Key Notes: Manifesto for Women’s Poetry Studies

Abstract

It’s a steal. When women poets enter the storehouse of popular images and forms, they reconfigure a major metaphor in feminist criticism and theory: women’s writing as an act of theft. We can trace it as early as H.D.’s invocation of the patron god of thieves in “Hermes of the Ways,” in which he serves as a muse of innovation. In Trilogy , Hermes Trismegistus becomes a thief lord who instructs the speaker to steal, plunder, and take cultural artifacts to perform poetic alchemy (63). Through a mixture of materials, H.D. could widen the scope of her work—and women’s place within it. For Alicia Suskin Ostriker, women poets must steal the language of patriarchal literary tradition to emerge from coded pilfering to bold revisionism. They steel themselves for their counter-poetics of appropriation and resistance, paradoxically assuming an inflexible position to render that tradition more pliable in their hands. Hélène Cixous links theft with woman’s fundamental act of flight (“stealing away”), drawing on the doubleness of the French verb voler. Her manifesto of l’écriture feminine counters the master language with a revolutionary “laugh of the Medusa” to reject rather than revise; Cixous steals/flies to “depropriate” (Feminisms 356 –57). In all three figurations of writing-as-theft, the woman poet operates as an outsider.