Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poets Across North America

By Claudia Rankine and Andre Gorz

“A fine and selective anthology that’s also a critical introduction to some of the most provocative, and some of the most original, poetry out there.” —Stephanie Burt, author of Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems

The American Poets in the 21st Century series continues with another anthology focused on female poets. Like the earlier books, this volume includes generous selections of poetry by some of the best poets of our time as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays on their work. This unique organization makes these books invaluable teaching tools.

Broadening the lens through which we look at contemporary poetry, this new volume extends its geographical net by including Caribbean and Canadian poets. Representing three generations of women writers, among the insightful pieces included in this volume are essays by Karla Kelsey on Mary Jo Bang’s modes of artifice, Christine Hume on Carla Harryman’s kinds of listening, Dawn Lundy Martin on M. NourbeSe Phillip (for whom “english / is a foreign anguish”), and Sina Queyras on Lisa Robertson’s confoundingly beautiful surfaces. In addition, a companion website presents audio of each poet’s work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780819572363

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Lisa Sewell

THIS ANTHOLOGY has come into being primarily in response to enthusiasm, even excitement about the current state of contemporary poetry in North America and, in particular, that portion being produced by women. It follows up on American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (Wesleyan 2002), edited by Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr, which was inspired by the 1999 conference Where Lyric Tradition Meets Language Poetry: Innovation in Contemporary Poetry by Women, though as Spahr notes in her introduction, it was not an actual proceedings of the conference.¹ The conference and the collection were explicitly interested in sparking a conversation across the ostensible divisions in contemporary poetry and in delineating an innovative meeting ground between lyric and avant-garde traditions. Where Lyric Meets Language contributed to the interrogation of these categories and also brought important critical and scholarly attention to the work of a range of contemporary women poets.² It is this second achievement that this new collection, Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America, will augment and advance, featuring the work of eleven more influential women poets: Mary Jo Bang, Lucille Clifton, Kimiko Hahn, Carla Harryman, Erín Moure, Laura Mullen, Eileen Myles, M. NourbeSe Philip, Joan Retallack, Lisa Robertson, and C. D. Wright. As with the first group, these writers have gained national and international reputations, and we hope to contribute to the scholarly and critical attention their work clearly merits.

We have followed the organization of the first collection, including poems and a poetics statement by each author, as well as a critical essay and bibliography, but this collection also looks beyond the parameters of the first, extending the geographic scope of the series, including several influential women poets from Canada. We have also been more eclectic in our choices, highlighting work that can clearly be located on either end of the spectrum between Language-oriented writing and the lyric tradition, as well as poets who trouble those categorical divisions. This is a variegated group to be sure, and we know we have created more gaps than we have filled. Each name evokes the name of another poet who could or should have been included—Fanny Howe, Alice Notley, Marilyn Chin, Rosemarie Waldrop, Jean Valentine—and we are already planning another volume that we hope will fill some of these gaps. But we also believe this anthology stands on its own in the breadth of its range and the intensity of its engagement with the world; the work collected here is richly representative, highlighting the ways women’s writing reflects and revises current trends in American poetry. Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America does not aim to name a new, coherent community or school but to attend to women’s writing in its various modes, its connectedness and difference, difficulty, and simplicity. Among the poems, statements, and essays are serendipitous juxtapositions and surprising connections but also real notes of dissonance and discord.

In the years since the publication of Where Lyric Meets Language, it has become more and more difficult to assign specific labels or rubrics to particular poets. As Stephen Burt suggests in the introduction to a collection of his reviews of contemporary poetry, descriptions of poets in terms of schools or regions or first principles have rarely been less useful than they are now.³ This development is especially well illustrated by the recent publication of the anthologies Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries, edited by Reginald Shepherd, and American Hybrid, edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John.⁴ In her introduction, Swensen suggests that in contemporary poetry today, idiosyncrasy rules to such a degree and differences are so numerous that distinct factions are hard, even impossible to pin down. Instead we find a thriving center of alterity.⁵ Much of the work collected here also resists clear categorization, and many of these poets also appear in these other anthologies. But a narrative that situates all of these poets at the crossroads of hybridity would not account for Carla Harryman, who was instrumental in establishing the West Coast Language poetry movement during the 1970s, or for Lucille Clifton’s plain-spoken but complex lyric i, which remained consistent for more than thirty years.

While the nature of the lyric—can it be reclaimed from its masculinist origins, does it reflect a solipsistic retreat to interiority or a complex resistant engagement with the world—remains an ongoing concern for many of these writers, the paradox of a thriving center of alterity that Swensen identifies in hybrid poetry provides the strongest thread of connection. Whether alterity is explored through thematic or formal strategies, the drive to somehow enact, represent, or recognize radical, unassimilable difference informs a wide range of these poems, poetics statements, and essays. This drive takes various forms and moves in numerous directions, but it generally involves the interrogation of fixed boundaries—between genres, between genders, between bodies. Alterity here is founded in an ethics, which, following Emmanuel Levinas, resists the separation between the one and the other: Tout autre est tout autre [Every other one is every bit other] is one of Levinas’s most famous claims.⁶ As Edith Wyschogrod explains:

traditional Western philosophy, including the work of Husserl and Heidegger, sustains a distinction between the one and the other. In empirical systems this distinction is retained as real; in idealistic systems it is rejected as illusory. But, Levinas argues, whether real or illusory, the distinction is always made and always rests upon the presupposition that it is constituted by a consciousness which discriminates. But the very possibility of incorporating the one and the other into a single point of view compromises the radical alterity, the exteriority of the other. Alterity which can be conjoined with or separated from the one by thought is not true alterity but part of what Levinas calls the same. Radical otherness derives from a more primordial source. It can never be adequately thought for it lies beyond ontology. It is reflected in the world through the advent of other persons.⁷

In work as disparate as Carla Harryman’s Baby and Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy, that separation between the one and the other is indeed treated as illusory. As much of the work collected here suggests, poetic language can be a site of contradiction and a means for articulating multiple positions. By disparate routes, through a range of forms, the poets in this collection resist the binary of the one and the other, gesturing toward what can never be adequately thought. C. D. Wright notes in her poetics statement that although no three people can agree about what precisely poetry is, it proposes an alternative perspective; among these writers alternatives proliferate.

The most familiar route can be found in the theorization of identity. Even in work that seems to reside at the more expressive end of the spectrum, the autobiographical comes under scrutiny, whether the i, as Lucille Clifton insists represents both [her] Lucille and the me that stands for people who look like me and the me that is also human, or is reduced to what Joan Retallack has described as mere point[s] of reference among others, part of an atmospheric exchange instead of a monological expression.⁸ Clifton’s resistance to the stability of the lyric speaker is explicitly informed by her awareness of historically being positioned as the other in terms of gender and race, and a number of other writers—Kimiko Hahn, M. NourbeSe Philip—also explore and enact this awareness, though they also emphasize the ways language constitutes itself around a covered over or ignored alterity. And for a majority of the writers in this collection, it is through writing and the performativity that inheres in language that alterity can be approached. Through a range of formal strategies, Retallack, Bang, Philip, Moure, Harryman, and Mullen all foreground linguistic instability, insisting that the social space of language is never static but instead, as Moure suggests, is constantly altered: the body alters space, language alters space, languages alter space. Alter our mouths. Alter each other. In unpredictable ways. Multilingualism, mixing different languages within sentences, within words—what Joan Retallack terms mongrelisme—also destabilizes larger cultural ordering systems. The second, or third, language may be chosen—as in Moure’s work and Hahn’s—or imposed, but can be used to interrogate the effects of assimilation and colonialism, and to call attention to the ways language constitutes identity.

Resistance is also enacted through the interrogation of the boundaries between genres, including those that distinguish lyric and narrative, verse and prose, poetry and memoir, poetry and fiction. We can see this in Carla Harryman’s prose poetry and Laura Mullen’s lyric novels, in Bang’s narrativizing lyrics and Hahn’s hybrid forms that draw on multiple traditions (Chinese, Japanese, as well as European) and cannot be readily accounted for by any one culture. Moure, Philip, Robertson, and Retallack cross the boundaries of form, discourse, and genre within single works, producing hybrid texts, with implications for gendered boundaries as well. The urgency to at least gesture toward alterity, to attempt, successfully or not, to recognize otherness through syntax, form, or the problematization of subjectivity in some cases seems to have been made more urgent by the policies of the U.S. government during the first eight years of the new century. Wright’s poems in Rising, Falling, Hovering incorporate responses to the U.S. occupation of Iraq; Bang’s abecedarian The Bride of E tries to assess and catalog the rueful apocalyptic drama of post-9/11 America; and Moure explains that she wrote Little Theatres against the overriding background of sorry rumblings of American public discourse that eventually led to the invasion of Iraq.

Another thread that does not connect or appear in all of the work, but certainly signifies in several places, bright red, like a stop light, is a resistance to critical analysis itself, to readings that unpack, assess, contextualize, and situate. As Sina Queyras notes, Lisa Robertson has long been associated with Canada’s Kootenay School of Writing, which embraced slogans such as we will not be understood, and as the Office for Soft Architecture, she created texts that ma[de] no attempt to . . . [be] accessible or readable in a predictable sense, to anyone. Aaron Kunin describes a similar resistance in the work of Erín Moure as a challenge to criticism, and Jena Osman notes that in reading Joan Retallack’s work expectations of interpretive analysis must be set aside so that the language can be approached on its own material terms: its sounds, rhythms, and associative paradoxes. This kind of resistance may be frustrating for the reader who is looking for stable ground from which to form an opinion, or a clear idea of what a work is about. But it also provides a concrete experience of what it is like to encounter alterity in all of its inassimilable otherness.

It is worth noting that although this collection focuses on women’s writing, these writers do not express a monolithic relationship to feminism. Just as the volume depicts the wide variety of contemporary poetries, it is situated at the juncture and disjuncture between multiple and contradictory feminisms. While Clifton, Hahn, and Mullen are explicit about the influence of feminism on their poetics, in much of the work, feminism is implicit: an always already present jumping-off point. What is essential about gender in the work of many of these writers is the insistent investigation of the relationship between gender and language, and between gender and genre, that corresponds more with a third-wave (as opposed to post, or post-post) feminism that can come to terms with . . . multiple, interpenetrating axes of identity, as Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake suggest in their introduction to Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism.⁹ Rather than being based in bodily experience, shared oppressions, and identity politics, the feminism evinced here reaches for a reversible . . . intersubjective and dialogic model of interaction capable of evading the forced binarism of relativism or positivism.¹⁰

In her preface to Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice, Isobel Armstrong emphasizes that this kind of resistance to the second wave concept of feminism is characteristic of both current women’s writing and contemporary theory. Armstrong notes that for many women writers, and I would suggest that this is true for the writers collected here as well, "[the] self-conscious concern with multiple forms of language arises from a need not to be trapped inside the expressive self of the female subject, but the obligation as a female subject, to release the lyric ‘I’ from the trap of a narrow identity politics."¹¹ While some critics may question the need for yet another anthology that focuses on women’s writing, the response to the first volume suggests that readers of all kinds are still hungry for critical efforts that situate women’s poetry. We hope the risks of engaging in a project that highlights gender divisions are balanced by the positive effects of drawing attention to and providing critical perspectives on these writers, believing that it is possible to question and resist the binary oppositions that structure cultural understandings of gender while also recognizing that due to social and historical conditions, gender does make a difference. The work of the writers collected here presents a proliferation of identities and identifications alongside investigations of genre, the sentence, and the poetic line, claiming them as forms expansive and flexible enough to gesture toward and speak these new subjectivities.

THE POETRY of Mary Jo Bang, whose name serendipitously comes at the beginning of the alphabet, provides an apt starting point for this collection. It is serendipitous because her work brings many of the questions informing contemporary poetry into focus. The author of six books of poems, Bang has been exploring the alterity that informs lyric interiority since the beginning of her career, and though in much of her poetry disjunction and abbreviation occupy the foreground, rather than claiming to invent a new lyric, she calls attention to the ways fracture and irresolution have always informed the lyric tradition. Highlighting her debts to previous works and to various predecessors, from Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf to Lewis Carroll, her work demonstrates the absorptive power but also exposes the suturing entailed in creating a unified speaker and poem. Bang’s particular version of alterity involves an othering of the lyric speaker. As she explains in her poetics statement, she is interested in shifting away from the figure of the poet plumbing the depths of her psyche and has developed a number of strategies that allow her to operate at a remove from her materials. Theater, photography, and filmmaking are apt analogies to the approach Bang takes, but these poetic plays or films expose their sutures and break through the fourth wall to call attention to the artifice of each scene.

As she writes in And as in Alice, from The Bride of E, Alice cannot be in the poem, she says, because / She’s only a metaphor for childhood / And a poem is a metaphor already. The poem is about Alice but also making poetry and about the fact that Lewis Carroll also called attention to the processes of imaginative making in his work. Even in her most apparently confessional, autobiographical work, Elegy, Bang blurs the boundary between bereft speaker and lost beloved object. Lyric identity is diffused among pronouns and subject positions, and as a whole the work insists that even at our most purely expressive moments, we are constructions in and of language. In her wide-ranging and deeply probing essay, Articulations of Artifice in the Work of Mary Jo Bang, Karla Kelsey explores the various devices Bang employs to call attention to the hard work of fiction-making that creates the lyric poem. Kelsey suggests that by foregrounding modes of representation, rather than the ‘content’ of what is represented. Bang’s work explores and exploits the tension between absorption in artifice and insistence upon recognizing the poem’s construction. Focusing on Bang’s reimagining of persona and ironic deployment of lofty and low symbolic figures, Kelsey suggests that by turning into, instead of away from, the apparent disjunction between expressive and self-referential language, Bang creates a resonant and unique voice in the field of contemporary poetry. She also argues that by creating a body of work that articulates the way in which lyric illusion functions, Bang posits that it is this very tension that has always already made the lyric a dynamic form.

It is with sadness but also pleasure that we include the work of Lucille Clifton in this anthology, a poet whose work also clearly demonstrates the dynamism of the lyric. Clifton’s social and aesthetic poetic associations would seemingly make her the poet most invested in the conventional lyric:

woman who shines at the head

of my grandmother’s bed,

brilliant woman, i like to think

you whispered into her ear

instructions. i like to think

you are the oddness in us

Her readily recognizable poems use accessible, transparent language and apparently treat the speaking subject as singular, stable, complete. But careful attention to the nuances of her work reveals a resistance to binary ordering systems that manifests in a flexible and mutable speaker. In her interview with Charles Rowell, she states: either/or is not an African tradition. Both/and is tradition. I don’t believe in either/or. I believe in both/and. Through speakers whose identifications are mobile and shifting—the i in a single poem can refer back to a persona but also to Clifton, and, she suggests, a shared identity based in community—she complicates the notion of a lyric subject, treating all her speakers as constructions in and of language.

In Lucille Clifton’s Communal ‘i,’ Adrienne McCormick illuminates this unexplored aspect of Clifton’s poetry, arguing that from early in her writing career, Clifton produced a multi-layered communal ‘i’ . . . and a complex vision of lyric subjectivity as constructed, contingent, and communal. Focusing on work that ranges across Clifton’s career—from the relatively early book, Two-Headed Woman, to her most recent, Voices—McCormick argues that Clifton is able to bridge constituencies more often positioned in separate conversations by committing herself to both/and thinking that is rooted in her inherited connection to African American traditions but also in her feminism. McCormick establishes the flexibility of Clifton’s communal i, demonstrating the instability of speakers in a wide range of poems, from poems in which the speaker is Lucille Clifton, to those in which the speaker is clearly an other.

Like Clifton, Kimiko Hahn explicitly identifies her work as feminist, titling her poetics statement "Still Writing the Body" and evoking feminist critics like Cixous and Irigaray as influences. Hahn strives for a poetry that rhythmically, sonically, and tonally evokes the corporeal and the emotional, which she understands as experienced viscerally, resisting the mind/body division that structures Western thought. In her poetics statement she expresses a determination to draw the whole body back into the experience of writing and reading poetry. Hahn’s work also crosses literary traditions and national borders. The bodily texts she creates are multivoiced collages, incorporating quotations from literary and critical writings, from Western and Asian traditions, and using Chinese and Japanese literary forms for inspiration. Hahn draws on and draws out the resistances that inhere in women’s writings from earlier centuries, including the work of Japanese writers like Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of the Genji and Sei Shōnagon’s pillow book, both written during the Heian period (8th–12th century).¹² In Orchid Root, Hahn writes, I need to return to the Chinese women poets / The flat language / of pine and orchid that can instruct the senses and teach the difference between the Narcissus fragrance / and burning rubber. These poets also seem to teach Hahn to let the voice of the other, especially the Orientalized feminine other, haunt and inhabit her poems.

It is through this kind of haunting that Hahn evokes a gendered alterity and multiplicity in her work. In ‘I Want to Go Where the Hysteric Resides’: Kimiko Hahn’s Re-Articulation of the Feminine in Poetry, Zhou Xiaojing focuses on poems that explore mother–daughter relationships, showing that Hahn redefines the feminine in terms that resist both Western masculinist discourse and the racism of cultural domination. Discussing works from both recent and older collections, Zhou argues that Hahn often speaks from the position of the radically othered feminine, specifically reclaiming the hysteric, a figure marginalized and maligned in phallo-centric discourse. Hahn posits an alternative way of knowing outside the gendered binary pairings such as mind/male versus body/female, and points to an alternative mother–daughter relationship outside of patriarchy and Orientalism. Despite Hahn’s stated suspicions of the cerebral in contemporary poetry, Zhou finds that her work enacts feminist theories as a method for investigating the female body and subjectivity in order to inscribe the feminine outside of patriarchal and racial hierarchies. Through Zhou’s careful reading, hysteria, in which the body speaks through symptoms, can be understood as productive instead of silencing, empowering instead of debilitating.

Resistance to the structuring functions of binary oppositions takes a more radical form in Carla Harryman’s genre-blurring performative and performance-based poetry, though as with Hahn that resistance is also keenly connected to the body. In Harryman’s work the connection to corporeality is foregrounded through the sheer physicality of the language, drawing attention to tone, the rhythms of speech patterns, repetition, and the ways sounds, syntax, and sentences accrue and speak to each other, as in this passage from Baby:

Certain sounds rigid formulas thought. Attract futures stuck in happy land. Give me liberty or give me death had not history in baby’s breath. But sound of force struck in her trunk. Here and then the beginning of baby’s not. And not.

Since the 1970s, Harryman has been writing at the interstices between forms and between genres; she has also been involved in numerous collaborations, including projects with visual artists, musicians, in performances, and with other writers. Harryman is interested in polyvocality, and in all of her work binary oppositions are resisted on multiple levels: Subjects and objects achieve reciprocity; abstractions and corporeality are treated as equally substantive; chronology is undone; conventions of looking, speaking, listening, and hearing are denaturalized, as is gender.

In "Listening In on Carla Harryman’s Baby," Christine Hume concentrates on Harryman’s 2005 book Baby in order to explore an epistemology of listening that beautifully exemplifies Harryman’s larger project. Drawing on theories of listening shaped by Roland Barthes, Adorno, Fred Moten, and others, Hume constructs a primer for reading Harryman, elaborating the multiple and contradictory forms of audition Baby evokes and outlining the ways the text offers an acoustic space, a rich multidimensional resonant field of relations that allows simultaneity. Hume demonstrates that in Baby, listening—as an act/non-action—can gesture toward or at least evoke a reciprocal alterity, endowing listening with the capacity to undo binary structures in the service of a relational model of identity. By emphasizing listening’s Derridean lack of origins, as Hume notes, Harryman shows us that we have always been listening.

Like Harryman, Erín Moure treats writing as theatrical, or as theatral as she puts it in her poetics statement. And her work too emphasizes sound, often reveling in the multivoiced chorus of sounds over and against, or alongside the words’ meanings, thus expanding our sense of what it means to understand poetry. In an interview with Paulo da Costa, Moure explained: We ‘understand’ poetry when it resonates with us, echoes with us, haunts us, piques our curiosity, compels us. That’s what has value.¹³ Much of her work calls attention to women writers, thinkers, and artists and to the gendered nature of meaning-making and language itself. In document32 (inviolable) from O Cidadán, she writes:

How a woman wanting to write can be a territorial impossibility.

 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Think of Ingeborg Bachmann in her hotel rooms. Her unsettled acts were noise’s fissures. To see her as citizen is indeed to know citizen as repository of harm, where harm is gendered too. Myths of violability, inviolability, volatility, utility, lability played out. In wars, women are territories, and territories are lieux de punition.

But perhaps Moure’s work is most explicitly feminist in its resistance to being categorized and named, and to absolute designations of any kind. Her poems incorporate multiple languages within sentences and even within words, and bear traces of the compositional process and her resistance to definitive versions. This creates literal and figurative edges and unsmooth surfaces within works. In Moure’s Abrasions, Aaron Kunin suggests that Moure’s resistant, unsmooth poetics evolve out of a simultaneous commitment to the intermingling, communal flow of multiple languages and to the radical particularity of language. He charts several of the strategies she uses to create new surfaces in her poems and stage language, including a proliferation of proper names in and on her work (her name can appear in a range of spellings; she uses pseudonyms and homonyms); translation as a distinctive formal feature that results in the intermixing of languages within and between poems, within sentences and even words; and an interrogation of citizenship that does not depend on nation or language.

Along with her formal experimentation, Moure is also an intensely lyrical poet—a combination of attributes she shares with Laura Mullen. Over the course of her career, Mullen has pushed more and more at the surfaces of words, exploding and exposing the contradictions that inhere in traditional lyric forms and lyric subjectivity. The poems in Subject, her most recent book, express a simultaneous enchantment and disillusionment with poetic language and poetic form. Mullen works to achieve what Lyn Hejinian might refer to as a radical openness in her poems, preserving the multiple possibilities that inhere in language while also highlighting its limitations and coercive powers. In her poetics statement she writes that one of the central tenants of her work is Accuracy, but an accuracy that:

includes humility toward and respect for both the medium (language) and all that is NOT language, to try to find the words . . . for? toward? near? with . . . ? (In relation.) Words change the situation as they reposition us (we are part of the situation); spectators are also participants.

Her poetry and her prose reflect this awareness of what each new work evokes and erases, of what is written down and what is left out. Mullen’s work also explores the limits of genre, publishing both poetry and fiction, and explicitly investigating the difference that inheres in each generic categorization. In Laura Mullen: Threatened as Threat: Rethinking Gender and Genre, Kass Fleisher explores Mullen’s interest in genre, claiming that it is inseparable from an interest in gender. Addressing both Mullen’s poetry and her fiction, Fleischer argues that her preoccupation with generic enforcement is coupled to a desire to dismantle social constructions of Woman by reconstructing the dual/duel she sees at play . . . in textual representations of women. In affecting this dismantling, Mullen is especially concerned with the ways dismantled women’s bodies create the fatal center of interest in genre fiction such as the murder mystery and the romance.

Eileen Myles is perhaps better known as a poet, but like Mullen she explores multiple forms and has also published fiction. On the surface, her work seems closest to Clifton’s, for she too develops personae in her work, including a persona named Eileen Myles, and like Clifton her language is straightforward, accessible, immediate. Her work is also strange and disorienting, using juxtaposition and accretion to shift within grammatical time frames (sometimes / I’m driving / and I pressed / the button / to see who / called) and between pronouns within a poem or a series of lines, resulting in poems that move through time as well as space, and have the immediacy of thought. Myles claims that poetry is recording, that her poems take place in the moment, and it is this effect that links her to the New York School. Myles’s work is also intensely performative, emphasizing the link between the physically present speaking/writing body and the written/spoken poem. The specific performativity in her work is connected to problems of visibility and invisibility, for as she acknowledges in her poetics statement, for a lesbian, visibility, even existence as anything but a joke, cannot be taken for granted.

In her essay The Lesbian Poet, Myles describes her desire to address the specificity of the female body vis-à-vis menstruation, to include the body, the woman’s as I see it, to approach this blood as part of the score.¹⁴ Myles’s poems create a textual equivalent that can convey the specificity of what it is like to inhabit a particular desirous and desiring body, and in order to do so she emphasizes the performative, but in a way that is quite distinct from Harryman or Moure. As Maggie Nelson explains in ‘When We’re Alone in Public’: The Poetry of Eileen Myles, Myles situates much of her work at the juncture between the female personal and the public sector. In her work, Myles’s use of markedly public speech foregrounds the privacy of the body; her exhibitionistic work entails questioning what precisely the female poet has to exhibit or expose. For Myles, like Hahn, the body is a sort of text, and an important part of her project is to bring the female body into the poem, to make lack flash and signify. While this may seem like an essentializing gesture along the lines of Cixous’ ecriture feminine, Nelson argues that Myles’s ‘proprioceptive’ poetry has less to do with finding an essential mode of female expression than with scribing ‘an economy, a metabolism or energy flow.’ Drawing on the (queer) theories of Judith Butler, Eve Kowalsky Sedgewick, and Monique Wittig, and in particular Sedgewick’s thinking about queer performativity, Nelson charts the insurrectionary effects of Myles’s speech acts in her poems, as well as her reimagining of the lyric speaker as both personal and performed.

The works of Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip are haunted by history, by untold stories and lost bodies, by lives that cannot be recovered because of the eradicating histories of colonialism and the African slave trade. Like Myles, Philip is interested in the speech act, but her work emphasizes the impossibility of speech for those of African descent, whose histories include the suppression of their native languages and the imposition of the colonizers’ tongues. In works like She Tries Her Tongue: Her Silence Slowly Breaks, Looking for Livingston, and Zong!, Philip mines the juncture between silence and speech, invisibility and presence, attempting to depict both the erasure of specific lives and the possibility of a language that can gesture toward those absences. She engages and juxtaposes a range of texts, including legal documents, to point toward conflicting accounts and competing discourses as well as the excesses that inhere in all language. Zong!, Philip’s most recent book, attempts to tell the story of the disastrous voyage of the slaveship Zong, whose captain had a large percentage of his cargo of 470 African slaves thrown overboard so that the owners could collect on their insurance. At the beginning of the Notanda section of the book, Philip writes: There is no telling this story: it must be told. And it is the intersection of these impossible injunctions that Zong! unfolds and depicts.

Discourse on the Logic of Language, from She Tries Her Tongue, also mines the interstices between speech and silence, both enacting and describing the impossibility of a mother tongue for those who inherit the oppressor’s language:

and english is

my mother tongue

is

my father tongue

is a foreign lan lan lang

language

l/anguish

  anguish

a foreign anguish

is english—

another tongue

As Dawn Lundy Martin suggests in The Language of Trauma: Faith and Atheism in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Poetry, in Philip’s work, often the speech attempt gets caught in the effort of speech, its impossibility in the wake of trauma, and circles back to language with variation. Focusing on She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks and Zong!, Martin engages theories of racial melancholia and post-traumatic stress to trace the ways Philip’s work exposes the erased, invisible, or missing colonized bodies and stories, focusing on the ways the work breaks down the mother tongue/foreign language to show the anguish beneath it, while simultaneously playing with its form and creating a ‘new’ language—a hybrid speak made recognizable from restructuring the old. Martin calls attention to the textual strategies Philip uses—including the fragmenting and fracturing of phrases and words, broken syntax, the use of repetition—to recover irrecoverable history, language, and bodies, or at least gesture toward that recovery while also enacting the futility of the attempt. She shows that ultimately Philip’s text becomes the lost body enact[ing] the trauma of disappearance, replaying it, and transferring the experience of trauma . . . [to] the bodies of those outside the text. As Martin notes, Philip allows the gaps in the stories—particularly in relationship to Zong!—into her texts, occup[ying] the haunting absences as absences and mak[ing] them newly available for readers.

Like Philip’s, Joan Retallack’s work emphasizes surface difficulty and presents formidable challenges to the reader, as well as a resistant and transformative politics. Explicitly committed to reciprocal alterity, Retallack combines chance-based methods of composition with a powerful sense of ethical responsibility. Her work uses the page as a field or canvas, calling attention to the typographical, to other logically possible selves and worlds, and to the surprises that inhere in language—what she calls wordswerve[s]. Over a twenty-year career, Retallack has continuously created texts that resist easy assessment and emphasize the real work of reading. She engages with the philosophy of Wittgenstein and Searle, but resists all totalizing assessments. Her work also bears the mark of her association with John Cage, and in particular the application of chance and procedure to making art. In her poetics statement, Retallack enacts her commitment to a procedural poethics—a term that infuses poetics with an explicitly ethical dimension—and also explores the reasons for her commitment to this mode. Procedures, she suggests, help us resist centers of the self and official logics but also importantly provide instructions for how (even why) one is to go on. She strives to create a literature that present[s] significant alternative sites for making meaning, potential locations for conceptual swerves.

In "The Method ‘In Medias Mess,’ Jena Osman suggests that Retallack’s work encourages, even demands, sustained awareness, a durational attention that can lead to a wide-ranging and playful dialogue with the world." Focusing on several key works, including AFTERRIMAGES, Mongrelisme, Memnoir, and Errata 5uite, Osman argues that Retallack’s procedural poethics allow her to connect art and life, but real life and a real world that is a complicated, messy place, without reducing or totalizing that messiness and complication. Osman charts the various discourses—what she calls messes—Retallack engages with in her work, including the literary/philosophical and popular written archive; the (resisted) polyglot of languages in American culture; and digital media and technology. And despite the potential impossibility of doing so, for much of Retallack’s work resists stabilized interpretations, Osman delineates the methods in Retallack’s work that pry words loose from singular and definitive meanings . . . lead[ing[ to . . . fluid acts of signification and swerves of discovery. Osman notes that the self and subjective experience are nevertheless not entirely absent from Retallack’s work. Her poems include a mixture of intuitive and procedural materials, each impacting the other. Autobiography is treated as one more cultural material.

Retallack is well known for her important intervention in and contribution to feminist criticism, Re: Thinking: Literary: Feminism, in which she rejects several feminist literary models, proffering instead a multiple, unintelligible, polylingual experimental feminine that can "exercise the power of the feminine as constructed, aesthetic behavior and not as the expression of female experience" (author’s italics).¹⁵ She calls for a literary feminism that reflects the disruptively audible—if not immediately intelligible—swerve or real gender/genre trouble [that] is possible only if we recognize what has been the continual constituting presence of feminine forms in language.¹⁶ Lisa Robertson’s work seemingly responds to this call, building texts that reimagine subjectivity and pull that continual constituting presence of the feminine to the surface. Robertson often creates texts from other texts—in the case of The Weather, from accounts of cloud nomenclature, contemporary and early meteorological accounts of the weather in England, and neo-classical and romantic literature; in the case of Rosseau’s Boat, from fifteen years of Robertson’s own journals.¹⁷ In these works, sentences borrowed from other texts are arranged to create new structures, building architecturally and drawing attention to the malleability of language, producing a gestural plenitude and delusional space that also gestures toward alterity.

Like many of the writers in this collection, Robertson’s work rejects the ordering systems of genre divisions, moving within single works between lineated verse and prose. For Robertson, generic distinctions present limits and hazards that must be assessed and addressed, and like Laura Mullen, she links those dangers to the ideologies that control gender, and to women’s absences, erasures, and silences. As she plaintively asks in Tuesday, from The Weather:

Where is our anger. And the shades darker than the plain part and darker at the top than the bottom. But darker at bottom than top. Days heap upon us. Where is Ti-Grace. But darker at the bottom than the top. Days heap upon us. Where is Christine. Broken on the word culture. But darker at the bottom than the top. Days heap upon us. Where is Valerie. Pulling the hard air into her lung. The life crumbles open. But darker at the bottom than the top. Days heap upon us. Where is Patty.

Here, sentences too heap upon us, simultaneously evoking presence and absence. Such resistance to binary structuring can be located in many aspects of Robertson’s work, including her insistent use of the plural pronoun. In her poetics statement, Soft Architecture: A Manifesto, Robertson also employs the first person plural, writing, We walked through the soft arcade. We became an architect.

This manifesto was issued by the Office for Soft Architecture (OSA), and as Sina Queyras observes in About Surface: Lisa Robertson’s Poetics of Elegance, in creating an office, Robertson externalizes herself, creating not only an alter-ego but ‘a space,’ a built space that is urban and inhabitable. As an office, Robertson asserts authority over those disciplines that have traditionally been the province of men—city planning, architecture, literary canon formation—and that have historically excluded women. Like Erín Moure, the OSA also insists on forms of mastery that do not master, and that include the domestic: interiors, sheets, curtains, clothing, soft fabric, malleable flesh. Focusing on three recent works, The Weather, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, and Rousseau’s Boat, Queyras explores the multiple ways through attention to surface and an externalized poetic Robertson produces a complex, feminist poetics of elegance in which the poem is a collaborative and inhabitable public space. As Queyras demonstrates, as an office for architecture, Robertson links the local to the global, calling attention to organic and mechanical forms, conducting a gendered interrogation of surface, and building a new model of subjectivity that both revels in and disrupts the continuity and sheen of those surfaces.

The final poet in the collection is C. D. Wright, and her work provides an appropriate and provisional closing point. In her use of narrative structures, frequent use of transparent, vernacular language, and recourse to an I of lyric interiority, Wright’s poetry circles back toward Lucille Clifton’s. At the same time, her use of accretion, juxtaposition, and syntactical disruption can be linked to Language-influenced poets like Philip, Retallack, and Robertson, who precede her in this anthology. But Wright’s work must be situated between lyric expression and Language poetry. This is partly because of the evolution of her work—which has moved from narrative forms to a more self-reflexive, materialist use of language—but it is also because Wright maintains explicit fidelity to both realms. Wright makes use of Language-based techniques of disruption and defamiliarization to call attention to the constructed nature of her poetry, but she also wants her poetry to clarify experience. As she writes in her poetics statement, My American Scrawl, Maybe poetry, the making of poetry, is not by definition a clarifying exercise, but it has a shot at it, as they say. It has a shot at the hyacinth light. And I really do want to communicate (by which I mean, pass it on) what little I have seen clearly (by which I do not mean, obviously seen). In addition to writing at the divide between lyric and language, Wright troubles several other junctures as well—the line between body and word, between north and south, high and low culture, documentary and witness, objective and subjective—and quite crucially, like Robertson, Wright is insistent on the connections between the local and the global.

In The Border-Crossing Relational Poetry of C. D. Wright, Suzanne Wise focuses on Wright’s two most recent works, One Big Self and Rising, Falling, Hovering. She charts the denaturalizing strategies Wright evolves to create a poetry that formally and thematically resists totalizing gestures, that both draws our attention to things in their discrete specificity and recognizes commonalities and relatedness. Wise links Wright’s crossing and questioning of geographical, class, and cultural boundaries to Edouard Glissant’s theory of A Poetics of Relation, demonstrating the various ways that her border-crossing poetics insist on a periphery that is the center and centers that line, the periphery. Glissant’s poetics of relation, like Levinas’s reciprocal alterity, resists the binary structuring of imperialism to depict a complex multiple relationship with the Other. Wise also tracks the formal strategies Wright engages to further undergird her critique of American policies, domestic and international. In Rising, Falling, Hovering, she moves between long hyperextended sentences that forge connections between and among worlds that have been shattered and shorter lines that demonstrate the snapping of syntax and logic under pressure to make sense of loss, grief, and a violent elsewhere. As Wise suggests, Wright is fully aware of her position of privilege in relationship to her subjects—inmates in Louisiana prisons in One Big Self, victims of U.S. imperialism and domestic neglect in Rising, Falling, Hovering—and is careful to evoke her own complicity in the systems of injustice she wishes to critique. But at the same time, through accretion and the use of juxtaposition without instruction, Wright is able to reveal the complex realities of others. It is in this insistent depiction of those complex realities that Wright provides some relief from the dire situations she feels compelled to write about; as with Philip’s work, we find a tentative beam of hope and light.

IN 2007, poet and critic Jennifer Ashton published a review of three works that focus on women and innovative poetry, including the first volume of American Women Poets in the 21st: Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Her assertion that on a numerical level the problem of underrepresentation [of women’s writing] has been corrected led to a lively and important conversation—in print in the pages of the Chicago Review and American Philology, and online on Ron Silliman’s blog and the Poetry Foundation’s website—about how far women writers (and women in general) have or have not come, about how feminism currently signifies in the lives of a number of different writers, and about just how equitable the poetry world actually is and whether or not the problem had indeed been corrected.¹⁸ No consensus was reached, but the outpouring of opinion, invective, and enthusiasm suggests that there is still plenty of interest in these issues. In creating this second volume devoted to women poets, we are responding to that interest and to the very enthusiastic reception of the first, and hope to add to the body of critical evaluation that is available, contributing to ongoing efforts to correct the historical exclusion of women’s writing and women themselves from the literary tradition and calling attention to the ways women’s writing reflects larger trends in the field. The work collected here confirms the ongoing revisioning of the lyric tradition Juliana Spahr identifies in her introduction to the first volume and the idea that innovation as a characteristic of women’s writing can be aligned with both the expressive lyric and the experimental poem.¹⁹ It also exposes readers to common threads of interest as well as absolute differences and demonstrates that whatever the numbers, women are at the forefront of trends in contemporary poetry.

Audio clips of many of the poems in this book are available at the book’s companion website: www.wesleyan.edu/wespress.aptc3.

NOTES

1. American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, eds. Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spar (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 1. Hereafter cited in the text as Where Lyric Meets Language.

2. A number of essay collections and anthologies that focus on innovative writing by women appeared during the first decade of the new century, including We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics, eds. Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice, eds. Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), and Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews, eds. Elisabeth A. Frost and Cynthia Hogue (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), as well as several scholarly studies including Elisabeth Frost, The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003) and Linda Kinnahan, Lyric Interventions: Feminism Experimental Poetry and Contemporary Discourse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004).

3. Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2009), 6.

4. Reginald Shepherd, ed. Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries (Denver: Counterpath Press, 2008); American Hybrid, eds. Cole Swenson and David St. John (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

5. American Hybrid, xx.

6. Quoted in Edith Wyschogrod, Language and Alterity in the Thought of Levinas, Cambridge Companion to Emmanuel Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 192.

7. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), xxx.

8. Lucille Clifton and Charles H. Rowell, An Interview with Lucille Clifton, Callaloo 22.1 (1999), 60; Redell Olsen, An Interview With Joan Retallack, How2, 1, no. 6 (2001), www.scc.rutgers.edu.

9. Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, eds. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3.

10. Nicky Marsh, Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry (London: Palgrave, 2007), 17.

11. Author’s emphasis. Isobel Armstrong, preface to Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice, xvii.

12. Hahn discusses these two works in "Pulse and Impulse: The Zuihitsu," in The Grand Permission: New Writing on Poetics and Motherhood, eds. Patricia Dienstfrey and Brenda Hillman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 75–81.

13. Paulo da Costa, Dialogues and Polylogues: An Interview with Erin Mouré, www.paulodacosta.com/erinmour.htm.

14. Eileen Myles, School of Fish (Boston: Black Sparrow Books, 1997), 130.

15. Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 134.

16. Ibid., 131.

17. Information about the evolution of these texts comes from Lifted: An Interview with Lisa Robertson, Chicago Review 51/52 (2006): 38–54.

18. Jennifer Ashton, Our Bodies, Our Poems, American Literary History 19 (2007),