Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women's Poetry (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Series Editor: Linda W...

Author: Nicky Marsh

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Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry By Nicky Marsh

Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry

Nicky Marsh

DEMOCRACY IN CONTEMPORARY U.S. WOMEN’S POETRY

Copyright © Nicky Marsh, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60026–3 ISBN-10: 0–230–60026–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October 2007 10

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Printed in the United States of America.

This book is dedicated with love and thanks to my parents, Peter and Yvonne Marsh.

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Content s

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Becoming Publics: Democracy and Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry

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1. Paper Money and Tender Acts: Feminism and Democracy Introduction Gender Trouble: The Foundations of Third-Wave Critique Difference and Democracy: June Jordan and Susan Howe Erica Hunt: Notes for an Oppositional Poetics 2. The Poetics of Privacy: Writing the Lyric Self Introduction The Privatization of the Academy Lady Freedom among Us?: Rita Dove Witnessing Responsibility: Carolyn Forché Reclaiming Silence: Jorie Graham 3. Against the Outside: Language Poetry as a Counter-Public Introduction Writing for the Reader: A Dialectic of Engagement An Impossible Task: Lyn Hejinian’s Autobiography Total Art: Being Public in the Work of Leslie Scalapino 4. Go Grrrl: Democracy and Counterculture Introduction The Aesthetics of the Obscene

13 13 13 20 36 39 39 41 47 54 63 73 73 76 82 91 101 101 102

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CONTENTS

Do It Yourself (DIY) Poetry and Visual Writing The Case of Kathy Acker Meat the Poet: Women, Work, and Class Poetry and Riot Grrrl 5. Romantic Materialism and Emerging Poets Introduction A Romantic Materialism The Responses of Juliana Spahr Harryette Mullen and an Emancipatory Literacy Lisa Jarnot: Literacy and Survival

105 110 114 124 131 131 132 136 142 147

Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Ac knowled gment s

My work on contemporary U.S. poetry began with a major research studentship from the British Academy Humanities Research Board. Its extension into a book was facilitated by additional grants from the British Academy and from the University of Southampton. These grants allowed me to complete archive work at the Poetry/Rare Books Collection at SUNY Buffalo; the Mandeville Special Collections at UCSD; the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Iowa. I am particularly grateful to the generosity and enthusiasm of SUNY Buffalo’s Michael Basinski throughout this period. My ability to complete this work has been greatly enabled by the intellectual support and friendship offered by colleagues at the University of Southampton. I would particularly like to thank Stephen Bending, Jackie Clarke, David Glover, Carrie Hamilton, Carole Sweeney, and Nadia Valman. I would also like to thank my friends— Stuart Bowden, Peter Boxall, Nadia Cohen, Tutul Dasmahapatra, Peter Fairley, Hannah Jordan, Maria Lauret, Ceri Morgan, and Paul Sweetman—for believing in this work (or me, and they are not the same) when I became less sure. Particular thanks are owed to Victoria Sheppard, Doug Haynes, Cora Kaplan, Peter Nicholls, Sujala Singh, and Peter Middleton who have all read and responded to this work at various stages. My debt of gratitude to Peter Middleton in all of these contexts is especially large. He has been a consistent and inspirational supervisor, colleague, and friend over the course of the past ten years. I am not sure this work would have been possible without him. The support of my family—Peter, Yvonne, Karen, Simon, Jack and Alex Marsh, Andy Cotton, and Nancy Traquair—was also vital to the completion of this work. I thank them all for their consistent, persistent encouragement, interest, and belief. I am thankful to my partner, Liam Connell, for many things. In this context I am grateful for his patience and his proof-reading. This book is also for him and our son, Malachy, with love. Parts of this book have previously appeared in earlier versions as “ ‘Infidelity to an Impossible Task’: Postmodernism, Feminism and

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Lyn Hejinian’s My Life,” Feminist Review, 74, (2003), 70–80; “ ‘This is the only time to come together’: June Jordan’s Publics and the Possibility of Democracy” in Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan, edited by Valerie Kinloch and Margret Grebowicz. (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books/ Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

Permissions The author and publisher are also grateful for the permission to reprint from the following sources: Lisa Jarnot, Some Other Kind of Mission (Providence: Burning Deck Press, 1996). Permission granted by Burning Deck Press. June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, ed. Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Permission granted by June M. Jordan Literary Estate Trust, www.junejordan.com. Cheryl A. Townsend, PseudoCop (Chicago: Mary Kuntz Press, 1995). Permission granted by Cheryl A. Townsend. Impetus May 3, 1985; Impetus March 7, 1986; Impetus May 16, 1989; and Impish Impetus November 2, 1991. Permission granted by editor, Cheryl Townsend. Impetus Magazine has survived more than twenty years before taking a financial hiatus. Cheryl A. Townsend has had several thousand publications to her credit in several hundred periodicals, anthologies, and collections. She continues to write what she feels most. Laura Joy Lustig, “Death Is Good if You Don’t know How to be Properly Alive” in The Literature Collection: Poems from Some of the World’s Greatest Unknown Authors, ed. Leah Angstman (Mason: Propaganda Press, 1999). Permission granted by Laura Joy Lustig.

INTRODUCT ION

Becoming Publics: Democracy and Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry

This book analyzes the contributions of contemporary women poets to discussions about the democratic tradition in U.S. literary culture. It reads the increasingly public interventions of women poets through recent gender theory, specifically the debates about citizenship and publicness that have characterized feminism’s “third wave” and argues that contemporary poetry explores the new kinds of democratic cultures suggested by U.S. poetry’s divergent publics. In early 2003 poetry appeared to offer itself as a site of renewal for what was seen to be a dangerously impoverished national democratic culture. Sam Hamill’s “PoetsAgainsttheWar” movement, galvanized by the withdrawal of the opportunity for legitimate democratic dissent (Laura Bush’s decision to cancel a Whitehouse poetry event to which Hamill had been invited for fears that it would be “politicized”), produced over 13,000 poems and hundreds of poetry readings across the nation.1 Fueled by outrage at the outbreak of war in Iraq and the accessibility of Internet technology the movement allowed poetry to appear a vital, democratic force at a moment when such possibilities appeared to be waning. Hamill was able to celebrate an “historic moment” that brought together unprecedented numbers of poets “in a single chorus” and reminded “our citizenry that poetry” could effectively address “social and historical subjects.”2 Yet the event also seemed to suggest something more complex about the relationship between poets and U.S. democratic culture. In explicitly evoking memories of the role of poets in the antiwar movement of the late 1960s, “PoetsAgainsttheWar” could not help but also evoke the faltering of this earlier movement’s promise to radically renew democratic culture. The high-profile condemnation of the Vietnam war by poets such as Robert Bly in 1968, for example, has

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been read by literary historians such as Jed Rasula as both the peak of the “milieu of protest surrounding the war” and as a “short lived” platform for political dissent.3 Indeed, the political agitations of the 1960s have since been associated by the ascendant right wing with nothing less than the collapse of U.S. democracy itself. Conservative thinkers have presented the valuing by 1960s’ radicals of “national criticism over patriotic identification, and difference over assimilation” as having “damaged and abandoned the core of U.S. society.”4 The reactionary response to the 1960s thus effectively inverted the desire of its radicals for a participatory public culture, producing instead a privatized culture that conflated privacy with autonomy. The complicity of poetry with this retreat from the public has been well documented. The critical narratives of Walter Kalaidjian, Jed Rasula, and Charles Altieri all lament the academy’s endorsement of the “poet’s private self, sullen at the end of ideology.”5 It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that many of the poets who participated in the 2003 “PoetsAgainsttheWar” movement seemed somewhat ambivalent and uncertain about what such a direct and literal political intervention suggested for both poetry and democracy. The movement was as remarkable for its lack of obvious political or literary homogeneity as it was for its sheer size or rapid energy. Figures as different from one another as Billy Collins and Charles Bernstein overcame their reservations and allowed themselves to be associated with the movement: the poet laureate frustrated that his attempts to separate the West and East Wings of the Whitehouse had failed and Bernstein anxious lest political protest slip into dogma.6 The informatively absent gestures of those who chose not to participate, such as Dana Gioia (whose appointment as chairman of the NEA had been planned for the canceled Whitehouse event), were also acknowledged in the ensuing debates.7 Such disparate responses can be read as indicating the persistence of the ambivalent legacy of the 1960s. For popular figures such as Collins, poetry’s established position in the institutional mainstream of U.S. life is evidence of the successful democratization of the institutions of poetry. Whilst detractors of such “Official Verse Culture,” such as Kalaidjian and Rasula, point to its complicity with the therapeutic culture of self, its defenders praise it for widening access to a supposedly elite cultural practice, for contributing to the possibility of cultural commensurability, and for raising the standards of literacy. Poets such as Jack Myers and Roger Weingarten, for example, have pointed to the importance of the poetry workshop for creating more egalitarian structures for poetry and for capturing the “unique and

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diverse character of the contemporary American experience.”8 Poets such as Gioia and Bernstein who are suspicious of such an eliding of the democratic with notions of inclusion, accessibility, and representation, have contributed to more critically ambitious literary communities. The linguistic deconstructions and alternative practices of community building associated with the Language movement can be fruitfully read alongside hopes for a radical democracy. Ernesto Laclau’s theorization of democracy’s need for both the deferred “empty signifier” and for multiple discontinuous public spaces offers a useful way of reading the complexity of the “Language” project and its various successors.9 Gioia and his defenders have, conversely, demanded the decoupling of poetry and democracy.10 Gioia has explicitly rejected the “intellectualization of the arts”11 in favor of a notion of public culture that could explicitly identify itself with the privatized cultures of business and the free market.12 Yet this neat narrative only gestures to the complexity of contemporary poetry’s engagement with democratic culture. As a generalized schema it underplays the heterogeneity of both the contemporary poetry scene and the nature of contemporary democratic debate. The division of poetry into such beguilingly discrete categories has been increasingly discredited for failing to capture adequately the fluidity and complexity of the contemporary scene. Such divisions overstate some differences, casting, for example, “linguistic deconstructions” as the preserve of “Language” poets, and downplay others, assuming that “Language” poets all agree on what is meant by “linguistic deconstructions”. The designation of such well-defined poetic schools also fails to account for the movement of writers and ideas between and within schools and offers little place for analyzing those poets who either resist them or whose communities go unacknowledged in these frequently mutually defining relationships. Critics and editors writing on women’s poetry, in particular, have pointed to the numerous ways in which this work has begun to evade and challenge the rigid stratifications of recent U.S. poetics.13 The imposing of any clear political spectrum onto the varied meanings of the term democracy is equally simplistic. That the rhetoric of democracy is as effective at describing U.S. nationalism and the expansionist aims of global capitalism as it is the ambition for a participatory political culture capable of delivering social justice seems to be integral to the crisis in a leftist participatory politics.14 Indeed, those committed to this latter aim have acknowledged the profound ambivalence of the vocabulary of democracy as a means for achieving it, suggesting that democracy’s “intensification of the experience of

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the constructed, relational character” of both identity and difference constitutes both a “virtue and a danger.”15 In U.S. cultural life, democracy clearly has a double meaning, referring to both the materially unequal dynamics of advocacy at the highest and most literal level of political power and the discursive, semiotic relations of re-presentation. It is in the tensions between these two terms, the ambition to influence or critique U.S. democratic culture through an interrogation of its discursive assumptions, that this project locates the work of contemporary women poets. My interest, then, is in examining the ways in which a range of poets have negotiated with the philosophical and pragmatic discussions about the meaning of democracy in U.S. culture. In conventional political science, theories of U.S. democracy have been understood according to two historical traditions. A laissez-faire liberalism, which promotes a negative conception of “liberty as noninterference: to be free is not to suffer compulsion by force” is ranged against a republican tradition emphasizing the role of political participation and the centrality of an active civic identity.16 Thinkers on both the Left and the Right have been keen to redraw these classical political economies in order to rescue the concept of democracy from the grip of institutional individualism and to renew the possibility of the democratic public sphere. Attempts by the Left to reimagine this sphere have been frequently divided by the familiar lines of late modern thought, torn between rational “deliberative” models of the public and more radical “agonal” models.17 Hence advocates of the former position, Habermasians such as Seyla Benhabib, advocate moving toward “a new synthesis of collective solidarities with plurally constituted identities”18 whereas those in the latter position, such as Chantal Mouffe, postulate that the “tension between the principles of equality and liberty” provides the indeterminacy that democracy crucially requires.19 The meaning of democracy on the Right is no more stable or internally coherent. Conservative thinkers frequently maintain that democracy is synonymous with a multiculturalism that threatens to dissolve the shared idiom of the citizen in the “acid of difference”20 whilst simultaneously using its language as a fig leaf for an expansionist foreign policy and its participatory practices to bolster a Christian fundamentalist community aiming “to restore hierarchy in government and society.”21 Such attempts to redraw the possibilities of modern democracy are clearly as cultural as they are political. Modern democracy, as Ken Hirschkop has argued, is not only “the product of institutions above society but of the linguistic intersubjectivity which constitutes it.”22

INTRODUCTION

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An exploration of the intersubjective relations of U.S. exceptionalism, forming collectivity through individualism, is clearly apparent in the literary tradition established by Walt Whitman and perpetuated by poets as varied as Robert Frost, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, and Robert Pinsky. Pinsky finds the roots of a democratic poetics able to assert the paradox of unity within difference in De Tocqueville. He notes that De Tocqueville castigates the “anti-poetic” nature of American democracy for relinquishing the possibility of a communion beyond “man” whilst also celebrating the “pluralistic, omnivorous, syncretic” poetics that this sociality produces.23 For Pinsky, U.S. poetry is significant because it enacts the intersubjective drama of democracy’s fragile social contract: it evokes “the attentive presence of some other, or its lack: an auditor, significantly absent or present.”24 It is unsurprising that the terms most frequently contested in democratic debate—individual and collective, public and private, unity and difference, security and contingency— are implicitly central to so many critical narratives for U.S. poetry. Gender is integral to these discussions in a number of ways. The frequently nationalist discourses of U.S. democracy are clearly informed by the familiar dynamics of a sexual politics. Simply put, the nature of women’s relationship to the division between public and private assumed in discourses of democracy continues to be vexed. Although liberal and republican democratic traditions define the political import of these key terms in oppositional ways—republicans find political freedom in the public and liberals in the private—neither of these traditions maps easily onto a feminist analysis. Feminism’s politicized questioning of liberalism’s cleaving of public from private was, of course, one of the primary achievements of second-wave feminism. More recently, feminist critics have been attentive to the potentially masculinist content of a reawakened republican civic identity: the “virtues that have now become identified as feminine,” as Drucilla Cornell baldly notes in her critical reading of Hannah Arendt, are not “suitable to include in the public realm.”25 In discourses of U.S. democracy the “feminine” often stands as its border guard: apparent in the maternal pedagogies of Laura Bush, in the transcendent virtues of the “Lady of Liberty,” in the safe sanctuary of the domestic private, and in the irrational and rude properties of the anarchic or uncontrollable. Feminist discourse itself has been a vital site for the attempts of theorists and practitioners to renew the possibilities of the democratic contract. As the literalism of feminism’s identiterian critiques were abandoned and the constitutive rather than descriptive role of discourse at least partially accepted, debates over how the relations

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between the private, the political, and the public could be understood became increasingly central to a wide range of feminist thinkers. At its simplest, an attraction to democratic thought corresponded to the coalition-building energy that feminism had long relied upon; feminists found “in the motion and multiplicity of current societies renewed opportunities for progressive articulations and productive alliances.”26 Yet a complex and disparate range of feminist thinkers—including psychoanalytical theorists of sexual difference such as Luce Irigaray, Marxists such as Nancy Fraser and anti-foundationalist thinkers such as Wendy Brown—have imagined the gendering of the democratic relationship in very different ways.27 Irigaray stresses a democratic dialogue that can incorporate the irreducible differences between man and woman “with each gender retaining its own tendencies and modifying them in exchange with the other”;28 Fraser advocates a model for the public sphere capable of connecting a “cultural politics of recognition to a social politics of redistribution”;29 Brown argues for the relinquishment of a politics of identity entirely, to “supplant the language of ‘I am’—with its defensive closure on identity, its insistence on the fixity of position, its equation of social with moral positioning— with the language of ‘I want this for us?’ ”30 This book focuses on the ways in which contemporary women poets have responded to these different agendas of a gendered democratic. Most obviously, I am interested in providing a new kind of narrative for contemporary U.S. women poets, one that acknowledges both their distance from, and their dependence upon, the particular cautions and exigencies of contemporary feminist critique. This has two aspects. Firstly, I am interested in the contributions of women poets to a range of literary sodalities. The woman poet who exists both within and without a literary community seems frequently able to highlight many of the community’s formative assumptions, and this critical relationship can be powerfully revealing. Secondly, my analysis focuses on the emergence of feminism’s “third-wave” as an example of the move from the social movements that radicalized the late twentieth century to the democratic cultures that promise to do the same for the twentyfirst. The critiques associated with this “third wave” of feminism, ranging from Brown’s damning of a politics of ressentiment to conservative debates about “power” and “victim” feminism, highlight the potentially problematic nature of this shift from feminism to democracy.31 In reading some of the most significant women poets to have emerged in the United States in the past three decades against these debates I point not to the continued existence of a gendered aesthetic but attempt to answer the questions that follow in its wake. Far from

INTRODUCTION

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rehabilitating a problematic model of gynocriticism the book focuses on the possibilities of what Rita Felski describes as “paraesthetics”: a critical engagement with both gender and the institutional positioning of art in which identity can be allowed to “fail.”32 The poets examined in this book are all, in very different implicit and explicit ways, engaged with the tensions between a feminist and a democratic identity in striving to form a new poetic language for being public. My concern with these competing narratives of contemporary poetics, of democratic theory, and of anti-foundationalist or “thirdwave” feminism, returns me to the vexed issue of the publicness of poetry with which I began. These three fields converge in their interrogation of the role of the public as the shared but mutable ground for participatory political debate. It is in the formation of what Michael Warner has described as the public’s “meta-pragmatic” background, involving “the organization of media, ideologies of reading, institutions of circulation” as well as “the particular rhetoric of texts,” that U.S. poetry has been able to fashion its alternative models of a democratic community.33 Yet claims for such a public are necessarily cautious. The idea that “publicness” is “a quality that we once had but have now lost, and that we must somehow retrieve” is, as Bruce Robbins has pointed out, a dangerously tempting way of evading the complicated political realities of the contemporary.34 The complex and indeterminate nature of the public, belied by nostalgic appeals for its retrieval, is apparent in the debates that have characterized contemporary U.S. poetry. The public, as the example of Collins, Gioia, and Bernstein suggested, can be used, respectively, to refer to the academy, to the market, as well as to a proliferating number of “counter-publics.” Such distinctions are only further complicated by a feminist analysis sensitive to an understanding of the public as that which is outside of the domestic private and, theoretically at least, inaccessible to the female gendered subject. Recent scholarship in U.S. poetics has come to increasingly concentrate on the nature of this writing’s engagement with the ambivalent concept of a public that exists, as Christopher Beach had it, “between community and institution.”35 Readings of the public are frequently defined by a set of divergent assumptions about the role of the literary, and of literary criticism, within it. The well-established divide between a social or political and an aesthetic or textual emphasis on poetry often emerges through these critical debates. Cary Nelson’s analysis of the politicized class-based poetry overlooked by modernism introduced the broad methodologies of cultural studies to U.S. poetry. “One literally never sees the poem on a page in and of

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itself alone,” Nelson notes in the opening to Repression and Recovery, “nothing that we can say or think about a poem is free of social construction.”36 Nelson’s attention to the public and social structures of poetry is apparent in the recent explorations of outsider or political poetry undertaken by writers such as Joseph Harrington, Maria Damon, Zofia Burr, Michael Thurston, and Mark Van Wienen.37 The motivating critical question in these revisionary studies of poetry’s public role (rendered explicit by both Wienen and Harrington) is not whether “the poem is any good” so much as “good for what?”38 Yet the emphasis on the politics of class and the utilitarian reluctance to make aesthetic judgments that characterize this methodology has suggested for some critics an anachronistic or a too literal model of the political and a rather agnostic view of poetry. James Longenbach, for example, responded angrily to Michael Thurston’s critical review of his work Poetry after Modernism by suggesting that Thurston exaggerates “the cultural power of criticism: asking a literary critic to be responsible (qua critic) for social justice is like asking a six year-old to make dinner. It consequently seems to me politically irresponsible to judge criticism in terms that are primarily political.”39 The literary critic Paul Naylor has similarly suggested that Cary Nelson’s model of cultural studies offers a reductive view of poetry’s political importance. Naylor draws upon Laclau and Mouffe in rendering Nelson’s insistence on poetry’s participation in class struggle irrelevant in a post–cold war culture in which both the primacy of class and the distinctions between textuality and materiality have been discredited. According to Naylor, the “simple and accessible” poetry discussed by Nelson “may end up affirming rather than critiquing a culture that values immediate gratification.”40 Yet Naylor’s alternative model of the literary public, which evokes a “trickle-down” theory of dissemination, seems to assume that privilege naturally diffuses rather than enshrines itself.41 According to ethnographer of reading Elizabeth Long, this is a model of literary consumption which “holds that innovative ideas and values originate with transcendent high cultural figures and are delivered by abstract processes—and in diluted form—to the lower (and in this mode, relatively passive) levels of the sociocultural hierarchy.”42 Such a description of reading seems to fall short of explaining the complex social assumptions and processes embedded within what Joseph Harrington has described as the “social form” of poetry, which includes “the historical meaning of the genre; the institutional production of the ‘poetic’ [..] the interpretations, reception, judgements and issues to which readers subject poems.”43

INTRODUCTION

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Retaining Nelson’s caution about overestimating the efficacious autonomy of the literary text and Naylor’s emphasis on preserving poetry’s capacity to challenge normative cultural practices requires not only a sensitivity to the “meta-pragmatic” background of the literary public but also a critical vocabulary for understanding the relative significance of these discursive structures. Naylor’s use of Mouffe and Laclau suggests one influential strategy for understanding a divergent range of contemporary publics. Yet this model’s stress on “openness and contingency” can risk appearing what one critic described as a “cosmopolitan celebration of the free market” rather than an engagement with the real differences between these spheres.44 Like Joseph Harrington, I have turned to the work of Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt for a more critical and nuanced analysis of the fragmented, compromised publics of late modernity. The work of these East German theorists has become increasingly influential in explaining the multiplicity of contemporary publics in economic rather than only discursive terms. Kluge and Negt understand the failure of the Habermasian bourgeois sphere to be rooted in its exclusion not simply of marginal groups but of the relations of production and reproduction. Their theorization of opposing counter-public models—deeply ambivalent “public spheres of production” and oppositional “proletarian” publics—acknowledges the role of these economic relations in constructing the public and the relationship between publics.45 Although this analysis downplays the gender-specific nature of the relations of production (in ways that require explicit interrogation), it offers a way of examining the varied forms of contemporary publics as indicating different critical–political positions rather than simply providing evidence of a healthy democratic process.46 Instead of celebrating an indeterminate struggle to fill the “empty signification” of power this book offers the potential of reexploring how the various publics of contemporary poetry are able to make connections between their social positioning, political aims, and constitutions as spheres of production and consumption. This book draws on these recent debates in democratic theory and “third-wave” feminism in order to explore how contemporary women poets have negotiated the complexities of being public. It highlights the engagement of women poets with poetry’s heterogeneous “social forms” and emphasizes how the productive response of these poets to the more reified assumptions debates within U.S. poetics (between mainstream and experimentalism, between accessibility and difficulty, between identity and difference) suggests new possibilities for public

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culture. It examines the ways in which women poets offer a critique of the normative conventions of U.S. democracy, particularly the relations between public and private that they assume, and struggle to use their writing and its cultural structures to imagine alternatives to them. Chapter 1 analyzes the terms by which a “third-wave” feminist democratic can be imagined, using the work of figures such as Wendy Brown, Patricia Williams, Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, and Chantal Mouffe. It draws from debates in recent gender theory a model of the democratic public capable of facing the irony of Jean Luc Nancy’s conviction that the belief in “freedom is the very thing that prevents itself from being founded.”47 The second half of the chapter produces a comparative reading of two very different poets, June Jordan and Susan Howe, which attempts to recast some of the established narratives for feminist poetics in light of this ambition for freedom. These readings mobilize a number of formative feminist dynamics (the tensions between radicalism and rationalism, ludicism and materialism, singularity and universality, antagonism and consensus) in contending that the struggle of poets to productively accept these conflicts is suggestive of the possibility of a democratic poetics. The conclusion makes the terms of such possibilities more explicit through a reading of Erica Hunt’s practice of a poetics of “contiguity.” Chapter 2 examines the ways in which the work of a number of women poets have engaged with the broad and often bland claims made on behalf of the democratizing role of the literary academy. This chapter reads the academy as an example of what Negt and Kluge have described as “a public sphere of production” and focuses on how the anxieties attendant upon this realm—with regard to the privatized professionalization of poetry and its complicity with an agenda of disciplinary specialization—are inflected in the work of contemporary women poets. The academy’s negotiation of the fraught divisions between market and state, work and art, high and low culture, has made explicitly manifest both the risks of institutionalized art and the tensions central to contemporary notions of the public. Yet, this chapter asserts, the bifurcation of these tensions with a gendered analysis shifts the terms of debate. The incorporation of the private realm, for example, has a very different status when read against an agenda that both understands this act as potentially emancipatory and has complicated the divisions it assumes. The chapter explores the ways in which Rita Dove, Carolyn Forché, and Jorie Graham have used poetry to renegotiate the relations between the public, the private, and the political, specifically in order to

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reclaim the private as a politically necessary space. It contrasts the surprisingly varied strategies evoked by these poets who carefully discriminate between privacy, privatization, and the private and argues that a more complex analysis of the differences implied by these terms in contemporary poetry is still required. Chapter 3 examines the important interventions of Language poetry within contemporary poetics, interventions to which my broader approach is clearly indebted. In this chapter, I develop the implications of Alan Golding’s analysis of Language poetry’s “provisionally complicit” relationship with the academy. I suggest that a formative tension that is highlighted in the work of women Language poets concerns the relationship between gender and the “mass” cultural forms that this largely avant-garde context has defined itself against. This chapter redresses this balance by examining how the tensions around femininity and consumption are crucial to understanding the constitutive ironies that enable Language poetry’s realization as a counter-public. Through exploring the interrogations of public collectivity offered by Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian, particularly their attempts to locate their writing outside of U.S. culture, I suggest that Language poetry offers a valuably complex engagement and expansion of the terms of democratic debate. Chapter 4 examines the role that poetry has played in the maintenance of countercultural movements. It focuses on the ways in which a largely working-class small-press community has constituted itself as a counter-public seeking to combine Language poetry’s desire for an oppositional literary space with mass democratic appeal. I read this writing’s reliance on the obscene—its effrontery of sexual and literary mores—as an example of a counter-public sphere (what Negt and Kluge describe as the “proletarian sphere”) seeking to negate the bourgeois sphere’s abstractions of lived experience. Yet, as my specific examples make clear, such a movement is consistently complicated by the complex configurations of gender and sexuality that it also involves: the careful ambivalence of the obscene moves in more unpredictable and chaotic ways once a critique of gender is brought into play. The final, concluding chapter offers a reading of the work of the most recent generation of experimental or “emerging” women poets, including Harryette Mullen, Juliana Spahr, and Lisa Jarnot. This chapter examines the way in which these poets grasp the indeterminacy of contemporary power, as it becomes both more diffuse and more resistant, as the very thing that makes it possible to move beyond the formative impasses of modernity. The chapter explores the

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ways in which these poets offer new critiques of race, class, nation, and sexuality whilst abandoning the currencies of legitimacy, morality, and authenticity. Instead, commonality—the grammar of democracy in Chantal Mouffe’s felicitous phrase—is provided by an attention to the intersection between poetics and the social.

CHAP TER

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Paper Money and Tender Acts: Feminism and Democracy

Introduction This chapter examines a number of women poets who have been identified with, but are importantly tangential to, the feminist poetry movement as it developed through the 1970s and 1980s. Its specific focus is upon the ways in which these poets have sought to reimagine the relations of the public, the private, and the political produced in that movement. The chapter supplements the familiar narratives about the development of feminist poetry, which have largely emphasized the political freight of the private, by emphasizing an alternative trajectory that has long been concerned with molding new kinds of public, democratic spaces for poetry.

Gender Trouble: The Foundations of Third-Wave Critique Feminism’s “third wave,” like Beckett’s Godot, seems to primarily exist in the anxious excitement evoked by suggestions of its imminent arrival. The term is a rather opaque reference point for twenty-firstcentury gender critique. It can seem both hopelessly vague (referring to a radical anti-foundationalism, to a neoconservative populist backlash, to a number of disparate youth cultures, or simply to a new generation of academic critics) and rather too precise (implying a definite and meaningful break with the terms and aims of “second wave”). For some commentators, such contradictions and multiple meanings are necessary to the “desires and strategies of third-wave feminists” as they have been “shaped by struggles between various feminisms as well as by cultural backlash against feminism and activism.”1 Feminism’s “third wave” seems an attempt to consolidate through coalition the

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complex and heterogeneous strands of the second-wave feminist movement from the uncertain ground that yawned open once feminism’s “innocence,” its reliance on the rationally progressive narratives of modernity, was lost.2 Although much has been made of feminism’s relinquishment of this enlightenment inheritance, many of the shifts in feminist debate that have occurred over the past fifteen years seemed to have signaled a less radical break with this history than that implied by either the emotive rhetoric of “innocence” or the generational language of “waves”. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the rather sweeping gestures suggested by the initial arbiters for and against the synchronicity between feminism and postmodernism and post-structuralism were recalibrated by theorists who carefully explored the possibilities of reconciling political urgency with radical epistemological skepticism. Although still far from complete, this work has extended more than it has curtailed feminism’s remit. Gayatri Spivak, for example, demonstrated that feminism’s somewhat belated responsiveness to class, race, and sexuality could be commensurate with a critique of both a radically indeterminate language and a powerfully unequal material. For other influential anti-foundationalist critics, such as Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, and Rosi Braidotti, feminist analysis involved revisiting issues of corporeality and sexuality in ways capable of absorbing changes in technology and resisting hetero-normativism: embodied utopias, cyborgs, and nomads all became increasingly influential and attractive tropes for feminism’s “third wave.”3 Such shifts significantly transformed feminism’s expectations of the literary. What Jacqueline Rose had described in 1988 as literary feminism’s “dual discursive inheritance,” its simultaneous striving for affirmation and deconstruction,4 was replaced by readings stressing literature’s ability to model new political possibilities for gender relations now that the “doxa of difference” had become impossible to maintain.5 Feminism’s continued ability to provide even an internally divided model of reading became precarious as the assumptions supporting both the emancipating “female” and the disrupting “feminine” subject came under vigorous critique.6 The increasing skepticism toward the notion of a “feminist reading” encouraged the view that “there is no ‘natural’ way to read a text: ways of reading are historically specific and culturally variable and reading positions are always constructed, assigned or mapped.”7 This revisiting of the self-acknowledged positivism of feminist cultural studies was particularly productive, as critics complicated what Janice Radway’s early work on feminist readerships meant for a feminist critique of culture.8 The polarization of

FEMINISM AND DEMOCRACY

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readers as “active” and “passive” was similarly superseded by approaches from critics intent on examining it as both “non-instrumental and implicated.”9 Instead of seeing reading as simply ending in individual textual interpretation, such work provided models that understood it through its embeddedness in discourses that exist prior to, but are in a dialogic relationship with, the specific reading or viewing experience.10 The formalist assumptions that had similarly dogged feminism for much of the 1980s also began to rapidly recede. Work on feminist autobiography and realism began to query the assumed foundationalism of mimeticism, exploring alternative ways of understanding fiction as a site of cultural practice.11 Poetry criticism began to similarly review its most favored assumptions and at last realized the contribution of women poets to modernist and late modernist experimental traditions. This disruption of the continuum of representation and politics produced not the feared nihilistic relativism but an increasingly nuanced literary–political vocabulary. For contemporary poets, these discussions resulted in an increasingly expansive literary vocabulary, as the possibilities of the visual, of the aural, of the cross-media and performed poem came, at last, into clearer view. Both central, and yet frequently deferred, in the theoretical debates supporting these changes was the question over how the relations between the private, the political, and the public could be understood once the literalism of identiterian critiques had been abandoned and the constitutive rather than the descriptive role of discourse at least partially accepted. It was in this context that the terms of democratic debate appeared increasingly attractive.12 For some, what was required was a closer attention to the definitions and possibilities of the private. Drucilla Cornell, for example, defended the “imaginary domain” for allowing for the separation of “what is of value in the doctrine of privacy” from its illegitimate promotion of hetero-normativity whilst others suggested that the private offers an “incommensurate or singular experience” providing a “reprieve from social control.”13 Yet it was the reinvigorated democratic public subject that became the tantalizing prize in a postfeminist future for a surprising range of feminist critics. The achievement of such a goal seemed to demand both a reconstitution and a denial of the existing divisions within feminism. Stalwarts of feminist literary criticism such as Elaine Showalter, for example, identified “third wave” feminism as an “ideology without a movement” and argued that it would only succeed where its predecessors had failed by abandoning its old essentialisms and conflicts and directly engaging with the literal demands of the “public.”14 For many theorists, conversely, the promise of the democratic furthered their

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existing positions. Psychoanalytical theorists claimed democracy could only be founded in an understanding of sexual difference;15 antifoundationalist critics insisted it must persistently “bring into question the foundations that it is compelled to lay down”;16 materialist critics strove to resist both essentialism and relativism by referencing the realpolitik of social context or the broader horizon of the “concrete” universal.17 In U.S. feminism, attempts to mediate the conflict between the latter two positions, between a materialist and an antifoundationalist notion of the democratic public, have proved especially fruitful. Patricia J. Williams’s Alchemy of Race of Rights confidently melds legal analysis, personal anecdote, racial critique, and post-structuralism in her account of the shifting politics of race and gender in contemporary American culture. Her critique focuses on how an increasing privatization has allowed public responsibility or accountability to be displaced by an economic privilege that denies both autonomy and privacy to those without financial security. She critiques both the state’s relinquishment of public tasks (examining slum landlords, school vouchers) and the segregation implicit in the privatization of public space (the shopping mall, the homeowning neighborhood). Yet Williams’s desire for a reinvigoration of a public culture capable of maintaining notions of accountability and responsibility stops short of a radical Foucauldianism. She parts company from Critical Legal Scholars, for example, when they attempt to discard the language of rights for their enshrining of the private subject. For Williams, the preferable alternative is to radically augment and expand the potent discourses of rights and responsibilities upon which democracy relies. She advocates widening “private property rights into a conception of civil rights, into the right to expect civility from others. [ . . . ] Unlock them from reification by giving them to slaves.”18 For Wendy Brown, seeking to make clear the “wounded attachment” of such emancipatory models, Williams’s analysis is an insufficient response to her political critique. Brown reproves Williams for allowing the “production and regulation of identity” to become a site of “injury” rather than a “vehicle of emancipation.”19 In place of this “distressingly durable” door to the “plastic cage” of discourse, Brown advocates a model of freedom at once alluring and yet difficult to conceive of.20 She suggests that the recognition of the tension between freedom and institutionalization is central to understanding the “difficulties of formulating a politics of freedom” for late modernity, and gestures to Jean Luc Nancy’s conviction that “freedom . . . is the very thing that prevents itself from being founded.”21 For Brown, such intractable contradictions


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require both a “historically and institutionally specific reading of contemporary modes of domination” and the realization that “freedom’s ‘actualization’” depends upon a “formulation of the political that is richer, more complicated and also perhaps more fragile than that circumscribed by institutions, procedures and political representation.”22 This anxious desire to create a public discourse capable of negotiating and redressing inequality from within such deeply contaminated formative discourses bites deep into the project of third-wave feminism. The much-publicized debate between Judith Butler and Seyla Benhabib turns on a set of similar tensions.23 Butler’s rendering of a performative analysis of sex and gender has been essential to queer and post-gender analysis. Her initial, influential, thesis was that prediscursive assumptions undermine feminism’s ability to extend its claims to representation and that feminists need to acknowledge that “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender.”24 According to Butler, the iterability of performance inveigles the act with a normalizing cultural authority, the re-signification of which produces agency: either the affirmative act of survival or the disruptive act of resistance.25 Seyla Benhabib, conversely, embraces post-Enlightenment thought whilst striving to retain a democratic Habermasian discursive, communicative concept of rationality.26 The most influential example of this has been her extrication from the Gilligan-Kohlberg controversy (in which Carol Gilligan refutes Kohlberg’s abstracted and pure notion of moral ethics by pointing toward the intersubjective, narrative practices of women) a reversible model of perspectives and the cultivation of “enlarged thinking.” This “weak” model of public ethics reaches for an intersubjective and dialogic model of interaction capable of evading the forced binarism of relativism or positivism. There are clear distinctions in the ways in which these two influential figures have theorized the constitution of the public. Butler’s model of political community, formed through the “regime of discourse / power whose claims it seeks to adjudicate,” is as difficult to imagine and implement as Wendy Brown’s promotion of “the style of political practices” over “policies, laws, procedures, or organization of political orders.”27 This model, in which difference can be “honored” without being assimilated to identity or made “an unthinkable fetish of alterity,” can possess no foundation beyond itself.28 The dangers of such a gesture are now fairly well documented. Most obviously, Butler’s apparent assumption that the de-reification of essentialist notions of identity is liberationary risks downplaying the potential recoverability of what are intended as radical gestures.29 Her disinterest

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in questions of the material (most obviously of the economic) both fails to adequately account for the constitution of agency and to analyze the potential that performative acts can be played to conservative ends, or constructed conservatively through their means of dissemination and reception.30 Even Excitable Speech, explicitly aimed at countering what she admits has been the “overdeterminations of the linguistification of the political field” remains curiously apolitical. Although its concluding gesture towards Bourdieu’s “habitus” suggests a sensitivity to utterance’s dependence on specific spatial and temporal conditions, Butler gives little indication as to how the political efficacy she attributes to “re-signification” can be sustained or, indeed, recognized.31 Seyla Benhabib’s model of post-Enlightenment feminist discourse, seeking to qualify such radical contingencies, conversely appeals to nothing less than the universal. Her aim in Situating the Self is to “situate reason and the moral self more decisively in the contexts of gender and community, while insisting upon the discursive power of individuals to challenge such situatedness in the name of universalistic principles, future identities, and as yet undiscovered communities.”32 Benhabib advocates a discourse model of public space (as opposed to either an Arendtian agnosticism or a conventional liberalism) that allows “issues of common concern” to be “accessible to discursive will formation.” Yet her concern with gender encourages her to use Habermas against himself as she recommends the “feminization” of this procedural discourse in order to “challenge unexamined normative dualisms between justice and the good life, norms and values, interests and needs.”33 The distinctions between Butler and Benhabib’s models of the public extend to both its imaginary form and the spheres it is able to encompass. Butler’s privileging of experimental performance and re-signification stands rather starkly against Benhabib’s commitment to narrative and mimeticism.34 The conflict between these critics over the languages and forms of democratic debate further attests to Ken Hirschkop’s contention that modern democracy is “not law but language, not the product of institutions above society but of the linguistic intersubjectivity which constitutes it.”35 The recent attempts of both Butler and Benhabib to politicize their philosophical attention to the public by reexamining its “constitutive outside” have produced similarly contrasting analyses. Butler’s work has turned to the classical paradigm of Antigone to explore the significance of kinship as the “mediating link” between the public and private spheres. For Butler, Antigone illuminates the “melancholy of the public sphere,” the unsteady space between inclusion and exclusion represented by one


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who is “precluded from the public constitution of the human” but who is “human in an apparently catachrestic sense of that term.” This “shadowy” space offers Butler the opportunity for an alternative to the hetero-normative “field of the human,” for new models of psychodynamic gender and familial relations.36 Benhabib’s attention to the same question mediates on the possibility of refiguring the tension between human rights and popular sovereignty that lie at the center of the U.S. constitutional ability to speak for “We, The People.” Benhabib suggests that the Arendtian ideal of a “global civil society” requires not only a partial relaxing of international borders but a more holistically embedded culture of democratic participation capable of linking “civil and political citizenship.”37 These familiar tensions between a radical and a deliberative model of public democracy are clearly not absolute. Theorists such as Nancy Fraser and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek have explicitly sought to negotiate what Fraser has described as a “series of mutually reinforcing false antithesis.”38 Fraser poses the space of the pluralized, subaltern counter-public as a realm capable of mediating the different demands of Butler and Benhabib. This counter-public facilitates both “withdrawal and regroupment” and the practice of “activities directed toward wider publics.”39 In addition, Fraser’s work has stressed, like that of Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, that a counter-public realm must account for the economic, as well as cultural and political, relations of production and consumption.40 In a usefully tangential move, Ziarek has suggested that the debate between Williams and Brown oversimplifies the ethics of democracy. Ziarek has suggested that Williams’s attention to the languages of rights and accountability should be read not simply as a legitimization of liberal democracy but as allowing for a redefinition of “democratic politics as an ongoing task of transformation.”41 Such a realization is central to Ziarek’s modeling of an “ethics of dissensus” in which notions of obligation and accountability temper the radical contingency of a democratic politics. Ziarek inscribes the “diachrony of responsibility into the futural politics of human rights” in order to preserve “noncoincidence at the core” of the democratic. She suggests that the “most significant limitation of the feminist politics of differences” is its failure to articulate a “nonappropriative relation to the Other that is based on responsibility and accountability rather than on power and knowledge.” Ziarek urges a feminist politics of democracy capable of articulating an “infinite responsibility for justice without the assurance of normative criteria” suggesting that such a responsibility is inevitably “anarchic because it is not based in any prior principle.”42

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There are, it seems, at least two ways of resolving the tensions between Butler’s anti-foundationalism and Benhabib’s critical materialism in thinking through new models of a gendered democratic space. Fraser’s demand for a counter-public capable of accounting for cultural relations of “recognition” as well as the economic facts of “distribution” can be positioned against Ziarek’s advocacy of a new kind of non-approriative intersubjective ethics. Fraser’s notion of the counter-public clearly privileges the material urgencies, and wider contexts of inequality, that Seyla Benhabib is so concerned with. Ziarek’s proposal of the more contingent foundation of responsibility, conversely, comes closer to a radical anti-foundationalism that seeks to release politics from false certainties. The second half of this chapter reviews the recent history of feminist poetry in suggesting how we might begin to write, describe, or know what Fraser calls an “idiom” and Mouffe a “grammar” for these democratic models. I provide readings of two poets, June Jordan and Susan Howe, who were born only a year and a few hundred miles apart but who have been kept steadfastly separate from one another by the formal and political assumptions of both contemporary poetics and feminism. The obvious and well-known points of contrast between these poets are less significant to my reading than an attempt to make apparent their complementary critiques of the narratives of U.S. democratic culture. These readings emphasize the complexity of Jordan’s modeling of a literary counter public and the potential of Howe’s exploration of a radical democratic ethics. I particularly foreground the ways in which both struggle to constitute new forms for a democratic public able to lever open the deadlock between what Wendy Brown describes as the robust “plastic cage” of institutionalized discourse and the impossible goal of “freedom.”

Difference and Democracy: June Jordan and Susan Howe Kathleen Fraser has provided a compelling account of the particular complexities faced by the women poet, born in the years leading to the outbreak of the Second World War and coming to maturity alongside the second-wave feminist movement. She notes that as a young writer the literary role models available were largely those of the token women attached to various postwar poetic movements: Denise Levertov was seen to be writing under “the fatherly aegis of W.C. Williams and Robert Duncan,” Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were “watched over by Robert Lowell,” Diane Di Prima was read as a


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“sister figure for the Beats,” and Adrienne Rich appeared “in the aesthetic company of W.S. Merwin and Galway Kinnell.”43 For Fraser, the usurpation by the women’s movement of these relations failed to bring about the possibility of difference and debate. This movement did not provide the “warm room where the multiple styles of women’s minds and bodies and poetic languages could flower” that Fraser had aspired to, but stressed poetics as “a place for self-expression, for giving a true account, for venting rage.”44 This emphasis on the personal and authentic is clearly apparent in the assumptions of those more conventionally influential poet-critics sharing Fraser’s narrow but significant generational window—such as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Alicia Ostriker, and Marge Piercy.45 In the critical model for reading women’s poetry that emerged in the late 1970s, and persisted throughout the 1980s, the assumption that the effects of reading, writing, and form were concurrent allowed criticism to focus on the poet as the exemplary subject capable of overcoming the “double-bind” of aesthetic and social exclusion.46 Such an approach privileged writing struggling to overcome the inequalities legitimized by the divorcing of the private and public: as the editorial to Florence Howe’s influential anthology No More Masks! asserted, for “young” poets “for whom the life of a woman is a public matter, such distinctions between public and private fall away.”47 This critical vocabulary was neither static nor crudely identiterian and the influence of Marxist and deconstructive vocabularies were both consistently brought to bear upon it.48 Nevertheless, the emphasis on the interiority of the poet could do little but affirm a politicization of the private rather than seek a reconstitution of the public. The broad assumption in the field was, as Katie King has asserted, that “the ‘poem’ ” could stand metonymically for “ ‘political action’ and ‘poet’ for the political identity ‘feminist.’ ”49 It was not simply an experimental tradition that was left out of this narrative (a tradition that Fraser has been central to the successful rehabilitation of) but an analysis of women poets’ contribution to an understanding of the public sphere outside of its crucial, but specific, relationship to the women’s movement. The critical reception of a poet such as Diane Wakoski indicate some of the limitations of a literary vocabulary that used representations of self to forge an elusive unity of public and private, form and politics. Wakoski, whose early writing seemed to move awkwardly between an artless first-person narrative and a broader social and political vision, was read by figures such as Alicia Ostriker through the familiar terms of second-wave feminist poetry criticism. Ostriker understood Wakoski

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as a poet struggling against a divided voice, striving to consolidate the tension between the “personal ‘real’ self ” and the “strong poetic ‘fantasy’ self ” that an androcentric literary culture insisted upon for the woman writer.50 Proponents of a modernist or experimental aesthetic, such as Marjorie Perloff, conversely read Wakoski’s striving to be “wholly natural, spontaneous and direct,” and her failure to make these particulars “transcend the individual ego,” as nothing more than sentimental “corn-pone.” For Perloff, Wakoski’s writing marks the excesses of a personalized and confessional poetics whose “most striking feature” is “that it is never disturbing or upsetting; it never challenges our comfortable assumptions. We can, so to speak, walk out of the theatre and forget all about it.”51 Yet an alternative reading of Wakoski, one that could highlight her refusal of these starkly opposing models of literary politics, is also possible. Wakoski can be read as critiquing the impossibility of her own transcendence in gendered terms whilst also refusing to embrace the politicization of the private. Hence, although Perloff reads Wakoski’s account of Sylvia Plath as “maudlin’ simplifications,” they can be alternatively read as a lampooning of the terms of the female poet’s idolization, a process that clearly calcified the very assumptions interrogated in Plath’s work: “Your beauty is / that simplicity, / that dumbness, [ . . . ] that lack of need for a complex and changing identity.”52 Indeed, Wakoski’s contribution to broader poetic debate often seems to suggest a desire for a very different kind of literary public. Her column in the early days of the American Poetry Review, “The Crafts of Plumbers, Carpenters and Mechanics,” rejects both the politicization and balkanization of the poetry scene in favor of a utilitarian, rather ironically excessively masculinized, model for writing.53 These aims are echoed in the poem “Poet at the Carpenters’ Bench,” which counterposes its straining to hold together its colliding registers of the personal, the elegiac, and the cynical, by defining itself against the obvious forms of publicity it rejects. The poem derides the poet who stands on stage alongside “a tattered American flag” for throwing “rusty water” at the audience and instead returns to the ideal of the poem as “a structure that will permit you to say / no, / a structure that will permit you to say / yes.”54 A reading of other poets who grew up alongside, and yet importantly tangential to, the mainstream women’s poetry movement— poets such as Kathleen Fraser, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Howe, and June Jordan—complicate the established narratives for “feminist poetry” in productive ways. These poets are important not simply for challenging the mimeticism implicit in much second-wave feminist


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poetry (or, perhaps more accurately, for challenging what the division between an experimental and a representational poetics implies) but for providing a sustained and heterogeneous critique of what publicness itself could mean for the woman poet. June Jordan’s acute sense of the limited and proscribed public roles available to the black woman poet, for example, radicalized her attempts to realize alternatives. That Jordan was the inheritor of the Leftist-democratic aspirations of Langston Hughes—notoriously dubbed by the Chicago Whip in his own lifetime as black America’s “poet lowrate” was evident in her first full-length piece of published poetry. This work, Who Look at Me had initially been Hughes’s and Jordan had been asked to complete it only after his death. The completed project makes manifest the shared desire of both writers to use the possibilities of literary experimentation to enlarge the possibilities of the public in the broadest possible practical and conceptual terms. Who Look at Me reproduces a series of visual images of African Americans alongside a single extended poem. The text’s scrutiny of the interdependencies of social integration and visual and literary representation is clear in the ambiguities of its opening the question: “Who would paint a people black or white?”55 The register of the book’s attempt to answer this question modulates between a children’s primer, a harsh critique of a racially inflected “blindness,” and an investigation into recent histories of racialized and aestheticized representation. Like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which it clearly echoes, the poem is concerned with understanding the modernist “crisis” in representation through the particular violence of the “white stare” whose blindness “splits the air.”56 The poem seeks to make apparent the distinct implications and possibilities of image and text-based representations. Its first image, Charles Alston’s Manchild, is a cubist-styled painting of a black figure. Jordan’s poem speaks to the ambiguity of this manipulation of mimeticism—“is that how we look to you / a partial nothing clearly real.” The following pages direct this assumed naïve viewer to the certainties of the physical that the painting also insists upon, pointing to the “solid clarity / of feature / size and shape of some one head.” The phrasing here plays, like the title of the poem itself, on two kinds of language coding: “some one head” suggests a reference to both black English and to the universality of singularity. This attention to the ambivalent authority of representation is consistent throughout. Descriptions of poverty and degradation—“starvation at the table,” “lines of men no work to do”— are stark next to an empty page.57 The painting of the eighteenth century, The Slave Market, conversely, is reproduced twice, on one page

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in its entirety and on the facing page a detail from it of a slave trader removing a child from his mother by his hair. The few words preceding these pictures, positioned low on the right hand of the page, “— (slavery:) the insolence—” suggest a rage, tautly bound in syntax, that neither the painting nor the poem, for profoundly contrasting reasons, are able to articulate.58 When published as a single poem Who Look at Me was dedicated to Jordan’s son, Christopher. This evoking of the personal was certainly not unique in Jordan’s writing and a significant part of her poetry has been both implicitly and explicitly autobiographical. This writing has suggested not only the familiar need to politicize and examine what is too easily deemed private, in this case the complex familial relations of an aspirational immigrant family, but also to scrutinize the terms of a subsequent entry into the public. Jordan’s striving to broach and interrogate a range of public registers was made apparent in her later work by her attention to the specific difficulties of feminizing the speaking voice. One of her most widely collected and read poems, “Getting Down to Get Over” was originally written for an African American women writer’s conference at Radcliffe in 1973. It centers on a critically recuperative voicing of the excessive range of meanings attributed to black femininity: “momma Black / Momma / / Black Woman / Black / Female Head of Household / Black Matriarchal Matriarchy / Black Statistical / Lowlife Lowlevel Lowdown.”59 This attention to the unstable signifying ground of black femininity—described by Hortense Spillers as a “bizarre axiological ground” whose overdetermined “nominative properties” render it an example of “signifying property plus”—is carried into the poem’s attention to its own linguistic assumptions.60 The poem’s listing of single words makes apparent the structures of linguistic meaning as well as their imagined voicing. buck jive cold strut bop split tight loose close hot hot hot 61


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The listing of verbs in this passage evokes an obviously sexualized, racialized, and gendered movement; their splicing with the adjectives “hot” and “cold” does little to lessen this. The poem’s tautness also derives from its contrast between synonyms (“jive,” “strut,” and “bop”) and contrasts (“tight” and “loose,” “hot and “cold”). The poem makes clear not only the tensions between speech and writing or between gender and race but also those between the axes of selection/ metaphor and combination/metonymy. Although frequently read as concerned with the representative politics of advocacy and address, Kim Whitehead, for example, reads the poem “as a conscious attempt to represent the realities of African-American women’s lives,”62 the poem actually seems to interrogate the conditions of such politicized mimeticism. As with Who Look at Me the poem marks the limits of existing models of oral, literary, and visual representation, and begins to gesture toward more expansive alternatives. It is hardly surprising, then, that Aldon Lynn Nielsen should cite the inattention that Jordan’s work has received when lamenting the fact that “black women were, for the most part, offered little incentive to pursue poetic experimentation in America.”63 Jordan’s questioning of the models of the public available to her make such concerns with the nature of representation more explicit. Although the influence of African American writers such as Hughes, Baraka, Reed, and Ellison are all apparent in her writing it was, with an irony she appeared to enjoy, Walt Whitman who offered her the opportunity to fully consider the relation between America’s failed democratic promise and the alternative possibilities offered by poetry.64 Jordan’s celebration of Whitman’s democratic aspirations— this “poet of the many people as one people”—is read against the contradictions of modernity itself. Jordan reads Whitman’s repudiation of feudalism not through an idealized bardicism but through his awareness of the intermediaries, the “critics and publishers,” of the New World. Such figures inevitably hamper democratic aspirations, according to Jordan, because their reliance upon the “marketplace” evokes the supply and demand “principles of scarcity” opposed “to populist traditions” of mass art.65 This reading of Whitman’s civic republicanism is a familiar one: it suggests both the enabling of public discourse afforded by the social institutions accompanying modern capitalism (education, print media) and the immediate degeneration of these possibilities at the hands of capitalist culture. This model is clearly shadowed by Habermas’s classic analysis of the public sphere in ways that usefully clarify the terms of Jordan’s alternative. For Habermas, the point at which the public sphere’s vital “critical

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publicity” loses its strength was the point at which the world of letters was replaced with the “pseudo-public or sham-private world of culture consumption.”66 This culture debilitated “criticality” by lowering the threshold capacity for public participation and making the possibility of disinterested debate impossible. Yet the assumed failure of this model, in which goods are both made more economically available and easier to “psychologically” access, refuses to account for the various ways in which “access was opened that do not fall into either category—the extension of public education and mass literacy, for example, or the increase in working-class leisure time.”67 Indeed, such oversights seem inextricable from Habermas’s vision of the neutral bourgeois subject capable of producing critical publicity only by possessing what seems a rather privileged ability to be disinterested in the “apolitical” questions of “survival needs.”68 It is not simply that Habermas wants to denude literacy of the investments suggested by a subject position but also, as importantly, of the relations (themselves inextricable from the social practices of gender) of consumption and production. The interrogation of the relationship between politics and representation that Jordan’s poetics frequently enacted was matched by her attempt to understand precisely how the public sphere she was striving for was formed and policed. She seems to well know that the modern democratic project needs to rethink the formative tensions between not only identity and difference, but also the relations of production and consumption and the false equivalence between “access” as a social right and “accessibility” as simplification embedded in Habermas’s model of the public. Rather than simply assuming the coincidence of “poem” and “political action” Jordan interrogates the potentially uneven match between her writing’s insistent re-signification of the frames of representation and the more literal economic and pragmatic influences that controlled the thresholds for public participation. It is Jordan’s attempt to reformulate the boundaries and conditions of the public whilst remaining consistently suspicious toward attributing any determinate meaning toward it that suggests her alternative model for a feminist-democratic poetics. This model interrogates the limits of its discursive grounding and rejects identity as a basis for politics whilst, at the same time, remaining closely focused on its social realities. The tensions between Wendy Brown’s railing against the institutionalization of political resistance and Patricia Williams’s insistence on the necessity of expanding its possibilities to include notions of ethics and responsibility are given an alternative form of resolution in Jordan’s work.


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In 1968, the same year as Who Look at Me was published, Jordan began working for the “Teachers and Writers Collaborative Program,” a venture intended to radicalize the teaching of language within public school education.69 Such an aspiration can be read against the events of that year in which, according to Bill Readings, U.S. education finally broke with a Humboldtian narrative of “education as the individual experience of emancipation” and became understood, instead, as a techno-bureaucratic system.70 Debates on the Left subsequently settled into a familiar tension: radical pedagogues urged educators to make their practice a site of political action while materialist critics contended that this attention to the discursive surfaces of the academy deflected issues of funding, of access, of the fate of primary and secondary education.71 The Collaborative can be clearly read against these debates. Its conceptual origins lay in the same series of conversations that led to the creation of the national bodies—the Associated Writing Program, the American Poetry Review, and the Academy of American Poets—identified with the increased professionalization of postwar poetry.72 As with these other bodies, such collaboration bore deeply ambiguous fruit. On the one hand, it was a clear attempt to exploit these changes in order to resist the worst excesses of the increased technocratic emphasis of the academy. The collaborative saw itself as a site for politically radical action. On the other, its adoption of many of their assumptions risked allowing poetry to be assimilated into these bureaucratic structures. The program, for example, routinely privileged a demotic rather than a more explorative or modernist poetic tradition.73 Jordan’s participation within this program, like her participation in the open access program at City College in the 1970s 74 and her establishment of the Poetry for the People program at Berkeley in the 1990s,75 can be read as an active intervention in these debates about public literacy. Her retrospective introduction to her account of the program relates the death of a thirteen-year-old participant who died because a white hospital would not treat him and links survival to institutional access in the most of literal of ways. Yet, at the same time, her description of the poetics program is careful in its claims. She begins by stating her awareness of the inadequacy of literal responses to the profound gaps in these children’s education: “How can you correct completely illiterate work without entering that hideous history they have had to survive as still another person who says: ‘You can’t do it. You don’t know. You are unable?’ ”76 Although she attributes an affirmative energy to poetry, her ironical acknowledgment of the gap between this act and the children’s needs obstruct a reading

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of it as simply productive of the emancipated subject. The efficacy she attributes to the ability of her students to write their own poetry neither naturalizes their speech nor celebrates their struggle for it; to do either would be to depoliticize the importance of the particular skills that the poetic allows for. In a tart defense of the work of one of her students, for example, Jordan writes: “Contrary to your remarks, a poet does not write poetry according to the ways she talks. Poetry is a distinctively precise and exacting use of words [ . . . ] One should take care to discover racist ideas that are perhaps less obvious than others.”77 Jordan’s texts written for young adults in this period continued to promote political activism through the expansion of reading possibilities and cultural literacy.78 At times this results in little more than a willing didacticism. Dry Victories, a polemical account of African American history spoken through a dialogue between two African American boys, is bracingly unreflective, ending with an author’s note suggesting that “wherever there is argument among historians, I have adapted a single-minded position.”79 The novel His Own Where, inspired by Jordan’s work on urban renewal and written with the intent of “familiarizing kids with activist principles of urban redesign, or, in other words, activist habits of response to environment,” has more complex implications.80 The novel entwines a conventional teen story about forbidden love with a critique of the atomization of the nuclear family and the impoverishing conditions of contemporary urban living. It was written entirely in black English from the viewpoint of a young black man, and is startling in its attempt to synthesize this variety of registers in constructing a utopian space where the man could become “ready father, public lover, privately alone with her.”81 The novel’s search for a literal and metaphoric utopian space belies the faltering language of the protagonist. The young man rebuilds the house he and his father had stripped bare in order to create a home for himself and his lover. It is a home without a hallway “that mean every part of the house is real. It belong to somebody, and be part of how you live, not how you get to where you live” and with a garden that has a “strong rose concrete” path “among the growing flowers.”82 The reception of the book is telling about the details of Jordan’s struggle to realize the forms of the public that the book describes. Although critically lauded (a finalist in the National Book Award) it was rejected by parents from its intended community who attempted to have it banned from public libraries because its legitimizing of black English was felt to be culturally disempowering.83


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Jordan’s detailed engagement with the kinds of claims that can be attributed to the intersection of identity and literature are similarly clear in her intervention in a late twentieth-century politics of Diaspora that extend beyond the potentially self-consuming attention to the politics of the literary academy. This critique resists bracketing off the economic relations of production and consumption in order to complicate the nature of the claims that can be made on behalf of identity. When she turns to the outside of the failed promises of U.S. democracy, Jordan turns to its complicity with the maintenance of a largely disenfranchised global community defined by inequality and exclusion. Her “Report from the Bahamas” opens by considering the irony of “a black woman seeking refuge in a multinational corporation,” the fact that her desire for security (against sexual attack) means that it is the British Colonial Sheraton Hotel which provides her with the freedom to go to the West Indies, the place from which her parents emigrated.84 Jordan extends this awareness, as she engages with the discrepancies between white holidaymakers and black Bahamian waiting staff, with the cultural politics of music and food and the economic politics of tourism, into an analysis of her own complex and contradictory positioning. In doing so she acknowledges that identity is an elementary but insufficient basis for politics—“race and class and gender remain as real as the weather. But what they mean about the contact between two individuals is less obvious, and, like the weather, not predictable.” Her attempt to forge an alternative, “reaching for the words to describe the difference between a common identity that has been imposed and the individual identity any one of us will choose,” is an attempt to formulate an ethical language for individuality capable of eschewing the voluntarist language of individualism.85 Her attempt to construct frameworks for new political coalitions on this basis continued to be evident in her journalism and speech making until her death as she made connections, without ever rendering simply equivalent, debates around issues as diverse and as pressing as sexual politics and American foreign policy.86 Jordan’s vision of the public complicates not only questions of access, pedagogy, individualism, and nationalism but also the privileging of reason as central to the possibilities of communicative action. In making apparent the role of the irrational, of desire, and of the visceral, her poetics gesture to a political embodiment beyond the institutional frameworks that her writing seeks to so actively adapt. The poem “From Sea to Shining Sea” published in Living Room in 1984, evokes both the anthems of U.S. nationalism and Ginsberg’s ode to Whitman in describing a supermarket’s disturbing parody of the fragility and randomness of what she terms as the “natural order.”

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Natural order is being restored Natural order means you take a pomegranate that encapsulated plastic looking orb complete with its little top / a childproof cap that you can neither twist nor turn and you keep the pomegranate stacked inside a wobbly pyramid composed by 103 additional pomegranates next to a sign saying 89 cents each87

Jordan’s scornful fury at the attempt to confine the mythic, erotic, and disturbing associations of the pomegranate is contrasted against a number of vignettes that cumulatively build the poem’s rage. Much of the poem is comprised of long and detailed accounts of specific injustices that include homophobia, unemployment, and environmental hazards. “This was not a good time to be gay,” we are told, because “Shortly before midnight a Wednesday / massacre felled eight homosexual Americans / and killed two: One man was on his way / To a delicatessen.”88 The specific details of these lines, which evoke the role of the public witness, are expanded to include race, sexuality, age, employment, gender, and region. The calmly itemized presentation and repetitively anaphoric structure of these descriptions are thrown into relief by the references to the precariously piled symbolic fruit. In the final two stanzas of this long poem the release from this unnatural world is violent and sexualized, as the fruit, “sucked by the tongue and the lips” releases its potential: This is a good time This is the best time This is the only time to come together Fractious Kicking Spilling Burly Whirling Raucous Messy Free Exploding like the seeds of a natural disorder89

The poem represents itself as a physically sexualized process, in a way that most clearly recalls the numerous climaxes of Whitman’s Song of Myself. This sense of freedom, which is the “only time to come


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together,” is brought about through the poem’s rejection of the alienation of consumption. The pleasurable violence of this release, which forces the visceral body back into view, complicates and compliments Jordan’s democratic vision, suggesting a notion of freedom—the “seeds of natural disorder”—in a wild excess of the careful pragmatism of much of her political writing. The centrality of this tension between rational responsibility and libidinous chaos to a democratic poetics is further developed in the work of Susan Howe. Howe, drawn to the antimonian traditions of Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens rather than to the bardicism of Whitman, Ginsberg, or Hughes, has come to increased prominence in the past two decades. Although Howe’s innovative, abstract poetics seem a far cry from Jordan’s explicit intervention in institutional debate, her critique of the vested interests concealed by American exceptionalism echoes much from Jordan. Reading these two poets against one another both completes and complicates my analysis of what lies on the inside and the outside of American notions of the democratic public and suggests quite a different model for understanding the histories of the relationship between contemporary women’s poetry and democracy. Although Howe shares Jordan’s equivocation toward attributing an explicit political efficacy to her own subject positioning, she articulates this hesitancy in very different ways. Howe has suggested that she operates from within an “intervening absence” and has acknowledged that such an interrogative void (that has force but no self ) may be, indeed, an “oxymoron.”90 Like Jordan, Howe’s concern with examining the instabilities of cultural boundaries as sites of discursive and material power insists upon a range of significatory practices. In the lengthy preface to the relatively early poem “History of the Western Borders,” for example, Howe unpacks the meanings of “mark” as both a “border” and a “bulwark”.91 The poem’s ostensible concern to narrate the “war whoop in each dusty narrative” begins by focusing on the inequities associated with the symbolical and literal claiming of American land.92 The poem alludes to the devastation of aboriginal American culture that the cartographic project inherent in the colonization of America caused. In the right-hand corner of the following page is written “for Mark my father, and Mark my son.” The word here also intimates, although with an affection typical of Howe’s ambivalent relationship with authority, the system of paternal naming upon which female identity has both floundered and depended. Like Jordan, Howe’s tracing of U.S. patrilinealism is attentive to its mobilizing of systems of linguistic and cultural representation. The word

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“mark” in this instance, for example, cannot help but also be about the typographic assumptions of writing itself. Howe, who began her career as a visual artist, has been consistently concerned with the materiality of culture in the most literal of senses.93 Not only does her writing explore the visual limits of poetics but it has been consistently concerned with how the physical presence and circulation of texts, as archives, libraries, books, diaries, letters, is integral to their ability to signify. In the introduction to The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, for example, she cites from Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language as she notes that the word “edit” means “I. Properly, to publish; more usually, to superintend a publication; to prepare a book or paper for the public eye, by writing, correcting or selecting the matter.” The regulatory implications of making a text public are disturbed by Howe, as she resists the “sensible partitioning” of editing and searches instead for “some trace of love’s infolding through all the paper in all the libraries” she comes to.94 Yet in place of Jordan’s attempt to answer these questions by formulating new institutional structures of literacy, Howe’s writing attempts to uncover the possibilities that lie behind the already-known discursive landscape that form such possibilities. She notes, for example, “First: before political theory people have no property. First: before civil order the arm of the church must extend its reach. First: the law holds gibberish off. Follow the footprints of justices.”95 In following the “footprints of justice” Howe offers a far-reaching critique of the ethical possibilities of the public as they impinge not upon questions of pedagogy and access but upon the possibilities afforded by the discursive order of democratic law itself. I want to examine the three poems brought together in The Singularities collection in order to explore what her embrace of the negative, Howe’s difficult ethical and political vision, contributes in this context. The first poem in the collection, “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time,” represents the exploits of Hope Atherton. Atherton was a reverend and a soldier in southern New England during the violent Indian wars of the 1670s. He was a member of a battalion that massacred an Indian encampment in the relatively infamous “Falls Fight” of 1676. During retaliation by the Native Americans, in what is now recognized as the last act of effective resistance to colonization by the native peoples of this region, Atherton lost his horse and became separated from his colonial community.96 When he rediscovered them, as the only survivor of the battle he had been involved in, he was rejected: “No one believed the Minister’s letter. He became a


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stranger to his community and died soon after the traumatic exposure that has earned him poor mention in a seldom opened book.”97 His existence is dependent upon recognition from a community and when this falters the unknowable outside of this community becomes dangerously apparent. Atherton, like Mary Rowlandson in Howe’s important essay “Captivity and Restoration,” demonstrates the violence and precariousness of the individual’s assimilation into a collective meaning through writing its physical loss. Both figures demonstrate the constraints of this community as it is formed through a nascent capitalist nationalism reliant on exclusionary narratives of gender and race. For both, their ability to write from the outside of this discourse is necessarily frustrated and partial: Rowlandson speaks with and against the biblical rhetoric handed to her and Atherton is represented by the contradictions of the ordered neologism. Atherton’s expedition is taken by Howe in the poem to be symbolic of the potential of her own journey through the landscape of America. His contradictory status, as complicit with colonialism and yet alienated from it, parallels Howe’s own construction of a poetics that is defined by an historical context from which it is also distant. What are described as Atherton’s literal attributes “effaced background dissolves remotest foreground. Putative author, premodern condition, presently present what future clamors for release” are used by Howe as an “emblem foreshadowing a Poet’s abolished limitations in our demythologized fantasy of Manifest Destiny.”98 His movement between visibility and invisibility offers Howe a trope for her “intervening absence,” for her attempt to explore the violence of the perpetuation of a U.S. language of nationalist colonialism, a “prophecy of our contemporary repudiation of alterity, anonymity, darkness,” from the inside, without being contained or appropriated by it.99 The second section of the poem, “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings,” attempts to describe Atherton’s journey through the in-between spaces of American history. He operates without access to an understandable language. The poem talks of the “Clog nutmeg abt noon / scraping cano muzzell / foot path sand and so,” the neologisms and half words mingling a sense of the acutely and threateningly physical with evocations of seventeenth-century words and sounds.100 The sense of chaos that this unhinging of linguistic certainty sets loose is contrasted in the poem against the incipient authority of the systems of communication that Atherton has left behind, the “Knowledge narrowly fixed knowledge / Whose bounds in theories slay.” The violence of this knowledge extends to the politics of land itself. Farming becomes associated with the violence of war. The loss of

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common land, the “Marching and counter marching / Danger of roaming the woods at random,” is linked to the violence of an organized harvest that was, of course, so central to the motivating successes of American colonization.101 The clarity of this familiar, if malevolent, image of the scythe jars against the loss of the “weir birchbark” that it sweeps away.102 The second poem in the collection “Thorow” continues to explore ways of rewriting these “paternal colonial systems” whose “positivist efficiency appropriates primal indeterminacy.”103 In doing so the poem complicates questions of authorship and ownership. Its title, an apparent conflation of the name Thoreau and the verb “through” alludes to both the radical freedoms described by the author of “Civil Disobedience” and a moving across an abstract landscape.104 This apparent reference to an agency that does not rely, like Atherton’s, on collective recognition (the constraints of the democratic so infamously eschewed by Thoreau) is reinforced by the accompanying citation from Deleuze and Guattari that relinquishes authoriality as it seeks to understand how “every name driven will be as another rivet in the machine of a universe flux.”105 In the poem Howe becomes a scout moving through the landscape of the territory into “unknown regions of differentation.” The poem appears to move through the psychic and literal landscape of the newly colonized Americas. “Complicity” battles “redemption” as Howe strives to realize the “Original of the Otherside / understory of anotherword” and to acknowledge that “the origin of property / that leads here [ . . . ] my ancestors tore off / the first leaves.”106 The final poem in the collection, “Scattering as Behavior Toward Risk,” seems to highlight the anarchic ethics for representing responsibility that this investigation into democracy involves. Peter Quartermain’s reading of the first section makes clear how the rule of the law condenses for Howe questions of subjugation with questions of gender, sexuality, and ownership.107 Quartermain reads Howe’s alternative to this system of domination as part of her entry into “a process of perception and thought subject perpetually and continuously to re-casting, re-seeing, re-vision.”108 Yet the poem also seems more knowing and specific about its relationship to the political codifications that form this landscape than perhaps this language of phenomenology suggests. The shape and vocabulary of the poem changes dramatically after this first page as its resistance to “the old army / Enlightened Rationalism” becomes increasingly explicit.109 Democracy is intimately linked to property owning and the free market— “Paper money and tender acts”—which are to be resisted if not entirely


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rejected because “Rules are guards and fences.” The poem’s caution toward the “Stoic iconic Collective / Soliloquy and the aside” of “political literature” also seems to reject the predictable alternatives—“counter thought thought out” and “utopian communism”—positioned against hegemonic assumptions about American freedom.110 The specter of Thoreau in the poem urges us less toward the importance of either individualism or a property owning private than towards the radical possibilities of anarchy that can escape them. Described by Emma Goldman as the “greatest American anarchist,” Thoreau functions to remind us of the belief in anarchy as “the spirit of revolt, in whatever form, against everything that hinders human growth. All anarchists agree in that, as they agree in their opposition to political machinery as a means of bringing about the great social change.”111 The last two pages of the poem embody this violent anarchic movement, a struggle to realize social change without the instruments of political machinery, as words and lines are once again refracted, scattered across the page, by “THE REVISER.” Although Howe can look as if she is flirting with a politically diffident form of transcendence in this writing, the collection is actually seeking a point where “there is a sudden change to something completely else. It’s a chaotic point. It’s the point chaos enters cosmos, the instant articulation. Then there is a leap into something else.”112 In attempting to realize a violent cultural transformation, Howe rejects the constraints that Wendy Brown has suggested are always framed by “institutions, procedures and political representation.”113 In making evident the constitutive outside of American myths of its own democratic public, Howe posits the violent unregulated anarchy of singularity. The differences between Howe and Jordan’s models for conceptual frameworks for gender, democracy, and contemporary poetics correspond to the two different models for a gendered democracy with which I began. Jordan’s attention to literacy makes contiguous the necessity of re-signification and the complex demands of political participation. Her poetry’s attention to the possibilities of expanding literacy is off-set by her simultaneous attention to the social structures within which these texts are able to actually operate. Jordan struggles for freedom whilst knowing that its institutionalized assumptions, with regard to the practices of identity and power, are both necessary and antithetical to its realization. This knowledge usefully produces an interrogation of the relations between democracy, gender, and poetics that strives for a literary counter-public whose efficacy derives from its incorporation, rather than its exclusion, of difference, of the economic, of the irrational. It is this attention to the broad implications

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of the public sphere within which signifying operates, rather than her aesthetic or even her political choices, that suggests parallels with the theory of feminist democracy sketched by, for example, Nancy Fraser. Howe suggests something quite distinct, something that comes closer to the agonal responsibilities suggested by Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. Howe’s discursive interrogation of democratic assumptions gestures toward more radical possibilities for understanding the capacity of the poetic to highlight the political responsibilities of collectivity. In place of the collective institutional constraints of the democratic that Jordan so solicitously heeds, Howe seeks to realize and reject the motivating interests that underpin notions of American political freedom and makes apparent, in so doing, both the necessity for, and the difficulty of, maintaining a contingent and responsible relationship with alterity. Yet these two alternative models for representing a democratic space are clearly not entirely mutually exclusive. Jordan’s critique of the politics of literary representation and her evocation of a libidinous, democratic energy finds parallels in the scrawling anarchy of Howe’s “REVISER.” Similarly, Howe’s persistent attention to the cultural biography of texts, her suspicion of the social and economic networks of distribution, echoes Jordan’s damning of the role of the literary marketplace in inhibiting a Whitmaneseque democratic public. From two very different directions, the poets come close to converging in their analysis of the failures of U.S. literary culture to provide a space for radical democratic critique. The vocabulary for a feminist-democratic poetics that I am suggesting in this chapter relies upon a sensitivity to the similarities, as well as to the more familiar differences, between these poets. In some ways, of course, this vocabulary is replete with its own formative and familiar tensions: a deconstructive radicalism seems posed against a Habermasian rationalism, a ludic textualism against an institutional materialism. Yet in making evident the shared struggle of these two poets with these constitutive contradictions, rather than simply enshrining them, then the possibility of discussing a gendered democratic poetic space has begun.

Erica Hunt: Notes for an Oppositional Poetics Erica Hunt, a poet whose work seems to demonstrate the very possibility of simultaneously drawing upon the traditions of Howe and of Jordan, has described a poetics of “contiguity” that is very illuminating in this context. In her essay “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics” Hunt notes the discontinuity between the languages of literary


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experimentalism and of political materialism and renders it a site of possibility rather than defeat. Hunt seeks alternative strategies for negotiating a cultural hegemony that has proved so effective at both forcing “oppositional groupings” to be dependent on “external definitions” and at assimilating alternatives to this. In the face of this dilemma she proposes “contiguity, as a textual and social practice” capable of considering “how writing can begin to have social existence in a world where authority has become highly mobile, based less on identity and on barely discerned or discussed relationships.”114 Contiguity, as John Guillory’s powerful reading of Paul De Man makes clear, is suggestive because it evokes not simply literal proximity but the mutability of metonymy and contingency rather than the more determinate processes of metaphor and absolutism.115 As a “social practice,” Hunt suggests, contiguity would acknowledge “the relationships among groups who share an interest in changing the antidemocratic character of the social order is not as oblique as their individual rhetoric would represent” and that this demands critical “syntheses that would begin to consider the variance between clusters of oppositional writing strategies with respect for what has been achieved.”116 Such a de-essentialized and apparently rhizomatic social and literary aspiration chimes with much contemporary vocabulary— echoing Mouffe and Laclau’s analysis of the deepening of agonal democratic struggle, or Ziarek’s model of “anarchic responsibility.”117 It suggests a poetics capable of understanding the difficulties of the need to rewrite the public sphere to include relations of survival and need and also to imagine the new kinds of identity and relationships that would make this possible. A poetic correlation of this demand is suggested in Hunt’s collection Arcade, collaboratively made with artist Alison Saar. The poem “the voice of no” offers a reading of the claustrophobic impoverishment of social routine—“No need to be contrary, I put on a face. / No use for muscle, the workers stand on line for hours”—and places this against iconic images of the female body.118 These visual texts, as they shift and recombine images of fertility and of bondage, give the frustrations of the poem a racially specific allusive context. The poem’s images and text are concerned with analyzing and escaping a routinization bound by the alienated relations of work and class as they intersect with the specific economies of gender and race. The activity of writing is set both optimistically and caustically against what is described in the preceding poem “Arcade” as “The World of WorkTM” in its search for the “fold in the mind, just past the point where a thought can be followed.”119 The possibilities of poetry, described by

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Hunt in her collection Local History as “the surplus,” lie in its ability to make manifest the “pause before the day’s contents are anticipated in detail that overspills its container.”120 Yet rather than assuming that this surplus—poetry’s resistance to the bureaucratic structures of modernity—can be formally drawn from the text, Hunt suggests that writers must be sensitive to “the dispersed character of the social movements” and “look squarely” at the roles that writers play in “forming new social consciousness.”121 Her exploration of “plural strategies” that would “remove the distance between writing and experience,” for example, castigates the “privileging” of “language as the primary site to torque new meaning and possibility” for severing itself “from the political question of for whom new meaning is produced.”122 Hunt aspires for a powerfully contradictory reading, one capable of understanding poetry both as a physical, emotional, intellectual bulwark against “the bureaucratic seizure of the possible” and as paradoxically dependant upon these structures, upon the dispersed and fragmented social publics of contemporary politics, for its literal meaning.123 Hunt is gesturing toward the possibility of a poetic community that can encompass the possibilities that both Jordan and Howe offer. Such a utopian aim, I want to suggest, can be traced through a number of feminist literary histories in revealing, if quite disparate, ways. The chapters that follow extend this framework to the work of contemporary poets whose work has been engaged in various ways with the U.S. democratic project. It explores the ways in which the frames of the democratic suggested in this chapter—the attention to dissent and consent, to freedom and responsibility, to mass participation and critical deliberation, to unity and difference, to literacy and to difficulty, to public and private—are rewritten in the work of contemporary women poets. The poets working to renegotiate these relations are writing not only from the varied traditions suggested by Howe, Jordan, and Hunt but are writing from the mainstream literary academy, from the avant-garde community, from the shop floor, from the Library of Congress, and from the riot grrrl movement. In each case these communities of poets create very different kinds of democratic publics seeking to articulate very different kinds of political and poetic agendas: in many ways it is in the sustainability of these differences that the optimism of this book really resides.

CHAP TER

2

The Poetics of Privacy: Writing the Lyric Self

Introduction The relationship between U.S. poetry and its democratic culture has been cast in the most literal of roles by some of its commentators. Bill Moyers’s high-profile and well-funded “Search for American Democracy,” for example, was earnest in its celebration of the importance of the nation’s poets. “Democracy needs her poets,” Moyers reminds us in the introduction to the book accompanying his successful The Language of Life series, “because our hope for survival is in recognizing the reality of one another’s lives.”1 The assumptions supporting ventures such as Moyers’s have been treated with derision by critics on both the Left and the Right, disdainful of its adherence to the possibility of transparent self-expression and acquiescence to a blandly depoliticized multiculturalism.2 The suggestion that democracy relies on the politics of an institutionally produced notion of “recognition” seems to provide a rather weak solution to the tension between the cultural homogeneity demanded by the Right and the risk of cultural incommensurability associated with the social movements on the Left. Claims such as Moyers’s appear to suggest the effect on poetry of the “uneasy merger of individualism with institutional collectivism” that has come to debilitate the popular potential of U.S. democratic culture.3 The chapter examines a number of women poets who have been engaged in a critique of this relationship between individualism and the institution and strives to produce a more specific vocabulary for understanding the significance of contemporary women’s poetry’s apparent complicity with the privatization of U.S. culture. Notions of privatization, privacy, and the private are, as Michael Warner has pointed out, notoriously indeterminate. In addition to the feminist

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definition of the private as the unpaid domestic realm, Warner adds another twelve possibilities, including civil or non-state, secret or restricted, tacit or implicit as well as related to “the individual, especially to inwardness, subjective experience” and the “genital or sexual.”4 An analysis of the private as the realm of the intimate or the authentic has, Warner acknowledges, become as difficult to sustain, and as central to democratic freedom, as the public: the politics of “privatization destroys real privacy even as it erodes public activity.”5 For a whole host of critics, the ascendancy of an institutionalized privatization––Hannah Arendt’s disputed “rise of the social”––has been at the cost not only of the public but also of a meaningful private or intimate realm. Thus, for critics such as Debra Morris, Drucilla Cornell, and Patricia Bolling, the private provides the possibility of a “singular experience” offering “a special kind of reprieve from social control.”6 Far from being commensurate with either identity politics’ promise to heal the “divisions of the political world by anchoring them in the authentically personal”7 or with an institutionally sanctioned autonomy, this defense of privacy attempts to remove it from “its illegitimate promotion of the heterosexual nuclear family as the good family” and attempts to do so “without reducing the value of privacy to the right to be left alone.”8 This chapter examines the heterogeneous ways in which a number of women poets have been productively engaged with the assumptions about privatized individualism embedded in the conventions of the contemporary first-person lyric poem. It examines three poets, Rita Dove, Carolyn Forché, and Jorie Graham, who have all attempted to use poetry to reclaim privacy as a political necessity, in an attempt to resist the institutionalization of poetics fostered in what Charles Altieri termed the “scenic mode.”9 The chapter explores how each of these poets has reconciled their relatively prestigious position within the academy with a critique of its assumptions about the role of the public, private, and the political. These three poets use their writing, and their sensitivity to its specific cultural positioning, to reimagine these relationships in very different ways and with surprisingly different results. Rita Dove provides a compelling example of how the self can be used––in, ironically, the most public of ways––to affirm the privatization of politics whereas Carolyn Forché and Jorie Graham use the private self to explore alternative models of individual accountability. The chapter contrasts the dangers apparent in Dove’s private, voluntarist version of selfhood with Forché and Graham’s attempts to reclaim the private of poetry as a site of political responsibility. In order to explore how these poets have negotiated these relationships, this chapter first examines the ways in which the politics of the

THE POETICS OF PRIVACY

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poetic academy have been discussed over the past thirty years. Its first section rereads the prevalent narrative for academic poetry, suggesting ways in which the activity of writing and teaching poetry in the contemporary U.S. academy can be read as a site of potential critique rather than only of either complicity or affirmation. The literary academy’s negotiation of the increasingly fraught divisions between public and private, between work and art, between high and low culture, makes explicitly manifest both the risks of institutionalized art and the tensions central to contemporary, often peculiarly idealistic, notions of the public.10 As a realm, the difficulties that it poses closely correspond to those that Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge have attributed to a “public sphere of production,” which assimilates the private “life context” of its participants. Such spheres, Negt and Kluge have suggested, have overlaid the “traditional public sphere” confronting the “ideality of the bourgeois public sphere” with the “compact materiality” of the facts of production. This consequently is, for Negt and Kluge, a deeply ambivalent realm. These spheres of public production are “characterized by fissures and a wealth of contradictions,” torn between the possibility of the political critique that a revealing of the “materiality” of “production” might offer and the contrasting need to assert only “agreement, order and legitimation.”11 The central body of the chapter explores the ways in which women poets have been sensitive to the productive possibilities of this ambivalence, particularly around the gendered implications of the division between public and private that it implies. Negt and Kluge’s analysis of the public spheres of production’s tendency to incorporate private realms––the “context of living”––has a different status when brought into play with an agenda that has both understood this act as emancipatory and has complicated the divisions it assumes. Contemporary women poets, writing against a feminist literary tradition that has often problematized both the division between public and private and the distinctions around work, art, culture, and commerce, open a moment of suggestive ambivalence within the already shifting ground of the U.S. literary academy. The chapter explores how this ambivalence offers the potential of analyzing anew the implications of representations of the lyric self in a post-confessional poetics.

The Privatization of the Academy The suggestive implications of the woman poet’s relationship to the tensions suggested by the workshop have yet to be fully explored.12

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The parallels between the women’s movement and the workshop mode––the importance of self-narrative, the swift ascendancy of a disciplinary presence in the academy, the focus on the limitations and the desirability of a public culture––have gone largely unremarked upon. Jonathan Holden, for example, assumes that women’s writing exists as an entirely separate entity and is crudely dismissive of the specific contributions that women poets may have made to the mainstream tradition he so actively champions.13 Yet a body of women poets identifying themselves with this critical tradition nevertheless exists. In 1982, for example, the collection Extended Outlooks: The Iowa Review of Women Writers locates itself between the claims of the workshop and of feminist literary criticism of the early 1980s. The introduction imagines its readership to be that of “readers of feminist journals, who want to cut across categories” and this aspiration to move beyond an over-polarized feminist debate is accompanied by the desire to “reach beyond a purely literary audience,” one named as capable of absorbing dissonance and difference.14 The preservation of conflict rather than the enforcement of resolution has become a familiar trope for those seeking to rehabilitate the contemporary institutions of Higher Education as a location in which the worst excesses of postmodern technocratism can be resisted. Robert Young, for example, has suggested that the academy, existing both within and beyond the market economy, can function as the “surplus” that the latter “cannot comprehend,” whilst Bill Readings has described the academy as a site capable of supporting community without identity, one belonging to “dialogism rather than dialogue.”15 The defense of the ambivalent intersection of feminism and postmodernism has been similarly cast through its prompting of dissonant institutional cultural practices.16 It is not simply, as relatively early ventures into this realm suggested, that the intersection of feminism and postmodernism politicized the “anti-aesthetic” but that they prized open the very terms upon which debates about the cultural meaning of a literary aesthetic can occur.17 The radical pedagogue Henry Giroux has suggested that the intersection of modernism, postmodernism, and feminism within the literary academy provides a practice capable of idealistically combining “liberalism’s emphasis on individual freedom, postmodernism’s concerns with the particularistic and feminism’s concern with the politics of the everyday.”18 These approaches can be extended to describe the space of creative writing in Higher Education in ways that evoke far more ambivalent possibilities for it than those implied by its default position in poetry’s


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culture wars. I want to review the recent histories of the writing workshop in opening up an alternative way of understanding its significance. My reading is positioned against a familiarly reductive logic that assumes, in Michael Bérubé’s words, the academy to be “either the passive recipient of cultural products endorsed by nonacademic gatekeepers and previous academic generations, or the central-cultural means of defusing marginal forces by absorbing them into the bureaucracy of institutionalization.”19 Instead, I want to identify the academy as a place in which these energies, and what they imply for the possibilities of the democratic public, have been rendered usefully explicit. Stephen Wilbers’s history of the creative writing program at the University of Iowa suggests that the program began in the late nineteenth century and emerged as a discipline influenced by both regionalism and New Criticism in the early decades of the twentieth.20 Paul Engle and Wallace Stegner were amongst the first students to receive master’s degrees from the program, and both went on to become influential in its subsequent development in the postwar period. That the Iowa program of the 1930s and 1940s was intended to be the creative equivalent to the Modernist paradigms now erased from the program’s literary genealogy has provided a lingering irony. The creative writing program, in its early twentieth-century inception, was, John Crowe Ransom suggested, intended not only to shadow the New Critical desire for a “precise and systematic” reading, but also for a public space in which the idealized general “man” of letters could thrive.21 By the 1950s the routinization of the institutional practice of criticism had tarnished these ideals: both the evaluative principle of New Criticism and the synthesis of the teaching of creative writing and criticism had dissipated. “Symbolically,” Alan Golding notes, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop “was founded the same year as Brooks and Warren’s landmark textbook Understanding Poetry. [ . . . .] if the original goal of writing programs was to keep theory from overwhelming practice, that goal has been achieved only by isolating and impoverishing poetry.”22 This impoverishment, assumed to enshrine the individualistic, privatized bourgeois self, is apparent in a pedagogical program in which, as even contemporary defenders of it acknowledge, questions about teaching are “asked and answered, if at all, solely in the minds of conscientious instructors.”23 Iowa became the “elephant machine”––the machine creating other machine––dedicated to reproducing “the mystique of professionalism” obscuring “the reasons why creative writing was ever taught in the first place.”24

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These anxieties about the failure of the academy corresponded with more general fears about the fall of “public man.” Wendell Berry, for example, wrote in 1975 about the “crisis” in poetry that had allowed the poet to withdraw from “everything not comprehended by his specialty.”25 This stress upon poetry as a specific language, rather than cultural practice embedded in the community, led to a “general degradation of literacy” as poets failed in their task of purifying “the language of the tribe.”26 For Berry, the turn to self in contemporary writing is indicative of the rejection of politics in favor of a therapeutic form of solipsism. “Publicly,” Berry suggests, “we have delegated our capacity to act to men who are capable of action only because they cannot think. Privately, as in much of our poetry, we communicate by ironic or cynical allusions.”27 Both because and despite of the grand, democratic claims made on its behalf, the institutionalization of poetry became, if not actually accountable for, then at least representative of, public culture’s failings. A variety of critics followed Berry in arguing that the institutionalization of poetry makes manifest culture’s distancing from its natural constituency, its formal stagnation, aesthetic banality, and the homogenizing mediocrity that accompanies the institutional standardization of late modernity. Christopher Beach’s account of these “careers in creativity” demonstrates how the elision of the disparate fields of “cultural production and the institutional field of preservation and legitimation” resulted in a collapse of aesthetic and political commitment.28 The logic of this argument is clear––the institutional career ladder offered to the poet-teacher allowed them to be too closely entwined with the vested, necessarily conservative, interests of the academy. The institutional location had rendered writing, in the memorably blunt terms of Joseph Epstein’s popularization of this debate, both “smug” and “hopeless.”29 These critiques have now been absorbed by the very centers to which they were once directed. Even R.V. Cassill, a founder of the AWP, a body that functioned as such a lynchpin to the workshop structure, stunned the organization when he more recently urged it to disband because the time for such programs has passed.30 Yet the political implications for the private suggested by Engle’s influential model of the workshop seem potentially both more indeterminate and more complex than this lapsarian narrative (itself placed under pressure by critics such as Lorenzo Thomas and Walter Kalaidjian) may suggest.31 The political implications of Engle’s use of the public and private, for example, suggest an anxious sensitivity to the shifting nature of these terms in the cold war rather than simply a willing absorption of them by a “bourgeois aesthetic blind to the


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social foundations of its own anxious malaise.”32 In suggesting that the designations of public and private conceived of in the creative writing academy are more explicit, and more explicitly political, than condemnation of them sometimes suggests, I am also––ironically, perhaps––suggesting that their reevaluation in the hands of contemporary critics is possible. Engle’s impulse toward the private, in other words, had specific political implications that can be usefully separated out from a more general condemnation of the formal quietism of the institutionally produced lyric self. In many ways Engle appeared to situate himself in the modernist tradition. The introduction to his On Creative Writing draws heavily from the work of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Gustave Flaubert, and Anton Chekhov.33 Similarly, his suggested reading for “The Writer’s Workshop Course in Writing Poetry” combined Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry with his own The New Poets of England and America, which heavily relied on the standard American modernist fare of Frost, Sandburg, Ransom, Stafford, Williams, and Pound. Yet Engle’s apparent commitment to modernist disinterest extended to his attitude to the University itself in very specific ways. His successfully self-publicizing sorties into the public sphere—appearing in publications from The Daily Iowan to The Times, The Miami Herald, and The Saturday Evening Post—led him to explicitly defend the public University from the critique that it was capable of producing little more than bureaucrats. This polemic (frequently levered by unfavorable references to the elitist and incompetent British Oxbridge system where Engle had studied as a graduate student) claimed the American University to be a place offering freedom to large swathes of the nation’s youth: “expand heaven” is how he describes its policy of mass recruitment to the popular press.34 Engle was consistently resistant to the systematization of teaching that is now so damagingly associated with the “elephant machine” and his favored notion of the workshop seems to have been as an idealized public realm. He explicitly considered the workshop to be an American version of the Parisian sidewalk café “where younger writers meet with older writers and talk about their craft.”35 For Engle, the workshop was intended to allow the artist, while “practicing a completely private art” to be reassured by a sense of community that provided him (Engle generally referred only to men) with “competition” whilst also freeing him “from the imperatives of the marketplace as he may never be again.”36 The institutional location of the workshop was meant to protect, whilst also preparing, the individual poet from the market: it

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was a compromised public space ironically designed to nurture the private arts. Engle was candid about the political frames that this version of freedom relied upon. In his contribution to a volume dedicated to understanding the role of education in postwar America, he makes his understanding of the political requirements of disinterested art explicit. Engle’s notion of the private is clearly as economic as it is political or cultural as he suggests that artistic freedom is more likely to be secured by “a lot of competing capitalists in New York” than by the “socialist boys in Washington.”37 The implications of this assertion on a world stage dominated by the cold war were similarly clear in his descriptions of the International Writing Program (for which he and Hualing Nieh Engle were nominated for a Noble Peace Prize in 1976) as “not a little academic affair” but the “twentieth century at its noblest and dirtiest.”38 His desire to protect students from Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe from “ideological oppression” (he notes that many of his writers had been prisoners of state or war) resonates against his celebration of “the lavish variety of the American way of doing everything.”39 The tensions between this commitment to disinterested art and to entrepreneurial, free-market nationalism were equally clear in the modes by which the program was able to sustain itself. Although situated in a public institution, Engle’s was able to raise both the finance for, and the profile of, the program in the most unlikely of quarters. An article in The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, takes great pleasure in the idea of a “big Midwestern utilities company in the Renaissance role of patron of the arts” and celebrates the Writing Workshop for being funded by “washing machine firms, insurance companies, the Merchant’s National Bank of Cedar Rapids, the Quaker Oats Co.”40 The workshop itself later explicitly participated in such enterprises as the brand of the “Iowa Writer’s Workshop” was sold as a correspondence course by the Britannica schools division of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Press. For Engle, then, the public and private were vexed and slippery terms: the latter refers to both an economics outside of the state and an intimate realm and the former to the possibility of a literary community outside of the economics of the market. In each case these definitions take their meaning from their opposition to the liberal welfarism of state intervention. The Iowa tradition, as Engle conceived of it, made evident the tensions that are constitutive of late modern notions of the American public on a literary stage. This influential model of the workshop can be read as having made, albeit perhaps not always intentionally, the conflicts between modernism and mass culture, between


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art and work, between political disinterest and economic interest much more explicitly central to this project than criticism directing us solely toward its institutional complicity with a privatized culture seems to suggest. The choice between dismissing creative writing in the academy for its complicity with postindustrial culture’s need for technocrats and enshrining of a particular form of privatized U.S. individualism or between defending it as a site of democracy simply on the grounds that it increased access to culture seems, I am suggesting, a false one. The practice of teaching writing seems to allow for the tensions endemic to claims about the public, private, and democracy in U.S. culture to be made apparent rather than only resolved. In rethinking this polarity I want to examine what writing poetry in the academy implies for a space capable of encompassing the ironies of imagining anew the possibilities of both public and private relationships.41 I want to think of this space as one in which Engle’s rather Faustian pact with Higher Education, especially when viewed through a feminist and postmodern point of critique, becomes a starting rather a finishing point for the possibilities of understanding writing in the academy as a location for debate and dissent.

Lady Freedom among Us?: Rita Dove Rita Dove, trained at Iowa, published by Norton, has been recipient of the Pulitzer Prize (making her the only African American poet except Gwendolyn Brooks to have been so) and between 1993 and 1995 was Consultant to the Library of Congress (renamed, more resonantly, the National Poet Laureate). She has been unambiguous about what this clear prestige and national regard has meant for her poetic role. Her introduction to The Best American Poetry 2000, for example, produces a familiar narrative: Buffeted by social forces, poets male and female dove into the wreck, only to discover a thousand and one ways both to be in the world and to report on it: by exposing one’s steaming liver (the confessionalists), by making the intolerable bearable through elegance of presentation (formalism), by beguiling the reader to take in the world through refracting the lens of poet’s personality (New York School), or by refracting the very medium of communication (Language poets).42

In response to this fractured arena Dove takes refuge in the democratization brought about by a federally supported poetics, claiming that

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it has improved “the quality of life for millions in ‘the pursuit of happiness’ by providing access to the very cultural life that was once the privilege of the elite.” She is also clear about the price of this support, averring that the modern poet can no longer afford to hone “their specialized tools while the barbarians––no matter if they are religious fanatics or materialistic profitmongers––continue to sharpen their broadswords. Stepping into the fray does not mean dissipation of one’s creative powers; it may mean less sleep, but it may also mean survival.”43 Dove’s defense of a democratic poetics echoes the language of commentators such as Joseph Epstein and Christopher Beach who have been more explicitly critical of the mainstream position that she appears to occupy.44 In her two official Poet Laureate lectures, Dove asserted that contemporary poetry had failed both the public and private realms. The first of these, “Stepping Out,” harangued the dominant interiority of contemporary U.S. poetry. This was nowhere sharper than in her parody of the mainstream poetic style. This parody, the poem “From My Couch I Rise,” is comprised of comfortably scanning lines lifted at random from an unnamed anthology. If the explicit critique is here directed toward the safe domesticity that uniformly characterizes this verse, then the implicit critique, suggested by the fact that the poem actually works, is directed toward the conservatism of its tone and style. The second lecture, “A Handful of Inwardness” insists, conversely, on the “need for the intimate and private in our lives,” describing a need to retreat from “the window of the world in order to find another way of speak [ . . . ] to find a private vocabulary for a public purpose.”45 These lectures conclude by insisting that writing needs to contain both polarities in order that it can “make us acutely aware of our individual heartbeat, even while it creates a community of whispers.”46 Dove places her writing in the public as Habermas conceived of it between the spheres of the political (the literal world of legislators that she describes seeing from her office high in the Library of Congress) and the private (behind the firmly bolted doors of her French holiday home)––in order to preserve the meaning of both realms. In place of the prevalent liberal postmodern accounts of Dove’s work I want to suggest that her modeling of this space reveals something far more pointed about the gendered relationship between contemporary democracy and individual agency. Dove’s explicit evasions of the aesthetic assumptions associated with both second-wave feminism and the Black Arts Movement have been read against emerging literary models that have embraced artifice as resolving the


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overdetermining choice between jouissance or affirmation. Alison Booth, writing about Dove’s 1995 collection of sonnets Mother Love, for example, suggests that the poet can “claim a large family without fanfare, a birthright eclectic, postmodern as it plunders and mocks pedigrees, vast as the distance between Ohio and Sicily, but not precisely universal.”47 This is a tradition, which, Booth suggests, has long stressed the masks, not only of femininity but of identity itself, and includes H.D.’s Helen and Plath’s “pure acetylene virgin.”48 Similarly, Carol Muske locates Dove within a tradition of feminist artifice and praises her “protean” capacities and “mercurial shifts.”49 More generally these capricious qualities have been read as integral to Dove’s postmodern liberalism. Her reluctance to identify herself with what she perceived as identity politics’ inevitable relationship to essentialism and aesthetic disavowal has been read as constituting at once both the depoliticization and the success of these discourses. For critics such as Arnold Rampersad, for example, Dove’s status as a “workshop” poet, far from being a stick to beat her with, is read as testament to her skill, her lack of ideology, her professionalism and, importantly, her inclusivity. Her poems are exactly the opposite of those that have come to be considered quintessentially black verse in recent years. Instead of looseness of structure, one finds in her poems remarkably tight control; instead of a reliance on reckless inspiration, one recognizes discipline and practice, and long, taxing hours in competitive university poetry workshops and in her study; instead of a range of reference limited to personal confession, one finds personal reference disciplined by a measuring of distance and a prizing of objectivity; instead of an obsession with the theme of race one finds an eagerness, perhaps even an anxiety, to transcend––if not to actually repudiate––black cultural nationalism in the name of an inclusive sensibility.50

In this reading of Dove her professionalism and control become the very thing that protect her from the excesses of a political literature. Critics are certainly right in suggesting that questions of identity figure in Dove’s work in the most anti-foundationalist of ways. Much of Dove’s poetry in Grace Notes, for example, is concerned with exploring an awareness of the constructedness of racial discourse. In poems such as “Stitches” and “After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time before Bed,” the authorial voice describes being confronted with an exposure to the raw immediacy of the body beneath the racialized skin. In “Stitches” this knowledge is literally traumatic: the observation “ ‘So I am white underneath!’ ” is the result of torn skin

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and swelling blood. This momentary perception is obliterated in the poem––“Amazing / there’s no pain”––by the “black line straight” of suturing.51 The awkward arrangement of adjectives in this phrase emphasizes the color (of the) line, reinforcing the clinically precise eradication of the racial ambiguity that the authorial voice so painfully earned, and seemingly desired. Yet this violent enforcement of racial identification is complicated elsewhere in the collection. In the poem “After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time before Bed,” for example, the awareness that the “black mother and cream child” might be the same because their internal genitalia share the same coloring is fraught. The enforcement of racial binaries is seen to be something that can be supplanted through a hierarchy of identity: the shared femininity of mother–daughter is being cautiously offered in order to overcome the racial separation that otherwise divides them. The poem gains closure by repeating the childish words that first made this observation within it: “we’re in the pink / and the pink’s in us.” The word “pink” here plays on the word “milk” from the original bedtime story being told, and the slippage shares with “Stitches” the implicit, but uncommented, effect of coding racial transcendence as white.52 That Dove’s desire for a universalism that simultaneously betrays its impossibility can be read as a critique of the naturalized hegemony of whiteness seems unlikely when read through the public role she has allowed her writing to assume. Dove’s role as Poet Laureate has meant that she has been explicitly identified with U.S. liberal politics and its mobilization of poetry as an inclusive discourse. If Bill Clinton was only too aware of the flattering nature of the comparisons that were made between him and John F. Kennedy then this was never more apparent than when he became the first president since Kennedy to have a poet read at his inauguration. Clinton’s choice of Maya Angelou in place of Robert Frost seems to represent not only the new president’s desire to mark the changes in U.S. cultural life, both real and desired, since Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration, but a particular attitude toward public literature. In aligning himself so explicitly with the arts, Clinton was also implicitly aligning himself with Kennedy’s repeated valorization of the artist as providing a defense against the illegitimate wielding of power. Yet, as Zofia Burr’s reading of this comparison has made apparent, this was a view of poetry that defiantly resisted assigning it any public role. Clinton’s implicit evocation of Kennedy’s famous description of the poet as a “check on power,” Burr suggests, is an appeal to the integrity of poetry’s “private, personal” disinterestedness that becomes public only on the “basis of its ability to remain an idiom apart from all the public discourses of society.”53


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One of the events that Dove participated in through this political association was the “Millennium Lecture Series.” The “American Poetry Lecture Evening” involved readings, commentary, and discussion between the First Lady, the three most recent Poet Laureates, the general public, and local schoolchildren. The First Lady’s contribution to the evening attributes to poetry a familial, even maternal, power to provide unity and continuity for the Nation: “In every moment of our lives the poems we read or write or remember speak to us, often transforming us, comforting us. And we pass that love for them down from generation to generation.”54 The implications of this simultaneous feminization of the nation and of poetry are made manifest in Dove’s own celebration of the democratic, which allows only for its validation. At the ceremony commemorating the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Capitol, for example, Dove read the poem “Lady Freedom among U.S.,” the quiet, assured tone of which celebrates the efficacy of a U.S. nationalist imaginary. In the poem the poet echoes the “blunt reproach” that she reads on the face of the Statue of Liberty and berates Americans for their indifference to their own freedom––to the tenacity of democracy and equality––“for she is one of the many and she is each of us.”55 The readings of Rita Dove as politically neutral, and her own assumptions about the plasticity of identity, can be more accurately read through her alignment with a democratic model that assumes a permanent feminized presence able to transcend the contingent and masculinized realm of political action. This gendered treatment of democracy creates a powerful tension between Dove’s function as a signifier for universal democratic inclusion and her actual exclusion of difference that suggests incommensurability or inequality. This is a tension that Negt and Kluge point out as being endemic to a public sphere of production that reconciles “the exclusionary mechanisms of the bourgeois prototype” with “a maximum of inclusion” through a melding of public and private by arrogation of the “life context” of consumers.56 Precisely the same fissuring can, of course, reveal a moment of potential: Chantal Mouffe’s claims for radical democracy urges a model of citizenship that refigures, without discarding, the relations of public and private. Yet although Dove offers a thorough exploration of what Mouffe has described as the “grammar of democracy” her assumption that privacy is synonymous with individual freedom (rather than with the intimate or the confidential, for example) proffers a subtle but significantly different reading of democracy. In On the Bus with Rosa Parks Dove seems to carefully explore the implications of the divisions between public and private. The collection

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ends with a poetic sequence named after Rosa Parks. In contrast to the polemic, universalizing identifications suggested by the dedications to Parks written by poets such as Pat Parker––“I am the black woman / & I have been all over / I was on the bus / with Rosa Parks”57––Dove is cautious and hesitant. Dove’s text moves from the short poem “Climbing In,” which evokes the “Lie-gapped” mouth of a bus as mechanically hostile, to descriptions of the two women who first refused segregated seating.58 These two predecessors of Parks––Claudette Colvin and Mary Smith––never became public figures, and this seems to be the central concern of these poems. The coda to the poem “Claudette Colvin Goes to Work” is an extract from a Boycott flyer from 1955, in which Colvin’s name is misspelled. The poem produces a vignette of the “menial twilight” of a life spent in domestic service, doing “what needs to be done.” This elegy to the mundane life of a woman whose “mama was a maid [ . . . ] whose daddy mowed lawns like a boy” is difficult to read as anything other than a critique of the ways in which the demarcations of public and private are loaded with the familiar hierarchies of race and gender.59 The following two poems, “The Enactment” and “Rosa,” focus on the production of Parks as a public figure. Both poems comment wryly on the privileges that both allowed for, and followed from, Parks’s occupation of a “trim name” with a “dream of a bench / to rest on.”60 The poem is about an icon––it is not about tracing either a private notion of Parks or a sense of her as a political activist. Parks became public property; indeed in some ways she was nothing but public property––her name indistinguishable from a bench memorial, her activity was to do nothing “inside a place / so wrong it was ready.” Colvin, however, remains in her “menial twilight” even though she is by contrast, we have been reminded a page earlier, the person who does “what needs to be done.” Dove is not privatizing the public, being complicit with the politically conservative image of Parks as a woman who was simply, and individually, tired of standing rather than as a political activist taking part in a planned political strategy. Nor is she attempting to render the private public, to reclaim figures such as Colvin and Smith in order to construct a romantically individual and teleological narrative for this political movement. Dove is acknowledging that political agency relies on an intersection of the public and the private that is dictated by race, gender, class, and sexual properties that cannot be simply reversed or abandoned. Her drawing attention to this careful grammar of democracy, and the specifically narrow ways in which black women in the United States have been allowed to function within it (something only reinforced by her own position), offers a convincing critique of such


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constructions whilst also, more ambivalently, accepting them as a necessary platform for political change. This resistance to exploring a more critical or radical notion of these divisions simultaneously allows Dove to confirm the narrative that suggests that the campaign against segregation in the South in the mid-1950s was the beginning of an effective civil rights movement. This is a model of political change that seems consistent with her liberal affirmation of the Clinton regime. Occluded by such an account is the fact that the second reconstruction of the United States ended very much like the first, that one of the central gains of the Civil Rights movement was the production of a black middle class that became increasingly distanced from the broader political vision of the Civil Rights movement.61 Dove’s own family, of course, participated in just this shift: her father progressed from being an overeducated and underemployed elevator-man to being one of Goodyear Tyre’s first black scientists. Indeed it is this progression that Dove’s awardwinning Thomas and Beulah quietly celebrates. The poem tells the life of Dove’s grandparents, beginning with her grandfather as a young man on a riverboat in Tennessee and ending with her grandmother as an old woman reflecting on the social changes that have allowed her to attend an integrated corporate picnic. The terms by which Dove understands the relation of the individual to the public and private spheres are made further evident as she has moved away from contemporary lyric poetry to classical dramatic forms. Her 1995 collection Mother Love uses the myth of Demeter and Persephone to examine the complications of the mother–daughter relationship and her play The Darker Face of the Earth uses the frame of Sophocles’s Oedipus to discuss slavery and miscegenation in the U.S. South. In what appears to be an inversion of the rape and insemination of the black female slave by the male white landowner The Darker Face of the Earth is about Augustus, the slave son of a white landowning woman and black male slave. This figure, whose reputation for bravery and insurrection precedes his appearance on the stage, unknowingly murders his father, sleeps with his mother, and dies with her at the moment of a slave revolt: the classical parallel suggesting the horror of slavery’s social distortions. The less overtly analogous aspects of The Darker Face of the Earth extend its classical paradigm into Sophocles’s questioning, in the third play in the Theban Trilogy, of how the personal and the political can be reconciled in an authoritarian state. The character of Phebe (itself a clear play on Thebes) seems to echo Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta whose decision to give her treasonous brother

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burial rights in the face of Creon’s interdiction resulted in her own and her prospective husband’s––Creon’s son––suicide. Antigone’s “choice” has become emblematic of the gendered implications of assumptions about private and public. She pulls the private into the public, transforming the “universal activity” of the government “into a work of some particular individual.”62 Dove’s rewriting of this emblematic figure’s choice between private devotion and public honor through the character of Phebe enables a move from a position of silence to a position of power. Like Irigaray’s reading of Sophocles, Dove stresses the ability of the female character to mock masculine law by “making fun of the adult male who no longer thinks of anything but the universal, subjecting him to the derision and scorn of a callow adolescent.”63 In response to the Oedipal Augustus’s high rhetoric: “Tonight! Tonight / we’ll show the white man / how well we’ve learned / his brand of justice” Phebe’s answer is given, we are told, with a “(touch of sarcasm): We’re ready and waiting, Augustus / All you have to is / say the word.”64 Antigone’s honoring of her brother over the state is paralleled by Phebe’s reproach to Augustus as she pleads with him not to return to his white lover (and mother) because she cares what happens to him “more than revolution or making history / Those may be traitor’s words, but I don’t / care.”65 Yet rather than the attempted entombing and subsequent suicide of Antigone, Phebe lives and leads the slave revolt that Augustus’s Oedipal desire denied him. Her possession of such complete, complex historical agency is brought about through resisting Antigone’s ethical dilemma that required the consolidation of the familial and the divine: in Dove’s vision the feminized private becomes a place of autonomy, where politics can be abandoned, even at the moment of insurrection. Dove’s rewriting of the play further demonstrates the ways in which she assumes the private to be commensurate with autonomy. This is a conflation that theorists such as Michael Sandel have argued effectively limits the possibility of democracy. For Sandel the “triumph of autonomy in matters of religion, speech and sexual morality” becomes a “consolation for the loss of agency in an economic and political order increasingly governed by vast structures of power.”66

Witnessing Responsibility: Carolyn Forché The political or emancipatory implications of Dove’s construction of an alternative model of the public in contemporary U.S. democratic culture falters, with perhaps a predictable irony, on its assumptions


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about the inherent freedom of the individualized subject freed from the constraints even of identity. In so doing Dove’s writing both reveals and denies the particular social contradictions inherent in the ideals of a democratic universalism. I want to examine how Carolyn Forché’s work, which shares Dove’s explicit aim of interrogating and constructing the possibilities of alternative models for public and private politics, addresses the same problematic. Like Dove, Forché’s writing is characterized by the employment of the free-verse lyric narrative voice. Whilst she too has troubled the assumption that this act can be made efficacious through a rendering of the exemplary authorial subject, her alternative to this produces a very different engagement with the question of agency. She is able to pinpoint, in ways that Dove resists, how the political relations of advocacy demanded by democracy––representation as vertereten in Spivak’s useful deconstruction of Marx––cannot be so neatly divorced from the semiotic relations of re-presentation––of darstelling.67 In the simplest of terms, Forché replaces Dove’s liberal promotion of freedom as central to democracy with a more republican concept of social, historical, and personal responsibility. This attention to responsibility, associated in chapter 1 with Ewa Plonowska Ziarek’s notion of anarchic democracy, requires a more interrogative relationship of the individual’s reliance upon what are finally revealed as inescapable institutional and social frameworks. In Forché’s writing, as Kevin Stein’s reading of its dialogic potential has argued, to “speak about ethical matters is itself an ethical act.”68 Forché’s first collection, Gathering the Tribes, was published in 1976 and won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Its “gathering of the tribes” turns out to be a process which uncovers a notion of kinship that is heavily reliant on the associations of femininity. The collection’s opening accounts of Eastern European migration and of Native American culture deploy a conventional free-verse, first-person structure. The poem “Burning the Tomato Worms” opens with the epigram: “That from which these things are born / That by which they live / That to which they return at death / Try to know that.”69 This sense of religious circularity becomes about the poet’s reluctant and then approving identification with all that her paternal grandmother represents, as her grandmother’s Slovakian foreignness both enables, and is superseded by, the shared rituals of feminine maturity. On the one hand the grandmother is the receptacle of the poet’s ancient, apparently premodern birthright, “Before I was born, my body as snowfat [ . . . ] Sending crackled paths of blood / Down into my birth.” On the other, the simplicity of the grandmother, “Eat Bread and Salt and Speak the Truth,” provides a “confrontation of

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something / That was sacred and eternal” that they share.70 This identification is suggestive of the inevitability of both loss and progression, a characteristic of modernity that features heavily in the descriptions of the Latin American culture of the following section. This rendering of a universally premodern culture metonymically links domestic knowledge, women’s bodies, commodities, and the land. The poem “Mientras Dure Vida, Sobra el Tiempo” (“Money Becomes Very Deep, Weighs More, Moves Less”), for example, describes a woman with “the body of a twisted bush” with teeth like “chips of winter river” who pays for her “coffee, medicine, pork” by “digging in her breasts / for money.”71 The last section of the collection disrupts these conservative and potentially exoticist conflations. The poem “Taking Off My Clothes” quite literally denudes the fantasy of a fecund and omniscient femininity to reveal the harshness of the woman’s body in a poem that defiantly reverses the gaze of the observed. The woman undresses without decorum or eroticism, acknowledging the bodily violence attendant on the act of preparation: “I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair / on my legs with a knife.”72 The knowledge of the woman who has “hundreds” of words for “the snow” is silenced, the poem implies, not just because of a taboo on women’s speech but because of the degradations of being observed, of being denied privacy. The question that has been simplified throughout the text with regard to how its rare knowledge is gained is suddenly complicated by the startling nakedness of this poem’s ability to turn upon the voyeurism of the observer. Forché’s second collection, The Country Between Us, enlarges upon these responsibilities of witnessing, observing, and recording. Much of Forché’s early career was spent in the war zones of international politics of the 1980s: after El Salvador she went, with her husband the photographer Harry Mattison, to the Lebanon and then to South Africa. The activities associated with witnessing in each of these locations have been central to her identification as a writer. In El Salvador she produced historical research on the conditions of the revolution and wrote the words for a photojournalistic documentary piece, in the Lebanon she worked for public radio, in South Africa she wrote explicitly on the connections between U.S. and South African racial politics.73 The prose poem “The Colonel” is Forché’s most famous rendering of her awareness of the responsibilities of the poet as privileged witness. As Michael Greer’s reading of it suggests, Forché speaks from a “dual stance––I am other and outside, but at the same time implicated” and deploys the “fracturing and defamiliarizing of perception”


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to “distinctly political” ends.74 The opening words, “What you have heard is true,” position the narrative about to unfold within a political context, requiring the reader to acknowledge that the act of witnessing is not about an exchange of information––we already know what we are to be told––but about an admission of our own implicated position. The poem goes on to blankly embed the normal fact of violence within an equally normal bourgeois context: “His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter files her nails, his son went out for the night.”75 The poet’s own experience, both of the evening and of the act of writing poetry from it, are rendered part of this ambivalence. The hosts provide “green mangoes, salt, a type of bread” and then, after the disruptions of the cleared table and political small talk, the colonel produces a grocery bag and spills “many human ears on the table.” The ears become a literalized metaphor, not only for horror but for the act of listening that poetry demands. This synthesis of the political and the meta-poetic is about the absolute necessity of representation; at the crisis in the poem, when the even-paced prose falters, we are simply told that the ears “were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this.”76 The poem became a test case for the limits of the relationship between the political and the aesthetic in mainstream poetics of the period. Jonathan Holden’s blithe defense of the workshop as a site of democracy falters over it, as he suggests that it “is precisely when the distinction between what is political and what is not breaks down or is denied that the quality of art declines.”77 Robert Pinsky, who has so vociferously defended the democratic potential of poetry, celebrates the poem because its commitment to witnessing––“we must answer for what we see”––allows Forché to enter the great democratic paradox of American poetry in which the Janus-like poet celebrates “democracy” whilst being “angry and despairing at the place, in the actual United States, of democracy, liberty and poetry.”78 The Country Between Us (which is, of course, as much the United States as it is El Salvador) appears to be a watershed in Forché’s attempts to render the cultural spaces afforded by poetry that can act as “witness” to these violations of human freedom and attendant failure of the political. In the second section of the collection the grandmother is once more evoked as a transforming obstacle. She points to the easy privileges of the international intellectual and cautions the guilty younger poet to “hold” her “tongue” because she is “trying to tell” her “something.”79 Forché’s obedience to this emblematic figure, her subsequent faltering over how to speak (there was thirteen years between the publication of The Country Between Us and The Angel of

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History), can be traced through her attention to the difficult responsibilities of representation and cultural authority that witnessing involves. Although producing no major collection of poetry throughout this period, Forché participated in a series of dialogues and interventions, embracing, like June Jordan, the role of the public intellectual in order to articulate the broader implications of her rapidly expanding poetic project. In a conference on Human Rights she struggles with the opposition between Pablo Neruda’s insistence that political responsibility requires transparency and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s assumption that writing which is “irreducible, opaque” is “intolerable because not at authority’s disposal.” In place of this classic modernist dilemma she advocates a poetry of sensibility, “the network of inner necessities” that shape our “response to the human condition.”80 Yet this is no naïve embrace of humanism. Elsewhere Forché writes on her misgivings about the “post-Romantic, Worsdworthian, lyric,” becoming “frustrated” with what she perceived to be its “almost narcissistic sensibility that was introverted and muted and rather delicate.”81 Like Dove, she seeks to renegotiate the meaning of the personal and political in order to reform political language. She suggests that “to globalize the feminist point that the personal is political is either to indicate that the personal is completely reducible to relations of power” or that it can “on its own affect those relations and that power.”82 She is aware how difficult this makes the realm of the personal. She knows that while its effacement can allow the “surrender of the individual to the overbearing realities of an increasingly alienated world,” its celebration can indicate “an inability to see how larger structures of the economy and the state circumscribe, if not determine, the fragile realm of individuality.”83 Although, like Dove, she turns to the broad familial sweeps of a twentieth-century narrative to reshape these narrowed alternatives her realization of the possibility of both freedom and responsibility that this places upon the poet are significantly different. Forché’s critiques have entailed an attention to the social structures facilitating poetry. During a visit to El Salvador in the early 1990s she met a journalist who had also written about the phenomena of Salvadoran soldiers removing the ears of dead rebels as war trophies. He tells her that he subsequently discovered that “the officer mentioned in [his] article was so proud of having his name in The New York Times” that he had the article laminated for his wallet. Forché juxtaposes this account with meeting an emissary from the U.S. embassy who tells her she should stick to her poetry, “ ‘After all,’ he


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assured himself aloud, ‘nobody reads poetry.’ ”84 The irony is very clear: her writing must not risk, like the journalistic piece in The New York Times, being subsumed into what it seeks to critique. In order to make her act of witnessing public––rather than a potentially recoupable act of publicity––then the confines and expectations of the poetry world affords an alternative place for figuring “the network of inner necessities” of the lifeworld. It is part of the compromise that Forché realizes she must make in a culture in which “communicative thought and action are inhibited; where money circulates more fluently than verbal forms; where democracy does not extend beyond its institutions.”85 Forché’s striving for the alternative forms of the social offered by poetry is most explicit in her editing of the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. The scale of this collection, containing poetic records of atrocities from the Armenian genocide to contemporary China, required an editorial policy reliant on more than political or formal partisanship. Forché selected poets whose writing testified to the violation of “individual integrity,” those for whom the “social had been irrevocably invaded by the political in ways that were sanctioned neither by law nor by the fictions of the social contract.” The social––between the public and the “supposedly safe havens of the personal”––is named as a space “of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protest disseminated. It is the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice.”86 This notion of the “third” space of the social differs significantly from Dove’s. Rather than requiring an enshrining of the unassailable, voluntarist private it requires Forché to keep two contrasting models of the subject in play. On the one hand, Forché moves toward increasingly complex paradigms for constituting the subject in poetic language in ways that disavow the primacy of the personal and of poetic redemption. Her emerging affinity with figures such as Wittgenstein and Benjamin problematizes her ability to equip her work with either a mimetic frame or metanarrative capable of directing its moral claims. In 1996, writing alongside the work of many Language poets, Forché drew upon Walter Benjamin’s model of montage, expressing a desire to “dissolve the speaker, the fiction(s) of the speaking voice, into the play of Being, of Language, of Difference.”87 The Angel of History seems to be one outcome of this aspiration as her earlier free-verse lyric is replaced with a citational and fragmentary aesthetic that struggles to find a way to record the violence of history. The book opens with a quotation from Benjamin’s ninth thesis on the philosophy of history in which the eponymous angel’s face is turned to the past and

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sees there not a “chain of events” but “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” as the oblivion of progression is counterpoised against the possibility of its own redemptive alternative.88 At the same time, this modernist aesthetic jars against Forché’s continued insistence on retaining the “fragile realm of individuality” as a site of resistance and accountability. She continues, long after it has become rather conservative in intellectual realms to do so, for example, to defend the academic poetry workshop as a site of resistance in a system of Higher Education intent on training “a managerialtechnical class for the transnational globalization of technical economies.”89 This advocacy, importantly distinct from those concerned only with protecting a beleaguered status quo, resulted in Forché’s interpretative contribution to the development of an AWP program for Creative Nonfiction. For Forché, the institutional development of Creative Nonfiction (the so-called fourth genre “with poetry, fiction and drama being the first three”)90 enables an explicit discussion about the pragmatic and political responsibilities of an artist bound by a professional context. In this context she rejects the language of Benjaminian critique in favor of a literary subjectivism. She praises the unabashed reemergence of the authentic “I” for embracing the political responsibilities of witnessing in face of “journalism’s current collaboration with its corporate sponsorship” that uses the veil of objectivity to present a sanitized world capable only of the “manufacture of consent.”91 The Angel of History can be read as attempting to mediate the tensions between Forché’s theoretical skepticism and her desire to renew the concept of responsibility that these two models of self indicate. That the poem concludes by providing a set of self-exegetical models suggests something of the nature of this compromise, recalling Jordan’s attention to the terms by which the public is constituted. The first of the “Book Codes,” comprising the final, unpaginated section of the collection, is made up of fragments from Wittgenstein, detailing Forché’s engagement with the impossibility of a knowledge outside language. The poem admits authorial responsibility into this logic, suggesting that writing what “depends on my life” would be “like the film on deep water.”92 The collection’s movement across a familial territory of the twentieth century takes place between these two poles, as Forché attempts to both deconstruct historical teleology and accept the consequences for subjective witnessing that this implies.93 The second poem in the collection, “Notebook of the Uprising” is a meditation on the difficult legacies of the Second World War and the


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Prague Spring for Forché’s Eastern European relatives, with whom she was reunited only after the end of the cold war. Forché prepared for the exorbitant responsibilities of attempting to create such a “notebook” by studying with scholars attempting to record holocaust testimonials and to establish the difficult terrain of “survivor writing.”94 Shoshana Felman’s account of the violence of such labor has described how such surrogate witnessing cannot take place without its agents “in turn, passing through the crisis of experiencing their boundaries, and their separateness, their functionality, and indeed their sanity.”95 Forché, who has described feeling like a “bad courtroom stenographer” in writing this poem, is alive to the problematic not only of her own boundaries and separateness from this history but also to the functionality of her intentions. Although she is led once more by her grandmother––“Anna said ‘carry this’ and ‘follow behind me’ ”––96 her redemptive powers are diminished, her recollections, “a few invisible souvenirs: / words spoken by coals in a tile oven, / empty iron benches wrapped in snow” now rendered unyielding.97 The poem combines a guided traversing across this imaginary territory, “so we are going back, to the invisible railyard shed and the poppy-seed cakes” with a palimpsest of fragments gleaned from diaries, calendars, graffiti, photographs, and oral memories, suggesting a thematic rather than chronological consistency.98 Its account of tracing a female relative, for example, is concentrated within one stanza but its various aspects––the initial phone call, finding her apartment, watching her reaction, hearing her memories––are temporally and spatially refracted. The motif of recovering the unrecoverable is strongly present even here: “A language even paper would refuse, / bell music rolling down the cold roofs.”99 This impressionistic evoking of history, a “map drawn from memory of the specular itinerary of exile. /An erasure of everything destroyed yet left intact” is deeplyself conscious.100 The poem seeks the possibility of redemption, Benjamin’s “time of the now” replete with the nourishment of the historically understood, from within these fragments. Stanza ten provides an account of a visit to a prison camp. It opens by detailing the absurdities of its present-day appearance, “past cut fields, tarpaulin-covered hayricks, / petrochemical plants spewing black smoke [ . . . ] At the prison gate a woman stood holding a bouquet of leeks wrapped in paper.”101 These echoes of the deprivations associated with the prison suggest both its contemporary continuance and also that no real sense of the past can be gained from its physical presence. Yet the stanza ends by attempting to embrace this contradiction, as it moves from a gesticulation of visceral

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understanding to a gesture of commemoration that allows for the very possibility of redemption. We walked the cold, swept-clean barracks, ran our hands down long trestle tables and tiered bunks. We picked forget-me-nots and left them where he died. Somewhere here, somewhere with his name carved into a wall, are the words into your sunblessed life.102

This italicized quotation, the notes appended to the collection tell us, is a translation of a line of poetry from Robert Desnos who died “two days after the camp was liberated by Russian troops.”103 The permanence suggested by the physicality of the words provides a hope that cannot be entirely annulled by their more obvious ironical overtones. These lines have become something of a talisman for Forché’s difficult, dual commitment to the languages of critique and accountability that democratic responsibility demands. Her autobiographical essay “Emergence” describes reading them first inscribed anonymously on a holocaust memorial in Paris (to which Robert Desmos had directed her) and finding their source only later.104 The lines seem to function as a way of ambiguously connecting the conflicts between Forché’s desire to critique the self and to maintain it as a site of political resistance. Forché’s work ties uncertainties about representation and aesthetics to the agenda of human rights in order to defend a self that is both contingent and yet in need of preservation from the potential violence of the political. The emergence of the social for poetry, a third-space that supersedes the false choice between public and private writing, has quite different implications in the work of Dove and Forché. Although their vocabulary and their literary strategies for discussing this need are superficially similar, their analyses of its implications for the relation between self and institution are very different. Dove renders the public a realm capable of liberating the private, allowing it to become the place where politics can be escaped. What her writing also suggests, however, is the limitations implicit in such voluntarist assumptions as they appear to idealize the capacity of a universalism whilst only implicitly, even inadvertently, acknowledging its social constrictions. The effect is to simplify the relationship between the political and the literary in ways that enervate both. Forché’s attempt to establish a realm free from the political is much more complex. Rather than enshrining the centrality of the unassailable private, Forché’s writing seeks to replace such assumptions with a notion of


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individual responsibility. Although her poetic lyric is informed by the personal and the intimate, this is consistently measured against a desire to understand the cultural weight that this carries. As a consequence of this, Forché’s writing seeks to posit the space of poetry as a space of resistance whilst also being prepared to negotiate with the cultural and political limitations that this aestheticized ideal will also always involve.

Reclaiming Silence: Jorie Graham Jorie Graham’s work has gone further than that of either Dove or Forché in its commitment to an investigation of the fluid processes of the intimate self. Graham is less concerned, as Helen Vendler has noted, with the “private lyric” of “the socially marked self ” than with an “impersonal lyric” that “represents what used to be called the soul, but might better, in Graham, be called consciousness.”105 Graham’s writing is attentive to the possibilities of the impersonal but specific self, discriminating between individualism and interiority, privatization and the private. Her writing has garnered much of the particular approval given to the successful poet in the academy. The plaudits accompanying her prestigious appointment at Harvard in 2000, for example, suggest that “above all, Graham is democratic” and praise her clarity, her diversity, and her demand that poetry be “the saving grace of the republic.”106 Yet Graham’s writing seems to eschew the clarity that the saving of the “republic” might once have been assumed to involve. The opacity and difficulty of her writing seem comparable to the intellectual energy of Joan Retallack or the recalcitrant transcendentalism of Fanny Howe. Graham’s relationship to the academy has seemed characterized by this apparent tension. On the one hand, she shares Paul Engle’s approval of the institution as a place that has preserved the skills of reading and writing poetry, this “un-lucrative work” that “casts a hard stare back at the marketplace, one that awakens secret (albeit unnecessary) guilts.”107 At the same time, she is cautious about the increased eclecticism of the contemporary workshop, noting that the synthesis of “the many––oftentimes balkanized––aesthetic devices” of figures as disparate as Susan Howe and Sharon Olds are taken by students less willing to “lift the ideological or political assumptions that gave rise to those styles.”108 The same ambivalence is apparent in Graham’s description of the cultural role she ascribes to poetry. In her introduction to the Best American Poetry 1990 Graham tries to find––as does Dove a decade later in the same anthology––some point

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of connection between the fractured schools and styles of American poetics and a broader vision of the nation. But where Dove emphasizes the importance of public democracy (albeit one that reveals itself to be irreducibly private) Graham focuses more explicitly on the importance of poetic intransigence. Graham approvingly summarizes the contributions of poets as different from one another as Language poets, lyric poets, and narrative poets to complicating a shared aesthetic and moral ground, asking how “anyone trust the world enough to write it down? When we experience a loosening of setting or point of view, and a breakdown of syntax’s dependence on closure, we witness an opening up of the present-tense terrain of the poem, a privileging of delay and digression over progress.”109 Yet on other symbolically unifying occasions, such as her presidential address to the AWP, Graham questions the cost of these delays and digressions. This inaugural speech to the AWP was given in Iowa 1991, in the midst of the first Gulf war, and Graham urges poetic writing to act as a counter to such a mediated yet ironically unrepresentable war. For Graham, the “crucial philosophical skepticism, enhanced by relativity, psychology, and the brilliant speculations of contemporary theory and physics” of contemporary theory has produced “a surface so liquid it is barely a wind. And that wind blows through us.” Her speech closes by naming the “primary function of the creative use of language” as the need to “restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.”110 The complex ambitions that Jorie Graham attributes to her writing, to resist simplification whilst keeping “responsibility alive,” can be usefully positioned against those of both Dove and Forché. Graham shares with Dove the desire to identify and celebrate a cultural role for American poetics and equivocally accepts the representative status that this imposes upon her. Graham also shares Dove’s skepticism about the possibility that the literary institution is able to provide a site for such explorations, contrasting it unfavorably against the more resistant realm of the intimate. Whereas Forché cautiously celebrates the possibility that the social spaces of writing can provide a safe space for the “fragile realm of individuality,” Graham and Dove strive for a critical distance from them. In discussing the constraints of teaching in the workshop, for example, Graham has suggested that the demanding relationships required by workshop teaching threaten her, so much that she feels as if she is “burning my own work so that the next generation can make theirs [ . . . ] Sometimes I want my silence back––my right to silence––really desperately.”111 Graham’s diffident relationship to a poetics of identity is clearly apparent in this suggestion that


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silence––the very thing from which second-wave feminist poets felt themselves to be struggling to emerge from––is a position of privilege and potency. Yet Graham’s attachment to the ethical possibilities of this silent private comes closer to the ambitions of Forché than Dove. Graham, like Forché, is committed to exploring the intimate as providing the sense of ethical accountability from which politics can emerge. Graham’s torquing of the relationship between the public, the private, and the political is, therefore, quite specific. Her desire to maintain the critical, political importance of the private sphere resists both Dove’s voluntarist notion of autonomy and Forché’s institutionalized notion of the social. In their place Graham posits the intimate as a place capable of the radicalism and responsibilities of unhampered thought. Graham’s dramatization of these competing pressures––for cultural relevance, for individual accountability, for silence––crystallizes in her representation of the poetic self. Graham’s attempts to find ways of representing the self outside of the dyadic parameters of contemporary thought and poetics suggests comparisons with poets such as Lyn Hejinian, Juliana Spahr, Alice Fulton, and the British poet Denise Riley. Each of these poets shares Graham’s broad refusal of the mutually exclusive languages of experimentation/representation and disruption/authenticity. Graham places the attempts of such poets to usurp the “conflict” between the “desire for Romantic fulfillment” and the “distrust not only of the validity of personal experience but of the very notion of an essential self” at the “core of what we see happening today”: Somewhere between the “I” that takes its authority from an apparent act of confessional “sincerity,” and the “I” that takes its authority from seeing through to its own socially constructed nature, there is still the “I” that falls in love, falls out of love, gives birth, loses loved ones, inhales when passing by a fragrant rosebush––the “I” that has no choice but mortality.112

Graham’s writing, as Kirstin Hotelling Zona has noted, finds “agency in the act of tracing one’s contingency, in rebuking revelation and apparitions of closure. Hardly intractable, it is precisely in the play between these postures of autonomy and contingency” that she discovers the possibility of a “more moral terrain.”113 The ambition for a “moral terrain” for the private that disdains the institutionalization of individualism is evident throughout Graham’s writing. Graham revisits the dramatic and gendered conflicts of reason

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and emotion, desire and possession, mutability and escape (suggested by Adam and Eve, Apollo and Daphne, Penelope awaiting Odysseus) in order to make clear the uneven relations of power underpinning their more pleasurable mutability. Graham’s work, as Cynthia Hogue has acknowledged, takes as its “investigative premise large, cultural issues, primarily the workings of power and its attendant forms (imperialism, colonialism, sexual and economic possession)” and contextualizes them “by dramatizing specific instances.”114 This dramatization of cultural power frequently brings the speaking subject itself into question. Helen Vendler reads Graham’s negotiation of the overdetermined opposition between lyric subjectivism and an impersonally ascendant high modernism through Graham’s rejection of the naturalizing conservatism of a breath-line synchronicity in favor of a “horizontal and vertical prolongation” that provided the writing with “visual plane areas.”115 This “tarpaulin,” to use Vendler’s borrowed phrase, also allowed Graham to interrogate the primacy of the individuated perceiving self. In poems such as “Manifest Destiny,” from Materialism, Graham attempts to examine the ethical weight that can be attributed to this subjective perception. The poem is an attempt to come to terms with the memorializing of American history. Its central image is of a bullet from the American civil war that bears three teeth marks. The lifting of this auratic object from its “blazing case” by the poem’s narrator precipitates a conjuring of the varied violent histories it suggests. The poem’s attempt to imagine the “muzzleflash, dust” confusion of war is profoundly self-conscious. The moment of shocked realization that the bullet produces initially turns into a wry condemnation of war––“The line is where that has to be maintained at all / cost?”116 But the poem’s attempts to form this critical narrative, to extrapolate out from these “dark impressions” of teeth to “8,000 bodies, sticky with blossom, loosening into the wet / field,” is brought sharply against its own vain impossibility. The attempt to realize the past––to honor or condemn it––is continually frustrated by the presence of the sentimentally aestheticized metaphors that conceal it. In this case, the tension between the ironically innocent and sweet bloom of the peach tree and the angry visceral, naked pain suggested by the bitten bullet forms a slow reflexive dialogue. The poem realizes the absurdity of its ambition to recall the past from its physical remainders––“Where shall the scream stick? / What shall it dent / Won’t the deafness be cracked.” In its place it seeks ethical meaning from the possibilities of relation, “I’m looking for contagion. I’m watching the face / of my friend as he tries to see / deeply the bitten bullet,” and in the drier


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realities of historical narrative, “This is a peach seed. It has come from Amsterdam. / Before it was in a crate unloaded in Venice.”117 This exacting attention to responsibility is frequently extended in Graham’s writing to a sense of the private and domestic self. The collection, The Errancy, for example, opens with the poem, “The Guardian Angel of the Little Utopia.” The poem uses the vocabularies of modernists such as Pound, Eliot, and Oppen in presenting a self-effacing exploration of the diminutive pleasures of the domestic: “Shall I move the flowers again? / Shall I put them further to the left / into the light?”118 In opposition to the “party so loud downstairs, bristling with souvenirs” the poet’s attention to the private realm of “liberty” is necessarily precious, “a gossamer with dream, a vortex of evaporations” whose pleasurable disintegration, “Oh knit me that am crumpled dust,” seems inevitable. Yet this collapse is a strangely adamant one. In place of the heightened “tiny purposes” of the interior life we are thrown to a new surety: “knit me that am. Say therefore. Say / philosophy and mean by that the pane.”119 The loss of meaning is not total: we are told to say “philosophy” but to mean “pane.” This mobilizing of the image of the “pane” (and its obvious homonym of pain) is a rich one in Graham’s writing. It suggests a dynamic trope of mediation, a gesture toward something like Derrida’s parergon, described by Isobel Armstrong as “the surround which marks off an aesthetic space, but which is ambiguously of it and not of it.”120 The iconic repetition of the poem’s final, staged image––“Let us look out again. The yellow sky / With black leaves rearranging it . . .”––is, in its casually portentous evocation of Pound’s Metro and Eliot’s skyline, wry about its failure to reconcile this into a moment of modernist epiphany even as it retains the possibility of the contingent transcendence of the everyday. 121 This attention to the mediating possibilities of the demarcating frame persists throughout The Errancy and frequently leads to Graham’s interrogation of the metaphysical. The collection’s concerns with windows, curtains, umbrellas, shading, and shelter demands a poetics capable of incorporating the tensions between the inner and outer, control and freedom, material and spiritual as well as between public and private. The poem’s long poem “Le Manteau de Pascal ” is central to the collection’s dynamic in this respect. The poem is “loosely inspired” by the Magritte painting of Pascal’s coat, which depicts “the coat in which Pascal was buried, and in whose hem or sleeve or ‘fold’ the note containing the ‘irrefutable proof of the existence of god’ is said to have been stitched.”122 The poem’s attempt to realize the complex ironies suggested by Magritte’s ambition to depict

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the metaphysical within the quotidian––to represent a rationalized faith––are given further weight by an entry from the journal of Gerard Manley Hopkins that relates Hopkins’s study of the oak to his rejection of religion. This journal extract reinforces Pascal’s paradox as the rejection of faith seems oddly prosaic and careless in contrast to the detailed pleasures of botany: “It was this night I believe but possibly the next that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England.”123 This desire for a materialist model of the transcendent is also evident in a citation from Magritte as it enjoins us to “think about objects at the very moment when all meaning is abandoning them.” Graham follows these thinkers in attempting to conjure a vision beyond the perceptual. The failure of this sought-for “vision,” the dashing of the possibility of both seeing and believing, spikes each of “Le Manteau de Pascal’s” proffered moments of exultation. In the lengthy last stanza this dynamic gathers pace as the poem’s most suggestive phrases are seemingly randomly repeated: you do understand, don’t you, by looking? a neck like a vase awaiting its cut flower, filled with the sensation of being suddenly completed, the moment the prize is lost, the erotic tingling, 124

The effect is to distance the poem from not only its principal protagonists but also from any hope of certainty. The concluding line, “that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying,” seems to encapsulate this ironical deflection of both the certainties of the perceiving subject and of authorial resolution.125 To seek a protection against radical uncertainty becomes, like Magritte’s painting of Pascal’s coat, both decorative and chimerical. In striving to find the moment beyond meaning in The Errancy Graham is also pointing to the need to find an ethical moment within the intimate, as the possibility of the visionary that can transcend it is deflected by the cultural processes that make its very articulation imaginable. The representation of this ebbing movement of consciousness, as its vain struggle to catch itself throws it back onto the limitations of its senses, is expanded in Graham’s 2002 collection Never, which contrasts “the mind’s insistent coming back and coming back” against the “song that falls upon the listener’s eye.”126 The 2005 collection Overlord brings together Graham’s consistent concerns with historical testimony, the ethics of intimacy, and the possibility of transcendence. The occasion of the collection’s title is the American-led offensive that began with D-Day and ended with the


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victory of the Allies in Europe. The collection opens with a memory of the self-consciousness of the child, the difficult realization that “we, only we” can “retreat from ourselves / and not be / altogether here.”127 Such a willed absence, that heightens individuality through the language of the collective, is profoundly ambivalent. To be absent from oneself suggests both war (cruelty’s capacity to act without engagement or responsibility) and poetry (an imaginative capacity for dreams, associations, empathy). Beyond these more prosaic possibilities the intimation that we “can be part full, only part, and not die” suggests the desire for a frustrated metaphysical communion that is an equally significant part of the “overlord” of the collection’s title. Graham’s solicitous attempt to chart a personal pilgrimage across the literal battlefields and literary memoirs of the Second World War, her careful responsibility to the presence and absence of this past, creates a number of parallel narratives. The clearest parallel is between the landscape of Northern France in 1944 and the present. The “Praying” and the “Spoken from the Hedgerows” series of poems collage Graham’s own writing with the letters, diaries, and memoirs of combatants. The attempts of these poems to incorporate the violent and quotidian facts of war––that simultaneously enlarge and contract a non-combatant’s sense of the human––are again cut through with a reflection on the hubristic nature of such a task. It is in the humility that this combination produces, it seems, that the poems are able to offer the slim possibility of redemption: “Oh who will hear this. When it comes it will be time only for / action. Keep us in the telling I say face to the floor [ . . . ] / do not force us back into the hell / of action.”128 By locating the first of these poems in the spring of 2003 Graham also suggests parallels between the Normandy invasion and the U.S. attack on Iraq, which began in March 2003. The broader trajectory of the collection moves us steadily toward this present as the words of Roosevelt’s soldiers give way to twenty-first-century fears regarding immigration, global warming, homelessness, and Sharia law, a world in which “the Abyss has gone plural.”129 Poems such as “Passenger,” “Commute Sentence,” and “Copy (Attacks on the Cities, 2000–2003)” all suggest the destruction of the assumed fabric of the human relation. The iconography of these poems––angry immigrant taxi-drivers “plastered” with American flags, “gloves, trays, uneaten sandwiches” falling from buildings––clearly evoke the political crises of the opening years of the century.130 The ideological certainty of the soldiers apparent in Graham’s initial attempts to “bring back a time and place [ . . . ] ‘the United States and her allies / fought for freedom’ ”131 is thrown into doubt along with the deferred promise of

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the God in whose name these various wars have been undertaken. As Graham rhetorically asks of the driver in “Passenger,” “Are you / fluent in this one-god’s country. I know your country also has / one god but read the fine print he is not the / same as ours” only to be repelled by her own language––“ ‘Ours.’ How does one peel this sticky / nationhood off.”132 Graham’s retreat to the private in this collection, her appeal to the possibility of individual relations, acts as a way of responding to the failure of both the state and of religion to deliver the freedom whose costs they have already exacted. Graham’s final description of feeding a hungry, homeless man so “cold he cannot even remember / he is supposed / to ask” is both moving and powerfully ineffective. In this case the careful exactitude of the description, “Last week leaving with a newspaper and some juice I gave him / the juice. In November when we had bought a ready-cooked chicken for our dinner I handed him the chicken” creates more difficulties than it assuages, serving only to remind us of uneaten meals and lost months. The careful descriptions of this act, “got a plastic knife. Got more paper and a paper plate,” register the depths of the unnamed man’s abasement whilst curiously aggrandizing the narrator’s failure to fully understand them. The poem is despondent in the face of this failure, the narrator admits that “as always” they “have done nothing” whilst steadfastly refusing to “[make of the grief a kind of beauty that might endure].”133 The private realm, like poetry itself, offers Graham a necessarily limited possibility of response. Indeed, Graham’s real achievement seems to be in honestly exploring the nature of these limitations rather than in striving to offer them a false resolution. Graham’s work seems to deploy the intimate and private in order to precisely explore the difficulties of being either political or public in the United States at the start of the twenty-first century. In this Graham’s conclusions seem closer to that of Hejinian and Scalapino, which are examined in Chapter 3, than with the poets of the academy that she is more routinely read alongside. The work of poets such as Dove, Forché, and Graham suggest a poetics whose increasing self-awareness, especially with regard to the contradictions of their own cultural positioning, can be opened into critique and the possibility of dissidence. For each, the easy domestic sureties of what Charles Altieri dubbed the “scenic mode” have given way to a poetics seeking to make apparent the very tensions that academic poetry has been understood as obscuring, particularly around the indeterminacy of the meaning of the private.134 The professional positioning of these poets, like their awareness of their reliance on apparently liberal notions of self and representation, are brought


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directly into the frame of their writing. Rather than seeking radical alternatives these poets turn their attention onto the possibilities of incorporating indeterminacy into their writing. Such attention mines the very instabilities that the position of poetry in the academy suggests, instabilities that are themselves indicative of the broader tensions in U.S. culture. Yet the nature of these interrogations of poetry’s vexed relationship to the political, the private, and the institution are quite distinct. Rita Dove’s careful demarcations between these realms center the private as a site of political agency able to eschew the demands of an identiterian politics that it otherwise appears to evoke. Forché and Graham, although similarly cautious about a literal representation of self, are more willing to represent it as a site of resistance. In the work of these two writers, in quite different ways, the poetic self is used to accentuate a poetics of intransigence that evokes Ewa Plonowska Ziarek’s notion of an anarchic responsibility involving the contingent commitment to the other rather than simple self-expression. In such writing an interrogation of the private becomes a starting rather than a finishing point for a political poetics: it becomes a site upon which the costs of a privatized poetics are uncovered rather than maintained.


CHAP TER

3

Against the Outside: Language Poetry as a Counter-Public

Introduction Rae Armantrout’s poem “The Garden,” from her collection Necromance, opens with an allusion to “lipstick ads in the 50s.” The neat image evokes the potent iconography of consumerism and femininity in the postwar period: the ambivalent twinning of America’s ascendant capitalism with the new social movements of which feminism was so influential.1 The taut irony of these opening lines, and the more complex interrogations that characterize Armantrout’s writing, are consistent with the critical tenor of much of Language writing and particularly the role of both consumption and gender within it. From registering the costs of Eve’s lapsarian knowledge, to the “insinuating and slangy” presence of masculinity, Armantrout’s poem unflinchingly teases out the associations of femininity with both desire and violence. Like so much of Armantrout’s poetry, the tartness of this critique is further ironized by its demure, diminutive presentation. The Language poetry movement with which Armantrout has been primarily associated has been the single most vital development in American poetics in the last three decades. The writing and cultural–political analyses identified with this increasingly uneasy “school” have expanded the political possibilities of poetic representation. The radicalism of the Language movement was initially constituted through a diverse body of texts intent on exploring new configurations for community and individuality, new ways of holding taut the tightrope between political intervention and critical assimilation, and new strategies for understanding the relationship between reader and writer. The attempt to reinvigorate literary consumption, in particular, offered important new possibilities for reconceptualizing the grounds of a participatory community. In explicitly rejecting the

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languages of inclusion and accessibility, Language poets used the activity of reading and writing to elucidate more critical and active models of communal culture. The focus of this chapter is on how Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino illuminated the positive limits of these invigorated democratic ideals, particularly as they recast the fraught relationship between gender and consumption. Armantrout’s interventions in these debates suggest much about the processes of the Language community. Her essay “Why Don’t Women do Language Orientated Writing?” (the only essay in the seminal In the American Tree anthology to explicitly consider gender politics) acknowledges that women may have been conventionally reluctant to produce experimental writing because of their need “to describe the conditions of their lives. This entails representation. Often they feel too much anger to participate in the analytical tendencies of modernist or ‘postmodernist’ art.”2 In a later qualifying essay she names the contradiction this position suggests, one reducible to the familiar textual/experimental versus materialist/realist dichotomy, as a site of opportunity. She suggests that language play is actually more responsive to “women’s condition [ . . . ] internally divided, divided against herself ” than conventional narrative and that it may constitute a “moment of freedom [ . . . ] As outsiders, women might, in fact, be well positioned to appreciate the constructedness of the identity which is based on identification and, therefore, to challenge the contemporary poetic conventions of the unified Voice.”3 Two aspects of this shift are worth attention. Firstly, most obviously, Armantrout highlights the fact that women poets played a pivotal role in developing a poetics for the Language writing community, even if their contributions took less polemical forms than those of their male peers. Women Language poets, as Armantrout’s later essay indicates, have productively realized the possibilities of bringing Language writing’s investigative aesthetic into play with anti-foundationalist models of feminist thinking. The possibilities of such approaches have begun to receive an appropriately serious amount of critical attention: readings of individual women Language poets and of their complex literary genealogies have all appeared in the past decade. Secondly, and as importantly, Armantrout’s critical writing is testimony to the workings of a literary community capable of both self-scrutiny and internal disagreement. Armantrout’s description of her own “Cheshire” poetics “that points two ways then vanishes in the blur of what is seen and what is seeing” offers an appropriately suggestive description of this skeptical model of the democratic: It’s a way to explore the relation of part to whole. This relation is a vexed one. Does the part represent the whole? Is metaphor fair to the

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matter it represents/Does representative democracy work? I think of my poetry as inherently political (though it is not a poetry of opinion). In an optimistic mood, one might see the multiple, optional relations of parts in such work as a kind of anarchic cooperation.4

It was this extraordinary capacity for self-reflexivity and cohesive heterogeneity, for “anarchic cooperation” in Armantrout’s useful terms, that allowed Language writing to transform itself from a literal community of writers to a more abstract counter-public capable of offering a productively diffident model of the democratic. The movement was quickly able to relinquish the “authenticity, homogeneity, and continuity of inclusion and exclusion” that Negt and Kluge ascribe to literal communities in favor of the mediated relations of the counterpublic. It was also, as the example of Armantrout suggests, capable of exploiting the attendant necessity to reinvent “the promise of community through synthetic and syncretising images” as a site of political possibility, of difficulty and contingency, rather than only of complicity or closure.5 In playing out these processes, and in facilitating a slippage between literal communities of writers, readers, and publishers and a larger, imagined readership, Language writing realized the complex, ungrounded forms of freedom that new models of democratic living seem to require. In place of a liberal-institutional model of democracy, one satisfied by the consumerist languages of access and inclusion and with a privatized notion of autonomy, Language poets sought more difficult and dissident models for representing a participatory community. This chapter explores the ways in which Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino have highlighted the productively complex and unreconciled tensions of this counter-public realm. These tensions are not only those named by Armantrout—between the “need to describe the conditions of one’s life” and the need to accept self-division, marginality, and construction—but those between experimentalism and “mass” cultural forms, between femininity and feminism, and between political action and assimilation. Both Hejinian and Scalapino use these tensions to forge an alternative to the prevailing conceptions of public–private relations in contemporary U.S. culture. Hejinian, like Jorie Graham, offers a compelling account of the lure that the intimate has held. Hejinian’s writing derives its significance from its ability to deconstruct the pleasures suggested by the normative private subject whilst also locating then within a broader, and implicitly more ambiguous, political and social context. Scalapino’s writing, conversely, engages with the literal conditions of the public: from the discourses of the mass media to the physical organization of space.

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In so doing she is able to interrogate the possibilities and limitations of an experimental poetic aesthetic seeking to directly intervene in these spaces. In my final readings of both poets I contrast the ways in which they sought to step outside of their dominant paradigms—outside of both the conventions of democratic U.S. culture and experimental poetry—in order to further illuminate the assumptions within which they were working.

Writing for the Reader: A Dialectic of Engagement The literal communities that initially gave shape to the Language movement, gathered on the East and West coasts, were concerned to explore the conditions and implications of literary production, reproduction, and consumption. This approach was motivated by a desire to usurp the assumed conservative individualism of what Charles Altieri had termed the “scenic mode” by producing new configurations of collective, aesthetic, and political responsibility. “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry,” one of the many collaborative essays written by poets from the Bay area, contended that the “Language” movement’s emphasis on the materiality of language and attack upon individuality actually mattered less than its striving for collectivism. If there is one premise of this writing “that approaches the status of a first principle” it is “the reciprocity of practice implied by a community of writers who read each other’s work.”6 The essay gives this very general aim precision by linking a right-wing agenda to an autonomous conception of art—“a kind of individual atomization that stands in for an individual sensibility based on implicit norms”—and conversely identifies Language writing with “the politics of intention— as opposed to aesthetic arbitration.”7 The publication of this essay in Social Text is now regarded as indicative of the dispersal of the literal communities and collectives of the Language movement into the academy toward the end of the 1980s.8 In this period, key figures in the movement began combining their commitment to smaller journals such as This and L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽ A⫽G⫽E with the editing of larger anthologies and collections by academic publishers. That the “Aesthetic Tendency” essay was subtitled “A Manifesto,” despite its considered eschewing of the homogenizing effect of the “Language” label, is suggestive of both the simplifications that its emergence as a nascent institutional form involved and the constant attempts at deflecting this by Language writers. Language

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poetry’s realization as a counter-public sphere, at the moment when both the radical aesthetics and collective optimism of the avant-garde were being more generally decried, was consistently conscious of the ironies of its actions.9 As Language poetry became an increasingly influential movement in American poetics its practitioners explicitly theorized the constitution of their alternatives to mainstream cultural life. The results indicated both the self-scrutiny of this moment and the contrasting models of the democratic public invoked by these writers. In The L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E Book, one of the first moves by these writers into a collective past tense, Charles Bernstein considers the movement in terms of literary history’s individualizing pull and the “star” system of the contemporary academy. He notes that because “poetry community (ies) are not a secondary phenomenon to writing but a primary one” they risk promoting a “series of banana republics” rife “with internecine (i.e. inner) conflict.”10 Ron Silliman gave his more deeply pessimistic analysis of these dangers an explicitly political analogous meaning. He compared the position of the “outsider” poet to that of the radical Left, given the uncomfortable choice of either working within the Democratic party, “an entirely corrupt institution—and one, incidentally notably weaker than the academy” or “through marginalized third party formations” that are pitifully weak in a two-party system. The alternative, to “avoid electoral politics altogether,” is equally impoverishing as it requires either abandoning political change, trusting in an increasingly unlikely revolution, or accepting the fragile accomplishments of a culture that can be “easily negated by changes at an institutional level.” Silliman, the outsider poet, turns to the academy with the same appetite as the radical turns to the Democratic party—“with all the emotional conflicts one might expect of a starving person trying to pick edible scraps of nourishment out of a pile of vomit.”11 Barrett Watten, less viscerally disgusted by a politics of compromise, argued that “what is efficacious in social change is not the ‘being’ of a marginal social group but its assertion of identity and the leverage this brings to bear on conditions.”12 In its formative descriptions, then, Language poetry’s counter-public was not only heterogeneous and contingent but also directly informed by the narrowing of the forms of political action—in the academy, in mainstream politics, on the radical Left—available in broader and more literal public and social frameworks. The bluntest end of Language writing’s “leverage” on these institutions was its demand that the reader, the consumer brimming with agency in a postmodern discursive economy, be acknowledged as

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active coproducer of meaning. Essays anthologized in the 1980s repeatedly attest to the centrality of this claim. The essay “For Change” describes the reader “not as a consumer of the experience sustained by the poem but as a fellow writer who shares conscientiously in the work and can willingly answer the uses of the medium which the writer feels impelled to undertake.”13 The presupposition in the relatively early monographs of Linda Reinfield and George Hartley, in the anthologies edited by Silliman and Douglas Messerli, and in the literary histories of Bob Perelman and Hank Lazer, was that Language writing aimed for a radical restructuring of the “relationship of reader and writer.”14 Such claims became a test case for the conundrum of postmodern agency. Figures such as Andrew Ross championed Language writing for allowing a Marxist literary aesthetic to “meet with the political realities of a shared discursive condition and not to insist on the rarefied rhetorical plane writers are inclined to protectively regard as their inherited polemical turf.”15 Ross placed this intervention within a discursive landscape that owed much to Baudrillard’s extending of Marx’s critique of the commodification of the political economy to include the commodification of the sign, a schema that reads “signifier and signified” as corresponding “to exchange value and use value.”16 For Ross, Language writing provided a postmodern antidote to his diagnosis of the failed impersonality of modernism, because it was able to accept “subjectivity as a given and thus necessary to language rather than imagined either as superimposed or as pre-existing.”17 Ross extended this brokering of the link between postmodern paralysis and political praxis to the reader, who he understood as responsible for the significance of their own consumption. Language poetry, Ross asserts, demands a “fair deal [ . . . because] the labor of composition is somehow equal to the labor of reading, and so the readers share meaning rather than merely responding to the writer’s meaning, or else producing their own at will.”18 Yet Marxist critics were scornful of such claims.19 Frederic Jameson, most infamously, read Bob Perelman’s “China” as merely symptomatic of the “schizophrenic” excesses of a late capitalist culture, glorifying in “disjunction to the point at which the materials of the text, including its words and sentences, tend to fall apart into random or inert passivity.”20 Within American poetics itself, these rather blunt debates were being more carefully located within literary and institutional traditions. The former approach, evinced in the work of critics such as Peter Quartermain, Joseph Conte, and Marjorie Perloff, placed Language writing within a marginalized tradition of parataxis. Perloff

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was more influential than any other single author in detailing this genealogy. Although sagely hesitant about the groupings and divisions with Language writing, she demonstrates the vitality of “poesis, (the process of making a poetic construction)” that is marked by its ability to acknowledge its own “radical artifice.” Such writing, Perloff suggested in her monograph of that name, is “less a matter of elaboration and elegant subterfuge, than of the recognition that a poem or painting or performance text is a made thing—contrived, constructed, chosen—and that its reading is also a construction on the part of its audience”.21 An overlapping slew of critical texts published in the early 1990s read Language poetry diachronically, comparing it favorably to poetic traditions (notably those in the mainstream) less conscious about their cultural implications. Christopher Beach, Alan Golding, Walter Kalaidjian, Hank Lazer, Jed Rasula, and Charles Altieri were all significant in analyzing the specific cultural advances made by Language writing, specifically in terms of its transformation of reading, of theory, of the institution, and of the culture industry.22 The writing of key figures such as Charles Bernstein suggests the ways in which Language writing’s engagement with both its institutionalization and its assumptions about literary form produced an ever-evolving ironic complexity. In the mid-1990s, Bernstein extended the ironical frames suggested by seminal essays such as “Artifice of Absorption” to community itself. He acknowledges that community always involves exclusion, “an imaginary inscription against what is outside,” yet he renders this “outside” a place of oppositionality and attraction, it is “where some poetry will want to be. That is, some poetry will want to work against received ideas of place, group, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, person, member, individuality, tradition, aesthetic tendency. One does not use collective nouns, or at least not without skepticism (if not anxiety).”23 His reluctant commitment to community is the result of his desire for a public space capable of more than publicity, and he is well aware of the twin dangers of assimilation and elitism that this risks, considering this double bind an “effective tool for the stringent enforcement of cultural hegemony within a multicultural environment.” Characteristically, he turns this risk into a defense, charging his critics with also wanting it “both ways”: that the “radically paratactic approaches” of experimental writing cannot be demonized “as both the unreflected product of the worst of the culture and at the same time as esoteric.”24 Bernstein understands the dialectical movement of the counter-public sphere. The risk that this poetic community collapses into what it critiques is not only a condition of its existence, but is also enabling, providing

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the writing with an opportunity for critical success as well as political failure. This diffident and dialectical model of community characterized the feminist politics of many Language writers, as the recent surge of interest in this field has more than demonstrated.25 Critical accounts such as those by Ann Vickery and Megan Simpson have aligned women experimentalists with a broader tradition of experimental writing and analyzed its contributions to the communal formations of the Language movement. Vickery’s genealogical tracing of the work of women Language practitioners reveals that the conventional mappings of Language poetics “complete with leading representatives and manifestos” have duplicated “mythologies of genius and hierarchized participation on terms of sexual difference.”26 Her work unsettles this narrative, as well as distinctions between textual and cultural criticism, by providing detailed alternative histories of the ways in which women Language poets operated within and across the stratifications of the emerging Language movement. Yet a formative tension not fully addressed in this existing critical work is that between gender and the cultural forms that this largely avant-garde context defined itself against. Most writing on women experimental poets accepts the oppositional distinctions between their writing and “mainstream” culture as a premise to their explorations of both its embattled status and its critical and aesthetic achievements. Although the high formalist divisions of an earlier moment are often carefully historicized, the same caution has not been as thoroughly extended to the various tensions between the uneven constellations of the feminine/femininity/feminism’s relationship to mass culture. I want to examine how these tensions add a gendered dimension to understanding the enabling constitutive irony of Language poetry status as a diffident counter-public. The vocabularies of the avant-garde (and its various antitheses) possess a well-documented if rather inconclusively ambivalent relationship to both a symbolic vocabulary of gender and to the material conditions in which “women” produce art: in both cases the tensions around these distinctions are understood as productive of agency itself. The avant-garde’s privileging of linguistic subversion and resistance to referentiality has been frequently elided with a notion of the feminine as both the underside of representation and as the corporeal. This connection, most influentially staked out in Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language, makes what is literally unspeakable— the pulsations of the pre-oedipal chora, in this case—the territory of the “feminine.”27 The identification of the Kristevean semiotic with

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the work of male modernist poets provides an irony that feminist critics have understood as evidence of the androcentric complicity of radical literature and institutional authority. The capacity for an avant-gardist intervention into culture becomes a way of exerting agency whilst also problematizing femininity. Marianne DeKoven’s analysis of the relationship between feminist authoriality and avant-garde culture, for example, asserts that while “ecriture feminine” is used to describe “the male avant-garde” women writers must concentrate on establishing “themselves as an “ambiguously nonhegemonic group” in relation to it, “simultaneously within it and subversive of it.”28 This description concurs with Joan Retallack’s interrogation of what representation, “picture theory,” entails for a feminist aesthetic. Retallack notes that the “literature of images”—from “literary and romance novels to Romantic poetry to movie and fashion magazines” leaves “women “with a damaged self-image—a static projection of incompetence and inadequacy, and paralysis—having no sense of how to get from ‘here’ (flawed self) to ‘there’ (idealized image).” Although Retallack remains importantly skeptical about the implications of Kristeva for a feminist critique she, like DeKoven, acknowledges the “curious” fact that writing associated with the “feminine” has been a male preserve and suggests that “the strongest literary practice” lies in the “experimental feminine that, in active exploration of multiplicity and unintelligibility—in the articulation of silence—draws us on.”29 Of course, what Retallack also reveals here is that the alienated mass of representational culture, from Romance novels to fashion magazines, that is the avant-garde’s apparent antithesis has also been associated with the “feminine” throughout the twentieth century.30 One obvious reason for this association is that the construction of femininity has been frequently understood through a set of social practices whose signification is recognized and measured through a skilful manipulation of personal and domestic consumption. The frequent elision of femininity and artifice—“masquerade” in the work of Joan Riviere, “performance” in the more recent work of Judith Butler—has compounded this association.31 Language writing’s implicit assumption that without the intervention of the “difficult” text consumption can only be a passive act neglects the fact that consumption has constituted a site of agency and cultural power for the historically constructed woman—albeit in interestingly ambivalent ways. Judith Butler’s reading of reiterative performance is not the only way in which this agency has been theorized. Work on consumption, for example, has suggested that to assume that the activity is either one of passive reification or subversive resistance relies on outdated

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narratives of liberal progression. Daniel Miller’s work, for instance, represents the housewife as one of the most, rather than the least, powerful figures in twentieth-century economic and cultural politics. Miller challenges what he describes as the “myths” of consumption, which damn the consumer for being responsible for global homogenization and/or the negation of sociality or authenticity and instead insists that we recognize consumption to be inextricable from the production of subjectivity.32 The symbolic associations of the feminine with both avant-garde and mass culture provide the woman artist with two very different kinds of cultural power: the possibility for “an active exploration of multiplicity and unintelligibility,” as Retallack describes it, and also for an interrogation of the relation between consumption and identity that theorists of cultural studies in particular have emphasized. Teresa De Lauretis’s urging of feminists to move “between the (represented) discursive space of the positions made available by hegemonic discourses and the space-off, the elsewhere of those discourses” is suggestive in this light.33 De Lauretis’s own critical practice, for example, maintains the possibility of a filmic feminist counter-practice through the production of both alternative cinematic forms and alternative ways of exploring, and of appropriating, consumption within the mainstream.34 The following half of this chapter examines how the tensions between and within these varied cultural practices, the de-reification of the symbolic (unrepresentable) feminine and the fraught position of women in capitalist culture as consumer and consumed, are made apparent in the work of Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian. I want to explore how both poets have realized the enabling boundaries of Language writing, which exist not only between “community and institution” but also between realism and experimentalism, between consumption and production, and between gender and capitalism, as potential sites of agency. In exploiting these sites of potential friction, rather than ironically deflecting them, the writing of both poets have attempted to expand the potential forms of political agency available to the woman poet.

An Impossible Task: Lyn Hejinian’s Autobiography Of the roll call of experimental women poets anthologized in texts such as In the American Tree and Out of Everywhere, Lyn Hejinian

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seemed to have participated more actively in the construction of a community for Language writers than nearly any other. Her significance at least partly derives from her attempts to create a theoretical and practical community to fulfil the rhetoric of Language writing’s own agenda. Hejinian contributed to collaborative works, co-edited Poetics Journal with Barrett Watten, and was responsible for Tuumba Press, without which many poets of this period would have not been published. In addition to supporting discussions of the possibilities of a gendered dynamic for Language writing, Hejinian was also vigorous in attempting to make Language poetry’s literal poetic community aware of the gendering of its own practices. In doing so, Hejinian explicitly explored what Language poetry’s dialectical model of community suggested for an analysis of the self. This attention to the political and private acts of community was matched in Hejinian’s writing by her persistent engagement with the mimetic and narrative structures for representing selfhood. Hejinian understood the “person” as “the described describer of what it knows by virtue of experience. [ . . . ] The idea of the person enters poetics where art and reality, or intentionality and circumstance, meet. It is on the neurotic boundary between art and reality, between construction and experience, that the person (or my person) in writing exists.”35 Her writing seeks to discover agency in the articulation of everyday existence: to exploit the point at which the subject’s own self-evident knowledge of experientiality and the subject’s discursive constructedness collide. The assumption that the exposure of the artifice of representation produces agency is one upon which the apparently disparate discourses of the experimental poetics of Language writing and of anti-foundationalist feminism have been able to converge. Hejinian, in keeping with both of these discourses, connects her manipulation of the line between “construction and experience” to a praxis capable of resonating beyond the text. In “The Rejection of Closure” she explicitly states that the “open” text “invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies.”36 At the same time, the essay demonstrates some caution about the apparently wide-reaching cultural efficacy of this activity. “It is impossible,” she notes in its final pages, “to discover any string or bundle of words that is entirely free of possible narrative or psychological content. [ . . . ] While word strings are permissive, they do not license a free-for-all.”37 Such limits are foregrounded in Hejinian’s writing through genre, dubbed by Jameson literature’s “social contract.”38 The

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generic conventions most consistently evoked are those of autobiography: her most famous text is My Life and much of her published work has been concerned with finding new modes for representing self-narrative and interiority. Such a practice has been an unsurprisingly ambivalent one for feminist writers: on the one hand, its assumptions about the self-knowing subject possessing an expressive language appear steeped in the discredited assumptions of modernity and yet, on the other, its enduring appeal suggests the continued cultural importance of narrative, identification, self-expression, and referentiality. In a relatively early essay “Language and Realism” (part of her “Two Stein Talks”) Hejinian engages with this contradiction by emphasizing the complexities of realism. She suggests that realism attempts to understand questions that are both “metaphysical” (“the nature of the Real, the relationship of the Real to Appearances, the distinction between the simulacrum and the original”) and “ethical” (“the relationship of Art to Truth” and an insight into how “literature can and should be useful”).39 Her articulation of this classic literary dilemma takes refuge in a rather instrumental language. She is clearly less invested in the “subversive” tropes of femininity—the work of Luce Irigaray is, for example, cited and dismissed as potentially essentialist in “The Rejection of Closure”—than with the ethical responsibilities of representation. These principles are most evident in Hejinian’s examination of autobiography. Although My Life (published in two versions in 1981 and in 1987) is the most important example of Hejinian’s exploration of these warring impulses, other poems written in this period attest to her close scrutiny of what the generic expectations of autobiography suggest for the reader. “Redo” and “The Guard”—both published in 1984, the mid-point between the first and second editions of My Life—are explicitly concerned with the act of self-narrative.40 “The Guard” seems to represent the construction of the written self as an act of hesitant authority against a threatening and nihilistic world and “Redo” extends this anxious tone in its reflection on an autobiographical projection of self. The suggestion in the first stanza that “Her autobiography / is ninety percent picaresque. / While thus moralizing all we have done / is shout/ the name of someone we know”41 creates a tension between the poem’s narrating impulse and its fear that the reader may simply be deafened by the personalization of the account. The poem goes on to mock its own claims to embrace the reader in light of this. Commitment? that sort of autobiography. Confession? that sort of misunderstanding

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— like infidelity to an impossible task. Who can take it over? It is as moral for night to fall.42

The autobiographical intimacy with the reader is represented as quixotically untenable and the poem suggests that this perceived failure is the product of its untenable ambitions, its “infidelity to an impossible task.” Toward its end it suggests, “People / think I have written an autobiography/ but my candor is false (I hear a few shots / slouching at my realism).”43 The poem seems to face the painfully impossible demands of the reader it creates, as it both derides the hope for “candor” as naïve and yet acknowledges the controversy that its own move toward “realism” may evoke. My Life’s success lies in its ability to reconcile the false opposition between the aspirations of “Language” writing and the conventions of autobiography.44 Hejinian’s rapprochement between these discourses is most clear in her insistence that there is, or at least there is an acceptable desire for, a “real” presence in the poem. My Life’s articulation of desire and identification most obviously displays its generic allegiance to autobiography. It is precisely special way of writing that requires realism. This will keep me truthful and do me good. Across the street in the pawing wind a herd of clouds pastures in the vacant lot. Night after night, in poetic society, line gathering and sentence harvesting. Of course I wanted to be real ! Words are guards, so words are wives. The story of the Emperor’s New Clothes is about mass delusion and the power of advertising.45

This citation is taken from one of the additional eight stanzas that Hejinian wrote for the second edition of the poem and which are meant to represent the eight years of Hejinian’s life that passed between the two publications. The passage presents, like much from these supplementary stanzas, a retrospective analysis of the effects of My Life’s self-narration. Hejinian is both admitting her desire for a sense of self and also acknowledging that the production of this “realist” self is a literary effect. Far from decrying realism as naïve or reactionary the poem elucidates its attractions and compares it to the poetic society, “across the street,” that is made to sound, with its “pawing wind” and “clouds pastures” almost sheeplike in its monotony. “Of

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course,” a narratorial voice sharply interjects, “I wanted to be real!” In suggesting the similarities between words, wives, and guards Hejinian suggests that words share the same bad press as the stereotypical wife: their control over us prevents us from experiencing and exploring the freedom that we desire. Yet since the reader knows that Hejinian is unlikely to participate in such a sexist image of marriage, then the ironical implication is that the custodial role of language is both chosen and pleasurable: the thing that allows us to be “real.” The simple finality of Hejinian’s judgment on the children’s story of the Emperor’s New Clothes turns upon the same point of finely tuned irony. The fairytale is about “mass delusion and the power of advertising” but to know only this is to forget that, as Hejinian suggests in the first of these final eight stanzas, “We like the tailor and we like the child, but we don’t like the naked emperor.”46 Hejinian does not simply reject the act of mass delusion—“we like the tailor,” because this is as enjoyable as the unmasking of delusion—“we like the child.” What Hejinian seems to object to is the vanity of those who think that language can be made to serve power so easily—“we don’t like the Emperor.” In place of the Manichean choice between recognizing artifice or being seduced by mass delusion (which clearly also echoes the “choice” between critique and consumption) Hejinian advocates the intricacies and pleasures that exist between the two. Hejinian’s essay “Reason” provides an analogy for understanding this intervention. The phrase “along comes something—launched in context” threads throughout the essay, embodying Hejinian’s attempt to conjoin representation and the real in order to avoid the emptiness of a postmodern negativity and the positivist assumptions constructed as the alternative. Hejinian reconciles this opposition through the use of “reason” that can operate “in the border between concepts—and again between several interdependent pairs of concepts. Reason may even constitute such a border zone.”47 This action allows for “an acknowledgement of the liveliness of the world, the restoration of the experience of our experience—a sense of living our life.”48 Jean-François Lyotard’s The Differend (explicitly referenced by Hejinian toward the end of this essay) offers a model for this form of agency. According to Lyotard, an articulation, a “phrase” is constituted “according to a set of rules (its regime)” and “phrases from heterogeneous regimes cannot be translated from one into the other.”49 The differend is Lyotard’s term for the point at which the continual friction between phrase regimes becomes visible. It is the point at which the “action” of context is made manifest and “provides a mechanism of description that will allow the event to be presented in its singularity rather than suppressed in

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re-presentation.”50 For Lyotard, the significance of art lies in its ability to “bear witness” to this process. Like Hejinian’s “reason,” the differend makes explicit the uncertain borders through and against which meaning is made. Neither seeks resolution because to do so would be to lose the dynamism of movement that context demands. Hejinian’s use of “reason” functions as an alternative description of the struggle between experience and construction, between realism and abstraction. This is a movement, of course, which seems to echo the dialectical workings of the Language community itself. In her later writing Hejinian’s extends this critical process of “reason” to normative assumptions about the relation between self and community in U.S. culture. Toward the end of the 1980s she made a number of trips (including two lengthy solo visits) to the Soviet Union and her writing of this period suggests an attempt to reexamine her assumptions about self. Her essay “The Person and Description,” for example, opens by noting that “the English word self has no real Russian equivalent, and thus the self [ . . . ] as I think I know it, is not everywhere a certain thing [ . . . ] when speaking Russian a self is felt but has no proper name, or the self occurs only in or as a context but is insufficiently stable to occur independently as a noun.”51 In her contribution to Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union, an account of visits to Russia written by a number of Language poets, Hejinian gestures to the ambivalence of this difference. She describes the distinctions between American and Russian conceptions of selfhood: “Subjectivity is not the basis for being a Russian person. Our independent separate singularity can hardly be spoken of, but Arkaddi said, ‘many people wish it.’ ‘You know,’ I said, ‘many of us wish to overcome it. We think that if we surpass or supersede the individual self we can achieve community.’ ”52 Oxota, published in 1991, is the fullest account of the time that Hejinian spent in Russia in these final and uncertain days of the cold war. The text’s concern with tracing the effects of Glasnost and Perestroika on Russian culture allows for a renewed meditation of the apparent division between Russian community and American “separate singularity,” between democratic capitalism and its apparent converse. The text’s representation of the decentered self is the result not of the deconstruction of a bourgeois identity but of an attempt to narrate a profound cultural displacement. Hejinian’s emphasis is on the space between the “phrase regimes” of American and Russian culture—“the excitation of the same experience by two grammars.”53 Oxota’s descriptions of the transitions in Russian culture are paralleled by Hejinian’s sense of alienation from both Russian and American culture: “going /

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out right then for milk involved an unintelligible belief in / everything / I simply couldn’t manage the incorporation of what I know.”54 In the space between these deliberately ill-fitting historical and personal narratives emerges an altered understanding of the gendered nature of agency and community. The poem’s subtitle announces it to be “A Short Russian Novel” derived from Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Hejinian has explained that this verse form “seemed like the perfect vehicle for what I was trying to do—it is concise (elegant even) but allows room for speculation and digression. And it rhymes with Pushkin’s Russian work, which I wanted to imitate in other ways as well—by including social commentary, self-examination, literary discussion, by writing a ‘comedy of manners,’ and all the while indulging in metaphysics.”55 The negotiation of changing expectations of selfhood is frequently linked in Oxota to these changing expectations of writing. Writing the “short Russian novel” enacts the protagonist’s experience of “moving through” something that she is “unable to take part / personally in” and assuages her sense of isolation and alienation. The description of this process as something that is “neither invented nor constructed” again evokes genre as a structure that foregrounds the tension between the chimerical freedom of pure invention and the passivity of being externally constructed.56 This stalwart attempt to rethink self significantly alters the role given to the reader. The very first chapter announces with an almost camp sense of performance that “We must learnt to endure the insecurity as we read / The felt need for a love intrigue / There is no person—he or she was appeased and withdrawn / There is relationship but it lacks simplicity.”57 Not only does this introduction prepare the reader for the unknown but it also makes explicit that they will not be guided. The small piece of truth that the text is able to offer—“I am glad to greet you”—actually seems a decorously stark curtailment of the expectations that the metanarrative text of My Life, for example, provided. The domestic assurance of this earlier text is replaced, as the awkward phrasing of this line suggests, with a sense of a narrator working within a foreign and uneasy tongue. The text is, however, far from solipsistic. The scrupulous observation of social mores that the formal and thematic structure of Eugene Onegin allows for is evident in Oxota’s drawing upon tropes taken from the tradition of Pushkin and from the anecdotes of her Russian companions. The novel is held together by these “typically Russian stories,” by conversations with named protagonists, and by exhaustive descriptions of an immediate environment, each capturing something

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of the book’s complicated historical moment. The comic book figure of the “colonel,” for example, plays a ubiquitous role in Russia’s urban myths “because,” Hejinian has suggested, “so many of the men in the generation just before mine were in the military and ended up as colonels.”58 The story of the colonel is a recurring narrative motif used to mark the uncertainties of the changing social order. He is a “sentimental and duckfooted” character, representing a benign image of the ineptness of the Russian military. He tells his wife, for example, that “they were cutting his pay to / cover the cost of a panzer tank he’d lost in a maneuver.”59 The descriptions of his debasement appear to be nostalgic for a fading status quo as his sense of guilelessness is reinforced by descriptions of his avuncular ability to respond to the needs of children. One story features him watching a porcelain washtub descending an escalator: “But what of the intolerable bathos of the colonel / The washtub slipped / Momentous shift / This was a crime in life now substantiated by a crime in art / A nationalist was going by a guise.”60 The washtub, which will “rise, ripen and must fall,” underlines the colonel’s receding authority and is juxtaposed against a more malevolent image of emerging power, the nationalist “going by a guise.” Hejinian’s awareness of her role as linguistic and cultural translator complicates these sidelong glances at the violence and nationalism of the changing nation. In an early chapter she recalls being “asked to explain the phrase sex kitten and the term pussy.” The impossibility of answering such an apparently straightforward question is suggested by both Hejinian’s turn to the “Gray sky, frost crushed on trees” of the immediate environment and her ensuing resistance to speech: I arranged myself in explication—slowly lifting my right arm A pose knowing that it can be allowed It was absurd—like thoughts around the edge of what needs to be understood He deferred He asked which women prefer61

The gendered implications of this apparently unbridgeable chasm between U.S. and Russian culture are frequently crystallized through contrasting assumptions about the role of the domestic, specifically of consumption. “Oxota” means “the hunt” in Russian and this is most frequently understood as a battle against the scarcity of food. Hejinian’s descriptions of domestic privation radically alter the meaning of necessity: “But I’d misjudge hunger—it puts words in the mouth / The restoration of metaphysics is achieved with a variant of /

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pointedness.”62 Rather than simply debasing art, this shift in priorities gives significance to Hejinian’s fusing of the quotidian and the conceptual. Her painstaking attention to the material and tactile—the smell of a blanket, the feel of a salad, the color of snow or of light — becomes part of the grander political consciousness that failed “plots” and a “conspiratorial tone” require.63 This more pointed “metaphysics” (described by one Russian companion as an abandonment of “our fidelity to big things”64) also sensitizes Hejinian to different possibilities for gender and for the private. The significance placed upon the mundane acquisition of consumables makes the relationship between femininity and consumption appear both less passive and less driven by the coy eroticism of artifice. The “coupon economy” may render women “universal” but such women “know what they want [ . . . ] they have speakable satisfactions.”65 This unsentimental account of desire and sexual difference extends to the intimate, and much of Oxota struggles to understand what the private can mean in a culture that represents itself as attributing no “independent separate singularity” to the subject. Hence, while the novel takes pleasure in the frank discussions around “the scope of the experience of sex”66 it also seems uneasy about the possibility of the “eros of no individual, the sex that is impersonally free / It might be a pornography, stripping and gears.”67 Both the admiration of this inclusive candor and the anxiety about an impersonal sexuality (the narrator seems frequently anxious about her own lack of privacy and what is assumed about her relationship with others, for example) are set against the ironic awareness that it is in America that the sex industry thrives: “But now, Lyn, goodbye, she said, in America I want to see sex / films / Well, my civilization is willing.”68 The benefits of democratic capitalism for feminism could hardly be presented more ambivalently than in this dry recognition of the freedoms of former Soviet women to consume the potential exploitation of women in the massive pornographic industry of the United States. The novel’s ability to “bear witness” to the distance between these opposing “regimes” is always deferred. The layers of misrepresentations and misunderstandings through which both cultures have defined themselves against each other mean that neither ever becomes fully available for analysis. Hejinian’s description of the radical changes in Russian culture certainly never attempts anything as crude as comparison or judgment. Instead, the novel presents a set of ideologically potent but false oppositions—“we can only momentarily oppose control to / discontinuity, sex to organization, disorientation to domestic / time and space, and glasnost (information) to the hunt”—in an

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implicit rejection of cold war ideologies.69 The discreteness of the two cultures is explored whilst their obvious oppositions—community and individuality, communism and capitalism, authoritarianism and democracy—are demonstrated to be reductively simple.

Total Art: Being Public in the Work of Leslie Scalapino Hejinian’s detailed tracing of the complex ways in which the gendered subject is constituted through their engagement with the divisions between public and private is shared by the poet Leslie Scalapino. Hejinian and Scalapino’s collaborative text, Sight, is testimony to their converging but disparate approaches to this central question and indicates much about their different analyses of the gendered politics of community. The poem is motivated by the shared desire to investigate “the working of experience” by focusing on the experience of seeing.70 The dual concerns of the text, with realizing the implications of a collaborative process and with furthering an understanding of phenomenology, are apparent in the movement of the very distinct styles of the two poets. As the poem progresses, excerpts from each poet (including work both have published independently elsewhere) lengthen and the distinctions between the radically paratactic style of Scalapino and the critical realism of Hejinian begin to blur as they slowly form a dialogue. Yet, at the same time, the individual aims of each poet become sharper. For Hejinian, the poem is part of a poetics that understands itself as a form of inquiry. The value of collaboration lies in its ability to enact the intersubjective dimension of “acknowledgement” that sight entails: “In Sight we attempt to acknowledge the world simply by seeing it but also by stating that something has been seen. To do this, we carry on an activity (a continuous action); we are in motion, turning toward (things between us).”71 This concern with the responsibilities of being is realized through Hejinian’s echoing of Scalapino’s words and in her moves toward expanding and clarifying their possibilities. Although Scalapino is also concerned with the quotidian processes of the experiential, her formulation of the broader ethical implications of such a concern is importantly different. Scalapino’s analysis of shared phenomenology focuses on realizing Sight as an enactment of reality rather than as a commentary upon it. For Scalapino, Hejinian’s emphasis on the potentially restorative aspects of poetry are less significant than her own awareness that there can be nothing beyond the moment: “When I’m suffering you tend

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to alleviate to bring suffering into the currency of the “social,” the realm that is convivial—whereas I’m saying it’s (also) apprehension itself when it’s occurring.”72 For Scalapino, this produces not only a more skeptical and resistant poetics but also one in which poetics is allied to consciousness rather than self-consciousness. Scalapino’s disjunctive style fixes firmly on the externality and appearance of phenomena (including thought and writing) rather than on its implications for the ethical possibilities of reflective writing. The possibilities for such writing are more radical and more uncompromising in their demand for an experimental poetics. Scalapino has described this as an aim for a “total art,” capable of resisting distinctions between theory, writing, and practice, because “poetic discourse is itself ‘poetry.’ ” This aspiration, detailed in the wryly named essay “The Cannon,” is supported by what she terms her “secret doctrine,” a desire “to get complete observing at the same instant (space) as it being the action,” to confound the separation of presentation and representation.73 Scalapino’s repeated insistence on understanding practice as reality rather than technique has been directed explicitly against those critics of Language writing who accept “polemic directive” because such acts are “divorced from the live gesture.” She has been scathing about the masculinized assumptions of early Language writing and also about the very apparatus—the anthologies, the reading models, the theoretical vocabularies—that facilitated the emergence of Language writing into the academy and implicitly involved “reproducing the conventional distinctions (as categories of thought).”74 Scalapino’s “Autobiography” presents this aim for a “total art” in terms that seem to respond to the dialectical frame I have attributed to both Bernstein and Hejinian. Although this “Autobiography” resists narrative (it was written as a biographical resource for Gale Research but was rejected by the editor because “I mean I can appreciate stream-ofconsciousness and all—but this is going to be in libraries!”), it is surprisingly explicit.75 The text’s combination of childhood memories, of political and formal ambitions for individual poems, and of the influence of other poets and artists, are revealing. Scalapino’s childhood memories of moving between the very different cultures of Asia and America, for example, provide a formative model for understanding her identification with the processes of alienation. This sense is associated with a politicized aesthetic ambition and with a reflexive process of subject formation: I freaked out and beginning then [at fourteen] sought (later in writing) the “anarchist moment”—the moment that would be only disjunction itself.

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In the process, I’ve created this memory track. Yet had the sense that I had to make fixed memories move as illusion, that they move as illusions.76

The text’s analysis of the movement of memories is suggestive of more than a self-conscious awareness of autobiography. Scalapino’s resistance to normative models of identification is associated with the violence as well as the liberation of the “anarchist moment” of the outsider. Many of the text’s anecdotes focus on a sense of heightened isolation: as the child is excluded by teachers, rejected by classmates, pinched by a grandmother, or “smashed against the wall” for interracial dancing on a “crossing from India to East Africa.”77 This sense of isolation is also internalized and associated with instances of self-harm: of refusing to speak, to eat and—in one very brief reference—of overdosing. These struggles are frequently related in the poem to the desire for an escape that comes from the fraught position of “being between. Spatially. Gyration where one is there breathless, in violence.”78 This attempt to be released from what Scalapino calls “social conscription”–is necessarily to be at risk because “being ‘free’ is simultaneous with the conflict.”79 In Scalapino’s writing her uncompromising radicalism, her hope for a participatory political culture, involves not only “the reciprocity of practice implied by a community of writers who read each other’s work” but also the willingness to risk the violence of being unrealized and going unread.80 In this sense, Scalapino seems to go much further than Hejinian in illuminating the risks of the “Language” Project: the dialectical space between “phrase regimes” cannot always simply be understood as recoupable or palliative. This sense of alienation that seems to characterize Scalapino’s writing has been particularly well suited to producing a critique of the politics of public space and of the immediate conditions of visible reality. Such attention recalls Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to overcome Cartesian dualities without resorting to the “metaphysics of presence.”81 The world of physical phenomena and the being of the speaking subject come into meaningful existence at the same moment for MerleauPonty. This situating of politics within the local, as a direct response to the dangers of the universal, has been more generally seized upon as a way of retaining the political in a nontotalizing way. To think spatially has been constructed as offering an effective challenge to the teleological assumptions about time and progress that have dominated the epistemology of modernity. Leslie Scalapino’s work offers a way of constructing a feminist politics through an engagement with the politics of the phenomenology in its most literal sense. Her desire to be

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“public” has led her to go further than Hejinian in exploring the ability of the text to reform the boundaries of political meaning. As with Hejinian, this aim has involved a consideration not only of the experimental writing community but of the broader specific assumptions of mainstream U.S. culture against and within which this successful counter-public operates. Many of the poems included in Scalapino’s 1985 collection that they were at the beach explore the discursive construction of space. The first poem in the collection, “buildings are at the far end,” interrogates the spatial construction of social inequality. The poem is concerned with the tensions within urban spaces: industrial parks, train stations, high-rise buildings, docks, and wastelands. Scalapino details who moves, how they move, who looks, how they look. I work, yet seeing a delivery driver in the sweltering weather I had the sense that he’d come to an area that is vacant. Like a dock or a pier, it didn’t have any shade or people—and therefore the duties of the driver are undefined, in terms of the work he’s doing. Yet there’s a sense of people—not being there, the area in the sun being remote—but being in an industrial area anyway in sports car, or ordinary cars. The others in an industrial park, and the driver of the van isolated.82

This stanza, like most of the collection, seems to be about the way in which social class defines our possession of the world. The delivery driver exists in a space that affords neither protection, company, nor definition: he works alone, unknown and without shade. The physical vulnerability of his “sweltering” isolation is contrasted to the existence of those who can afford to construct their own space, who can afford to be invisible. They travel in “sports” or “ordinary cars” and their occupation of industrial space can be sensed rather than seen, they are remote from the van driver and the sun. Private space, Scalapino implies, is not only the enclosed world of the domestic but is also the protected world of class privilege. The text mimics the blank tone of the documentary, appearing to record an unnamed individual’s observations about their environment. The speaking subject is physically located in the text, yet also denied the privileged self-knowledge of lyrical authority. The lack of an interior monologue, and of the accompanying process of ready identification, reinforces the poem’s alienated reading of public space. The critical reception of this poem was informed by the familiar contours of American poetics in the 1980s and 1990s. Marjorie

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Perloff reviewed the poem in American Poetry Review and argued for the inextricability of the alienation that Scalapino’s poetics perform and the landscape that they are describing. Perloff suggests that the “subject” of Scalapino’s writing is the “unrelatedness of life in the modern city, the failure of its settings and its daily ‘events’ to come together” and that this sense of disjunction relies upon the “carefully controlled repetition of highly selected, condensed verbal units, upon interruption and resumption, as if we were listening to a slightly staticky radio.”83 Reviews of the text by critics associated with either the New Formalist Movement or the “Mainstream” emphasized, conversely, strategies of accommodation that attempted to overcome the poem’s formal disruptions. Mark Jarman reviewed they were at the beach in The Hudson Review according to conventional categories of form suggesting that the poem, despite its “apparent Derridean blurring of genres,” speaks with “a lyric voice.” Jarman understands the formal fragmentations of the writing, “often imageless, flat and redundant” as rendering “the very chinks that allow us a partial view” of its concealed expressive self.84 Gary Lenhart, writing for more uncontroversial The American Book Review, privileges the “individualism” that is “the subject and method of Leslie Scalapino’s poems.” For Lenhart, Scalapino’s anxiety over selfhood is not the burden of an ideological structure that it is painful, or even dangerous, to relinquish. It is, rather, the “spare, quiet and intensely self-conscious voice of Scalapino’s sexual and social discomfort [which] strikes me as authentic and even profound.”85 This assumption bears heavily on Lenhart’s reading, allowing him to read the poem through what seems to be an inversion of Scalapino’s own poetics: he knows that the poem is fracturing his expectations of poetic mimesis, but for him this signifies the failure of the art to reach life—and not the refusal to recognize the distinction between the two. Scalapino has more recently become critical of such reading frameworks, contending that “all demonstrations (as writing or speaking) are sidetracked by being defined as a category.”86 Scalapino has even been censorious of Marjorie Perloff for assuming a “division between ‘radical artifice’ (as avant-garde practices) and ‘native transparency’ as if there were a dichotomy, as if ‘authenticity’ were not also (in some avant-garde practices) oppositional only as ‘constructed domain.’ ”87 According to Scalapino, Perloff’s critical readings reinstitute “the construction one is attempting to remove (and she defines one’s writing as that seamless construction that one is attempting to unravel).”88 Scalapino’s resistance to the apparent ease with which these reading models attribute meaning to poetic form is indicative

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of her desire for a more radically avant-gardist connection between text and reading context. In the 1990s the direction of Scalapino’s work shifted, as the emphasis on poetry was usurped by an attention to a broader notion of genre. Prose, narrative, drama, the comic book, and journalism begin to feature in Scalapino’s writing as she began to grasp with formulating alternative forms of public discourse. The enigmatic title to the 1996 The Front Matter, Dead Souls juxtaposes a familiar postmodern reflexivity (front matter is the publishing term for a book’s cover, title, and contents page) with classic Russian literature (Dead Souls is the name of Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 “realist” comedy). The result combines Gogol’s damning survey of contemporary politics with an evasion of literary subjectivism: “I was trying to write real political-social events transpiring at the time, written only as visual text (with no pictures). [ . . . ] As if by being that which is physical seeing only, rather than their being language-imagination (i.e. as if they could be only physical seeing only as text, and are not imagination).”89 Hejinian’s description in Oxota of Gogol’s “epic” Dead Souls as one “hopeful of resurrection”90 finds a parallel in the self-consciously optimistic ambitions of Scalapino’s Front Matter, Dead Souls. The first paragraph of the text both announces its excluded status from the public sphere in which it wants to be perceived as operating and explicitly states itself as an alternative to this sphere. The Front Matter, Dead Souls is a serial novel for publication in the newspaper. Its paragraph length chapters can also be published singly on billboards or outdoors as murals. Parts of it were submitted to various newspapers during the election campaign, though not accepted.91

Alongside this desire to see the text enter the public space of a newspaper, billboard, or mural sit Scalapino’s familiarly uncompromising poetics. This is a plot in a continual series of actions. The writing of events is not a representation of these events; actions are not submitted to being made peaceful by doctrine or interpretation, that is, in a fake manner, but artificially by finding their own movement and a dual balance in an impermanence of the structure.

The writing wants to be able to enter the public world of billboards, and to remain as “action” rather than “representation.” It appears, in other words, to attempt to combine Scalapino’s aim to challenge the

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distinction between art and life with mass culture’s access to public space—specifically that most debased and idealized space of an election campaign. Like Eileen Myles’s explicitly female “write-in” presidential campaign of 1992 (which is lauded in Front Matter for making apparent the “country’s absent marginalia”) the poem aims to offer itself as a direct intervention in this most obvious form of democratic discourse. The paradoxes of the avant-garde are represented by the desire to place a text that radically disrupts the commodification of representation in the very spaces—in a newspaper or upon a billboard—that depend upon this commodification for their existence. The desire for an avant-garde art that questions the autonomous realm of its existence is complicated because of the recognition that this has already occurred, not because of the potency of the “writerly” text but because a reality constituted by these forms is always already discursive. Yet the text resists allowing this familiar pessimism, what Peter Bürger diagnosed as the “false sublation” of commodity aesthetics, to stifle its ambitions.92 The text is “loosely based in L.A” and it satirically contrasts the violence and tensions of the city’s underclass with their public representations in the media, particularly in newspapers. The poem’s short visual vignettes, which emphasize movement and color over narrative and interiority, make implicit connections between the first Gulf war, the Rodney King case, drug addiction and prostitution, the global implications of the AIDS epidemic, and the LA Riots. The poem also shares with Eileen Myles’s campaign the desire to mock the increasingly right-wing rhetoric of Republican politics. At one point, for example, the poem cites Dan Quayle’s reported suggestion that the situation comedy Murphy Brown was adding to the moral degeneracy of the country: “Our vice president, who links the acceptance of a single / mother by the viewers of a TV series, which as such is un- / dermining family values to the riots, thinks firing of cities arises / from being born.”93 Quayle’s linking of the LA riots to the “undermining” of family values in this period provides another example of the increasing privatization of the state as it sought to place national and economic responsibilities upon the family. Such moves depend on neoconservative assumptions about the specific “failure” of the radicalized and feminized family.94 Scalapinos’s critique of such calculatedly naïve discourses is intimately linked to the potency of such discursive constructs. Yet this example represents not the inescapable strength of the image in the hands of the politically powerful, but Quayles’s rather crass assumption about his own ability to seize it. In this instance, for example, Quayle’s critique of Murphy

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Brown provided a moment of welcome schadenfreude as his condemnation of single parenting also forced him to condone the series for providing a “pro-life” message.95 Scalapino’s critique of the relationship between image and power reveals it to be incommensurable, potentially jarring and ludicrous, rather than simply an act of successful ideological naturalization. Such an insight allows Scalapino to declare the existence of the “real.” The Front Matter, Dead Souls describes itself as a “scrutiny of our and ‘one’s’ image making, / to produce extreme and vivid images in order for them to be real.” The text’s aim to produce knowledge of the processes of the “real” is dependent upon a poetics of intention. The blank tone of the documentary that characterized that they were at the beach has given way to a reading practice that is now being explicitly directed. Such directions are necessary if the reader is to make sense of the text at all: shocking images nestle against rather contradictory acts of exegesis. This combination signifies the text’s chimerical desire to be avant-garde, popular, and politically oppositional. The poem’s determined enactment of its own impossibility is perhaps both its finest achievement and the point at which the contradictions within it display most tension: “this was to be written on billboards, that it never occurs. / There’s an opening to not occurring even.”96 The impossibility of creating the experience of public “reality” within a public space is faced without despair because the imaginative space for stating it has been created. At this point Scalapino’s writing reveals the impossibilities of a contemporary avant-garde and remains faithful to its aims. The difficulty of reading Scalapino’s writing results from its dependency on reading practices that do not yet exist. It reminds us that the avant-garde cannot actually be read through existing narratives of literature or sociological accounts of culture because it is, by definition, outside of its historical moment. A review of The Front Matter, Dead Souls in Scalapino’s own local Bay Guardian suggests how this ironical problematic was reflected in her critical reception. The review suggests that although the book achieves a “pure and immaculate glow” that it “frequently evades access,” that “the ultimate response to it” would be “to not read it at all, to deny it the time and space that it denies its characters” because in “severing bonds between words” Scalapino has also “severed the bond between reader and poem, making her work impenetrable.”97 The irony is, of course, that what makes this writing so impenetrable is precisely that it attempts to examine what it actually means to give characters and events “time” and “space.” Scalapino’s critique of democratic public space is returned to the tension between

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accessibility and difficulty, to the need to find another way of reforming the terms by which the public is constituted. A single, brief anecdote in Scalapino’s “Autobiography” seems to offer a wry commentary on the difference between Scalapino and Hejinian’s contribution to the communal project of Language poetry. One of Scalapino’s earliest accounts of her alienation from mainstream culture is traced back to her elementary school where the “teachers chose favorites and excluded and spoke meanly to, regarded negatively, the children who were not the favorites.” Scalapino both critiques the formative power of such practices and identifies her own strategies for resistance from within them: The standard as “pet” (as if “at all” in existence) being based upon sense of convention, personalities being this, before we know what this is. Or those who were favored already behaved in a way that is convention. [ . . . ] I was sent home once from school with a note pinned on my dress on my chest which read, “won’t speak.” At the time I was happy or at any rate fine.98

Scalapino relates this experience of silence to her understanding of the dynamics of the public sphere as it was constituted in the child’s world. She compares the schoolboys who “didn’t respond to repression, would forget, be noisy and playful” with her father’s colleagues who “would ridicule in tone, humiliate their wives at the dinner table to which the wives would say nothing, embarrassed” and attempts to place herself beyond this: “I grasped what socially is, what would be expected of me, and rejected it.”99 In the middle of this retrospective account, Scalapino tells the story of how Hejinian and Scalapino had driven past Scalapino’s old elementary school together after their first meeting and how Hejinian had commented that she had attended school there saying “I was ‘teacher’s pet.’ It was very funny.” Beyond the coincidental humor of this description, of an experience remembered in shared and yet antithetical ways, is a wry allusion to very different assumptions about community and gender. While both Hejinian and Scalapino use a radical parataxis in modeling a community vigilant about its own practices and assumptions about both gender and representation, for Hejinian this process is associated with the necessity of possibility and of pleasure whereas for Scalapino it is associated with the possibility of failure. Hejinian’s feminist politics facilitate a resolution to the tensions between inclusion and exclusion or mainstream and experimental culture whilst for Scalapino these politics demand a reenactment of them.

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Chapters 4 and 5 explore how contemporary poets have sought alternative strategies for addressing these risks suggested by Language poetry’s model of a counter-public. Chapter 4 explores the small press community, tracing the ways in which this working-class self-publishing constituency has produced an alternative model for “third-wave” feminism and for a literary public that seeks to be both radical and genuinely inclusive. This analysis particularly focuses on the profound ambiguities of the “obscene” in this writing—its effrontery of literary and sexual mores—as they both challenge and reinforce some of the conventional abstracted assumptions of the democratic public. The final chapter examines how a newer generation of poets, one clearly influenced by the Language movement, have offered optimistic strategies for resolving the conflicting demands of a poetic democracy that the various chapters of the book have outlined. This chapter examines how these now familiar tensions—between singularity and universality, between freedom and responsibility, between accessibility and difficulty, between abstraction and lived experience—are given an alternative resolution in the production of a new form of democratic literacy.

CHAP TER

4

Go Grrrl: Democracy and Counterculture

Introduction That the small press scene is larger and more heterogeneous than critical narratives can absorb has become something of a truism. Far beyond the carefully staged debates taking place on the pages of American Poetry Review teems a self-publishing industry that has peeped only glancingly over the critical horizon of American poetry. The indeterminate and uneasy categories of the “small press” have been frequently acknowledged but only rarely explored in the critical narratives of postwar U.S. poetry. This apparently chaotic and relatively uncharted small press scene seems an obvious site for exploring the imaginative role of democracy in U.S. literary culture. The most frequently commented upon characteristics of this poetry scene—its uncharted size, its eclecticism, its long history—speak directly to the ambivalent discourses of U.S. democracy. For some, the small press scene corresponds to the fear of a threateningly undiscriminating mass culture. Phillip Lopate’s satirical text, “The Little Magazines Keep Coming,” for example, associates the small press with an uncontrolled infantilism that is analogous to a conservative view of mass democratic culture. Lopate’s text concludes by suggesting that “little magazines have no value but pose no threat” and may “amuse themselves in the corner as long as they don’t drool on the carpet.”1 Yet, for others, the small press is a site of democratic celebration: its persistence, divergence, and eclecticism taken as evidence of the presence of a healthy culture able to support dissident counter-publics. Maria Damon, for example, has described the “postliterary poetry” of the small press as the “realms of gold” for a “utopian hetero-democracy made of charged talk-language; but like other alchemical ideals, it’s always already there.”2

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This chapter explores the ways in which a range of women poets have complicated this rather baldly stated dichotomy, specifically how the contributions of women poets has both heightened and disrupted the small presses’ fulfillment of the best and worst of democracy’s promise. It uses the analytical taxonomies suggested by the curators of the small press scene to tentatively suggest an aesthetics for this poetics. It explores the uneasy combination of visual experimentation and the “unadorned” depiction “of daily life and the physical functions of the human body” that often characterizes small press poetry.3 In tracing the various ways in which women poets have responded to, and been positioned by, this aesthetic I examine the specific complexities that attempts to represent the marked female body within a poetic culture brings forth. The heterogeneous and eclectic writing communities supported by the small press poetry scene offer women poets a number of possibilities for occupying a critical counter-public whilst also demonstrating the exquisite difficulty of attaching any kind of political meaning to the integrity and independence of this realm.

The Aesthetics of the Obscene It seems to have been primarily the archivists and taxonomists responsible for the curating of contemporary American poetry who have been seriously engaged in attempts to gauge the size, significance, and changing characteristics of the small press. The figure most closely identified with attempts to chart the small press scene is Len Fulton. Fulton’s 1990 Directory of Poetry Publishers is dwarfed by its gargantuan task of attempting to impose a geographical, thematic, and aesthetic order on the 6,600 journals and presses it details. The dizzying array of thematic categories evoked by the publication suggests a thriving small press poetic scene responding to the eclectic, special interests of a heterogeneous culture.4 Fulton’s ability to compile such a directory at all is the result of three decades of work in poetry’s small press. His 1971 essay, “Anima Risin’: Little Magazines in the Sixties,” provided a broad overview of the significant changes in poetry’s small press that had occurred during the 1960s. He reads the dramatic growth in the small press through three influences: “one technological and economic (offset printing), one aesthetic (concrete poetry) and one spiritual (mimeography).”5 He suggests that the “concretists” subversion of the “traditional boundaries between the literary and the visual arts” combined with the “Do It Yourself ” radical ethos and technologies of the 1960s in fueling new kinds of cultural spaces and forms for contemporary poetry. For Fulton, Charles

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Bukowski exemplifies these complicated and even contradictory characteristics. Fulton notes that “few magazines” have been “untouched” by Bukowski’s writing: “tough as wire, Dada-like, always saying it the way it comes down to him, incessantly fascinated with the very act of making the poem.”6 Loss Pequeño Glazier’s updating of Fulton’s bibliographic survey of the small press scene in the early 1990s similarly emphasizes its ability to “accommodate diversity” whilst identifying the presence of three particularly influential poetic traditions. Glazier’s three traditions—the “meat poetry” presenting “unadorned portrayals of daily life and the physical functions of the human body,” the “American strain of concrete poetry that pursued visual experimentation,” and “The New York school” serving a “core of avant-garde writers”—suggest some continuity with Fulton’s findings.7 Like Fulton, Glazier tentatively described a specific small press aesthetics that exists outside of the conventional formal divisions in American poetry. Like Fulton, Glazier identifies this poetics with visual experimentation, with workingclass explicitness, and with a radical cross-arts practice. The account of the connections between concrete poetry and the “zine” (a relative newcomer to the small press scene) given by yet another two of American poetry’s most influential archivists, Robert Bertholt and Michael Basinski, suggests the presence of something like a loose consensus in descriptions of this “outsider” aesthetic.8 Bertholt and Basinski’s collaborative essay identified zine poetry with an increasing experimentation with the visuals of signification, a response to the waning of the referent, and a growing “non-literary audience.” They characterized this poetry according to a collage aesthetics made from “stolen or plagiarized material, mixed with propaganda, featuring a strong enjambment of print and visual media, which on occasion is meant to be to some extent shocking or purposefully sexually violent— obscene in an old sense.”9 I want to expand and develop this notion of the obscene as a usefully ambiguous trope for analyzing how the aesthetics of the small press offers an alternative model for understanding the response of poetry communities to shifting formations of the public sphere and democracy in U.S. culture. In its most literal “old” sense the obscene refers to the centrality of sexual explicitness and sexual anxiety that frequently characterizes the “meat” writing of the small press in particular. A central concern of this chapter is to examine how this explicitness facilitated what was often a sophisticated interrogation of class, gender, and sexuality. This writing’s insistent rendering of the marked, sexualized body as both public and economically significant

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breaches the codes of a public culture that assumes these relations to be private—effectively disrupting what Michael Warner describes as the “mirage” of a “pre-political humanity” from which citizens are thought to emerge, and return to, “in the (always imaginary) future after political conflict.”10 As Warner makes clear, the stakes in puncturing such illusions is not the legitimacy of recognition but the processes available to subjecthood itself. Warner’s own model of a “queer” counter-public, for example, aims to “support forms of affective, erotic and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity.”11 In striving to represent the intersecting dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality the counter-publics of contemporary poetry offer an alternative to the public sphere’s enshrining of a voluntarist, privatized form of identity primarily directed toward the normalization of “the family sphere.”12 The emphasis of all these observers of the small press scene on visual experimentation—Baskinski and Bertholt’s description of the zine’s use of plagiarism and propaganda and juxtaposition of visual and print media, for example,—suggests an additional kind of obscenity. In rendering visible the modes of production of the material page the small press has often displayed a palpable disregard to the niceties of textual uniformity, consistency, or harmony. In doing so, the visual and material poem can pose something of an affront to the category of the literary itself. In foregrounding their frequently unconventional and unsanctioned modes of production these texts also foreground the need for roughly equivalent modes of consumption. The possession of such modes is, of course, central to contemporary readings of the efficacy of the counter-public sphere: it is precisely this that Language poetry’s dialectical relationship with the academy succeeded in achieving. Yet I am interested in examining how the alternative small press scene can be read through a desire for a mass democratic culture that made it quite distinct from Language writers whose investment was more properly politically theoretical. As the editor of the poetry journal Photostatic phrased it, he was indebted to “LANGUAGE poets” for formalizing “that it’s ok for language to just be” but cautious of their “cerebral” tendencies.13 I want to use the ambiguity of the small press’ reliance on the obscene, its effrontery of literary as well as sexual mores, as a way of exploring its specific aims for a mass, if necessarily more ambivalent, engagement with mainstream U.S. culture. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge are useful in this context: their knowingly anachronistic model of the “proletarian” sphere seems


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particularly relevant. Negt and Kluge describe this sphere’s ability to draw attention to the contradictions of the bourgeois public sphere’s assumed abstraction of experience. This corresponds to an attentiveness to the “imaginative strategies grounded in the experience of alienated production” and an awareness that such articulations are constantly threatened by a reifying reabsorption by the bourgeois culture they seek to evade. This sphere “involves the dialectical interplay of three distinct elements: the experience of re/production under capitalist, that is, alienated conditions; the systematic blockage of that experience as a horizon in its own right [ . . . ] and a penchant for personalization, individual and collective fantasy, and creative reappropriations.”14 I want to explore countercultural poetry’s attempts to critically negate the abstractions of the bourgeois sphere through articulating the “sensual substance” of lived experience whilst also deflecting the possibility of recuperation. Yet the representations of “personalization, individual and collective fantasy” that frequently function as a site of resistance in this writing are rendered complex by the centrality of gender and sexuality to them. The representations of the gendering of sexual labor that is frequently apparent in this writing disrupts the completeness and purpose of the category of the counter-public in a range of disquieting ways.

Do It Yourself (DIY ) Poetry and Visual Writing Since the 1960s the cultures of the small press scene have thrived in the complex networks of countercultural artistic communities, such as mail art, assemblings, fluxus, and zine writing. Over the past thirty years these movements have been active in creating a heterogeneous range of cultural and social networks intent on disrupting and parodying hegemonic conventions of community, communication, and representation. The overlaps between small press poetry communities and these larger artistic communities are not difficult to discern. Commentators such as John Held have made apparent the connections between the aspirations and key participants of poetry’s small press culture and Ray Johnson’s parodic New York School of Correspondence or fluxus’ Eternal Network.15 Similarly, Mail Art’s demand for “No More Masterpieces,” and its naming of posted objects, flyposters, rubberstamping, and cassettes as art—a practice described as a “kind of improvisational jazz” combining “Dadaism, Nouveau Realisme, Futurism, Fluxus, and Situationalism”—have all

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been influential in the development of a poetic counterculture.16 Len Fulton has suggested that when these cultural practices exceeded the poetic text, as was the case “with much intermedium art, with ‘happenings,’ autocreative-destructive art or environmental poetry such as glass poetry” then the small press poetry magazine became instead an “effective promoter and cataloger” of the countercultural scene.17 The continuation of these connections into the 1990s has been suggested in the work of Stephen Perkins who makes connections between the Neoist group, the “Smile” journal, the Praxis Group, and zine culture.18 The explicit political vocabulary given to these countercultural communities was made evident in events such as the Art-Strike and the Festival of Plagiarism, both of which were intended to highlight, and seemingly invert through excess, the contradictions of contemporary avant-gardist strategies.19 An article written as part of the festival of censorship by “Karen Elliot” (itself a pseudonym for a collection of authors) suggests this very clearly.20 The pamphlet “Censorship: Existence as Commodity and Strategies for Its Negation” advocates a necessary withdrawal of cultural participation—“Everyone, one step less if you want to be revolutionaries!”: What is necessary is willingness on our part to give up the “identity” and “productivity” which capital has forced us to invest in [ . . . ] The goal of revolutionary censorship is to censor everything for every reason [..] The possibilities for communal transformation of the world thus lie in the “negative” when one is capable of disconnecting from the imposed notions of economy.21

The very act of reading is constructed and annihilated by this ruthlessly exhilarating logic. By instructing her readers to do “your part and start by censoring this text,” she seems wryly aware of the paradoxes of such a political ambition, admitting that in some “cases it is up to the ‘individual’ censor to determine the approach (s)he wishes to adopt.”22 For many small press poets these radical ambitions to disrupt commercial culture were translated into an experimentation with the limits and implications of the page itself. Journals as different from one another as Lost and Found Times, Vile, Assembling, Nitrous Oxide, Photostatic, Poetry Motel, MalLife, Core, Atticus, Co-Lingua, NRG, and Photostatic reconciled poetry and a political counterculture through experimentation with the visual field of textuality. Johanna Drucker’s attention to a tradition of literary materiality (of the


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“marked” text that “forces the language into a public domain” as opposed to the self-effacing putatively private “unmarked” text of the Gutenberg tradition) illuminates much about this foregrounding of writing.23 For Drucker, visual writing supersedes phenomenology’s overdetermined choice between the transcendent and the corporeal by demanding both a “self-referential attention to questions of production” and to “the discourses of cultural theory which index the analysis of the social conditions, context and claims for the political effects of signifying activity.”24 In this logic an attention to the political implications of signifying, to the discursive contexts that literally allow the visual to mean, is made apparent by foregrounding the materiality of textual language. An awareness of the additional knowledge made apparent in the visual or concrete poem was apparent in much of the self-analysis of textuality in the small press scene. In Photostatic, for example, the visual poet Harry Polkinhorn elevates the visual above the verbal as language has “effectively committed suicide” because of its vain attempts to repress and excise its “connections to the filth, murder, and suffering of experience” whereas the visual is replete with “its concretized charge of human labor.”25 Such publications were frequently as knowing as Drucker with regard to the modernist antecedents of these practices. The secondary title of Photostatic, for example, was “Retrofuturism,” and the work of both Walter Benjamin and the 1913 armory show were included amongst the journal’s themed dedications. This was a poetics that seemed equally indebted to these modernist strategies in their use of montage and in their use of the “found” object to suggest the limits of the literary. Johanna Drucker has also usefully pointed to the significant connections between feminism and the poetry and visual art communities clustered around seminal journals such as Meaning or How(ever) in the United States from the 1970s onward.26 Women poets and artists as varied as Bernadette Mayer, Anna Banana, and Eve Ensler were pivotal to the crossover work between the poetic, artistic, and countercultural scenes. Anna Banana’s editing of the journal Vile, for example, was significant for both narrating the processes of “Mail Art” and for making explicit the contributions of women to that which she dubbed “Fe-Mail-Art.”27 Eve Ensler was a contributory editor to the journal Central Park, which aimed to “combine verbal and visual experimentation with aggressive social commentary.”28 Ensler’s visual texts, which often took the form of mocking reproductions of mainstream advertising images, were often explicit in their critique of the misogynistic iconography of advertising. The work of such figures suggests that the clear overlap between experiments in

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the visual arts, networking movements, and the counterculture was consistently capable of incorporating a gendered critique. More broadly, the contributions of figures such as Lucy Lippard and Alison Knowles to the communities of Mail Art and fluxus, respectively, like the moves toward a visual poetics in the work of writers such as Susan Howe, Kathleen Fraser, Norma Cole, and Joan Retallack, suggest the parallels between this work and a deconstructive feminist critique. Although the number of women artists publishing in visually experimental texts in the 1980s and 1990s was relatively small, the feminist content of the work of those who did so was fairly explicit. The “Existentialism and the Illusion of Choice” edition of Photostatic, for example, contained a poem by Janet Janet (an active agent in Art Strike) explicitly engaging with the concept of choice from a feminist standpoint.29 The poem was simply called “Pro Choice” and featured a series of symbols evoking the familiar symbolic representation of women’s reproductive organs—the biology textbook drawing of the fallopian tubes and the womb—repeated against a page scored with black lines.30 This literal affirmation of reproductive choice becomes rather unstable as its repetition allows for a sliding into other symbols, not only the obvious images of IUDs but also of a stethoscope, a steering wheel, a nuclear power logo, the emblem for Mercedes cars. These drawings point to the relative unfamiliarity of images of female reproductive organs as opposed to masculine iconography, a sense reinforced by the phallic resonance of many of these images. Moreover, the crude clarity of the drawings on the ruled lines of a textbook suggests a defiant anger, that the need to represent the images overwhelms the inappropriateness of doing so. The text’s ability to articulate this evokes Drucker’s theorizing of the tension between the phenomenal presence of the image and the signifying operation of language: the slippage between images foregrounds the arbitrary nature of the latter, whilst the anger of this move is borne by the physical impenetrability of the former. Journals such as Co-Lingua and NRG, although again predominantly publishing the work of male poets, included poems by women poets such as Maria Gitin and Sheila E. Murphy with a clear interest in gender politics. Gitin’s poem “EAT EAT EAT,” for example, was first published in edition 4 of NRG and then reprinted in the relaunched first edition of Co-Lingua. The poem’s opening appears to be a bald blast against the contradictory food and love relationship that feminist critics have established as a familiar contradiction of femininity. EAT EAT EAT LOVE LOVE LOVE


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FAT ⫽ HAPPY no no no nono Origin of the not-is31

Gitin seems to suggest that the perversity of these associations for femininity provide a way of understanding its negativity. Suggesting that this contradiction is the origin of the “not-is” explicitly echoes psychoanalytical feminists such as Luce Irigaray who have described the self-dived nature of femininity. The poem develops these contradictions further through a series of images—“pressed dried flower photos,” “boogie on down / get up: get down”—suggesting the powerlessness of the “medicated” woman unable to find “the end of my space.”32 A poem appearing in the journal Slipstream (ecumenically included in Fulton’s small publishing directory in the categories of Avant Garde, Beat Generation, Experimental, Feminist, Long Poem, New Age, New York School, Open Form, Politics, Postmodern, Protest, Sex, Short Poems, Social Awareness, Sound Poetry, Surrealist and Urban) suggests the critiques offered by the multiple registers of this writing. The poem, by the writer and queer legal theorist Ruthann Robson, is called “Sugar” and features on one half of the page a fragmentary, poignant confessional writing. The contexts for this are, if not quite clichés, then at least grimly predictable. The poem ranges from the domestic evocation of hams cooked by grandmothers, to the affection of abusive partners, to images of illness and isolation. Yet, alongside these is an account of the historical and political implications of the farming and manufacture of sugar, its importance to colonialism, its use of slave labor, its role in a workingclass diet. What my grandmother smeared All over the Easter ham. Dotted With cloves. White sugar steeped In molasses. Brown sugar [ . . . ] The American Sugar Company was Indicted and convicted in 1942 for violating the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of slavery.33

The different paragraphs remain fragmentary; neither is allowed to become a directional metanarrative. The poem’s ability to critique the limitations of the differing available forms for public and private

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articulations benefits from its attention to the gap between what is literal—in this case the facts of sugar production—and what is rhetorical or metaphoric—the association between femininity and sweetness. The visual poem’s status as both an “object and an act,” to use Drucker’s words, allows it to critique the ways in which the marked registers of the public and the unmarked registers of the private are functioning whilst, simultaneously, being resistant to relinquishing either. The tension between the two modes is revealing. The undercutting of the lyrical poetic language of the first-person narrator with a gesturing to the empirical facts of labor suggests a disquiet about the elite cultural implications of poetry that paradoxically characterized much of this writing.

The Case of Kathy Acker Kathy Acker is a writer who has explored the gendered implications of this ambivalent energy toward and against both mainstream and poetic culture. Acker began her career in the underground arts scene in San Francisco and New York during the early 1970s, after studying with Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis and then at UCSD. The poet David Antin introduced Acker to conceptual theories of writing. Although a prose writer rarely considered in accounts of U.S. women’s poetry, Acker’s primary influences in this period were poets as well as “musicians, painters, performance artists, filmmakers, dancers.”34 In a telling interview with Sylvère Lotringer, Acker has recounted much of her early intellectual biography. From David Antin, for example, Acker remembers learning to consider the processes and methodologies of writing in ways that distanced her from an expressive, representative aesthetic: “form is determined not by arbitrary rules, but by intention. [ . . . .] I had really been trained in the idea that you just don’t sit down and write, you have to know why you write and why you use certain methodologies.”35 Acker was also influenced by poets such as Robert Kelly, Jackson MacLow, Jerome Rothenberg, and Charles Olson, suggesting that she received an “early training” from the Black Mountain School: Olson’s main thesis was that one sentence comes after another sentence so you might have the movement of meaning, but also a movement where language leads to language. Olson also had his way of seeing the world and putting it down in a certain kind of rhythm, usually a very jagged rhythm, like writing from scat.36


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In Acker’s own work this attention to the materiality of writing frequently intersected with her ambition to bring the marginalized physical body into the text. Acker’s “achievement,” Linda S. Kauffman has suggested, was to “expose all ideologies that produce ideas without bodies, ideas that develop only at the expense of the body.”37 Acker’s attempt to find ways of representing the labor of this materially realized body, particularly its complex relationships to desire and economics, offers much to an understanding of the politicized, difficult aesthetics of the small press scene. Some of Acker’s first public audiences were the poets associated with New York’s St. Marks Poetry Project in the early 1970s. At St. Marks she read from her first work “POLITICS.” Acker resisted overtures from the “big publishers” interested in the “sensationalism” of this work and initially distributed her second major work, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, through California’s Mail Art networks instead. The subsequent publication of Black Tarantula in New York in the mid-1970s came about through the intersection of the arts, film, and poetic communities, which allowed Acker to be both aesthetically adopted and economically subsidized by the arts world.38 From this point on then Acker seems to have occupied a tangential relationship to the visual arts scene just as she had to the poetry scene: “I was doing verbally the sort of work that they were doing visually, so it made sense. The language was the same.”39 Acker’s continuing positioning between these two communities, which grew as she became increasingly involved with the emerging punk movement, was evident in her participation in later events such as John Giorno’s 1980 Dial-A-Poem Poets: Sugar, Alcohol, & Meat, along with writers as varied as William Burroughs, Bob Holman, Anne Waldman, Charles Bernstein, and Eileen Myles. Acker’s published texts from the late 1970s and early 1980s can clearly be read against the mixed visual aesthetics of the small press. In publications such as Implosion, for example, the physical presentation of the page emphasizes a DIY aesthetic that contrasts against its relatively high reproduction standards. The pamphlet’s pages are marked by thick red drops (satirically literalizing the “ink and blood” metaphors that proliferated in descriptions of women’s writing in the early 1980s) and suggest the shadows and bent pages of the home mimeographed or photocopied text even when this is clearly not how they were reproduced.40 The potency of this confrontation with the political assumptions of mainstream literary culture is most apparent in its reception. Acker worked as a short-term writer-in-residence in Idaho during a political controversy in which the religious Right was attempting to

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institute homophobic censorship laws. Acker’s work was drawn into this debate and damned for its expletives, for its depictions of “lesbian love,” and because its “narrative was difficult to follow.”41 This conflation of textual and sexual obscenity was repeated in the rationale behind the censorship of Blood and Guts in Germany where it was banned for its representations of “kindersex” and “S/M,” and for its formal “experimentality.”42 Acker’s work has consistently and productively combined visual and thematic forms of “obscenity”: her cross-arts literary practice questions the permissible limits of the literary in terms of her visually disrupted, non-narrative, and often plagiarized texts and in terms of their sexually explicit content. Acker’s work makes apparent the tensions and contradictions that the simultaneity of these two forms of affront imply for the woman writer. Acker not only presents female sexuality as a site of simultaneous subjugation and empowerment but is also able to suggest that the assimilation of this duality by the culture that produced it allows it to be re-presented as a disabling contradiction rather than as an empowering critique. Acker’s ability to resist this process, to pervert the inevitable appropriation of the antinomy of female sexuality, is intimately connected to the complexity of her formal experimentation with “self-identity in reading” which, as Carla Harryman has described it, “multiplies, expands, pixelates, contracts.”43 Acker’s representations of the sex work in which she was involved at the start of her career, for example, provides a compelling account of the difficulty of representing the complex dynamics of erotic female labor that was actually “all about money.”44 Acker describes how she began writing whilst working as a sex worker: “I had two three half hour shows. And I would have half an hour between each show. So I would go to Tad’s Steakhouse and would write, just to keep my mind together.”45 The resulting work, “POLITICS,” is comprised of “little prose poems” and a “huge diary section all about the sex shows.” The piece involved “cutting in tapes, cutting out tapes, using a lot of dream material, using other people’s dreams, doing a lot of Burroughs experiments” and was an attempt to combine her “two lives, the poetry and the sex show.”46 This conceptual piece resists both the “autobiographical, third generation Surrealism” of her peers in the St. Marks Project and the explicitly gendered critique of female sexual exploitation being offered by contemporary feminist writers and poets, who were to adopt Acker’s work only later. Acker’s critique of the commodification of female sexuality required a disruption of representation. It seems that only the fractured, chaotic text can represent the complexity of a body that is simultaneously formed through exploitation, abuse, pleasure, fantasy, and economics.


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Acker’s depiction of the sex show begins the republished “POLITICS”47 and reappears in an act of self-appropriation toward the end of “The Story of my Life,” the final chapter in The Black Tarantula. This chapter continues the novel’s satirical bildungsroman, which has produced narratives for marginalized antiheroes (including “Moll Cutpurse, the queen-regent of misrule,” Helen Seferis, Alexander Trochi, and W.B. Yeats) alongside plagiarized passages from pornography and Acker’s own diary. “The Story of my Life” presents details that may actually reflect Acker’s biography “1970. I begin to live solely according to my desires. I hate fighting, all use of weapons and show of courage since I’m only interested in operating sexually” alongside plagiarized passages and exorbitant accounts of the French Revolution.48 Acker’s depictions of the sex show demonstrates the difficult positions of identification, for both reader or the writer, that her contradictory relationship to sexuality produced: In one of the acts in my sex show I become a young woman who is talking a psychiatrist. [ . . . ] I stop; I see hundreds of men watching me, I’ve delusions: men follow me, men want to hurt me, men want to have sexual activities with me without my consent and desire to. The psychiatrist laughs at me. The men who are watching me as I writhe around on the bed start talking to me I joke back with them. [ . . . ] I’m Joan of Arc. I lead soldiers in drag and kill everyone. I become hot: I rip off my clothes, I begin to masturbate men make me ooo soo hot. [ . . . ] Faster give it to me now NOW ooo (low) oooooo (higher) oooo oooo oah auahhh oahh. eha. (down again). All my diseases are gone.49

The passage illuminates the potency of Acker’s resistance to a single frame of reference. At its start, its staging of the performative representations of sex as public spectacle evokes two interrelated themes that were to become so characteristic of Acker’s writing: the apparently abusive sexual fantasies of the young girl and a parody of Freudian analysis. Yet these are quickly complicated by the hiatus provided by the narrator’s “delusion” of being watched—which of course she is. From this point on it becomes impossible to know either on what level this representation of sexual performance is operating or to discern the literal from the metaphorical. It is unclear whether this is a narrative enactment of the scoptophilic economy of the sex show;

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whether this voyeuristic dynamic has been breached (and, indeed, if the narrator is complicit or compromised by this); or whether the narrator is entirely lost to a protective individual fantasy (imagining herself as Joan of Arc). The mockingly exact representations of orgasm and the final fantasy that “all my diseases are gone” only heighten these ambiguities. We are reminded that sex work is a performance and a dangerous reality just as we are told that sexual pleasure itself is purgative. Robert Glück has suggested that such writing demands “extra-literary relationships” that complicate “the kind of judgements most readers never need to make” until judgment itself “falls away in favor of a kind of astonishment.”50 The community of readers demanded by such a reading practice, Glück suggests, are complex— “a gathering of outcasts that evolves into a band of pirates” that “draws an equal sign between freeing our ability to love and the destruction of the state.”51 In combining the “obscenity” of the plagiarized, visual, and nonnarrative text with the obscenity of explicit sex Acker is able to simultaneously acknowledge and resist the inevitable recuperation of her writing by the mainstream culture that she seeks to critique. Acker’s representation of sexual labor makes apparent the conflicting relations of power, knowledge, participation, and desire that such work involves. In representing these relationships Acker explicitly breaches what Lauren Berlant termed “the aura of the little girl” the “image of the citizen as a minor, female, youthful victim who requires civil protection by the state” who “provides a rationale for protecting the heterosexual privacy of ‘adult’ national culture.” In so doing Acker reverses the logic of public female sexuality in which “women are paradoxically both the bearers of the value of privacy and always exposed and available to be killed into identity” and moves toward “a noninfantilized political counterpublic” that understands “sexuality as a set of acts and world-building activities” and which “seeks to undermine the patriotic ethics in which it is deemed virtuous to aspire to live in abstract America, a place where bodies do not live historically, complexly or incoherently.”52 Acker’s disruptive work does not simply celebrate this libidinous counterculture so much as explore the difficulties that a representation of its political, economic, and aesthetic complexities demands.

Meat the Poet: Women, Work, and Class Acker’s ability to simultaneously employ and critique the contradictory registers of explicit female sexuality was certainly not unique in the small press poetry world. Women poets such as Joan Jobe Smith,


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Lyn Lifshin, Ann Menebroker, Linda King, and Cheryl Townsend, who published and wrote alongside paradigmatic figures such as Charles Bukowski, were similarly interested in an explicit and libidinous writing. These poets were writing in small press journals such as Wormwood Review, Lost and Found Times, Slipstream, Plastic Tower, and Lilliput Review as well as editing their own journals such as Pearl, Purr, and Impetus. The often highly sexualized narrative-voice poems that these poets wrote seems to correspond to that which Fulton and Glazier identify as “meat” writing, which “distances itself from rejected the transcendent values and literary posturing of the Beats, preferring direct unadorned portrayals of daily life and the physical functions of the human body.”53 The work of these predominantly working-class women, which has been overlooked in both the few accounts of the small press and the many accounts of women’s poetry, demonstrates the complexity of attempting to meaningfully demarcate the boundaries of Berlant’s “noninfantilized political counterpublic.” The gender-specific concerns of these poets were most apparent in their editing of a number of woman-centered publications, such as the journals Pearl and Purr, which both began in the mid-1970s. The overt sexualization of the writing in these journals was seen as emancipatory. This emancipation entailed replacing the perceived literary separatism of feminist politics with an attention to the sexual pleasures and erotic energies of heterosexuality. Pearl’s first editorial stated that its present was to “present in toto the feminine point of view of art and poetics; and to provide an exclusive format with which to exhibit the excellence of the truth, the art, and the beauty of woman” whilst also acknowledging “the presence and magnificence of man.”54 In a similar editorial in Purr, Geraldine King gives a reading of a male poet, commenting that “he is not as sexual as I would want him to be, but male poets are never as sexual as I like. Hence Purr, which aims to go beyond protest poetry to written proof man is thinking of woman [ . . . ] surely battling men with hot poetry will make woman’s lot a happier one.”55 The sexual content of much of this writing reveals the complexity behind these rather celebratory sexual politics. Poems by writers such as Bukowski, Gerald Locklin, and Judson Crews seemed more profoundly anxious and misogynistic about the implications of a “minnow baited / fish-hooked” female sexuality than the rhetoric of these journals otherwise suggest.56 In the work of women contributors sex is also complicated, represented not simply as source of humor and pleasure but as source of resistance, of anger, and of income. The

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front covers of early editions of Purr, for example, reproduced images of three sculptures by Linda King (who was also Charles Bukowski’s partner). These images were xeroxed onto rough, brightly colored sugar paper. The image on the front of the second edition depicts a naked woman with her legs akimbo, on the third a naked woman in the late stages of pregnancy, and in the fourth a naked woman breastfeeding. Their titles are revealing: number four is called “nursing mother,” number three “pregnant woman,” and number two “looking for work.” That the sexualized image of the woman in the first of these images is referencing the sex industry disrupts the teleological narrative of womanly fecundity that the series otherwise may suggest. Although individual journals such as Pearl and Purr were often relatively short-lived, frequently frustrated by a lack of funds, this community of women writers continued to thrive into the 1980s and 1990s. Cheryl Townsend’s journal, Impetus, for example, which began in the mid-1980s in Stowe, Ohio, published many of the same poets as Pearl and Purr and was able to command a broader readership that allowed it to run successfully for over a decade. A presentation of the contrasting but interdependent codes of sexuality and economics, which rendered femininity so ambivalent, continued to be a central characteristic of this writing. The poem “The Secrets of Lipstick” by Sheila Seiler, begins with a domestic image of a man asking a woman why she paints her mouth “April Rose. I tell him it makes my smile / more friendly and emphasizes my / laboriously straightened teeth. I / grin to demonstrate.”57 The second half of the poem explores the ambiguity suggested by the bared teeth of the grin, an ambiguity that makes the poem’s gendered account of acquiescence increasingly uncomfortable. The secrets of the lipstick that go unmentioned include the importance of its ability to distinguish “My morning mug from his,” the individual pleasures of the “glowy satin sensation of color,” and the “secret kick of wearing Lusty Orchid Lips” with a “straight angular suit to / Straighter more angular meetings.”58 Elsewhere, the visual possibilities of the cut-and-paste DIY aesthetic are used to highlight the vulnerability of women’s sexual and economic identity. Poems such as “One Out of Every Four Women Gets Raped,” published in one of the “Women Only” editions of Impetus, provides a striking visual image of what is presented as a bald fact of abuse. The poem is suggestive of the absurdity of such statistics. The gap between the crudeness of the structure and the baldness of the title indicates how reductive such pieces of information are in terms of the actual experiences of women.


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One Out of Every Four Women Gets Raped Duck Duck

Duck Goose

Deborah Bacharach Somerville, Massachusetts59

The graphic and sardonic implications of the child’s game are overlaid with a number of different evocations of femininity: they suggest the passivity of the hunted fowl, the domesticity of the cooked bird, they even suggest flirtatious and maternal overtures: to be goosed, to be somebody’s duck. A consideration of women’s general relative economic and cultural powerlessness is also heavily present in this writing. This analysis of economic power takes a number of forms. In some cases the alienating effect of the routinized labor upon which these women appeared to be dependent is rendered very literally. A poem by andrea mackinnon (a name that, in eliding two of feminism’s two most radical cultural critics, may well be a pseudonym) called “lounge poem,” for example, seems to be little else than the pad upon which a waitress in a bar might record orders. 2 vod br vod mar sm & kur lamb mich wind 2 vod v-mart br wind mich gin v-mart br ch lite60

The fragmented list, which only occasionally suggests recognizable words and at time barely even registers as sound, evokes the

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instrumentalism of the woman’s social interactions. The irony of the last word, where light refers neither to illumination, weightlessness, or frivolity but to the branding of beer, suggests the only critical note in the poem. It is not simply that language has been corrupted through abbreviation but that the speaker has been alienated from language. That the other recognizable words in the poem are wind and lamb, which share the same connotations of freedom as lite, allows this critical irony to stand, quite literally, on its own. The pressures upon the speaking position brought about by this cultural alienation are present even when the poems are presented in the form of a more conventional free-verse first-person lyric. Townsend’s self-description in the introduction to her collection of her own work PseudoCop emphasizes the self-consciousness of her construction of a persona for her work. Cheryl A Townsend (CAT) is usually known for her satirical, sexy and clever one liner poems. She has been published in over a thousand journals in the underground press, publishes Impetus Magazine from her basement office, works as a store detective in JC Penny and goes home to her pre-fabricated house on a cul-de-sac in mainstream suburbia where that basement links her to the global village called the underground press.61

This persona’s “purring onto the page” functions both as a claim for her poetic legitimacy (expressed in terms of audience size) and her pleasurable defiance toward the conventions of poetry. The book is a collection of vignettes. Short frames describe Mary who “lost her job 6 months ago / can’t get any assistance / has an 18 year old son who / is mentally handicapped,” and Gussie, “just a city nigger / the tsk tsk of society and / release to diversionites / pimps buy her like a coca- / cola bottle small deposit / for a big return.”62 The writing’s apparent aim to move the reader with stark and intimate portrayals of the unemployed, of sex workers, and of drug users is repeatedly interrupted by the interjections of the store detective, who always gets the “last hurrah.”63 The introduction’s elision of the poet with the store detective, wielding a literal as well as metaphorical power in the poem, provides an obvious satirical comment on authority. In turn the reader, encouraged to identify with this voice—as observer rather than participant—is asked to become aware of their complicity with this authority. Yet at the end of the poem this tilts into a more uncomfortable parody as a lyrical mode overtakes the colloquially robust voice.


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I fantasize a quintessential existence as I look out into the sullen sky A life that people will remember in the forever years that I am gone64

Here the poem ironizes the conventions it rejects—“I drink my coffee black and romanticize.” Yet this ironical fantasy of poetic omniscience, “my poetry will be a keepsake / and young girls will eulogize my words / and they’ll swear to my ghost in the mist,” is also anxious. The bardic role being ironized is also somehow desired—the subject of irony seems to be the desire for this confirmation. The limited social power of the editor who, like the store detective, returns home to her prefabricated house, is also present here. The authority of the poet is placed within the context from which the poet writes and the fantasy of poetic omnipotence is confounded by social impotence. These anxieties about access to legitimized forms of authority can be read into the details about the production of the publications themselves. The editorial style of Impetus, in a way certainly not unique in the small press, deploys a familiar tone, reinforcing the fact that, in the early editions of this journal at least, Townsend probably knew much of her readership. The intimacy of these editorials, which explain delays in production through personal accounts of relationship breakdowns, moves, and redundancies, provides a strong sense of community for this writing (in the inside cover of Nine, for example, Townsend proposes to her lover) and also makes clear that the journals represent a commitment to work outside and in excess of the conditions of paid labor upon which the writers are dependant. Part of this is an anxiety about maintaining the circulation and the financing of these journals. Impetus off-sets this anxiety by a literal and intelligent use of adverts. The journal initiated a program called “The Flyer Exchange,” which offered advertising either for $5 an advert or free on a reciprocal basis. The adverts consequently carried by the journal not only allow it to financially survive, but also lend it a note of social legitimacy. In an editorial called “The Cat’s Meow” in 1989, Townsend notes with obvious satisfaction that the journal’s reliance on distribution through exchange had been finally superseded, that “circulation has almost doubled and there are now a number of bookstores hosting the IMP on their shelves across the USA.”65 Yet Impetus also figures this anxiety about cultural legitimization in the more critical terms suggested by its attention to the different registers of a marked and unmarked use of language. The language and coding of advertising may continue to provide what Drucker termed

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the “norms against which experimental typography takes on its cultural significance as transgressive” but for much of the small press the presence of these norms also registers a rather ambiguous alienation from public culture.66 As well as being a source of critique or parody the marked text of the advert, for example, also becomes an object of desire and legitimacy, the wish for an authority that can be evaded less easily. Adverts are used in these journals as both sources of cultural authority and sources of cultural critique. In a “Women Only” issue of the journal, for example, adverts for feminist pressure groups are placed next to poems. In Women Four, an advert for a pro-choice movement is included next to a poem about abortion. On the one hand such advertisements serve a literal function, providing public service information to women and allowing the journal to identify with mainstream organized feminist debate. At the same time, the obvious visual and typographic contrasts suggested by placing an entirely subjective first-person account next to a public advert for a pressure group foregrounds the different authorities, the different reading modes, of these two discourses. The marked block of the advert and the unmarked italicized narrative of the poem interpolate the reader very differently as the gap between a public and a private articulation is very clearly rendered. In the “erotic” editions of the journal, “Impish Impetus,” the same thing occurs, but adverts for women’s groups are replaced with personal ads—“country gal seeking teddy bear for / serious relations. Likes country / music, travel, slow dancing, warm / moonlit nights.”67 These presentations are shorn of the details that would allow them to literally function as adverts and the ironical contrast between them and the surrounding poems is consequently more evident. At play seem two different formal conventions for representing sexual identity and desire. The poem’s baldly erotic if clichéd fantasies, “I lie outside your bedroom / window and dream/ of your tongue” contrast against the factual fantasies of the adverts for a “Male 27, 6’3”, 200lbs, blue eyes, brown hair, looking for a serious relationship, woman who likes dining out.” The ironical gap between these two registers functions to increase the absurdity of both the lyrical staging of the obscene and the aggressive marketing of sexual desire.68 Yet not all small press writing was able to so productively negotiate its ambivalent relationship to the representational forms of mainstream culture. This writing also demonstrates the limitations of attempts to demarcate a counter-public sphere, as its capacity to articulate what Negt and Kluge term a “proletarian” lived experiential—to be “obscene” in order to expand what it means to be public—risked


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constant recuperation by the reifying mechanism of publicity. In such instances the awareness of artifice ironically becomes evidence not of the potential for critique and resignification, but of powerlessness, a collapse into complicity with a mainstream agenda. The poet Lyn Lifshin’s writing is nearly all written in the autobiographical first-person voice. This writing is clearly available to a feminist reading. It has consistently pushed at the conventions of selfrepresentation, frequently questioning and parodying issues of female identity and their relationship to iconography. In one edition of Wormwood Review, for example, Lifshin published over thirty poems from her lengthy sequence of “Madonna” poems. Each of these very short, often humorous poems, turns upon its neat encapsulation of a cliché of femininity—from “Bikini Madonna” who reveals what is interesting but “what she hides is vital” to “High Interest Rate Madonna” who is kind to the “greedy” but “afflicts / the needy.”69 One of the most satirical aspects of these poems is their sheer quantity, the amount suggesting both the mutability of female identity and the plasticity of the endless recycling and reappropriations of hegemonic authority. Such a large body of texts has made Lifshin nothing less than one of the most productive poets writing in America. It seems to be nearly impossible to piece together a complete bibliography for Lifshin’s work because much of it is published in small press publications that have never been archived. Her profligacy is, indeed, almost unseemly and can evoke the fear of the feminized, mass culture that erodes the discriminating principles of U.S. democracy. Critics have unsurprisingly read the enormity of this output precisely as testament to the lack of judgment in this publishing community. R.S. Gwynn’s acerbic account of contemporary publishing uses the fact that Lifshin tops Len Fulton’s “sweepstake” of the most published ten poets in 1990 as evidence of the general banality of contemporary writing: that the list also includes Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and Robert Creeley goes uncommented upon.70 Comments about the apparent ubiquity of Lifshin’s work are not restricted to such conservative attacks on popular poetic culture. A poem “For Lyn” in the small press magazine Plastic Tower, for example, notes that her name can be found in “every contributor’s copy” and its satirical question—“does Lifshin ever notice me?”—seems to suggest that Lifshin’s profligacy disrupts the reciprocity between readers and writers that the small press culture relies upon.71 I want to contrast the various ways in which Lifshin has been published in an effort to provide some way of reading this excess, and also in order to relate it back to the ambiguities around formal experimentation, gender, and class apparent in the small press.

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Lifshin’s work has featured in an astonishing array of publications, including nearly all small press titles, mainstream magazines, and academic journals. Recently the publishers Black Sparrow released a collected edition of her writing. Like many poets, Lifshin’s earliest work appeared in self-authored chapbooks. One of these is the collection Offered by Owner published in 1978. In many ways this self-published collection shares the professional style of the mainstream press. It includes a contents page and an introduction, and its cover features a professionally coy photograph of the artist. The introduction— comparing publishing poetry and selling real estate—reinforces the central theme of the book through positioning the reader as a buyer, as an active and potentially judgmental recipient. The collection does nothing to disrupt this. The poems present a number of feminized anxieties about body image, about access to education, about maternal relationships, which were certainly not untypical to second-wave feminist poetry of the late 1970s. The poems are sandwiched between pictures from the “author’s collection” of her growing up that provide an alternative commentary on what is being read. Hence, a photo of the author looking youthful and slim is given a very specific meaning when published between a poem called “Fat” and a poem called “His Dangling Pronoun.” The second of these poems is a fantasy of teacher seducing her “favorite student dark and just / back from the army with those / hot olive eyes.”72 The first is an internalized account of a woman loathing her excess weight: “it hangs around / reminding you of what / wasn’t totally / digested a layer of heavy / water, something greasy.”73 The picture clearly operates in the gap between these two poems: we are being offered it as a way of sharing the fantasy, of confirming its authenticity. The woman’s naked elegantly poised legs in the photograph echo the “shaved up high” and “soft nougat thighs” of the erotic poem. Yet it also provides a discordant context for the surfeit of memories in “Fat.” The smiling woman of the photographic image is rendered vulnerable as we are told of the narrative voice’s violent self-image: “I used to put the scales back 10 pounds / I still do and would have beat myself with the heaviest rubber chains [ . . . .] jessica’s mother once said / lyn you’ll never get / cold this winter / fat legs / like that.”74 The effect of the contrast, of course, is to consider the woman’s body as a simultaneous source of anxiety and pleasure. The deep ambiguities of selfidentity are made intrinsic to the production of the zine itself: its tendency to speak directly to the reader, to literalize authorship, to depend upon models of exchange rather than commodification. When republished by Black Sparrow in the rather superfluously entitled “autobiography” section of the smart and thick Cold


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Comfort: Selected Poems 1970–1996, many of these tensions are removed from the poem. It is streamlined: the small “i” so characteristic of small press writing has been capitalized, its detailed specificity is expunged, and reference to the present played down. The lines cited earlier become “I put the / scales back, would have / beat myself with / rubber chains [ . . . ] Somebody once said / you’ll never get / cold this winter / fat legs / like that.”75 The result is, of course, that the poem becomes almost entirely generic: a rather uncompelling account of a widely recognized and familiar condition. The resonance created by its previous location next to both a specific image of femininity and an alternative fantasy of self are entirely lost. Lifshin’s work was also published in the mainstream popular press in the 1980s and 1990s, including magazines such as Rolling Stone and Ms. Her appearance in the latter, a seminal journal for mainstream feminism, is interesting for its apparent inversion of many of the critical demands and assumptions of small press culture with regard to both gender and a visual economy of signification. Lifshin published her elegiac poem “Alberta Hunter,” in the year of the singer’s death, in Ms. The poem uses Hunter’s iconographic status, as an aged woman performing in public, as a jazz singer, and as a liberated woman, to strike a note of defiant optimism. It uses the specific history and name of the woman who began life in Memphis, went North to Chicago “on a dime” and carried on singing until her death at eighty-five, “her hair pulled / straight back not / to miss anything” to suggest a progressive narrative for women’s liberation.76 Hunter’s race and sexuality, which are also part of what makes her success so remarkable, are either ignored or simply assumed in her name. Yet the poem appears toward the end of the magazine, slotted in to the lengthy “small ads” sections that routinely dominate such publications. The critical relationship of montage posed by the juxtaposition of poetry and adverts suggested by journals such as Impetus seems almost entirely inverted in this instance. The barest space is given to the poem. It appears on a corner of page eighty and is crowded and dulled by the profusion of color, strength of type, and excessive detail of the adverts that surround it. The poem’s universalizing expectancy— provided by the contrast between the boldness of its hope and the lightness of its biographical touch—are lost as they jostle against the jaunty tone and large print of an advert for “Apricot flavored Brandy” and the details that the selling of an “Odor-Free Litter Box” and “Authentic RAF Sweater” apparently require. That the political freight of the poem, in terms of Lifshin’s position as both a feminist and zine writer, should be so casually lost is in keeping with the fate of

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Ms in the mid-1980s as its reliance on advertising revenue came into increasing conflict with its feminist aims.77 However, the dynamics around the various publications of Lifshin’s many works are more complex than this act of recuperation alone suggests. Lifshin’s work was also collected and published by other zine publishers. The zine “he wants his meat in the woman who’s dead,” for example, is about Lifshin but written by a fan and is suggestive of the alternative stakes in the circulation of writing within small press communities. The editorial begins fairly neutrally, noting that the author in question has “probably written and published more poems than anybody in the history of the world” yet its ending, thanking “LYN” for being “the only poet who’s satisfied my need,” resonates with more visceral overtones.78 The effect of Lifshin’s more violently sexual writing changes in this instance, the piling up of narratives of violent abuse against women becomes disconcerting when formed by an editor who calls himself the rather militaristic sounding, “Generalimisso.” The poems are cut and pasted onto a chaotic blackand-white backdrop. The narrowing of the white space around the words and sudden endings of the poems add not only to their frantic tones but also to the sense in which they are active in a fantasy in which they are not necessarily complicit. This sense is at its strongest when one of the sources for the violent fantasies that the poems contain is presented alongside it. The cutting from a newspaper of the story of a violent murder of a woman, once placed next to Lifshin’s poem about the subject, becomes uneasy. The story refers to an investigation into the possibility that a cult was responsible for the sacrificial murder and cannibalism of a woman. The name of the cult, the last words in the new story tells us, is “The Church of the Realized Fantasy.” The production of a source for Lifshin’s poem seems to be neither manipulating questions around the poem’s authenticity nor demonstrating how Lifshin’s astonishing creativity is maintained so much as evoking the more threatening suggestion that her fantasies are realizable. Such a depiction of Lifshin’s work makes apparent the unstable nature of the performative enactment of erotic writing and offers a literal corollary to the uncertain reading positions that Acker’s work produces.

Poetry and Riot Grrrl In the past decade the ambitions of the networking and countercultural movements have been transferred to mass culture in ways that have heightened the difficulty of isolating a radical politics for a


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counter-public sphere. The much-heralded zine movement, a popularization of the self-publishing practices of the earlier “mimeograph revolution,” gave the networking communities of the small press a visibility beyond their more obvious literary and artistic centers. Selfproclaimed zine practitioners grandly traced their history to not only the long established traditions of the small press but to the pamphleteering of the eighteenth century, the national amateur press association of the nineteenth century, the science fiction fanzines of the 1950s, the Punk Movement of the 1970s.79 Stephen Duncombe, a central academic defender of this movement, has attributed its importance to its ability to produce a strategy of cultural resistance specifically in tune with the cultural changes of the late eighties and nineties. “In an era marked by the rapid centralization of corporate media,” he suggests, “zines are independent and localized, coming out of cities, suburbs and small towns across the USA.” The “vernacular radicalism” of this writing, according to Duncombe, provided the possibility of investing the “tired script of progressive politics with meaning and excitement for a new generation.”80 Zines were primarily motivated by their resistance to mass capital culture, and all that it implied for selfhood, labor, consumption, and locality. This “DIY” culture allowed work to be reconceptualized as a site of protest within the “grim new economy of service, temporary and flexible work.”81 An important early principle of the zine, for example, was that it would not be sold for profit. The price of zines was measured in terms of either covering the cost of production and postage or, if this were free (typically, zines were xeroxed and sent, illegitimately, from work), then they were circulated in exchange for other zines and cash omitted from the process entirely. Zines also resisted the categorization that both commodification and collection demanded. The erratic change of titles, the publishing pseudonyms, the irregular numbering, the inconsistent dating, the ad-hoc methods of distribution, and the determinedly single-issue or esoteric nature of the subject matter all made this a field virtually impossible to map in any coherent way.82 The subject matter of zines as well as the social circumstances of their production and consumption were also integral to their critique of the excesses and banality of mainstream culture. The zines provided a perfect platform for single-issue campaigning. Zines such as “An Appeal to the Homeless,” for example, were explicit in their political identification and goals. The publication’s editorial announces that it was made possible “at the illegal expense of rich business industries” and that it is “based on the ideas of anarcho-theft and the actions of rebel thieves.” Its purpose is “to be a free guide to survival and aid for

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the homeless and needy in all communities around the world. It should be reproduced and distributed in as many languages as possible as often as possible by anyone who is capable of doing so.”83 This seditious relationship between labor and production, often drawing attention to laws surrounding copyright and intellectual property, was frequently foregrounded. Johnny R’s zine “SHOULDN’T YOU BE WORKING?” takes pride in the fact that is “MADE ENTIRELY AT WORK WHILE ON THE CLOCK AT BORDERS BOOKS IN WASHINGTON, D.C. I’M HIDING BEHIND SOME BOOKSHELVES RIGHT NOW AS I WRITE THIS.”84 The naming of Borders, a multinational company that has used the language of community and accessibility to win its battle against independent booksellers, is clearly far from accidental here. Yet the publications that seemed to represent the most vital aspects of zine culture, those that most neatly embodied its attacks on consumption or its new configurations of identity, were also the ones that became most successful outside of the boundaries of the self-publishing community. The zine Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption, for example, embraced this contradiction in providing a counterculture consumerist guide. Yet these contradictions became less satirically ironical as the zine grew from its humble origins—500 copies run off at work and distributed by friends—to a column in an “ ‘alternative’ weekly,” to a paperback, and finally to a column in New York magazine.85 A few individual writers also enjoyed this level of exposure. Pagan Kennedy’s bildungsroman, Zine:How I Found Six Years of My Life and Finally . . . Found Myself . . . .I think, turned her involvement in an outsider community into a generic teen bildungsroman.86 Similarly zines such as FactSheet Five, Bitch, Bust and even the literary zine Lost and Found Times all gained an international reputation and circulation beyond the networks of zine producers and consumers at which they were originally aimed and the past five years has seen a process of collection, anthologization, and narration being extended to zine culture.87 The emergence of a gender politics in zine writing emphasized the unstable cultural positioning of this writing and the role of women in particular within it. One of the biggest successes of the zine movement was its association with the emergence of the riot grrrl movement captured in zines such as Bust and Bitch. In many ways, this movement seemed to offer an instance of the particular political complexities associated with feminism’s “third wave.” From its possibly apocryphal beginnings, “a list of men who date-raped” written onto “the third stall, second floor of the Library at Evergreen State


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College,” the riot grrrl movement sought to render its acts of unruly public articulation as politically meaningful.88 One of the many versions of the Riot Grrrl Manifesto, for example, urged its members not only to “resist psychic death” but to “cry in public.” By 1992 a national network of chapters, workshops and rallies, zine writers and readers had been established.89 According to an early commentator, the movement was a reaction to mainstream American feminism, which had become either “increasingly clouded in jargon” or appropriated by the “pop-psychology industry, where every conflict could be resolved from ‘within.’ ”90 Riot grrrl’s breaking with both theory and therapy allowed an articulation of the oppressions and pleasures they identified with the corporeality of a gendered body. Cultural theorist Neil Nehring’s defense of riot grrrl music, for example, reads its anger as a powerful antidote to both feminist intellectualism and to Marxist accounts of postmodern culture that insist on its passivity. Not only did women musicians refuse to “be a victim of gendering,” Nehring argues, but they also broke with an “intellectual-literary bent by making self-creation a more exciting and attractive matter than studiously absorbing feminist tracts or spinning out feminine ecriture for literary theorists.”91 Such gestures were explicitly read against the language of third-wave feminism as it was identified with both postmodern cultural studies and anti-foundationalist gender theory. Ednie Garrison, for example, uses this vocabulary in order to understand the formation of this movement as both “popular” and “subcultural,” as providing an autonomous space that “can penetrate as an interface between different third wave cohorts.”92 The parallels between the aims of riot grrrl and the work of countercultural figures such as Kathy Acker were apparent from the start. Acker’s work and friendship explicitly influenced Kathleen Hanna, for example, the lead singer in Bikini Kill and one of riot grrrls’ reluctant leaders.93 These terms are also apparent in the riot grrrl zines. The cofounders of Bust, for example, celebrate a period of coalitional “DIY feminism—sistah, do-ityourself,” which includes “all kinds of names for ourselves, lipstick lesbians, do-me-feminists” and approvingly cite from theorists of postfeminism who described it as “playful where feminism is merely sober, flaunting an ironic sense of identity.”94 The function of poetry within riot grrrl seemed to be to both realize these playful possibilities and, in a way that recalls a less ironical moment in feminism, to provide a strategy of subjective empowerment. Many riot grrrl zines were determinedly personal in nature (giving rise to the “per-zine” category), and their subjects frequently included sexual abuse and body image alongside desire, fashion, and

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fantasy. Poetry appeared in the individual zines of riot grrrls, in a number of small-circulation self-published anthologies and as individual poetry zines. Laura Joy Lustig, for example, published her own zines (Literary Laxative, Apology to Idiots, and Oscar) as well as contributed to collections edited by others. Her writing often seems to echo the themes of the riot grrrl movement. Her poem, “Death Is Good If You Don’t Know How to Properly Be Alive,” is written using a very generation-specific language and visual coding. Talk 2 & squeeze bush tight. / above ground w/bones below. Pelvis. -inside its earth where everyone above loves 2 play psychic w/ & say they are “@ peace”95

The poem’s discussion of death is clearly encoded with a metaphoric frame whose referencing to the “bush” squeezed “tight” and the pelvis “inside its earth” clearly alludes to sexuality. This connection not only presents sex as terrifyingly macabre but also suggests both a rage and a dependence on the saccharine banalities of a culture that conceals this apparent grim inevitability with clichés. The poem’s interspersing of language with very contemporary visual codes and an explicit language of the body are suggestive of the resistant potential of the visceral and “obscene” to these countercultural communities. Yet the independent existence of the riot grrrl community seemed to have been extraordinarily fragile. The movement’s core constituency was young, white, and often middle class and its insistence on separatism echoed the second-wave feminist debates of twenty years earlier. Yet this separatism, like the media blackout that riot grrrl imposed upon itself in 1992, seems to have been as much a resistance to consumer culture as it was to the over-simply masculine-identified institutions of the “patriarchy.” It was an attempt to avoid riot grrrl’s transgressive sexual images from being appropriated by a consumer culture that was anxious to provide a lucrative woman’s market with innovation, especially an innovation characterized by a youthful and


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apparently liberating sexual voracity.96 Riot grrrl seems to have been literally predicated upon an impossibility: the moment of its success was also the moment of its ending. It seems then as if the possibility of a literary counter-public able to be truly public in the sense that radical theorists such as Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant intend is somewhat quixotic. In each of the specific small press writing communities examined in this chapter, the promise of such publicness is offered only to be qualified by the complex interdependencies that exist between a poetic counterculture and the privatized, consumerist culture of normative U.S. culture. The inability of the woman poet to exist within these structures, the dynamic instability of representations of female sexuality, heightens the ambivalence of the contribution of the small press to debates about the significance of a literary articulation of U.S. democracy. On the one hand, these poets effectively present a critique of women’s commodification and are able, in very different ways, to structure innovative reading communities to support it. The work of writers as different from one another as Kathy Acker, andrea mackinnon, Cheryl Townsend, and Lyn Lifshin go some way toward producing a literary public in which the complex representations of working-class female sexuality can find a public form. Yet the profound fragility of these representations, which are constantly faced with censorship, with appropriation and with lack of financial support, also demonstrate the ways in which the cultural threat to normative culture that such representations pose is also constantly defused and recuperated. The survival of the working-class woman poet within the small press community seems testimony to both the possibilities and the difficulties of a participatory democratic counterculture.


CHAP TER

5

Romantic Materialism and Emerging Poets

Introduction Tucked away in the “Cultures” section of Mark Wallace and Steven Marks’ recent anthology, Telling It Slant, is a small, detailed half-page cartoon by the writer Gary Sullivan. The cartoon, “America, a Lineage,” parodies a literary concern with origin and influence, with understanding tradition as “DNA passed along from one generation to the next.” The tradition in question begins with “the imagists” who “begat the objectivists who begat Black Mountain who begat the Beats who begat the New York School who begat the L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E movement” and the cartoon gently mocks such reductive literary histories whilst acknowledging the anxiety that it produces in the young poet who awakes after this nightmare “filled with anxiety,” wondering “who begat me?!”1 Such a self-conscious approach to literary tradition, demarcating a complex and heterogeneous pedigree whilst eschewing its determining implications, is in keeping with the apparent contradictions that have surrounded recent work in the “parallel” tradition. On the one hand, this writing continues to participate in what has long been one of U.S. poetry’s more marginal poetic communities. Yet, on the other hand, as the opening to the introduction of Wallace and Mark’s anthology notes, “The sales of various types of non-‘mainstream’ poetries, if taken together, likely exceed the ‘mainstream’ center whose shadow they supposedly occupy.”2 The numerous awkward “New” designations proposed for this emergent generation of poets have seemed ironically aware of the inevitable contingency of such gestures. These self-definitions, as others have noted with barely concealed frustration, have been frequently characterized by an eschewal of the task.3 This reluctance can be

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attributed to the desire to avoid both the combative formalism that calcified the various definitional gestures of their predecessors and the oedipal teleology of generational readings. These “emergent” writers accept a catholic divergence of literary influences and styles because they seem to require something more productive than either critique or formal innovation seem to offer. This generation of poets, Steve Evans has suggested, came of age in the aftermath of the cold war, when capitalism defined the freedom “not of people, but of markets [ . . . ] not of engaged citizens in a regenerated civil society, but of predatory gangsters loosed into conditions of unbridled economic anarchy.”4 Lisa Jarnot’s introduction to An Anthology of New (American) Poets finds political urgency in this moment. Jarnot suggests that she was part of a generation whose maturity coincided with the “fragmentation and disintegration of the Left,” the “grief of an AIDS epidemic, and the beginning of the end of a liveable global ecosystem” and who need to be able “to communicate candidly, with hope, and with urgency.”5 Yet such a desire has meant a return to a transparent poetic aesthetic for only a few. The sense of urgency and need for clarity has more frequently demanded a re-sharpening of the relationship between the political and the literary in ways that have required new, contingent models of practice and community.

A Romantic Materialism Many of the writers associated with this generation of poets have shared educational backgrounds: Brown University, the Naropa Institute, Bard College, and New College of California have each supported younger poets working in these parallel, paratactic traditions. The Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, home to Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe for much of the 1990s, has been especially productive in this regard. The writing of its alumni from this period indicates much about the ironies suggested by the search for new forms of poetic and social identity in the face of such a vested and institutionally sanctioned marginality. One of the earliest collective publications from this group of writers was The Lab Book, edited by Jena Osman in 1992. The book pairs individual poems with readings, “in the spirit of scientific discovery,” to make “visible that unknown substance” that coheres a pedagogical program.6 The collection, whose contributors include Juliana Spahr, Mark Wallace, Lew Daly, Bill Tuttle, Peter Gizzi, Cynthia Kimball, Jefferson Hanson, and Elizabeth Willis, aims to reveal the “mechanisms

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by which we write, read, construct and disclose.”7 This formalized act of mutual critique is rendered an experimental form of labor with unpredictable outcomes. The poems included in the collection are identifiable with the paratactic traditions of American poetics, but are not clearly derivative of any single poet or school. In attempting to trace processes of exegesis and influence The Lab Book suggests something of the broad intellectual parameters of this program as it sought to react to the assumptions about form and politics embedded in the work of its most direct predecessors. The opening poem in the collection is Mark Wallace’s “Thrilled in the Upper Reaches of Doubt.” The poem combines fragments of cliché and narrative as it appears to strive for meaningful communion whose self-consciousness about its own impossibility stops just short of exhausting it: “but when you reach me, I like it, / just there, on the side / to where we go, / unexpected, seed and seen and how / it could have been, could it.”8 The majority of respondents attempt to draw out the faltering tone of the poem, to unpack its suggestively, repetitively, stopped sentences. This takes various forms. Spahr, for example, works on the tension between “caption: capture” implied by the poem’s hesitant tone of inquiry, explicitly politicizing the “unavailable freedoms of slaves / women represented in a light show” only alluded to by Wallace.9 Others, such as Willis and Burns, give the poem the ascendant lift that it is unable to fully realize: “ ‘your voice’ becomes a ‘ledge’ that, despairing or / ‘thrilled,’ one leaps from in the story of how to fly.”10 Many of the respondent poems also submit poetical and theoretical influences—George Oppen, Beverly Dahlen, Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas—that may be at play in Wallace’s writing. The two more formulaic responses to the poem suggest something of the parameters of these exegetical processes. Lew Daly, writing in essay rather than poetic form, indicates the most obvious limits to the mutual correspondence between these writers. He locates Wallace in the “L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E” tradition and dampens the “thrill” of his “doubt” by caustically hoping that “in the future one might even have reverence for language without necessarily making an instrument of, or a mockery of, the spirits of presence and even transcendence.”11 His response (which is consistent throughout the collection) proffers the spiritual materialism that his journal Apex of the M was disseminating in the mid-1990s.12 Peter Gizzi’s criticism, again one that remains constant throughout the experiment, is, conversely, deeply satirical, directed at the structures of formal exegesis and only

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tangentially considering the poem itself. Gizzi presents what appears to be a parody of the creative writing workshop primer and reduces reading to a set of theme-related activities: Get in your car. Visit the nearest Zoo or Arboretum. Take your Time to enjoy and think about what you are seeing [ . . . .] Compose a 7-line poem on your favorite observation of a living species addressed to the occupant of the grave that interested you, explaining to them that in your absence you are the last witness of a marvel and in doing this you have honored both the living and the dead. This is the responsibility of the poet.13

The tensions between and within Gizzi’s critical irony and Daley’s Marxist metaphysics are apparent in the ambiguities of Wallace’s own work. Wallace was among the first of many writers to examine the naming of the theoretical or political tendencies of “emerging avant-garde poetries” in the “post-language” moment and his critical and poetic writing indicates much about its subsequent terms.14 His work has consistently combined a pragmatic attention to the local demands of political and cultural responsibility (a word stressed by both Gizzi and Daly) with a poetic ambition for more radical forms of freedom. This combination, named by him as “Romantic Materialism,” has produced various amusingly deft analyses of his desire for, and resistance to, literary community,15 of the political and cultural complexities elided by a monolithic notion of the “mainstream,”16 of the implicit formalism of poetic debate.17 His often ironic and self-effacing critical style is complemented by a commitment to the material and singular act of poetry itself as “absolute, powerful. I had created something out of my body, my consciousness, my desire. It was real, as the world was real with that difference.”18 Although Wallace’s poetry explores the possibilities of the lyric, his hopes for literary community rest upon understanding “extreme disjunctions” as a “fruitful ground of possibility, not as something that calls into suspicion one’s production allegiances.”19 In the work of the women poets associated with this fragmented movement this attenuation of poetic form and politics has produced a catholic spread of the former and a well-honed sense of the latter. The work of poets such as Lee Ann Brown, Kristin Prevallet, Linda Russo, Pam Rehm, and Laynie Browne possess a wide range of predecessors and an often quite disparate sense of what constitutes the political. Pam Rehm’s The Garment in Which No One Had Slept, for example, searches uneasily for a quotidian metaphysics attentive to the “Mistook. Mystic.


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Mistaken.”20 Lee Ann Brown’s incisive and acerbically witty Polyverse evokes the eroticized urban suggested by figures such as Frank O’Hara, Bernadette Mayer, Hannah Weiner, and Walt Whitman.21 The reading of a literary feminism implicit in the work of these writers is equally diverse. Lee Ann Brown shares with contemporary European poets such as Caroline Bergvall a sophisticated exploration of a “queer” femininity whereas Linda Russo’s reading of Joanne Kyger and Elizabeth Willis’s reading of Lorine Niedecker demonstrates the continuing need for the acts of preservation and reclamation that are easier to identify with literary feminism’s “second wave.”22 Yet what is increasingly clear is that this celebration of the convergence of a variety of literary traditions is more than an embracing of hybridized writing practices or a tolerant acceptance of diversity. The careful diffidence of these writers seems motivated by the desire to construct meaning through knowing the conservative, totalizing and normative risks such a venture entails. The indeterminacy of contemporary power, as it becomes increasingly more diffuse and more resistant, seems to be the very thing that makes it possible to move beyond “both modernity and its nihilistic reverse.”23 The ambition of these poets to establish a poetic practice through the grasping of this indeterminacy suggests parallels with the aspirations for a democratic poetics suggested in my opening chapter. The example of The Lab Book indicates the various aspects of this democratic poetics that concern me here. Firstly, the text indicates something of both the ascendant poetic ambition of this writing and the ways in which the material structures of poetry (of the institution, of publication, of pedagogy, and so on) are constantly foregrounded and acknowledged. These writers appear to share Erica Hunt’s demand for a poetics capable of defending against “the bureaucratic seizure of the possible”24 whilst also acknowledging poetry’s dependence upon the dispersed and fragmented structures of these institutional bureaucracies for its meaning. The models of identity explored by these writers are thus also characterized by an acute sense of their contingency. Spahr’s politicized reading of Wallace’s poetry is, for example, typically cautious and allusive. This acceptance of the “positive value of a dislocated identity” is the very thing, to use Ernesto Laclau’s words, that makes possible the antagonisms of contemporary democracy.25 The unwillingness to impose a false resolution on difference suggested by Wallace’s encompassing of both Daly’s spirituality and Gizzi’s negative irony in itself offers a fruitful model for a democratic community. Michel de Certeau has offered a useful way of conceptualizing what the tension between poetic recalcitrance and institutional pragmatism

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means for reading. According to de Certeau, reading is situated “at the point where social stratification (class relationships) and poetic operations (the practitioner’s constructions of a text) intersect.” For de Certeau, the antagonism between these two processes makes “reading into an unknown” from which emerges “the experience of the literate readers (theatricalized and dominating)” and also “rare and partial, like bubbles rising from the depths of the water, the indices of a common poetics.”26 This concluding chapter explores how this notion of a “common poetics,” a productive rendering of the tension between the normative practices of literacy and the expansive possibilities of experimentation, offers new forms for thinking through the problem of a public democratic sphere. Two of the central difficulties of thinking through a democratic poetics that have persisted throughout this book—the false conflation of democracy with access and simplification and the need to model new forms of a public and private identity—are both offered some kind of resolution in the work of these poets.

The Responses of Juliana Spahr Juliana Spahr has been a particularly prolific graduate from Buffalo’s poetics program. Her contributions to numerous collections, her editing of Chain, Writing from the New Coast, and Poetics of Criticism, and her satirical literary history Spiderwasp, have all rendered apparent the materiality of the cultural practices that form poetry as a site of contemporary knowledge production.27 The latter text, originally published in Buffalo, carefully tells three (literally) parallel kinds of story about literary criticism. The first is the fabulous metaphorical tale of the violent conjoining of the eponymous spider and wasp. The second is a critical reading of three poets whose work demonstrates “the most distinct characteristic of the work by emerging poets of the 1990s: the tendency to violate the aesthetic separations of various schools and to deliberately create an aesthetics of joining.”28 The third, a series of footnotes, delineates the critical debates that charted Language poetry and its newer descendants, what Spahr names as “emergent” poets. The essay both gently mocks the monologic and combative “reason” of academic discourse whilst suggesting an alternative that allows for productive conjunction and innovation in place of either oedipal narratives of usurpation or the defeatism of analyses highlighting only fragmentation. This emphasis on the possibilities of connection, heightened by the tone of the distanced participant, characterizes Spahr’s interventions into recent debate. She has echoed, for


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example, Kristin Prevallet’s defense of the possibilities offered by poetry’s small press communities, contending in Poets & Writers that its collective structures offer a viable antidote to the academy’s continued valorization of the individual.29 Spahr’s desire for less combative models of poetic community also informed her subtle and precise feminist politics. Her coeditorial work on Chain with Jena Osman aimed at the “impossibility of a frameless frame” and combined its move across the porous boundaries of the contemporary poetry scene with an analysis of gender.30 This aspiration was most evident in the journal’s first edition, which examined the relationship between women and editing. The collection included a number of chain poems that made apparent the complex web of national, aesthetic, social, and generational associations between women poets that extended beyond any obvious linear narrative: Maggie O’ Sullivan’s poem was sent to Denise Riley, Kristin Prevallet’s to Pam Rehm, Joan Retallack’s to Tina Darragh and then to Diane Ward. Similarly, Spahr’s collaborative editing of collections such as American Women Poets in the Twenty First Century provides neither a gynocritical account of what women poets continue to share nor does it “dramatise” the competing poetries of the contemporary scene. Instead the collection searches for “lyrics that comment on community and that move lyric away from individualism to shared, connective spaces. Lyrics that can reveal how our private intimacies have public obligations and ramifications, how intimacy has a social bond with shared meaning.”31 This desire to make evident new forms for the interdependencies of public and private is apparent in both Spahr’s poetry and her elucidation of a politics for reading. Her critical text, Everybody’s Autonomy, favors the trope of anarchy, a political model capable of providing a “collective attention to the multiple, an attention to the diversity of response in the name of individual rights.”32 This attention to reader autonomy seemingly constitutes a realization of Language poetry’s active reader, yet it inverts even an ironical grasp of such implied “tribalism.”33 The notion of individuality, carefully separated from individualism, becomes a place of freedom, allowing “readers self-governance and autonomy” and forging discursive economies that do “not subordinate readers to explicative functions.”34 Although this productive trope risks underplaying other contemporary models of connection that strive for (and also, like anarchy, potentially inhibit) “both individuality and community” the same cannot be said of Spahr’s poetry.35 Its assertively skeptical tone explores the barriers that mitigate against the potentially utopian possibilities of an anarchic collective.

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The uncompromising pared-down collection Response is concerned with the limits of public interaction. The two parts of its central question—“how to tell without violating?”—suggest both the intersubjective weight of language (telling is rendered so potentially burdensome) and the belief in the sanctity of the individual and the experiential (violation is rendered the worst of all outcomes). This equates to an anxiety about how to understand public knowledge, “mass thought patterns,” when faced with categories such as history, opportunity, truth, or art that are unable to withstand the deforming pressures of ideology.36 The collection’s opening poem, “responding,” ventures toward the “unsecular forbidden” margins of an art form that can escape these forms of ideological instrumentalism. This aspiration takes its hesitant shape from the poem’s cataloguing of the recurring violence of its alternatives. It claustrophobically details the invested, repetitively “generic” use of representation by nations, by commodity culture, by journalism—“an eagle holds a symbol / fake [name of nation used as an adjective] heads”—and opens itself to a deeply ambivalent countermovement: we remain searching [searching we question, respond [deny we [move forward37

Like Susan Howe’s trope of the “stutter,” which the poem implicitly invokes, Spahr’s “margins” of possibility take shape through their reformulation, only ever partially resistant, of the very discourses they seek to critique. In this instance the poem’s desire for positive intellectual movement (to search, to question) needs to simultaneously disrupt its ability to assume a progressive meaning—“[deny we [move forward.” The collection’s final three poems, “documentary,” “testimony,” and “witness,” each provide subtly different analyses of the relationship between telling and violating. The brief “documentary” poem, for example, is comprised of short frames that evoke the curt parameters of the genre. The poem makes apparent the ways in which the predictable characteristics of documentary—an insistence on narrative causality, the provision of incidental everyday details, the framing of meaning with crude visual metaphors—function to render the familiar shocking and to delimit the possibility of response. killing is an ordinary act, the two men, the neighbor, the numerous clips from news programs assure


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the man who committed the murders comments on how the night he spent in jail, the next day was father’s day, as if it mattered [ordinary] has turned to all that is [injustice] [extraordinary] [at] [a] [loss] [for] [words,]38

Rather than defamiliarizing the crime in order to represent something of it (in the way in which Scalapino’s Defoe seeks, for example) Spahr uses square brackets to denote the absence of both the crime and the possibility of a response to it from these denuded representations. We are left with the conventions of criminality from which all possibility of truth has been carefully expunged. Spahr’s attention to the “relationship between private intimacies and public obligations” produces in the poems “testimony” and “witness” readings of the tensions between the body’s public discursive construction and its private physical violability. The first poem explores the statements made by victims of alien abduction, and the second explores how the physical absolutism of the presence of the HIV infection was given social form— “a marriage of scientific terms, / personal observation, and pornography.”39 “testimony” considers the fear of paranoia and misinformation in contemporary US culture, as they lend themselves to truisms that conceal rather than reveal the possibilities of “truth in an age of cover-up and misinformation.” The poem tranquilly accepts this irony, explaining toward its end that the point is “not the laugh / nor the truth / nor to merely explore truth’s turns” but to know “what we do? / trust no one?”40 The poem’s interpretation and examination of the cultural functions of these testimonies is hesitant and allusive, as it makes apparent their common threads—the emphasis on physical mutilation, on female reproduction, on technological intervention, on the echoing of cold war fears, on the powerlessness of the abducted— without comment. Spahr does not allow the obvious cultural manipulations of these experiences, the parallels between them and popular culture or between them and governmental policy, to disrupt the veracity of the insights of the abducted. The intersubjective and formative weight of telling, “ ‘I can’t say this happened to me and expect to be treated in the same way again,’ ” is respected.41 Testimony is retained as a form of agency despite its inextricability from an impossible dialectic of truth and falsehood. “More than identity,” the poem concludes by suggesting, “our attraction is to puzzle / the lineage of close encounters / anecdotal data, exhaust residue, radiation levels five times the / norm.”42 Spahr’s later work is written from Hawai’i, where she taught at the University of Hawai’i in Manoa from the late 1990s onward. The

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spare tone of Spahr’s writing, her literalization of the abstract and her abstraction of the literal, now focus on the possibilities of cultural difference. Spahr is particularly concerned with analyzing the Hawaiian politics of place from the position of the outsider. She is aware of the Pacific as it is defined by two views: “a view from the sea (of those who arrived from elsewhere) and a view from the land (those who were already there)” and attempts to explore the “hashing that happens as these two views meet.” Her poem things of each possible relation hashing against one another explores Hawaiian ecobotany, the complex relationship between “exotic (alien)” and indigenous plantlife that forms the cultural and economic topographies of the Pacific Islands.43 In her collection Fuck-You-Aloha-I-Love-You Spahr embraces the conflict between indigenous and Western conceptions of the public, in particular the languages of rights and of ownership. The poem “gathering: palolo stream,” for example, ends with a note from the “Public Access Shoreline Hawai’i vs. Hawai’i County Planning Commission, 1995.” This commission, the note suggests, was intended to protect “indigenous Hawaiians traditional and customary rights of access to gather plants, harvest trees, and take game.”44 In discussing the “balance between the rights of private landowners and the rights of persons exercising traditional Hawaiian culture” the commission stated that “ ‘the western concept of exclusivity is not universally applicable in Hawai’i.’ ” Yet Spahr notes that the rights protected by this statement have been “constantly eroded by property owners who restrict physical access by fencing in areas, closing roads, diverting water, etc.”45 The poem that precedes this note attempts to explore the possibility of a space capable of providing new kinds of socialities from this apparent conflict. It begins by acknowledging the Palolo stream as a resource and as a public: it is “a right. / It is a place for gathering. / A place for gathering aholehole.”46 These possibilities are delimited by the presence of buildings and a “parking lot” that “is unused / while the stream is rich and full.”47 The parking lot becomes emblematic in the poem of the apparently cosmopolitan privileges of the “certain of we” who “drive” yet the poem complicates the binary suggested by this schema by multiplying the meanings and activities associated with “driving.” The anaphoric stanzas produce a sense of driving as a process for change and adaptation. The poem’s description of these possibilities of “waking up” are, however, characteristically cautious in their claims: Certain of we are driving from the way of thinking of it as one to


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the way of thinking of it as one and one.48

Spahr’s cautious move toward “thinking of it as one / and one” implies a way of thinking that resists thinking only in terms of either identity or difference and an alternative possibility for the “hashing.” The poem “switching” in the same collection makes this aim for a public language that is able to encompass visceral irrationality and normative discourse even more explicit. The poem contrasts the literal facts of sex, “A bed is soft and we, the two / people in the hotel room, run our hands / over each other’s bodies,” with the literal facts of intellectual discussion, “We in the room with the table / gesture. / We debate how to want action. / We point. / We speak of uninvested discourse.”49 The poem is candid about what its ability to render such comparison means: “when I am lost simple juxtapositions, / like comparing people in a room / with a table to people in a hotel / room, feel like sense. / Like truth feels.”50 This “simple juxtaposition” is a clear attempt to challenge what the dichotomies of public reason and private desire—“the public table thinking / the private bed thinking”— mean for engaged social interaction. The staged naïvety produces a surprisingly compelling description of what lies beyond this impoverished dichotomy: “To make fluency. To / make flourish in both. A wrought / iron trellis in both.”51 The wrought iron trellis, ornate but unyielding, decorative but enclosing, evokes something of the ambiguities of a poetics searching for the thing that “might matter” that can extend across the public table and private bed. Spahr’s search, in Everybody’s Autonomy, for literary equivalents to this inclusive and responsive public discourse, draws upon the work of the contemporary poet Harryette Mullen, amongst others. Sphar reads Mullen through and across the work of Gertrude Stein, producing a sophisticated account of the positions of resistance and identification offered by each poet. Mullen’s ability to highlight the intersection between African American cultural conventions of signifyin(g), sampling, double-consciousness and Anglo-American literary traditions of modernist and postmodernist fragmentation and montage is vital for Spahr who reads her as able to signify “on signifyin(g), instead of emphasizing the way texts talk to texts, she privileges also the way they talk differently, talk back, and talk with readers.”52 Spahr’s highlighting of the pleasurable swiftness of these moves in Mullen’s writing can, however, occlude Mullen’s overt concern with the various difficulties that this also incurs. The critical hesitancy apparent in Spahr’s own poetry, her rendering of the powerful cultural

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norms that delimit the possibility for “anarchy” in the same moment that they make it possible, are explored further in Mullen’s work. If Spahr’s poetic writing seeks to open moments of possibility from a silhouetting of the narrowed terms of public interaction, then Mullen offers an analogous analysis of the constitution of the very thresholds of its entry.

Harryette Mullen and an Emancipatory Literacy In many ways, of course, Mullen sits rather uncomfortably within the “emergent” poetic community described by Spahr in texts such as Spiderwasp. Mullen does not share the same educational contexts, nor did she contribute to the debates that Spahr discusses, and her first poetry collection was published in the mid-1980s rather than in the mid-1990s. Yet although Mullen was not an obvious member of even this most heterogeneous of literary communities, the body of her work echoes many of its formal and political characteristics. Most obviously, Mullen has identified herself as an inheritor of the “Language” tradition. She has attributed her rejection of the “tradition of the ‘authentic voice’ ” (in which her first work was written) to her exposure to the works of the “Language” writers as a graduate student in Santa Cruz.53 Mullen, like many of the poets more obviously identified with this literary community, has also been concerned to reconcile the paratactic strategies of Language writing with a number of disparate literary traditions in forming new models for sociality and identity. It is how this concern has allowed her to refine Spahr’s concern with the possibilities of a public discourse, specifically with the literacies of a “common poetics,” that I want to examine. Mullen’s shift from “the tradition of the ‘authentic voice’ ” to a troubling of literary paradigms of identity challenges divisions between expression and experimentation, authenticity and hybridity, and high and low cultural forms.54 Her writing draws upon multiple referential and formal axes: playing on the discourses of electronic culture, Hollywood, advertising, modernism, and popular music whilst utilizing the quatrains of the blues, modernist montage, spoonerisms, homophones, anagrams, and acrostics. This poetic play, like Mullen’s increasingly influential contributions to African American literary theory, has been consistently concerned with the signification of the racially marked body.


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Mullen’s attention to the economic ascendancy of whiteness, and the fact that it is “produced through the operation of marginalizing blackness,” focuses on the complex intersection between race and commodification.55 Trimmings (Mullen’s second collection but the first that demonstrates the influence of the “Language” poets upon her) draws from the specular economies of Stein’s modernist readings of the metaphorical and metonymical associations of race, gender, and class. Yet her attention to class in particular disrupts the erotic and playful implications of her stylistic hybridization. The poem’s erotic evocation of the detail of a tightly tailored dress, and the breasts it reveals, are, for example, raw against the contrasting knowledge that this “blowing blissful” body is simultaneously “blowzy,” “bleached,” or “starched.”56 These latter images, in naming the labor that goes into the construction of the female body, are also suggestive of the fact that this ideal is the preserve of the young, the white, and the rich. In the slightly later S*PERM**K*T the iconography of color, of marketing, of labor and economics, of consumption and desire are again all seamlessly worked together. The poem’s account of the market revolves around its ability to control and sanctify the possibility of bodily or cultural incontinence that consumption’s reliance on the evocation of desire, appetite, and excess all necessarily evoke. Meat is rendered pinkly bloodless, sexual pleasure is soaped away, reproduction is steeped in eugenics, and the “nimbus glow” of transcendence is reserved for the anorexic. Frequently in the poem this fascination with the possibilities of control segue into racialized fears about impurity, contamination, miscegenation, and a more literal critique of the economic system supporting it. A stanza examining the racialized aesthetics of adverts for cleaning products (“Bad germs get zapped by secret agents in formulaic new im- / proved scientific solutions. Ivory says pure nuff and snowflakes / be white enough to do the dirty work”) is placed alongside an ironic recognition of the segregated nature of much domestic labor in the United States (“Swinging burgers do a soft shoe, gringo derbies tipping latina”).57 Yet Mullen’s attention to the intersections of race, gender, and class in U.S. culture consistently eschews the attractions of an individualized model of identity. Most obviously, these poems consistently deflect the possibility of authoriality. The self seems to function as something of a trickster figure stepping across and in between lines of cultural demarcation. S*PERM**K*T ’s stark titular omissions highlight the absence of pronouns, of “u” and “are” and (depending on whether the absent

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word is assumed to be “supermarket” or “spermkit”) even “I.” In Muse and Drudge, conversely, authoriality is dispersed into a collective, cultural self, what Mullen has termed an “anonymous ‘I’, a generic ‘I’, a traditional ‘I’, the ‘I’ of the blues,” that draws attention to Mullen’s playful manipulation of a visceral literary tradition.58 The poem ends, for example, by ironically stressing the “southern song” of the poet’s “body” whilst transferring any originary meaning to the changing readers—the “stray companions”—that the poem morphs against.59 In Sleeping with the Dictionary the letters “I” and “U” are the only ones entirely omitted from the poem’s alphabetic structure. The poem gives various accounts of this, beginning with a series of disclaimers mocking the very notions of responsibility that they imply: “Forgive me, I’m no good at this. I can’t write back. I never read / your letter.”60 The later poem, “Any Lit,” disperses a single declarative sentence across the alphabet, repeating its single phrase— “you are a ukulele beyond my microphone”—but substituting each time its key nouns with words that phonetically echo the structural sound of the “you” in ukulele and the “mine” in “microphone.”61 A poem toward the end of the collection, “You and I,” ties this absence even more explicitly to the paradoxes of inclusion and exclusion: “Who’ll spell out for us, if we exist, / why you and I missed our turn on the list?”62 The attention to the shibboleths of cultural visibility and invisibility that are implicit in Mullen’s toying with representations of authoriality is commensurate with her analysis of the implications of literacy, reading, and community.63 Her commitment to the deconstructive traditions of the Language moment and to expanding Gates’s model of signifyin(g) converge upon these questions. Muse and Drudge has been read as Mullen’s attempt to forge a poetic constituency capable of countering the racially segregated nature of her audiences.64 Mullen is, moreover, aware of her own uncomfortable positioning within a culture in which the very notion of literacy has been racialized. Her experience of reading “words never meant for me, or anyone like me—words that exclude me, or anyone like me, as a possible reader” forces her to experience “my exclusion and my inclusion as a literate black woman, the unimagined reader of the text.”65 Mullen shares Erica Hunt’s caution about the political implications of the avant-garde, aware that the range of literacies that accompany its proliferation must also represent a “proliferation of illiteracies.”66 She makes explicit connections between increasing illiteracy and cultural disenfranchisement, the fact that the “economic and social policies in the U.S. that widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots inevitably deepen the divide between the literate and the illiterate.”67 Such dichotomous


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relations return Mullen to the dilemmas around the false continuities between access (as social right) and accessibility (as textual simplification or literalism) already faced by poets such as June Jordan and Carolyn Forché. Like them, her resistance to this dichotomy forced her to engage with the terms framing the democratic public. Yet Mullen’s intervention in these debates about literacy seeks neither alternative models of the institution or of poetic responsibility but more radically literary alternatives. While she derides E.D. Hirsch’s “cultural literacy” as a “franchise” offering “a panacea for the anxieties of the educated and elite classes contemplating an increasingly diverse and multicultural population” and is more appreciative of its direct alternatives— “the lyrical transparency of Sappho, or Pablo Neruda” or the “democratic appeal of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes”—she seeks to transcend these false oppositions. Her own work, she suggests, aspires to qualities that “resist translation, that have to do with living, reading, and writing inside a particular language.”68 Her reading of Sandra Cisneros details something of this. For Mullen, Cisneros’s ability to write into an “ideologically contested space of linguistic difference, error, mutual incomprehension and antagonism” suggests “the potential” of what “might be regarded as a third language, accessible to those whose linguistic experience, combined with formal education, has produced a new and emancipatory literacy.”69 Mullen’s proposing of this “third” model of literacy seems to echo the possibilities of de Certeau’s “common poetics.” It is a model of writing that seeks to use the structures of poetic knowledge in order to free itself from them. Sleeping with the Dictionary seems to come closest of all Mullen’s works to imagining this difficult, dissonant form of literacy. The work is an “offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet’s most seductive writing partners, Roget’s Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary.”70 The poem’s explicit drawing upon the alphabet foregrounds the resource that Johanna Drucker describes as not only “a set of symbols whose distinct visual characteristics have provoked a plenitude of imaginative projections” but a site offering “a rich record of cultural history and ideas which interweave the domains of philosophy and religion, mysticism and magic, linguistics and humanistic inquiry.”71 The “abecedarian” structure of Sleeping with the Dictionary offers Mullen the opportunity to celebrate this potential in language’s most elemental and literal of building blocks. Poems such as “jinglejangle” and “Bla bla” comprise of onomatopoeic repetitions and rhymes pointing to the inventiveness and the banality of vernacular everyday language. This evokes the processes of speech

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acquisition, of language’s dependency on its physical qualities of sound, repetition, vision. It is writing, literally, that everybody can read. Yet often this listing is only partially playful, the mix and the inversions gesturing to moments of cultural anxiety or banality as well as pleasure. The poem’s play around the letter “a,” “ab flab [ . . . ] / airfare / Asian contagion analysis paralysis Anna banana,” for example, suggests, respectively, slighting critiques of fashion and weight, commonplace privilege, racial integration, anti-intellectualism whilst also gesturing toward the already existing cultural alternatives.72 Yet, as the title’s mocking play on the film title Sleeping with the Enemy suggests, Mullen’s account of the alphabet’s mediation by texts such as Roget’s Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary is less utopian than Drucker’s description of it implies. The disjunction between these two reference texts is also vaguely threatening or unsettling. The former is premised on John Roget’s taxonomy that assumes a clear hierarchy of knowledge, a “logical progression from abstract concepts, through the material universe to mankind itself culminating in what Roget saw as mankind’s highest achievements: morality and religion.”73 The American Heritage Dictionary, conversely, is a project deeply embedded in U.S. self-representations of a successful democratic multiculturalism. Far from assuming the possibility of neutral classification the dictionary attempts the quixotic task of understanding how a “native language becomes the social interaction of all of its speakers.”74 The dictionary’s luminous “Usage Panel” includes the work of at least eleven poets amongst its list of novelists, journalists, historians, academics, and lawyers. The inclusion of a disparate range of poets, including Fanny Howe, Robert Hass, Erica Jong, and Mary Oliver, suggests both that the poet is still understood as at least one guardian of America’s linguistic democracy and the struggle necessary to adequately represent the diversity that this implies. Sleeping with the Dictionary gently critiques the aims of both of these sources. The poem “Mantra for a Classless Society, or Mr Roget’s Neighborhood” parodies Roget’s assumption that abstract and materialist concepts can be divorced from morality, religion, or emotion, or, indeed, that a hierarchy of these taxonomies can be so carefully imposed. The poem begins with the word “cozy” and ends with the word “tense” and its winding through the associative synonyms and antonyms that link them makes very clear who and what is served by them as descriptors for class. To be cozy is to be not only “wealthy affluent prosperous substantial” but also, in a succinct account of Patricia J. Williams’s critique of public/private relations, “protected, private,


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concealed.” To be “uncomfortable,” on the other hand, is to be “destitute impoverished needy” as well as “upsetting awkward ill-atease.”75 Although Mullen’s collection is generally more sensitive to the disruptive possibilities of a less “neutral” and inclusive language it also resists simply celebrating linguistic democratization. Poems such as “Bilingual Instructions,” for example, notes where the language line of apparent multiculturalism operates in U.S. culture: “Californians say No / to bilingual instructions in schools” and on “ballots” but “yes” to the placing of such instructions on “curbside waste receptacles.”76 This sharp political note characterizes the collection’s allusive engagement with the increasingly right-wing and potentially racist subversion of twenty-first-century U.S. democratic process. The poem “Denigration,” for example, interrogates the historical synonyms of race and appears to allude to the elections of January 2001 in which the racial exclusions of U.S. democracy became extremely crude: “Does the mayor demand a recount of every bullet or does city hall simply neglect the black alderman’s district?”77 Mullen’s acknowledgment of those communities whose democratic disenfranchisement cannot be recouped by new forms of cultural literacy, even one that accepts the necessity for “mutual incomprehension and antagonism,” is astutely candid.78 The question of how to represent the un-represented community—in terms of both vertereten (the political relations of advocacy) and darstelling (the semiotic relations of re-presentation)—is left necessarily unanswered in this writing.79

Lisa Jarnot: Literacy and Survival One of the more obvious ironies of this emerging community of new experimental poets has been its simultaneous desire to eschew and expand the categories of identity. On the one hand, figures such as Steve Evans have explicitly rejected contemporary strategies of “designation”80 while, on the other, writers such as Spahr, Brown, and Mullen have contributed to the expanding politicized deconstructions of contemporary gender and racial critique. Mullen’s acknowledgment of the predicament of the most disenfranchised groups in U.S. culture suggests the necessity of both strategies: the need to posit more sophisticated critiques of identity and a willingness to acknowledge the places where such models will also inevitably fail. The possibility of such failure offers an alternative way of negating the abstractions of the bourgeois sphere that Negt and Kluge claim is necessary to the success of the “proletarian” counter-public. This final section returns to this aim in examining how Lisa Jarnot’s

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attempt to find forms for representing the disenfranchised produces a new form of literacy from the material and singular act of the poetic. If the writers contributing to The Lab Book suggest the existence of one kind of community for the city of Buffalo, Lisa Jarnot—who grew up there—directs us to quite another. Although Jarnot’s accounts of the autobiographical impulse have involved a playful and resistant critique,81 her poetry has also acknowledged how central her discovery of “language” was to both a realization of her own precarious class position and her ability to survive it. The silencing “shame” that writers as varied as Carolyn Steedman and Rita Felski have ascribed to the educated working-class woman is mediated for Jarnot through poetic language.82 In Jarnot’s introduction to the chapbook One’s Own Language she provides an account of how the discovery of a murdered relative’s body made her aware that “my people existed in the world of language as outsiders and throwaways, temporary spectacles to be pitied and avoided in a society intrigued by murder and dysfunction.” Yet, in the same moment, she describes her possession of an “instinct” that allowed her to endure this, an instinct “facilitated by another world, a language which allowed me to transcend a specifically barren, unspeakable and unspeaking place. I spent my days scrawling words into the pale green army issue notebooks that my father brought home from work. In my family I was the collector of words. I was a survivor.”83 Works such as Some Other Kind of Mission suggest the ways in Jarnot explored this awareness of the casting of marginal society’s “throwaways” and “temporary spectacles” through an avant-garde aesthetic. The poem combines fairly conventional typography with pages of cut and paste more reminiscent of the “obscenity” of the zine than of modernism. The first poem in the collection, “Introduction,” foregrounds a number of competing signifying registers, rendering the page a space of typographic composition rather than expression and highlighting a move between various forms of reading. The first page is comprised of a montage of different papers including graph paper, a musical score reconstructed from scraps of paper, a hand-drawn diagram, and a letter. The only words in the introduction are contained in the letter (which has “lucky pierres” as sender and “pierre” as recipient) and they present a mocking introduction to a mythic hero, deploying and deflating its aggrandizing language: “he they say will come again and he i say / sells hoovers.” Similarly, the wasp-waisted center of the poem, replete with the erotic charge of ambivalent adoration (“you double crop / my midnights / in a glaze”) is wittily


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defused by a punning on the similarity of Elvis, Elves, and Evil (“sparrow’s lights with this neon / where the bacchae, like the elvi, / come to sing”).84 The self-aware irony of this introduction is augmented further on the next page, “Figure One. Looking forward to playing some more.”85 This consists of a page from an academic primer on Kant in which the central principles of Kantian thought (“The Critique of Judgement completes Kant’s undertaking of criticism by concluding that there are a priori principles at the basis of judgement as there are for understanding reason but that these principles are not constitutive but only regulative of experience”) are scored out (or highlighted) and then superimposed with fragments of type. The careful classifications and logical procedures of Kantian thought become a fragmented narrative, in which philosophical complexity is alluded to whilst being stripped to an emotional urgency. Of the phrase, “The pleasure in beauty arises from a feeling of the purposiveness of the object in relation to the subject” we are left with, more simply, “The pleasure of the object in relation to the subject.”86 Similarly, the description of the sublime stresses broken movement rather than completion: “the mind moves so that we meet in the harmony or desire (the dynam).” At the very bottom of the page the description of a function key on a computer program—“PF1⫽Help”—suggests both the instrumentalism of this shifted language meaning and evokes the openness of the page, its sense of continuity with, and reliance upon, other forms of reading and writing. This initial, parodic undercutting of foundational assumptions is continued in the poem’s treatment of a questing narrative. Like Jarnot’s other poems, The Fall of Orpheus and Ring of Fire, the context for Some Other Kind of Mission is the detailed social and physical landscape of the non-cosmopolitan United States.87 The poem counterpoints enigmatic references to the tropes of great quest—“Paris and Helen,” “Lance,” “wise men bearing gifts”—with the banal infrastructures of fishing, farming, labor, highways, motels, and supermarkets. Its erasures, densely repeated phrases, and labyrinthine prose seem pointed less to a deflationary rewriting of these masculinized myths than to capturing the repetitive and fragmented lives of itinerant America that may still require them. [ . . . ] i was at the walls in bars and they were speaking all around the field soil. they retracted me to the farm my plan. fuck you. in chaos. the bus behind the plan and dreamt of spoken but retracted. having only terns and the firs and the

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clover clever here at the lamplight in the firs of having clover. all around at having field soil in the chaos. [ . . . ]88

In ways that are reminiscent of both the closely scrutinized aleatory procedural difficulties of Language poets such as Scalapino, and the fragmented accounts of contemporary life offered by poets such as Cheryl Townsend, the poem captures the rhythms of work, of halfcompleted conversations, of frustrated dreams, of stultifyingly overfamiliar landscapes. The poem’s repetition of key words—firs, terns, mesh—evokes not only the straitened physical world of the farmed or hunted but also problematizes the limitations of reference. The repetition in the poem provides both a fragmented circling around familiar assertions and a range of expanded meanings and homonyms: “terns” becomes turns, interns and “fir” becomes infers, furs. Toward the end of the poem this playing out is potentially reversed as repetition also allows the words—“firs and terns and firs and terns and terns”—to be emptied out of meaning entirely.89 Yet, as the title of the collection tells us, Jarnot is concerned with “some other kind of mission,” and this poem seems intent on more than simply reveling in the failure of narrative and representative modes or in drawing comparisons between this failure and a fragmented, nomadic life. The repeated emphasis on the materiality of language opens itself to a wit in the poem, which heralds something of a wild euphoria. The poem’s internal and apparently incremental use of language, as meaning for a word builds slowly across sentences, allows the poem’s sense of constrained repetition to give way to lucid and fierce fantasies of freedom: “sundays i’d like to be what the birds have been. break- / ing luck of taking action shattered. to be like what the birds have / been unslendered.”90 Sunday, the day of escape, is laden with radical and viscerally unalienated possibilities, with the freedom of birds. The realization of this moment of “slender violet walking”91 is clearly dependent on the material and singular act of poetry—the moment of wonder and permanence that Mark Wallace similarly ascribes to the poetic. Jarnot carries this resistant possibility into her interventions in debates about writing and literacy. The quasi-confessional introduction to One’s Own Language is followed by yet another parody of a poetry primer that insistently plays with the ambivalence of its exclusion from, and yet proximity to, the terms of the academy. By naming itself as part of the “Curriculum of the Soul” series the poem extends the historical implications of this ambivalence to Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. Duncan’s Curriculum of the Soul chapbook of 1974,


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“Dante,” opens with a citation suggesting that “it is in the social definition of freedom / that we most sense / the presence of the Law / pluralistic, multiphasic.”92 Jarnot’s addition to this series suggests new ways of understanding the potential of the “pluralistic, multiphasic” presence of the Law in language. The paradoxical relationship between authority and freedom explored in Some Other Kind of Mission is further developed in One’s Own Language through Jarnot’s consideration of a series of literal and hypothesized laws around language use that concentrate on the physical pleasures of language itself. The second section to the text provides an alphabet, suggesting an ironically literalized approach to reading that echoes Mullen’s reading of the alphabet as a site of regulation that poetry can transform into possibility and Osman and Spahr’s attention to the assumptions of pedagogy. Each letter of the alphabet becomes a word and is ascribed a quotation: D is for Dialogue, G is for Genome, K is for Kinetics. The accompanying citations provide different propositions with regard to the connection between the world and language: the empirical certainties of language-acquisition theorists and the terrifyingly banal literalism of gene theory are cast alongside the conjectures of critical theorists and modernist poets. The resulting alphabet lays bare the constitutive rules of language as a resource capable of re-creating the world. What it means to say “I,” for example, is understood through both the sound of the vowel—“ ‘the reason why the sound [i] comes to be easily associated with small, and [u,o,a] associated with bigger things, may be to some extent the high pitch of the vowel’ ” and through Duncan’s assertion that “we are in our physical beings poems, even as each practicing his / her art in the language.” The sensuous viscerality of the poetic is translated in these instances into an ironically literal form of pedagogy. The primary structures of literacy suggested by the alphabet are offered as a site of poetic transformation that is capable of negating the alienating abstraction of the lifeworld. It is through the practice of poetic language that the subject is able to find himself or herself as a “physical being.” The work of Lisa Jarnot, like that of Mullen and Sphar, aspires for a literary model of the public that take us a long way toward the utopian possibilities suggested by radical democratic theorists. In the hands of these writers, this desire involves not simply a literal rejection of identity politics but a genuine attempt to configure modes of social relation and responsibility that are founded upon their own contingent impossibility. The work of each of these poets is established on the desire to reconcile the prevalent, recurring tensions of democracy between identity and difference and between institutionalization and

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freedom. They struggle with the former by offering models of politicized, and yet crucially indeterminate, social identity. An attention to the political implications of race, class, nation are retained in this work whilst the currencies of legitimacy, morality, and authenticity that these positions have also involved are interrogated, sometimes abandoned. Instead, commonality—the grammar of democracy in Chantal Mouffe’s felicitous phrase—is provided by an attention to the processes of the social: by the possibilities of Spahr’s “wrought iron trellis,” of Mullen’s dissonant “emancipatory literacy,” of Jarnot’s literalized “own language.” That these processes are realized through an attention to the assumptions of literacy and access that form the boundaries of this “public” also suggest, of course, the ways in which the tensions between freedom and institutionalization are reconciled in this writing. The social processes, the modes of writing, reading, and of literacy, offered by these poets share the ambivalent contingencies of their models of the political: at once formed through the institution and yet critically critical of it. The languages of gender, democracy, and contemporary poetics seem entwined in ways that profoundly qualify and expand the meaning and potential of each. The tensions between contemporary “third-wave” feminism and democratic theory can be understood through a shared attempt to proffer models of agency that rely on equivalence and commensurability rather than on identity and individualism. The concern of a wide number of contemporary women poets to escape the formal and political calcifications of the postwar literary scene can be usefully positioned against this challenge, can be read as seeking to realize and develop both new forms of sodalities and new possibilities for representation. The various publics and counter-publics of contemporary poetry make apparent the complexities of realizing such an aim in U.S. culture. As this book has sought to demonstrate, it is hard to imagine an innocent or radical public space for this democratic culture not formed through the pressures of the institution, the marketplace, or the imaginary nation and not divided by the specific discourses of race, gender, and class. Yet, at the same time, this survey of the work of contemporary women poets has also demonstrated that these familiar difficulties are capable of being constantly rethought and reimagined. The line that the book has traced—from June Jordan’s formation of an institutional and cultural literacy, to Carolyn Forché’s embodying of an anarchic responsibility, to Leslie Scalapino’s engaged damning of the impoverishment of public debate, to the zine writer’s struggle to legitimate representations of feminine labor—gestures toward the


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formation of a new vocabulary for reading these constitutive tensions of the democratic. Poetry’s ability to be at once of the public and yet capable of exceeding its presumptions allows for a space in which the radical contingencies of contemporary power can be reshaped through new conceptions of identity and of responsibility and freedom, of universality and particularity.


Note s

Introduction Becoming Publics: Democracy and Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry 1. See “PoetsAgainsttheWar.Com” (last accessed 1.9.06). 2. Sam Hamill, “Introduction: Poets against the War,” Poets against the War, edited by Sam Hamill (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/ Nation Books, 2003), 2. 3. Jed Rasula, The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects 1940–1990 (Urbana: National Council of Teachers in English, 1996), 383. 4. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997) and Meta Mendel-Reyes, Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory (London: Routledge, 1995). 5. Walter Kalaidjian, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 19. Rasula has damned poetry’s privileging of “the metaphysics of the intimate encounter” (Rasula, The American Poetry Wax Museum, 314) and Altieri has despaired of a poetry that flees into “forms of extreme privacy that we hope are as inviolate as they are inarticulate.” Charles Altieri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 16. 6. In his contribution to Rick London and Leslie Scalapino’s edited collection Enough, an Anthology of Poetry and Writings against the War (Oakland: O Books, 2003), Bernstein warned against “being hectored toward moral discourse, toward turning our work into digestible messages. This too is a casualty of the war machine, the undermining of the value of the projects of art, of the aesthetic.” 7. The online poetry journal BayMoon, for example, pointed explicitly to the “Missing response from poet Dana Gioia, NEA Chair” and noted that its “attempts to obtain a statement from Mr. Gioia have not yet been answered” http://www.baymoon.com (last accessed 1.9.06). 8. Roger Weingarten and Jack Myers, “Foreword,” New American Poets of the ’90s, edited by Jack Myers and Roger Weingarten (Boston: David R. Godine, 1991). Similar claims have been made in Jonathan Holden’s The Fate of American Poetry (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia

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9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

NOTES

Press, 1991); David Wojahn and Jack Myers, “Preface,” A Profile of Twentieth Century American Poetry, edited by Jack Myers and David Wojahn (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1991). Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 120. Samuel Lipman, “Redefining Culture and Democracy,” The New Criterion 8, no. 4 (1989), 18. Dana Gioia, “Notes on the New Formalism,” Conversant Essays: Poets in Conversation, edited by J. McCorkle (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 180. Dana Gioia, “Business and Poetry,” Hudson Review 36, no. 1 (1983); R.S. Gwynn, “No Biz Like Po’ Biz,” Sewanee Review 100, no. 2 (1992). Recent “crossover” anthologies and collections suggest how difficult it is to simply read the woman poet through this familiar formal pugilism. A Formal Feeling Comes, edited by Annie Finch (Santa Cruz: Story Line Press; 1994); American Women Poets in the Twenty First Century, edited by Claudine Rankine and Juliana Spahr (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002); Jacqueline Vaught Brogan and Cordelia Candelana, eds., Women Poets of the Americas: Toward a Pan-American Gathering (New York: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999). In addition, critical essays such as Clair Wills, “Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Experimentalism and the Expressive Voice,” Critical Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1994) and Linda Kinnahan, “Experimental Poetics and the Lyric Voice in British Women’s Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 37, no. 4 (1996) point to the reductiveness of reading women’s poetry against terms such as “mainstream” and “experimental.” David Trend, “Democracy’s Crisis of Meaning,” Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship and the State, edited by David Trend (New York: Routledge, 1996). William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 193. Philip Pettit, “Freedom as Antipower,” Contemporary Political Theory: A Reader, edited by Colin Farrelly (London: Sage Publications, 2004), 151. Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Seyla Benhabib, “From Identity Politics to Social Feminism,” Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship and the State, edited by David Trend (New York: Routledge, 1996), 39. Chantal Mouffe, “Democratic Politics Today,” Dimensions of Radical Democracy, edited by Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992), 13. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (Ontario: Ansani Press, 1993), 75. Mendel-Reyes, Reclaiming Democracy, 22.

NOTES

157

22. Ken Hirschkop, Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 37. 23. Robert Pinsky, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 15. 24. Pinsky, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, 30. 25. Drucilla Cornell, “Gender Hierarchy, Equality and the Possibility of Democracy,” Feminism and the New Democracy: Re-Siting the Political, edited by Jodi Dean (London: Sage, 1997), 218. 26. Jodi Dean, Introduction to Feminism and the New Democracy (London: Sage, 1997), 2. 27. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Luce Irigaray, Democracy Begins between Two (London: Athlone Press, 2000); Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracies,” Between Borders: Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, edited by Henry Giroux and Peter McClaren (New York: Routledge, 1994). 28. Irigaray, Democracy Begins between Two, 16. 29. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition (London: Routledge, 1997), 181. 30. Brown, States of Injury, 75. 31. Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the World (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993); Katie Roiphe, The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1994). 32. Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000). 33. Michael Warner, Publics and CounterPublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 14. 34. Bruce Robbins, “Introduction: The Phantom Public Sphere,” The Phantom Public Sphere, edited by Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 35. Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Between Community and Institution (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 36. Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 10. 37. Zofia Burr, Of Women, Poetry and Power (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Joseph Harrington, Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002); Michael Thurston, Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Mark Van Wienen, Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 38. Mark Van Wienen, Partisans and Poets, 24.

158

NOTES

39. James Longenbach, “A Response to Michael Thurston,” College Literature 25, no. 3 (1998), 193. 40. Paul Naylor, Poetic Investigations (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 38. 41. Naylor, Poetic Investigations, 32. 42. Elizabeth Long, “Textual Interpretation as Collective Action,” The Ethnography of Reading, edited by J. Boyarin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 206. 43. Harrington, Poetry and the Public, 4. 44. Benjamin Bertram, “New Reflections on the ‘Revolutionary’ Politics of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,” Boundary 2 22, no. 3 (1995), 90. 45. Miriam Hansen, “Foreword” to Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 46. Hansen, “Foreword” to Public Sphere and Experience, xxix. 47. Brown, States of Injury, 8–9.

1

Paper Money and Tender Acts: Feminism and Democracy

1. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, “Introduction,” Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, edited by Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 2. 2. Jane Flax, “The End of Innocence,” Feminists Theorise the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 447. 3. Rosi Braidottti, “Toward a New Nomadism,” Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, edited by Constantin Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (London: Routledge, 1994); Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (London: Routledge, 1995); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991). 4. Jacqueline Rose, “The State of the Subject: The Institution of Feminism,” Critical Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1988). 5. Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000). 6. Elisabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (London: Women’s Press, 1988). 7. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 35. 8. Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1991); Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular

NOTES

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

159

Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Meaghan Morris, The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1988). Sara Mills, “Reading as/Like a Feminist,” Gendering the Reader, edited by Sara Mills (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994); Sara Mills and Lyn Pearce, Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996). Wai Chee Dimock, “Feminism, New Historicism and the Reader,” Readers in History: Nineteenth Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response, edited by James L. Machor (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Lyn Pearce, Feminism and the Politics of Reading (London: Arnold, 1997), 13. Sidonie Smith, “The Autobiographical Manifesto: Identities, Temporalities, Politics,” Autobiography and Questions of Gender, edited by S. Nueman (London and Oregan: Frank Cass, 1991); Liz Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). Drucilla Cornell’s preservation of the “imaginary domain” of the private, Chantal Mouffe’s formulation of feminist citizenship, and Marion Young’s refiguring of democracy are all aimed at answering this question. Druscilla Cornell, At the Heart of Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000); Chantal Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community,” Dimensions of Radical Democracy, edited by Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992); Marion Iris Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Debra Morris, “Privacy, Privation, Perversity: Towards New Representations of the Personal,” Signs 25, no. 2 (2000), 325; Cornell, At the Heart of Freedom, 39. Elaine Showalter, “Third-Wave Feminism,” Plenary paper presented at the “Third Wave Feminism Conference,” University of Exeter, UK, July 2002. Luce Irigaray, Democracy Begins between Two (London: Athlone Press, 2000). Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’ ” Feminists Theorise the Political, edited by J. Butler and J.W. Scott (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 8. Seyla Benhabib, “From Identity Politics to Social Feminism,” Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship and the State, edited by David Trend (New York: Routledge, 1996); Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition (London: Routledge,1997). Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 164.

160

NOTES

19. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 128, 134. 20. Brown, States of Injury, 28. 21. Brown, States of Injury, 8–9. 22. Brown, States of Injury, 8–9. 23. Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (London: Routledge, 1995). 24. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 5. 25. Judith Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” Feminist Contentions, 140. 26. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (London: Polity Press, 1992). 27. Brown, States of Injury, 8. 28. Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” 140. 29. bell hooks’s critique of Butler’s reading of Jennie Livingston’s film Paris is Burning makes this argument most clearly. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (London: Turnaround Press, 1991). 30. Butler’s own defense of such critique is contained in “Merely Cultural,” Social Text 15, no. 3–4, (1997). 31. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), 134. 32. Benhabib, Situating the Self, 8. 33. Benhabib, Situating the Self, 113. 34. Benhabib, for example, dismisses the “performative disruptions of artistic life” on the very instrumental grounds that the United States has produced an avant-garde culture “that is the envy of the world without managing to solve the problems of corrupt campaign financing, blockages in legislative processes, misguided foreign policy, and lack of universal health care coverage, parental leave, decent housing, and education.” Seyla Benhabib, “Sexual Difference and Collective Identities: The New Global Constellation,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24, no. 2 (1999), 338. Benhabib’s explicit advocacy of narrative is evident in recent work by critics such as Maria Pia Lara and Martha Nussbaum who have been consistently drawn to the novel as providing new models for public agency. Maria Pia Lara, e.g., suggests that women’s narrative offers the possibility for conceptualizing “the public sphere as a cultural arena where ‘public’ meanings of justice and the good permeate democratic institutions, and where the tensions produced between facts and norms are seen as the dynamics that allow for the possibility of interventions by emancipatory movements.” Maria Pia Lara, Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity Press: 1998), 5. Similarly, Martha Nussbaum’s work on public morality claims the importance of the literary as a realm in which the imaginary and empathetic capacities upon which both justice and

NOTES

35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

161

democracy can be explored and perpetuated. Again, Nussbaum assumes that it is primarily the novel, or at least narrative, that offers an idealized alternative to current conceptions of the public. Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and the Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). Ken Hirschkop, Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 37. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, The Welleck Library Lectures (Irvine: Columbia University Press, 2000), 81. Seyla Benhabib, Transformation of Citizenship: Dilemmas of the Nation State in the Era of Globalization: The Spinoza Lectures (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2001), 60. Nancy Fraser, “False Antitheses: A Response to Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler,” Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, edited by L. Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1995), 60. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus, 82. Nancy Fraser, “Heterosexism, Misrecogonition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler,” Social Text 15, no. 3–4 (1997). Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 70–71. Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus, 5–6. Kathleen Fraser, “The Tradition of Marginality,” Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press, 2001), 30. Fraser, “The Tradition of Marginality,” 31. As well as contriving one of the lingering readings of Dickinson as “both ironically a madwoman (a deliberate impersonation of a madwoman) and truly a madwoman (a helpless agoraphobic, trapped in a room for her father’s house)” Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar shaped some of the more influential assumptions of the field of feminist literary criticism. Susan M. Gilbert, and Sandra Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 583. Piercy and Ostriker were not only popular feminist poets but their critical and editorial work was vital in establishing a canon for this movement. Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); Marge Piercy, Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now (New York: Pandora, 1987). Suzanne Juhasz names this compulsion as “the need to validate the personal and the private as legitimate topics for public speech and in the need to integrate the private and public worlds, only in this way can the double bind be broken, can the woman poet truly be one person, an integrated self functioning powerfully in every facet of her experience.” Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women, a New Tradition (New York: Harper and

162

47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

NOTES

Row, 1976), 6. One of the only contemporary critiques of this state of affairs was offered by Cora Kaplan who noted that concern with overcoming the “double-bind” upon the woman poet, divided between her “social identity” and “poetic practice,” became as Cora Kaplan noted, “the insistent subject, sometimes overt, often hidden or displaced” in discourses around American women’s poetry. Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), 71. Florence Howe, “Introduction,” No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women, edited by Florence Howe (New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1973), 3. Cheryl Walker, “Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990). Jan Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s Writing (London and New York: Pandora, 1987). Katie King, Theory in Its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. Women’s Movements (Indiana University Press, 1994), 121. Ostriker, Stealing the Language, 80. Marjorie Perloff, “The Corn-Pone Lyric 1972–1973,” Contemporary Literature 16 (1975), 91. Diane Wakoski, The Collected Greed Parts 1–13 (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), 115. Wakoski’s response to Robert Bertholt’s critique of the “Iowa workshop conspiracy,” e.g., rejects the framing of poets as “Caterpillar poets or Iowa poets or black poets or women poets or Southern poets, etc.” Diane Wakoski, Toward a New Poetry (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1980), 56. Diane Wakoski, Smudging: To Smoke or to Protect against Frost (as an Orchard) By Means of Smudge (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1972), 30. June Jordan, Who Look at Me (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1969), 1. Jordan, Who Look at Me, 3. Jordan, Who Look at Me, 23. Jordan, Who Look at Me, 51. June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2005), 174. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 17, no. 2 (1987), 65. Jordan, Directed by Desire, 176–177. Kim Whitehead, The Feminist Poetry Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 92. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 161. June Jordan, Lyrical Campaigns: Selected Poems (London: Virago, 1989). Jordan, Lyrical Campaigns, 71.

NOTES

163

66. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, translated by Thomas Burger (London: Polity Press, 1989), 160. 67. Craig Calhoun, “Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere,” Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 24. 68. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 160. 69. Phillip Lopate, “Issues of Language,” Journal of an Experiment: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, edited by Herbert Koch (Washington DC: Teachers and Writers, 1979), 102. 70. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 145, 146. 71. Henry Giroux, Schooling for Democracy: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1989). The latter position been suggested by, e.g., Carol A Stabile, “Another Brick in the Wall: Recontextualisng the Crisis,” Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics and the Crises of the Humanities, edited by Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson (London: Routledge, 1996). 72. Koch, Journal of an Experiment. 73. Phillip Lopate has suggested that the program depended upon “a curiously shrunken view of the American poetic tradition; which jumps directly from American Indian songs to William Carlos Williams, Gregory Corso and Nikki Giovanni.” Yet, Lopate also notes that this aesthetic homogeneity was the result of the failure of its own utopian aims, of a financial system that is “premised on hiring workers who would live below the annual living wage, who will accept a transient ‘consultant status’ and who, cannot, therefore, risk experimentalism,” Phillip Lopate, “Issues of Language,” Journal of an Experiment: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, edited by H. Koch (Washington, D.C: Teachers and Writers, 1979), 340. 74. Patricia Mann has suggested the ways in which events at City College can be understood as exemplary of the changing conditions of the “public.” Patricia Mann, “Unifying Discourse: City College as a Postmodern Public Sphere,” Social Text 25, no. 6 (1990). 75. June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, edited by Lauren Muller and the Poetry for the People Collective (New York: Routledge, 1995). 76. June Jordan, Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (London: Virago, 1987), 10. 77. June Jordan, Moving Towards Home, 10–13. 78. June Jordan and Terri Bush, eds., The Voice of the Children (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1968). 79. June Jordan, Dry Victories (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1972), 75. 80. June Jordan, Moving Towards Home, 29. 81. Jordan, His Own Where (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1971), 87.

164

NOTES

82. Jordan, His Own Where, 66. 83. Jordan, Moving Towards Home, 31. 84. June Jordan, “Report from the Bahamas,” Ethics: A Feminist Reader, edited by Elizabeth Frazer, Jennifer Hornsby, and Sabina Lovibond (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 226. 85. Jordan, “Report from the Bahamas,” 232. The essay was originally published in the short-lived British journal Emergency. This publication aimed to offer itself as a corrective, the final editorial ruefully notes, to the “suicidal inability” of British socialism in the mid-1980s “to move beyond the most basic assumptions of Marxism and the structures of the nation state.” Despite the obvious prescience of such an aim, the profound and active polarities of British politics in the mid-1980s, and the journal’s publishing of seminal “Black Atlantic” figures such as Toni Morrison, Isaac Julien, Kobena Mercer, and Paul Gilroy, it “failed in the market” after four editions. Jordan’s close attention in the essay to the inadequacy of the language of subject positions in the face of transnational economics makes this failure even more ironical. Mark Ainley, Peter Ayrton, Wendy Falconer, Max Farrar, Paul Gilroy, Kate Pullinger and Mandy Rose, Vron Ware, “Editorial,” Emergency 4 (1986). 86. June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays (Boston: South End Press, 1985). 87. June Jordan, Directed by Desire, 325. 88. Jordan, Directed by Desire, 327. 89. Jordan, Directed by Desire, 331. 90. Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the West in American Literary History (Wesleyan: University Press of New England, 1993), 24. 91. Susan Howe, The Western Borders (Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1976), 90. 92. Howe, The Western Borders, 99. 93. Recent criticism has made much of Howe’s development of a visual aesthetic for feminist poetics: see Craig Douglas Dworkin, “ ‘Waging Political Babble’: Susan Howe’s Visual Prosody and the Politics of Noise,” Word and Image 12, no. 4 (1996); Kathleen Fraser, Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2000); Alan Golding, “Susan Howe’s Visual Poetics,” We Who Love to be Astonished, edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue (Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press, 2001). 94. Howe, The Birth-Mark, 4 and 7. 95. Howe, The Birth-Mark, 2. 96. Richard Middleton describes the battle Hope Atherton was involved in: The conflict was the natural result of population pressure on the Native peoples immediately to the west and north, notably the Wampanoags, Narraganseetts, Mohegans and Nipmuncks [ . . . ] The new Englanders sent a combined force under Josiah Winslow against them which killed 300 men, women and children. This assault promptly increased support for Metacomet, since most

NOTES

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111.

112.

165

American Indians now realised they were fighting for their lives [ . . . ] Most notable was the routing of a force under Captain Turner in the Connecticut Valley in which forty of Turner’s men were killed [ . . . ] By the summer of 1676 it was all over. The American Indians of Southern new England had effectively been reduced to a few remnants cooped up in special villages, their way of life and environment destroyed forever. Richard Middleton, Colonial America: A History 1607–1760 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 127. It was the rout against Captain Turner that Atherton, in becoming separated from his regiment, escaped. Peter Nicholls has suggested that Howe’s account of this battle was taken from George Sheldon’s A History of Deerfield: Massachusetts 1895–96 (Somersworth, NH: New Hampshire Publishing, 1972); Peter Nicholls, “Unsettling the West: Susan Howe’s Historicism,” Contemporary Literature 37, no. 4 (1996). Susan Howe, The Singularities (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 4. Howe, The Singularities, 4. Howe, The Birth-Mark, 89. Howe, The Singularities, 6. Howe, The Singularities, 12. Howe, The Singularities, 12. Howe, The Singularities, 41. In “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau famously asks whether “democracy” can be seen as the “last improvement possible in Government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognising and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened state, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived,” William Henry Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” Political Writings/Thoreau, edited by Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 21. Howe, The Singularities, 42. Howe, The Singularities, 55, 50, and 52. Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics; From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 86–87. Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics, 88. Howe, The Singularities, 64. Howe, The Singularities, 67. Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” American Philosophies: An Anthology, edited by Leonard Harris, Scott L. Pratt, and Anne S. Waters (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 408. Susan Howe, “An Interview with Susan Howe Conducted by Edward Foster,” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 4 (1990), 173.

166

NOTES

113. Brown, States of Injury, 8–9. 114. Erica Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, edited by Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof Books, 1990), 204. 115. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). 116. Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” 205. 117. Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus, 6. 118. Erica Hunt and Alison Saar, Arcade (Berkeley: Kelsey St. Press, 1996), 28. 119. Hunt and Saar, Arcade, 26–27. 120. Erica Hunt, Local History (New York: Roof Books, 1993), 57. 121. Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” 204. 122. Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” 204. 123. Hunt, Local History, 57.

2

The Poetics of Privacy: Writing the Lyric Self

1. Bill Moyers, The Languages of Life (New York: Main Street Books, 1996), xii–xiv. 2. Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Between Community and Institution (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 3. Richard M. Merelman, Partial Visions: Culture and Politics in Britain, Canada and the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 59. 4. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 172. 5. Warner, The Trouble with Normal, 171. 6. Debra Morris, “Privacy, Privation, Perversity: Towards New Representations of the Personal,” Signs 25, no. 2 (2000), 325. 7. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 26. 8. Drucilla Cornell, At the Heart of Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 39. 9. Charles Altieri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 10. Oskar Negt, and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,1993), 15. 11. Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 15. 12. The obvious and important exception to this is the work of Adrienne Rich. See Altieri, Self and Sensibility; Walter Kalaidjian, Languages of

NOTES

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

167

Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Holden assumes a dichotomy between men and women’s poetry, suggesting that “male” poetry “although realistic in setting and characterization” tends to be a poetry of “sensibility” whereas “female” poetry “though often anguished and passionate, attempts to deal realistically with questions of history, ideology, social and personal responsibility—to deal with ideas rather than “feelings.” Jonathan Holden, The Fate of American Poetry (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1991), 29. Extended Outlooks: The Iowa Review of Women Writers, edited by Jane Cooper, Gwen Head, and Marcia Southwick (New York: MacMillan, 1982). Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Diane Elam, e.g., suggests that the simultaneity of deconstruction and feminism in the academy produces the “political institution in which non-political thought can occur and the non-political institution in which political thought can occur”; Diane Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme (London: Routledge, 1994), 94. Henry Giroux, “Modernism, Postmodernism and Feminism,” Postmodernism, Feminism and Cultural Politics, edited by Henry Giroux (Albany: State University of New York, 1991). Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985). Henry Giroux, “Modernism, Postmodernism and Feminism,” Postmodernism, Feminism and Cultural Politics, 56. Michael Bérubé, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centres: Tolson, Pynchon and the Politics of the Canon (New York: Cornell University Press, 1992), 36. Stephen Wilbers, The Iowa Writers Workshop: Origins, Emergence and Growth (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1980). John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1938), 328. Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 86. Dave Smith, Local Assays (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 222. D.G. Myers, The Elephants Teaching: Creative Writing since 1880 (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996), 168. Wendell Berry, “The Specialization of Poetry,” Hudson Review 28 (1975), 12. Berry, “The Specialization of Poetry,” 16–17. Berry, “The Specialization of Poetry,” 25. This anxiety was repeated in other critical writing of the 1970s, such as Charles Molesworth, The

168

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

NOTES

Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979) and was still present in much later texts such as Ross Talarico, Spreading the Word: Poetry and the Survival of Community in America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture, 46. Joseph Epstein, “Who Killed Poetry?” Commentary 86, no. 2 (1988), 20. George Garret, “The Future of Creative Writing Programs,” Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy, edited by Joseph Moxley (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers in English, 1989). Yet an account more vexed and more complex than this lapserian narrative of academic rationalization has also been proposed. Lorenzo Thomas, e.g., has noted that the “anti-communist and anti-industrial stance” of the Southern Agrarians so active in Iowa in the 1920s and 1930s was profoundly implicated in a white supremacism that could uniquely afford to be so nostalgic about the “southern way of life.” Lorenzo Thomas, Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Birmingham: Alabama University Press, 2000), 86. Walter Kalaidjian has similarly noted that the cultural politics of this particular form of New Criticism was based not simply on a reaction against a newly powerful consumer culture but also on a fascistically “proactive, anti-Communist agenda.” Walter Kaladjian, “Marketing Modern Poetry and the Southern Public Sphere,” Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization Rereading, edited by Kevin J.H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 302. Walter Kalaidjian, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 23. Paul Engle, “The Writer on Writing,” On Creative Writing, edited by Paul Engle (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1964). Paul Engle, “In Defense of the State University,” The Saturday Evening Post, February 13, 1960, Vol. 232, Issue 33, 22. Robert Dana, “Preface,” A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, edited by Robert Dana (Iowa: Iowa University Press, 1999), x. This was an assumption shared by Stegner. See Wallace Stegner, On the Teaching of Creative Writing (Hanover, NH: Montogomery Endowment, Dartmouth College, 1988). Paul Engle, “The Writer and the Place,” A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 5. Paul Engle, “The Creative Person in a World of Conflict,” Education during World Transition, edited by Charles M. Allen (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1951), 38. Paul Engle, “The International Writing Program,” The Miami Herald, February 26, 1976.

NOTES

169

39. Paul Engle, “The Writer and the Place,” 108. Yet this extravagance had its limitations; the Workshop’s “multiculturalism” did not appear to always extend to African Americans. Michael Harper’s account of the program is astringent; he recounts being accepted by a community of African American athletes rather than writers, and finding employment difficult upon leaving because of his referees mentioning his race, despite it being illegal to do so. See A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 40. William Hogan, “Paul Engle among the Midland Medici,” The San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday March 27, 1962. 41. Paul Engle, “Engle Discusses Role of the Teacher-Writer in American Universities in Times Article” from On Iowa: September-October, 1955, 6. 42. Rita Dove, “Introduction to the Best of American Poetry 2000,” Best American Poetry 2000, edited by Rita Dove (New York: Scribner, 2000), 17. 43. Dove, “Introduction to the Best of American Poetry 2000,” 23. 44. Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture and Joseph Epstein, “Who Killed Poetry?” Commentary 86, no. 2 (1988). 45. Rita Dove, The Poet’s World (Washington DC: The Library of Congress, 1995), 67. 46. Dove, The Poet’s World, 66. 47. Alison Booth, “Abduction and Other Severe Pleasures,” Callaloo 19, no. 1 (1996), 125. 48. Booth, “Abduction and Other Severe Pleasures,” 125. 49. Carol Muske, Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography and the Shape of the Self (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 92. 50. Arnold Rampersad, “The Poems of Rita Dove,” Callaloo, 9 no. 1 (1986), 53. 51. Dove, Grace Notes, 51. 52. Dove, Grace Notes, 41. 53. Zofia Burr, Of Women, Poetry and Power (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 185. 54. “Remarks at Millennium Lecture Series, April 22nd 1988” released on the Internet by the Office of the Press Secretary, The White House. The Internet webpage for this event was removed after the 2001 presidential election. 55. Rita Dove, On the Bus with Rosa Parks (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 69. 56. Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, xxx. 57. Pat Parker, Movement in Black: An Expanded Edition (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1999), 122. 58. Dove, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, 78. 59. Dove, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, 79–80. 60. Dove, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, 83.

170

NOTES

61. Marable Manning, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990 (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1991). What proportion of the AfroAmerican community experienced these positive changes remains contested. William Chafe suggested that as many as 35–45% of black families succeeded in achieving a middle-class lifestyle while Marable Manning suggests it may be as low as 7–10%. William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 62. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by J.N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 288. 63. Luce Irigaray, “The Eternal Irony of the Community,” Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 226. 64. Rita Dove, The Darker Face of the Earth (Brownsville: Storyline Press, 1994), 115. 65. Dove, The Darker Face of the Earth, 117. 66. See Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: American in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 118. 67. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by P. Williams and L. Chrishman (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). 68. Kevin Stein, Private Poets, Worldy Acts: Public and Private History in Contemporary American Poetry (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996), 146. 69. Carolyn Forché, Gathering the Tribes (Yale: Yale University Press, 1976), 4. 70. Forché, Gathering the Tribes, 4–5. 71. Forché, Gathering the Tribes, 34. 72. Forché, Gathering the Tribes, 53. 73. Carolyn Forché, “Foreword to Inside Apartheid: One Woman’s Struggle in South Africa,” Inside Apartheid: One Woman’s Struggle in South Africa, edited by Janet Levine (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1988). Forché also wrote the text for El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers, edited by Susan Meisela, Harry Matthison, and Fae Rubenstein (New York: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-Operative, 1984). 74. Michael Greer, “Politicising the Modern: Carolyn Forché in El Salvador and America,” The Centennial Review xxx, no. 2 (1986), 168. 75. Carolyn Forché, The Country between Us (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 16. 76. Forché, The Country between Us, 16. 77. Jonathan Holden, Style and Authenticity in Postmodern American Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 76. 78. Robert Pinsky, The Poet and the World (New York: Ecco Press, 1988). 79. Forché, The Country between Us, 28.

NOTES

171

80. Carolyn Forché, “Sensibility and Responsibility,” The Writer and Human Rights, edited by Toronto Arts Group for Human Rights (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 23–24. 81. Carolyn Forché, “Roundtable Comments,” The Centennial Review xxx, no. 2 (1986), 130. 82. Carolyn Forché, “The Writer in Politics,” The Writer in Politics, edited by William Gass and Lorin Cuoco (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1996), 141. 83. Forché, “The Writer in Politics,” 141. 84. Forché, “The Writer in Politics,” 139. 85. Forché, “The Writer in Politics,” 136. 86. Carolyn Forché, “Introduction,” Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forché (New York: Norton, 1993), 31. 87. Carolyn Forché, “On Subjectivity,” Onward: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, edited by Peter Baker (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 350. 88. Carolyn Forché, The Angel of History (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), Preface. 89. Carolyn Forché, “ ‘Culture, Canon, Curriculum’: A Response to ‘The Opening of the American Mind’ by Lawrence Levine,” November 25, 1997 (http:///osf1.gmu.edu/forchem/oldsite/culturalcanon.html. Last accessed 6.23.03). 90. Bill Roorbach, Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2. This genre is, as such a broad definition implies, also much broader and less politically coherent than Forché’s interpretation of it perhaps suggests. In its institutionalized forms, the genre can include diaries, journals, memoirs, personal essays, cultural criticism, and travelogues. 91. Carolyn Forché, “The New Literature,” Writing Creative NonFiction: Instructions and Insights from the Teachers of the AWP, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (New York: Writer’s Digest Books, 2001). 92. Carolyn Forché, The Angel of History (from unpaginated part V). 93. In an interview given in 1991 Forché discussed reactions to the ending of the cold war and the historical redrawing of the political-geographic map of her political identifications, being moved at being able to see her family in Czechoslovakia and her anxieties about the “cataclysmic change” of the world order as the democratic structures of the West appeared to be in crisis at the very moment of the “political collapse of totalitarianism.” Carolyn Forché, “Interview,” Points of Departure: International Writers on Writing and Politics, edited by David Montenegro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 63. 94. Forché, “The Writer in Politics,” 139. 95. Shoshona Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanlaysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), xvii. 96. Forché, The Angel of History, 27.

172 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

105.

106. 107.

108. 109.

110.

111. 112. 113. 114.

115. 116. 117.

NOTES

Forché, The Angel of History, 25. Forché, The Angel of History, 28. Forché, The Angel of History, 42. Forché, The Angel of History, 43. Forché, The Angel of History, 34. Forché, The Angel of History, 34. Forché, The Angel of History, 82. Carolyn Forché, “Emergence,” Writing Creative NonFiction: Instructions and Insights from the Teachers of the AWP, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard. Helen Vendler, “Ascent into Limbo,” The New Republic, July 11, 1994, 27, 28. Cited in Thomas Gardner, “Introduction,” Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry, edited by Thomas Gardner (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 4. Robert N. Caspar, “About Jorie Graham: A Profile,” Ploughshares Winter (2001–02), 194. Mark Wunderlich, “Interview with Jorie Graham: The Glorious Thing,” American Poet 3, Fall (1996). Reprinted on the “Jorie Graham” page at the website for The Academy of American Poets (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15774. Last accessed September 2006). Wunderlich, “Interview with Jorie Graham: The Glorious Thing.” Jorie Graham, “Introduction,” Best American Poetry 1990 (New York: Collier Books, 1990). Reprinted on the “Jorie Graham” page at the website for The Academy of American Poets (http:// www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15774. Last accessed September 2006). Jorie Graham, “A Presidential Lecture by Writer’s Workshop and English Department Associate Professor Jorie Graham,” University of Iowa, February 3, 1991. Mark Wunderlich, “Interview with Jorie Graham: The Glorious Thing.” Mark Wunderlich, “Interview with Jorie Graham: The Glorious Thing.” Kirstin Hotelling Zona, “Jorie Graham and American Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 4 (2005). Cynthia Hogue, “The Speaking Subject In/Me: Gender and Ethical Subjectivity in the Poetry of Jorie Graham,” Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry, edited by Thomas Gardner (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 242. Helen Vendler, The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 82. Jorie Graham, “Manifest Destiny,” The Dream of the Unified Field (Hopewell: Ecco Press, 1995), 183. Graham, “Manifest Destiny,” 189, 190.

NOTES

173

118. Jorie Graham, The Errancy (London: Carcanet Press, 1998), 1. 119. Graham, The Errancy, 2 and 3. 120. Isobel Armstrong, “Writing from the Broken Middle,” Women: A Cultural Review 9, no. 1 (1998), 72. 121. Graham, The Errancy, 3. 122. Graham, The Errancy, notes. 123. Graham, The Errancy, 67. 124. Graham, The Errancy, 70. 125. Graham, The Errancy, 70. 126. Jorie Graham, “In/Silence,” Never (London: Carcanet, 2002), 13. 127. Jorie Graham, Overlord (London: Carcanet Press, 2005), 2. 128. Graham, “Praying (Attempt of June 14 03),” Overlord, 33. 129. Graham, “Commute Sentence,” Overlord, 73. 130. Graham, “Passenger” and “Copy (Attacks on the Cities 2000–2003),” Overlord, 71, 75. 131. Graham, “Spoken from the Hedgerows,” Overlord, 40. 132. Graham, “Passenger,” Overlord, 71. 133. Graham, “Posterity,” Overlord, 87, 88. 134. Altieri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry.

3

Against the Outside: Language Poetry as a Counter-Public

1. Rae Armantrout, Necromance (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1991), 19. 2. Rae Armantrout, “Why Don’t Women Do Language Orientated Writing?” In the American Tree: Language, Realism, Poetry, edited by Ron Silliman (Orono: National Poetry Foundation Inc., 1986), 544. 3. Rae Armantrout, “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity,” Sagetrieb 11, no. 3 (1992), 9. 4. Rae Armantrout, “Cheshire Poetics,” EPC (http://epc.buffalo. edu/authors/armantrout/poetics.html. Last accessed January 06). 5. Miriam Hansen, “Foreword” to Negt and Kluge’s Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxxvi. 6. Ron Silliman et al., “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry,” Social Text 19, no. 20 (1988), 271. 7. Silliman et al., “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry,” 271. 8. The shift has been variously narrated by its participants: one of the most obviously controversial accounts was the public discussion that followed the publication of Bob Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) in The Impercipient Lecture Series 1, no. 4 (1997).

174

NOTES

9. Andreas Huyssen’s “map” of the postmodern suggests that the potential that the apparent loss of modernity’s authoritative narratives had proffered to the radical political and cultural movements in the 1960s had given way by the following decade. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1988), 170. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984). 10. Charles Bernstein, “The Conspiracy of ‘Us,’ ” The L=A=N=G=U= A=G=E Book, edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 187. 11. Ron Silliman, “Canons and Institutions: New Hope for the Disappeared,” Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, edited by Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof Books, 1990), 160. 12. Andrew Ross/Barrett Watten, “From Reinventing Community: A Symposium on/with Language Poets” In Aerial 8: Contemporary Poetics as Critical Theory, edited by Ron Smith (Washington DC: Edge Books, 1995), 192. 13. Ron Silliman et al., “For Change” In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986), 486. 14. Linda Reinfield’s relatively early Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue maintains that the “commitment to rescue” that Language writing brings about is its “restoring [of] the reader.” Linda Reinfield, Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 32. See also Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 31, and Hank Lazer, Opposing Poetries: Volume One—Issues and Institutions (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 40. 15. Andrew Ross, “The New Sentence and the Commodity Form: Recent American Writing,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 375. 16. Ross, “The New Sentence and the Commodity Form,” 368. 17. Andrew Ross, The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 211. 18. Ross, “The New Sentence and the Commodity Form,” 376. 19. Terry Eagleton damned theories that privileged the reader in this way, suggesting that they are “equivalent in some sense to worker’s cooperatives within capitalism, readers may hallucinate that they are actually writers, reshaping government handouts on the legitimacy of limited nuclear war into symbolist poems” and that the job of “socialist criticism” should “not be primarily concerned with the consumer’s revolution. Its task is to take over the means of production,” Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: Verso, 1986), 184. 20. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 31. Jameson’s attack upon the

NOTES

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

175

implicit political abeyance of Language writing found sympathy within practitioners of the avant-garde American poetic itself. Later critics such as Vernon Shetley suggested, more cautiously, that Language writing’s reliance “on the academy to produce the sophisticated, theoretically inclined readers it assumes” was evidence of the limitations of its efficacy. Vernon Shetley, After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 159. For Shetley, the necessary “knowingness” of the reader reveals a “high and unargued value” upon self-consciousness rather than literary value, and that what differentiates the work of Robert Frost from Charles Bernstein “is the latter’s superior awareness of the many ways of reading his poetry,” 141. Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 27, 28. Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Between Community and Institution (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999); Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Walter Kalaidjian, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Lazer, Opposing Poetries; Jed Rasula, The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects 1940–1990 (National Council of Teachers in English, 1996). Charles Bernstein, “Community and the Individual Talent,” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 26, no. 3–4 (1996), 177. Bernstein. “Community and the Individual Talent,” 182. Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the U.K., edited by Maggie O’Sullivan (London: Reality Street, 1996); Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, edited by Margaret Sloan (Jersey City: Talisman, 1998); Megan Simpson, Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women’s Language-Orientated Writing (Suny: State University of New York Press, 2000); Ann Vickery, Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Geneaology of Language Writing (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000); We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics, edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001). Vickery, Leaving Lines of Gender, 11. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Marianne DeKoven, “Male Signature, Female Aesthetic: The Gender Politics of Experimental Writing,” Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, edited by Ellen G. Frideman and Miriam Fuchs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 79. Joan Retallack, “:RE:THINKING: LITERARY: FEMINISM: (Three Essays onto Shaky Grounds),” Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry

176

30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

NOTES

and Theory, edited by Lynn and Christanne Miller Keller (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 375. Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1986). Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” The Inner World and Joan Riviere: Collected Papers: 1920–1958, edited By Athol Hughes (London: Karnac Books, 1991). Daniel Miller, “Consumption as the Vanguard of History,” Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, edited by Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 1995). Teresa De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (London: MacMillan, 1987), 26. Teresa De Lauretis, “Guerrilla in the Midst: Women’s Cinema in the 80s,” Screen 31, no. 1 (1990), 6–25, 16. Lyn Hejinian, “The Person and Description,” Poetics Journal 9 (1991), 167, 170. Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” Poetics Journal 4 (1984), 134. Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” 130. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 106. Lyn Hejinian, “Language and Realism,” The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 88–89. Both “Redo” and “The Guard” were republished in The Cold of Poetry (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1994), 14. Hejinian, The Cold of Poetry, 91. Hejinian, The Cold of Poetry, 96. Hejinian, The Cold of Poetry, 105. Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry. See also Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2001). Lyn Hejinian, My Life (2nd ed.) (New York: Sun and Moon Press, 1987), 101. Hejinian, My Life, 92. Lyn Hejinian, “Reason,” The Language of Inquiry, 340. See also Peter Nicholls, “Phenomenal Poetics: Reading Lyn Hejinian,” Postwar American Poetry: The Mechanics of the Mirage, edited by Christine Pagnoulle and Michel Delville (Liège: Université deLiège, 2000). Hejinian, “Reason,” 345. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xvi. Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 108. Hejinian, “The Person and Description,” 166–167.

NOTES

177

52. Lyn Hejinian, Michael Davidson, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman, Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (San Fransisco: Mercury House Incorporated, 1991), 34. 53. Lyn Hejinian, Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (Great Barrington: The Figures, 1991), 63. 54. Hejinian, Oxota, 22. 55. Lyn Hejinian, “A Local Strangeness: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian,” Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative Authors, edited by Larry McCaffery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 129. 56. Hejinian, Oxota, 12. 57. Hejinian, Oxota, 11. 58. Hejinian, “A Local Strangeness,” 129. 59. Hejinian, Oxota, 11, 22. 60. Hejinian, Oxota, 49 61. Hejinian, Oxota, 36. 62. Hejinian, Oxota, 153. 63. Hejinian, Oxota, 37. 64. Hejinian, Oxota, 89. 65. Hejinian, Oxota, 60. 66. Hejinian, Oxota, 206. 67. Hejinian, Oxota, 270. 68. Hejinian, Oxota, 192. 69. Hejinian, Oxota, 93. 70. Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino, Sight (Washington DC: Edge Books, 1999), from unpaginated introduction. 71. Hejinian, Sight, from unpaginated introduction. 72. Scalapino, Sight, from unpaginated introduction. 73. Leslie Scalapino, The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), 16. 74. Scalapino, The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence, 22. 75. Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 50. 76. Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography, 2. 77. Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography, 28. 78. Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography, 29. 79. Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography, 23. 80. Ron Silliman et al., “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry,” Social Text 19, no. 20 (1988). 81. For Merleau-Ponty it is in the act of perception that physical existence turns into “being”: “I grasp myself, not as a constituting subject which is transparent to itself, and which constitutes the totality of every possible object of thought and experience, but as a particular thought, as a thought engaged with certain objects, as a thought in act [ . . . ] Thus I can get outside the psychological cogito, without,

178

NOTES

82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

however, taking myself to be a universal thinker.” M. Merleau Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenal Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 22. Leslie Scalapino, that they were at the beach (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 3. Marjorie Perloff, “Soundings: Zaum, Seriality and the Recovery of the Sacred,” American Poetry Review 15, no. 1 (1986), 45. Mark Jarman, “Singers and Storytellers,” The Hudson Review 39, no. 2 (1986), 335. Gary Lenhart, “Avant-Garde or Postmodern?: Review of Leslie Scalapino’s that they were at the beach and Fanny Howe’s Robeson Street,” American Book Review 9, no. 1 (1987), 14. Scalapino, The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence, 25. Leslie Scalapino, R-hu (Berkeley: Atelos, 2000), 100. Scalapino, R-hu, 103. Leslie Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography, 36. Hejinian, Oxota, 211. Leslie Scalapino, The Front Matter, Dead Souls (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 1. Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 54. Scalapino, The Front Matter, 49. Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Zillah R. Eisenstein, The Color of Gender: Reimagining Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Eisenstein, The Color of Gender, 77. Scalapino, The Front Matter, 49. Max Winter, “Harsh Words,” The Bay Guardian, May 1996. Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography, 21. Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography, 22 and 23.

4

Go Grrrl: Democracy and Counterculture

1. Loss Pequeˇno Glazier, Small Press: An Annotated Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 63. 2. Maria Damon, “Post-Literary Poetry,” Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies and the Public Sphere, edited by Amitava Kumar (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 46. One important exception to the prevalent neglect with which small press poetry has been treated is Maria Damon’s, The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 3. Glazier, Small Press, 2.

NOTES

179

4. Len Fulton, Directory of Poetry Publishers (Paradise, CA: Dustbooks, 1990). Interestingly, baseball, martial arts, ornithology, and Star Trek are all assigned numerous poetry journals while socialism only one. Mary Biggs’s work A Gift that Cannot Be Refused: The Writing and Publishing of Contemporary Poetry (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990) also provides an important account of the working of the small press. 5. Len Fulton, “Anima Risin’: Little Magazines in the Sixties,” American Libraries 2, no. 1 (1971), 25. 6. Fulton, “Anima Risin: Little Magazines in the Sixties,” 33. 7. Glazier, Small Press, 2. 8. In this, Baskinski and Bertholt were doing work similar to other librarians who were concerned with the implications of this culture for the archivist. Jason Kucsma, “Preserving Zines in the Library: Countering Marginalisation and Extinction,” Zine Guide 3, Winter/Spring (2000) and Chris Dodge, “Pushing the Boundaries: Zines and Libraries,” Wilson Library Bulletin 69, no. 9 (1995). The difficulties of recording information about the small press as they are frequently unpaginated, undated, and even unnumbered (or, alternatively, these conventions are openly mocked, as in the example of Photostatic) inevitably render some of the following references less than exhaustive. 9. Michael Basinski and Robert J. Bertholt, “From Concrete Poem to Zine Display,” Robert Lax and Concrete Poetry, edited by Anthony Bannan (Buffalo: Burchfield Art Centre, 1991). 10. Michael Warner, Publics and CounterPublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 192. 11. Warner, Publics and CounterPublics, 203. 12. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 4. 13. Dan Raphael, “Editorial,” Co-Lingua, 34 (undated), 1. 14. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxxii. 15. John Held, Mail Art: An Annotated Bibliography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1991). 16. Karen Elliot, “Introducing Mail Art: A Karen Elliot Interview with CrackerJack Kid and Honoria,” Postmodern Culture 3, no. 2 (1997), unpaginated. 17. Fulton, “Anima Risin,” 30. 18. Stephen Perkins, Approaching the 80s Zine Scene and Subspace; International Zine Show (Iowa City: Plagiarist Press, 1992). 19. Stewart Home, The Art Strike Papers (Brighton: Authority, 1991). 20. The persona of Karen Elliot is, itself, a play on cultural assumptions about authorship. She is not an individual person but a pseudonym for

180

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

NOTES

various pieces of collective writing published by the Dialectical Immaterialism Press. Karen Elliot, Censorship: Existence as Commodity and Strategies for Its Negation (Dialectical Immaterial Press, 1990), unpaginated. Elliot, Censorship. Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 97. Drucker. The Visible Word, 43. Harry Polkinhorn, Photostatic, 40, December (1989), 1502. Johanna Drucker, “Feminism, Theory, Art Practice,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory and Criticism, edited by Mira Schor and Susan Bee (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000). Fe-Mail-Art, edited by Anna Banana, Vile 6 (Berkeley: Dossier Editions, 1978); About Vile: Mail, Art, News and Photos from the Eternal Network, edited by Anna Banana (Vancouver: Banana Productions, 1983). Stephen Paul Martin, “Editorial,” Central Park Spring, 11, no. 3 (1987). Janet Janet was explicitly engaged with Art Strike movement; she was editor of the zine Schism, which published a parody of the ten-step program during the art strike, with each page containing a list of questions, such as: “TODAY I DID NOT / MAKE ART / EXHIBIT ART / SELL ART / BUY ART,” Schism 24 (1990). Photostatic 32, September 1988, 1140. Maria Gitin, “EAT EAT EAT,” Co-Lingua 34 (undated), 14. Gitin, Co-Lingua 34 (undated) 14. Ruthann Robson, “Sugar,” Slipstream 10 (1990), 88. Kathy Acker, “Critical Languages,” Kathy Acker: Bodies of Work (London: Serpents Tail, 1997), 82. Kathy Acker, “Devoured by Myths: An Interview with Sylvere Lotringer,” Hannibal Lecter, My Father, edited by Kathy Acker (New York: Columbia University, 1991), 2. Acker, “Devoured by Myths,” 4. Linda S. Kauffman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 221. Acker, “Devoured by Myths,” 9. Acker, “Devoured by Myths,” 10. Kathy Acker, Implosion (New York: Wedge Press, 1983). Kathy Acker, “Proposition One,” The Artist in Society: Rights, Roles and Responsibilities (Chicago: New Art Examiner Press, 1994), 38. Acker, “Devoured by Myths,” 19. Carla Harryman, “Acker Un-Formed,” Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker, edited by Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman, and Avital Ronnell (London: Verso, 2006), 36.

NOTES

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

181

Acker, “Devoured by Myths,” 5. Acker, “Devoured by Myths,” 6. Acker, “Devoured by Myths,” 4, 5. Kathy Acker, “POLITICS (My First Work. Written When 21 Years Old,” Hannibal Lecter, My Father, edited by Kathy Acker (New York: Columbia University, 1991), 25. Kathy Acker, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by The Black Tarantula (New York: TVRT Press, 1975), 133. Acker, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, 141. Robert Glück, “The Greatness of Kathy Acker,” Lust for Life, 49. Robert Glück, “The Greatness of Kathy Acker,” Lust for Life, 51. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 67. Glazier, Small Press, 2. Joan Jobe Smith and Marilyn Johnson, “Editorial,” Pearl 1, Spring (1974), 1. Geraldine King, “My Purring Reviews,” Purr 5 (1976), 2. Judson Crews, “BEAD, YOU SAY, OF THE BLUE WICK,” Purr 5 (1976), unpaginated. Impetus 3, May (1985), 67. Impetus 3, May (1985), 67. Impetus: Female Four, February (1992), 18. Impetus 3, May (1985), 66. Cheryl Townsend, Pseudo Cop (Chicago: Mary Kuntz Press, 1995), 2. Townsend, Pseudo Cop, 3–6. Townsend, Pseudo Cop, 12. Townsend, Pseudo Cop, 16. Impetus 16, May (1989), 1. Drucker, The Visible Word, 93. Impish Impetus 2, November (1991), 32–33. Impish Impetus 2, November (1991), 32–33. Lyn Lifshin, Wormwood Review 26, no. 3 (1986), 103–109. R.S. Gwynn, “No Biz Like Po’ Biz,” Sewanee Review 100, no. 2 (1992). See also Len Fulton, “Sweepstakes,” Directory of Poetry Publishers (Paradise, CA: Dustbooks, 1990). W. Gregory Stewart, “For Lyn,” Plastic Tower 31 (1998), 23. Lyn Lifshin, Offered by the Owner (Cambridge, NY: Slohlm, 1978), 14. Lifshin, Offered by the Owner, 16. Lifshin, Offered by the Owner, 17. Lyn Lifshin, Cold Comfort (New York: Black Sparrow, 1996), 18. Lyn Lifshin, “Alberta Hunter,” Ms February (1984), 80. Lori Melton McKinnon, “Ms.ing the Free Press: The Advertising and Editorial Content of Ms. Magazine, 1972–1992,” The American Magazine: Research Perspectives and Prospects, edited by D. Abrahamson (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1995).

182

NOTES

78. Generalissimo, HE WANTS HIS MEAT IN THE WOMAN WHO IS DEAD (Forth Worth: Homemade Icecream Press, 1992), unpaginated. 79. Seth R Friedman, ed., The Factsheet Five Zine Reader: The Best Writing from the Underground World of Zines (New York: Three River Press, 1997), 10–11. These rather catholic self-definitions at least partly arose from the fact that this writing was concerned to explore the possibilities of cultures of independent publication that could extend beyond those that had supported poetry. Most obviously, the zine community was disdainful of the conventions of most poetry, especially that of the mainstream. The zine Bad Poetry Digest, e.g., is censorially critical of what it calls “private writing,” cynically noting that “NO ONE CAN BE BUSTED FOR BAD POETRY / WHICH IS UNSUPRISING / SO MUCH UNECESSARY VERBIAGE / PRINTED SPOKEN EMAILED FILMED FUCKED AND FRITTERED AWAY,” Daniel A. Russel, “Editorial comment,” Bad Poetry Digest, 6.1 (undated). Alternatively, this resistance to poetry seemed the result of a desire to radicalize minority forms of cultural production in ways that sat uncomfortably with the high points of American twentieth-century poetic production that appeared, by the 1980s, to have failed to offer political choices to the zine’s self-elected constituents. 80. Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zine and the Politics of Alternative Culture (New York: Verso, 1997), 3. 81. Duncombe, Notes from Underground, 2. 82. Jason Kucsma, “Preserving Zines in the Library: Countering Marginalisation and Extinction,” Zine Guide 3, Winter/Spring (2000) and Chris Dodge, “Pushing the Boundaries: Zines and Libraries,” Wilson Library Bulletin 69, no. 9 (1995). 83. Lone Wolff Prometheus, “Preface,” An Appeal to the Homeless: Self Sufficiency through Shoplifting (Washington DC: Nation of Thieves, 1996), 1. 84. Johnny R., Shouldn’t You Be Working 5, 3624 Conn. Ave. NW., Washington DC 2008. 85. Factsheet5, 61, April (1997), 7. 86. Pagan Kennedy, Zine: How I Found Six Years of My Life and Finally . . . Found Myself . . . I Think (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1995). 87. Mike Goldberg and Janice Gunderloy, The World of Zines: A Guide to the Independent Magazine Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1992); The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order, edited by M. Karp and Debbie Stalker (New York: Penguin, 1999). 88. Emily White “Revolution, Girl Style, Now,” Rock She Wrote, edited by Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers (New York: Delta, 1995; first published in LA Weekly, July 10–16, 1992), 396. 89. White, “Revolution, Girl Style, Now,” 397. 90. White, “Revolution, Girl Style, Now,” 402.

NOTES

183

91. Neil Nehring, Popular Music, Gender and Postmodernism: Anger Is an Energy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc., 1997), 156. 92. Ednie Kaeh Garrison, “US Feminism-Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub) Cultures and the Technologies of the Third Wave,” Feminist Studies 26, no. 1 (2000), 141. 93. Hillary Frey, “Kathleen Hanna’s Fire,” The Nation, January 13, 2003. 94. Karp and Stalker, “Herstory: Girls on Girls,” The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order, 309–310. 95. From Leah Angstman, ed., The Literature Collection: Poems from Some of the World’s Greatest Unknown Authors (Mason: Propaganda Press, 1999), 3. 96. Mary Celeste Kearney, “Don’t Need You: Rethinking Identity Politics and Separatism from a Grrrl Perspective,” Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World, edited by J. Epstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

5

Romantic Materialism and Emerging Poets

1. Gary Sullivan, “America, A Lineage,” Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics in the 1990s, edited by Mark Wallace and Steven Marks (Tuscaloosa and London: Alabama University Press, 2002), 41. 2. Wallace and Marks, “Introduction,” Telling It Slant, 1. 3. Joel Kuszai, ed., Poetics @ (New York: Roof Books, 1999). 4. Steve Evans, “The American Avant-Garde after 1989: Notes Toward a History,” Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally, edited by Romana Huk (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 88. 5. Lisa Jarnot, “Preface to an Anthology of New (American) Poets,” An Anthology of New (American) Poets, edited by Lisa Jarnot, Leonard Schwartz, and Chris Stroffolino (Jersey City: Talisman House, 1998), 2. 6. Jena Osman, “Introduction,” The Lab Book, edited by Jena Osman (Buffalo: Poetics Program, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1992), vii. 7. Osman “Introduction,” vii. 8. Mark Wallace, “Thrilled in the Upper Reaches of Doubt,” The Lab Book, 3. 9. Spahr, The Lab Book, 5. 10. Willis, The Lab Book, 6. 11. Daley, The Lab Book, 8. 12. The Apex of the M’s editorial stance was severely critical of what it understood to be Language writing’s inability to respond to the injustices in the social, suggesting that it is complicit with what it seeks to attack: “Self-conscious opacity in poetry, long before it counteracts or brings an end to the socio-cultural status quo, perhaps compounds the problems

184

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

NOTES

resulting from increasing rates of illiteracy and atomization in the public sphere, problems upon which global capitalism, supposedly the enemy of the avant-garde has come to depend.” Lew Daly, Alan Gilbert, Kristin Prevallet, Pam Rehm, “Editorial,” Apex of the M 1 (1993), 5. Gizzi, The Lab Book, 7. Mark Wallace, “Emerging Avant-Garde Poetries and the ‘Post Language’ Crisis,” Poetic Briefs 19, Supplement to August edition (1995). Mark Wallace, “With Romantic Materialism,” A Poetics of Criticism, edited by Juliana Spahr et al. (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994). Jefferson Hanson and Mark Wallace, “Is This a Mainstream Dialogue?” Central Park 24, Spring (1995). Mark Wallace, “Toward a Free Multiplicity of Form,” Telling It Slant. Wallace, “With Romantic Materialism,” 252. Wallace, “Toward a Free Multiplicity of Form,” 197. Pam Rehm, The Garment in Which No One Had Slept (Providence: Burning Deck Press,, 1993), 23. Lee Ann Brown, Polyverse (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1997). Linda Russo, “To Be Jack Spicer in a Dream: Joanne Kyger and the San Francisco Renaissance,” Jacket 7 (1999) and Elizabeth Willis, “Who Was Lorine Niedecker,” American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets Fall (2001). Ernest Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 97. Erica Hunt, Local History (New York: Roof Books, 1993), 57. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 100. Michael de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching,” Readers and Reading, edited by Anthony Bennet (London and New York: Longman, 1995), 157. Juliana Spahr et al., eds., A Poetics of Criticism (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994). Juliana Spahr, “Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism,” Telling It Slant, 409. Juliana Spahr, “Poetry, Academies, and Anarchy,” Poets and Writers 28, no. 6 (2000), 21–26. Kristen Prevallett, “Why Poetry Criticism Sucks,” Jacket 11, April (2000). Juliana Spahr and Jena Osman, “Introduction,” Chain 1 (1994), 129. Juliana Spahr, “Introduction,” American Women Poets in the Twenty First Century, edited by C. Rankine and J. Spahr (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 11. Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity, (Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2001), 13. Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy, 13. Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy, 14. Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy, 13. Juliana Spahr, Response (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1996), 9. Spahr, Response, 17, 31.

NOTES

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

185

Spahr, Response, 46. Spahr, Response, 90. Spahr, Response, 69. Spahr, Response, 62. Spahr, Response, 73. Juliana Spahr, things of each possible relation hashing against one another (Newfield, NY: Palm Press, 2003), 29. Juliana Spahr, Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 31. Spahr, Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You, 31. Spahr, Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You, 21. Spahr, Fuck You—Aloha— I Love You, 27. Spahr, Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You, 29. Spahr, Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You, 38, 39. Spahr, Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You, 47. Spahr, Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You, 53. Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy, 100. “A Conversation with Harryette Mullen, Farah Griffin, Michael Magee and Kristen Gallagher, 1997.” Selections from this conversation appear in the journal COMBO, 1 (Summer 1998), edited by Michael Magee. From a personal interview with Harryette Mullen, cited in Kate Pearcy’s “A Poetics of Opposition?: Race and the Avant-Garde,” from a paper given at The Conference of Contemporary Poetry, Rutgers, April 24–27, 1997. Harryette Mullen, “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” Diacritics 24, no. 2 (1994); Harryette Mullen, “Miscgenated Texts and Media Cyborgs: Technologies of Body and Soul,” Poetics Journal 9 (1991). Harryette Mullen, Trimmings (New York: Tender Buttons, 1991), 31. Harryette Mullen, S*PeRM**K*T (Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1992) (unpaginated). Harryette Mullen, “An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Calvin Bedient,” Callaloo 19, no. 3 (1996). Harryette Mullen, Muse and Drudge (Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1995), 80. Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 3. Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary, 6. Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary, 78. Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary, 78. In an interview with Calvin Bedient Mullen suggested that in Muse and Drudge she was “trying to make a text that did address various audiences, and so the various registers and different lexicons and different allusive potentials had to do with that diverse audience that

186

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80.

81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

NOTES

I want as my readers,” Mullen, “An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Calvin Bedient,” 664. Harryette Mullen, “Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded,” Boundary 2, Spring (1999), 199. Mullen, “Imagining the Unimagined Reader,” 199. Mullen, “Imagining the Unimagined Reader,” 199. Mullen, “Imagining the Unimagined Reader,” 199, 201. Harryette Mullen, “Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek,” MELUS 21, no. 1 (Spring) (1996), 4. Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary, jacket notes. Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 11. Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary, 34. Peter Mark Roget, Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (London: Longman, 1962). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) (New York: Houghton Mifflon Company, 2000), xxviii. Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary, 49. Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary, 10. Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary, 19. Mullen, “Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek,” 4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by P. Williams and L. Chrishman (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). Steve Evans’ turning of Robert Grenier’s seminal “I HATE SPEECH” assertion into a “hatred of identity,” e.g., advocates a practice capable of resisting “Capital as it now rushes, apparently unopposed, to close a deal long in negotiation, the deal whereby it at last achieves its dream of self-identity in the purge of its final, potentially fatal impurity—people” (Tuscaloosa and London: Alabama University Press, 2002), 13. This essay introduced both Writing from the New Coast and Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics in the 1990s. Lisa Jarnot “On Identity,” Passages 6: Three Takes from the Poetry Project’s Symposium on “Identity and Invention” May (1998). Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000) and Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (New York: Rutgers, 1987). Lisa Jarnot, One’s Own Language, Curriculum of the Soul (Canton, NY: The Institute of Further Studies, Glover Publishing, 2002), 2, 3. Lisa Jarnot, Some Other Kind of Mission (Providence: Burning Deck Press, 1996), 15. Jarnot, Some Other Kind of Mission, 17. Jarnot, Some Other Kind of Mission, 17.

NOTES

187

87. Lisa Jarnot, The Fall of Orpheus (Buffalo: Shaffaloff, 1993); Lisa Jarnot, Ring of Fire (Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 2001). 88. Jarnot, Some Other Kind of Mission, 64. 89. Jarnot, Some Other Kind of Mission, 96. 90. Jarnot, Some Other Kind of Mission, 23. 91. Jarnot, Some Other Kind of Mission, 23. 92. Robert Duncan, Dante: A Curriculum of the Soul 8 (Canton, NY: The Institute of Further Studies, 1974).


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Index

access/accessibility as mode of literary representation, 3, 8–9, 26, 58, 74, 75, 98–9, 100, 122, 136, 145 as social right, 26, 27, 29, 32, 47, 48, 97, 104, 126, 145, 152 See also consumption, democracy, literacy, public sphere Acker, Kathy, 110–14, 124, 127, 129 Blood and Guts, 112 The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, 111, 113–14 “POLITICS”, 111, 112–13 Alston, Charles, 23 Altieri, Charles, 2, 40, 70, 76, 79 anarchy, 34–5, 36, 37, 55, 71, 75, 92–3, 132, 137, 142, 152 Angelou, Maya, 50 Antin, David, 110 Arendt, Hannah, 5, 18, 19, 40 Armantrout, Rae, 73–5 “The Garden”, 73 Necromance, 73 “Why Don’t Women do Language Orientated Writing?” 74–5 Armstrong, Isobel, 67 Atherton, Hope, 32–3, 164n96 Autobiography, 15, 84–5, 92–3, 99, 148 AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs), 27, 44, 60, 64 Banana, Anna, 107, 146 Baraka, Amiri, 25

Basinski, Michael, 103, 104 Baudrillard, Jean, 78 Beach, Christopher, 7, 44, 48, 79 The Beat Poets, 21, 115, 131 Benhabib, Seyla, 4, 10, 17–20, 160n34 Benjamin, Walter, 59–60, 61, 107, 133 Bergvall, Caroline, 135 Berlant, Lauren, 114, 115, 129 Bernstein, Charles, 2, 3, 7, 77, 79, 92, 111, 132, 155n6 “Artifice of Absorption”, 79 Berry, Wendell, 44 Bertholt, Robert, 103, 162n53 Bérubé, Michael, 43 Black Arts Movement, 48–9 Black Mountain Poets, 110, 131 Bly, Robert, 1–2 body, the 31, 36, 56, 102, 103–4, 111, 112, 115, 122, 127, 128, 137, 143 Bolling, Patricia, 40 Booth, Alison, 49 Braidotti, Rosi, 14 Brown, Lee Ann, 134–5, 147 Polyverse, 135 Brown, Wendy, 6, 10, 16–17, 19, 20, 26, 35 Bukowski, Charles, 102–3, 115, 116 Bürger, Peter, 97 Burr, Zofia, 8, 50 Burroughs, William, 111, 112 Bush, Laura, 1, 5 Butler, Judith, 10, 17–20, 81

218

INDEX

Cassill, R. V., 44 Cisneros, Sandra, 145 Civil Rights movement, 53, 170n61 Clinton, Bill, 50, 53 Cole, Norma, 108 Collins, Billy, 2, 7 Colvin, Claudette, 52 consumption, 9, 19, 29, 31, 51, 97 cultural, 26, 75, 76, 104, 125–6 and gender, 9, 11, 26, 73–4, 81–2, 89–90, 121, 128–9 and race, 143 reading as, 8, 77–8, 81, 86, 122 See also access/accessibility Conte, Joseph, 78 Cornell, Drucilla, 5, 15, 40 counter-publics, see public sphere Creeley, Robert, 121 Crews, Judson, 115 Dahlen, Beverly, 133 Daly, Lew, 132, 133, 135 Damon, Maria, 8, 101, 178n2 Darragh, Tina, 127 de Certeau, Michel, 135–6, 145 De Lauretis, Teresa, 82 DeKoven, Marianne, 81 Deleuze and Guattari, 34 democracy as accountability, 16, 19–20, 40, 60, 62, 65 as advocacy, 4, 25, 55, 147 civic identity, 4, 5, 19 dissent, 1, 2, 38, 47, 101 free market, 3, 4, 9, 34, 46, 132 See also public sphere and access/accessibility Derrida, Jacques, 67 Desnos, Robert, 62 Di Prima, Diane, 20–1 Dickinson, Emily, 31 Dove, Rita, 10–11, 40, 47–55, 58, 59, 62–3, 64, 65, 70–1 “After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time before Bed”, 49–50

“American Poetry Lecture Evening”, 51 “Claudette Colvin Goes to Work”, 52 “Climbing In”, 52 The Darker Face of the Earth, 53–4 “The Enactment”, 52 “From My Couch I Rise”, 48 Grace Notes, 49–50 “A Handful of Inwardness”, 48 “Lady Freedom among the U.S.”, 51 Mother Love, 49, 53 On the Bus with Rosa Parks, 51–4 “Rosa”, 52 “Stepping Out”, 48 “Stitches”, 49–50 Thomas and Beulah, 53 Drucker, Johanna, 106–7, 108, 110, 119–20, 145–6 Duncan, Robert, 150–1 Duncombe, Stephen, 125 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 22–3 education, 25–6, 27–8, 42–3, 45–7, 60, 122, 145 163n71, n73, n74. See also access, literacy, workshop poetry Eliot, T. S., 67 Elliot, Karen, 106, 179n20 Ellison, Ralph, 23, 25 Engle, Hualing Nieh, 46 Engle, Paul, 43, 44–7, 63 Ensler, Eve, 107 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 58 Epstein, Joseph, 44, 48 Evans, Steve, 132, 147, 186n80 Felman, Shoshana, 61 Felski, Rita, 7, 148 feminism Butler-Benhabib debate, 17–19, 20 and class, 14, 100, 128

INDEX

community, 6, 80, 99, 107, 127, 137 identity, 5–6, 7, 9, 15, 16, 21, 49, 64–5, 121, 127 Ms, 123–4 and postmodernism, 14, 42, 47, 48, 127, 167n16 and post-structuralism, 14, 16 and psychoanalysis, 6, 16, 109 and public-private division, 5–7, 13, 39–40, 41, 58, 75 and race, 14, 16, 23–5 riot grrrl movement, 38, 126–9 and sex industry, 90, 112 second wave, 5, 13, 14, 20–1, 22–3, 48–9, 65, 122, 128, 135 and technology, 14 third wave, 6–7, 9, 10, 13–17, 83, 100, 126–7, 152 See also feminist aesthetics, feminist politics, gender, sexuality feminist aesthetics, 6–7, 9–10, 14–15, 21–3, 26, 36, 42, 49, 74, 75, 80–2, 83, 84, 93–4, 107, 108, 121, 135, 156n13, 160n34, 161n46 feminist politics, 5–6, 19, 26, 80, 93–4, 99, 115, 137 Fluxus, 105, 108 Forché, Carolyn, 10, 40, 54–63, 64, 65, 70–1, 145, 152 Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (ed.), 59 The Angel of History, 57–8, 59–62, 171n93 “Book Codes”, 60 “Burning the Tomato Worms”, 55 “The Colonel”, 56–7 The Country Between Us, 56–8 Gathering the Tribes, 55–6 “Mientras Dure Vida, Sobra el Tiempo”, 56

219

“Notebook of the Uprising”, 60–2 “Taking Off My Clothes”, 56 Fraser, Kathleen, 20–1, 22–3, 108 Fraser, Nancy, 6, 19, 20, 36 Frost, Robert, 5, 50, 175n20 Fulton, Alice, 65 Fulton, Len, 102–3, 106, 115, 121 Garrison, Ednie, 127 Gates, Henry Louis, 144 gender and agency, 18, 48, 51, 52, 80–2, 83, 88, 152, 160n34 and civic identity, 5 and class, 11, 29, 37, 52, 100, 103–4, 114–24, 128, 129, 143, 148, 152 and consumption, 9, 11, 26, 73–4, 81–2, 89–90, 121, 128–9 and food, 108–9, 110 performance of, 17 and race, 25, 33, 37, 52, 123 sexual difference 6, 16 sexual labor, 105, 112–4, 115–16, 118 See also the body, feminism, feminist aesthetics, feminist politics, Language poetry, sexuality Gilbert, Sandra, 21, 161n45 Gilligan, Carol, 17 Ginsberg, Allen, 29, 121 Gioia, Dana, 2, 3, 7, 155n7 Giorno, John, 111 Giroux, Henry, 42 Gitin, Maria, 108–9 Gizzi, Peter, 132, 133–4, 135 Glazier, Loss Pequeño, 103, 115 Glück, Robert, 114 Gogol, Nikolai, 96 Golding, Alan, 11, 43, 79 Goldman, Emma, 35

220

INDEX

Graham, Jorie, 10, 40, 63–71, 75 Best American Poetry 1990 (ed.), 63–4 “Commute Sentence”, 69 “Copy (Attacks on the Cities 2000–2003)”, 69 The Errancy, 67–8 “The Guardian Angel of the Little Utopia”, 67 “Manifest Destiny”, 66–7 “Le Manteau de Pascal”, 67–8 Materialism, 66–7 Never, 68 Overlord, 68–70 “Passenger”, 69–70 “Praying”, 69 “Spoken from the Hedgerows”, 69 Greer, Michael, 56–7 Grosz, Elizabeth, 14 Gubar, Susan, 21, 161n45 Guillory, John, 37 Gwynn, R. S., 121 H.D., 49 Habermas, Jürgen, 4, 9, 17, 18, 25–6, 36, 48. See also public sphere Hamill, Sam, 1–2 Hanna, Kathleen, 127 Hanson, Jefferson, 132 Haraway, Donna, 14 Harrington, Joseph, 8–9 Harryman, Carla, 112 Hartley, George, 78 Hass, Robert, 146 Hejinian, Lyn, 11, 65, 70, 74, 75–6, 82–91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 99 “The Guard”, 84 “Language and Realism”, 84 Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union, 87 My Life, 84–6, 88 Oxota, 87–91, 96 “The Person and Description”, 87

“Reason”, 86–7 “Redo”, 84–5 “The Rejection of Closure”, 83, 84 Sight (with Leslie Scalapino), 91–2 Hirsch, E. D., 145 Hirschkop, Ken, 4, 18 Hogue, Cynthia, 66 Holden, Jonathan, 42, 57, 155n8, 167n13 Holman, Bob, 111 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 68 Howe, Fanny, 63, 146 Howe, Florence, 21 Howe, Susan, 10, 20, 22, 31–6, 38, 63, 108, 132, 138 “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time”, 32–4, 164n96 The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, 32 “Captivity and Restoration”, 33 “History of the Western Borders”, 31–2 “Scattering as Behavior Toward Risk”, 34 The Singularities, 32–5 “Thorow”, 34 Hughes, Langston, 23, 31, 145 Hunt, Erica, 10, 36–8, 135, 144 Arcade (with Alison Saar), 37 “Arcade”, 37 Local History, 38 “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics”, 36–7 “the voice of no”, 37 individualism, 4, 5, 29, 35, 39–40, 43, 47, 63, 65–6, 76, 95, 137, 152 Irigaray, Luce, 6, 54, 84, 109 Jameson, Frederic, 78, 83, 174n20 Janet, Janet, 108, 180n29 Jarman, Mark, 95

INDEX

Jarnot, Lisa, 11, 132, 147–52 “Figure One. Looking forward to playing some more”, 149 “Introduction”, 148–9 One’s Own Language, 148, 150–1 Some Other Kind of Mission, 148–50, 151 Johnson, Ray, 105 Jong, Erica, 146 Jordan, June, 10, 20, 22–31, 32, 35–6, 38, 58, 60, 145, 152, 164n85 Dry Victories, 28 “From Sea to Shining Sea”, 29–31 “Getting Down to Get Over”, 24–5 His Own Where, 28 “Report from the Bahamas”, 29, 164n85 Who Look at Me, 23–4 Juhasz, Suzanne, 161n46 Kalaidjian, Walter, 2, 44, 79 Kaplan, Cora, 161n46 Kauffman, Linda S., 111 Kelly, Robert, 110 Kennedy, John F., 50 Kennedy, Pagan, 126 Kimball, Cynthia, 132 King, Geraldine, 115 King, Katie, 21 King, Linda, 115, 116 Kinnell, Galway, 21 Kluge, Alexander, 9, 10, 11, 19, 41, 51, 75, 104–5, 120, 147. See also public sphere Knowles, Alison, 108 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 17 Kristeva, Julia, 80–1 Kyger, Joanne, 135 Laclau, Ernesto, 3, 8–9, 37, 135 Language poetry, 73–100, 183n12, 186n80

221

and the academy, 11, 92, 104, 173n8 community, 59, 64, 73–82, 83, 87, 93, 131 as counter-public, 11, 75, 77, 94, 100 and gender, 73–4, 80–2, 83, 92 influence of, 133, 136, 142, 143, 144, 150 and the reader, 76–82, 88, 98, 137, 174n14, n19, n20 See also specific authors Lara, Maria Pia, 160n34 Lazer, Hank, 78, 79 Lenhart, Gary, 95 Levertov, Denise, 20, 121 Levinas, Emmanuel, 133 Lifshin, Lyn, 115, 121–4, 129 “Alberta Hunter”, 123–4 Cold Comfort: Selected Poems 1970–1996, 122–3 “Madonna”, 121 Offered by Owner, 122–3 Lippard, Lucy, 108 literacy, 2, 26, 27–8, 32, 35, 38, 44, 100, 136, 144–5, 147, 148, 150–1, 152. See also access, education literary academy, 2, 7, 10, 11, 27, 29, 38, 40–7, 63, 64, 70–1, 76–7, 92, 104, 137, 150 Locklin, Gerald, 115 Long, Elizabeth, 8 Longenbach, James, 8 Lopate, Phillip, 101, 163n73 Lowell, Robert, 20 Lustig, Laura Joy, 128 “Death Is Good If You Don’t Know How to Properly Be Alive”, 128 Lyotard, Jean-François, 86–7 mackinnon, andrea, 117–18, 129 “Lounge Poem”, 117–18 MacLow, Jackson, 110 Magritte, Rene, 67–8

222

INDEX

Mail Art, 105, 107, 108, 111 Marcuse, Herbert, 110 Marks, Steven, 131 Mattison, Harry, 56 Mayer, Bernadette, 107, 135 Menebroker, Ann, 115 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 93, 177n81 Merwin, W. S., 21 Messerli, Douglas, 78 Miller, Daniel, 82 Morris, Debra, 40 Mouffe, Chantal, 4, 8–9, 10, 12, 20, 37, 51, 152 Moyers, Bill, 39 Mullen, Harryette, 11, 141–7, 151–2 “Bilingual Instructions”, 147 “Bla bla”, 145–6 “Denigration”, 147 “jinglejangle”, 145–6 Muse and Drudge, 144, 185n64 “Roget’s neighborhood”, 146 Sleeping with the Dictionary, 144, 145–7 S*PERM**K*T, 143–4 Trimmings, 143 Murphy, Sheila E., 108 Muske, Carol, 49 Myers, Jack, 2–3 Myles, Eileen, 97, 111 Nancy, Jean Luc, 10, 16 nationalism, 3, 5, 29, 33, 46, 49, 51, 89, 114 Naylor, Paul, 8–9 Negt, Oskar, 9, 10, 11, 19, 41, 51, 75, 104–5, 120, 147. See also public sphere Nehring, Neil, 127 Nelson, Cary, 7–9 Neruda, Pablo, 58, 145 New Criticism, 43, 168n31 New York School, 47, 103, 105, 131

Niedecker, Lorine, 135 Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, 25 Nussbaum, Martha, 160n34 O’Hara, Frank 135 O’Sullivan, Maggie, 137 obscene, 11, 100, 103–4, 112, 114, 120, 128, 148. See also riot grrrl, zines, small presses Olds, Sharon, 63 Oliver, Mary, 146 Olson, Charles, 5, 110, 150 Oppen, George, 5, 67, 133 Osman, Jena, 132, 137, 151 Chain (ed. with Juliana Spahr), 137 The Lab Book (ed.), 132–5, 148 Ostriker, Alicia, 21–2, 161n45 Parker, Pat, 52 Perelman, Bob, 78 Perkins, Stephen, 106 Perloff, Marjorie, 22, 78–9, 95 Piercy, Marge, 21, 161n45 Pinsky, Robert, 5, 57 Plath, Sylvia, 20, 22, 49 “PoetsAgainsttheWar” movement, 1–2 Pound, Ezra, 67 Prevallet, Kristin, 134, 137 private, 39–47 as autonomy, 2 and class privilege, 16, 94, 146–7 as domestic realm, 24, 40 as imaginary domain, 15 as interiority, 21 as intimacy, 40, 48, 65, 70, 75, 139 as non-state economics, 40, 46 relations with the public and the political, 10, 13, 15, 21, 50, 51, 52, 62–3, 110, 137, 131, 159n12 as site of freedom, 51

INDEX

as the sexual, 40, 103–4, 114, 141 See also privatization privatization privatized poetics, 63, 71 of the state, 97 of U.S. culture, 2, 10–11, 16, 39–40, 129 See also private public sphere, 6, 7–8, 96, 98, 103, 136 agonal (radical) model of, 4, 17–19, 36, 37 counter-publics, 7, 9, 11, 19–20, 35, 75, 77, 79–80, 94, 100, 101, 104, 105, 114, 120, 129, 152 deliberative model of, 4, 19 Habermas, 4, 9, 17, 18, 25–6, 36, 48 proletarian sphere (Negt and Kluge), 11, 104–5, 120, 147 public spheres of production (Negt and Kluge), 9, 10, 19, 41, 51 See also access, democracy Pushkin, Alexander, 88 Quartermain, Peter, 34, 78 Quayle, Dan, 97–8 queer identity, 104, 135 R., Johnny, 126 Radway, Janice, 14 Rampersad, Arnold, 49 Ransom, John Crowe, 43 Rasula, Jed, 2, 79 Readings, Bill, 27, 42 Reed, Ishmael, 25 Rehm, Pam, 134–5, 137 Reinfield, Linda, 78, 174n14 Retallack, Joan, 63, 81–2, 108, 137 Rich, Adrienne, 21, 166n12 Riley, Denise, 65, 137 riot grrrl movement, 38, 126–9

223

Riviere, Joan, 81 Robson, Ruthann, 109–10 Rose, Jacqueline, 14 Ross, Andrew, 78 Rothenberg, Jerome, 110 Russia, 87–91, 96 Russo, Linda, 134, 135 Sandel, Michael, 54 Sappho, 145 Scalapino, Leslie, 11, 70, 74, 75–6, 82, 91–9, 139, 150, 152 “Autobiography”, 92–3, 99 “buildings are at the far end”, 94 “The Cannon”, 92 The Front Matter, Dead Souls, 96–9 Sight (with Lyn Hejinian), 91–2 that they were at the beach, 94–5, 98 Seiler, Sheila, 116 Sexton, Anne, 20 sexuality, 11, 12, 14, 34, 40, 52, 79, 90, 103–4, 112–17, 123, 124, 128, 129 Showalter, Elaine, 15 Silliman, Ron, 77, 78 Simpson, Megan, 80 small presses, 100, 101–12, 114–16, 119–24, 125, 129, 137 Assembling, 106 Atticus, 106 Central Park, 107 Co-Lingua, 106, 108 Core, 106 How(ever), 107 Impetus, 115, 116, 118, 119–20, 123 Implosion, 111 Lilliput Review, 115 Lost and Found Times, 106, 115, 126 MalLife, 106 Meaning, 106

224

INDEX

small presses—continued Nitrous Oxide, 106 NRG, 106, 108 Pearl, 115–16 Photostatic, 104, 106, 107, 108, 179n8 Plastic Tower, 115, 121 Poetry Motel, 106 Purr, 115–16 Slipstream, 109, 115 Vile, 106, 107 Wormwood Review, 115, 121 See also zines Smith, Joan Jobe, 114 Smith, Mary, 52 Sophocles, 53 Spahr, Juliana, 11, 65, 132, 133, 135, 136–42,147, 151–2 American Women Poets in the Twenty First Century (ed.), 137 Chain (ed. with Jena Osman), 136, 137 “documentary”, 138–9 Everybody’s Autonomy, 137, 141 Fuck-You-Aloha-I-Love-You, 140–1 “gathering: palolo stream”, 140 Response, 138–9 Spiderwasp, 136–7 “switching”, 141 “testimony”, 128, 139 things of each possible relation hashing against one another, 140 “witness”, 138, 139 Spillers, Hortense, 24 Spivak, Gayatri, 14, 55 Steedman, Carolyn, 148 Stegner, Wallace, 43 Stein, Gertrude, 141, 143 Stein, Kevin, 55 Stevens, Wallace, 31 Sullivan, Gary, 131

Thomas, Lorenzo, 44, 168n31 Thoreau, Henry David, 34–5, 165n104 Thurston, Michael, 8 Townsend, Cheryl, 115, 116, 118–19, 129, 150 Tuttle, Bill, 132 Vendler, Helen, 63, 66 Vickery, Ann, 80 visual experimentation, 102, 103, 104, 105–10, 148–9 Wakoski, Diane, 21–2 Waldman, Anne, 111 Wallace, Mark, 131, 132, 133–4, 135, 150 Ward, Diane, 137 Warner, Michael, 7, 39–40, 104, 129 Watten, Barrett, 77, 83 Weinen, Mark Van, 8 Weiner, Hannah, 135 Weingarten, Roger, 2–3 Whitehead, Kim, 25 Whitman, Walt, 5, 25, 29, 30, 36, 135, 145 Wilbers, Stephen, 43 Williams, Patricia J., 10, 16, 19, 26, 146–7 Williams, William Carlos, 5 Willis, Elizabeth, 132, 133, 135 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 59, 60 workshop poetry, 2–3, 41–2, 43–7, 49, 57, 60, 63, 64, 134, 162n53, 168n31, 169n39 Young, Robert, 42 Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska, 19–20, 36, 37, 55, 71 zines, 103, 104, 105–6, 122, 123–4, 125–8, 148, 152, 179n8, 182n79

INDEX

Apology to Idiots, 128 An Appeal to the Homeless, 125–6 Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption, 126 Bitch, 126 Bust, 126, 127 FactSheet Five, 126

he wants his meat in the woman who’s dead, 124 Literary Laxative, 128 Oscar, 128 SHOULDN’T YOU BE WORKING? 126 See also obscene, small presses, visual experimentation Zona, Kirstin Hotelling, 65

225

Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women's Poetry (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

American Political Poetry into the 21st Century (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

American Political Poetry into the 21st Century (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

American Political Poetry into the 21st Century (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-first Century)

Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMENS WRITING (Postcolonial Literature)

Contemporary U.S. Latino a Literary Criticism (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (American Literature Readings in the 21 Century)

Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Problems In American Democracy

Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Yeats as Precursor: Readings in Irish, British, and American Poetry

Contemporary Readings in the Foundations of Metaphysics

Contemporary Readings in the Foundation of Metaphysics

Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Debating the Divine, Religion in 21st Century American Democracy

Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Blackwell Guides to Literature)

Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (No. 157))

From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women's Poetry (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

American Political Poetry into the 21st Century (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

American Political Poetry into the 21st Century (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

American Political Poetry into the 21st Century (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-first Century)

Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMENS WRITING (Postcolonial Literature)

Contemporary U.S. Latino a Literary Criticism (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (American Literature Readings in the 21 Century)

Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Problems In American Democracy

Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Yeats as Precursor: Readings in Irish, British, and American Poetry

Contemporary Readings in the Foundations of Metaphysics

Contemporary Readings in the Foundation of Metaphysics

Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Debating the Divine, Religion in 21st Century American Democracy

Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Blackwell Guides to Literature)

Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (No. 157))

From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

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