Abstract
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.
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Notes
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.
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.
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).
Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
Elisabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (London: Women’s Press, 1988).
Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 35.
Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1991);
Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular 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.
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.
Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 128, 134.
Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (London: Routledge, 1995).
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 5.
Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (London: Polity Press, 1992).
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), 134.
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 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.
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 70–71.
Kathleen Fraser, “The Tradition of Marginality,” Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press, 2001), 30.
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 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.
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.
June Jordan, in 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.
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).
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, translated by Thomas Burger (London: Polity Press, 1989), 160.
Craig Calhoun, “Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere,” Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 24.
Phillip Lopate, “Issues of Language,” Journal of an Experiment: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, edited by Herbert Koch (Washington DC: Teachers and Writers, 1979), 102.
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 145, 146.
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).
June Jordan, Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (London: Virago, 1987), 10.
June Jordan and Terri Bush, eds., The Voice of the Children (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1968).
June Jordan, Dry Victories (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1972), 75.
Jordan, His Own Where (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1971), 87.
June Jordan, “Report from the Bahamas,” Ethics: A Feminist Reader, edited by Elizabeth Frazer, Jennifer Hornsby, and Sabina Lovibond (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 226.
June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays (Boston: South End Press, 1985).
Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the West in American Literary History (Wesleyan: University Press of New England, 1993), 24.
Susan Howe, The Western Borders (Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1976), 90.
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).
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 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.
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.
Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics; From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 86–87.
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.
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.
John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Erica Hunt and Alison Saar, Arcade (Berkeley: Kelsey St. Press, 1996), 28.
Erica Hunt, Local History (New York: Roof Books, 1993), 57.
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© 2007 Nicky Marsh
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Marsh, N. (2007). Paper Money and Tender Acts: Feminism and Democracy. In: Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607156_2
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