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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber, eds., Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1997. x + 373 pp. $49.95; $19.95 paper.
Poetry has enjoyed something of a rebirth in the public sphere over the past ten years, emerging in new locations--community centers, bookstores and cafes, festivals, "slam" competitions, and the Internet--where it responds to and creates new audiences. This striking convergence of poetry with the public sphere throws into relief a whole set of challenges facing critics who want to account for contemporary poetry's cultural status. What is the relation of poetry, a discourse for so long associated with private emotions and lyric subjectivity, to civic ideals of democracy, equality, and access? How do identity-based politics intersect with conventional ideals of aesthetic value? What is the efficacy of a "politics of form" versus a politics of social content or context? These critical challenges, which threaten to deepen the already wide fissures in a notoriously factionalized field, are compounded by the difficulty of constructing a socially oriented literary history of an art form that is resistant to the narrative impulse, and by a growing sense among both poets and critics of the irrelevance of drawing distinctions between "critical" and "poetic" writing. New critical spaces for understanding the resurgence of public poetries are urgently needed.
One perspective for understanding the cultural importance of poetry as a public discourse is feminist criticism, which through its interdisciplinary and culturalist poetics has much to offer to a long overdue cultural studies approach to poetry. Several recent books, including the three under review here, consider poetry's vital role in reflecting and reconfiguring the feminist movement's agendas for social and cultural transformation.(1) These critical accounts of the dramatic outpouring of poetry by women since the 1960s give us new and deeply historical models for understanding this particularly decisive entry of poetry into the public domain. They also offer an opportunity for estimating poetry's past and potential contributions to the construction of a "feminist counterpublic sphere" as an ideal discursive space, and for assessing how effectively feminist critics have been able to juggle the intricate public sphere questions of aesthetics and politics, access and context, audiences and institutions. One of the most difficult issues that has engaged feminist critics is how to balance the ideals of identity politics with efforts to create a multicultural, multiethnic feminism that can speak across and between competing affiliations and hybrid locations. The poet Adrienne Rich gave powerful voice to this ethical and artistic responsibility to foster diversity and dissent at the "Poetry and the Public Sphere" conference held at Rutgers University in April 1997, saying, "I want everything possible for poetry. I want to read and make poems that are out there on the edge of meaning yet can mean something to the collective."
Each of the three books under review also wants to make room for "everything possible" for poetry. In setting such wide scope for their investigations, the authors and editors may bemuse those academic readers who view the critical economy as operating on principles of scarcity rather than plenty and who see the aim of criticism as the taxonomy and classification of poems in order to establish a hierarchy of value. In refusing these familiar critical conventions, the feminist poetry criticism reviewed here does not avoid critical judgment or discard the idea of aesthetic value in favor of a genial neutrality; instead, it meditates self-reflexively on the institutional and material conditions of aesthetic response. To insist on remaining open to "everything possible," after all, is not to say that "anything goes." No criticism, feminist or otherwise, can be all-inclusive; some work will always be selected for discussion while other work is inevitably excluded. But there is in these books an unusual widening of critical scope and a determined opening up to the variety and variability of women's poetic production. Given the current critical climate, it is unusual for the same book to discuss or include work by, say, Rita Dove and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, or to place Alicia Ostriker's work next to that of Susan Howe. In marking these differences and making these connections, feminist critics are showing themselves to be especially alert to a whole range of formal, aesthetic, and political practices, recognizing and valuing their varied potential for cultural critique. At a time when some of our most influential poetry critics seem bent on fostering divisiveness by insisting on a purely formalist vision of poetic value, relegating political poems to the status of "victim art" or narrowly restricting the definition of what constitutes a poetic avant-garde or "experiment," this new body of feminist poetry criticism is refreshingly capacious. Together these books offer a powerful testimony to contemporary poetry's vibrant public life and a valuable analytical history of poetry's involvement in the feminist movement, challenging us to rethink the terms under which we construct genre theory and literary history.
In Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women, Lynn Keller cuts across conventional boundaries and definitions of the "long poem" to redefine the genre and to expand its canon in ways that can account for the richness and diversity of women's contemporary writing in extended poetic forms. One gauge of poetry's intimate relationship with feminism, for Keller, is the growing number of women poets working in such "expansive forms" as epic-based poems, dramatic sequences, or radically disjunctive series. In fascinating and richly detailed readings of a wide range of long poems, Keller suggests that this resurgence over the past three decades of women writing long poems "follows from struggles in the `second wave' of feminist activism for expanded attention to women's experience, history, and artistic powers" (305). If women have turned to the genre of the "long poem" because it is particularly amenable to the "sociological, anthropological, and historical material" necessary for a poetry of cultural critique (14-15), it is feminism that has helped them to enter the "quintessentially male territory," as Susan Stanford Friedman has put it, of the "big-long-important poem" (Prins and Shreiber 15). Keller reads this new writing by women to answer urgent theoretical questions about gender's implication in the historical development of genre and the literary dynamics of influence and intertextuality. Her substantial introduction, entitled "Pushing the Limits of Genre and Gender: Women's Long Poems as Forms of Expansion," moves easily through several knotty questions of genre theory and literary history, while suggesting some institutional and historical contexts for the resurgence of women's long poems. Thus integrating formal and generic analyses with cultural and historical readings, Keller provides an engaging and much needed analysis of gender's intersection with diverse, though usually male-defined, conventions of the long poem.
Although "long poems" by a few modernist women, such as H.D. and Gertrude Stein, have begun to receive attention, Keller shows that the general consensus remains the same: the major poems in the field, even in the contemporary context, are by male poets. Keller's piercing review of the critical record demonstrates that this perception is largely the result of literary histories that define the genre of long poem so narrowly that they exclude from discussion those poets, women especially, whose work is marked by generic hybridity or nontraditional themes. By redefining the genre, Forms of Expansion becomes the first full-length critical discussion of the long poem to pay substantial attention to women poets and even to acknowledge long poems by women writers of color.
For the purposes of her investigation, Keller defines the long poem broadly as any "book-length" poem. In doing so, she "encourage[s] ... a book-based approach to contemporary poetry generally," contributing powerfully to a growing critical turn away from the isolated and easily anthologized expressive lyric and toward compositional and critical approaches that emphasize process and context (22). Her inclusive generic definition has the immediate effect of bringing into view a dazzling array of works by women. In limiting her discussion to work by women poets, Keller seeks neither to establish a female countertradition nor to develop a feminist counteraesthetic; instead, she surveys the genre in a way that "redresses imbalances in previous criticism," compensating for postwar literary histories that obscure or render invisible long poems by contemporary women and their female modernist precursors...
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