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Poetry in Our Political Lives

Eavan Boland, ObjectLessons:TheLifeof the Womanand the Poetin Our Time. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. xvi + 254 pp. $23.00. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar:Writingas Feminist Practice.New York: Routledge, 1990. x + 196 pp. $16.95 paper. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, eds., Feminist Measures:Soundings in Poetry and Theory.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. x + 410 pp. $49.50; $22.95.

n 1987, Critical Inquiry devoted its spring issue to the subject of politics and poetic value. In his introduction, the editor, Robert von Hallberg, focuses attention on how the increasing critical preoccupation with "self-interest (often understood as the interest of a class or gender)" is making a "strongly evaluative criticism" of poetry difficult. Indeed, the problem for von Hallberg is not the attention paid to exposing the "selfinterested" politics of writers, but rather how this concern fails to enlist sufficient attention to the poetic work writers perform in writing their poems. Given this situation, von Hallberg notes the temptation for criticism to urge the political significance of particular literary forms, although such approaches would be simplistic. Despite these difficulties, however, von Hallberg stresses the need to establish an evaluative criticism that in its simultaneous

0010-7484/96/0002-315 $1.50 LiteratureXXXVII,2 Contemporary ? 1996 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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attention to politics and poetics could "intervene" "in the production and reception of the poetry of our contemporaries."' Since 1987, the difficulties von Hallberg elaborates have become more complex. The critical preoccupation with "self-interest" or "vested interest" has turned into a much more expansive discussion of positionality, in which the very complexity of addressing the multiple determinations of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, among other factors, has made the consideration of not only poetry's poetics but also its politics increasingly difficult. The critic RitaFelski has delineated just how complicated these issues can be. Pointing out the limitations of a feminist criticism that exclusively privileges a poetics of subversion and parody, Felski comments on how discourses "which may appear discredited and outmoded for one social group may acquire new and significantly different functions for another." Indeed, "what appear to be similar discourses may in fact have quite diverse meanings and effects."2 Von Hallberg concludes his 1987 discussion of the vexed critical problems of his time by indicating the most hopeful aspect of the collected essays: "these essays state what some critics want poetry to be in our political lives" (419). Although on the surface this formulation seems somewhat uneventful, it may be the only response to the conflicting needs of his and our critical situations. With this statement, von Hallberg suggests that poetry is neither reducible to nor separable from "our political lives." Further, the term "our political lives" implies that we share political arenas, if not necessarily the stances our various lives may lend themselves to. And importantly, von Hallberg intimates that the question of politics and poetry might best be approached by considering what we want poetry to be. The assertion "what we want poetry to be" is, of course, perilously close to the problematic advocacy of certain poetics. Yetthere can be important differences. Most often, when specific poetries are promoted, they are urged in universalizing and exclusive ways, 1. Robert von Hallberg, "Editor's Introduction," Critical Inquiry 13 (1987) 415. This issue was expanded into a book, Politicsand Poetic Value(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987). 2. Rita Felski, "Modernism and Modernity: Engendering Literary History," Rereading Modernism:New Directions in Feminist Criticism,ed. Lisa Rado (New York:Garland, 1994) 199.

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apart from the larger social and literary contexts that give rise to them. However, this exclusive hierarchizing of poetic modes apart from social and literary contexts is not at all necessary. Further, attention should be placed on what poetry brings into existence, rather than what it rejects. Indeed, to fail to consider contemporary poetries from the perspective of what some "we" at least wants poetry to be may be to elide political questions. Although poetry, like other forms of representation, can be studied for what it tells us about cultural representation, poetry especially enables us to think about intervention in cultural forms-in their enactment, disruption, and transformation. And apart from considerations of what "we" want poetry to be, this ongoing "invention of culture" cannot be fully evaluated.3 In some of the most valuable work under review, poets and critics discuss in far-reaching ways what they want poetry to be. While the "political lives" here are all in some way feminist, the poets and critics articulate their criticism with respect to many diverse political and poetical affiliations. Through the variation and richness of this work, we can begin to focus, if not to answer, the question of what we want poetry to be in our political lives.

Eavan Boland's Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time and Rachel Blau DuPlessis's The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice provide a provocative comparison of radically different poetries. While Boland professes to draw her'inspiration directly from a larger poetic tradition of well-crafted verse, DuPlessis establishes her writing primarily in relation to avant-garde writing practices. Indeed, the forms of their texts, which might be seen as the respective manifestoes of these two women poet-critics at midcareer, reveal their differences. Boland writes a kind of combined kunstlerroman and literary analysis, aiming through "[a]rgument and recollection" to recount her own difficult, and ongoing, rite of passage as a woman poet (xiii, xii). DuPlessis's collection of essays, 3. I take the term "invention of culture" from Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981). For Wagner "invention" is not so much a "making new," as the ongoing process of cultural reproduction, although with a temporal difference that precludes mere replication.

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written at different times of her life and partiallyrevised for publication in this volume, may be seen as a feminist reading practice that redefines itself as a feminist writing practice. Through a "concerted and endless practice of criticalrupture," DuPlessis aims to form an alternative "textual space"-an "otherhow" through which "a plethora of 'polygynous' practices teem" (152). But although Boland and DuPlessis may be seen to advocate almost diametrically opposed poetries, both formulate their poetical ideas in large measure as a response to the same poetical and political dilemma. For both writers, the discovery of the ways women are figured in those poetic traditions to which they turn creates a crisis in their respective poetic careers. For not only must they address the prevalent depictions of women as object and other in these poetries, but they must confront how these representations enable male poets to establish themselves as active poetic speakers and agents. Indeed, the very dynamics and readability of the poetries on which they draw are dependent on this objectifying and othering of women. In Boland's case, this dilemma causes her to attempt to transform the expressivist lyric tradition by altering its subject-object dynamics. DuPlessis aims to "revamp" the "Western lyric," initiating a writing that through its multiple perspectives can inquire into as well as disrupt the material conditions of poetic production (150). As a woman poet, Boland tells of having "blundered into an ancient world of customs and permissions," in which the pacification of the female had already transpired (27). Further, she attests to writing within a chauvinistic Ireland, "where the word womanand the word poet were almost magnetically opposed" (xi). Despite these handicaps, Boland declares that only through the auspices of a rich poetic tradition can she engage in the kind of full exploration that too much attention to feminist ideologies (however politically advantageous) would prematurely delimit. Boland, however, imagines no small-scale revision of the poetic tradition. As Romantic or modernist poets were once "emblematic" for their time, now the woman poet must be "an emblematic figure" for our time (xv). Indeed, it is precisely the woman poet who is well positioned to ask those questions "at the heart of the contemporary form"-about "revising the stance of the poet" and "the relation of

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the poem to the act of power" (xv). In fact, ObjectLessonsitself might be seen as an effort to make the female poet emblematic. Boland's account of her life in poetry well manifests the work a woman poet must perform in order to interpolate herself into a tradition of diverse allusions, metaphors, and conventions that have been formed primarily through male poets and poetic speakers. Take, for example, the sequence of life and language events beginning with Boland's meditation on how she is unable to write a poem about her somewhat older neighbor, a mother like herself. The poem is prompted by the awareness that "hers is the life mine will become, while mine is the life she has lost" (203). Analyzing why she could not write this poem, Boland concludes that while outside the poem she is free to experience her life, the poem itself poses its own restrictive field: "That I could not write [the poem] was nothing new. What unsettled me was that . . . neither did I feel

free to imagine it" (207). This failure leads her to proclaim, "Iwant a poem I can grown old in. I want a poem I can die in" (209). In order to write such a poem, she must rethink the relationship of a poet's subjectivity to objects, and importantly male poetic speakers' relationships to eroticized objects. ForBoland realizes that her failure to write this poem is bound up in the ways that women's "ornamental" and not "mortal"qualities have been the subject of poems (211). Considering why she is nonetheless inspired by the writing in men's erotic poems, she concludes that what she admires is not their possessive sexuality but their transformativeexpression. This realization leads her on a "surreal"quest to rescue beautified objects from a possessive sexuality (217). Analyzing several different erotic poems by women, Boland beings to understand how "subject and object are differently politicized" in women's poems. Women's erotic expression is an "index of powerlessness," signifying an entirely different erotic economy (221). In these poems, a possessive sexuality is not expressed, but rather the vulnerability of desire and the fragility of the body. Boland relates these observations to her years of maternal experience, which have provided her with many "intense" "sensory objects," revealing "a world suffered by the senses but not owned by them" (220). By "disassembling" the sexual, the erotic, and the poetic, Boland can now write a poem that is "an act of rescue, rather than a strategy of possession. And the ob-

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ject she returns to rescue with her newly made Orphic power and intelligence [is] . . . herself: a fixed presence in the underworld of the traditional poem" (227, 233). Boland concludes this chapter with an epiphany-a kind of stand-in for the poem she could not write and now writes: Thatmomenthas come to me which was prophesiedby anotherwoman's And once again there is a notebody in a summer twilight years ago.... book open on the table by the window. .... If I stood in that garden and looked southwest, I would see the Dublin hills. If I looked east, I would see the suburbs that led to the city. And high in those hills is the river which had made the city: the Liffey, now being refilled by rain. Its source and mouth, its definition and loss seem to me at that moment close to the realizations and dissolutions my body has known in this very house. I walk to the table. I sit down and take up my pen. (238)

Boland symbolically writes a poem that can hold her aging body, precisely because she can dignify it by comparing it to a powerful symbol of Irish nationhood and womanhood-the Liffey. But Boland has importantly rescued the Liffey from male-authored poems by her own female identification with its vulnerability-its dissolutions that tell of an always mutating body. While the poetic inventions of this sequence are at once alchemical and contorted, they are importantly brought on by Boland's refusal to forgo a sense of connection to a larger poetic tradition. Yet the question presents itself rather forcibly, just what is Boland allying herself with in staking her allegiance foremost to the poetic tradition? For Boland, the poetic tradition is clearly the rich resource of crafted poetic stances and finely wrought writing that inspired her to become a poet. It is also, in part, an Irish poetic tradition in which "self-expression and survival. . . combine" (ix). Yet the primary valuing of this tradition would seem to ignore the rather monumental critique delivered by Boland against the ways it is gendered, as well as her reconstructed relationship to it. Furthermore, while her female positioning leads her to establish a different, and compelling, erotic economy (no small achievement), Boland's stance of vulnerability reenacts feminine stances within the larger culture. (Of all Boland's formulations in Object

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Lessons, I find her prescription for the voice of a political poem most powerful: "The mover of the poem's action-the voice, the speaker-must be at the same risk from that action as every other component in the poem. If that voice is exempt ...

[it will have]

the reduced authority of an observer" [186].) Yet given how vulnerability defines her poetics, rather than existing as a possibility within them, Boland is left without a poetics that could produce assertive, or even lustful, poetic speakers. Boland's poetics, like other feminist accounts that situate themselves with primary reference to women's existing lives, ends up idealizing the very effects of oppression that she would wish to combat. Indeed, Boland does not, nor could she, address the central contradiction of her poetry, between her poetic stances of vulnerability and the act of power of her own "emblematic"writing. Yet to dismiss Boland's inventive poetics in any simplistic way would be a mistake. The very way Boland contains contradictions, rather than exposing them, may account for her poetic power. She is not primarily interested in telling about her life, but ratherin "reveal[ing]" and "dignify[ing]" her culturally muted existence as a suburban housewife and mother through the auspices of a prior poetic tradition (134). In the end, Boland may well be far more serious about the ritual of poetry than she is about the facts of her life. Unwilling to forgo the public space of a powerful poetic tradition, she is compelled to construct a female poetic speaker as an entirely adequate-"emblematic"-figure to occupy this site. In ThePinkGuitar,DuPlessis crucially encounters the dilemma of being a woman and a poet in her reading, which at once inspires, but also prohibits, her writing: "I read them, dazzled, Pound, Williams, Eliot. They 'read' me. Some me, anyway. I am, within their words, dug into habitual gender sites, repositioned from producer to produced, from writer to written, from artist to inspiration. Or to blockage" (47). DuPlessis notes, in fact, how the very "readability" of these avant-garde texts are dependent on their predictable gender narratives (42). But this problem leads DuPlessis, unlike Boland, away from the lyric. For DuPlessis, the very "iconicity"of the lyric is "deeply related to the beauty, inviolability, selfcontainment and iconicity of the Female Figure as object" (142). Thus she would "Depoeticize: reject normal claims of beauty.

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Smoothness. Finish. Fitness. Decoration. Moving sentiment. Uplift" (144). But while DuPlessis enlists avant-garde or postmodernist poetics, of a "dispensation of centerless heterogeneity of discourses," she does so only within a gender (and sometimes racial) politics (153). Noting in many avant-garde texts "a bizarre distance from and even distaste for the historical situations created by gender and racialinequalities," DuPlessis aims to disclose and disrupt these inequalities (153). Questioning through her writing the larger politics of literary production and reception-of literary fame-she will pose the question of all avant-garde texts: "How does it create itself by positioning its women and its women writers?" (153). For DuPlessis, "Nothing changes by changing the structures or sequences only," as "Nothing changes by changing the content only" (141). What is particularlypowerful about ThePinkGuitaris the way its readings of prior texts are simultaneously a form of criticalintervention and poetic evocation. (I had read several of these essays before and found that as a collection they provocatively amplified each other.) In her writing, DuPlessis allows herself as much criticaland emotional range as possible-of didactic statement, poetic evocation, theoretical pronouncements, emotional equivocation, polished writing, and flattened speech. By the very permissiveness of her practice, DuPlessis can gather diverse insights (and she is remarkablyinsightful) that would be suppressed in a more singularly argued critical or poetic piece. Because she demands range rather than containment, DuPlessis is able to fully develop not only her acute critical reactions to texts but also her emotional and passionate responses. Rather than finding a voice, she wants to lose one, exploring a body and mind "dunked in the culture, stained with it. ...

All cells are cultural cells" (170).

For DuPlessis, as for Boland, erotic representation is particularly fraught with the gender relations so problematicto her writing. But there can be no rescue of "eroticizedobjects," as Boland would have it, apart from the psychosexual dynamics and representational conventions by which they have their existence. In her essay "Sub Rrosa:Marcel Duchamp and the Female Spectator,"DuPlessis considers Duchamp's installation of EtantDonnes,frequently described as "one of the most violable nudes in the history of art" (68). Al-

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though Duchamp's installation depends for its evocation on existing gender relations, it also calls them into question. Duchamp points to the clitoridectomy of all Western depictions of the female body by opening up this nude and showing "what has always been missing" (80). In response to Duchamp's aggressive cultural commentary, DuPlessis establishes her own richly outrageous writing: labial "Duchamp has made a twisted, asymmetrical gash-richly a vulva 'is.' Deep, like an Sbut curved and wayward-where curved valley, disturbing, uncanny, provocative: (t)his lady has her bottom put on wrong" (70). Moreover, by investigating her perspective as a female spectator, multiply caught between identificatory positions of androcentric voyeur and violated object, DuPlessis constructs an erotic viewing that does not language-over the wounding politics of gender: My...

response of anger mixed with protective pity overrides the

immasculated reading eye. Thereupon I feel pity, for myself depicted, for my strained and impotent anger. I feel pity for the image, a compassion, an identification, a happy sorrow, and an arousal-of wonder? Wherefore this crystalline scene surrounding this piggish pink mass? Is she sleeping? is she hurt? is she wounded? is she coming? has she come? (74)

Although my preference for the more expansive emotional and critical range of DuPlessis's, over Boland's, poetics may be evident, I wish to equivocate from this liking in order to consider the larger political and poetical arenas these poets inhabit. Indeed, both writers form their poetics around the same poetical/political issue, namely of the objectifying and othering of women in male poetic texts. And while Boland elects to transform the poetic tradition seemingly from within it, DuPlessis conceives of an "otherhow." Yet neither is simply inside or outside the poetic tradition; rather, each must enact her feminist intervention through existing discourses. Boland, who is compromised by the poetic tradition to which she allies herself and comments on the necessary "compromise" of poetic form, creates a powerful rupture through her "emblematic" entry into a poetical scene that has marginalized her (115). As such, her poetic acts are radically constructivist, for she must achieve her own seemly expression through revising her un-

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seemly treatment within this tradition. While DuPlessis would seem to refuse compromise, she is forced to take on a didactic function. Yet DuPlessis does not fully address the didacticism of her poetics, invoking at times postmodernist writing practices in ways that her politics don't entirely allow. In uniformly repudiating, as she does, authority, transcendence, and singularity, DuPlessis doesn't consider the ways that these are implicated in her feminist poetics. The supreme quality of ThePinkGuitaris how insightfully and thoroughly DuPlessis understands the ways that gender relations are embedded within signifying practices-and how a feminist writing practice must disrupt these practiceson multiple levels, in multiple ways. The Pink Guitarestablishes a powerful feminist writing practice not because of DuPlessis's refusal of authority,transcendence, and singularity, but because of the ways she redeploys these.

In putting together FeministMeasures:Soundingsin PoetryandTheory, editors Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller intended to "expand current conversation[s]" between poetry and theory (2). Importantly, they have also produced a volume that brings into focus poetry and politics. While this came about in part because Keller and Miller sought out critics and poets representing a range of ethnicities and poetries, it is also the result of current criticaltrends in which theoretical investigation occurs at the level of multipositioned subjects. Through its rich collocation of criticalissues, FeministMeasures,especially in its plentiful inclusion of essays on an impressive range of contemporary poets, initiates a number of far-reachingdiscussions on what some critics and poets want poetry to be. Elizabeth Hirsh's "Another Look at Genre:Diving intotheWreckof Ethics with Rich and Irigaray" and Joan Retallack's ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM: (three essays onto shaky grounds)" replicate something of the division between Boland and DuPlessis. Hirsh, utilizing the recent theories of Luce Irigaray,conveys the ways in which poetry constitutes a ritualistic site but, unlike Boland, entertains the need for a separatistpolitics in order to transform this site. Focusing on the rhetorical situation of a poem in which an "I" addresses a "you" through a third mediating term,

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typically a "he," Hirsh brings out the sense of transformation that would occur through a mediating "she." In this new "female genre," in which sexual difference is not suppressed, the "autobiographical I" of the poem is transformed into a new "culturalI" (118, 124). Hirsh explains Irigaray's "political, ethical, and poetic" gesture: "the poet, by speaking to or evoking her subject, also puts herself in play, and at risk; she moves and is moved" (118, 124). Although it would be easy to criticize Hirsh's/Irigaray's ideas here in their failure to attend to subjects' multipositionality over a range of social determinations, to do so would be to fail to appreciate these utopian poetics, which may have some use for women for whom gender politics are not the primary politics. (I wonder, for instance, of the applicability of these theories if the mediating "she" were explicitly black as well as female.) Further, Irigaray, often wrongly criticized as essentialist, is importantly not only dialogic, as Hirsh emphasizes, but strategic. Establishing through her theoretical writings how an insidious masculine domination occurs at all levels of discourse, Irigaraymaintains that the failure to enact sexual difference at this time is tantamount to "genocide" (119). Hirsh applies Irigaray's ideas to Adrienne Rich's poetry, somewhat problematically. Despite Rich's obvious gynocentric and lesbian commitments, these take place more significantly on thematic rather than ritualistic or formal levels. Even though Rich sometimes employs the form of personal address, her poetry would seem to be written through a rather stabilized set of norms, a mediating "he," in ways that Irigarayat least would find troublesome. Like DuPlessis, Retallackurges a heterogeneous writing practice. But unlike DuPlessis, she envisions a writing that can surpass gender politics through a transformative play with language. Criticizing "picture theories" of poetry, Retallacknotes how the idealizing images of a mainstream poetry are particularly problematic for women who are themselves idealized. But although Retallack acknowledges the uniquely oppressive conditions that have defined women's lives, she sees no purpose for a literarywriting that would work to reveal or to subvert this oppression. Criticizing a feminist poetry that would base its practice on either experience or subversion (sub-version merely valorizing a masculine version), Retallack

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urges a poetics that generates "a proliferation of formal possibilities" and that provides a new "poethics" "to live by" (357, 363, 354). While Retallack'semphasis on "construction"and on "inventing a polymorphous future" provide, as do Hirsh's ideas, an important utopian direction for women's writing, I find her beyond-gender poetics problematic. While many poems, including Retallack'sown intriguing work, make compelling examples of writing in which there is "a proliferation of possibility beyond invidious dualisms," to conceive of an entire poetics as beyond gender, or as beyond subversion of gender, seems ratherlimited (347). Indeed, at least for some language poets, the disclosing as well as the disrupting of problematic political discourses is important. (What, after all, is any disruption but a subversion that has occluded its argument?) Further, Retallack'selevation of a strongly male avant-garde as beyond reproach, whereas feminist criticsas different as Alicia Ostrikerand Judith Butler are lumped together because of the ways they authorize, if inadvertently, masculine versions, seems particularly blind. I wonder why Retallack, who would urge a "nonpurist" or "nonabsolutist" writing, needs to move beyond gender so completely (365). For as DuPlessis aptly remarksin ThePinkGuitar,it is not that women are necessarily "circumscribedor limited by gender, but she will be affected" (161). In "Unnaming the Same:TheresaHak Kyung Cha's DICTEE," Shelley Sunn Wong shows through Cha's avant-gardetext the ways that formal experiment and disclosure of social content can reinforce each other. Cha's "multiple positionalities as woman, as colonial and postcolonial subject, as religious subject, and as a Korean"are brought out in her text through a cross-genre writing which attends to the material production of meaning (45). Rejecting "representativeness" and "authenticity" as dominant categories for determining literary and political value, Wong urges how "a mode of aesthetic intervention can simultaneously constitute a mode of social intervention" (43, 45). Wong takes particularaim at the traditional bildungsroman, in which a subject "can only aspire to, and move ineluctably toward, the valorized maturity of the majority culture" (45). "[C]ultivat[ing]the uneven textures of history" through enlisting contradictoryand discontinuous discourses, Cha refuses to "ra-

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tionalize the dismemberments of the past," opening up "a space for the expression of damaged life" (48). If Wong's insightful and evocative sense of Cha's poetics does much to combine political and literary agendas, her text also raises problems. While Wong urges a multiple positionality as the defining aspect of Cha's work, she does not fully address how transformative processes within poetic writing can break positionality down. Wong points to Cha's inclusion of a female "diseuse" as "the very condition of alternative speaking" (51). Like DuPlessis's "otherhow," Hirsh's/Irigaray's "female genre," and Retallack's "poethics," Cha's inclusion of the diseuse would seem a recognition of the utopian possibility of radical transformation-transformation in which positionality is altered, or ceases in some ways to matter. (In a different way, Wong's own text bears this strain of positioned and nonpositioned discourse as she notes how "appropriate" postmodern critical languages helpful to the reception of Cha's previously ignored text can also be "appropriative"[64].) If Retallack's "poethics" suppresses positionality in the interest of radical transformation, Wong fails to address how transformative (universalizing) propensities of language may make positionality problematic. M. Nourbese Philip, in "Dis Place The Space Between," avoids the problem of asserting the primacy of positionality or of transformation by demonstrating, rather than arguing for, her poetics. In her poetic text, Philip plays with how the "displacement" of African Caribbean women in institutions and discourses bent on using them turns into "dis place," her own untranslatable, demotic speech act (287). The transformation that the text enacts, of African Caribbean women repossessing their sexual and legal persons (these are contingent on each other) occurs only through untranslatable historical languages and events. A mixed-genre form, "Dis Place" discloses the incommensurateness of genres, moving between and mixing deconstructive passages, poetic evocation, historical texts, and a raucous staged play. In order to possess "dis place" of her own history and writing, Philip instates a group of Jamettes, lower-class Caribbean women who historically were sometimes prostitutes and sometimes political insurgents, whose

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bawdy actions enable them to command the streets, and eventually the courtroom. Unlike Boland, who ends up valorizing women's dispossession, albeit through an evocative erotic poetics, this writing clearly indicts the colonizers' appropriation, while refusing to moralize away needs for a lustful possession and sexuality. In occupying "the space between" (at once indicative of the place between the text's multiple discourses and between women's legs), Philip shows how subjects positioned through historical discourses can poetically deploy these languages in their own ethical, sexual transformation. While the preceding essays focus on the implications for both the production and the reception of women's contemporary poetry, other essays in the volume primarily concentrate on its reception. Lynn Keller, in "MeasuredFeet 'in Gender-BenderShoes': The Politics of Form in Marilyn Hacker's Love,Death,and the Changingof the Seasons,"argues against the contention that "formalistverse necessarily embodies a particular(patriarchal)ideology" (260). Utilizing Judith Butler's theories, Kellershows how MarilynHackeremploys traditional sonnet forms in order to reveal "gender roles as performative rather than . .. natural, inevitable structures" and to

open up "a range of possibilities for the female subject" (269-70, 264). Thus Hacker in her lesbian love sequence, flirting with the unequal power relations between the lover and the beloved of the traditional love lyric, also subverts them. But if Keller shows how very little ideological meaning can be attached to poetic forms so broadly designated as "free" and "open," or "formal"and "set," she does not consistently address the ways that poetic forms can be caught up in politicaland ideological processes (260). At one point, she concludes that the formal differences between Hacker and Adrienne Rich might best be addressed through "personal taste" (264). But as Keller shows so well throughout her fine discussions of Hacker's poems, political choices are implicated in formal choices. And if Hacker'sand Rich's poetic forms are different, so are their politics-albeit neither can be discussed through simple, dichotomous concepts. Susan Stanford Friedman, in "Craving Stories: Narrative and Lyric in Contemporary Theory and Women's Long Poems," also seeks widely to alter criticalreception of women's poetry by show-

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ing the limitations of Roland Barthes's and JuliaKristeva's ideas of the poetic as disruptive and narrative as repressive. Establishing the importance of "story" to a diverse group of poets, Friedman argues that Barthes's and Kristeva's valuations are uniquely problematic "for writers of any group that has been absent in or trivialized by hegemonic historical discourses" (21). Indeed, "the need for narrative ...

reflects issues of positionality and marginalization"

(17). While Friedman's basic argument makes a forceful point, her hegemonic use of the category of narrative, especially in her construction of such overreaching categories as "historicalnarratives" and "mythic and religious narratives,"causes her to lump together very different writers, silencing their poetics (25, 30). I wonder when the discontinuities and gaps of a narrative cease to make it a narrative, or how the need for telling discourses that address causation might be figured in nonnarrative ways. Akasha (Gloria)Hull, in "Channeling the Ancestral Muse: Lucille Clifton and Dolores Kendrick," and Elaine A. Jahner,in "Knowing All the Way Down to Fire," address the reception of women's poetry specifically within multicultural contexts. Hull questions the translation of African American women poets' own explanatory poetics into terms more amenable to "Eurocentricontologies" and poetics (98). Noting how Lucille Clifton and Dolores Kendrickattest to the importance of such African American spiritual traditions as spirit possession and the channeling of female ancestral energy for both their writing process and product, Hull asks, "Where in current theorizing about poetic form and politics is there space to explicitly situate such matter(s)?"(98). Recognizing the untranslatability of cultural concepts, Elaine Jahner concentrates on how cultural translation, or exchange, nevertheless occurs, stressing the recent mobility of peoples and ideas over the globe. Utilizing Julia Kristeva's theories of the uncanny, she suggests that by recognizing "the uncanny in ourselves, we can also respond to strangers in our midst with the recognition that arises from mutual need" (171). Further, she stresses how the at once specific ethnohistorical but also transportive capacities of metaphor enable this exchange. Focusing on the poetry of Native Americans Joy Harjo and Linda Hogan, Jahner establishes how their respective metaphors of "Deer Woman" and "fire"allow for

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dynamic cultural interactions, both within and between different cultural groups (166). By paying attention to metaphor, those mediational devices that enable cultural exchange, Jahner seeks to initiate responsible comparative cultural study. But while Jahner's objectives are to get at the best of both worlds, cultural specificity and dynamic interaction, her analysis of Harjo's and Hogan's poetry does not fully address the kinds of translations that occur between writers and their cultures or between writers and their audiences, nor could it, really, given the extreme variability of all these entities. However, her ambitious contribution reminds us of the ways that metaphors, while culturally freighted, are also open constructions that can aid (or not aid) in psychologically rich, accountable cultural transmissions. There are many other excellent essays in FeministMeasuresthat do not focus on the production and reception of women's contemporary poetry but rather establish their criticism primarily in relation to literary history or to individual poets. Three of the essays call for or outline large historical projects. In "The Feminist Poetics of Aemelia Lanyer's 'Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,"JanelMueller, analyzing Lanyer's life and revision of the Christian tradition, urges a full exploration of "the conditions that empowered female authorship in preindustrial and pre-Enlightenment Europe"(211). In "The Powers of Powerlessness: The Courtships of Elizabeth Barrettand Queen Victoria," MargaretHomans considers how social relations complicate textual meanings. Studying a large arrayof nineteenthcentury texts, Homans focuses on their representation of asymmetrical gender relations and notes how ostensibly the same posture assumed by men and women can mean rather differently.Thus for Robert Browning to claim a poetic stance of abjection in his love letters and poetry may be empowering, but for Barrett, such a stance has complications. As a woman poet, she is "an inferior posing as a superior posing as an inferior"(242). Rachel BlauDuPlessis, in " 'Corpses of Poesy': Some Modern Poets and Some Gender Ideologies of Lyric," discusses the necessity of locating the "cultural work done by poems" by paying attention to the ways they are "saturate[d]"with all kinds of cultural and social materials, not always immediately accessible (71). A truly historical project would entail an archaeology of the poem, locating its materials in larger

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historical discourses while also considering the ideological dimensions of the lyric as inflected through these discourses. Important for DuPlessis are the ways that the "whole melodrama of romance" "fuels the language practices of poetry,"as she explores in this essay how the "analytic"poetics of Mina Loy and Marianne Moore counteract these practices (76, 78). Other essays focus on specific poets and theorists. Suzanne Juhasz, in "Adventures in the Worldof the Symbolic:Emily Dickinson and Metaphor," argues against such poststructuralist theorists as Julia Kristeva who would divide language into presymbolic and symbolic modes. Utilizing object relations theories, Juhasz argues that Dickinson does not value the speechlessness of presymbolic modes but rather the way that the experience of speechlessness can be translated into metaphoric language. Cristanne Miller, in " 'The Erogenous Cusp,' or Intersections of Science and Gender in Alice Fulton's Poetry," draws attention to Fulton's use of quantum mechanics theory, in which a radical perspectivism disallows "all systems of dualized or oppositional distinction" (317). Calling into question any singular framework, such as gender, quantum mechanics enables the possibility of a sexual subject that remains "ungendered" (319). Teresa McKenna, in " 'An Utterance More Pure Than Word': Gender and the Corrido Traditionin Two Contemporary Chicano Poems," discusses how Juan Gomez Quiiones and Lorna Dee Cervantes revise the problematic gender relations of the corrido tradition, which nonetheless serves as a "catalyticmemory" linking them to their "sites of difference" (204). I initially suggested that much of the work under review is important because of how diverse critics and poets address what they want poetry to be, and that through this focus both the politics and poetics of poetry might best be considered. By way of conclusion, I wish to raise questions about poetry as a primary category of analysis. My very use of the term "poetry,"as opposed to "the poetries discussed here," might be seen as a kind of false designation, putting more purchase, so to speak, on my own commentary than a discussion of multiple poetries might otherwise command. In other words, what are the politics and the value of organizing curriculum, criticaltexts, and reviews through the category of poetry-as opposed to, say, considering texts first and fore-

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most through socially engaged categories such as history, ethnicity, and so forth? Of course, poetry is, and should be, regarded with primary reference to these categories. However, especially with respect to contemporary poetry, diverse poetries should also be considered as "poetry." "Poetry,"as poesis or making, enables us to think of a contemporary culture that some entity is constructing out of contemporary cultures. Certainly most "common" terms benefit some persons more than others-and no doubt the common term "poetry" is well enmeshed with the often male and white literary politics that have dominated academia. Even so, "poetry" seems an inviting term-especially given how recent largescale abandonment of this site leaves it open for redefinition. For women, of diverse affiliations and positionalities, the very making of poetry-of culture-seems to hold many more possibilities than have yet come about. Universityof Washington,Bothell