradition, the connective force of identiﬁcation with the lyric speaker, nonetheless remains as a persistent interstice in the readerly exchange, creating small slices of resistance or abrasion that texture the difﬁcult work of Denise Riley. Rachel Blau DuPlessis reads this conﬂicted lyricism as part of an “interiour debating between subjectivities” in which the “social subject” is in “dialogue with the blandishments and pleasures of the singular, lyric ‘I,’ and its investiture in diction” (“Knowing” n.p.). The question of the “lyric person” has been central to discussions of Riley’s poetry, including her own response to Romana Huk’s interview question concerning why she does not, “despite its current renouncement as a traTheory and the Lyric “I”

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ditional vehicle for the ‘private voice,’ abandon it altogether?” Riley responds: “I don’t have the choice to ‘abandon’ it. You get formed in a certain way” (Huk, “Denise Riley” 19). Her poetic encounter with lyric has elicited criticism as “at best politically retrogressive and at worst positively ‘narcissistic,’” comments Huk in regard to the Keery/ Wilkinson debate over her use of the “I” (“Denise Riley” 20). Keery is offended by her “self-consciousness” (13); Wilkinson ﬁnds her “log of reﬂexiveness” a narcissistic “writer’s looking glass” (“Illyrian Places” 61, 69). On the other hand, Wheale regards her writing as “dislocating” the subject through an alertness to “the responsibilities of the pronoun which creates the identity and the agency in writing,” thus opening the poems “to include the reader’s subject position” (“Colours” 73–74); DuPlessis hears Riley announcing “a serious and forceful resistance to the lyric” (“Knowing” 64); Wills uncovers a “practice of deviant reading” in which “Riley appropriates the lyric, puts it to her own use, by cutting it up and deforming it” (“Contemporary Women’s Poetry” 45); Michael Haslam celebrates the possibility that Riley’s work will “vindicate the deep high lyric; and this from a higher or deeper peak or hollow of circumspect awareness of matters of, say, categories of identity, of, say, contemporary discourse, than, say, I, who also try for lyric ﬂight, would dare. . . . She desires lyric. She questions the conditions for lyric” (100). Recognizing the lyric’s cultural codes as part of a system preexisting and shaping the “I,” one recent poem of Riley queries: “I’d thought / to ask around, what’s lyric poetry? / Its bee noise starts before I can: / You do that: love me: die alone” (“A Shortened Set,” Mop Mop Georgette 22). Similarly, in the appropriately entitled poem “Lyric,” the “I” struggles with the form of lyric that “I was already knotted in,” feeling both intense attraction to the generic conventions (its “sweet music”) while also ﬁghting with “whatever motors it swells / to hammer itself out on me” (Mop Mop Georgette 36). Riley’s own multiple identities as poet, theorist, woman, and feminist inform the range of critical reaction to her lyric engagement that insistently proclaims an “I” while holding up for inspection the discursive determinations of subjectivity. Asserting in one poem, “I’d thought / to ask around, what’s lyric poetry?” Riley’s poetic struggles with this question draw upon a rich background of intellectual, poetic, and political activism (“A Shortened Set,” Mop Mop Georgette 22). The daughter of an “unmarried working woman and a father whose 208

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name I do not know,” Riley was born in 1948 in Carlisle and adopted by a working-class couple, who raised her in Gloucester. Riley’s feminism, honed through teenage readings of de Beauvoir and Woolf, remained a “privately held conviction” until the late sixties, when she joined the Abortion Law Reform Association and entered the women’s liberation movement while also taking part in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam.24 Riley’s involvement with feminist activism in the seventies is intertwined with her involvement with the political Left, and, as Romana Huk notes, “her work maintains clearer connections to the severe attitude toward myths of self-discovery which became evident in the changing Marxisms of 1970s Britain and their Althusserian critique of langue,” which reveals itself in Riley’s early poetry’s “critique of some early forms of romanticised feminist radicalism growing out of the women’s movement and into poetry,” especially through the inﬂuence of Adrienne Rich” (“Feminist Radicalism” 240). Studying moral sciences and fine arts at Cambridge during these years, she went on to receive a doctorate in philosophy at Sussex University. Labeling herself a socialist-feminist, Riley embarked in the early seventies on a “countereducation of reading Marx and Hegel, Engels, Althusser, Freud — among a great many other European socialists and theorists of society.” Encountering the newly translated Foucault in 1972 and further poststructuralist writers, Riley recalls entering vigorous debates that “gyrated around the poles of humanism and antihumanism” that “turned on different theories of the human subject,” including feminist readings of the “dethronement” of the humanist subject (“A Short History” 124). Two other signiﬁcant thinkers during this time were Merleau-Ponty, for isolating “the inevitable ambiguity between collectivity and individuality,” and Wittgenstein, for describing “the intelligibility of words as depending on their positioning,” philosophical concerns that circulate through her poetry (“A Short History” 126, 127). While this “counter-education” proceeded to include readings in developmental psychology and psychoanalysis for Riley’s feminist-materialist study of childcare and the state, War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother, she continued to ﬁnd theories of discourse useful: “There was an immediate helpfulness about the idea of discursive formations” and about the argument that “people understand their lives discursively,” so that a historical project would “distinguish what different forms of description were active at what levels” (“A Short HisTheory and the Lyric “I”

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tory” 123). This argument informs her theorization of the politics and history of feminine identity in Am I that Name? Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History, which Huk describes as a project “to reconcile an empirical tradition of working historically through observation and experience with needing to face post-modernism’s deconstruction of all epistemologies, particularly the experiential” (“Feminist Radicalism” 241). This project’s interest in strategies of demanding “self-recognition in the designations of language despite a resistance to its claustrophobic containment and seductions,” of continually “invok[ing] and refus[ing] . . . women’s experience,” informs Riley’s work with the lyric, as critics like Carol Watts and Romana Huk have delineated (Watts 157, 158). The chronological conﬂuence of Riley’s developing intellectual interests, her political activities, her critical texts, and her writing of poetry intensiﬁed with her exposure to similarly interested poets. Writing poetry on her own during the early seventies, in the midseventies Riley’s new friendships with poets in Cambridge, particularly Wendy Mulford, prompted her to publish her ﬁrst collection, Marxism for Infants, with Mulford’s small press. A network of British poets looking beyond British shores, including Mulford, J. H. Prynne, John James, and others, and the “large and ambitiously international” Cambridge poetry festivals, gave Riley access to the work of poets outside of Britain, including Americans like John Ashberry, Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, James Schuyler, John Wieners, Anne Waldman, and Alice Notley (Riley qtd. in Huk, “Denise Riley” 17). More recently, on the editorial board of Macmillan’s Language, Discourse, Society series, she has edited a collection of essays authored by poets associated with alternative, experimental strands of British poetry entitled Poets on Writing: Britain, 1970 –1991. As well, Riley edited a 1994 issue of Critical Quarterly, devoted to contemporary poetics, literary history, and critical theory.25 As researcher, editor, professor (having taught at a number of universities, including Brown, Princeton, Brisbane, and Goldsmiths’ College in London), and political activist, as historian and philosopher, Riley’s “various pointed contributions to many debates over social history and policy, gender and identity, and the deﬁnition and development of feminist studies in academic discourse” have engendered a cross-disciplinary intertextuality within her poetry (Wheale, “Colours” 74). The 1985 collection Dry Air gathers poems from ear210

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lier books, including Marxism for Infants, No Fee, and Some Poems, the latter two collaborations with Mulford. These poems display a central concern with social and cultural forces that shape the gendered self, and they ask how language can affect these structures. In particular, economics constitutes a framework or system for considering the interactions of language, subjectivity, and gender, as in “Affections Must Not,” where love’s link to economics is ﬁgured through the description of the home and the conventional role of mother as “straight out of colonial history, master and slave.” The poem’s challenge to this system is issued formally in the ﬁnal line as the “I” places herself within an alternative textual/grammatical conﬁguration: “I. neglect. the. house.” (Dry Air 27). The punctuation — a period inserted after each word — allows each word to stand separately while on the same line, a grammatical change breaking, as it were, the “wires which run to & fro between love and economics” by breaking the poetic line linking “I” and “house.” Exposing the “constitutively public nature of the private sphere,” argues Watts, the poem’s “movements of identiﬁcation and refusal, protection and restraint” enact “a drama of interpellation: the way in which language hails identity and brings it into social being, forming subjects ‘between love & / economics’”; further, the recognition of this “ﬁction” as ﬁction provides a way in which it can be “contested, endstopped” (166), the line between love and economics broken. The reconstitution of the female “I” outside of dominant norms occupies the primary concern in this poetry. “A note on sex and ‘the reclaiming of language’” (7), which Romana Huk identiﬁes as rejecting the “possibility of getting back to a feminine language, a ‘mother tongue,’” presents a female subject facing the difﬁculty of self-representation in a system of culture and language that has represented women as the “not-you,” the Other (Huk, “Denise Riley” 21). Elsewhere, Huk insists upon the “potent early critique of romanticised projects in the female construction of identity” leveled by the poem’s appearance in the early seventies amidst calls for claiming a woman’s voice and writing her life. Rather than assuming an essentialized “woman,” the poem’s engagement with discursive systems deessentializes the authentic notion of feminine selfhood: “ ‘Sex’ as gendered essence is thus de-naturalised by the poem’s parodic naturalisation of the relentless and inevitable process of linguistic construction of selfhood” (Huk, “Feminist Radicalism” 241). The poem’s opening emTheory and the Lyric “I”

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phasis on representation sets such a process into play, for within a culture selling representations of Woman that enable its public narratives of power, the necessary task is “e.g. to write ‘she’ and for that to be a statement / of fact only and not a strong image / of everything which is not-you, which sees you.” As the poem’s overlays of narrative suggest, the woman understands herself within the discourses or descriptions operating at different levels to “see” her. Making use of a storyline in which a woman (called “The Savage”) returns home from a trip, the poem places this seemingly ordinary narrative within the context of imperialist conquest and the domination of nature, exploring the intersecting conﬁgurations of the “feminine” in historical thought. The Savage is ﬂying back home from the New Country in native-style dress with a baggage of sensibility to gaze on the ancestral plains with the myths thought up and dreamed in her kitchens as guides She will be discovered Later, we discover that “the new land is colonised, though its prospects are empty” and “[t]he Savage weeps as landing at the airport / she is asked to buy wood carvings, which represent herself.” Just as public myths enter the domestic kitchen “as guides,” the private woman is neither separate from nor immune to the systematic othering of the “feminine” within private, public, historical, and literary spheres. Working through the “comedy and violence of misrecognition: what it takes to be social, to become a ‘woman,’” claims Watts in discussing Riley’s early poems such as this one, “[i]dentity is ‘lived here in the transitive sense of the word, externalized in the gendered social imaginary’” (159, 160). The language of the poem, in evoking various narratives, seeks an alternative for the “she” to the cultural representations available to her and suggests that the meaning “ﬂocking densely around the words seeking a way / any way in between the gaps” occurs not through mimetic means but through the “gaps” made apparent when seemingly disparate narratives (travel, domestic, imperial) are brought together and their interconnections foregrounded. As with this poem, others in Dry Air consider the role of cultural institutions of family, religion, nationalism, and morality in deﬁning 212

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gender identity. How does the “I” perceive itself, much less represent itself, in the midst of culture’s dominant images of the feminine? And how do structures of language take part in advancing conventions of gender that privilege men? In asking these questions, Riley’s poetry seeks out textual alternatives while also exploring the efﬁcacy of language experimentation through bringing its own discursive mechanisms within the realm of cultural critique. This poetics signals the danger that avant-garde experimentation can produce a poetry as reiﬁed and as private as the traditional lyric, echoing Erica Hunt’s contention that a “troubling aspect of privileging language as the primary site to torque new meaning and possibility is that it is severed from the political question of for whom new meaning is produced” (“Notes” 204). Riley’s poetry continually registers a need to connect language experimentation with an awareness of history, economics, and social forces and to avoid the poetic stance of separation from the world, whether through disdain for the world or through abstractly theoretical language play. Just as a poem like “Ah So” suggests that the lyric voice speaking to itself cannot be politically effective (“Speaking apart, I hear my voice run on . . . / disturb the text; you don’t disturb the world”), it also suggests that language is not in itself oppositional, a point emphatically conveyed by Riley’s dismissal of “versions of ‘political’ poetry which, to travesty them a bit, assume that there is an immanent connection between the destruction of conventional syntax and an attack on conventional political order” (in Huk, “Denise Riley” 18). Particularly in a world where men have both money and power, the material subordination of women is not merely a matter of linguistic construction, and the economic constitution of subjectivity is asserted in the ﬁnal line of “Ah So”: “I found some change in my trouser pocket, like / a man” (Dry Air 48). To be a subject is to be an economic agent is to be a man. How can textual manipulation effectively challenge such a system? 26 Taking up this question, Mop Mop Georgette moves in more experimental directions while continually questioning what such a move means in relationship to the self and the social/political world. The opening poem, “Laibach Lyrik: Slovenia, 1991,” contextualizes lyric utterance within political reality, a wrenching of the transcendent urge of conventional lyricism.27 Centrally concerned with the issue of representation, the poem or “lyrik” enacts a complex decoding of modes of representation and subjectivity through textually incorTheory and the Lyric “I”

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porating multiple discourses of identity that circulate within a problematized framework of voicing one’s experience and narrating one’s self. The ﬁnal question raised explicitly by the poem is “ What is it that shapes us,” a question reﬂecting back on the modes of representation of experience and ultimately of subjectivity rendered within the text. The poem begins with a sequence of six three-line stanzas, presented in italics and characterized by an aesthetic concern with interwoven sounds and “beautiful” imagery of nature that suggests the lyrical mood of poetic self-expression. Recalling a romanticized pastoral landscape, the section smoothly evokes a refuge from the world, exempliﬁed in the ﬁrst stanza: “The milky sheen of birch trees / stepping forward. Breathless / the deeper woods.” Providing a discourse within which we are to understand the speaker as a lover escaping into transcendent bliss, this italicized section almost successfully replicates the lyric severance of the “I” from the world. However, just as the “wreaths of raspberry smoke / pat the steady sky,” the text admits what such poeticized imagery obscures: the political realm of war, in which raspberry smoke is actually “the guns of rebels,” a reality revealed in the ﬁfth stanza (“Cream ﬁelds chat quietly / careless of distant provinces / and the guns of rebels”) only to be covered over again by the mechanisms of poeticized representation in the sixth and ﬁnal stanza: “ Whooping cranes rise where / herdsmen, clattering, wheel about / the plains in scarlet” (7). The devices of symbolic allusion — the raspberry smoke, the scarlet herdsmen — suggest an underlying violence but refuse that materiality within the discursive boundaries of the lyric. Riley’s text breaks these boundaries at this point in the poem, interrupting the lyric pastoral to expose the strategies of representation that ideologically link poetic form and discourse to political acts. The text visually alters its type from italics to a plain font, signifying a shift announced as well by the initial demand in this section to “Cut the slavonics now. Cut the slavonics” (8). As slavonics, the noun form of Slavic, provides a seemingly uniﬁed category of languages that are actually distinct, the lyric mode has offered a unifying discourse of self and experience that the poem now proceeds to challenge. Once the pastoral of the ﬁrst section is ended, we come to realize it has operated as a representation of the land once labeled Yugoslavia, a repre214

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sentation omitting aspects of the experience of civil war. The problem of representation becomes immediately foregrounded in this second section, and the question of how to position and represent one’s self intensiﬁes in terms of national identity, prompted by the realization that the category of nationality is shifting: Entering Yugoslavia we aren’t there, we are straight into Slovenia instead late at night, frozen, instantly crazy with obsessive and terrible tenderness again, unable to ﬁnd my passport. Napoléon, sauveur of Illyria! whose monument in Ljubljana spells out in gleams of gold calligraphy, Our Liberty. Here videos of the summer bombings, entitled the Triumph of Slovenia, or How a Nation Awoke, are wrapped in paper jackets showing ﬁghter planes with yellow extension-lead cables, mortar smoke, on stalls with t-shirts, logos of the state. The country restaurant pipes a ﬁrst-time go at national music to its dining rooms, unclear what that should sound like; oompah Bavarian results, mortifying to the city friends, who disconnect its speakers, drawing down a ruddy glare of sausages, peasant style. The need to represent a national history as well as the ideological bias attending the shaping of a history, communicated by the videos of summer bombings that are renamed in jingoistic rhetoric, ﬁnd expression on an individual basis also: “In London / temporary exiles meet, some in despair about their forced new names / others worn down with dislocation, with explaining histories” (8). These “explaining histories” question the rhetoric of nationalism. One voice asks, “‘ Who says I must be ‘Bosnian’ now. / I grew up Yugoslavian.’” Another voice ambivalently asserts the political necessity of a language of nationalism arising out of material circumstances: “‘the Theory and the Lyric “I”

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deaths of twenty thousand make me this / that I don’t want to be. But that blood lost means I must take that name — / though not that politics — must be, no not a nationalist, yet ambiguously Croatian’” (8). In splicing together these voices and events, the poem comments on the process by which representation represents, acknowleging that history is the “stammer” of an “imperfect story” (9). Yet the “I” is part of the stammer, a mediating perspective that is neither neutral nor natural. The poem shifts from the voices of exiles to the speaking “I,” who recognizes, “I’m not these, never could be, am by accident of place of birth protected” (9). Emphasizing the positioning of the speaking “I,” the poem goes on to ask how we can come to understand experience if it can never be objectively or fully present in language — and what that means about the responsibility of witness in a world of atrocities that must be communicated. Can the “I” break through the framework of nationalism positioning her “across real distances / made semi-manageable through irony,” or is she helpless to repeat the “usual spectator’s cocky journey home through stupidness” (9)? The third and ﬁnal section of the poem, again in italics, offers no clear answer, although its elliptical movement suggests that no true unity of self exists but that moving beyond a yearning for “wholeness” and autonomy can lead to a selective construction of history that enables an “I”: The settling scar agrees to voice what seems to speak its earliest cut. A rage to be some wholeness gropes past damage that it half recalls — where it was, I will found my name. A hesitant gap now stretches its raw mouth: I will become this sex and Istrian. (9) Here is a voice created from a selected position among fragmentation and gaps, imaged as a stretching mouth, a raw mouth, that registers analogously with “this sex” in a lineated bracketing of feminized associations. Like the exiles, this female “I” must speak from the position of marginality and disenfranchisement. The poem’s lyric voice 216

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here signals a crossover between sexual and national processes of identiﬁcation, critiquing the transcendent impulse of the lyric form (the yearning for wholeness) while asserting a necessary “I” that explores fragmentation rather than wholeness as a politics of identiﬁcation and communication, iterating Riley’s comment that it is through “fragmentation and lack of a boundary” that others’ differences can be perceived (in Huk, “Denise Riley” 20). However, as the exiles’ words have expressed, a reiﬁed self-creation can be as destructive as it can be enabling, for the “white lights / from ﬂares” continue to illuminate the war-torn night, and “resonant cities are obliterated” (9–10) despite (or because of ?) the ﬁnal assertion of self that ends the poem: “ What is it that shapes us, whether / we will or not, that through these / / opened and reopened mouths that form / the hollow of a speaking wound, we / come to say, yes, now we are Illyrian” (10). While the allusion to Illyria, the ancient region of the Balkan peninsula that provides an image of historical and cultural connection, suggests a voicing of a collective subjectivity, it also holds suspended the question of whether this voicing of identity is an alternative to nationalism or merely another way of representing it. The problem, in the end, is whether or not the “we” whose mouths claim “we are Illyrian” can revise ideologies of nationalism through the primary recognition of how such a claim constitutes a system of representation rather than a transcendent truth. Through bringing together various voices, including the poet’s, with multiple discourses of self-representation, the poem’s formal strategies enact problems of representation involved with claiming or voicing an “I” at the individual level or a “we” on the national level, creating a tension between empirical categories of identity and discursive systems that “shape us.” The refusal to separate linguistic constructs from material contexts underlies Riley’s more vexed contemplations of the lyric, as in “Disintegrate Me,” which experiments with a dispersal of self in language and then reﬂects back upon that experiment. Part of a series of seven poems in a sequence entitled “Seven Strangely Exciting Lies,” the poem is dense with detail packed into long lines that abandon logical continuity or narrative.28 The poem opens with a self positioned as a transcriber and vehicle for external voices — “radio voices” heard from “my post a zealous secretary, as / transmitter of messages from the dead” (62). Riley the theorist has commented that Theory and the Lyric “I”

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“[p]oetry in its composing is an inrush of others’ voices. So ‘ﬁnding one’s voice’ must be an always frustrated search” (“Is There Linguistic Guilt?” 83). The poem suggests as much. Longing for an alternative to this polyglot subjectivity, the speaker questions how agency can be constructed within this paradigm: “[A]ll the while a slow hot cut spreads / to baste me now with questions of my own complicity in harm.” 29 A few lines later, the poem’s “I” veers from the self constituted by other voices into a romantic discourse, or a way to avoid the difﬁcult question of agency: could I believe instead in drained abandon, in mild drift out over some creamy acre studded with brick reds, to be lifted, eased above great sienna ﬁelds and born onward to be an opened stem or a standing hollow This melodious lyric discourse of transcendence modulates into lines that begin to stress the medium of language, signaled by an increasingly harsh and heavy prosody that invites a focus upon the text while growing resistant to easy referentiality in a clot of words: gulls emulsifying blackened earth striped and coiled under rock under burnt straw air fuzzed in breathy ﬁelds of coconut-sharp marine milk vessel ﬂopped at the lip ﬂicking down swathes of gorse ﬂowers In this movement from lyrical ease to linguistic texture, the poem foregrounds aspects of the “postmodern text” as described by American Language poet Bruce Andrews: “A semantic atmosphere or milieu, rather than the possessive individualism of reference” (in Nicholls 124). However, the speaker suddenly interrupts this text to comment upon the modulation between Romantic and postmodern textual strategies. Reasserting the speaking self who has been lost in the ﬂow of words, the poem asks whether the poststructural “death of self” isn’t just a rewarmed Romantic wish for transcendence: “No single word of this / is any more than decoration of an old selfmagnifying wish / to throw the self away so violently and widely that interrogation / has to pause since its chief suspect’s sloped off to be cloud, to be / wavery colour bands” (63). The poem ends by wondering whether this denial of self, posed as an avoidance of responsi218

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bility, is also a denial of necessary agency (“if I understood / my own extent of blame then that would prove me agent”) or an admittance of the “likely truth of helplessness . . . the humiliating lack of much control” (63). The poem’s investigation of self-reference as a lyrical strategy suggests Romana Huk’s overall point about Riley’s lyric interventions: “The fact that Riley’s forms have often remained within the realm of recognisable lyric (if distorted by other kinds of discourse) underscores her recognition that radical ‘departures’ . . . are misleading, and that the only possible way out of discursive binds is to ‘shufﬂe’ through them” (“Feminist Radicalism” 241). Throughout the volume, the questions and problems of agency posed by “Laibach Lyrik” or “Disintegrate Me” reoccur, overtly and subtly drawing from and forcing issues of gender. The poem “Dark Looks” (54) intervenes in contemporary theories of subjectivity and writing through relating textuality to gendered authority. Opening with a fashionable dismissal of the author (“ Who anyone is or I is nothing to the work”), the poem goes on to evoke a gender-coded dilemma: “The writer / properly should be the last person that the reader or the listener need think about/ yet the poet with her signature stands up trembling, grateful, mortally embarrassed/ and especially embarrassing to herself, patting her hair and twittering If, if only / I need not have a physical appearance! To be sheer air, and mousseline!” (54). Carol Watts, speaking of another poem, describes a similar moment that bespeaks a “romantic paradox” that is also, arguably, a postmodern paradox: “the desire for the loss of self and yet the prospect of extinction of consciousness that goes with it,” but here transformed, putting at stake “the externality of that lyric self in the world, the acknowledgement of its embodiedness” (164). The speaker’s concern with her own body counterpoints the initial denial of self in the text, pointing to the danger of erasing the materiality of the female body in embracing certain poststructuralist understandings of “text.” 30 The female body is again evoked in the poem through references to menstrual blood so that we are forced to consider the question of the poetic “I” in relationship to the positioning of the female body in discourse and culture. Within this framework, the speaker queries, “ What forces the lyric person to put itself on trial though it must stay rigorously uninteresting?” (54). Is dullness of self the modern manifestation of Romantic transcendence, covering over the material aspects of the world, providing a “veil for the monomaTheory and the Lyric “I”

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nia / which likes to feel itself helpless and touching at times?” (54). The ﬁnal lines of the poem revaluate the ﬁrst line’s assertion of the author’s absence from the text by intoning a humorously desperate plea to the reader not to forsake the “I” in the text: “So take me or leave me. No wait, I didn’t mean leave / me, wait, just don’t — or don’t ﬂick and skim to the foot of a page and then get up to go —” (54). The voice seems unclear about whether the “I” is the text or outside the text, appealing nonetheless to the text as a connective between reader and an “I” who menstruates while also offering a way to think of the textual constitution of both the “I” and its representation(s). Watts terms this kind of connective moment, motivated by a sense of “otherness of self” in language and dependent upon an embodied materialism, “an affective movement or ﬁgurative process [in Riley’s recent poetry] that charts the desire for recognition by the other” (165). In another context, Riley’s comments about the speaking “I” provide a useful gloss for this and other vexed apprehensions of the “I” in Mop Mop Georgette: “I can’t believe in a selfhood which is other than generated by language over time; yet can readily feel inauthentic if I speak of myself as a sociologised subject. This describing ‘I’ produces an anxiety which can’t be molliﬁed by any theory of its constructedness. . . . What purports to be ‘I’ speaks back to me, and I can’t quite believe what I hear it say” (“Is There Linguistic Guilt?” 81). Exploring possible poetics derived from encounters between material culture, contemporary theory, and feminist politics, Riley’s work, like Monk’s and Mulford’s, takes part in a signiﬁcant activity of cultural intervention interested in individuals’ discursive understandings of their lives and in culture’s constitutions of female selfhood. In her own theorizing the issue of identity in Am I That Name? Riley disclaims a collective identity for women, relocating identity politics from empirical collectivity to rhetoric: “[T ]he closeness between an identity and a derogatory identiﬁcation may, again always in speciﬁc contexts, resemble that between being a subject and the process of subjectiﬁcation.” Thus, she argues, the “question of the politics of identity could be rephrased as a question of rhetoric. Not so much of whether there was for a particular moment any truthful underlying rendition of ‘women’ or not, but of what the proliferations of addresses, descriptions, and attributions were doing” (“A Short History” 122). The “proliferations” and their processes of making mean220

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ing through the conventions of the speaking “I” occupy the textual operations of these poets, whose work refuses culture’s dominant expressions of the feminine while insisting upon gender’s inseparable link to the project of language experimentation and the necessary reconsiderations of the lyric “I.”

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Notes introduction 1 The 1998 conference held at Barnard College on women’s poetry is a good example of this positioning, as is the conference title, “ Where Lyric Tradition Meets Language Poetry Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry by Women.” 2 For an exception, occurring early in these debates, see especially Hank Lazer’s 1988 essay on Rachel Blau DuPlessis included in Opposing Poetries, Volume Two: Readings, which wonderfully brought together different strains of innovative writing to fully include feminist efforts at a time when feminism and innovation were most often not juxtaposed except by women/ feminist writers. More recently, the collection of essays edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue (We Who Love to Be Astonished ) strikes me as exceptional in its full integration of feminist perspectives into discussions of Language-oriented writers, albeit all the poets discussed are women. Nonetheless, critical treatments of women poets do not necessarily evoke feminist thinkers or paradigms in framing arguments about the “experimental.” Hinton and Hogue offer a valuable group of essays that expand understandings of experimental practice through substantive attention to feminist poetics. 3 Many theorists have reviewed the encounters between academic feminism and contemporary continental theory in the 1980s, beginning most famously with Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics. For an instructively speciﬁc recount, see Jane Gallop, Around 1981.

1: lyric conversations and interventions 1 Fraser’s poem originally appeared in Notes Preceding Trust 36– 40. It also appears in il cuore: the heart, Selected Poems, 1970 –1995 79– 82. 2 Kim Whitehead’s study The Feminist Poetry Movement valuably charts the role of feminist poets and poetry in the 1970s women’s movement, exploring “how feminist poets write out of a theorized poetics.” However, the bracketing of formally innovative poetries from this history disallows a fuller story of feminist poetic production and reception. 3 Armantrout’s essay “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity” was written in response to a 1988 comment by Ron Silliman on experimental poetics and gender. Silliman commented on “poets who do not identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history, for they have instead been its objects. The narrative of history has led not to their self-

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actualization, but to their exclusion and domination. These writers and readers — women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the marginal — have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to whom is the subject of these conventions, illuminates the relation between form and audience” (Silliman, “Poetry and the Politics of the Subject: A Bay Area Sampler,” Socialist Review 18.3 [1988]: 63, in Armantrout 287– 88). See Ann Vickery’s study of women experimental poets for an excellent introduction to the various groups and their links to particular publishing ventures that emerged since the 1970s in North America. Vickery goes on to observe that “to some degree, this double marginalization is now being reversed. While Language writing is still undervalued in its feminist potential, women’s contributions to Language writing have been increasingly recognized and celebrated in the past few years.” Nevertheless, in altering critical categories for reading these poets, much work needs to be done in tracing particularly feminist inﬂections, traditions, and strategies that have powerfully shaped ideas about and practices of poetry in recent years. Critical narratives of innovative poetry continue to centralize the activities of a few men, with women tagged on as they ﬁt into the paradigm, as exempliﬁed in Marjorie Perloff’s keynote address, “After Language: Theory and the Question of Transparency,” at the 1998 Barnard College conference, “Between Lyric and Innovation: Contemporary North American Women’s Poetry.” (Perloff’s address can be accessed at www.wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/after_langpo .html.) See Vickery’s introduction for a suggestive list of critical studies important to formulating ideas about Language writing but that do so at the expense of women writers and, especially, feminist ideas. A recent case in point about both the centrality of Language poetry’s formulations of the subject and its problematization, especially by feminist writers, is the British-published collection of essays, Contemporary Women’s Poetry, edited by Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones. Included in this diverse collection are essays by Mark on American Language poetry and women precursors; by Clair Wills on Fanny Howe and the lyric subject in religious/spiritual poetry; by Carol Watts on the interpellated subject and the lyric in Denise Riley’s poetics; by Harriet Tarlo on the use of pronouns and lyric signiﬁcation in contemporary avant-garde women like DuPlessis; and an essay by myself on subjectivity and nationalist discourse in Carol Ann Duffy’s work (extended in chapter 3 of this book). For a more extended chronology and narrative of these early Language discussions, centered around these ﬁgures and publications, see Marjorie Perloff, “After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discon-

Notes to Pages 6–9

tents.” Quite often, the more overt dismissals of the lyric subject have taken place in establishing distinctions between Language writing as an intellectual project and the “workshop” poem dominating academic creative writing programs by the seventies, privileging a self-revelatory poetics of epiphany. The so-called workshop poem is highly criticized in these contexts. See Beach (Poetic Culture) for an extended study of institutional conditions involved in the growth of the creative writing workshop and challenges to it as a primary mode of poetic instruction. 8 For discussions of the lyric against which Perloff positions her own poststructurally informed views, see Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker, eds., Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, a collection criticized by Perloff for omitting poetry informed by contemporary theory. By the late nineties, Perloff had criticized an ahistoricized reading of the Romantic lyric she sees informing recent discussions of the lyric, although in many cases critical uses of the Romantic mode draw upon her own earlier formulations as here summarized. See her “A Response,” concluding Mark Jeffreys, ed., New Deﬁnitions of Lyric: Theory, Technology, and Culture, in which she accuses the essayists of “conﬂating two things: the attenuated, neo-romantic lyric of the later twentieth century . . . and the actual English lyric of the Romantic period” (247). 9 Kinereth Meyer’s essay “Speaking and Writing the Lyric ‘I’” argues against recent tendencies to describe the lyric self in dichotomous terms as either the transcendent, expressive “I” (Romantic) or the “I” as a ﬁctive construct (postmodern). Meyer regards the lyric as a “meeting ground” (131) for the voiced presence of direct speech and the ﬁctionality of utterance marked by self-referentiality in language. In selecting poems seemingly antithetical to the language-centered projects discussed by Perloff while employing theoretical concepts and vocabulary that often coincide with hers, Meyer’s essay provides an interesting example of the critical response to the discussion that had emerged by the late eighties of the interactions between Language-centered poetry and theory. It includes a helpful survey of scholarship on the lyric up to its 1989 publication date. 10 Peter Nicholls surveys the varieties of postmodern and poststructural positions on the self, arguing, “Language writing is most assimilable to the broad outlines of the postmodernism debate when it mounts a sceptical interrogation of the subject. The main ideas here are familiar from recent Continental theory: the subject is constituted in language and is eccentric to the language s/he speaks (Lacan); the subject is unstable or ‘in process’ (Kristeva); the subject is ‘interpellated’ by ideology, hence subjectivity is an ideological effect (Althusser)” (124 –25). For discussions by American Language poets on subjectivity and language, see Andrews and Bernstein; Silliman, ed., In the American Tree and The New Sentence; Perelman, “The First

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Person”; Bernstein, A Poetics; Susan Howe; and the 1991 issue of Poetics Journal (vol. 9) devoted to “The Person.” For commentary by British poets, a good source is Denise Riley, ed., Poets on Writing: Britain, 1970 –1991; see particularly Ken Edwards, “Grasping the Plural,” which interestingly draws in part upon ideas articulated by Perelman in “The First Person.” See Huk, “In AnOther Pocket,” for a provocative critique of a paradoxically similar move toward “universality” in avant-garde Language theories and practices claiming to resist such transcendence through disavowing the “located or peculiar ‘self’” while ironically drawing upon an American national mythos of “reconstructable identity” that celebrates “a kind of oxymoronic collective atomization that at every level enables the individual to imagine herself/himself reassembling dissociated fragments of pooled cultures independent of historical limits”: “The position of the American subject as self-creator located in an equalizing mesh of differences that ironically obviate difference has had an enormously powerful impact on the relationship drawn in postmodern poetry between artists and materials — the latter including ‘race’ and ‘history’” (25). Huk’s argument is that race gets elided within a “dehistoricized linguistic landscape” that ironically replicates the “erasure of particular national and raced histories” that it seemingly opposes in a universalized, Romantic notion of individualism (26). Allison Cummings represents the narrative trend in lyric through Rita Dove’s poetry; the multicultural trend through Joy Harjo’s; and the metapoetic through Susan Mitchell’s. Susan Howe’s work has generated much useful discussion of lyric innovation, including the aforementioned essay by Perloff, “Language Poetry,” as well as the recent book-length treatment of Howe by Rachel Tzvia Back, Led by Language: The Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe. See Alan Golding for an insightful reading of Howe’s feminist poetics and her visual experimentation or “graphicity.” For an earlier assessment of Howe’s experimental lyricism, powerfully argued as a gendered critique of “the apprehension of [masculine] power,” see DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar (133). Of course, Howe’s own essays and interviews offer stunning commentary on formal experimentation, the lyric, and gender. See The Birthmark (1993) and her interview with Lynn Keller. Friedman’s book Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter effectively resituates the argument of this particular essay within a theory of “locational feminism” that seeks to “reinvent a singular feminism that incorporates myriad and often conﬂicting cultural and political formations in a global context,” thus assuming “difference without reifying or fetishizing it” (4): “The feminism in the singular that I advocate assumes a locational epistemology based not upon static or abstract deﬁnition but

Notes to Pages 12–21

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rather upon the assumption of changing historical and geographical speciﬁcities that produce different feminist theories, agendas, and political practices” (5). See Bergvall for a rich discussion of concerns about theoretical “feminism” and experimental writing by women, especially concerning intersections between “identity-seeking,” form, and gender (33). Simpson’s study is particularly concerned with relations of gender, language, and knowledge in a group of modernist and contemporary women poets, drawing valuably upon poststructural and feminist theory that investigates epistemology. Consequences of such framing persist. Perloff’s “After Language Poetry,” from which these comments are taken, complains that “a good bit of soft theorizing” is taking place among women poets, citing the post-Language efforts of women poets to counteract their exclusion from “earlier formulations of poetics” (8). Interestingly, Perloff credits (with good reason) the efforts of Lee Hickman’s journal Temblor for advancing women poets associated with L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E, initiated in 1985, while never mentioning HOW(ever)’s contemporaneous efforts to include not only the women of that particular movement but a broader range of women writing experimentally. The electronic archive at Rutgers University contains all issues of HOW(ever) and can be accessed through the website for HOW2, the secondgeneration of HOW(ever) begun online in 1998. See www.departments .bucknell.edu/stadler_how2. See a full discussion of Fraser’s engagement with these various lineages in chapter 2. For other discussions of the journal, see Frost, which complements this study in identifying feminist trajectories within avant-garde formulations, although Frost devotes valuable discussion to modernist and black arts movements as well. Also see Vickery, who provides a history of the journal and a description of its format and goals while also locating tensions within the journal around questions of form and academic critical writing. Vickery also discusses the journal’s interaction with French feminist theory and a “wide variety of feminist practices” (125). See also Gevirtz, who helped edit the journal. Her essay places the editing of HOW(ever) within the psychoanalytic and historic context of androcentric anxiety over women writing. Hogue’s essay on Fraser offers particularly useful insights into the reclaiming of women modernists performed by the journal and discusses poetic relationships between Fraser and H.D. For a rich set of autobiographical-critical insights, see Fraser’s essays in Translating the Unspeakable and also “The Jump: Editing HOW(ever).” See also the collection of essays edited by Jeanne Heuving on HOW(ever) found in HOW2 1.5

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(spring 2001), including essays by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Elisabeth Frost, Ann Vickery, and myself. Fraser, HOW(ever) 1.1: 1. All further references to HOW(ever) will be parenthetically cited by volume number and page. In a discussion about the journal’s introduction of forgotten women modernists that took place during a panel discussion at the “Poetry and the Public Sphere” conference (Rutgers, 1997) DuPlessis helpfully commented upon the strange experience of atemporality in reading many of them for the ﬁrst time, so that earlier generations of women came to seem like contemporaries. Peters’s hostility toward Language-oriented poetry in general ﬁnds expression in another review of HOW(ever) (1.4), printed in the Small Press Review (December 1984): “This is yet another pretentious spin-off from the exothermic stuff smothering the Bay Area these days — Language Poetry. Fraser’s journal exudes a smugness characteristic of most journals meant for in-groups of whatever gender — her group is women ‘into’ Language. . . . This is all quite unreadable” (6). In personal correspondence, Fraser discusses the “uphill struggle” of “finding/ locating” an audience: “I always put ten copies at Small Press Trafﬁc in SF and another bunch with Small Press Distribution in Berkeley (for mail orders). We funded it through subscriptions . . . our list ran between 300 – 400 at most. The low subscription rates never completely covered our printing and mailing costs. . . . [I]t was total improvisation, every step of the way” (April 28, 1997). In “The Jump: Editing HOW(ever),” Fraser writes that “it was the most difﬁcult task to lure anyone into something speculative, partial, ‘informal,’ i.e. not sanctioned by the fully-developed, footnoted format. I sent out a large number of personal letters of friendly invitation to feminist scholars and essayists whose work I discovered in my reading. We handed out ﬂyers at regional and national MLA sessions and at conferences on H.D. and E.D. and V.W., inviting contributions . . . but with mostly silence in return” (46). Vickery notes the inclusion of Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Carolyn Burke, both interested in theories of écriture féminine and poststructuralism, as editors who proved “invaluable in shaping an intertext between the academic and the poetic” and in infusing the journal with contemporary theoretical concerns (122). Fraser also edited Feminist Poetics: A Consideration of the Female Construction of Language, a series of essays by feminist critics and graduate students organized by Fraser through a graduate seminar at San Francisco State University. Focusing on then-forgotten women modernists, the essays seek to

Notes to Pages 27–35

bring the theories of French feminists to bear upon the poetic works, developing one of the earliest published attempts to integrate poststructuralism, feminism, and women’s poetry and exploring the new theoretical tools with which these poets could be read. Like the essays in HOW(ever), the essays in Feminist Poetics are often speculative, exploratory, and openly invitational to the nontheoretically inclined reader. 28 Respondents in this ﬁrst forum include Kornelia Freitag, Cynthia Hogue, Hannah Mockel-Rieke, Frances Presley, Linda Kinnahan, Meredith Stricker, Meredith Quartermain, Ann Vickery, Nicole Markotic, Linda Russo, and Elisabeth Frost. Each forum in subsequent issues is edited by a guest editor, focusing on a particular question or issue. 29 I also do not mean to suggest seamless agreement among the members of the editorial board about the project of HOW2. Russo and Vickery, in particular, raise important questions about what it means to be “genderspeciﬁc” in the journal’s focus and editorial selectivity or within the context of Internet publishing.

2: lyric discourse, the arts, and the avant-garde 1 Dickey’s quote is from a book review that compares Sylvia Plath’s The Colossus and Barbara Guest’s Poems (758, 764). Fraser’s quote is from “The Tradition of Marginality” (24). DuPlessis is quoted from her recent review of Guest’s Selected Poems (23). 2 Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller, eds., The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2000). 3 Guest’s Selected Poems (1995) is preceded by numerous books of poetry, a biography of H.D., a novel (Seeking Air), a variety of collaborative works with artists, and art criticism (primarily for Art News). 4 See Lundquist, “The Fifth Point of a Star,” for an excellent articulation of Guest’s role as a “deﬁning and foundational ‘member’” of the New York school. Lundquist identiﬁes Guest’s inclusion and exclusion from major representations of the New York school since the 1960s. She is especially critical of the recent study by David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1998), which omits Guest from any consideration. As Lundquist eloquently argues, such erasures of Guest’s work clearly signal a continuing critical neglect, despite more positive signs of critical reappraisal elsewhere. 5 As editor of HOW(ever), Fraser published Guest’s work. Additionally, she discusses Guest in two essays on the topic of women experimental writers, “The Tradition of Marginality” and “Line. On the Line. Lining up. Lined with. Between the Lines. Bottom Line.” Fraser’s essay on Seeking

Notes to Pages 38– 47

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Air, Guest’s novel, appears as “One Hundred and Three Chapters of Little Times: Collapsed and Transﬁgured Moments in the Fiction of Barbara Guest,” Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, ed. Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989). Fraser notes that, despite having published at least four books by the time of the anthology and many poems in New York school magazines, Guest’s work was unfavorably judged by the men putting together the collection: “Bill Berkson, who advised Shapiro and Padgett, explained to me later: ‘ We didn’t think her work was that interesting.’” DuPlessis does note that Guest was included in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (1960) and its revision, The Postmoderns (1982), indicating a degree of recognition within a post-1945 American avant-garde. Additionally, John Bernard Myers included a substantive selection of her work in The Poets of the New York School (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1969). See Lundquist, “The Fifth Point of a Star,” for further discussion of Myers’s regard for Guest. Sara Lundquist’s valuably updated essay on Guest for the 1998 Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) (1998), which I encountered three years after the National Poetry Foundation conference during which I ﬁrst advanced this critical analysis of Dickey’s disdain, furthers the evidence identifying the particulars of a “critical climate ill equipped to appreciate” Guest’s “abstract, experimental lyrics.” Lundquist cites a 1968 review of The Blue Stairs by James Atlas (Poetry [March 1969]) that “repeatedly stressed his sense that the poems were chaotic, lacking in narrative clarity, disconnected, confused, and marked by ‘the uneasy quality of her speech’” (“Barbara Guest” 164). I quote here from the 1980 DLB, which was revised and updated in 1998. The more recent DLB essay on Guest is by Sara Lundquist. The issue of this feminist “divide,” which includes both material consequences for poets and a tendency to oversimplify a set of easy categories within which to place poets, has been usefully analyzed, debated, and problematized. In gatherings such as the Barnard College symposium on women’s poetry, “ Where Innovation Meets Lyric Tradition” (1998), and the Rutgers University conference, “Poetry and the Public Sphere” (1996), poets and critics have been involved in discussions of “feminist poetics” in terms of literary histories, reading practices, etc. For a useful and clarifying delineation of issues and their complexities, see Lynn Keller’s essay on Alice Fulton, “The ‘Then Some Inbetween.’” All references to “Belgravia” are taken from Guest, Selected Poems 13–14. I want to stress here that I am describing a particular reading of Plath from this time that recognized confessional movements but disregarded (and denigrated) linguistic inventiveness, as Dickey’s review suggests.

Notes to Pages 48– 60

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Fraser herself is quick to point to the sustaining qualities of Plath’s poetry outside of the conventional label of the “confessional” poet. Fraser met Judy Starbuck (now Lureschi), the then-separated wife of poet George Starbuck, in San Francisco, describing their friendship growing out of a “shared isolation as young mothers who were also trying to keep our art and craft alive.” Viewing a portfolio of etchings and prints brought by Starbuck to San Francisco, Fraser found that they “seemed to speak to the strangeness and marginality I was feeling in this new place of ﬂower children & Janis Joplin straining her voice beyond human limits & toilet training,” and the two women combined Fraser’s poems and Starbuck’s etchings “arbitrarily” into a book. The etchings necessitated the largepage format. Despite the role of accident in the physical production of this text, the resulting page, and its relationship to a visual/verbal intertext, inﬂuences the reception or reading of the text within discourses of poetics and suggests the degree to which the volume reveals Fraser’s encounters with new poetics in the sixties. Among these, Spicer, Oppen, Duncan, and Olson seem to comingle in the volume’s movement away from an expressive ego and toward a textual attentiveness, enhanced by the material ﬁeld of the page: “Olson . . . gave me the page and history and the archeology of the body. All this was just beginnning to seep in, when I wrote that book.” Lureschi has gone on to work as an oil painter and to incorporate fabric and stitchery in “stitched/collage paintings” (Fraser, personal correspondence, June 2000). Fraser’s ﬁrst volume of poetry, the 1966 Change of Address (also by Kayak), includes visuals also, as each page of poetry is accompanied by tightly penned ink drawings of singular objects, reminiscent of anatomical or botanical illustrations. In her essays, Fraser identiﬁes Rich’s importance to her in the 1960s both as a helpful mentor and as a poet whose focus on women’s experience inﬂuenced her own writing. During her years in New York, Fraser often attended readings by Rich. Later, points of tension would arise around Rich’s objections to a feminist avant-garde, which she feared would not reach an audience effectively. These are descriptives that Fraser uses consistently in her essays to revalue and talk about the alternative writing methods of Woolf, Richardson, and de Beauvoir, among other female writers whose prose models inﬂuenced her thinking about tracking interiority through language. Keller’s reading of this poem identiﬁes the two ﬁgures as mother and (male) child, seeing this relationship as suggestive of the “reign” of masculine power within which the mother is expected to operate. Keller presented this reading in a plenary address entitled “‘just one of / the girls: normal in the extreme’: Kathleen Fraser, Fanny Howe, and Rosmarie Wal-

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drop Writing in the ’60s” at the National Poetry Foundation conference on North American poetry of the sixties, University of Maine at Orono, June–July 2000, and later published in Differences. 18 Ibid.

3: “our visible selves” 1 The “i-mage,” Philip explains, displaces the Western, individualized “I” with the “Rastafarian practice of privileging the ‘I’ in many words” (She Tries Her Tongue 12). As Paul Naylor explains, “privileging the ‘I’ in her ‘i-mages’ is a crucial act in the project of ‘altering the way a society perceives itself,’ particularly when the ‘I’ has been subjugated in that society” (177). Naylor’s chapter on Philip provides an intriguing analysis of the “cultural intervention” of her poetry through its exploration of “linguistic, historical, and political conditions of contemporary culture,” offering a “contemporary investigative poetry” rather than “poetic representations of personal experiences” (9). 2 Carr and Homans are responding speciﬁcally to concerns voiced by Valerie Smith’s groundbreaking essay, “Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the ‘Other’” (1989), which identiﬁed problematic trends in white feminist encounters with postmodern theory, in particular, a debate taken up variously by others in thoughtful and valuable ways. See, for example, Elizabeth Abel, “Black Writing, White Reading,” and Sara Suleri, “ Woman Skin Deep.” 3 Poems from each book do appear elsewhere in different contexts that change or even eliminate the visual performance each text, taken as a whole, enacts. 4 It is no accident that such innovative feminist work ﬁnds acceptance primarily with small presses. Kelsey Street Press, which publishes Arcade, is particularly committed to promoting and supporting innovative poetry by women, and their editions are noteworthy in advancing the visual aspect of contemporary feminist poetics. 5 All quotes from Hunt’s work and visual images by Saar are taken from this volume, unless otherwise noted. Page numbers are indicated parenthetically in the text. 6 The quote in reference to Hunt’s ﬁrst book is by Charles Bernstein, found on the back cover of Local History. 7 In this essay, hooks focuses upon Alison Saar as an example of such decolonizing practice. See also in the same volume her interview with Saar, “Talking Art with Alison Saar” (22–34). 8 In this essay, Hunt discusses contiguity as “textual and social practice,” referring to the relationship of oppositional groups and textual practices. 9 See, for example, Carby for a discussion of urbanization and the “dis232

Notes to Pages 79–93

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course of black female sexuality” attending the migration of black, working-class women to American cities (124). Carby’s essay, focusing upon the twenties, nonetheless carries forward important implications for the “major discursive elements” continuing to deﬁne black female urban behavior as pathological in the public mind and policy decisions (117). See hooks, “The Poetics” 117, for discussion of this point. Also, my thanks to Cara Cilano for alerting me to the context of Josephine Baker in relation to representations of the raced and gendered body. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observor: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1990), 352, quoted in Wiegman 36. For an interesting treatment of the connections between contemporary conservative Christian movements and capitalist ideology, see Kintz. In a chapter entitled “God’s Intentions for the Multinational Corporation: Seeing Reality True,” Kintz traces the “narrative of market fundamentalism that claims that the market, when allowed to work freely, will naturally provide the best and fairest of all possible worlds” and that deﬁnes the corporation in “spiritual terms as a natural extension of God’s natural law” (218). For discussion of the production of the body within capitalist frameworks, see Lowe. His treatment of race as a “discursive construction with real effects” takes place primarily in the chapter “Social Reproduction Practices” (102). “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy” 10 –25. All quotes from Philip are taken from She Takes Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks unless otherwise noted. Here Philip quotes Stanley Burnshaw, The Seamless Web (New York: George Braziller, 1970). Prior to devoting herself full-time to her writing, Philip obtained both an M.A. and a law degree in Canada (following a degree in economics at the University of the West Indies) and practiced immigration law. In part, she moved to Canada to pursue a writing career, which met early on with difﬁculties in publishing her race-conscious but experimental work. Philip’s experience with the Canadian literary establishment has been the subject of various of her essays and commentaries, in which she discusses problems of racism and access. See Hunter for a discussion of Philip’s struggles with “the social and political roots of marginalization” as a black writer in Canada, such as her “ﬁghts about racism with PEN or with the Writer’s Union . . . or . . . the controversy at the Women’s Press (Toronto) that split the Press Collective” (273). For Philip’s comments, see the “ Where They’re At” section of “Gut Issues in Babylon: Racism and AntiRacism in the Arts,” Fuse (April–May 1989): 125; “The White Soul of Canada,” Spectacular Failures (spring 1991): 63–77; and the essays in her collection Frontiers.

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16 Particularly for discussions of the African female body, colonialism, and the diaspora in Philip’s work, see Carr; Davies. Carr argues that “Philip theorizes this body as a corporeal text that refused to submit to the cultural deformation of the colonial process” (74). Davies discusses Philip within the context of migration narratives and diasporic experience, paying particular attention to the “theory of language . . . embedded” in Philip’s poetry, which offers “ways of reading arrange of signifying practices which give voice to material and historical speciﬁcities of Black female experience” (164). While my discussion certainly overlaps with those of other critics who have been drawn to Philip’s linguistic practices, the focus of my discussion emphasizes the operations of the visual as a structural and conceptual force in relation to language, the body, and history. 17 Carr’s treatment of Philip is extremely useful in its goal of theorizing the work of language in She Tries Her Tongue that resists an ahistoricizing strain in postmodern Language theory. 18 My gratitude to Danette DiMarco and Cara Cilano, whose respective dissertations treat Philip’s works with insight and complexity. I have learned much from their work on this poet. 19 Wiegman brilliantly charts the ascension of biology and especially of comparative anatomy in this regard, building upon the work of theorists like Sander Gilman. Particularly interested in the correlation of nineteenthcentury science with “metaphysical hierarchies” in relation to the mother ﬁgure, Laura Doyle extends a discussion of comparative anatomy into the twentieth-century fascination with eugenics. 20 Carr comments that “[f ]orm, like language, becomes a kind of allegory for the fragmentation and disruption of ‘being’ for the African female subject” and rightly insists that the historical-social matrix of the diverse cultural contexts that are “invoked and recontextualized” by Philip’s formal practice cannot be separated from it (81). Carr is particularly interested in a formal hybridity emerging from the “collisions” between the demotic and standard English. Philip herself often comments upon her “excitement . . . as a writer” to engage the “confrontation between the formal and the demotic within the text itself” (“Trying Her Tongue” 116). 21 For a discussion focused more exclusively upon the relationship between gender, race, and silence that is particularly attentive to Philip’s uses of the Caribbean demotic, see Marriott; for a discussion of relationships between space, decolonization, and language, see Savory.

4: the rhetoric of self, nation, and economics 1 A number of critics have usefully explored Duffy’s discursive and feminist strategies. See Gregson’s Bakhtinian discussion of discursive inter234

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sections in Duffy’s poetry; see Dimarco for a discussion of problems of representation regarding gender; see Thomas’s analysis of poststructuralist elements in Duffy’s poetry; see Kinnahan for a discussion of gender, language, and poetic form; and see Kennedy’s analysis of Duffy’s “poetry as media” situated within a generation of poets that this critic reads as engaging public discourse through postmodern means. Robinson offers a brief but useful discussion identifying some of Duffy’s themes and linguistic strategies in his chapter, “Declarations of Independence: Some Responses to Feminism,” which surveys a group of women poets, including Fleur Adcock, Anne Stevenson, Medbh McGuckian, Fiona PittKethley, and Duffy. British forms of New Right discourse and ideology have parallels in other Western capitalist countries, especially France and the United States. See Levitas and Seidel for discussions of the varied uses of the term. See Anna Marie Smith, who, among others, positions Enoch Powell as a central spokesperson in the emergence of the New Right, which “advocated a full-scale attack on the welfare state, a rejection of the ‘social’ consensus approach to economic problems and the elimination of ‘permissiveness’ in educational and state policies” (175). Rees-Jones’s critical treatment of Duffy helps to demonstrate ways of bridging the mainstream and the experimental. Interestingly, though, the list of recent and forthcoming titles in this series clearly indicates its canonical leanings (though inclusively so, particularly in regard to women writers), and Duffy’s inclusion signiﬁes a critical appraisal (from a publishing standpoint) of her “ﬁt” within a British canon. Likewise, Kennedy’s study, New Relations, constructs a “New Generation” of poets valued for both accessibility and plurality whose poetry consciously engages in the public arena and whose “Britishness,” while indicating a newly diverse plurality, nonetheless gains legitimacy in its lineage from Philip Larkin, at least as constructed by Kennedy. I am particularly indebted to Rees-Jones’s careful examination of Duffy’s uses of the dramatic monologue, of lesbian eroticism, and of Catholic resonances. For a particularly scathing and suspicious condemnation of the critical construction and marketing of the “New Generation” as the new center for British poetry, see Iain Sinclair’s introduction to the anthology Conductors of Chaos. He writes that a “recent (and sinister) phenomenon, the ‘New Generation’ poets, have arrived in our midst like pod people. . . . They were invented by marketing men, hyped into existence with seemingly ﬁctitious occupations and previous histories dreamt up by Poetry Society copywriters” (xvi).

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6 Huk refers to Linda France, ed., Sixty Women Poets (Newcastle-upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1993). 7 Tuma’s comments arise within a discussion of the critical treatment, particularly by Kennedy, of the “New Generation” poets in Britain. His description here speaks generally to the group of poets associated with this designation, not to Duffy in particular, although her work ﬁts his description and is included in Kennedy’s grouping. 8 For prior discussions of “experience” and language in Duffy’s work, for example, see Dimarco; Gregson; Jane E. Thomas; and Kinnahan, “Look.” Kennedy’s attention to sociopolitical contexts in relation to these issues is useful, although necessarily limited by the range of poets he treats. In a chaper focusing on “Poetry as Media,” Kennedy groups Duffy with other poets such as W. N. Herbert, Ken Smith, Duncan Bush, Carol Rumens, and Maura Dooley to explore their common “concern with how the self is constructed and with how the factors that shape that construction inﬂuence political and social engagement” (218). He deﬁnes “poetry as media” as “concerned explicitly with the social and political fabric of contemporary living and with the pressing problems of our age such as racism or unemployment” and regards Duffy’s poems as providing an “analytical approach to language [that] is turned on the language of politics and especially the nature of that language in the 1980s and 1990s” (228). 9 Duffy claims no connection to Stein, and, when asked in an interview by Andrew McAllister whether she liked the earlier writer, she responded, “No, I think she’s lousy. I have quoted her, but it was tongue in cheek. . . . I’m not a good fan of hers” (76). Nonetheless, Stein’s interest in the materiality of language is clearly shared by Duffy, although one cannot claim Stein as a conscious origin or characterize her linguistic strategies as comparable to Duffy’s, which maintain a stronger allegiance to the referential functions of language. Other critics such as Alan Robinson have remarked upon Duffy’s use of a “Steinlike syntax . . . [that] relentlessly emphasises the opacity of language” (198). 10 For an excellent and extended treatment of this poem in relation to the tradition of the dramatic monologue, especially as it descends to us through Browning, see DiMarco. I am grateful to DiMarco’s scholarship on Duffy in this respect, both in her article on Duffy and Browning, and in her unpublished dissertation, a comparative study of Victorian male writers and twentieth-century female poets who rewrite them. 11 All further references to the poem are from Standing Female Nude 46. 12 Thanks to my wise and well-traveled colleague and tea drinker, Anne Brannen, for this observation. 13 Neoclassical economics refers to economic theory that arose, alongside 236

Notes to Pages 136– 48

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corporate capitalism, in the 1870s and 1880s in England, Europe, and America, building upon but altering older frameworks of political economy. Stressing the notion of “economic man” as autonomous and rational, neoclassical theories of the market, exchange, and agency have held dominance in post-1945 America and, more recently, in England. Feminist economic theory argues that neoclassical theory either erases women as economic agents or considers them (particularly in post-1970 versions) only within the family unit. Additionally, neoclassical claims to objectivity invalidate the historical and political embeddedness of ideas argued by feminist methodologies. Recent feminist critiques of neoclassical theory include Randy Albelda, Economics and Feminism: Disturbances in the Field (New York: Twayne, 1997); Michele A. Pujol, Feminism and AntiFeminism in Early Economic Thought (Brookﬁeld, VT: Edward Elgar, 1992); Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, eds., Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (Chicago: U of Chigaco P, 1993). See also Paul Ekins and Manfred Max-Neef, Real-Life Economics: Understanding Wealth Creation (London: Routledge, 1992). Levitas quotes from Omega File: Scottish Policy 1. The reports were published individually in 1983– 85, then as a collection in 1985; page references are to individual reports. Members of Duffy’s family were Labour supporters, and she has cited “Politico” in relation to her grandfather’s political activism. In an interview, she comments, “My father stood as Labour candidate at the 1983 General Election. He stood at Leigh in Lancashire and should have got it but they all voted for the Alliance. . . . [B]oth my father and grandfather were heavily involved in politics. In fact my grandad was imprisoned during the Depression for political action.” Reﬂecting on the impact of Thatcher on Labour, she mused in 1988, “ Well we don’t now have a Labour Party. As we speak they’re in Blackpool trying to rewrite what socialism is. She’s done it hasn’t she?” (McAllister 71). Belsey analyzes Hayek’s “teleological conception of the market order of capitalism” and positions him as a central ﬁgure for Thatcherite conservatives (192). The quote is taken from Scruton, “The Case against Feminism,” Observer, May 22, 1983, 27. Quotations from the British Nationality Bill 1981, taken from Hansard, June 4, 1981, quoted in Bhabha, Klug, and Shutter, 47. See ibid. for an excellent analysis of immigration policy and women in Britain, particularly of the gender inequities in immigration law. See Radstone on feminist uses of nostalgia that work against the constrainingly conservative forms of nostalgia. About Duffy, she proposes

Notes to Pages 149–57

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her work “interrogates rather than celebrates nostalgia,” particularly through what she sees as “its evocation of the hyper-reality of lost homeland and lost love” (56). Original source is Victoria Gillick, Dear Mrs. Gillick (Basingstoke, 1985), 71–72. See Lovenduski and Randall 44 – 45 for discussion of the conﬂict between Gillick’s campaign and Thatcher’s opposition to government control in this area. The second chapter of this study is devoted to feminism and Thatcherism in the 1980s. See Anna Marie Smith 208 –14 for her analysis of the “absence of the lesbian in criminal discourse,” an erasure assuming that lesbians do not have an autonomous sexuality or sexual desire, and her discussion of the demonization of the lesbian in Thatcherism’s representation of the black lesbian and the lesbian as parent. The argument of this section is situated within recent discussions of New Right ideology and discourse in relation to postempire immigration issues. This quote is taken from a pivotal 1979 campaign speech by Thatcher, in which her stand against immigration greatly increased her popularity among voters. Foundational studies of these interrelated issues of race and law and order include Gilroy; Hall et al.; Goulbourne, Black Politics; and most recently, Anna Marie Smith. The term black is often used by scholars studying British immigration to designate “people with both African and Asian backgrounds in Britain” and to “denote people who experience discrimination based on their (non-white) color” (Goulbourne, Black Politics, 9). Especially when referencing scholars using this term, and unless otherwise speciﬁed, this essay assumes “black” to mean “of color” in Britain. Powell used this ﬁrst metaphor in a speech in Birmingham, April 20, 1968. See Anna Marie Smith 23 for discussion of the terms black invasion and black invader. Hall et al. include numerous similar quotes from conservative members of Parliament opposed to immigration. As Gill Seidel persuasively demonstrates, it is not necessary to “allege an organizational connection” between populist groups and conservative leaders, the latter of whom protested any association with such groups as the facist National Front (114, emphasis added). More signiﬁcant is to “illustrate the discursive continuities and overlaps” among “a whole range of xenophobic, racist and sexist discourses,” whether framed in populist or academic language (114, 113, emphasis added).

Notes to Pages 160 – 66

30 The phrase and concept of ethnic nationalism is taken from Goulbourne, Ethnicity. I am greatly indebted to his historical and rhetorical analysis of immigration in Britain. 31 See also the essays in Levitas for close analysis of the language and concepts of intellectuals and economists inﬂuencing New Right politics. 32 See Anna Marie Smith and Goulbourne, Ethnicity, for useful discussions of this “recoding.” 33 The 1981 Nationality Act created three categories: the British citizen, whose parent or grandparent is born or naturalized in the U.K.; the British Dependent Territories citizen, who is born or naturalized or had a parent born or naturalized in a British colony and who possesses rights only in that colony; the British Overseas citizen, who is granted U.K. citizenship by virtue of living in colonies that became independent but may nevertheless suffer entry restrictions. See Bhabha, Klug, and Shutter for an excellent discussion of this legislation in regard to race and gender. 34 Exceptions to the patriality rules include the granting of citizenship to inhabitants of the Falkland Islands following Britain’s conﬂict with Argentina and to the ﬁnancially and culturally “elite” of Hong Kong. 35 Quoted in “After Powell,” 56. This 1998 essay focuses on the Muslim Pakistani population in Bradford and the patterns of “seperateness” in education, marriage, and family maintained by this group, demonstrating a continuing anxiety over these issues. 36 See Seidel’s essay for an excellent analysis of the New Right theory of race and nation as exempliﬁed by the conservative group associated with the Salisbury Review but overlapping with other conservative discourses in the 1980s. 37 The “extensive discrimination” to meet nonwhite immigrants included housing discrimination by “the majority of white landlords, estate agents and building societies,” forcing them “to rent the worst types of local government housing or to ﬁnance their own mortgages with groups of friends, often for the purchase of condemned housing” (Anna Marie Smith 141). 38 See Bhabha, Klug, and Shutter for useful information on deportation patterns. 39 Margaret Prescod-Roberts and Norma Steel, as quoted in Lauretta Ngcobo, ed., Let It Be Told: Essays by Black Women Writers in Britain (London: Virago, 1988), 14 –15. 40 Gender discrimination in immigration laws is extensively documented in Bhabha, Klug, and Shutter. 41 The counterdiscourse produced by immigrant and minority populations in Britain is important to note here although beyond the scope of this

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chapter to expand upon. For fuller accounts of the prominence of minority activism and voices in relation to mainstream and community politics since the 1970s, see Goulbourne, Black Politics; Bhabha, Klug, and Shutter; and Bryan, Dadzie, and Scafe. During these years, “pressures on the British economy accelerated the disruption of white workers’ positions in the manufacturing sector and the disintegration of white working-class neighbourhoods. At the same time, the majority of black workers were locked into the lowest-paid occupational positions, such as unskilled manufacturing and service sector positions. The low incomes of the black workers and the racist exclusionary practices [in housing] . . . led to the concentration of the black communities in the most run-down and overcrowded inner-city areas” (Anna Marie Smith 146). Enoch Powell, speech at the London Rotary Club, Eastbourne, November 16, 1968, 217–18 in John Wood, ed., Freedom and Reality (Kingswood: Paperfront, 1969). Quoted by Anna Marie Smith 154 –55. The patriality laws of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act and the 1971 Immigration Act were stimulated by this “national emergency” and severely restricted the right of entry of nonwhite colonials and former colonials; as Anna Marie Smith argues, “the boundaries of the nation became ofﬁcially conceptualized in terms of familial blood ties,” so that descendants of many white Britons in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand whose parents or grandparents once emigrated from England could resettle in the U.K., while individuals of the New Commonwealth countries, even though descended from British subjects in colonies, usually lacked the ancestral tie to England that would allow free entry and citizenship (181). For discussions of discursive developments around the issue of “mugging” and the campaign for a law-and-order state, see Gilroy; Hall et al.; and Anna Marie Smith. Kennedy reads the poem in terms of consumption and a “loss of coherent national identity,” while my stress is on the poem’s resonance within immigration and nationalization discourses. Kennedy comments usefully that the poem presents “apparently random aspects of ‘my country’ . . . as separate but equally seductive items of consumption and pleasure” (New Relations 229). Honeyford was a headmaster in Bradford, running a school with a 90 percent population of Asian-British children. He was ﬁred following published critiques in the Times Educational Supplement and the Salisbury Review in 1984 of multiethnic education and went on to become a leading spokesperson for conservative opposition to multiculturalism. See Seidel 116–17; Anna Marie Smith 115–16.

Notes to Pages 173–78

5: theory and the lyric “i” 1 All quotes are from Denise Riley, the ﬁrst from the poem “The Savage,” Dry Air 7; the second from her theoretical work, Am I That Name 5; the third from the essay “Is There Linguistic Guilt” 78. 2 Two recent collections of essays on contemporary British women poets begin to redress this issue. See Bertram and, more recently, Mark and Rees-Jones. The latter collection invaluably adds to discussions of British and American women, including critical essays about a remarkable range of poets, including such diverse writers as Denise Riley, Sharon Olds, Fanny Howe, Carol Rumens, and Adrienne Rich, as well as essays by poets themselves, such as Maggie O’Sullivan, Anne Stevenson, and U. A. Fanthorpe. 3 Important exceptions to this neglect of contemporary British poetry within American criticism include, most recently, Tuma, Fishing by Obstinate Isles; a special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism entitled “Pocket Epics: British Poetry after Modernism,” edited by Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton (spring 2000); and the collection of essays on “alternative” poetries edited by Romana Huk entitled Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetics Transnationally (Wesleyan UP, 2003). Of these three collections, Huk’s is most committed to including substantive discussion of women poets. 4 Keller and Miller begin to address this situation, focusing as it does on links between women’s poetry and contemporary theory. Joan Retallack’s essay in this volume is especially useful in considering feminist politics in relation to innovative and expressive modes. See also Friedman and Fuchs, one of the ﬁrst collections of feminist essays on women’s experimental writing, which deals primarily with prose writing but explores concepts applicable to other (and hybrid) genres. Other early useful discussions include Fraser’s consideration of form and women’s poetry in “Line. On the Line. Lining Up. Lined with. Between the Lines. Bottom Line”; DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar; the essays on women in Antony Easthope and Johan O. Thompson’s Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory (1991); and the special issue of Critical Quarterly edited by Denise Riley (1994). More recently, see Simpson; Vickery; and Spahr. 5 Caroline Bergvall’s article outlines the debate between what she terms “feminist” and “experimental” poets through considering their “diverging practices,” particularly as they are informed by contemporary feminist theories (especially poststructural) (31). Clair Wills’s article takes up this debate, responding in part to Bergvall’s analysis, and provides an incisive argument against the “false dichotomy” of the critical “separation of poetry into formally conservative and radical forms” (“Contemporary Women’s Poetry” 38).

Notes to Pages 180 – 84

241

6 Although increasing numbers of innovative women poets are receiving attention, a feminist-identiﬁed poetics remains understudied. Among works by critics who do not identify themselves as “feminist,” see, for example, Perloff, Poetic License, for essays on Howe and Hejinian, and Peter Quartermain’s discussion of Howe in Disjunctive Poetics. However, in the few book-length treatments of Language poetry, male poets receive primary attention. See Linda Reinfeld’s Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue (1991) and Jed Rasula’s The American Poetry Wax Museum (1996). Rasula’s study discusses contemporary experimental poetry almost exclusively in terms of male poets and their theoretical, editorial, and poetic work. Bob Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry, a history of American Language poetry, includes a chapter on gender. Book-length studies of women experimental poets are only recently appearing, including Anne Vickery’s Leaving Lines of Gender and Megan Simpson’s Poetic Epistemologies. 7 I quote from DuPlessis’s “‘Knowing in the Real World’: A Review of Denise Riley,” which reviews Mop Mop Georgettte, drawing upon Riley’s theoretical and autobiographical writings. I am grateful to the author for sharing this review with me prior to its publication in Parataxis. This British journal, edited by Drew Milne at the University of Sussex, was devoted to the publication and discussion of alternative poetries and unfortunately ceased publication in the late nineties. 8 The volume contains one essay, by Helen Kidd, on women poets. Kidd deals primarily with her own work and the impact of French feminist theories on her conceptions of subjectivity. She brieﬂy discusses Wendy Mulford and Denise Riley. For an excellent review of New British Poetries that usefully situates the essays within the context of postwar British practice and discussion of poetry, see Tuma, “ Who Needs Neo-Augustanism?” Anthony Mellors reviews the book in terms of its engagement with contemporary theory. 9 This interesting essay addresses the works of women poets in the United States in the seventies and eighties that Mulford claims “as a poet [to] ﬁnd stimulating, useful or necessary,” adding that “there are many more poets in the US one needs to read than in Britain” if one is interested in the “poetically experimental” (261). The essay provides extended discussions of Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, and Fanny Howe. 10 In their introduction, Caddel and Quartermain signiﬁcantly identify John Matthias’s 1971 anthology 23 Modern British Poets as the ﬁrst American effort to create a reading and critical audience for contemporary British poetry in America. More recently, Keith Tuma’s Fishing by Obstinate Isles investigates a history of American and British interactions while introducing a contemporary audience to the vitality of modernist and postmodernist practices in Britain. See also Romana Huk’s critique of Other 242

Notes to Pages 184 – 87

11 12

13

14

15

16

17

(271) and earlier anthologies of experimental work for assuming a transparent model of “experimentalism” that ignores the localities of race in articulating the aesthetic distinctions and categories of an “alternative” poetics (“In AnOther’s Pocket” 30 –31). Tuma quotes Kennedy from his introduction to New Relations 14. For a useful and fuller discussion of Kennedy’s formulation of the New Generation and its support by major publishers in Britain, see Tuma’s chapter, “Alternative British Poetries,” in Fishing by Obstinate Isles, particularly 193–201. My own discussion of Duffy in the previous chapter seeks to complicate both Kennedy’s and Tuma’s readings of her “mainstream” status. See also Mottram’s introduction to the section of experimental poetry in The New British Poetry. Mottram notes that the poets included had almost all been published by Poetry Review, edited by Mottram between 1971 and 1977, a brief period during which the Poetry Society (which published the Review) modiﬁed its antimodernist stance and provided short-lived support for experimental and alternative poetries. Tuma also reviews Patrick Deane’s At Home in Time: Forms of NeoAugustanism in Modern English Poetry, which he describes as a “responsible account of the British center” but limited in its conception of contemporary British poetry. See also Tuma’s “Erasing Modern Poetry,” in which he levels the charge that “the [British] Arts Council has for years done everything it can to suppress or ignore innovative writing in England” (202). His more recent book-length study, Fishing by Obstinate Isles, treats this neglect in more depth and detail. For recent discussions of these issues beyond the scope of this essay to include, see Tuma, Fishing by Obstinate Isles, which problematizes the American-British interchange, and Huk, “In AnOther’s Pocket” and “Feminist Radicalism in (Relatively) Traditional Forms.” Huk’s essays insist upon examining assumptions about race and gender in any discussion of “experimental” poetics, and her essays skillfully argue historical reasons for differentiating American and British experimental modes that are illuminated most vigorously when attending to subjectivities of race and gender constructed within each national imagination. However, as Huk notes in “In AnOther’s Pocket,” despite its eclectic sense of inclusion, Out of Everywhere does not contain the work of any women of color, which suggests to Huk that the notion of “experimentalism” needs to be investigated in terms of its (still transparent) racial assumptions about language, subjectivity, and national identity. Clair Wills importantly insists on making distinctions between the historical and cultural formations attending modernist and contemporary versions of the “sentimental.” See Clark for an extensive treatment of the as-

Notes to Pages 187–91

243

18

19

20

21

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sociation of self-expression with the feminine that has carried so much weight throughout the century. What John Wilkinson calls a “curiously de-centered debate” over Riley’s poetry, focused primarily on the use of the pronoun “I” and the status of the self, occurs over the course of essays by Nigel Wheale (Parataxis [1993]), James Keery (PN Review [1994]), and Wilkinson (Parataxis [1994]), who brieﬂy describes this critical conversation as positioning Riley in relationship to postmodernism (for Wheale, the poetry is positively and “continually alert to the responsibilities of the pronoun which creates the identity and the agency in writing” [73]; for Keery, Riley indulges in feminist self-absorption). Riley responds to the accusation of narcissism in a 1995 PN Review interview with Romana Huk in which the poet states that narcissism is “a condition of being fragmented, but it’s through that fragmentation and lack of a boundary” that others’ differences can be perceived, making narcissism a “prerequisite for politics” (“Denise Riley” 20). Female poets are typically omitted from histories of contemporary British poetry. For example, Vincent Sherry mentions only Stevie Smith in The Columbia History of British Poetry’s most recent survey of the ﬁeld from 1945 to 1990. One of the only American collections of essays on the ﬁeld, Acheson and Huk’s Contemporary British Poetry does contain essays on women’s poetry attentive to gendered gaps in literary histories. Recent anthologies that seek to correct this omission include Caddel and Quartermain, Other; O’Sullivan, Out of Everywhere; and Sinclair, Conductors of Chaos. Noteworthy critical collections devoted to women’s poetry that include substantive entries on British poets include Bertram, Kicking Daffodils, and Mark and Rees-Jones, Contemporary Women Poets. Tuma’s Fishing by Obstinate Isles devotes a mere four pages to Geraldine Monk as woman-poetrepresentative, “extracted here from a whole host of British women experimentalists . . . inevitably to be made to carry a discussion of the issues confronting feminist poetry in Britain,” although those issues are never really raised (229). This collection gathers works from Rotations (Siren, 1979), Long Wake (Writers Forum/Pirate, 1979), Spreading the Cards (Siren, 1980), Quinta del Sordo (Writers Forum, 1980), Tiger Lilies (Rivelin, 1983), Banquet (Siren, 1984), Animal Crackers (Writers Forum, 1985), Sky Scrapers (Galloping Dog, 1986), Herin Lie Tales of Two Inner Cities (Writers Forum, 1986), and Quaquaversals (Writers Forum, 1990). Noting her feeling of displacement within a modernist or neomodernist tradition, her sense of its “otherness” having to do with its production “from a differently gendered place,” Mulford also describes the isolation of women working within this tradition from other women writing in more familiar forms (34). She partially attributes the “remarkable absence

Notes to Pages 192–200

22

23

24

25

26

27

of cross-fertilisation between women working in the theoretical ﬁeld and those producing certain kinds of contemporary ﬁction and poetry, both here and in America” (33), to the male-centered focus of theoretical readings of modernist literature taking place in the late seventies. Mulford and Riley collaborated again in the 1982 volume Some Poems, and although the poems are identiﬁed by author, Peter Middleton describes the volume as a “collaborative quotation,” in which “each speaks the words of the other, as endorsement and extension of their own” (“Breaking the Perspex” 5). These volumes are Reactions to Sunsets (Ferry, 1980), The Light Sleepers (Mammon, 1980), Some Poems (CMR, 1982), River Whose Eyes (Avocadotoavocado, 1982), and The A.B.C. of Writing (Torque, 1985). This information is taken from Riley’s short memoir piece “ Waiting” (237, 248). A chilling and associational account of her childhood, it unsettles the autobiographical voice and resonates with issues of identity. This issue includes a review of Poets on Writing by Anthony Mellors (who also reviews the Hampson and Barry collection) and an interesting if contentious introduction by Riley that casts aspersions upon any ahistorical application of “critical theory” to “poetry.” Also in the issue is Clair Wills’s essay, which has been invaluable to me. For two excellent engagements with this question of textuality in relation to Riley’s poetry and particularly her work with the lyric, see Huk, “Feminist Radicalism in (Relatively) Traditional Forms,” and Watts, “Beyond Interpellation?” Huk explores Riley’s use of mainstream conventions of self-reference and confession to unsettle polarized dichotomies between “traditional” and “experimental” poetics of the self. Watts is interested in a recognition of the interpellative force of language and the “grammar of that power” explored in Riley’s lyric movements (169), particularly through what Watts terms the “characteristic affective syntax” of her most recent poetry. By this, Watts means a phenomenological weightiness or “rich materialism” in the poetry (regarding “affect” as “that mass of material sensations, impressions and impulses that has not been assimilated into consciousness” that swirls through the poems of Mop Mop Georgette), compelling “an affective movement or ﬁgurative process” that “demands the recognition of the otherness of the self which makes it, by deﬁnition, social” (165). Both Huk and Watts offer insightful assessments of a progressively attenuated focus on identity and how it develops from early to recent poetry through Riley’s interest in the lyric. Huk’s argument is positioned within a debate about experimental poetics and feminist poetry, while Watts locates Riley’s concerns within a framework of postmodern phenomenology. John Wilkinson usefully explains, “Laibach is a Slovenian rock band”

Notes to Pages 201–13

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that seems “committed to celebrating Slovenian nationalism in terms which reveal that nationalism as a thoroughly mongrel invention” (“Illyrian Places” 63). Riley’s poetry often draws on sources in popular culture, some of which are referenced at the end of Mop Mop Georgette. 28 See Watts’s discussion of “affect” as a “mass of material sensations” in Riley’s poetry that work through processes of interpellation. 29 Wills reads the poem’s opening image as the “technologised body”: “Even when most turned in on the self, the poet is most subjected to invasion by technology. Thus ‘It’s hard to own perceptions,’ since ownership would imply coherence and consistency of the self” (“Contemporary Women’s Poetry” 47, 49). 30 As Watts eloquently argues, though siting “consciousness in bodily terms,” Riley avoids a realignment of “the embodied self with a traditional lyric expressivity” in continually stressing the “radical externality within identity itself” (164).

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Notes to Pages 217–19

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Index Abel, Elizabeth, 232n abstract expressionism, 61– 63, 65– 66 accessibility, 3–5, 7– 8, 48 –50, 85– 88, 183. See also language, materiality of Acheson, James, 244n Ackland, Valerie, 202 Adcock, Fleur, 235n African American: enslavement, 82, 87, 110, 114, 117, 121, 123; erasure, 80; expressive traditions, 15–16, 119; folk art, 90; goddesses, 118, 128; masks, 107; migration, 80 – 81; poetics, xvii, 84 – 88; traditions, 86; writing, 97 Albelda, Randy, 237n Alden, Daisy, 51 Alderman, Nigel, 241n Allen, Donald, 60, 230n Allnut, Gillian, 187 Althusser, Louis, 209, 225n Altieri, Charles, 14 America: gender, 57; racial history, 92, 99; science, 93, 95–96, 108, 114, 116, 122–24. See also African American Amis, Kingsley, 187 Andrews, Bruce, 9, 218, 225n Armantrout, Rae, 4 –5, 202, 223–24n, 242n Armitage, Simon, 187 Armstrong, Isobel, 19 Ash, John, 187 Ashberry, John, 49, 210 Atlas, James, 230n

avant-garde, xix, 58; American and British, 181, 190; and black poets, 84 – 88; and gender, 6, 42, 44, 59– 60, 63; and lyric, xiv, xvi, 9, 183, 184, 186, 213; and personal, xiii; and politics, 192; and uniﬁed subject, 12. See also experimental poetics; language poetries. See also under feminism; Fraser, Kathleen; HOW(ever); lyric Baartmann, Saartjie, 96 Back, Rachel Tzvia, 226n Baker, Josephine, 94, 233n Bakhtin, Mikhail, 234 –35n Barry, Peter, 185, 189, 245n Bartman, Sarah, 96 Bass, Ellen, 48 Beach, Christopher, 225n Beauvoir, Simone de, 57, 209, 231n Bellamy, Dodie, 27–28 Belsey, Andrew, 151, 152, 156, 237n Bergvall, Caroline, 12, 22, 227n, 241n Berkson, Bill, 230n Berlant, Lauren, 112, 117 Bernstein, Charles, 9, 11, 17, 18 – 19, 21, 37, 44, 53, 198, 225–26n, 232n Bernstock, Judith, 62, 66 Berrigan, Ted, 210 Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei, 27, 202 Bertram, Vicki, 241n, 244n Beveridge, William Henry, 147 Bhabba, Jacqueline, 171, 237n, 239n, 240n

Bishop, Elizabeth, 51 Blaine, Nell, 65 Blanton, C. D., 241n body: black female, 82, 93, 110 – 31, 234n; in capitalism, 89–108; commodiﬁed, 81, 96–109, 144, 154; discursive, 82, 83; gendered, 80 – 81; and lyric subject, 80; material, 80 – 81, 83, 219; maternal, 56, 93; natural, 90, 92; and poetry, 80; in the public sphere, 80 – 81, 98 –99; racialized, 80 – 139; as spectacle, 97; visual, xxi, 70, 80 –131; white, 81, 97, 99– 100, 108, 116–17. See also under Duffy, Carol Ann; Fraser, Kathleen; Guest, Barbara; Philip, Marlene Nourbese Brannen, Anne, 236n Breeze, Jean “Binta,” 21 Briggs, Asa, 164 Britain: and decolonization, 170, 175; and Falklands, 150, 239n; heterosexism in, 132, 163, 238n; individualism in, xxiii, 132, 133, 135, 142, 148, 155, 172; and nationalism, 132, 148, 164, 188; and North America, xix–xx; poetic traditions of, xxiii; post-empire, xxii–xxiii, 133, 164; post-World War II, 147, 149, 164; Race Relations Acts, 167; racial discrimination, 164 –78, 238n; White Defence League, 169. See also British economics; British immigration; British politics; British Poetry Revival British economics: collectivist, 132, 135, 147, 148; free-market, xxii, 132, 134 –35, 142, 147, 150, 167, 172; Keynesian, 147, 149, 172; neoclassical, 148 – 49, 154, 236– 266

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37n; Omega File, 151. See also capitalism; Duffy, Carol Ann; Riley, Denise British immigration, xxii, 132, 238n, 239– 40n; 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, 164; 1948 British Nationality Act, 164, 167; 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 165; 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 165, 240n; 1971 Immigration Act, 165, 240n; 1981 British Nationality Act, 167, 239n British politics: Conservative party, 147– 48, 154, 171–72; Labour party, 147– 48, 152, 167, 172, 237n; the New Right, 134 –35, 142, 145, 150 –78, 235n, 238n, 239n; Thatcherism, xxiii, 134 – 35, 142, 148 –78, 183, 205, 239n British Poetry Revival, 136, 189, 192 Brossard, Nicole, 22 Browning, Robert, 143 Bryan, Beverley, 174, 240n Bunting, Basil, 189 Burke, Carolyn, 26, 46, 49, 228n Burnshaw, Stanley, 233n Bush, Duncan, 236n Caddel, Richard, 187, 242n, 244n Cambridge School, 199 Campbell, Beatrix, 160 – 61 capitalism: British, 132, 148, 183, 200; and Christianity, 103, 233n; industrialization, 95–96; and poetry, xiii; and visual body, xxi. See also under body Carby, Hazel, 80 – 81, 232–33n Carr, Brenda, 81, 83, 111, 232n, 234n Cha, Theresa, 35

cheek, chris, 186 Christianity, 103, 118, 233n, 235n. See also capitalism Cilano, Cara, 233n, 234n Cixous, Hélène, 35, 199, 200, 201, 203, 205 Clark, John W., 49 Clarke, Adrian, 243– 44n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 200 colonialism, xxi, 81, 112, 117, 211, 234n consumerism, 85, 89, 104. See also capitalism Cotter, Holland, 62 Crary, Jonathan, 95, 233n Crown, Kathleen, 16 Crozier, Andrew, 188, 189, 199 Cummings, Allison, 15, 226n Dadzie, Stella, 240n Dahlen, Beverly, 26 David, Miriam, 156, 157, 159 Davie, Donald, 187 Davies, Carol Boyce, 234n de Man, Paul, 10 Deane, Patrick, 243n DeKooning, Elaine, 65 DeKoven, Marianne, 3, 23–24, 46, 58 Derrida, Jacques, 199 Dickey, William, 49–53, 229n, 230n Dickinson, Emily, xviii, 1–2, 32, 228n Diggory, Terence, 229n DiMarco, Danette, 234n, 235n, 236n Dooley, Maura, 236n Doolittle, Hilda, 29, 32, 45, 227n, 228n, 229n Dove, Rita, 15, 226n Doyle, Laura, 234n Drucker, Johanna, 34 –35, 84

Duffy, Carol Ann, xiv, xix, 182, 184, 187, 224n, 234 –35n, 236n; and agency, 140, 146– 47; background, 134, 139, 237n; critical reception, 135– 40; dramatic monologue in, 133, 139, 140, 142– 47, 153, 167– 68, 176, 235n; and economics, 132, 134 –35, 142– 63; and immigration, xxii– xxiii, 134 –35, 154, 163–77; and lesbian desire, 161– 63, 235n; and love lyric, 133; and mainstream poetics, 133–34, 136– 42, 243n; and masculinity, 155–56; and maternal, 155– 62; and national identity, xxii, 132, 134 –35, 154, 163–79; and the New Right/ Thatcherism, 134 –35, 142, 145, 148 –78, 237n; and sexual desire, 161– 63; works: “$,” 147; “Act of Imagination, The,” 132–33; “Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team, The,” 172–73; “Comprehensive,” 177–79; “Debt,” 147, 156; “Deportation,” 167– 68, 169–71; “Foreign,” 167– 69, 171; “Fraud,” 153; “Girlfriends,” 162; “In Mrs. Tilscher’s Class,” 162; “Like Earning a Living,” 147; “Litany,” 158 –59; “Making Money,” 132, 147, 153–54; Mean Time, 134, 153, 158 –59; “Money Talks,” 147, 152; “Mouth, with Soap,” 159– 60; “Mrs. Skinner, North Street,” 173–75; “Oppenheim’s Cup and Saucer,” 163; “Originally,” 167– 68, 171; Other Country, The, 132, 134, 140 – 42, 149, 153–54, 168, 173–77; “Politico,” 152, 237n; “River,” 141; Selected Poems, 136; Selling Manhattan, 134,

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Duffy, Carol Ann (continued ) 151, 152, 169; “Selling Manhattan,” 147, 151; Standing Female Nude, 134, 142– 47, 149–50, 156, 157, 163, 177–79; “Standing Female Nude,” 142– 47; “Stuffed,” 163; “Talent Contest,” 149; “Till Our Face,” 163; “Translating the English,” 176–77; “ We Remember Your Childhood Well,” 161– 62; “ What Price,” 147, 149–50; “ Whoever She Was,” 157; “ Words, Wide Night,” 141; “You Jane,” 155–56, 157, 163 Duncan, Robert, 61, 231n Dunn, Douglas, 187 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, xvi, xvii, 12, 15, 20, 31, 41– 42, 61, 64, 71, 185, 190, 202, 223n, 224n, 226n, 228n, 241n; on experimental writing, 6– 8, 19, 31, 41– 42; on Guest, Barbara, 44, 45, 46, 47, 58, 229n, 230n; and HOW(ever), 26, 28, 228n; on Riley, Denise, 191, 207– 08, 242n Easthope, Antony, 241n Edgar, David, 177 Edwards, Ken, 189, 190, 192, 193, 199, 203, 205, 226n Edwards, Kerry, 34 Einzig, Barbara, 44, 46, 47, 58 Ekins, Paul, 237n Eliot, T. S., 85, 189 Engels, Frederick, 209 essentialism, xx, 82, 90, 180, 203, 211 Evans, Steve, 5– 6 experimental poetics: American and British differences, xix, 133, 182–90; and black poets, 84 – 88; British, xiv, 187; critical devalua268

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tion of, 49–50; and feminism, xiv, xv, xix, 5–23, 45; lyric variations of, 15–16; and mainstream poetics, xx, 22, 25–26, 50, 136– 37, 183– 84; and subjectivity, 19– 20. See also avant-garde; expressive poetics; language, materiality of; language poetries; and speciﬁc poets and texts expressive poetics: and authenticity, 3–5, 7, 10 –11, 43, 51, 132, 180, 183, 184, 200, 207, 211; and experimental poetics, xvi, xx, 22, 50, 136–37, 180, 183– 84; and feminism, xv, xvi, 3– 4, 43, 45; privileging of, 49–50; self-writing, 17–18. See also accessibility Fanthorpe, U. A., 241 feminine, devaluation of the, 66, 191–92 feminism: academic, 41; and avantgarde, xiii, xv, xvii, 3–23; and critical discourse, xiv; and economic theory, 237n; ﬁrst-wave, 202; French, 203, 229n; gynocriticism, xv; and intervention, xix, xx, 2, 23, 24; and language poetries, xv, xvi, 8 –9, 137, 223n, 224n; in poetry, 191–92; and politics, xxiii, 182, 183, 199, 200; protofeminism, xx, 40, 41– 44, 45; and recovery, 23; secondwave, 3, 41, 45, 62; and Thatcherism, 238n; white, 83, 232n. See also lyric; masculinism; poetics, feminist; poststructuralism; Women’s Liberation Movement; and speciﬁc poets and texts. See also under experimental poetics; expressive poetics

Ferber, Marianne A., 237n Finkelstein, Norman, 11 Forrest-Thomson, Veronica, 199 Foucault, Henri, 98, 126–27, 209 France, Linda, 136, 236n Frankenthaler, Helen, 65, 66 Fraser, Kathleen, xiv, xvi, xviii–xx, 1–3, 14, 42– 44, 181, 185, 202, 227n, 228 –29n, 231n, 241n; and avant-garde, 66; and British poets, 190; and Emily Dickinson, 1–2; and Barbara Guest, 47– 48, 50 –51, 58 –59, 60, 61, 79, 229– 30n; HOW(ever) and HOW2 editorships, 25–31, 33, 35–39, 183, 228n, 229n; lyric “I,” xx, 5, 63, 68; and maternal, 67– 68, 70 –73; and Joan Mitchell, xxi, 60 – 63, 69–72, 75, 79; and New York School, 59– 63, 79; and Charles Olson, 61; protofeminism in, xx, 40, 66; romance narratives in, 67– 69, 70, 73, 75–76; and visual, xiv, xxi, 59–79; white space in, 63– 64, 67, 75, 77; works: Change of Address, 231n; “Gloom Song,” 70 –72; il cuore: the heart, Selected Poems, 1970 –1995, 223n; In Deﬁance of the Rains, 43– 44, 63–79; “In Deﬁance of the Rains,” 67, 77– 79; “Just beyond Sight,” 68; “Letters” series, 73–75; “Little Joy Poem,” 66– 67; “Lost,” 72; “Nasturtiums,” 74; “Notes for a Voyeur,” 68 – 69; Notes Preceding Trust, 223n1; “Poem Wondering if I’m Pregnant,” 72; “poems from TRUE ROMANCES,” 75; “re: searches,” 1; “To a Boat, Streets Have No Feelings,” 75; What I Want, 63– 64 Freilicher, Jane, 48, 65

Freitag, Kornelia, 39, 229n Freud, Sigmund, 209 Friedan, Betty, 57 Friedman, Ellen, 7, 230n, 241n Friedman, Susan Stanford, 20, 21, 46, 226n Frost, Elisabeth, xviii, 227n, 228n, 229n Fuchs, Miriam, 7, 230n, 241n Fuller, Alison, xvii Fulton, Alice, 14, 137, 230n Gallop, Jane, 223n Gamble, Andrew, 147, 149, 151, 154 –55 gaze, 41, 58, 111, 117 Gevirtz, Susan, 26, 28, 29, 44, 53, 227n Gilbert, Sandra M., 26 Gilder, George, 154 Gillick, Victoria, 160 – 61, 238n Gilman, Sander, 234n Gilroy, Paul, 177, 238n, 240n Golding, Alan, 226n Golston, Michael, 17 Goulbourne, Harry, 165, 166, 170, 178 –79, 238n, 239n, 240n Gregson, Ian, 134, 234 –35n, 236n Gubar, Susan, 26 Guest, Barbara, xiv, xix, xx, 13, 25, 42–58, 181; and autobiography, 52; and confessional poetry, 52; critical devaluation of, 43, 44, 46– 48, 49–53, 230n; and gender, 55–58; and love lyric, 53; and lyric “I,” xx–xxi; and maternal, 56; and modernism, 46, 229n; and New York School, 44, 46, 47, 48 – 49, 229n; protofeminism in, xx, 40; recovery of, 44 – 45, 46– 47; and subjectivity, 52–53; works: “Belgravia,” 43– 44, 53–

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Guest, Barbara (continued ) 58, 230n; The Location of Things, 49; Poems: The Location of Things, Archaics, the Open Skies, 49, 229n; Seeking Air, 229n; Selected Poems, 229n. See also Fraser, Kathleen H.D., 29, 32, 45, 227n, 228n, 229n Hall, Stuart, 152, 172, 238n, 240n Hampson, Robert, 185, 189, 190, 245n Harjo, Joy, 15, 226n Harrison, Tony, 187 Hartigan, Grace, 65, 66 Haslam, Michael, 208 Hayek, F. A., 152, 237n Heaney, Seamus, 186, 187 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 209 Hejinian, Lyn, 8, 9, 137, 202, 242n Herbert, W. N., 236n Heuving, Jeanne, 227n Hickman, Lee, 227n Hill, Geoffrey, 187, 189 Hill, Selima, 187 Hillringhouse, Mark, 52 Hinton, Laura, xviii, 23, 223n Hodgkin, Howard, 206 Hogue, Cynthia, xviii, 23, 30, 39, 61, 76, 87, 223n, 227n, 229n Hollander, John, 49 Holmes, Colin, 165, 166, 167 Homans, Margaret, 20, 83, 232n Honeyford, Ray, 178, 240n hooks, bell, 90, 97, 101, 104, 106, 232n, 233n Hosek, Chaviva, 225n HOW2, 37– 40, 227n, 229n; archives, 39; community, 39; hybridity, xix, 40; mission of, 38 Howe, Fanny, 13, 184, 190, 202, 224n, 231n, 241n, 242n 270

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Howe, Florence, 48 Howe, Susan, xvii, 13, 16, 17, 31, 32, 35, 37, 41, 137, 184, 201– 02, 226n, 242n HOW(ever), xix, xx, 2–3, 23– 40, 227n, 228n; “alerts(,” 32–35; and avant-garde, 24 –27, 39– 40; and Canadian writing, 27, 29; criticism against, 29, 37; and feminist community, 23–26, 30, 190, 201– 02; formation of, 25–28; hybridity in, 3, 28, 34; literary criticism in, 29–30, 31–35; mission of, 6, 24 –28, 183; physical appearance of, 30; poetry section, 30 –31; “postcards,” 32–33, 36; and process, 36; and recovery, 32, 35; special topics in, 35–36; and theory, 24, 33, 35; and visual, 36–37; “ Working Notes,” 30 –32, 36. See also Fraser, Kathleen Hughes, Ted, 136, 186, 188 Huk, Romana, 9, 12, 19–20, 21, 133, 136, 137–38, 186, 191, 226n, 243n; on Riley, Denise, 207– 08, 209, 210, 211, 213, 217, 219, 236n, 241n, 244n Hulse, Michael, 136 humanism, 12, 146, 209 Hunt, Erica, xiv, xvii, xix, 79, 81– 109, 232n; and collaboration, 89–90, 109; and communal poetry, 85– 88; and racial identity, xxi, 82–109; and visual, xxi–xxii, 82–109; works: “after Baudelaire’s ‘The Muse for Hire,’” 101, 107– 09; Arcade, xxi–xxii, 82– 109, 113–14; “Arcade,” 103; “Coronary Artist (1),” 93; “Coronary Artist (2),” 93–95; “Coronary Artist (3),” 95–98; “Eco-

nomic Man,” 108; “First Words,” 91–93; Local History, 90; “Madame Narcissist,” 107; “Magritte’s Black Flag,” 98 –99; “Motion Sickness,” 100 – 01; “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” 90 –91, 101, 213; “Risk Signature,” 107– 08; “Science of the Concrete,” 87– 88, 102, 105– 06; “so sex, the throne whose abrasions we crave,” 109; “Squeeze Play,” 102; “Starting with A,” 98 –99; “Variations,” 109; “voice of no, the,” 103– 04 Hunter, Lynette, 87, 233n identity politics, 82, 89, 97, 100, 101, 220 Irigaray, Luce, 35, 199, 201 Jaffer, Frances, 26, 27–28 James, John, 199, 210 Jeffreys, Mark, 16–17, 225n Jenkin, Patrick, 159 Johnson, Honor, 58 Jones, David, 189 Kaufman, Robert, 45 Keery, James, 191–92, 208, 244n Keller, Lynn, xvii, 6, 14, 45, 77, 79, 136–37, 226n, 230n, 231n, 241n Kellogg, David, xvi Kennedy, David, 136, 140, 180, 187– 88, 235n, 236n, 240n, 243n Keynes, John Maynard, 147. See also British economics: Keynesian Kidd, Helen, 242n Kim, Myung Mi, 27, 35 Kinnahan, Linda, 12, 45, 224n, 228n, 229n, 235n, 236n Kintz, Linda, 233n

Klug, Francesca, 171, 237n, 239n, 240n Koch, Kenneth, 49, 51 Koethe, Jonathan, 10 –11 Kraskin, Sandra, 62, 66 Kristeva, Julia, 225n Kunitz, Stanley, 51, 60 Lacan, Jacques, 199, 225n language, materiality of, 7, 10 –11, 43, 68, 140, 180, 183, 198. See also accessibility; experimental poetics; expressive poetics language poetries, xiii, 8 –23, 136–37, 182, 224 –25n, 234n; in Britain, 133, 189– 90; history of, xv, xvii, 8, 13; L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E ( journal), 227n; and lyric, xx, 10 –13, 186; and Marxism, xv; and personal, 18 –19; principles of, 11–12; and theory, xv, 24. See also avant-garde; experimental poetics; feminism; poststructuralism Larkin, Philip, 187, 188, 235n Lazer, Hank, xiv, 15, 223n Lee, Edna, 32 Lehman, David, 229n Levertov, Denise, 14 –15, 51 Levitas, Ruth, 151, 156, 235n, 237n, 239n Lippard, Lucy, 62 little journals, 7, 227n; British, xxiii, 182, 185–90; Canadian, 37. See also HOW2; HOW(ever) Lourde, Audre, 26 Lovenduski, Joni, 238n Lowe, Donald, 97, 104, 233n Lowell, Amy, 45– 46 Lowell, Robert, 51, 60 Loy, Mina, 35, 45

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Lundquist, Sara, 45, 46, 53, 229n, 230n Lureschi, Judy. See Starbuck, Judy lyric, 1–23; and autobiography, 9–10; conventions of, 12–13; feminism, xiii, 3–23; feminization of, xvi, 2; and gender, xiv, xvi, 1–3, 20; history in, 16–17; late (or new), xiii, 17–18; love lyric, 20 –21, 43, 53; and paintings, 62; problematizing of, xiii, xx, 2; revaluations of, 12–19; Romantic inheritances, 4, 11, 12, 20, 191, 225n; “workshop” style, 17, 225n. See also avant-garde: and lyric; lyric subject; and speciﬁc poets and texts lyric subject, 225n; and capitalism, 201; and feminism, xiii–xvi, xx, 3–5, 201; and identity, xiv; and public realm, 88; uniﬁed, 3– 4, 10 –11, 132, 201; and visual, xxi– xxii. See also lyric; subjectivity MacDiarmid, Hugh, 189 Mackey, Nathaniel, xvii Manousos, Anthony, 52 marginalization of women: in avant-garde, 2, 28, 34 –35, 42, 47; in British poetics, 133, 184 – 92; in language poetries, 8 –9, 24, 39; in literary history, xix, 2, 8, 47, 190 –91; in mainstream poetry, 42; in theory, xv Mark, Alison, 184, 185, 224n, 241n, 244n Markotic, Nicole, 229n Marlatt, Daphne, 26, 31 Marriott, David, 137–38, 234n Martin, Agnes, 65 Marx, Karl, 209 272

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Marxism, 183, 199, 200, 203, 209; in language poetries, xv masculinism: in abstract expressionism, 60 – 62; in British experimental poetry, 184 – 86; in British New Right, 155; in critical theory, xv; in Charles Olson, 59, 61. See also masculinity; New York School, and gender masculinity: in avant-garde, 59– 60, 63; black, 101– 02; in British poetry, xxiii, 183, 162; and capitalism, 200; and erasure of gender, 19. See also Duffy, Carol Ann; marginalization of women; Monk, Geraldine Matthias, John, 242n Max-Neef, Manfred, 237n Maxwell, Glyn, 187 McAllister, Andrew, 236n, 237n McGuckian, Medbh, 235n McGuirk, Kevin, 16 McQuade, Molly, 44 Mellors, Anthony, 242n, 245n Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 209 Merwin, W. S., 14 –15 Meyer, Bernadette, 202 Meyer, Kinereth, 225n Middleton, Christopher, 49 Middleton, Peter, 188, 203, 245n Miller, Cristanne, 6, 241n Miller, Nancy, 3 Miller, Stephen Paul, 229n Milne, Drew, 242n Mitchell, Joan, xxi, 60 – 63, 65, 69–72, 75, 79; Les Bluets, 69–70 Mitchell, Susan, 15, 226n Mockel-Rieke, Hannah, 39, 229n modernism, 136, 200, 243n, 244n, 245n Moi, Toril, 223n

Monk, Geraldine, xix, xxiii, 181– 83, 187, 190 –98, 220, 244n; background of, 192; and linguistic experimentation, 193–98; and manifesto, 192–93; masculine subject in, 195–98; and nationalism, xiv; and Romanticism, 197, 198; and subjectivity, 193– 98; works: “DREAM TWO *** CORRIDOR,” 193–95; “MOLECULAR POWER PROGRESSIVES,” 195–96; Sway of Precious Demons, The, 193; “ WHERE?,” 195, 196–97 Monroe, Jonathan, 18 –19 Moore, Marianne, 35, 45 morality, 135, 147, 159. See also Gillick, Victoria Morgan, Edwin, 206 Morris, Tracie, 16 Mottram, Eric, 189, 190, 243n Movement, the, 187– 89 Mulford, Wendy, xix, xxiii, 27, 44, 53, 181– 83, 185– 86, 187, 188, 190, 192, 198 –207, 220, 242n, 244 – 45n; and agency, 200; and autobiography, 198; background of, 199; and Colidgerean “I,” 200; as editor, 183, 198, 202; and expressivity, 205– 07; and framing, 206– 07; as literary critic, 198; and nationalism, xiv; and Riley, Denise, 201, 210, 211, 245n; as small press publisher, 183, 199; and subjectivity, 199–200; and theory, 198 –207; works: A.B.C. of Writing, The, 203; “Bathed in Air,” 202– 03; Bay of Naples, 206– 07; Bravo to Girls and Heroes, 200 – 01; “how do you live,” 203– 05; Late Spring Next

Year, 201, 207; No Fee: A Line or Two for Free, 201, 211; “Notes on Writing,” 198 –201, 206; Some Poems, 245n; “Valentine,” 206– 07 Mullen, Harryette, 81, 84 – 87 Munro, Eleanor C., 65 Myers, John Bernard, 48, 230n National Front, 135, 165, 167, 177, 238n Naylor, Paul, 132, 232n Nelson, Julie A., 237n New Criticism, 31, 43, 58 New Generation, 136, 187, 235n, 236n New York School: and gender, 61– 62, 65– 66; women painters, 79. See also Fraser, Kathleen; Guest, Barbara Ngcobo, Lauretta, 239n Nicholls, Peter, 11, 218, 225n Nichols, Grace, 21, 138 –39 Nielsen, Dorothy, 14 –15 Nielson, Aldon, xvii Notley, Alice, 190, 199, 210 O’Donnell, Susannah Cassedy, 88 O’Hara, Frank, 48, 49, 61, 210 Olds, Sharon, 241n Oliver, Douglas, 199 Olson, Charles, xvi, 25, 59– 63, 64, 65, 190, 231n Oppen, George, 190, 231n Osborne, Sir Cyril, 166 O’Sullivan, Maggie, xix, 190, 192, 241n, 244n Owen, Maureen, 36 Padgett, Ron, 48, 230n palimpsest, 16, 58, 112 Pannell, Norman A., 166

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Parker, Patricia, 225n Perelman, Bob, 18, 225–26n, 242n Perloff, Marjorie, xvi, xvii, 9, 10 – 12, 17–18, 21, 22, 24, 224 –25n, 226n, 227n, 242n Peters, Robert, 29, 228n Philip, Marlene Nourbese, xiv, xvii, xix, 80 – 87, 96, 110 –31, 233n, 234n; background of, 111, 233n; and communal poetry, 85– 88; history in, 110, 121–27; and image, 80, 110, 131, 232n; and maternal, 112–16; and mother tongue, 122–26; and religion, 116–19; and science, 114, 116, 122–24; and visual, xxi, 79, 82– 87, 111–12, 121–31; white space, 130; works: “Adoption Bureau,” 113; “Adoption Bureau Revisited,” 115–16; African Majesty: From Grassland and Forest (The Barbara and Murray Frum Collection), 112, 119; “And over Every Land and Sea,” 112–16; “Catechism, The,” 118; “Catechist, The,” 116; “Communicant, The,” 118; “Cyclamen Girl,” 112, 116–18; “Dis Place,” 114 – 16, 118, 124, 126–27; “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” 121–27; “Epiphany,” 118; “Eucharistic Contradictions,” 116– 18; “Habit Of: Poetry, Rats, and Cats, The,” 121–22; “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones,” 112, 119–21; She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, xxi, 80 – 87, 96, 110 –31; “Transﬁguration,” 118; “Universal Grammar,” 121, 127– 31; “Vows,” 117–18 274

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Pitt-Kethley, Fiona, 235n Plath, Sylvia, 25, 43, 49–50, 51–52, 60, 229n, 230 –31n “poetess,” xvi, 191–92 poetics: black, 187; communal, 85– 88; confessional, 43, 52, 58, 60, 64, 230n; and écriture féminine, 203, 228n; environmental, 14 –15; and experimental, 42– 43; experimental and expressive, xiii, xiv, xvii; feminist, 187; as intervention, 3; and language poetries, 18 –19; and mainstream, 45; and public sphere, 3. See also African American, poetics; experimental poetics; expressive poetics; and speciﬁc poets and texts politics: of form and genre, 19; of personal, 4; of process, 36. See also British politics; feminism, and politics Pollock, Jackson, 62– 63 postcolonialism, xiv, 110, 168, 175 postmodernism, 138, 140, 182, 186, 191, 210, 218, 219, 225n, 232n poststructuralism, 140, 209, 218, 219, 225n, 235n; and feminism, xv, 6, 22, 183, 199, 228n; in language poetries, xv, 10 –11. See also theory Pound, Ezra, 186, 189, 190 Powell, Enoch, 148, 156–57, 168, 171, 173–74, 235n, 238n, 240n; and Powellism, 165– 66 Prescod-Roberts, Margaret, 239n Presley, Frances, 229n private sphere, 4, 11, 206, 211 Prynne, J. H., 199, 210 public sphere, 3– 4, 17, 88, 211. See also body; poetics, feminist Pujol, Michele A., 237n

Quartermain, Meredith, 39, 229n Quartermain, Peter, 187, 242n, 244n Radstone, Susannah, 237–38n Randall, Vicky, 238n Rasula, Jed, 242n Ratcliff, Carter, 70 Raworth, Tom, 199 Rees-Jones, Deryn, 136, 184, 185, 224n, 235n, 241n, 244n Reinfeld, Linda, 242n Retallack, Joan, 7– 8, 241n Rexroth, Kenneth, 29 Rich, Adrienne, 4, 25, 26, 51, 68, 184, 209, 231n, 241n Richardson, Dorothy M., 231n Ridge, Lola, 45 Riding, Laura, 45 Riley, Denise, xix, 137, 180 – 83, 184, 187, 190, 192, 199, 207–21, 224n, 226n, 242n; and autobiography, 245n; background of, 208 –10; critical devaluation of, xvi, 191–92, 208, 244n; and economics, 211; as editor, 210; expressiveness of, xvi; and feminist activism, 208 – 09, 220; linguistic experimentation of, 213–21; and Mulford, Wendy, 201, 210, 211, 245n; and nationalism, xiv; works: “Affections Must Not,” 211; “Ah So,” 213; “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History, 182, 210, 220, 241n; “Dark Looks,” 219; “Disintegrate Me,” 217–19; Dry Air, 210 –13, 241n; “Laibach Lyrik: Slovenia, 1991,” 213–17, 219, 245– 46n; “Lyric,” 208; Marxism for Infants, 210 –11; Mop Mop Georgette, 191, 208, 213–20,

245– 46n; No Fee: A Line or Two for Free, with Wendy Mulford, 201, 211; “note on sex and ‘the reclaiming of language,’ A,” 211–12; “Savage, The,” 241n; “Seven Strangely Exciting Lies,” 217; “Shortened Set, A,” 208; Some Poems, with Wendy Mulford, 211, 245n; “ Waiting,” 245n; War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother, 209 Robinson, Alan, 235n, 236n Romanticism, 10, 219; and transcendence, 218, 219. See also lyric, Romantic inheritances Rumens, Carol, 236n, 241n Russo, Linda, 39– 40, 229n Ryan, Anne, 62 Saar, Allison, 79, 232n; Arcade, xxi, 82–109 Sappho, 12 Savory, Elaine, 234n Scafe, Suzanne, 240n Scalapino, Leslie, 192, 202 Schuyler, James, 49, 210 Schwartz, Delmore, 49 Schwartz, Leonard, 14 Scruton, Roger, 155–56, 161, 237n Seidel, Gill, 135, 167, 168, 178, 235n, 238n, 239n, 240n Sexton, Anne, 43, 51, 52 Shapcott, Jo, 187 Shapiro, David, 48, 230n Sherry, Vincent, 205, 244n Shutter, Sue, 171, 237n, 239n, 240n signature, gendered, 3, 17–18, 23–24, 35, 38, 40, 202 Silliman, Ron, 9, 17, 21, 192, 223–24n, 225n Simpson, Megan, xviii, 22–23, 227n, 241n, 242n

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Sinclair, Iain, 187, 235n, 244n Sloane, Margaret, xviii small presses, 232; British, xxiii, 135, 136, 182, 183, 185–90, 199 Smith, Anna Marie, 135, 148, 151– 52, 155–56, 161, 163, 165, 166, 167, 170, 173, 174, 177, 235n, 238n, 239n, 240n Smith, Ken, 236n Smith, Sheila K., 27 Smith, Stevie, 244n Smith, Valerie, 83, 232n socialism, 183, 237n; and British women poets, xxiii, 209. See also Marxism Spahr, Juliana, 241n Spicer, Jack, 231n Spillers, Hortense, 111, 113, 116, 120, 127, 131 Starbuck, George, 231n Starbuck, Judy, 63, 231n; In Deﬁance of the Rains etchings, 69, 72, 74, 76–77 Steel, Norma, 239n Stein, Gertrude, 29, 45, 142, 236n Stevens, Wallace, 14 Stevenson, Anne, 187, 235n, 241n Stewart, Pamela, 27 Stricker, Meredith, 32, 35, 39– 40, 229n subjectivity: in British women poets, xxiii, 199; gendered, xiv, xix, 12, 20 –21, 23, 45, 63, 130; questioned, 9–11; Romantic ideas of, 10; uniﬁed, 11, 85, 86, 138, 149. See also experimental poetics; expressive poetics; Guest, Barbara; lyric subject; Monk, Geraldine; Mulford, Wendy Suleri, Sara, 232n Sweeney, James Johnson, 62 276

Bibliography

Tarlo, Harriet, 224n Thatcher, Margaret, 202, 238n. See also British, politics, Thatcherism theory, 8, 19, 39; and contemporary poetry, xv, 18, 23; and feminist poetry, 180 –220; and gender, xv, 22, 24, 83; postcolonial, 40; queer, 40; and women, 24. See also poststructuralism Thomas, Jane E., 139– 40, 141– 42, 235n, 236n Thompson, Johan O., 241n Tuma, Keith, 136, 138, 186, 187, 189, 195, 236n, 241n, 242n, 243n, 244n Vanderborg, Susan, 16 Vickery, Ann, xviii, 8 –9, 27, 39– 40, 223n, 227n, 228n, 241n, 242n, 299n visual: of canvas, 60; and identity, xxi, 81, 92, 129; and media, 104; and page space, 59, 60; and surveillance, 104; and verbal, xxii, 79, 84, 88 –109. See also body; Fraser, Kathleen; HOW(ever); Hunt, Erica; Philip, Marlene Nourbese Waldman, Anne, 190, 210 Waldrop, Rosemarie, xvii–xviii, 14, 202, 231–32n Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 202 Watten, Barrett, 9 Watts, Carol, 210, 211, 212, 219, 220, 224n, 245n, 246n Welish, Marjorie, 44 Westfall, Stephen, 62 Wheale, Nigel, 188, 208, 210, 244n Wheeler, Lesley, xviii Whitehead, Kim, 223n

Wiegman, Robyn, 89, 92, 96–98, 104 – 06, 109, 111, 114, 116, 121, 125, 234n Wieners, John, 210 Wilkinson, John, 191, 207, 208, 244n, 245– 46n Will, Frederic, 49 Williams, William Carlos, 189, 190 Willis, Elizabeth, 13–14 Wills, Clair, 12, 21, 22, 184, 186, 191, 205, 208, 224n, 241n, 243n, 245n, 246n

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 180, 209 Wolff, Janet, 138, 205 Women’s Liberation Movement, 3– 4, 43, 199, 209. See also feminism Wong, Shelley Sunn, 21–22 Wood, John, 240n Woolf, Virginia, 209, 228n, 231n Zukofsky, Louis, 190

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