Rachel Blau DuPlessis Talks Feminism, Writing a Long Poem, & More at The Oxonian Review

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is interviewed at The Oxonian Review about, well, much of import--from her beginnings as a poet to feminism's influence on her work, to its critical reception, to the necessity of reading the opening chapter of Blue Studios for any literary critic, to her long work, Drafts, and more. A valuable excerpt:

In ‘Reader, I married me: Becoming a Feminist Critic’, the opening chapter of Blue Studios, you detail your intellectual and creative development and your experiences as a woman in academia. I can’t help but feel that this chapter is essential reading for women working in literary criticism, especially young women. How do you feel things have changed, if it all? What work, cultural and political, is still to be done?

Thanks for pointing to that essay as crucial; I’m glad that the useful genre of female Bildung in essay mode might be exemplary for others. One’s life is not just one’s own. Struggle is continuous, and any gender progress needs to be strategically defended. We have seen, ‘even’ in the West, levels of misogyny and resistance to simple gains (like the right to control one’s body; the right to not be subjected to punishing violence for one’s claims of decision-making agency; the right to have a salary not lowered by gender prejudice) that are shocking in the context of human rights. And in this period, too, right now, crucial struggles for female literacy, education and freedom of movement are fiercely contested. Some things have changed in some places, but forces of anti-female reaction are still staggering. I cannot give a list of the work still to be done—it would be too long–and in all zones of human endeavor: medicine, family policy and domestic arrangements, fairness of access to education and to social goods, legal rights, questions of sexuality and embodiment, negotiations among child-bearing, child caring, and professional development, economic justice and fairness…

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Which contemporary poets are you reading? Where do you feel avant-garde poetry is heading?

The first answer is—as many as I can with care, mainly on the innovative side of things—trying to read Canadian, British, New Zealand, and Australian poets as well as US poets, and also sometimes poets in other languages. The second question is always weird—“who knows?” is one answer. That said, I think the documentary, socially and ecologically engaged poetries, the poetry that sometimes overspills the understood modes of “poetry” into essay, hybridity, and visual text are most exciting to me now. Poetry is an ethical practice as well as an aesthetic one—just even thinking about what this means and how it is instantiated is a useful task.

Read the full interview here.