(First letters of each line make “ANNIE”)
Report this comment

Yes, that that used to be a danger, but readers seem more sophisticated now about issues of identity. Langston Hughes is not only read as a Black poet, even though he often wrote very much with that identity in mind. Crane, Auden, Whitman, H.D., and Bishop are not only read as gay poets (granted, they were not explicitly writing as gay poets to the extent that Hughes was writing as a Black poet); and Eliot is not only read as an Anglican poet, and so on.

Hopefully, we now have the luxury to be explicit about our identities without being pigeonholed and restricted by them. So I don’t, thank goodness, feel I have to choose between being read as a woman poet and being read as a poet.
Report this comment

and they might have gone on growing
and they might now breathe above
everything I speak of sowing
(everything I try to love).
Report this comment

This same marker-discussion rears its elephant snout when we come to “minority” poets.

When I reviewed Juan Felipe Herrera for Poetry Flash in 1987 I saw an interesting distinction that as a Mexican-American, Juan Felipe carries the badge (which can also be read, defensively, as a chip on the shoulder) of being a quote-unquote Chicano Poet, whereas his Mexican compadres Alberto Blanco and David Huerta, whom I reviewed with him, can simply act out in the world as “poets,” focusing largely on aesthetic issues rather than identity.

Nathalia Toledo, however, who writes bilingually in Zapoteca, for all that she is the daughter of the famous painter Francisco Toledo, gets to carry the baggage of being “una poeta indígena.”

Ron Silliman argues that there’s no such thing as a “poet” per se, that everybody carries the marker of their lineage. This always struck me as a cover for the general unreadability of the langpo product. I dunno.

I like Annie’s phrase “dynamic disequilibrium.”

Probably the visibility of these chips, elephants or baggage have faded just a little over the past two decades. The unwieldiness of the metaphor indicates our persistent discomfort with the Other.

To say nothing of the women in the room. As is our male privilege.

Maybe soon we’ll get to a place where we don’t need no steenking badgers. Ya think?
Report this comment

Thanks for joining the thread. You’ll see if you go back to the very opening of the post that many women have decided they would not like to be referred to, or think of themselves, as women poets; in fact, that is the context of the post. If you read further you’ll see that in this post, partly because of the great number of women poets who have chosen NOT to write in any way as woman poets, “woman poet” doesn’t refer to being biologically female, but rather to choices I’ve been making as a poet about which poets to choose as influences, which aesthetic decisions to make and which traditions to write in. And of course, the apparent paradox of the title is purposely meant to amuse.

best,
Annie
Report this comment

Terreson
Report this comment

Now THAT’S funny!
Report this comment

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Or is it blog ;-]
Report this comment

If you really want to honor and understand a poet’s work, you urge the reader to look at it, not you.

RHE
Report this comment

I’m sorry.
Report this comment

Terreson
Report this comment

You have no idea how ridiculous a dialogue like this sounds from the outside, Tere, from Europe or Asia—but then most fundamentalism sounds ridiculous when you’re not in it. And I’m saying that charitably as someone who lives in a culture where the gods get fed more respectfully and beautifully each morning than the people, where the rice goddess, Mae Pho Sop, is so revered no man can survive even a glimpse of her naked and just to be sure it will still be there in the morning sleep with a pillow between their leg.

I also say it charitably as someone who lives in a world where democracy is the brunt of many a joke, not to speak of equality.

Lighten up, I say. Indeed look at what William Kammann posted just above. I googled the name to find out he’s the new director of Poetry Grants at the NEA, so I assume he knows what he’s talking about when he draws our attention to the old New Yorker cartoon with the two ladies sitting at the bar in the Colony Club. “I don’t mind being equal,” one says to the other, “as long as I don’t have to give up being superior.”

Christopher
Report this comment

A second time the issues involved get trivialized.

Terreson
Report this comment

Terreson
Report this comment

If someone had said that Frederick Crews had invented this sentence for a character to utter in Postmodern Pooh, I’d not have batted an eye. It’s only the thought that someone might have meant it which gives me pause. I myself refuse grammatical hierarchy and subordination through the use of glottal stops and yodelling, but never with heavy breathing or Coleridgean pants.

RHE
Report this comment

To me it is axiomatic that both Feminist Poetics and Feminist Criticism are essential to a widening of aesthetic values. Just as Marxist crit takes issue with aesthetic values defined by a dominant class; and as Deconstructionist crit ultimately takes issue with Western metaphysical attitudes; Feminist crit takes issue with aesthetic values whose absolutes are defined by men. This is key. This is the crux. And so if some poet who is a woman says me to she is looking to explore a certain line of inquiry into aesthetic values she calls women poetry I understand her to mean she is looking to define values based on her own parcel of perceptional experiences, or on what she knows in her body to be true. Nor do I consider her line of inquiry to be limited to her experience of herself only. Rather, and in the end, what she discovers will lend to that desperately needed redefinition of what it means for all of us, for women, men, heteros, gays, blacks, whites, lesbians, hispanics, the disabled, jocks (choose your category), for all of us to redefine what it means to be a human being.

(As an aside I still don’t understand, never have, why some men find the Feminist critique threatening. I am not saying anyone involved in this discussion does. Just saying I’ve noticed as much over the years on the part of certain reactionaries in influential places. Harold Bloom comes to mind for one. But then I’ve always been a sucker for the greatest love story the world has ever known, that of Abelard and his Heloise. True partnership between two equals, except for maybe that, in the end, the student out-thought the teacher, and had the greater, more passionate conviction in the philosophical ideas they pursued.)

Again I wish I could somehow give a link to the article. I guess there is reason still for hanging onto the printed page. But here is a paragraph that gives an idea of the Feminist analysis when it comes to poetics. The article’s author is Elaine Showalter.

~ Feminist poetics raises questions about gender and genre, or the relationship between sexual identity and poetic form. According to Gilbert and Gubar, ‘verse genres have been even more thoroughly male than fictional ones.’ Epic encodes masculine values of heroism and conquest; the pastoral elegy has functioned as a ‘vocational poem’ signaling ‘admittance of a male novice to the sacred company of poets.’ Women poets have revised and transformed such male genres as the sonnet, the lyric, and the elegy. Furthermore, while women have been missing from the pages of traditional lit.hist. as poets, they have figured prominently as subjects in men’s poetry, represented as angels, whores, or monsters. As poets, they have revised these images as well as male myths describing female figures as Eve, Medusa, Cassandra, Circe, Demeter and Persephone, Ariadne, Penelope, and Eurydice. Even meter or punctuation may be seen as connected to gender. Finch has described iambic pentameter as a ‘patriarchal meter’ representing religion, public opinion, and status, while Dickinson’s hymn stanzas constitute a feminist ‘anti-meter.’ Other critics see the orthography of Dickinson’s poems as efforts to inscribe sexual difference through the use of dashes, both to refuse grammatical hierarchy and subordination and to introduce feminine ambiguities – gaps, wounds, stitches – into the poem. ~

I am not looking to argue any of the finer points of the quoted paragraph’s thinking. Nor will I. I am only looking to suggest there is a wider, damn near universal context in which any such line of inquiry, be it called womens poetry or womens work, or what have you, should, at least in my view, be placed. Again, the context is both cultural and historical. Maybe I should say herstorical.

As they say in the art of debate: he who defines the terms controls the argument

Terreson
Report this comment