210 122 3MB
English Pages 201 Year 2013
Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 1
04/10/2013 10:22:44
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 2
04/10/2013 10:22:44
Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010 Body, Time & Locale
by David Kennedy and Christine Kennedy
Liverpool University Press
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 3
04/10/2013 10:22:44
First published 2013 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2013 David Kennedy and Christine Kennedy The right of David Kennedy and Christine Kennedy to be identified as the authors of this book has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-84631-977-8 cased
Web PDF eISBN 978-1-78138-577-7
Typeset in Stone by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 4
04/10/2013 10:22:44
Contents
Acknowledgements
vii
CONTEXTS 1 Increasing Presence: With Some Notes on Categories and Methods 3 2 Terms of Engagement: Experimental Poetry and its Others
18
3 Critical Histories
31
Poetries 4 Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Wendy Mulford: Lyric Transformations 51 5 Geraldine Monk: Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum 68 6 Denise Riley: Corporeal and Desiring Spaces
83
7 Maggie O’Sullivan: ‘Declensions of the non’
100
8 Harriet Tarlo, Elizabeth Bletsoe and Helen Macdonald: ‘Being Outside’
115
9 Caroline Bergvall, Elizabeth James/Frances Presley and Redell Olsen: Virtual Spaces
126
10 Younger Women Poets 1: Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson
145
11 Younger Women Poets 2: Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke
159
Bibliography
175
Index
185
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 5
04/10/2013 10:22:44
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 6
04/10/2013 10:22:44
Acknowledgements
Our thanks are due to Anthony Cond at Liverpool University Press for commissioning this book and for exemplary support throughout the writing process. The discussion of Geraldine Monk’s Interregnum in Chapter 5 draws on two previous publications: an earlier co-authored version of the discussion, published as ‘Poetry, Difficulty and Geraldine Monk’s Interregnum ’ in The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk; and David Kennedy’s review of Noctivagations, published as ‘Writing Larks’, PN Review 147, 29.1 (September–October 2002), pp. 78–9. An earlier version of Chapter 6 was first published as ‘“Expectant Contexts”: Corporeal and Desiring Spaces in Denise Riley’s Poetry’ in Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 1. 1 (September 2009), pp. 79–103. The discussion of Jennifer Cooke’s ‘Steel Girdered Her Musical’ in Chapter 11 was given as a paper at the conference ‘Legacies of Modernism: The State of British Poetry Today’ at Université Paris-Diderot, 9–11 June 2011. Jennifer Cooke and Emily Critchley kindly allowed us to quote from unpublished papers given at the same conference on Andrea Brady’s Wildfire and Marianne Morris’s Tutu Muse, respectively. Glenda George’s and Geraldine Monk’s answers to our questions about the 1970s and 1980s were invaluable in writing the ‘Contexts’ section of this book. Cathy Wagner allowed us to quote from her unpublished paper on Denise Riley, given at the conference ‘Poetry & Poetics of the 1980s’ at the University of Maine, 27 June to 1 July 2012. The authors and publisher would also like to thank the following people for permission to use their work: Caroline Bergvall for extracts from Éclat (Sound & Language, 1996); from ‘Cropper’ in Carrie Etter, ed., Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010); and from ‘Cropper’, ‘Goan Atom’ and ‘Middling English’
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 7
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Acknowledgements in Meddle English (New York, NY: Nightboat, 2011); Andrea Brady for extracts from Wildfire (San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2010); Jennifer Cooke for extracts from ‘Steel Girdered Her Musical’, in *not suitable for domestic sublimation (London: Contraband, 2011);Emily Critchley for extracts from ‘When I Say I Believe Women’; Tony Frazer and Shearsman Books for permission to quote from Harriet Tarlo, Poems 1990–2003 (2004); and from Elisabeth Bletsoe, Landscape from a Dream (2008); Elizabeth James and Frances Presley for permission to quote from Neither the One nor the Other ; Nicholas Johnson, Etruscan Books and Helen Macdonald for permission to quote from Shaler’s Fish (2001);Quotations from Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems and Translations (Lewes: Allardyce, Barnett, Publishers, 1990), reprinted in Collected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman Books, in association with Allardyce, Barnett, Publishers, 2008) courtesy of Allardyce, Barnett, Publishers. Copyright © Jonathan Culler and the estate of Veronica Forrest-Thomson; Geraldine Monk for quotations from Interregnum; Marianne Morris for quotations from Tutu Muse ; Jeremy Mulford and Loxwood Stoneleigh for permission to quote from Wendy Mulford’s Late Spring Next Year: Poems 1979–1985; Redell Olsen, Ken Edwards and Reality Street for extracts from Secure Portable Space (2004); Maggie O’Sullivan, Ken Edwards and Reality Street for quotations from In the House of the Shaman (1993) and Body of Work (2006); Denise Riley, Ken Edwards and Reality Street for quotations from Selected Poems (2000); Sophie Robinson for quotations from a (Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2009) and The Lotion (Old Hunstanton: Oystercatcher Press, 2010); and from poems in the anthologies Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2009) and Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (Exeter: Shearsman, 2010); Harriet Tarlo for extracts from ‘brancepeth beck’ and ‘coast’.
viii
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 8
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Contexts
1
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 1
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 2
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Chapter 1
Increasing Presence: With Some Notes on Categories and Methods
You are reading a book about experimental poetry written by women in Britain between 1970 and 2010. Such a book is long overdue because, in Britain, experimental women poets have struggled to get attention even from sympathetic critics. The important conference ‘Legacies of Modernism: The State of British Poetry Today’ (Paris, June 2011) featured uncomfortable debates about the critical invisibility of older experimental women poets. Similarly, Robert Sheppard’s comprehensive survey of the British Poetry Revival and Linguistically Innovative Poetry, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents 1950–2000 (2005) only discusses Maggie O’Sullivan at any length. Denise Riley’s poetry gets about one page and other important figures are either discussed as critics (for example, Caroline Bergvall and Veronica Forrest-Thomson) or mentioned only in passing. Feminist critics have tended to focus on either Veronica Forrest-Thomson or Denise Riley because their poetry is an easy ‘fit’ with reading practices derived from poststructuralism and Second Wave Feminism. There is, then, a large body of women’s experimental poetry in Britain that has never received its critical due and continues not to, with the result that it is forever in danger of being forgotten or overlooked. And, as Peter Middleton observed twenty years ago, ‘poems can only mean as much as the discourse where we give them attention’ (Hampson and Barry, 1993, 132). We have chosen the designation ‘women’s experimental poetry in Britain’, as opposed to ‘British women’s experimental poetry’, because while the context of critical reception in which we locate our discussion may be more clearly identified as British, the production of the poetry discussed does not fit neatly within this category. We are keen to avoid the problems created within a wide range of poetry criticism where ‘British’ is treated as a neutral container when it is not. For 3
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 3
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence example, Robert Sheppard’s The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents 1950–2000 (2005) and Fiona Sampson’s Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry (2012) are very different books from each other. We are also keen to avoid any claims regarding inclusiveness and scope that our book cannot match because its interests are not in representing a multicultural and devolving ‘Britain’ but in poetry produced by writerly networks. These networks do, it is true, reach different parts of England but, from there, might have links with Norway, France or the United States (US) that are just as important as any connections with Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Cusp: Recollections of Poetry in Transition (2012), the ‘collective autobiography’ of alternative poetry scenes in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s edited by Geraldine Monk, not only reveals the importance of writerly networks, but also the importance, within them, of poetry as an item of social and political exchange. The use of the designation ‘British women experimental poets’ would also risk claiming the authority to represent Britishness during a specific period. Such a framing would occlude the more complex relationships to place and power that mark this particular kind of writing. Finally, the use of the designation ‘British women experimental poets’ would increase the risk that this book, in creating a new canon of ‘British experimental women writers’, excludes others still further – although one feels bound to add that any sort of canon that could include such writers would, at least, be something.
Power, value, voices and generations To return to Peter Middleton’s statement about the meaning of poems and critical discourses, it is important to add that the meaning of poems is also determined by the fields of power in which they exist or are allowed to exist. We are persuaded by psychotherapist David Smail’s argument for greater awareness of individuals’ relationships with proximal and distal power. Smail argues that people’s sense of worth stems from two sources: [F]irst, their relations as literally little people with the big people who occupied the proximal field of power during infancy and childhood, and second the sense of metaphorical littleness or bigness they later discovered themselves to have been accorded by the more distal powers of a social world which sorts people according to the ideological criteria of class. (Smail, 1993, 45)
And a social world that sorts people, one might add, according to the ideological criteria of gender and race. Sorting produces a hierarchy of attention. Linda Kinnahan notes that ‘writing without a sense of a reading community of scholars and poets open to the 4
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 4
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence assertion of a gendered “I” in experimental terms’ is a risky business, which is accompanied by potentially disabling anxieties: ‘the feared consequences range from erasure to condemnation’ (Huk, 2003, 277). This also involves bigness and littleness. For example, is there something particularly male about the productivity of, say, Allen Fisher, J. H. Prynne and Tom Raworth? Has the sheer bulk of their œuvres made them unignorable for many male critics? To come at this from another direction, have experimental women poets historically risked continual erasure precisely because their work has often registered the fact that, in the words of Helen Kidd, ‘[t]he notion of a single identity with which to face the world, of the self as a constant, and likewise the notion of a single poetic voice, have left me feeling profoundly uncomfortable’? (Hampson and Barry, 1993, 157) In The Speed of Darkness (1968), the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote of ‘working out the vocabulary of my silence’ and of ‘all my voices’ (Rukeyser, 1968, 112, 82) – a surprising pre-echo of ‘voices leap’ in Denise Riley’s ‘Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else’ (Riley, 2000a, 47). And does this make it easier to construct women’s writing as ‘little’ and therefore dismiss it or overlook it? It is all too easy to see literary criticism, like history, as a great forgetting. This is certainly the case with British feminist poetry which we will discuss in Chapter 3. Cultural and critical visibility is a matter of who is allowed to be big and who is allowed to be little. And, of course, it is no coincidence that work constructed as little is often that which addresses things that are too big to be assimilated within the dominant orders of representation. An important part of this book is a belief that women’s experimental poetry in Britain opens up crucial questions about bigness and littleness. These questions are not only about men and women but also about children, animals, culture and nature. Our project, then, is historically reclamative but it also responds to a turning point in women’s experimental poetry in Britain. If experimental poetry can be conceived as a discipline, both in the sense of something that can be taught and as a mode of experience that produces significant change in, and rewards for, writers and readers, then a younger generation of women poets can be said to be expanding the engagements of that discipline by writing it into and out of economics, poetics, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Writers such as Andrea Brady, Jennifer Cooke, Emily Critchley and Marianne Morris are poet-critics, publishers, organisers of conferences and robust and vigorous debaters in online publications and forums. For these women, the poet and her poetry are inextricable from Kulturkritik and political activism. They have drawn inspiration from US Language writers such as Lyn Hejinian, and many, like their US peers, work in higher education. This mirrors a wider shift in the economics and socialities of the experimental writing scene as well as demonstrating significant changes in women’s experience and opportunities. Women poets are starting to 5
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 5
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence occupy what the title of a forum published by Jacket e-zine in 2007 called ‘Post-Marginal Positions’. One might add that such positions are often post-national and that without transatlantic and trans-European communication much of the poetry discussed here would be even less visible than it is.
Limits and fictions These changes suggest that it is the right time to see where women’s experimental poetry in Britain has come from and where it might point and to refocus attention on what it means, what it has meant and what it might mean in the future to be a woman writing. We have chosen our starting date of 1970 for similar reasons. Veronica ForrestThomson’s Language Games was published in 1971 and was awarded the New Poets Award 2; Wendy Mulford founded Street Editions in 1972; Paula Claire began her long career of sound poetry and visual text collaborations during this decade; Denise Riley began publishing her poetry; and Fiona Templeton was a co-founder of London’s Theatre of Mistakes, 1974–1979. As Ken Edwards notes in his introduction to the ‘Some Younger Poets’ section of The New British Poetry (1988), women were ‘[increasing] their presence in what has always been a more male dominated poetry than its equivalent in the United States’ (Allnutt et al., 1988, 269). At the same time, it is worth noting that much of the poetry that can be called experimental – poetry by, say, Denise Riley or Geraldine Monk – did not start appearing until the late 1970s or early 1980s. Claire Buck argues that Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford’s combination of modernist experiment and poststructuralist theory placed their poetry ‘somewhat at odds’ with the work that was anthologised in One Foot on the Mountain: An Anthology of British Feminist Poetry 1969–1979. Buck goes on to note that rising interest in poststructuralist theory coincided with a recognition of ‘the limits of the consciousness-raising process’ in the early 1980s (Acheson and Huk, 1996, 94). We will explore whether women’s experimental poetry in Britain is, in part, a product of this particular moment in British feminism in Chapter 3. Women poets’ increasing presence cannot be separated, then, from the rise of the women’s movement at the end of the 1960s. The story of that revolution is well known but it is worth reminding ourselves what it felt like. Angela Carter, looking back at the 1960s from the early 1980s in her contribution to On Gender and Writing (1983), remembered a brief period towards the end of that decade when ‘truly, it felt like Year One, that all that was holy was in the process of being profaned and we were attempting to grapple with real relations between human beings’. Hand-in-hand with that grappling, Carter continues, went questions concerning the nature of reality and her ‘own questioning 6
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 6
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence of the nature of my reality as a woman . How that social fiction of my “femininity” was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing’ (Wandor, 1983, 70). Carter’s account speaks to the ‘why’ that is the revulsion at the way things are, which is what drives revolution. The only question is ‘how’. Michelene Wandor writes, in the same volume, how attending the first Women’s Liberation conference at Ruskin College in the spring of 1970 brought back into her life a ‘sense of belonging, which I had previously only ever felt onstage’ (Wandor, 1983, 4). Carter’s and Wandor’s thirty-year-old accounts of forty-year-old events serve to remind us of the ease with which the story of revolution could once be written and how it was once inextricable from women’s writing. It is hardly surprising to find Carter concluding her essay by saying that she felt she had more in common with ‘Third World writers’ (her phrase) who were ‘transforming actual fictional forms to both reflect and precipitate changes in the way people feel about themselves’ (Wandor, 1983, 76). Wendy Mulford makes a similar point about feeling and revolutionary change, looking back at twelve years of writing, publishing and political activism in 1979: I find it hard to estimate exactly what has happened to my writing in this period, but certainly at the outset I found it impossible to value what I was doing – to see it at all clearly. It just seemed to dribble out. Out of the intensity of my feeling, I think I would have said. I started to discover what I was doing about 1974–5 […] through my involvement in the women’s movement, and my friendships with particular women. That was the time when the whole question of the ‘construction’ of the self started to form mistily on the skyline. […] How far did the illusion of selfhood, that most intimate and precious possession, reach? How could the lie of culture be broken up if the lie of the self made by that culture remained intact? (Wandor, 1982, 31)
Like the Carter and Wandor passages, Mulford’s reminiscence describes an important political shift: the moment when feeling (independent experience) starts to become affect (feeling fixed to idea). And a feeling fixed to an idea is one of the starting points for praxis.
Body, time and locale This political shift from feeling to affect is an important part of our larger argument throughout this book about the relation of women’s experimental poetry in Britain to body, time and locale. Our understanding of affect draws, in part, on Lacan’s rejection of the opposition between affect and idea – an opposition that can be found 7
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 7
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence in Freud, philosophy and German psychology. For Lacan, the symbolic order (both the realm of culture and realm of law which controls desire) transcends the long-standing opposition between affect and intellect. From this, it follows that, in the words of Dylan Evans, ‘the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is not the reliving of past experiences, nor the abreaction [i.e. discharge through verbalization of emotion attached to repressed ideas] of affect, but the articulation in speech of the truth about desire’ (Evans, 1996, 6). We are not proposing that poetry is ‘like’ psychoanalysis but it is certainly arguable that the contrast between, on the one hand, reliving past experiences and discharging emotion and, on the other, articulating in speech the truth about desire might describe the differences between the poetry of the so-called mainstream and parallel tradition of experimental poetry. Feeling becomes affect or emotion becomes articulated desire because the individual, as in the passages from Angela Carter and Wendy Mulford, comes to the awareness that feeling is not merely – or perhaps not even – something personal that we possess but something that is produced in us and/or given to us by forces (cultural, economic, social, political) working on the body and producing, in turn, the self that Carter calls a social fiction. Locale and time are involved because those forces position the individual body in a particular spatio-temporal matrix. While it might seem that we are drifting towards a Heideggerian ‘thrown-ness’ here, it is more useful to think in terms of David Smail’s argument (referred to earlier) that people’s sense of worth partly derives from how distal powers sort them according to the ideological criteria of class, gender and race. Smail supports his argument with a number of case histories from 1980s Britain. In the context of the current discussion, it is worth noting that female subjects outnumber male subjects 2:1. This may partly be a reproduction of the familiar ‘male analyst–female subject’ narrative but it is also clear from many of Smail’s cases that women are particularly sensitive to, vulnerable within and, consequently, better attuned to the fields of power that he describes. The importance of time to the movement from feeling through recognition of a problem to the articulation of desire is neatly summarised by Denise Riley: The political problem isn’t so much one of identities but of when women take on the identities of ‘women’ or of ‘humans’, and how. It is a question of the temporalities of women. ‘Identities’, says Mary Ann Doane, ‘must be assumed if only temporarily’. This is indeed strategically the case; but I would go farther to suggest that identities can only be held for a time, both individually and collectively … (Weed, 1989, 136 [emphasis in the original])
8
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 8
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence Riley argues that ‘this founding temporality’ is crucial for both the history of feminism and the word ‘women’. Temporality is an important part of the work of Julia Kristeva – a critic whose work we have found particularly useful in our explorations of women’s experimental poetry in Britain. In common with many psychoanalytic critics, Kristeva focuses on the ways in which an originary scene is replicated and re-enacted but, for her, this scene is cultural. In About Chinese Women (1974), she argues that the unity of monotheistic capitalist societies derives from a radical separation of men and women at the heart of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. There is a ‘localization of the polymorphic, orgasmic body, desiring and laughing, in the other sex’ so that in contrast to man who speaks the word of God, woman, ‘who has no access to the word … appears as the pure desire to seize it, or … as the desire to continue the species’ (Moi, 1986, 141–2). The creation of culture and creation of woman become synonymous with each other and with a species of castration which is ‘the support of monotheism and the source of its eroticism’ (Moi, 1986, 145). As a consequence, women cannot gain access to ‘the political and historical affairs of our society, except by identifying with the values considered to be masculine … by playing at being supermen’ (Moi, 1986, 155). Women are condemned to be the servants of either the dominant order’s consolidation or its subversion (Moi, 1986, 155–56). Kristeva argues that women can and should refuse both of these extremes: By listening; by recognizing the unspoken in all discourse, however Revolutionary, by emphasizing at each point whatever remains unsatisfied, repressed, new, eccentric, incomprehensible, that which disturbs the mutual understanding of the established powers. (Moi, 1986, 156)
The idea of culture founded on castration or separation is developed further in ‘Women’s Time’. Kristeva argues that ‘female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations’ (Moi, 1986, 156 [emphasis in the original]). She associates ‘repetition’ with the cycles of gestation and biological rhythms in general and associates ‘eternity’ with what she terms ‘monumental temporality’. These associations echo Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘Messianic time’ which Benedict Anderson has usefully glossed as ‘a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present’ (Anderson, 1991, 24). Kristeva gives no indication that she has read Benjamin but, for her, female subjectivity becomes problematic in the context of a predominant linear conception of time (Moi, 1986, 192). In the words of Jeni Couzyn’s poem ‘The Message’, ‘The message of the men is linear’ while the message of women is love, figured as ‘the circle of light we carry / at the centre of our bodies’ (Allnutt et al., 9
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 9
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence 1988, 90). For Kristeva, this linear kind of temporality is inherent in civilised values and ‘renders explicit a rupture, an expectation or an anguish which other temporalities work to conceal’ (Moi, 1986, 192). At the same time, this temporality is associated with the enunciation of logical sentences and narratives of ‘beginning–ending’, which ‘rests on its own stumbling block, which is also the stumbling block of that enunciation – death’. And Kristeva notes how the hysteric would rather experience the self in terms of cyclical and monumental temporalities and that this yearning is ‘perhaps embedded in psychic structures’ (Moi, 1986, 192). Feminism’s initial response to linear time has led, Kristeva argues, to first and second phase feminism offering women a rather simplistic choice: ‘insertion into history’ or ‘the radical refusal of the subjective limitations imposed by this [i.e. linear] history’s time’ (Moi, 1986, 195 [emphasis in the original]). Newer European feminist movements, she argues, are starting to mix those two attitudes (Moi, 1986, 195). Kristeva next argues that we must not only move beyond Freud-derived constructions of female subjectivity but we must also achieve a fuller understanding of Freud’s notion of castration in order to move beyond existing constructions of sexual and symbolic difference. Both men and women are involved in this, since Freud’s later metapsychological writings ‘imply that castration is, in sum, the imaginary construction of a radical operation which constitutes the symbolic field and all beings inscribed therein’. Separation is, therefore, ‘the common destiny of the two sexes’, and Kristeva again uses the example of the hysterical woman to exemplify how an awareness of this separation can lead to an attempt to deny it. Obsessional men seek to overcome and master it. She then moves from the mentally dysfunctional to assert that separation is ‘constitutive of the symbolic’ and characterise it as ‘the break indispensable to the advent of the symbolic’. One consequence of this is that women either try ‘to fulfil their experience to a maximum’ within this framework or call it into question (Moi, 1986, 198). It is worth noting here how Kristeva’s discussion, like reviews of Riley by Keery and Wilkinson and passages in Riley’s own theoretical writings, either elide or risk eliding what might be termed ‘the self-reflexive feminine’ with mental dysfunction. Where, then, does this leave women? Kristeva argues that it leaves them with an ‘urgent question … What can be our place in the symbolic contract?’ (Moi, 1986, 199 [emphasis in the original]) This question arises because the social contract is based on the separation that Kristeva has already outlined. This separation is ‘an essentially sacrificial relationship’ and ‘order of sacrifice’, although the route from separation to sacrifice remains a little unclear (Moi, 1986, 199). What we might deduce is that patriarchy and the symbolic contract constitute themselves both by and through sacrifice, either real or mythic. Sacrifice is, for example, the crucifixion that is the foundational moment of Christianity. But it 10
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 10
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence might also be described as the constitution of male power through the construction of the female as lack and Other, and the demand that women, in Kristeva’s words, perpetuate the socio-symbolic contract in the roles of mothers, wives and nurses. Male power demands that women sacrifice any desire for self-determination by carrying out these roles; and women, in turn, internalise that demand. As a consequence of separation and sacrifice, women ‘seem to feel they are casualties’ and ‘find no affect’ in either the contract or language (Moi, 1986, 199). Nonetheless, Kristeva argues that one way for women to put themselves in a more active relation with the contract consists in trying to explore the constitution and functioning of [it], starting less from the knowledge accumulated about it (anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics) than from the very personal affect experienced when facing it as a subject and as a woman. This leads to active research … particularly those attempts, in the wake of contemporary art, to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnameable repressed by the social contract. (Moi, 1986, 200)
Kristeva is suggesting a two-part process here. Women should first explore what it means to be regarded, and to experience the self, as casualty, as sacrificial. Since this condition is experienced in the ways in which women’s bodies are called to be used, this exploration will lead to new ways of describing and experiencing women that are not implicated in use and sacrifice.
Women’s writing and women’s bodies The dangers inherent in discussing women’s writing in terms of women’s bodies cannot be ignored. In an important review article discussing critical books by Kathleen Fraser and Linda Kinnahan and a volume co-edited by Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr, Jennifer Ashton surveys US women’s poetry from feminism to Language writing and concludes that ‘its agenda [remains] utterly and literally essentialist’. She argues that while the point was always to make sure that women were fairly represented by including them as women […] the success at that effort of inclusion – the elimination of unfairness – almost immediately transformed the commitment to equality between men and women into a commitment to celebrating the differences between them – the most distinctive of which is, of course, the body. The radicalization of that transformation by
11
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 11
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence the theoretical avant-garde has simply redescribed the presence of a distinctive female experience or point of view as that of a distinctive female body. Indeed, the demand for formal innovation is the technology of this redescription, since it requires that the femininity of the poem be understood not as a function of its content but as a function of its form. (Ashton, 2007, 228 [emphasis in the original])
This is, perhaps, a little overstated, and it certainly ignores the extent to which under-representation is inextricable from dominant technologies of description. It also ignores the difficult questions raised by fair representation and inclusion. If we argue, for example, that the formal innovations of H. D. and Mina Loy were once denied the same recognition as those of Eliot and Pound on gender grounds, then does granting them equal recognition have to take into account the grounds of that denial? It is difficult to map Ashton’s account over the history of women’s poetry in Britain but it raises important questions which have received little attention in accounts of the period after 1970. In terms of our own interest in the body, we are powerfully struck by the extent to which the poetry that we discuss is often focused on the production of different or new types of bodies: Veronica ForrestThomson’s ambivalently modernist textual bodies; the ‘atomic tongues’ of Geraldine Monk’s Pendle witches; Denise Riley’s warty toad-poet; Jennifer Cooke’s feathered ‘kittenista’; and the abject and traumatised female bodies of Marianne Morris’s Tutu Muse. As that brief list suggests, there is often a powerful element of fantasy which, we would argue, is significantly connected with a particular moment in post-war British culture. This moment can be located in the early 1980s and remains largely undocumented and unexplored. What can be said is that, through feminism, a dialogue opened up between Marxism and psychoanalysis which, in turn, converged with an interest in fantasy, as evidenced by Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy (1981); Formations of Fantasy (1986) co-edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan; and fiction by, for example, Elizabeth Baines and Angela Carter. Far from being a literary sub-genre, fantasy was conceptualised as a bridge between the political and aesthetic. Fantasy became a means of understanding ideology’s deep embedment in the unconscious and how the work of art produces a transformative encounter with the unconscious where ideology resides.
Voicing and unvoicing The apparent ease with which successive generations of experimental women poets in Britain can be aligned with radical political moments might lead one to imagine that their poetry expresses an assertive 12
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 12
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence identity politics. In contrast, we would argue that what can be discerned within a range of work during the period that we are discussing is a process of simultaneous voicing and, what might be termed, ‘unvoicing’. What we mean by this is that a particular voice (which is, as in all poetry, an effect of syntax and vocabulary) is never in play for very long. Whatever voice is established quickly gives way to another. So, for example, Geraldine Monk’s poetry moves between commentating and mediumistic voices and between simple, almost naive language and something akin to free improvisation which values words for the sounds that they contain and can be broken down into. Denise Riley can be broadly described as articulating the discomforts of the lyric self in a poetry that often seems to delight in breaking the lyric contract at the precise moment of offering it. As the ending of ‘Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else’ has it: ‘You hear me not do it’ (Riley, 2000a, 49). Refiguring a poem as something that is heard, as opposed to written and then read silently, underlines the importance of voice in experimental poetry. The process of voicing and unvoicing is even more marked and self-conscious in the work of younger poets. Jennifer Cooke’s sequence ‘Steel Girdered Her Musical’ (to be discussed in Chapter 11) moves from a revolutionary female body speaking in what is termed ‘majestic’ through highly personalised statements of political despair to end on a collective ‘we’ and ‘us’ who are ‘awaiting someone to have a better idea’ (Cooke, 2011, 26, 37). Andrea Brady’s ‘Note’ to Wildfire speaks of wanting to ‘write a forensic poem, one whose structure could accommodate an excess of social information’ and ends with the question ‘what would make you throw yourself out?’ (Brady, 2010, 71, 73) The carefully notated objects and traces, prosey sonnets and photographs of Sophie Robinson’s process-elegy a amount to what Diane Ward calls a ‘project to document a world that persists while it is ceasing’ (Robinson, 2009, 66). Francesca Lisette’s ‘Shutter // Target’ speaks of ‘fouling the apriori’ (Lisette, 2010, 7). The cumulative effect in other poems in her pamphlet, As the Rushes Were, of words like ‘adhere’, ‘unglued’, ‘prising’, ‘sticky’, ‘glue’, ‘laminate’ and ‘gums’ seems to figure a charged intimacy and an ambivalence about attachment, whether personal and erotic or collective and political. How might this simultaneous voicing and unvoicing be accounted for? First, it is clear that large areas of women’s experimental poetry in Britain have been, and continue to be, interested in exploring what Veronica Forrest-Thomson called the suspension of reading and writing ‘between empirical and discursive imagery [which] forces us to make connections which neither discourse itself nor the world already contains’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1978, 74). What results is a kind of hesitation. In the words of Forrest-Thomson’s poem ‘On reading Mr. Melville’s Tales ’, ‘the differment remains, remains and’ (ForrestThomson, 1990, 68), which is also an excellent attempt to get Derridean 13
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 13
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence ‘différance’ to work in English. Second, we have already referred to Denise Riley’s remark about women’s temporalities and the short-term nature of identity. The process of voicing and unvoicing would seem to mime temporality in both its senses, as well as becoming a way of evading the social fictions of femininity identified by Angela Carter. This, in turn, connects with what Jennifer Cooke’s note to her sequence ‘Steel Girdered: Her Musical’ calls ‘the possible impossibility of revolution’ (Cooke, 2011a). Voicing and unvoicing may, therefore, be a response to the possible impossibility of a female voice that is distinct from all of the other voices that produce and work the signifiers ‘woman’ and ‘women’. Two other things need to be said about the process of voicing and unvoicing. First, as we shall argue throughout this book, voicing and unvoicing have a significant effect on the content of poetry. It is not the case that unstable meaning is produced, but rather that the process of voicing and unvoicing redefines what can be considered content by forcing reconsideration of what can be considered voice. In the words of Marianne Morris’s ‘He Who Works is Happy’: ‘speech is now / something written and which only afterwards is permitted to leave my mouth’ (Morris, 2008, 42). Second, it is clear that unvoicing has often tempted critics into reading women’s experimental poetry as a matter of self-reflexive linguistic self-pleasuring at the expense of content. However, if Vincent Broqua’s argument is correct (2008) – that what Joan Retallack (2007) calls ‘the experimental feminine’ results in a non-place, which is extra-territorial and challenges national boundaries – then voicing and unvoicing may be the result of trying to discover what voice or voices might be appropriate for such a non-place. Broqua (2008, 2) notes that the experimental as a non-place also marginalises women even further, so voicing and unvoicing might be read as a continuing search for a language in which, and with which, to be acknowledged. It is doubtful whether one could take a lead from Jane Garrity’s Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (2003) and argue that experimental women poets in Britain have often been just as concerned as their interwar predecessors with contesting the national imaginary in the period after 1970. At the same time, Broqua’s argument suggests a sharp political emphasis in much experimental writing by women in Britain. As we shall we see in Chapter 2, much of this writing seeks to both think and act globally. To return to Joan Retallack, it is not merely the case that experimental poets are more willing than their mainstream counterparts to think and work transnationally. The non-place that might result from the experimental feminine is not the limbo or statelessness that Vincent Broqua seems to warn against. In contrast, it is what results when writers move us ‘away from picturing’ and from language as ‘static mirroring’ (Retallack, 2003, 117). What results is a practice that seeks 14
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 14
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence alternatives to representing the pre-existent feminine roles of ‘uniquely anguished “I”’ and ‘communally victimized “We”’. What Retallack calls ‘a solidarity of defiant images’ doesn’t change anything (Retallack, 2003, 121). In contrast, the experimental feminine looks for new ways of being intelligible because dominant ‘[c]odes of intelligibility rationalize values that derive their force from the extent to which they are constructed and defended in terror of the experimental and the feminine’ (Retallack, 2003, 127). The political implications of this are clear and can be felt behind, for example, Jennifer Cooke’s ‘kittenista’ speaking in a new language called ‘majestic’ or Emily Critchley’s ambivalently angry use and erasure of academically validated discourse in ‘When I Say I Believe …’. It is, admittedly, much harder to say what the national imaginary has been during the period covered by this book. But to return to David Smail for a moment, this imaginary has certainly involved questions of bigness and littleness. There has been an ongoing process of rethinking the appropriateness and size of Britain’s role in the world. After 1970, this has gone hand-in-hand with the question of whether Britain is a part of Europe. This has been accompanied by an increasing awareness of internal colonialism and corresponding campaigning for devolution. In this context, it is interesting to note Wendy Mulford’s comments in 1979 about the male ‘otherness’ of the modernist tradition: ‘I have, as it were, only a colonial relationship to such texts inhabiting a language and a culture which I’m not quite at ease in, which doesn’t quite fit’ (Wandor, 1983, 35). Indeed, one is reminded of Michael Hechter’s observation, in his study of internal colonialism in the British Isles, that: ‘It is the existence of a social boundary which defines the peripheral group, not the cultural stuff it encloses’ (Hechter, 1975, 207). Hechter makes a ‘margins vs. centre’ argument that is specific to what he terms the ‘Celtic fringe’ but Mulford’s comment makes clear that anyone crossing into the dominant culture can be made powerfully aware of their non-standard use of language. The cultural, political and social circumstances of the period after 1970 can be broadly described as the gradual dissolution of the post-war consensus and its replacement with ideologies derived from beliefs in the primacy of the free market. Writing in 1994, the political philosopher John Gray argued that one consequence of this dramatic change was that: In Britain today, two parallel movements of unravelling can be discerned beneath the topical ephemera of political life – an unravelling of the current form of the union between Britain’s component nations, visible in swift and dramatic political changes in Northern Ireland and in immobility and the decaying legitimacy of Westminster rule in Scotland […] [and] an unravelling of English national culture itself, as the
15
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 15
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence English struggle to shake off the inherited mythologies which distort their perception of themselves and their relations with neighbouring peoples. (Gray, 1994, 26)
This describes a recognisable landscape, although one feels bound to ask, in 2012, which came first: that is, were Gray’s ‘two parallel movements of unravelling’ already underway in the post-war period and so made consensus unworkable? Or is it free-market ideology that made those two movements of unravelling possible? Returning to contemporary poetry, Gray’s first movement is a defining component in the work of Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison and Seamus Heaney – all of whom can be said to reject ‘the current form of the union’ and its ‘inherited mythologies’. The assertion of class and regional identities in their poetries struggles to achieve what Marxist critic Michel Pêcheux terms ‘disidentification’. This describes a way of constructing subjects that is distinct from either master narrative and counter-narrative or dominant and sub-dominant (Ashcroft et al., 1989, 170–71). Disidentification aids recognition of the sub-dominant positions that the dominant culture prescribes for everything that it views as ‘not me’. The identification of boundaries suggests that, while the categories that they underwrite may be pervasive, they are also susceptible to change and transformation. What needs to be added to such a reading is that it has been too easy for commentators on both the left and right to discuss the unravelling of post-war consensus in terms of class and region at the expense of gender.
Dynamic, developing spaces The chapters that follow do not pretend to be a comprehensive survey, nor do they attempt to force a fit between the poetry that they discuss and a limited set of critical positions. Our readers are asked to understand that our book stands in contrast to an encyclopaedic approach that claims to contain a fully representative and complete list of participants. Our book discusses strong and significant examples of work that can be identified as women’s experimental poetry in Britain from 1970 to 2010. Our readers should also consider that these poets are plotted in a dynamic and developing space which is largely unexamined and unknown in either its historical dimensions or in terms of the forces that operate both around and through it. It is also important to stress that our first interest in and excitement about the poetry discussed here was as readers and poets ourselves and we hope that we have communicated that excitement. Chapter 2, ‘Terms of Engagement: Experimental Poetry and its Others’, presents our definition of the notoriously slippery term ‘experimental’. Chapter 3, ‘Critical Histories’, sketches the historical dimension just 16
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 16
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Increasing Presence referred to and shows how the history of women’s experimental poetry in Britain from 1970 to 2010 cannot, to a large extent, be separated from the discourses in which it has been discussed. The originality of the work discussed in this book cannot be understood by readings that are too narrowly feminist, postmodernist or poststructuralist or by criticism that chooses poetry to prove the efficacy of its own positions. Chapter 4 discusses the work of Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Wendy Mulford as examples of how women began to locate themselves self-consciously in experimental poetry as both subjects and political beings. Chapters 5 and 6 are devoted, respectively, to Geraldine Monk and Denise Riley – two poets whose work shows the complexity of the body-time-locale argument that frames this book. Geraldine Monk’s book-length Interregnum and Denise Riley’s body of self-questioning lyrics convey a powerful sense of the body as multi-functional (that is, it is not just what produces the voice and, consequently, poetry) and portray the voice as a total body manifestation – a full embodiment. Similarly, both poets show the voice going out into locales that are, in the words of Riley’s poem ‘The Castalian Spring’, ‘sociologised’. Being invited to submit to a ‘sociologised’ self also involves submission to linear time, and this produces a doubled version of the same rupture that Kristeva identifies as inherent in civilised values and institutions governed by the socio-symbolic contract. The speakers of these poems struggle with this rupture and with being forced to potentially take on new designations or being forced into new selves that are one-off events and continuing performances. Locale is also important in Chapters 7 and 8 which discuss the work of Maggie O’Sullivan, Harriet Tarlo, Elizabeth Bletsoe and Helen Macdonald, and argue that their encounters with the natural world deconstruct both dominant cultural codes and what Tarlo calls ‘the constructed explaining subject self’. Chapter 9 discusses two things: the highly original contribution that experimental women poets in Britain have made and are continuing to make in the area of performance and performance writing; and the conception of poetry as, or as access to, virtual space. Our discussion will focus on the work of Caroline Bergvall, Redell Olsen and a collaboration between Elizabeth James and Frances Presley. Finally, Chapters 10 and 11 will focus on the work of some younger women poets. Andrea Brady, Emily Critchley, Jennifer Cooke, Marianne Morris and Sophie Robinson are producing work that often derives from a sceptical re-examination of established ideas about the relationship between writing and gender. At the same time, the work of these younger women is often highly politicised and conceives of poetry as a way of intervening in the public sphere.
17
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 17
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Chapter 2
Terms of Engagement: Experimental Poetry and its Others
‘A whole new audience is about to join the iPod generation, next week, when free downloads of contemporary, strictly “non-mainstream” poetry will be available online’ – was how Brunel University launched the Archive of the Now in November 2006. The archive’s director, Andrea Brady, called it ‘a snapshot of the innovative work being done today’ that would ‘bring “the late Modernist tradition” to a wider audience’ and ‘provide access to so-called “difficult poetry”’ where ‘use of language, politics and performance might not fit what is traditionally recognised as poetry’. The press release’s brief biography of Brady included the information that she ‘runs the avante [sic] garde Barque Press’ with Keston Sutherland (accessed 8 November 2006). A posting by Brady on the Buffalo POETICS listserv stated that the Archive of the Now ‘focuses on what we can for brevity and controversy’s sake call “experimental” or “late modernist” writing’ and ‘will expand to include as many poets working within this tradition as possible’ (accessed 8 November 2006). Non-mainstream, innovative, late modernist, difficult, avant-garde, experimental – there is a huge range of terms for the type of poetry that is the subject of this book and, as Brady notes, controversy surrounding the use of them. Carrie Etter’s introduction to Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (2010) calls ‘avant garde’ and ‘experimental’ ‘exhausted categories’ and demands a reconception of British poetry as a ‘rich array’ and ‘a spectrum holding infinite points of difference’. At the same time, she cannot ignore how ‘in Britain, poetry’s cultural capital remains squarely with the Mainstream, or the most commonly written poetries’ (Etter, 2010, 11, 9). ‘Postmodern’ is another term that has been used by both supporters and opponents. Peter Brooker (1991) has applied the term positively to Tom Raworth’s poetry, while Don Paterson has attacked the poetry of contemporary British ‘postmoderns’ 18
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 18
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Experimental Poetry and its Others for ‘monotone angst, an effete and etiolated aestheticism, and […] joyless wordplay’ (Brady, 2004, 396). No wonder John Freeman simply called a selection of his reviews of, inter alia, Thomas A. Clark, Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood and Chris Torrance The Less Received: Neglected Modern Poets (2000). A press release that refers to ‘strictly “non-mainstream” poetry’ is clearly aiming for a neutral term, even though it cannot avoid internalising its own Other or Others. How, then, can non-mainstream poetry’s Others be described? There are plenty of designations available. For example, the late Ric Caddel often referred to mainstream poetry as ‘high street poetry’ or as poetry produced by the commercial ‘high street’ presses (Independent obituary, 11 April 2003). Peter Middleton has written of ‘the network of fruiting (or do I mean funding) bodies that support the poetry of mass observation which largely passes for verse these days’ (Dorward, 2003, 9). In their introduction to New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible (1993), Robert Hampson and Peter Barry argue that poetry that achieves a public does so because any ‘surface difficulty’ in poetic language is uninformed by ‘politics, philosophy and history’ (Hampson and Barry, 1993, 4). In the same volume, Peter Middleton’s ‘Who Am I to Speak? The Politics of Subjectivity in Recent British Poetry’ makes a similar point about ‘the expressive self that dominates establishment poetries both in Britain and in America’ (Hampson and Barry, 1993, 118). These poetries assume that a poem is the record of an ‘I’ speaking its loves and losses. This self expresses its feelings, narrates its history, and makes judgements, as if its right and ability to do so were beyond question. It is a self untouched by postmodernism. Each poem is a tiny resistance to theory […] and testifies to a general rule. Poetry is self-expression. Anything else is not poetry. (Hampson and Barry, 1993, 119)
Robert Sheppard’s The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents 1950–2000 favours the term ‘Movement orthodoxy’ and argues that this can be traced through a range of high profile post-war anthologies, from Robert Conquest’s New Lines (1957) to Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford’s The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (1998). For Sheppard, the anthologies that come after Conquest’s demonstrate that ‘[p]ost-war poetry of an orthodox variety has internalized [a] view of itself’ as consensually inclusive and diverse, ‘while perpetuating the poetic unconscious established in the 1950s’ (Sheppard, 2005, 131–32). Sheppard’s analysis clearly draws on Andrew Crozier’s essay ‘Thrills and Frills: Poetry as Figures of Empirical Lyricism’ (1983), which uses the poetry of Philip Larkin and others to argue that ‘[i]n the poetic tradition now dominant the authoritative self, discoursing in a world of banal, empirically derived objects and 19
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 19
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Experimental Poetry and its Others relations, depends on its employment of metaphor and simile for poetic vitality.’ Poets, he went on, ‘are now praised above all else as inventors of figures – as rhetoricians, in fact’ (Sinfield, 1983, 229). Such arguments are well-known. Indeed, surveying the publishers whose books regularly win the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize largely confirms Carrie Etter’s statement that: ‘poetry’s cultural capital remains squarely with the Mainstream, or the most commonly written poetries’ (Etter, 2010, 9). One should, of course, be cautious about generalisations, and there are many things that seem to support the idea of what might be called an expanded mainstream. Faber and Faber have published Sam Riviere’s 81 Austerities – a book that is marked by an online language world which is at a considerable distance from the traditional forty-poem slim volume. The Bloodaxe anthology Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (2009) found room for Sophie Robinson and other younger poets – Siddartha Bose, Mark Leech, Toby Martinez de las Rivas and Ahren Warner – whose work is neither expressivist nor reproduces a Movement-derived orthodoxy. The best work of poets like, say, W. N. Herbert, Alice Oswald or Michael Symmons Roberts does not fit those categories either. It is tempting to read all of this as a sign that, as Chris Hamilton-Emery has argued: There’s no binary opposition of avant-garde (now surely a historical term) and the mainstream, and there are no power structures that make sense within such a framework. What we have now is a multiplicity of practices and readerships and no real framework for understanding their trajectories, outside of consumption. (2007)
But the end of opposition seems a long way off when one turns to Fiona Sampson’s Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary Poetry (2012). A book by a former editor of Poetry Review, published by Chatto & Windus, can be taken as an ‘official’ account. The book’s final chapter, ‘The Exploded Lyric’, engages with ‘radical poetics’ which, for Sampson, ‘have been largely concerned with the impossibility of communicating and denoting’ (2012, 260). She sketches three generations. The generation that emerged in the Sixties (her examples are Harry Fainlight and Barry MacSweeney) ‘practised a kind of hyperbolic “over-saying”’ (260). A second generation, emerging in the Eighties and Nineties (her example is Elisabeth Bletsoe), replaced this with ‘what can seem like a dearth’, in which ‘a poem’s silences […] make space for multiple meanings’ (260). Finally, in the current century, poets are practising ‘a kind of automatic writing’ which is exemplified, Sampson says, by poets associated with Equipage, Reality Street and Shearsman. This poetry ‘runs through a series of grammatical tasks or takes up space on the page’ and eschews any interest ‘in the possibility that it might in itself create readerly experience, evoke insight, give pleasure or even argue 20
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 20
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Experimental Poetry and its Others a case’. At the same time, ‘[u]nifying these radical generations there is also J. H. Prynne’ (260). Sampson does not like the Sixties – there is an earlier reference to ‘dangerously utopian visions of transformation’ (35) – and presents Fainlight and MacSweeney as casualties of that decade’s fads and fashions. She is generally kinder to the women poets that she discusses, although some of her estimates are surprising. Denise Riley’s poetry exhibits ‘poetic caution’ but makes ‘universalizing claims’ (267). Frances Presley belongs to ‘radicalism’s second moment’ alongside Wendy Mulford, Denise Riley and Elisabeth Bletsoe (265). This second moment was influenced by Cixous, Kristeva and Irigaray whose ‘increased attention to the music, resonance and sheer pleasurability of language […] was clearly encouraging for serious, bookish young women interested in verse’ (265). Presley takes an ‘anti-photographic approach to landscape’ (267) – other aspects of her poetry are ignored – which means that her poems are ‘close to’ Yves Bonnefoy but also ‘evoke […] the work of Gillian Allnutt’, a poet who really ‘belongs in the lyric mainstream’. According to Sampson, the second wave shares ‘much […] with conventional lyric’ (268, 269). This has now ‘been overthrown by the new, reactive poetry’ represented by Keston Sutherland, Chris McCabe and Matthew Welton (269–70). For these poets, ‘a poem is text which renounces any other discursive purpose’ (269). At first sight, Sampson argues, this poetry might seem to share Jackson Pollock’s emphasis on ‘practice’ and ‘process’ but it ‘[resists] pleasure’ and results in ‘a text than can only “play” – and therefore only “happen” as postmodern poetry – for the poet himself, as it is being written’ (271). Sampson praises Prynne’s ‘voice’ but sees his poems ‘entering consistently deeper into privacy’ (273). Even so, his writing is ‘dense with purposive pleasure’, in contrast to ‘the diminishing returns of some of [his] imitators’ (276). It is easy to dismiss this as caricature but Sampson’s profile means that her book will be widely reviewed and will attract a relatively large readership. What her argument reveals is the complacent ease with which mainstream poetry conceives of itself as a national poetry. The non-mainstream is inward-looking – whether this is Fainlight’s bipolar disorder or Prynne’s alleged privacy – and concerned with pleasure, although this concern has diminished over recent years. Women, according to Sampson, dominated the second generation but are not really part of the non-mainstream. The other notable feature of Sampson’s argument is that non-mainstream poetry is characterised through comparisons with non-literary cultural products or aberrant behaviours and practices including Art Brut, abstract expressionism, anti-psychiatry and drug abuse. Placing non-mainstream poetry outside literature makes it easier to disregard. Women do not feature in Neil Corcoran’s discussion of what he terms neo-Modernist poetry. This poetry involves
21
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 21
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Experimental Poetry and its Others a turning against what these poets read as a played-out native humanist or empiricist tradition; a deliberate indebtedness to the work (poetic, critical and aesthetic) of Ezra Pound and, through him, of an American writing whose central figure is Charles Olson; and a readiness for an exploratory or experimental formal inventiveness not common in post-war British poetry. (Corcoran, 1993, 164)
‘These poets’ include Christopher Middleton, Roy Fisher, J. H. Prynne, Tom Raworth, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier and Douglas Oliver. Corcoran misreads Crozier’s ‘Thrills and Frills’ essay as a demand for ‘ascetic purity’ (165) and argues that most of Prynne’s work after Brass (1970) is ‘impenetrably opaque’ and ‘[resists] the intelligence’ (177). He adds: ‘If this is the kind of neo-Modern hermetic impasse to which traditional English humanists and empiricists have traditionally consigned the works of the British neo-Modern, then it is hard to know how to argue with them’ (177). As with Fiona Sampson’s brief survey of ‘British radical poetics’, ‘good’ Prynne and ‘bad’ Prynne are used to represent experimental poetry’s pleasures and alleged excesses. Reception is a consequence of visibility which can be adversely affected by controversies over naming. Naming is also a way of insuring against visibility. The pejorative use of terms such as ‘avant-garde’ or ‘difficult’ leads to what Allen Fisher has called mystification of significant work that does not offer instant entertainment or fulfilment of [dominant] paradigms; […] a mystification that gives some poetry the apparency of being more difficult than it is, an obscurity that encouragement towards engaged reading of that poetry would dispel. (Fisher, 1999, 28)
There are particularly British cultural factors involved in the reception of work which our study calls experimental. First, the dominance of a broadly rationalist poetry, as exemplified by the Movement, has not assisted the wider reception and visibility of poetry that takes modernism as one of its many starting points. Second, it is also notable that, in contrast to America, the UK does not have a centralist tradition of free verse. British poetry has suffered as a consequence. Similarly, British women poets have no equivalent of Emily Dickinson to look back to. Finally, as Peter Middleton has noted, both experimental poets and their critics continue to suffer from the lack of ‘self-representations of poetry, readership, community, and political intervention’ (Middleton, 2003a, 140). With some notable exceptions, such as Allen Fisher and Robert Sheppard, experimental poets in Britain have been comparatively reticent about publishing poetic statements in comparison to their 22
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 22
04/10/2013 10:22:45
Experimental Poetry and its Others American counterparts. In particular, British women experimental poets seem, until very recently, to have been doubly so. American women poets have written extensive accounts of how and why they do what they do. One can point to volumes of essays or important articles by Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino and Kathleen Fraser. American women critics and poets have also been widely and visibly productive in the criticism of experimental poetry. Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (1990), Susan Vanderborg’s Paratextual Communities: American Avant-Garde Poetry since 1950 (2001) and Joan Retallack’s The Poethical Wager (2003) are important interventions in literary history and poetics. The economics of publishing are certainly a factor – how many British universities have active presses? – but, crucially, visible activity is exemplary and generates further activity. In contrast, British criticism of experimental poetry can look impoverished. One is forced to revisit old positions and rehearse stale arguments instead of being able to join in a developing discussion. The reception and visibility of experimental poetry have also suffered from a publishing and media emphasis, after about 1990, on poetry as inextricable from a recognisable and marketable personal identity. Sophie Robinson is an interesting case in point. She is the only poet to appear in both Infinite Difference and the Bloodaxe anthology, Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (2009). Her biographical note in Voice Recognition tells us that: ‘Her poetry often deals with the complicated relationship between technology, culture and the female body’ (Byrne and Pollard, 2009, 140). This is in marked contrast to all of the other biographical notes in the anthology which are focused entirely on origin, education, current location and activity. On the evidence of biographies alone, one could be forgiven for wondering whether any of Robinson’s contemporaries have two ideas to rub together. Robinson, in contrast, has several ideas and rubs them together vigorously. This difference highlights the way in which experimental poetry generally conceives of the self as a site where conflicting forces – cultural, economic, political and social – are constantly in play and can be investigated, not just felt. Experimental poetry is more likely to be, in Allen Fisher’s phrase, ‘idea-oriented’ (Fisher, 1999, 6). It is this sense of investigation that partly lies behind our preference for ‘experimental’. Before going on to define our conception of experimental, we should examine the other available terms. ‘Innovative’ can be dismissed out of hand. It is altogether too generic: all poetry is already innovative by virtue of line breaks and its jagged right edge. It is also too closely tied to context. Seamus Heaney’s use of myth looks innovative in the context of mainstream post-war British and Irish poetry but considerably less so in the context of poetry by Charles Olson and Jerome Rothenberg. ‘Linguistically innovative’ describes a period on the British scene in the 1980s and 1990s. We are also uncomfortable with the implications of Carrie Etter’s title Infinite 23
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 23
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Experimental Poetry and its Others Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets which risks revalidating an economy of recognition where women, yet again, earn their place through performing difference and otherness. ‘Late Modernist’ is, at first sight, less problematic. For Anthony Mellors, calling a text ‘late modernist’ characterises an allegiance ‘to the modernist imperative that eclecticism and difficulty form a hermeneutic basis for cultural renewal’ and a simultaneous ‘disavowal of the unifying and totalising gestures of modernist aesthetics’ (Mellors, 2005, 2–3). Such a description could certainly be applied to, say, Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts or Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems. But ‘late Modernist’ fails to adequately account for a range of post-war practices: sound and image-based poetry; the conception of the page as a field where verbal and non-verbal materials co-exist or different verbal materials are collaged; an engagement with a range of theoretical discourses to inform poetry and poetics; or the greater use of chance and random procedures which remove intentionality from the text. Crucially, the term ‘late Modernist’ seems to exclude women. The title of Mellors’s book Late Modernist Poetics from Pound to Prynne looks uncontentious, whereas a book called, for example, Late Modernist Poetics from Roberts to Riley looks unlikely. This is partly because women poets are still only written into the narratives called ‘modernism’ or ‘late modernism’ with difficulty and partly because one remains sceptical about whether writing by Mina Loy, Lynette Roberts or Denise Riley can have such labels usefully applied to it. Carrie Etter’s dismissal of ‘avant-garde’ and ‘experimental’ as ‘exhausted categories’ converges with post-Peter Burger’s ‘death of the avant-garde’ arguments. Burger defined avant-garde art in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974/1984) as a particular movement and moment in the early twentieth century that was less interested in producing a new style or method than in questioning art as an institution in bourgeois society. In this context, Dada represented an unrepeatable response to the crisis of the First World War, which revealed the fictionality of both the rational ego and efficacy of reason. Burger, writing of Duchamp’s ready-mades, argues that: Once the signed bottle drier has been accepted as an object that deserves a place in a museum, the provocation no longer provokes; it turns into its opposite. If an artist today signs a stove pipe and exhibits it, that artist certainly does not denounce the art market but adapts to it. (Burger, 1984, 52)
Any subsequent avant-garde activity can only be neo-avant-garde and keep re-enacting the moment of Dada but without its political motivation or intent. In the words of the American poet Michael Donaghy: ‘Capitalism long ago defeated the avant garde by accepting it as another style’ (Brown, 2004, 57). 24
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 24
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Experimental Poetry and its Others Such arguments can be quickly dismissed. First, the date of publication of Burger’s book – 1974 – allies it with a wider Western, post-1960s pessimism concerning the ability of revolutionary cultural praxis to produce political change. To borrow the titles of two accounts from the 1960s, the ‘play power’ produced in response to post-war ‘bomb culture’ resulted in either polymorphous play or ineffective, largely middle class protest. Second, and more importantly, Burger’s account ignored female Dadas and how Dada’s real achievements went far beyond attacks on rationalism and bourgeois institutions. The work of Emmy Hennings, Hannah Hoch and Sophie Tauber-Arp was multimedia and cross-genre. Dada’s embrace of energy, flux and motion in a continual process of becoming produced the female Dadas’ combinations of dance, poetry, performance, puppetry and song which demonstrated, in turn, how the experimental uses cross-genre work to produce new cultural, political and social identities or the potential for them. We argue that it is this that keeps people returning to the experimental and continues to be an important feature of women’s experimental poetry in Britain. For this book, the term ‘experimental’ allows for the consideration of a wide range of poetry that differs from a dominant, more orthodox verse (which, many have argued, is derived from the Movement). Indeed, it is worth noting that critics as divergent in approach and interests as Harriet Tarlo and Sarah Broom have used the term unproblematically. Andrea Brady has argued that the term ‘implies that there is some kind of final truth that the poetry is seeking to establish, some hypothesis which it is trying to substantiate to which the practice in itself is secondary’ (Brady, 2007b). For us, the word ‘experimental’ is appropriate and valuable for its connotations of tentative procedure; of an act or operation carried out under conditions determined by the experimenter, which leads to the discovery of something unknown or is designed to test something known; and of an ongoing commitment to experimentalist practices. One of the many pleasures of reading experimental poetry is that one often does not know what a poet is going to do next. Carol Watts, for example, has published the postcolonial narrative poem Wrack (2007), sequences on colour and is currently working through the post-pastoral sequence Zeta Landscape. Multiple practices are also very important. The arc of Maggie O’Sullivan’s work combines poetry, performance and fine art practice. Indeed, these examples suggest that experimental poetry might be better described by the term suggested by Lawrence Upton – ‘restless poetry’ – which describes ‘the desire to try new techniques and […] “to stop doing it once I know what I am doing”’ (Upton, 1999, 2). What else can we say about experimental poetry? The four essays that Allen Fisher collected in The Topological Shovel (1999) provide a vocabulary for writing about experimental poetry that avoids the complications inherent in terms like ‘late Modernist’ or ‘avant-garde’. Fisher’s essays formulate a complex poetics drawing on, amongst 25
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 25
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Experimental Poetry and its Others other things, biology, linguistics and physics, and mounting detailed discussions of poetry by cris cheek, Eric Mottram and J. H. Prynne. The first essay, ‘The Mathematics of Rimbaud’, begins by noting ‘conceptions of art and poetry as process, and as idea-oriented’ and adds that ‘poetry is always “yet to be found” in the process of its making, and that making continues to take place through the physiology of the reader’ (Fisher, 1999, 6). In the words of his vast project Place : ‘I who am where I am / feel the surges of / of the pulses that are / not my heart’s’ (Fisher, 1978, 23). Visible process in poetry requires not only active participation from the reader but also participation that will change how the reader feels. This obviously has political implications. In the second essay, ‘The Topological Shovel’, Fisher records his own ‘considered interpositions between processes with aesthetic functions and extra-poetic processes where functions are different, without giving it the function of preprocessing parts prior to inputting to a larger process. It considers continual perhaps’ (Fisher, 1999, 11). Processes remain not only visible but also unsynthesised into a finished work so that possibilities and potentialities remain open. Fisher again returns to the idea of a poetry that is always about to be made. Theories of poetry are ‘[n]ot concerned with a poetry already written, but one that may arrive’, and Fisher himself wants ‘homeorhesis and yet to be able to change what’s potentially next’ (Fisher, 1999, 15, 19). ‘Homeorhesis’ means preserving a flow but it also has connotations of ensuring the continuance of a given type of change. These ideas underwrite Fisher’s exploration of what ‘Necessary Business’ calls the ‘poetry of new pertinence’ in the work of ‘cris cheek, Eric Mottram and J. H. Prynne, and fifteen or so others in the years since May 1968’ (Fisher, 1999, 22). Fisher notes that he is ‘speaking in a considerably small room’, and Robert Sheppard argues that ‘Necessary Business’, originally published in 1985, is an attempt ‘to manufacture poetic community’ and, as such, marks ‘a pivot between the British Poetry Revival and Linguistically Innovative Poetry’ (Sheppard, 2005, 196). Nevertheless, several of Fisher’s comments are highly pertinent to the current study. The poetry of new pertinence, to some extent, reproduces the historical avant-garde’s conception of art as life praxis in its repudiation of bourgeois ideas of art as separate from life. Fisher asserts that: Poetry does not collaborate with society, but with life; its field of collaboration is predominantly aesthetic, that is its main function. […] The poetry of new pertinence incites, its provides patterns of connectedness through its aesthetic function which initiate the process of production in me. (Fisher, 1999, 23)
Poetry of new pertinence, he continues, presents a ‘particular complex of signification, and as such, must be produced by the engaged reader 26
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 26
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Experimental Poetry and its Others who actualises the work’s pertinence’ (Fisher, 1999, 23). Patterns and processes are not present as something that the poet has already explored to their full extent. They are present in the work as something to be recreated and explored by the reader. They provide, to borrow the closing words of Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts, ‘guesses where we go’. There is a subtle but important difference between reader actualisation and the ‘multiple meanings’ description that is routinely applied to experimental poetry. The type of poetry exemplified by cris cheek, Eric Mottram and J. H. Prynne ‘[presents] language situations in which small perturbations of initial conditions lead to large, unforeseen changes in the possible production problems readers are invited to engage with, rather than rhetorical solutions or those proposed for effect’ (Fisher, 1999, 25). These types of works are ‘presentations of engagements and occasions which reveal possibilities through the showing of their activities in the act of reading them’ (Fisher, 1999, 29). The fact that experimental poetry – Fisher’s poetry, Emily Critchley’s ‘When I Say I Believe Women’, Denise Riley’s lyrics – is often accompanied by lists of resources or footnotes or endnotes is testament to a conception of poetry as something that is not absolute in itself and as something that operates in a larger active field. Poetry becomes what Fisher calls ‘a prospectus towards change’ (Fisher, 1999, 37). It becomes a prospectus because it produces physical and psychological changes in the reader – that is, it is not just consumed and flushed out. A clearer sense of what such a prospectus might look like can be gleaned from three more recent articles. Joan Retallack’s ‘What is Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?’ argues that an experimental poetics that means something more than ‘the latest stylistic oddities’ will have to explore ‘the shock of alterity’ and ‘the pleasure of alterity’; will have to address the fact that ‘we humans […] have yet to invite enough alterity in’; and be in ‘conversation with an interrogative dynamic’ (Retallack, 2007, 1). But Retallack also argues that experimental poetics involve the recognition of paradigm shifts in perception, citing Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Eadweard Muybridge and, finally, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans and ‘Orta or One Dancing’. Stein attempted to answer the question: ‘How to create an experience (ideally, a profound understanding) of character as it is beginning to be understood in twentieth century psychology, using materials of language absent from nineteenth century literary devices?’ (Retallack, 2007, 4) Experiment comes to be seen, then, as ‘a reaching out to experience things that cannot be grasped merely by examining the state of our own minds’, and she goes on to offer ecopoetics as a current example of such reaching out. John Cage is also invoked for his belief that we should stop trying to mirror nature and instead ‘adopt her manner of operation’ (Retallack, 2007, 7, 8–9, 10). Experimental poetics converges, then, with other ‘practices that reach out (interrogatively) toward constructive new 27
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 27
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Experimental Poetry and its Others ways of understanding and being in the world’ (Retallack, 2007, 11). Retallack implies a shift between the practices of modernism and later experimentalisms. Where Stein’s writing implies that literature ought to register changes in wider fields of human inquiry, Cage and ecopoetics imply that experimentalism is itself a means of understanding what needs to be changed. Therefore, Retallack’s argument implies a change in thinking about ourselves. Josh Robinson’s ‘“Innocence and Incapability Impose”: Towards an Ethic of Experimentation’ draws on Adorno’s Negative Dialektik and Ästhetische Theorie to argue that the experimental is not simply a matter of newness, but of a process in which something is tested, tried out. Whereas the category of innovative works includes those which posit a new mode of composition or expression which might be become established, an experimental work puts itself to the test, seeking to establish its validity by trial, and in turn necessitating further experiment. That is, experimental work is something like an essay. Essayistic thought involves the suspension of the traditional concept to method, avoiding attempts at transcendence. (Robinson, 2007, 5)
Robinson illustrates his argument with a single example – Douglas Oliver’s The Infant and the Pearl. Oliver’s poem comprises 101 twelve-line stanzas of alliterative verse and locates itself within the English sub-genre of the dream poem by writing back to the fourteenth century Pearl. Robinson, like Retallack, focuses on a broadly interrogative dynamic. The Infant and the Pearl displays ‘the tentativeness of a poem trying to find out whether a particular voice or mode of verbal production works’ and a strong sense of ‘the “working out” of the way in which poetic expression, ethical imperative and political action are related’ (Robinson, 2007, 7). Tentativeness and ‘working out’ mean that each five stanza subsection of the poem carefully reworks and re-imagines the same linguistic and conceptual material. This reworking not only involves writing through and back to the fourteenth century but it also means that, as Robinson notes, ‘the poem strains at its own limits throughout, from the ingenuity of the pararhyme […] to the enjambed refrain lines’ linking stanzas and subsections (2007, 9). This, combined with the poem’s dream narrative, greatly assists with Oliver’s main subjects: what politics feels like and how its effects are suffered by individuals. The poem typifies concern with a dialectic of care and harm which can be tracked through British experimental writing post-1970. For Robinson, Oliver’s experimentalism explores how transposing a mode of writing derived from an existing text into ‘a radically different political and social context makes a difference to its potential political and ethical content’ (Robinson, 2007, 10). This, in turn, allows for a focus on subjective experience not as a 28
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 28
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Experimental Poetry and its Others commodity but as the lived effects and affects of the individual within fields of power. Nicky Marsh’s ‘Going “Glocal”: The Local and the Global in Recent Experimental Women’s Poetry’ refers to ‘the broad experimental tradition’ (2007, 193). Poets writing in this tradition share ‘an ambition to produce an art capable of conceiving of what it means to know and write and say “war is us”’ (Marsh, 2007, 193). Experimental poets, then, might have a particular concern with what one of her concluding sentences calls ‘[acknowledging] the importance of an individual’s responsibility to a global politics’ and being ‘drawn to imaginatively produce alternative fantasies of connectivity – whilst also acknowledging the hubristic impossibility of [the] venture’ (Marsh, 2007, 202). This converges with Retallack’s argument that the experimental involves a sense of expanded responsibility to other beings who we do not know and cannot see. Expanded responsibility speaks to how the poetries discussed in this book define themselves. They are transitional texts in their risking, testing and trialling practices and in their working towards a vision of natural and cultural redefinition that tests the boundaries of experience, form and expression. They are asking and creating answers variously to the question of how to take an active and intelligent relationship to the suffering world. Maggie O’Sullivan explores human relations with the natural world through identification with other species and describes the horror of human/natural relations with the intention of shamanistic healing. In Geraldine Monk’s Interregnum, the feminine is explored as a space where society has projected the abject Other who performs being’s polarities of agony and ecstasy. Her essential quest involves discovering how to become and remain pleasure-centred, even when the world is experienced as extremes of suffering and deliberate malice. In Wildfire, Andrea Brady explores the effects of violent power relations through a study of the place of fire within the history of warfare. Here, horror and fascination are held together in a relationship of scholarly ambivalence. This position is a means of avoiding both the comforts of righteous identification with those suffering and justifications of political expediencies of violence. Finally, Jennifer Cooke’s ‘Steel Girdered Her Musical’ reads the human and natural tragedies of the world’s economy as effects of Western industrialism and consumer demand for goods and services. Her poem seeks answers to the question of how a woman can take a form and position that can effectively challenge and change the world for the better. The balance of hope and despair responds to the knowledge that failures of revolution must be understood as prerequisites to the creation of a completely new and successful form of politics. The risk involved in this, in common parlance, ‘failing better’, means that the subject – ‘I’ or ‘we’ – is often produced with great difficulty or expelled from the poetry. Elizabeth Southern in Interregnum says: 29
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 29
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Experimental Poetry and its Others ‘We hadn’t the learning / to read us right’ (Monk, 2003, 154). The ‘we’ and ‘us’ who emerge from Cooke’s ‘Steel Girdered’ are ‘rejects of repressive desublimation’ (Cooke, 2011c, 37). The poetries that we discuss in this book are, then, performative processes. These processes are evolutionary in terms of consciousness and identity and, as such, represent some of the highest endeavours of the species.
30
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 30
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Chapter 3
Critical Histories
Problem stories In the first act of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982), Marlene hosts an evening in an expensive restaurant to celebrate her promotion to head of the eponymous employment agency. Her guests are women from art, literature, history and myth. The women are: the traveller Isabella Bird (1831–1904); the Japanese courtesan and Buddhist nun Lady Nijo (b.1258); Dull Griet, a character from a Breughel painting; Pope Joan; and Patient Griselda from The Canterbury Tales. Marlene comments that ‘We’ve all come a long way’ (Churchill, 1991, 13), and, at first sight, all of her historical women are high achievers. But as the evening progresses and the women tell their stories, it becomes clear that although they can behave like men – talking across each other competitively and getting drunk – they have all paid a price for their success within patriarchal societies. Churchill’s play satirises the sexual politics of the Thatcher era but its opening act makes two other important points. First, that it is difficult to write a history of women that produces the modern woman. Second, that the history of women is susceptible to occlusions, elisions and ideologically driven distortions. Churchill’s play may seem distant from the subject of this book but, in many ways, our study encounters similar problems in trying to describe its starting point of 1970 and the continuing story of women’s experimental poetry in Britain. In this chapter, we will explore the difficulties involved in telling that story. Anyone trying to write about the late 1960s and early 1970s encounters the problem of trying to say what really happened. Even as the 1960s ended, writers as different as Christopher Booker and Arnold Wesker were characterising the decade as, respectively, nightmarish excess and, in political terms, the production of little more than ‘the habit of discontent’ (Hewison, 1988, 179, 178). The dominant Thatcherite view throughout the 1980s was that the 1960s were the source of everything that had gone wrong with post-war Britain. The Left has been equally dismissive and Arthur Marwick’s claim that ‘the much publicized activities of tiny minorities have distracted attention 31
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 31
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories from a very genuine liberation of the mass of the people’ is fairly typical (Marwick, 1990, 10). This ignores the importance of liberationist movements – black, gay and women’s – that emerged in the late 1960s. Marwick gives the women’s movement hardly any coverage and makes the frankly bizarre observation that, in contrast to America, ‘there was still something of a tolerance and genuine courtesy between men and women which softened the potential antagonisms’ (Marwick, 1990, 150). Marwick calls Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch ‘the critical event’ and states that it was to prove as influential as Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (Marwick, 1990, 150). A promise to discuss this text further is not followed up: after quoting the famous ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them’ passage, Marwick swerves away with the comment: ‘But let us leave questions of the relationships between the sexes’ (Marwick, 1990, 243). To return to stating ‘what really happened’, Walter Benjamin wrote in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940) that: ‘To articulate the past does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” […] It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ (Benjamin, 1973, 257). Benjamin was writing as Fascism swept through Europe, but Churchill’s play and Marwick’s sketchy account both powerfully suggest that any attempt to tell the story of women seems to take place at a moment of danger: any act of telling awakens forces that threaten to overwhelm it.
‘We are at war with ourselves’ Two accounts of the 1960s – one fictional and one autobiographical – throw women’s struggles with conformism into sharper relief. A. S. Byatt’s novel A Whistling Woman (2002) concludes a quartet of books spanning from 1950 to 1970 featuring Frederica Potter. A Whistling Woman opens in the summer of 1968 and describes, among many other things, Frederica leaving her career as a university lecturer and becoming the presenter of a television cultural review show Through the Looking-Glass. The novel’s haughty and self-aggrandising tone (which is only partly derived from the voice of its central character) trivialises and distances the period. Crucially, its female characters are shown to be alienated from both themselves and each other because no-one has any clear idea of what a woman is supposed to do or who she is supposed to be. This alienation is figured in physical terms. Frederica, chairing the second Through the Looking-Glass called ‘Free Women’, notes that herself and her guests ‘were all girl-women’ dressed in ‘equal elements of dressing-up, parody (of what?) and mask’ (Byatt, 2002, 146, 147). The ‘girl-woman’ is, of course, a well-established female artistic and cultural persona. During the debate, Frederica argues that: ‘The body […] wants to be pregnant. The woman often doesn’t […] We are at war with ourselves, perhaps’ (Byatt, 2002, 143). 32
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 32
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories Frederica and other female characters view their bodies and bodily events (miscarriage, menstruation, sexual desire) with a mixture of detachment and disbelief. The lack of generational continuity that we saw in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls is also in evidence here. When Mary, a motherless twelve-year-old girl, has her first period, she struggles to identify a female confidante. She doesn’t choose Frederica who later thinks the girl ‘doesn’t look old enough’ (Byatt, 2002, 235). Mary is another version of the ‘girl-woman’. A Whistling Woman also gives an instructive portrait of a woman experimental writer. Frederica publishes a book of ‘jottings, cut-ups, commonplaces and scraps of writing’ called Laminations – a title which refers ‘to her attempts to live her life in separated strata […] Sex, literature, the kitchen, teaching, the newspaper, objets trouvés ’ (Byatt, 2002, 38, 39). This converges with both Wendy Mulford’s comment that, when she started writing poetry, ‘I attempted to ground my work in the multiple voices of my life’ (Mulford, 1990, 264); and the opening of Denise Riley’s ‘Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else’ in which the body is ‘perforated, a tin sheet’ through which ‘voices leap’ (Riley, 2000, 47). Laminations is widely reviewed and whether or not reviewers like it, they all refer to it as ‘clever’. ‘Friendly’ reviewers, who give their reviews titles like ‘I Ching for Intelligent Chicks’ and ‘[compare] the cut-up technique to Burroughs and Jeff Nuttall’, go on to say that ‘the woman writer [lacks] the lunge for the jugular or the absolutely subversive intention of these models’ (Byatt, 2002, 264). A Whistling Woman gives an accurate picture of the unexamined sexism of the counterculture and also of women trying to live out a ‘conventional vision’ of themselves and doing things because they ‘[wish] to do what was expected’ (Byatt, 2002, 23). The flight from expectation is what drives Emma Tennant’s autobiographical memoir Girlitude (2000), which covers the period from 1955 to 1969. The memoir begins with a photograph of the author, then aged 17, at the time of her ‘coming out’ ball. The photograph captures a moment when ‘[t]he world gives every sign of being at my feet’ and ‘my only safe course lay in imitating the lives of my parents’ (Tennant, 2000, 3, 39). Tennant rejects this course, and so the rest of the book is an account of restless travelling and several marriages as she, like the women in Byatt’s novel, struggles with what to do and how to be. What Tennant struggles with is the legacy of ‘Girlitude’, which is a combination of the ‘status of permanent girlhood’ and ‘the dependence, the longed-for protection and the self-reproach of a species which can now only be alluded to self-consciously and with scorn’ (Tennant, 2000, 212, 39). ‘Girlitude’ also involves a well-defined physical appearance. When Tennant changes her appearance, she becomes a bizarre hybrid of Audrey Hepburn and Anna Magnani: ‘I am so unsure of who I am that I don’t even know who I’m trying to look like’ (Tennant, 2000, 153). Girlitude ends in February 1969 with the birth of Tennant’s daughter. She tells friends that she has given birth to a woman: ‘If I have given 33
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 33
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories birth to a woman, I ponder afterwards, can I at last give up being a girl?’ (Tennant, 2000, 216) A. S. Byatt’s novel and Emma Tennant’s memoir both describe the lives of bourgeois and haute bourgeois women but both books show the dominance of what Ann Oakley, looking back at the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of 1981, called ‘key components of the feminine personality stereotype: passivity, instability, materiality and maternalism’ and how ‘the kind of people women are supposed to be interferes with the flowering of their initiative’ (Oakley, 1981, 63, 92). Indeed, Oakley quotes Sheila Rowbotham, in what might almost be a pre-echo of aspects of Denise Riley’s poetry: ‘My own sense of myself as a person directly conflicted with the kind of girl who was sung about in pop songs’ (Oakley, 1981, 31). Byatt’s novel and Tennant’s memoir also show women struggling with the idea that looking after the body and its unruliness, socialising and managing the body, is the biologically programmed and socially demanded task of women. Women are expected to be guardians of the body and, as Frederica Potter’s ‘at war’ comment suggests, it is almost as if every woman is, in fact, two people: herself and her body. This guardianship is a huge and continual task for women, and it defines them as women in a visible social sense. The presentation of the body (clothes, shoes, make-up) changes to show the ongoing vigilance of woman as a woman.
Critical histories – 1: editors and poets We have spent some time on a cultural, social and historical sketch because, as the fictional example of Frederica Potter shows, how women are described determines how they are allowed to act and what they are allowed and/or expected to write. In general terms, this has meant that critics have felt obliged to preface accounts of women’s poetry in Britain with discussions concerning the extent to which the anthology or collection is or is not feminist. Male critics, such as Neil Corcoran in English Poetry since 1940 (1993) or Alan Robinson in Instabilities in Contemporary British Poetry (1987), have also taken care to detail disputes between women poets and women anthology editors regarding this question while, at the same time, stressing the impossible diversity of poetry by women. Robinson concludes that ‘what is distinctive’ in women’s poetry is ‘constituted by the restricted roles and discourses available to women in a capitalist patriarchy for the social construction of the self’ (Robinson, 1987, 162). Corcoran argues that whether or not women’s poetry is called ‘womanly’ or ‘feminist’, such a category ‘is not a hermetically sealed and self-identified one, but one riven by faction and fraction, permeable to the alternative and the unorthodox, waiting for its future’ (Corcoran, 1993, 199). Corcoran discusses Denise Riley in a chapter entitled ‘A Pen Mislaid: Some Varieties of Women’s Poetry’ and, having noted her ‘discursive 34
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 34
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories play’, observes that her characteristic poetry ‘is all as far from a propagandist platform poetry as I can well imagine’ (Corcoran, 1993, 233). The last phrase awkwardly abdicates the masculinist mastering account implied by the sentence’s central alliterative designation. In passing, the possible elision of women’s poetry with propaganda is not just a concern of male critics. Gillian Allnutt writes, in her introduction to the ‘Quote Feminist Unquote Poetry’ section of The New British Poetry, that: ‘When it comes to “feminist poetry”, I suspect that, in the minds of most publishers’ editors, the phrase is still synonymous with mere propaganda’ (Allnutt et al., 1988, 77). Neither Corcoran nor Allnutt give examples of propagandist poetry, and since propaganda can only mean in this context something written to further a particular cause, one wonders how that could be a bad thing. The implication is, of course, that there are poems that are somehow messages before they are poems, but the idea of a poem as a message or as conveying information is as hard to pin down as it is to control a poem’s reception. Denise Riley is a poet who manages to ‘pass’ between the so-called ‘mainstream’ and the parallel tradition of experimental poetry and, crucially, she is a poet who often appears in accounts of more conventional poetry. So while Neil Corcoran is happy that Riley is not a strident feminist and is ‘ironic’ (Corcoran, 1993, 233) about such poetry, Ian Gregson praises her work, together with that of Veronica ForrestThomson, ‘because it is as intelligent as that of Crozier, Prynne et al but less concerned to keep reminding the reader of that intelligence’ (Gregson, 1996, 195). Riley crops up in another discussion regarding what makes women’s poetry distinctive in Peter Barry’s Contemporary British Poetry and the City (2000), which uses her work to answer the question: ‘Where, in this examination of contemporary poetry and the city, are the women poets?’ (Barry, 2000, 16) Barry’s conclusion is that whereas male poets write ‘urban-specific’ accounts, what is ‘more common with women poets is an appropriation and internalisation of geography, so that it represents and embodies such things as states of minds, and structures of feeling’ (Barry, 2000, 16). Women poets ‘tend to be more radical in technique’, and Barry uses Riley’s poem ‘Knowing in the Real World’ – although he gets the title wrong – to show that it ‘seems to contain a much more radical series of doubts about place and identities than are encountered, by and large, in contemporary male poets’ (Barry, 2000, 17, 19). It is not to Barry’s credit that he uses a single poem to characterise women’s poetry in general, although he uses a poem from the parallel tradition unapologetically. At any rate, for Corcoran, Gregson and Barry, Riley’s poetry has merit because it is not too much of anything: not too feminist, not too clever and not too confident; indeed, in their view, it is, like the porridge in the fairy tale of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, ‘just right’. One wonders whether the critical attraction of Riley’s poetry lies in the fact that, as Anthony Mellors notes, its 35
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 35
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories ‘wandering I […] becomes part of the social structures it strives to discern’ (Mellors, 2005, 18). But the way in which Riley’s poetry is perceived as functioning at, as it were, just the right volume also begs the question of the extent to which experimental women’s poetry can be identified with feminist poetry or feminism in general. In Chapter 1, we noted Claire Buck’s argument that Denise Riley’s and Wendy Mulford’s experimentalism was ‘at odds’ with feminist poetry of the 1970s. We will now look at feminist poetry in more detail. The women’s movement produced a number of anthologies, such as Michèle Roberts and Michelene Wandor’s Cutlasses and Earrings (1977), Alison Fell et al.’s Licking the Bed Clean (1978) and Lilian Mohin’s One Foot on the Mountain: An Anthology of British Feminist Poetry 1969–1979 (1979). Buck characterises this poetry as ‘concerned with cultural critique, an accessible language and form, and the expression of women’s personal experience’ (Acheson and Huk, 1996, 87). Buck focuses on One Foot on the Mountain, and its fifty-five poets born between 1926 and 1955 are a good representative sample. One is struck immediately by the dominance of ‘I’ – usually lowercase – and the number of poems that speak to a ‘you’ or to, or for, a ‘we’. In the words of one contributor, Paula Jennings: ‘poems are the nearest thing we’ve got to a woman’s way of expressing through writing’ (Mohin, 1979, 200). This is echoed by Wendy A. Harrison’s statement that she writes poems as a way of communicating with other women (Mohin, 1979, 246). Poetry is, then, an enactment of a community and means of survival: these experiences must be written down and shared with other women. Mohin identifies ‘the primary quality’ of the poems that she selected as ‘one of redefinition […] contributions to the long task of renaming the world and our place in it’ (Mohin, 1979, 5). She goes on to note that her contributors ‘vary widely’ in their ‘relation to traditional academic standards of poetic craft’ (Mohin, 1979, 5). The overall emphasis on articulating previously invisible or devalued experience as a means of redefinition means that there is little reference to form or specific models of writing. Diana Scott writes: ‘I don’t want to write poetry about feeling. / I know how I’m feeling’; she celebrates, instead, what it feels like to belong to a collective. In Gill Hague’s ‘Uncertainty’, the speaker’s true feelings are suppressed by ‘old poetic ways’; similarly, Michelene Wandor writes that she doesn’t ‘want my struggling content condemned because / it has to use a tired form’ (Mohin, 1979, 82, 86, 188). These examples are few and far between but some contributors do experiment with form. They have given some thought as to how the form of the poem might itself participate in the work of redefinition and renaming. And it is notable that Mohin’s longest discussion of a single poem is devoted to one of the more experimental pieces – Caroline Halliday’s ‘November ‘77’, which combines disparate material – dreams, domestic scenes, politics, activism – in a picture of what it felt like to be alive during the eponymous month. 36
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 36
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories Both the poem and its speaker exist as, and at, the intersection of activities and discourses. This is true of other contributors. Caroline Gilfillan writes feminist consciousness in jump-cut collages, which are recognisable from Lee Harwood’s and Tom Raworth’s poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. Mary Woodward and Lorna Mitchell experiment with long lines and combinations of lyric and discursive writing that are now a commonplace of experimental practice. It might seem as if Claire Buck is correct in her suggestion of a lack of fit between consciousness-raising feminist poetry and experimentalism (Acheson and Huk, 1996, 84), but questions of context and visibility are more important than she perhaps allows. Mohin makes the point that: ‘Many women have deliberately chosen to keep their work from commercial publishers’ (Mohin, 1979, 2); and Blake Morrison makes the same point in his essay ‘Young Poets in the 1970s’ (1980): ‘women who might in the past have published with the larger houses and magazines have begun to prefer the readership of the committed few.’ Morrison’s subsequent dismissal of feminist poetry with terms like ‘overheated’, ‘menstrual obsessions’, ‘fire-andbrimstone’ and ‘banality’ makes it easy to see why (Jones and Schmidt, 1980, 146). It is highly instructive to compare Mohin’s anthology with The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982) which Morrison co-edited with Andrew Motion. The book – in theory, at least – looks back at the same period. Morrison and Motion include only five women poets: Fleur Adcock, Anne Stevenson, Carol Rumens, Penelope Shuttle and Medbh McGuckian. With the exception of Shuttle’s work, one looks in vain for the energy of the poems included in One Foot on the Mountain, which, in contrast, start to look highly experimental. McGuckian, at least, enacts a belief that female experience might redefine form and language. The poetry of Adcock, Stevenson and Rumens – who have all been dismissive of feminist poetry – seems constrained by a double desire: to inhabit poetry as rational form and portray the experience of women fictively. The speakers of these poems generally seem as alienated from themselves and detached from other women as the women in A Whistling Woman . It is as if feminism never happened. And this matters because of the inordinate amount of critical attention devoted to the work of Adcock, Stevenson and Rumens and their pronouncements and the critical amnesia surrounding the moment and content of anthologies like Mohin’s. As an aside, one wonders whether Denise Riley is able to ‘pass’ critically because her self-alienated poetic selves are recognisable from the self-alienated female selves of the mainstream. We noted earlier that Allnutt et al.’s The New British Poetry (1988) includes feminist poetry in its survey of parallel traditions. We also noted Allnutt’s need to disarm the propaganda argument. Mohin, incidentally, also argues that feminist poetry ‘goes further than the personally political poetry which has cried out against, for example, 37
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 37
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories war or slavery. Our work constitutes a challenge to the philosophical/ religious constructs which underlie all human activity’ (Mohin, 1979, 1). Allnutt selects only five poets who appeared in One Foot on the Mountain: herself, Alison Fell, Caroline Halliday, Michèle Roberts and Michelene Wandor. Some of her other choices (for example, Eavan Boland and Carol Ann Duffy) are now firmly identified with the mainstream, while many others have disappeared from view. In common with Mohin’s anthology, Allnutt’s selection ranges widely in terms of age and background demonstrating Allnutt’s statement that: ‘My conception of feminist poetry of the past twenty years is ahistorical or non-chronological.’ ‘Chronology makes no sense’ because there is no tradition to which new work by women can be added (Allnutt et al., 1988, 78, 79). Nonetheless, it seems clear from the differing poetry included in her selection and from work by women poets elsewhere in the anthology that feminist poetry of the previous twenty years had enabled and energised a wide range of work. The women’s poetry in The New British Poetry does share directness of address and a sense of poems beginning without any prefatory set-up which are recognisable from Mohin’s anthology. There is often a strong sense, in the words of Wendy Mulford’s ‘The Green Chateau’ (Allnutt et al., 1988, 210), of the poem as a ‘frame holding / not the thing but the effect’. This is as true of Eavan Boland’s ‘Nocturne’ (Allnutt et al., 1988, 84), as it is of work by, say, Geraldine Monk or Maggie O’Sullivan. There are other important contrasts to be made with the poetry in Mohin’s anthology. The more experimental poetry in The New British Poetry shows the process of simultaneous voicing/unvoicing that we discussed in Chapter 1. So, for example, Caroline Halliday’s ‘Music’ juxtaposes the sensuous description of music and touch with repeated references to ‘scream’ (Allnutt et al., 1988, 99–101). Some of Denise Riley’s contributions display her characteristic self-corrections: ‘and nearly wasn’t’; ‘lately it hasn’t been’ (Allnutt et al., 1988, 238, 237). In the more experimental poems found within the anthology, lyric and discursive modes co-exist. Finally, the more experimental poetry is often distinguished by scepticism about what can be said and corresponding senses of instability or rupture. The speaker of Glenda George’s ‘QUASI QUASI … as if, repeated’ complains: ‘Reality is so short lived. I am forced to quit for lack of things to say’ (Allnutt et al., 1988, 303–07: 304). Geraldine Monk’s ‘Poem for August – or for my birthday’ ends ‘I struck zero / AVULSION’ (Allnutt et al., 1988, 315). Avulsion has connotations of forcible rupture or separation, of tearing and a sudden cutting off of land by water. In two of Wendy Mulford’s poems ‘where our present is, is, strictly speaking, / irredeemable’, and ‘in that break is our existence’ (Allnutt et al., 1988, 207, 208). And in Denise Riley’s ‘Affections Must Not’, ‘inside a designation there are people permanently startled to bear it, the not-me against sociology’ (Allnutt et al., 1988, 237). The 38
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 38
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories poetry by women in The New British Poetry, then, reveals two things. First, reading the work in The New British Poetry alongside the work in One Foot on the Mountain suggests that a project of redefinition, renaming and challenging constructs may need more than a largely confessional/expressive mode, because such a mode is both an enactment of exhaustion at the moment of writing and an exhausting process to continue with. This is partly the force of the above Glenda George remark. To put it another way, the confessional/expressive mode cannot afford to play with language and form too much for fear of dissipating the emotional charge that it intends for its readers. Second, reading the two anthologies together also reveals that feminist poetry had much greater importance for both mainstream and experimental poetry than has previously been allowed. Imagery of cutting or feeling down to the bone, which can be tracked through Barbara A. Zanditon, Caroline Halliday, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Denise Riley, suggests there is much fruitful work to be done in tracing these connections.
Critical histories – 2: critics and theorists A closer reading of the poetry, then, suggests that feminism’s antipathy towards the experimental is misplaced but some feminist critics have nonetheless voiced this opinion very forcefully. Sara Mills dismisses Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language with the comment that ‘whilst the destabilizing which goes on in experimental texts is important, a more truly political writing is that which impels action or which changes consciousness’ (Mills, 1989, 106–07). In ‘Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Experimentalism and the Expressive Voice’, Claire Wills argues that textual destabilisation is political and addresses the same point in the form of two linked questions: Can the formal disruption of representational norms act as the ground for a radical gender politics? We are accustomed to thinking of politicised women’s poetry as work which carries an ideological message – indeed how can there be politics without ideology? (Wills, 1994, 35)
These are important questions because formal disruption can appear to be simultaneously bravely subversive (norms are not all powerful and can be disrupted) and politically complacent (any disruption is local and leaves norms in place). This converges with Peter Middleton’s critique of Kristeva’s theory of poetic language: ‘Do avant garde texts keep on disrupting the social order every time they are encountered, produced …?’ If the answer is ‘no’, he argues, then they cease to be revolutionary; if the answer is ‘yes’, then their effect is ‘somehow endlessly repeated, as if the text were an aspirin or steroids’ (Easthope and Thompson, 1991, 39
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 39
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories 83). Another way of answering ‘yes’ is to say that avant-garde texts are still not widely available or widely read and that mainstream literary culture continues to ignore or belittle avant-garde practices. If the question is rephrased as ‘can the same disruption keep on happening when cultural, economic, political and social conditions change?’, then a different answer emerges. Under capitalism, changes that do take place are largely superficial, not structural. This means that, as we already suggested in our discussion of Dada in Chapter 2, the avant-garde’s potential for changing subjectivity is ongoing. Each generation uses this potential in its own way and for its own ends. Subjectivity is a key issue for women’s experimental poetry in Britain, whether or not one reads it from a feminist perspective. As Wendy Mulford observed over twenty years ago in one of the first sustained accounts of women’s experimental poetry in Britain: ‘By and large, poets in Britain do not choose […] to resign the authority of the individual poetic voice’ (Mulford, 1990, 262). Such authority is clearly, in Clair Wills’s terms, a representational norm inviting formal disruption but, for women poets, the assumption of such authority is an important act of reclamation after centuries of denial. Veronica Forrest-Thomson may have meant something similar, when she wrote, in ‘Richard II’: ‘And I turned back to my smashed self and the few looks pieced my own doll / From the back-lash of the time brick’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 111). It may be that ‘I’ starts to gain meaning for some experimental women poets at the precise moment that it starts to lose meaning for most theorists. And this is in marked contrast to the feminist suspicion that experimental poets, in Caroline Bergvall’s words, have been, and still are, guilty of ‘[dispensing] with identity-seeking when positive female identification is still culturally and politically so vulnerable’ (Bergvall, 1993, 33). Debates regarding whether women’s experimental poetry is a valid and valuable form of political representation have sometimes been harder to sustain in Britain due to the relative dearth of critical writing by women poets. At the same time, however, we would argue that when such debates do take place, they are often obscured by particular critical approaches to experimental women’s poetry. As Harriet Tarlo has noted, criticism of the poetries that are called, variously, experimental, avant-garde, linguistically innovative or postmodern has tended ‘to focus exclusively on form and language’ (Thurston, 2007, 28). This has made it seem as if there is a broad agreement about how to describe the challenges and rewards of women’s experimental poetry in Britain. Tarlo herself, introducing a range of contemporary experimental poetry by women to a feminist readership that might be ideologically predisposed to reject it as elitist, argues that it is ‘radically democratic’ because its forms make its use of language ‘ultimately irresolvable’ and, therefore, allow a wide range of creative readings (Tarlo, 1999, 96, 97). ‘The possibility of multiple readings’ produces ‘the absorbing integrity 40
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 40
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories of the work’s provisionality’ (Tarlo, 1999, 96, 97, 98). Similarly, Sarah Broom argues that Geraldine Monk’s use of slashes and line breaks ‘[produces] a multiplicity of meaning’ and ‘[draws] our attention to the materiality of language, making us see words as strangely wrought artefacts of sound and form’ (Broom, 2006, 241–22). Linda Kinnahan also finds that Monk’s work ‘[demonstrates] the unfixability of meaning’ and ‘uses the materiality of language to examine the positionality of the gendered self’ (Kinnahan, 1996, 640, 644). Such readings are both reactions against Leavisite close reading practices, which tend to be applied to mainstream poetry, and attempts to mirror the theoretical interests of many experimental poets. This has had some curious effects. Experimental poetry has tended to be seen as meta-linguistic and meta-poetic – that is, concerned with writing and systems of representation and registering how, in Teresa de Lauretis’s words: The social subject is constructed day by day as the point of articulation of ideological formations, an always provisional encounter of subject and codes at the historical (therefore changing) intersection of social formations and her or his personal history. (Threadgold, 1997, 37)
So far, so ideological; but this critical approach risks making all experimental poets sound as if they are doing the same thing. More worryingly, it has often made experimental poetry appear isolated from, or not interested in, the energetic contestations of normativities of class, gender, nation, race and region; the redrawing of the relation between the public and private spheres; or the margins versus centre debates that have, in large part, driven post-war mainstream British poetry and post-war British society. Of equal concern is the way in which the ‘meta-’ approach risks marginalising women even further within an already marginalised poetic practice. To put this simply, the ‘meta-’ approach risks ignoring what women experimental poets in Britain are saying and talking about in their poetries and suggests, in turn, that the distinctive structures of their work are inherently incapable of saying what they mean. An important part of our project in this volume is to devise ways to read these poems which will allow their content to be explored and recognised explicitly. To return to our brief survey of Tarlo, Broom and Kinnahan, it is possible to trace considerable consistency from the mid-1990s onwards in terms of critical approaches to women’s experimental poetry in Britain. Arguments that experimental poetry reveals the materiality of language or disrupts dominant linguistic structures derive from, or are heavily influenced by, Julia Kristeva’s La Révolution du Langage Poétique (1974), which did not appear in English until 1984. For example, Kinnahan’s use of positionality clearly derives from Kristeva’s 41
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 41
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories description of ‘the realm of signification’ as ‘a realm of positions’ involving propositions and judgements (Moi, 1986, 98). Kristeva’s argument is founded on the idea that it is an interrelation between the semiotic and symbolic that produces the processes of signification or, to put it more simply, meaning derives from the interrelation of the pre-linguistic and linguistic. The semiotic is closely linked to the pre-Oedipal state, which Kristeva terms the chora (derived from the Greek for enclosed space or womb). The chora is where the individual experiences basic pulsions and rhythms. It is ‘a wholly provisional articulation […] that underlies figuration and therefore also specularization, and only admits analogy with vocal or kinetic rhythm’ (Moi, 1985, 161). However, the semiotic – the chora – must be split from and then repressed if meaning is to be possible. It nevertheless continues to exist as what Toril Moi calls ‘pulsional pressure on symbolic language: as contradictions, meaninglessness, disruption, silences and absences in the symbolic language. It constitutes, in other words, the heterogeneous, disruptive dimension of language’ (Moi, 1985, 162). An untheorisable ‘Other’ of language, which can only be seen when language is disrupted, is, to say the least, problematic. As Peter Middleton observes, Kristeva’s ‘definition of the signifying process results in the generic condition of limits transgressed, a condition which effaces any knowledges, truths or even statements made by the text in those areas where breakdown is alleged to occur’ (Easthope and Thompson, 1991, 84). Middleton argues that Kristeva’s reasons for calling ‘[a] work radical depend on a denial of its content in favour of a universalising description of it as a disruption of the symbolic order itself, and therefore a disruption which is literally symbolic’ (Easthope and Thompson, 1991, 93). The ‘materiality’ argument, then, keeps on discovering that, as we have already suggested, all experimental literature is doing the same thing. This argument risks minimising and marginalising its impact and playing into the hands of those who argue that the avant-garde is a repeatable style. The materiality/disruption argument becomes even more problematic when one attempts to attach it to ideas of revolutionary agency. How can something that can only be experienced and identified as disruption of an established order be the starting point for a radically different system? Moi argues that Kristeva’s ‘emphasis on the semiotic as an unconscious force precludes any analysis of the conscious decision-making processes that must be part of any collective revolutionary project’ (Moi, 1985, 170). No wonder, then, that radical feminists have often had difficulty with experimental art and literature. These criticisms can be taken further. First Kristeva argues that the release of the semiotic into language is experienced as, what one might term, a negative jouissance founded on expulsion and rejection. This means that using her theories to describe avant-garde poetries risks reproducing a kind of textual version of Freud’s description of the work of mourning. The avant-garde text is a kind of mourning – by 42
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 42
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories both the author and reader – for the loss of the semiotic, after which, to borrow Freud’s well-known description, ‘respect for reality gains the day’ and ‘the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’ (Freud, 1984, 253, 265). This is not as far-fetched as it sounds, when the avant-garde text is seen as a minor and temporary disruption in a dominant order. Second, as Anna Smith has noted, only one-third of La Révolution du Langage Poétique (the theoretical section) exists in English. Readers without French continue to be denied the opportunity of seeing how Kristeva reads the semiotic in the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and the prose of Lautréamont. Smith calls these readings ‘absurd’ and ‘arbitrary’ in their suggestion that ‘repetitive sound patterns […] correspond with repressed signifieds […] formerly resident in the unconscious’ (Smith, 1996, 102, 104). As an aside, one assumes that this part of Kristeva’s book is behind Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s argument that the ‘gentle foal’ in her poem ‘Pastoral’ ‘is important for his entle oal sounds rather than for his physical being’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1978, 125 [emphasis in the original]). We might be accused, at this point, of having wandered as far from women’s experimental poetry in Britain as Kristeva has from any widely recognisable writing or reading practices. However, it is important to understand what underwrites prevalent critical positions. Equally, we hope to have shown that justifying experimental poetry as either a revolutionary practice or set of effects, both in and on language, will only get us so far. What is needed is something other than, to borrow Middleton’s terms, universalising descriptions of generic conditions and effects. The Clair Wills article referred to earlier suggests one way out of the generic model because it attempts to describe what women write about, as well as how they write it. Wills questions ‘the usefulness of a bifurcated poetic tradition [of “modernist” vs. “traditional” lyric poetry] as an analytical tool’ (1994, 34). There may some truth in arguing that, during the period covered by this book, all poetries have become equally specialised in terms of visibility and readerships. Nonetheless, Wills neglects the extent to which bifurcation is the product of how different types of writing are privileged or deprivileged and how cultural and critical capital and actual resources are managed and distributed. In 2007, Cathy Wagner moderated ‘a cross-Atlantic forum’ entitled ‘Post-Marginal Positions: Women and the UK Experimental/Avant-Garde Poetry Community’, which aimed to address the relative dearth of women’s experimental poetry in Britain and the lack of critical response to it. The forum revealed some striking perspectives on the mechanisms of privileging and deprivileging. Andrea Brady and Geraldine Monk note both an historical problem and recent shifts. Brady observes that, in the US, ‘the activities of women like Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian etc created conditions for the emergence of equality between male and female poets’, whereas, in the UK, ‘women weren’t contributing to the magazines which turned 43
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 43
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories out to be responsible for articulating the primary poetic concerns’ during the 1970s and 1980s (Wagner, 2007). At the same time, it is also worth noting that the US’s national cultural consciousness includes the mother and father of their tradition of experimental literature, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. There are no British equivalents to these figures, and it is arguable that their cultural power may be tied to their coincidence with the potent moment of the formation and articulation of a new national identity brought about by the American Civil War and freeing of slaves. When President Obama presented the National Medals of Arts and Humanities in 2011, a ceremony which honoured John Ashbery and Rita Dove, his opening speech quoted from both Dickinson and Whitman, invoking, through their words, a unifying sense of American identity and higher aims. This also connects with the fact that, from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, poetry has had a significant role in both private and public life in the US. In Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (2007), Joan Shelley Rubin tracks the importance of poetry as a cultural force and vehicle for individual and national identity, through reading groups, local nationalistic pageants and a wide variety of public inaugural ceremonies. This is in marked to contrast to the UK and, in passing, may explain the relative incomprehension with which British critics and readers greeted Dana Gioia’s famous 1991 article ‘Can Poetry Matter?’ The UK also lacks a centralist tradition of free verse, as well as lacking canonical experimental figures. In British national literature, experimental writing is still a relatively unfamiliar phenomenon. This converges, in disabling ways, with what Geraldine Monk identifies as the fact that: ‘Women have always been socially disadvantaged, having less money than men and the responsibilities of childcare and often looking after elderly relatives. When life itself is precarious safety not experimentation is a refuge’ (Wagner, 2007 [emphasis in the original]). Monk goes on to suggest that there has been no dearth of women poets in the UK but that they have tended to publish in more mainstream contexts for economic reasons. Emily Critchley suggests that women poets have often felt that their work ‘had to be more or less explicitly tied up with examinations of gender, domesticity, anger, hierarchy and so on’ and, at the same time, have felt ‘the need to shore up their gender with positive perspectives, comprehensible by the culture at large’ (Wagner, 2007). Recent shifts involve, for Brady, the positive effects of the Contemporary Experimental Women’s Poetry Festival, which Emily Critchley organised in Cambridge in 2006. Monk notes that: A lot of experimentation is being written by and championed by women poets working in universities and colleges – women with good jobs and financial security. This could explain why American women are slightly ahead of us: they have been active for much longer in the many and flourishing poetics programmes up and
44
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 44
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories running in their academic institutions. […] This is now creating something that we have sadly lacked: a strong female tradition. (Wagner, 2007 [emphasis in the original])
Emily Critchley makes a similar point, arguing for the importance of ‘keeping up the number of women within the academy’, because if ‘women are not given access to the resources that inspire greatness, they are less likely to become great’ (Wagner, 2007). Critchley also quotes Kathleen Fraser’s comment that: ‘the established forms one is born into – the well-designed structures that precede, protect, and guide – may limit and even harm the ability to listen for an interior prompt of difference and to follow its peculiar, often “irrational” moves’ (Fraser, 2000, 202). This is similar to Geraldine Monk’s argument regarding choosing safety, and it underlines the need for a greater understanding of the relationship between what women produce culturally and their economic condition. The economics of women’s cultural production urgently require sustained analysis. To return to Clair Wills, the preceding paragraphs underline the risks involved in her suggestion that a large body of women’s poetry can be read together and that UK and US women’s experimental poetries can be read together. What is valuable in Wills’s article is her rejection of another ‘bifurcated’ way of analysing women’s poetry: … it is not that ‘expressive’ poetry naïvely falls back on a stable individuality, and experimental work explores the radical absence of subjectivity. Both are responses to the reconfiguring of the relationship between public and private spheres which makes the ‘private’ lyric impossible, and in effect opens it out towards rhetoric. While the private sphere has been invaded by the public, or the social, at the same time the social has opened up to take note of formerly private concerns, and both modes of poetry reflect in their form the changing nature of this relationship. (Wills, 1994, 39–40)
This starts to write real conditions and effects into the argument. Wills goes on to argue that, as a consequence, ‘many experimental women poets seem to be engaging in a complex negotiation between ideas and experiences of the individual and a sense of their disappearance in mass-culture’ (Wills, 1994, 41). For Wills, the work of, say, Lyn Hejinian and Denise Riley is ‘strongly weighted towards articulating questions of interiority and emotional inwardness’ and explores ‘new modalities of feminine experience, and new forms of interchange between the public and private realms’ (Wills, 1994, 50). At the same time, rather than seeking to ‘[establish] an idealised coherent identity, the “ideal” in this work seems to consist in finding a path through the clashing and contemporary forms of familial life and contemporary commodity 45
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 45
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories culture’ (Wills, 1994, 50). Some of these ‘clashing and contemporary forms’ are suggested by statistics gleaned from the post-war period which point to the changes in women’s lives: the 60 per cent increase in divorces between 1968 and 1971 or the changing ratio of young women to young men (15–29) during 1951, 1961 and 1971: 5,255,000 / 5,073,000; 5,100,000 / 5,159,000; and 5,764,000 / 5,915,000, respectively (Marwick, 1990, 168–72). Similarly, Marilyn Strathern’s argument that the English in the twentieth century have believed that ‘relationships produced (individual) persons and that (individual) diversity led to productive relationships, such that individuals created individuals’ (Strathern, 1992, 72) has profound implications for ideas of community, society and women’s role within them. Answers to such weighty questions are beyond the scope of this book, but the idea of poetry as both a means of making a path through culture and a record of that path-making are fundamental to this study. The changes outlined by Wills give even greater force to Denise Riley’s designation ‘the temporalities of women’ – that is, ‘that identities can only be held for a time’ (Weed, 1989, 136 [emphasis in the original]). Riley argues that, from the early nineteenth century onwards, ‘if Woman is placed outside History she is at the same time thoroughly embedded in and also constitutive of the newer “social”’ sphere and that ‘the separations between what counts as the social and the political’ are one point of origin for gender (Weed, 1989, 138). It is our contention that such separations are also one point of origin for much of the poetry that we discuss. As we argued in Chapter 1, this is where Kristeva’s writings on women and time are really valuable because they enable a clearer focus on temporality, temporariness and the relation of both to the public and private realms. Indeed, we would argue that critics using La Révolution du Langage Poétique to explore experimental poetry by women have, quite simply, been looking in the wrong place. Kristeva’s writings on women and time enable a greater focus on how Riley’s separations between woman-as-history and woman-as-social produce a continual movement between inside and outside – a movement that is, itself, figured as a continual renegotiation of the relationship between body, time and locale. We will argue that such separations, movements and renegotiations are crucial to an understanding of women’s experimental poetry in Britain. They give great urgency to two questions: ‘when and where is the poem happening?’; ‘who is saying what to whom?’ (which is not the same as asking: ‘but who is speaking?’). Recognising separation is a reminder of what was involved in consciousness-raising during the 1960s and 1970s. But raising consciousness also connects with our earlier point about evolving the consciousness of the species through the creation of new forms of poetic articulation – forms which may foster new awareness and insight into socially and politically located identities and their thresholds. As John Wilkinson has noted: ‘What needs asserting […] is that in 46
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 46
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Critical Histories Britain, “theory” in its full institutional guise arrived after the inauguration of the materialist poetics represented by [J. H. Prynne’s] Brass. This primacy of poetics is marked not only in Cambridge writing’ (Wilkinson, 2007, 97 [emphasis in the original]). Crucially, this shifts the argument away from concentrating upon the ‘women’s work’ of women experimental poets and repositions their writing as a work for, and of, humanity more generally. It identifies their writing as labour towards the proposition of an emergent and remade human identity and consciousness where the social and political are in a generally reorganised and inclusive relationship.
47
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 47
04/10/2013 10:22:46
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 48
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Poetries
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 49
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 50
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Chapter 4
Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Wendy Mulford: Lyric Transformations
Lilian Mohin identified ‘the primary quality’ of the poems she selected for One Foot on the Mountain as ‘one of redefinition […] contributions to the long task of renaming the world and our place in it’ (Mohin, 1979, 5). But the landscapes of this poetry are predominantly interior, whether in the speaker’s mind or in a room. When ‘the world’ does appear, it is usually either urban, derelict and/or deserted and threatening or it is conceptualised, as in Mary Woodward’s journey in her poem ‘summer of 76, spent working in Barnet Hospital but still going to a woman’s group in Clapham’: ‘towards / the evening and its/politics’ (Mohin, 1979, 181). Many of the poems that Mohin collects converge with the capitalised title of Stef Pixner’s poem ‘THAT WORLD THROUGH THE WINDOW IS A BAREFACED LIE’ (Mohin, 1979, 224). Such a view – ‘through the window’ – begs a double question: what can a non-mainstream women’s poetry write when it looks outward? And is a confessional, broadly lyric mode sufficient for ‘the long task of renaming’? Thomas Butler also notes that Pixner’s poem raises a question with which both feminist and women experimental poets have struggled: if the world is a lie – that is, a discourse that is injurious to the truth of the self – where is the subject to locate herself? (Butler, 2005, 197–98) However, the answer is not a simple choice between isolation and interiority or recognition that the world’s ‘barefaced lie’ is the self’s originary ground. The overwhelming sense of Mohin’s anthology is of poems shifting about in these two equally uneasy options, trying not to surrender to either and attempting to create a more satisfactory or valid position. The attempt to create something else is crucial for ‘the long task of renaming the world and our place in it’. The difficulties involved in shifting about within uneasy options are nicely caught by Mary 51
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 51
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations Woodward: ‘the train slipping / through the London / names as the day moves // away’ (Mohin, 1979, 181). The world (specifically the city, where most contemporary poets live) is a place of ‘names’, while our lived experience of it (‘the day’) seems to elude language and the making of poetry. Language and poetry are simultaneously places of deferred or elusive referentiality (‘slipping / through […] / names) and the individual’s engagement with society (‘towards / the evening and its / politics’). Woodward’s poem seems to be moving in the direction sketched by Thomas Butler, who, borrowing some designations from Rachel Blau DuPlessis, argues that ‘British poetry in the 1970s and 1980s struggled to discover a kind of writing that could be both “a repository and expression of subjectivity” and “a site where the materials of social subjectivity are absorbed and articulated”’ (Butler, 2005, 124–25). The project was a bold one, but Butler’s outline risks leaving poetry’s goal as a kind of self-reflexive, politicised mimesis. What must be emphasised in experimental poetry of the period generally and women’s experimental poetry in particular is a search for transformed modes of articulation which will contribute to political and social transformation. In the work of Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947–1975) and some of the early poetry of Wendy Mulford (b.1941), the lyric self is not abandoned but is ironised and exteriorised in order to explore a different condition of the subject (the ‘I’) and a different kind of consciousness. Exactly what that difference consists of is hard to say because the poetry often barely knows itself. What can be said is that aspects of being and relations between beings are reorganised both in and through the writing. This is both a reflection of social change at the time and a transformative project in itself. At first sight, the speakers of Forrest-Thomson’s poems are, collectively, conflicted about language’s and poetry’s ability to be transformative: ‘the differment remains, remains and’ at the end of ‘On reading Mr. Melville’s Tales ’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 68) is not the same as Gertrude Stein’s ‘The difference is spreading’. The Other is required to receive ‘the differment’ and if not heal it, then help to put it into activation; in the words of ‘In Memoriam’: ‘I could make all darkness light / If you would try’. But ‘Sonnet’ suggests that the Other is always-already somewhere else: ‘My love, if I write a song for you / To that extent you are gone’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 100, 91). That is, if you were here, I could just talk to you. Nonetheless, the ‘Preface’ to her final collection, On the Periphery, is passionate in its belief that poetry can be ‘a new and serious opponent – perhaps even a successful alternative – to the awfulness of the modern world.’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 263) This is, we might say, a poetry that wants to look forward but finds itself continually hampered because it also finds itself obliged to be sceptical about the presence of the Other. In contrast, Wendy Mulford’s essay ‘Notes on Writing: A Marxist/Feminist Viewpoint’ (written in 1979 and extended in 1982) expresses greater certainty. What is needed ‘is not 52
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 52
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations the kind of poetry that “services” the women’s or any other movement […] but poetry that is transformative, that compels us to recognitions we would prefer not to see, and makes us aware of choices we had denied’ (Wandor, 1983, 38 [emphasis in the original]). Recognitions and choices are involved with survival: ‘I must disbelieve a murderous future continuously being manufactured daily in our present’ (Wandor, 1983, 40). Poetry, then, is a means of disbelief that also involves a ‘search for you, the Other, that absence in whose features are composed all the specificity of the beloved, Woman, the highest condition to which I may aspire’ (Wandor, 1983, 40). Poetry is also a means of ‘violating […] Law through speech . AUDIBLE SOUNDS. SHOUTS IN THE THROAT OF TOMORROW’ (Wandor, 1983, 32 [emphasis in the original]). The focus on the future is something that can be found in the work of younger poets, like Jennifer Cooke’s ‘Steel Girdered Her Musical’, which will be discussed in Chapter 11. Cooke has said that her sequence is ‘about the possible impossibility of a revolution’, and, in Wendy Mulford’s poem ‘Red into Green’, the speaker says: ‘I haunt an impossible singing line’ (Mulford, 1987, 13). This line is later reworked in ‘Facing the Writing: Hommage à Gautier, for Jane’ as ‘haunt an impossible singing-line’ (Mulford, 1987, 58). Lyric’s vulnerability and precarious utility ought to be impossible in the face of ‘a murderous future’, but they have to go on being possible as an expression of ‘the highest condition’. This would seem to suggest that Mulford is a very different poet to Veronica Forrest-Thomson. For Mulford, lyric is both an entry into language and a carrier of things into it. Forrest-Thomson, in her ‘Preface’ to On the Periphery, is more interested in poetry’s relation to ‘the very languages that give us the world’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 263). But this might also include ‘the very languages that give us ourselves’. Both Mulford and Forrest-Thomson are concerned with the question of who is produced in and by the writing when ‘I’ writes a poem. This is a concern that can be traced throughout much of women’s experimental poetry in Britain: what form of social being can be conveyed in poetry?
Veronica Forrest-Thomson: acts of articulation One hesitates to deduce anything about experimental poetry from a conservative satire, but there is a sense in which Frederica Potter’s description in A Whistling Woman of late 1960s women’s self-composition from ‘equal elements of dressing-up, parody (of what?) and mask’ (Byatt, 2002, 147) describes the overall impression of Forrest-Thomson’s work very well. Parody is, as Gareth Farmer and Alison Mark have noted, an important element of the late work, but one has to add immediately that it is often difficult to discern the target or agree wholly with Farmer’s argument that Forrest-Thomson’s use of parody is about reordering or 53
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 53
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations creating new expectations. Forrest-Thomson does create the expectation that any type of language and/or reference can appear in a poem – W. S. Gilbert or Jacques Derrida, for example – but, in the moment of reading, the effect of parody is akin to a sudden step back: a disordering, prior to reordering. And what is being disordered is lyric or, rather, lyric is being resisted until a way is found to write, in the words of ‘Cordelia: or, “A poem should not mean, but be”’, ‘what it may contain’ that is not confessional. Veronica Forrest-Thomson wrote extensively about artifice and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ naturalisation in poetry. Bad naturalisation privileges referential and social comprehension over artifice. Artifice is everything about poetry that is not like everyday language. Bad naturalisation produces poems that can be paraphrased; good naturalisation produces poems in which all of the elements must be attended to and in which the reader is removed from the world that he or she already knows. ‘[T]he strangeness of poetic language’ is left intact and cannot be reduced to a statement about external reality (Forrest-Thomson, 1978, xi). This distinction, worked out in full in the posthumously published Poetic Artifice (1978), has had a wide influence. Robert Sheppard, for example, makes it a key element of his survey of post-war British experimental poetry, while Charles Bernstein has developed Forrest-Thomson’s ideas about the importance of apparently non-meaningful elements of poetry in ‘The Artifice of Absorption’ (1992). Alison Mark (2001) takes a lead from Bernstein and presents Forrest-Thomson’s poetry and criticism as a precursor of US Language writing. In the context of good and bad naturalisation, one should perhaps not be surprised by how unkempt her poems often are. ‘L’effet du réel’, from her last collection On the Periphery (1976), is a typical example. Some readers will recognise that the title is also the title of a Roland Barthes essay from 1968 which describes how literature achieves realism. Those readers will then bring into play what they already know about Barthes and will expect a particular sort of poem to follow: one is that is discursive and concerned with writing for its own sake. Other readers without this knowledge will be, in a sense, alienated – that is, the title will not help them to produce themselves as the usual readers of poetry that they recognise themselves to be. After that, it is hard to see how one part of the poem can be meaningfully connected with any other: a series of Wittgenstein-like philosophical remarks about perception are followed by a lyric, composed of eight short lines heavily indented to the right, which is then followed by two long-lined six-line stanzas, in which the poet is writing a poem and addressing ‘you’. Even single sentences repeat this process: ‘We construct an event out of, behind these shutters “people” / are sleeping’. It is possible to make a connection between ‘the regular “Norman landscape”’ in line 4 and the poem’s final line: ‘The abbey stands still, without quotation marks’. ‘Without quotation marks’ mocks the idea that anything can be 54
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 54
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations produced by writerly effort (that is, the rest of the poem) that is not still just writerly. On the other hand, ‘Our capacity / for indifference is truly astounding’ seems contradicted by ‘We do not watch with complacency the sea retreating’, just as it remains uncertain whether ‘we’ is all of us or just the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of the poem (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 58–59). It is unclear, then, how or why the different parts of the poem co-exist; indeed, the last two stanzas on their own would make an acceptable poem with the same title. If we have read Barthes’s essay, then we might say that the poem recreates its argument: in a fictional description of a room, items that are not part of the story’s meaning or plot are added to confirm its reality (Culler, 1975, 193). But then we would have to decide which parts of the poem are not integral to it – something that the poem itself gives us no help with. What the poem preserves is the ‘liveness’ of the writing of it. We are taken into the world of its writing, as opposed to the written poem as a product of that world of writing or the written poem as something that (re)produces the world outside writing. We have to find our own way through the world of the poem’s writing: we will have to look up where Maillezais is in the penultimate line but, even then, we might still wonder why ‘Such savage triumph returns us’ there. The sudden elisions, parataxes and shifts in ‘L’effet du réel’ work to preserve the poem’s being over its meaning. Something similar happens in ‘The Lady of Shalott: Ode’ when ‘The modern conveniences won’t last out’ is followed by ‘Bear tear flair dare’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 86). ‘L’effet du réel’ reveals some characteristics of Veronica ForrestThomson’s mature poetry: it is highly intertextual, mixes registers, tests our expectations of form and, in doing so, declares its absolute confidence in its own brilliance. It also contains emotive language which is unexpected in habitually self-reflexive writing. The poem highlights how many of her poems deal with love and produce the body (‘all the leg muscles / tremble so nicely’) and/or an interiority (‘turn over / and go to sleep’) (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 58, 65). Sometimes the interior is bodily and sometimes it is a physical place like a library or ‘Prynne’s room’. And both of these aspects of the late poetry relate to the huge problem that it seems to have with embodiment and reality. A poet who is convinced of ‘the awfulness of the modern world’ might reasonably be expected to want to get away from it, to ‘turn over’. Poetic artifice and the use of tradition as artifice are certainly one way to do this; indeed, On the Periphery is full of pre-twentieth century allusions. As she wrote in the ‘Note’ at the end of Language-Games (1971), the poetry is produced in and as a ‘“historical present” in which past language-forms, whether borrowed from poetry, letters, speech, or the dictionary, are made into a framework for a present act of articulation.’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 261) But the problem is, in a sense, made worse by the poetry’s failure to expand on what this awfulness is. The ‘Preface’ 55
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 55
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations connects ‘The Lady of Shalott: Ode’ with a ‘quest for a lost imaginative freedom’, but that is a prefatory remark, not a poem (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 264). This is all in marked contrast to the explicit links between Wendy Mulford’s portrayal of a death culture in her prose and the oppositional force of her poetry. Moreover, Forrest-Thomson seems to have been determined to find a way to write poetry that is absolutely contemporary, but connected with the past. The evocation and invocation of tradition in the mature poetry is her way of saying that the poetry must stand up with the best literature of ages past. This is an extraordinary project and an extraordinary ambition. She wants this tradition to be able to produce her, now. Forrest-Thomson wants her poems to produce her as part of a male tradition of modernist innovation. She is constantly in dialogue, both in her criticism and poetry, with the likes of William Empson and T. S. Eliot. In fact, we could even go further and say that the speaker of these poems is absolutely convinced that she has been, and is being, produced in this way. So the poetry is an attempt to embody herself and her experiences in the forms of this tradition. At the same time, the densely allusive and intertextual nature of the poetry registers the awfulness of the modern world as linguistic discomfort or unhomeliness. In these poems, there is a powerful sense of the self wanting to be absolutely modern but not being comfortable with modernity. How on earth, the poetry asks, can modernity have been produced by the past, when, on the face of it, modernity looks like a repudiation of the past? We referred earlier to the question of what self the writing of a poem produces. While it would be easy to say that many of Forrest-Thomson’s poems are ‘about writing’ such an account is limited and limiting. It neglects how Forrest-Thomson’s poetry often turns on bringing different affective worlds into active relation. In ‘L’effet du réel’, those worlds are love and friendship, intellectual exploration and pleasure in travel and sightseeing. Indeed, there is something similar happening to what Drew Milne identifies in Frank O’Hara: ‘His poems variously map the performance of his socialised being as lover, friend, aesthete and poet onto the performance of being a writer, projecting a compounded quality of lived performance and artifice’ (Milne, 2011, 299). O’Hara saw the two performances as co-extensive: as he wrote in ‘Poem read at Joan Mitchell’s’: ‘I would make it [this poem] as long as I hope our friendship lasts if I could make poems that long’ (O’Hara, 1991, 114). Forrest-Thomson’s poetry shares neither O’Hara’s faith in duration nor his pleasure in modernity and is much more concerned with how the socialised being that produces poetry is to be put into poetry. And, if the socialised being is the starting point for poetry, how can poetry be distinguished from modernity’s awfulness? So the combination of philosophical remarks, lyric, direct address and travelogue in ‘L’effet du réel’, within the contextual frame provided by a title from Barthes, are a particular type of performance and artifice. 56
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 56
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations The performance of being a poet who is sceptical about how language gives us the world is as much the content of the poem as its references to Norman landscape and an abbey. The poem dramatises, rather than demonstrates, Barthes’s essay. This dramatisation is what gives much of Forrest-Thomson’s mature work its particular flavour. Moments of socialised and personalised being exist as dramatic events. The personal and theoretical become ways of dramatising each other. If we ask the question ‘who is speaking to whom?’, then we get some odd answers: often, it seems, the poet is speaking to herself or the poem or perhaps even language; often, she is in dialogue with various poets and theorists. If we ask ‘where is this poem set?’, then we find that many of the poems have identifiable locations. Alison Mark argues that Forrest-Thomson wrote ‘on the cusp of the movement from modernism to postmodernism’ (2001, 1), which is a kind of location in itself. But we could also say that her work (both creative and critical) is an attempt to ask and answer the question of how ‘the tradition of innovation’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1978, 125) could go on being useful. Where the poetry of the British Poetry Revival had been influenced by various American poetries and poetics, Forrest-Thomson wants to find out how the modernism of Eliot and Pound can have value and use in the late twentieth century. There are significant dialogues within her work with both Eliot and Shakespeare. This suggests that Shakespeare and Eliot are linked within that ‘tradition of innovation’. It is clear from the ‘notes’ and ‘prefaces’ to her collections that ForrestThomson saw her criticism and poetry as co-extensive; however, using this as a way to read her poems risks failing the criticism and poems by each other’s high standards. John London (1991) approaches this sort of reading in an early review of her Collected Poems and Translations, and Edward Larrissy begins his account of her poems in A Various Art with the statement that: ‘Forrest-Thomson’s theories are more radical than her poems’ (Acheson and Huk, 1996, 71). What we can say about the poems is that they often enact a distinctive aspect of Veronica ForrestThomson’s account of artifice – that is, poetry’s artifice derives from poetry’s own being as a profoundly intertextual, allusive art. Artifice involves not just the language world of single poems, but the overall language world of ‘poetry’. This raises the questions of precisely who and what a poem produces, which, in turn, connects with ForrestThomson’s dialogue with lyric. Neil Pattison argues that her poetry ‘gets […] into the contradictions of lyric’s second-guess: performing knowledge of lyric’s ironic prevention, as a condition of the lyric’s truth ’ (Pattison, 2009, 1 [emphasis in the original]). A line like ‘Bear tear flair dare’ is certainly a lyric that performs itself ironically. Lyric’s clever performance (‘flair’) involves a kind of bravery (‘dare’), like walking a tightrope, because the poet dares herself to write out and perform something that she can hardly ‘bear’, something which threatens to collapse under its own weight (tear), although ‘tear’ threatens to ‘tear’ 57
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 57
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations the repetitive rhyme with the possibility of being the weeping that follows the collapse. What the poems produce and how they do so complicate this even further. Pattison argues that, as a whole, Forrest-Thomson’s poetry confronts the problem of ‘how to shift boundaries and reprise conclusions in a world where self is pre-identified and dominated by social relations whose signs prohibit attempts at discretionary re-identifications’ (Pattison, 2009, 15). But Forrest-Thomson’s determination to position herself within a tradition that is as much discursive (Eliot) as it is lyric (Swinburne) begs the question of how lyric is a means of re-identifying the self. And, as Alison Mark points out, ForrestThomson’s ‘I’ is more often ‘a construct’ or ‘a function, rather than a personality’ (Mark, 2001, 104, 105). ‘Pastoral’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 72) might just be ‘about’ a drive into the countryside that ends in a lovers’ argument but the poem does everything it can to resist such a reading. If Forrest-Thomson is ‘discretionary’ about anything, then it is dis-identification or even mis-identification. Similarly, in terms of the ‘Preface’ to On the Periphery, how is lyric to be either a plausible ‘alternative’ to, or account of, anything? For example, Alan Sinfield has given a persuasive account of how Tennyson’s poetry often has to combine the plausibility of lyric derived from an individual consciousness with the authority of narrative derived from social interactions (Sinfield, 1990, passim). Lyric’s plausibility may not always be enough on its own. Tennyson’s famous ‘no language but a cry’ from ‘In Memoriam’ – which drives Forrest-Thomson’s ‘In Memoriam: for W. S. Gilbert’ – may not be enough on its own because, as Pattison points out, that cry is usually an expression of love and – we might add, with Tennyson in mind – an expression of love that is intimate with loss. Similarly, the question might also be asked: what can lyric guarantee in the last quarter of the twentieth century? Answers (of a sort) to questions of embodiment and lyric’s plausibility can be had from two of the late long poems, ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ and ‘Cordelia: or, “A poem should not mean, but be”’. Both poems can be described as substantial literary entertainments, elegant and sophisticated, which situate the poet firmly within the literary canon and situate her behaviour in literary language. Literary language becomes a way of behaving in the world. It is hard to talk about the poems in terms of experience because experience is predominantly the experience of literature. Any ‘I’ is not an embodied self, but in Alison Mark’s terms, a construct or function. The poet is a function of the literature in which she chooses to position herself, and this positioning functions both as extremity and eccentricity. As J. H. Prynne noted in his ‘Personal Memoir’ in the first edition of On the Periphery, ‘powerful feelings’ keep ‘[forcing] their way’ into the poems, feelings which ‘seemed often excessive within her idea of poetry’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1976, 43). But ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ and ‘Cordelia …’ are in 58
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 58
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations every way excessive; indeed, that is part of their dynamism. Whatever depersonalised literariness represses, keeps on returning. This has two obvious, but important, effects. First, poetry is not ‘about’ personal expression but remains, nonetheless, an intensely personal activity. The two poems explore how it is possible to be impersonally present in an art form. Second, the densely allusive language and mocking tone of the poems are steering the meaning-making of the reader. ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ borrows its title from Swinburne and is organised in five different movements of temperament. The first eight-line section is an introduction in which the poet shows us how she is going to orchestrate a range of influences and resonances. The first two lines are borrowed from Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet CXXIX’: ‘Th’expence of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action and, till action, lust’. ‘Spirit’ would be recognisable to Shakespeare’s original readers as a punning reference to ‘semen’. The section asks for the loan of Aphrodite’s ‘girdle’ – which will later reappear as ‘hold onto your seat-belt, Persephone’, ‘Until Zeus has got back his erection’ (ForrestThomson, 1990, 88, 89). ‘Erection’ seems out of kilter with the overall register and, like ‘seat-belt’ and the later ‘whatsisname’, disrupts the language of the poem. These words anchor the poem and reader to the contemporary world and function almost as secure and securing points that are somehow stitched through the many layers of the poem’s language. The second section is a complaint of abandoned love, which ends: ‘And leave me to deal with gloomy Dis.’ Thus, the choice is either love or death – a choice strikingly familiar in a range of canonical literature. There is also a quotation from Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’ (‘I am aweary, aweary, / I would that I were dead’), which, like ‘The Lady of Shalott’, portrays death-in-life. The third section of the poem is highly discursive: poets, we are told, cannot be stopped from ‘dilating at length’ upon death or, indeed, on anything. ‘Dilating at length’ is what the poem starts to do here over a forty-four-line section composed of lines of up to nineteen syllables. The speaker is mocking herself as a poet and mocking the traditions of poetry, but her readers are also mocked for thinking that real love is anything like the love expressed in poetry. The familiar problem of embodiment is evoked here. The sense of the body is given through literary devices and flourishes: what love does to bodies is evoked by a list of poets from Sappho to Eliot and a list of classical tragedians, to which Eliot is also added. The section ends with a recommendation of stoicism – ‘unconscious / of what is going on even in their own bodies’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 89) – which is immediately mocked via reference to another Tennyson subject, Saint Simeon Stylites. A brief section then invokes Persephone who is, of course, condemned to return to ‘gloomy Dis’. The poem ends with six rhyming quatrains, which evoke both nursery rhyme and ballad forms, as well as looking back to the form of Swinburne’s Proserpine poem: 59
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 59
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations I went to hell with dignity, For by then, we were three. And whatever I feel about you, I certainly hate she. (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 90)
The closing quatrains are highly entertaining and totally pessimistic, ending with ‘the arms of gloomy Dis’. It is a rhyming poem that might be designed to mock the literary expectations of readers who imagine that ‘they would like to be’ in love. Ian Gregson catches an echo of Stevie Smith (Gregson, 1996, 202), and, indeed, Smith did use Persephone and various other female mythological figures as personae. Persephone, of course, stands for someone whose life is the product of libido, of a doubled desire for love and death. In Poetic Artifice, ForrestThomson describes Swinburne’s Faustine as ‘an organising principle in the verse’ and Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ as ‘an organising formal principle’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1978, 118, 123). Alison Mark reads both ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ and ‘Cordelia …’ from a feminist perspective, in which such female figures are recuperated from their roles as subjects for male poets (Mark, 2002, 98–99). But the more urgent question is perhaps how the rest of the poem has produced these six rhyming stanzas. Does the seemingly more personal rhyme need to be justified by largely impersonal, discursive writing? Is the subject finally stepping out from behind impersonality or is this also artifice? At some points in the rhyming poem, the poet does seem to be speaking as Persephone: ‘The god knows what will be the end’ sounds less colloquial than the earlier ‘The god knows why we bother with it’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 89). The questions raised are only partly answered by saying that the closing quatrains represent the more conventional poem that the poet can write now that she has, in the words of the ‘Preface’, ‘[recaptured] the right to speak directly through the traditional ranges of rhymed stanza’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 264). Similar questions are raised by the poem ‘Cordelia …’ which has received sustained critical attention from both Alison Mark and Gareth Farmer. Farmer has written a thoughtful and carefully worked account of the poem as a ‘triumph of artifice’ produced from the struggle to create ‘new imaginative orders’ (Farmer, 2009, 74). Mark reads it as a kind of Oedipal epic where the poet quests to produce herself from tradition. Both readings speak to important aspects of the poem but, at the same time, both downplay its inherent absurdism. Reading the poem aloud emphasises its repetitions, verbal pratfalls and riff-like qualities. As with ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, the opening is a kind of warm-up and overture: To those who kiss in fear that they shall never kiss again To those that love with fear that they shall never love again
60
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 60
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations To such I dedicate this rhyme and what it may contain. None of us will ever take the transiberian train Which makes a very satisfactory refrain Especially as I can repeat it over and over again Which is the main use of the refrain. (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 104)
The ‘ain’ rhyme is repeated until it becomes ridiculous in itself and ridicules the opening echo of Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’. Modernist epic is evoked by line four: Blaise Cendrars’s Prose of the Trans-Siberian & of the Little Jeanne de France (1913), originally produced as a large folded paper, with painted illustrations by Sonia Delaunay. Gareth Farmer notes that the first four lines are fourteeners – a form used in Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1587) and George Chapman’s translation of The Illiad (1616). Epic form is clearly evoked but so, too, if we know our Ovid, is a book of stories about transformations, which is itself a series of highly selective transformations of previous texts and stories. The opening lines have the same effect as the opening of ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ but with the difference that these are a literal layering (Eliot on top of Cendrars) which produces an ‘historical present’. The main part of the poem also begins with fourteeners: ‘I with no middle flight intend the truth to speak out plain’. Farmer, drawing on unpublished work by Simon Perril, points out that this echoes an early passage in Milton’s Paradise Lost where the poet draws attention to the uniqueness of his work. But ‘Cordelia …’ is going to be an epic about love and ‘love gone by that has come back again’. This movement of loss and return is personal but it is also literary. ‘To speak out plain’ is taking place through artifice which, paradoxically, is what Shakespeare’s Cordelia refused to use. The poem continues with a partial quotation from Eliot’s ‘The Dry Salvages’: ‘I may not know much about gods but I know that / Eros is a strong purple god’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 104). These lines speak to something that the poetry can never quite resolve. Eros is purple because, presumably, he is always engorged and tumescent. He is strong because he unleashes libido into the world. The ‘I’ of the poem has no time for spiritualised or neo-Platonic love (underlined by later lines on the reality of Dante’s relationship with Beatrice) and no sense of love as compassion or selfless understanding. Libidinous love is not a hopeful presence and therefore cannot transform the individual or social sphere. All it leads to is ‘Florentines […] / Killing each other’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 104). The overall effect of this is a worked poetics removed from social presence, which raises the question of how such poetry can possibly be an alternative to the awfulness of the world unless it allows us to mock that awfulness. With the line ‘Lorenzo dei Medici who lives for ever’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 105) the poem gets properly underway and, as implied by the 61
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 61
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations opening, we are quickly in the realms of comedy and absurdity. Lewis Carroll is referred to, and ‘I like kicking up larks or / Larking up kicks’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 106) is repeated and reworked several times. The literary references (Pound, Eliot, Swinburne, Shakespeare, Cendrars, Prynne and Joyce) go on piling up, but it would be an absurd project to try to unpack them all. We know that ‘Cordelia …’ had two other titles while it was a work-in-progress. A draft typescript was entitled ‘Pain Stopped Play or “The Twilight of the Gods” / for the Star’ and a draft manuscript was entitled ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 278). ‘Pain Stopped Play’, which parodies a phrase familiar to English readers from cricket journalism, perhaps does not tell us very much (it would actually make more sense to say that, in ‘Cordelia …’, play stops pain), although a relation between ‘pain’ and ‘play’ can be traced throughout the late poems. However, the use of the title of Eliot’s famous essay of 1919 suggests a particular type of practice. ForrestThomson had, as we have noted, written of an ‘historical present’ made up of ‘past language-forms’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 261). This converges with Eliot’s assertion that … the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and […] he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. (Eliot, 1975, 40)
Eliot’s essay is, at bottom, genetic – that is, it is concerned with tracing descent. Eliot was convinced that his modernity was the product of tradition or, rather, tradition as he saw it, and he spent much of his career writing highly finished poetry that showed how this was, in fact, the case. In contrast, it is as if ‘Cordelia …’ and ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ give us the unfinishable process that leads to finished work or perhaps the unfinishable process as the work. This may be Forrest-Thomson’s particular take on modernity: that if ‘her, here, now’ is to be the product of ‘them, there, then’, then the poem cannot be a finished work, because ‘her, here’ is never finished and any ‘now’ is only a temporary resting point. Forrest-Thomson’s late long poems seem to recognise that Eliot’s ‘consciousness of the past’ is impossible post-1945, post-Modernism (which is not the same as postmodernism) and post-poststructuralism. In the context of Eliot’s essay as ancestry research, it is notable that Forrest-Thomson’s past in ‘Cordelia …’ is a past of failed or destructive relationships, whether familial or amorous. Such relationships are the result of libido doing 62
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 62
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations what it will: at best, lies and self-deception; at worst, betrayal and death. The past, then, is not only a place of damage, but a particular kind of damage that continues to harm the present. This is why the poem uses mockery in order to damage the past in return. In this context, the ending of ‘Cordelia …’ seems like an improbable and unrealistic offer of consolation: Drink as much as you can and love as much as you can And work as much as you can For you can’t do anything when you are dead. The motto of this poem heeds And do you it employ: Waste not and want not while you’re here The possibles of joy. (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 109)
But that is partly the point, because the degree of impersonality that Eliot demanded – the degree involved in being Eliot – is impossible for the rest of us. ‘Cordelia …’ is, like much of Forrest-Thomson’s late work, a bleak entertainment that expects us to share its amusement at the possibility that literature’s much-vaunted humanity may be a lie.
Wendy Mulford: ‘how do you live?’ Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s work represents a dialogue with tradition and a conception of literature as a locale for self-embodiment that few experimental women poets would explore so radically until Emily Critchley in the current century. Wendy Mulford’s conception of tradition is more explicitly feminist than Forrest-Thomson’s. She describes having ‘as it were, only a colonial relationship’ to a male modernist tradition within language and culture. But reading only women writers is likened to ‘the Borgia torture, the chamber whose walls close in closer and closer till you suffocate. There simply isn’t enough work.’ The woman modernist turns to male modernism, because that is where ‘the major breakthroughs have been made’, but her ‘sense of alienation […] bounces [her] back again’ (Wandor, 1983, 35). This alienating tradition is an example of the ‘Law’ that poetry’s speech can challenge. Poetry, to borrow some words from Veronica ForrestThomson’s ‘On reading Mr. Melville’s Tales ’, is a means of ‘unweaving’ and ‘[superseding] […] banal dichotomies’ (Forrest-Thomson, 1990, 68). One such dichotomy is portrayed in Mulford’s ‘Blossom Dance’, where ‘Protestors and policemen perform the ritual / weaving songs and dances’ (Mulford, 1987, 12). The relationship between cultural, political and social form is reflected in the way that the poems in Late Spring Next 63
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 63
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations Year: Poems 1979–1985 move between formality and informality. Some of the poems that may be classed as experimental define their experimentalism through lapses in the etiquette of formal writing. So, for example, ‘Heimat’ (Mulford, 1987, 11) is unpunctuated and its quatrains of lines indented progressively to the right perform a declarative dynamism. Other poems have more open and/or irregular forms. ‘Age’ (Mulford, 1987, 15) has four increasingly irregular quatrains that move from quick notations to more meditative writing – a move that hinges on a single colon and full-stop. Indeed, irregular or residual punctuation, such as single commas in otherwise unpunctuated poetry (which is also an irregular or residual formality), is a feature of this writing. Punctuation is turned into something that is truly expressive as opposed to merely orientational. A sudden comma or similar element often has the effect of slowing the poem down or, as in ‘Age’, turning it in another direction. One hesitates to use the term cadence because its musical connotations might evoke the long-discredited ‘all art aspires to the condition of music’ and because its connotations of authorial distinctiveness seem equally fanciful and inexact. Nonetheless, we would argue that one effect of such punctuation is to make the reader conceive of the whole poem as a cadence. Cadence, that is, not just as patterning, but as part of poetry’s potential for transformative movement. So, for example, the colon and full-stop in ‘Age’ together allow the poem to produce ‘Bright clear notes’. And in ‘“How do you live?” for Hélène Cixous, who gave me the question (1979)’ (Mulford, 1987, 54), commas introduce bound-to-fail attempts to unwrite the opening line: ‘no clear answer, ambivalently’. ‘“How do you live?”’ ends with another question: ‘cradling / cuddling care, home love / tucked body refuge will satisfy what part?’ This underlines how often Mulford’s poetry looks to the future. There is something of John Wilkinson’s discussion of cadence here – published in the same year as Mulford’s book – which begins by wondering ‘is this a thing I do, writing the future?’ (Wilkinson, 1987, 81 [emphasis in the original]). However, Wilkinson’s analysis does not drill down to the level of punctuation. The ending of ‘“How do you live?”’ also demonstrates how what is released by the poem’s cadence and/or its residual formality, as manifested in residual punctuation, often looks like a breakdown in rational language. Something similar happens in the truly remarkable passage at the end of ‘The Meaning of Blue’ (Mulford, 1987, 45): ‘Through density dictator language must be / indefinitely in absence we uncover the / real meaning of blue’. This is perhaps an example, in writing, of what ‘How Do You Live’ calls ‘these ultra-private / accommodations between person & / politics negotiating survival’ (Mulford, 1987, 54). In a review of Late Spring Next Year, John Wilkinson argues that the volume’s key phrase might be ‘unmerited exchange’ (Wilkinson, 1987, 93). The phrase can be read socially and politically, as Wilkinson does, but it can also be read as a highly compressed poetics. ‘The Meaning of Blue’ can hardly be
64
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 64
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations said to ‘earn’ the concluding cadence, which begins with: ‘Through density dictator language must be / indefinitely in absence’, just as it would be crass to say that the closing lines demonstrate the poem’s opening assertion that: ‘There are other things out there […] besides those / the conscious mind allows’. ‘Unmerited exchange’ appears in ‘Sun-Drenched’ (Mulford, 1987, 22): In an equatorial jungle the painted parakeet bares his plumage There are no surprises no dark births beneath the rubber trees but signals of an unmerited exchange in which the light dances
Here, we can perhaps read a distant echo of Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondances’ in which ‘La nature est un temple’ where ‘Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent’ (Baudelaire, 1961, 13). Mulford is, however, no symbolist, and her jungle, unlike Baudelaire’s ‘fôrets de symboles’, holds out the possibility of exchange that is outside, what another poem terms, ‘that make-believe world / of calculation’ (Mulford, 1987, 24). The possibility that writing itself might also be outside the world of calculation underlies two references to it: ‘the uncircumscribed pencil traces / the erratic shape of love’ and ‘graphite tracings / reassuring of the / right to be living’ (Mulford, 1987, 60, 56). Pencil writing is, of course, susceptible to erasure, so what is figured here is the precarious existence of lyric’s ‘ultra-private accommodations’. ‘Love’ and ‘right’ are connected with the larger movement in Mulford’s poetry between inner and outer. Individual poems fluctuate between connection with the external world and the production of a reflective inner world. The essay ‘Notes on Writing’ (1979/1982) evokes Coleridge to conceive of ‘I’ ‘as moral agent and as in part imaginative creator of its world’ (Wandor, 1983, 39). Romanticism connects with Mulford’s call for radically ‘transformative’ poetry, through its new interrelation of cultural, natural, political and social spheres and production of a new type of subjectivity in language. Mulford goes on to say that love is ‘corkscrewing’ between inner and outer worlds and is ‘creating its desired visionary world’ (Wandor, 1983, 39). What the essay has called earlier on the same page ‘the unreconstructed domain of the passions’ is an affective domain that realigns inner and outer. Mulford’s poetry concentrates on such forces being accumulated and reconstructed in poetic language. As we shall see later in recent work by Marianne Morris, libidinal energy is both the desire for the Other and desire for change in the world. Indeed, desire for the Other is a transformative force – what ‘Poem at the Time of Festivals, Molesworth Peace Chapel, Dec. 1984’ calls ‘shapely touch in hand & lip’ (Mulford, 1987, 25). 65
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 65
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations As one might expect, the body is to the fore in Mulford’s poetry in Late Spring Next Year. Arms – our means of being companionable and
drawing the Other into our bodily space – appear in approximately eight of the poems. ‘The arm is a tenderness all its own’ and the means of making ‘human chains’ to oppose Western death culture (Mulford, 1987, 10, 12). ‘Facing the Writing: Hommage à Gautier, for Jane’ ends its first section with the question: ‘Do you believe all change begins / in the body?’ (Mulford, 1987, 57) The rest of the poem leaves this question unanswered but, collectively, the poems in Late Spring Next Year might answer that change begins with individual bodies. A different kind of body poem is found in ‘My Mother in May & Hawthorn’. This is a breast cancer poem, and its irregular form and direct address are reminiscent of Adrienne Rich’s eight-part elegy ‘A Woman Dead in Her Forties’, which was first published in the mid-1970s (Rich, 1978, 53–58). Mulford’s poem is not an elegy but a mother/daughter poem set before a mastectomy. The two women are connected by the body (‘To think I fed you with these tits, you say’) and by clothes (the mother repairing a negligee; the daughter remembering ‘the last time I wore one was for my daughter’s birth’). Although the speaker of the poem is ‘crying deep inside’, the poem can be said to focus specifically on the surfaces of femininity in a politicised way. The line ‘It is the ordinariness of this struggle shocks’ is simultaneously the cancer, mother and daughter, attachment and separation, but also the struggle of, and for, consciousness. The setting of ‘My Mother …’ is the pastoral and the garden. In the 1982 addition to the original ‘Notes on Writing’ essay, the garden is the place where the ‘murderous future’ can be ‘disbelieved’: ‘looking in to my sunlit familiar garden in its green stragglyness, it is possible to believe only in the reality of now, to occlude our general death’ (Wandor, 1983, 40). The natural world is not only a way of escaping or obstructing death culture, but also a place where different perceptions are possible. So in ‘Goblin Coombe’, ‘everything’ not only ‘has a name’, but ‘repeats a history’, and in ‘The Meaning of Blue’, the seascape takes ‘my mind beyond image’ (Mulford, 1987, 44, 45). Such poems look forward to later work, such as the 1998 volume The East Anglia Sequence: Norfolk 1984–Suffolk 1994, which, Matthew Jarvis argues, aligns Mulford with the radical landscape poetry identified by Harriet Tarlo (Jarvis, 2009, 470). But in the context of Late Spring Next Year and women’s experimental poetry in Britain in the late 1970s, that is in the future. Mulford’s early landscape poems are part of a wider grasping towards a radical vision, form and practice. Indeed, reading the East Anglian poems only as radical landscape poetry ignores how they, and the more recent poem-in-progress I China Am, are lucid and translucent, freed up and free to generate meaning. Their experimentalism is inextricable from the way that they give themselves to the reader immediately. These works have achieved what Mulford called ‘violating […] Law through speech ’ (Wandor, 1983, 32 [emphasis in the original]). 66
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 66
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Lyric Transformations In contrast, Mulford’s early work is dense and, in some ways, feels constrained and bogged down. But that feeling of constraint comes from trying to write politics as lyric and/or lyric as politics. The speaker of these early poems discovers a world of difference between writing political poems and writing poems politically. Writing poems politically involves a different mode of language and a different understanding of both the writer’s and readers’ relation to language. This is why the ‘singing line’ becomes ‘impossible’ – not because it can’t be done, but because it is constantly haunted by, in the words that Jennifer Cooke uses to describe her sequence ‘Steel Girdered Her Musical’, its own ‘possible impossibility’. This is an early version of the simultaneous voicing and unvoicing that can be traced throughout women’s experimental poetry in Britain.
67
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 67
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Chapter 5
Geraldine Monk: Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum
In Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (1998), Keith Tuma opens his discussion of Geraldine Monk (b.1952) as follows: Pity poor Geraldine Monk, extracted here from a whole host of British women experimentalists […] inevitably to be made to carry a discussion of the issues confronting feminist poetry in Britain. She might equally well be made to represent some of the possibilities of performance and performance writing … (Tuma, 1998, 229)
Tuma speaks to one of the difficulties involved in the criticism of women’s poetry. The term ‘women’s poetry’ suggests not only poetry that is by and for women but also poetry that is the articulation of women. Therefore, women’s poetry is always being called on to be representative of something. Tuma also evokes another difficulty in writing about women’s poetry: the assumption that experimental, feminist and radical can be comfortably elided. But identifying Monk’s poetry as explicitly feminist has often been difficult. In his introduction to the ‘Some Younger Poets’ section of The New British Poetry (1988), Ken Edwards saw a convergence between Glenda George’s championing of ‘womanism’ in order to avoid ‘the slur of “mere propaganda masquerading as literature”’ and the manifesto that Monk wrote with Maggie O’Sullivan which was published in City Limits in 1984. The two poets argued – in a passage that has since been endlessly quoted – that the most effective chance any woman has of dismantling the fallacy of male creative supremacy is simply by writing poetry of a kind which is liberating by the breadth of its range, risk
68
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 68
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum and innovation […] to exploit and realize the full potential and importance of language. (Sheppard, 2005, 163)
Women’s poetry that is explicitly feminist seems to run the risk of being called something other than poetry and the choices this leaves are stark. Women can write a poetry that is based on what Alan Robinson terms ‘rhetorical estrangement from the masculine poetic tradition’ (Robinson 1987, 208); that self-identifies as ‘womanist’; or that is simply ‘liberating’ because it is very, very good. Our reading of Interregnum will argue that, because Geraldine Monk’s book-length sequence is concerned with a linguistic sociality outside the dominant order (the Pendle witches), it enables a different focus on terms such as experimental, feminist and radical. This allows for a rethinking of these terms and their automatic attachment to certain sorts of writing. Indeed, the idea of alternative linguistic sociality could be said to figure as an important aspect of experimental poetries. As such poetries have largely been denied – and, wary of commodification, have often actively rejected – access to the structures of transmission and reception available to so-called ‘univocal’ poetry, they have increasingly been located, produced in and addressed to distinct, but often barely visible, socialities. However, in the context of our opening discussion, it seems reasonable to argue that Interregnum is also an extensive figuration of a number of issues circulating around women and language. What do women say and what can they say? How do they say it and where? What happens when they speak with what Monk and O’Sullivan’s manifesto called ‘range, risk and innovation […] the full potential and importance of language’? Daniel Tiffany’s recent book Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightife, Substance (2009) is particularly useful in thinking through these questions. One strand that runs through Tiffany’s wide-ranging argument is the connections between lyric poetry and a range of demotic language usages, including riddles, nursery rhymes, curses, chants and criminal cant. This has clear connections with the speech of witches which is believed to consist of charms, curses, hexes and spells. Tiffany also draws attention to mythical female figures, whose speech or vocal sounds are terrifying and/or seductive and potentially fatal, such as the Sphinx and her famous riddle, the song of the Sirens and the wailing of the Harpies (Tiffany, 2009, 70–74). The riddle of the Sphinx speaks to the fears and desires that circulate around woman and language. Tiffany points out that those who encounter the Sphinx are killed ‘for failing to recognize their own human image in the “monster” portrayed by the riddle (a creature with two, three, or four legs at various times of the day)’ (Tiffany, 2009, 74). The implications of Tiffany’s reading are profound. First, when a woman speaks she produces something monstrous to the male listener. Second, when she speaks men don’t recognise a common humanity in what she 69
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 69
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum says. Finally, as the myths that Tiffany refers to suggest, there is a fear that female language may be captivating and, as with witches’ charms and spells, performative of a binding and terrifying power.
Supernatural soundscapes Magic (as performative utterance) and the supernatural (as hauntings and presences) are never far from the centre of Monk’s poetry. Hearing her read highlights how much her poetry welcomes such potentialities; how many of her texts are only fully activated in performance; and how that activation comes, in large part, from the texts’ co-extensiveness with a range of registers, usages and voicings. Her language usages can include comments about the venue, apologies for not having assembled a clear programme of work, indecisiveness about what to read, descriptions of how particular poems were composed, greetings to friends in the audience and remarks to latecomers. Monk’s voicings can veer from intimate whispers to booming full-throated shouts and cries, from broad Lancastrian to something approaching Received Pronunciation (RP), from Sitwellian articulations to everyday speech. During a reading of her work, Monk is always doing at least one of the following: speaking, acting, speaking acts or acting speech. Monk’s ability and willingness to communicate with an audience is inextricable from her unique identity as a poet and performer. Her compelling performances of her texts articulate an understanding of those texts. Monk’s performances articulate an understanding-in-process because they allow her to act as a kind of intermediary between the rawness of her material and audience. Her poetry can be characterised by an emphasis on the rawness of data coming through the five senses; an often vertiginous evocation of motion; references to uncontainable female sexuality; explorations of how the authority of representational systems is always compromised; and the confident portrayal of a desiring self in search of the world that she wants to have. In Monk’s poetry, the feminine is often identified with a pleasure-centred existence that is under threat. It is also worth noting the operatic and musical aspects of Monk’s readings. In the context of our earlier point about performances articulating an understanding, the written text is a score in the sense that its full articulation is not on the page. As a lieder cycle needs the presence and actions of a voice to access the deep emotional and psychological world and time of its individual parts, so a Monk text needs its author’s voice to release deeper levels of experience from language than dictionary or encyclopaedia levels of meaning. Indeed, one of Monk’s other works is Angel High Wires – an electroacoustic song cycle in collaboration with musician Martin Archer, based on Schubert’s entire lieder output. 70
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 70
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum If this seems an unnecessary digression (writing about readings that you, the reader, cannot hear), it is important to stress that Monk’s readings underline how her work performs an active and continuing relationship between voice and environment. First, it is notable that when Monk does describe the circumstances of a particular poem’s composition, she often focuses on a particular social and/or geographical setting or context. Second, the way that Monk reads is co-extensive with what can also be discerned in many of her published poems. In sequences such as ‘Hidden Cities’ and ‘Manufractured Moon’ (Monk, 2001, 63–70, 73–78), there is a strong sense of the voice being thrown out into an environment (usually urban), in order to see what bounces back. This can be fragments of the original voice, other selves and historical echoes. Indeed, Monk has spoken of her interest in engaging with ‘the emotional geography of place’ (BEPC author page). Language is what gives form to an individual’s emotional geography, so language as articulation is marked by larger forces. Monk’s preference for sequences might be read as the need for a constraint within which process poetics can be fully energised. Meredith Quartermain calls Monk’s work ‘a socio-poetic soundscape where place and class and gender are matters of rhyme, quantity, pitch and pronunciation’ (Quartermain, 2007, 73). It is notable that Monk’s Selected Poems (2003) begin with the words ‘Settlement’, ‘Settling’ and ‘instinctive navigations’. The placing of that last phrase below a gap between the other two words suggests an unfinishable process. .
Interregnum: ‘Nerve Centre’ – oppositions and exchanges The recognition of common humanity, emotional geography, other selves and historical echoes are crucial to Monk’s book-length sequence Interregnum, first published in 1994. It is an imaginative exploration of the notorious witch trial of 1612 when ten women from the Pendle area of East Lancashire were hung as witches in Lancaster. Magical activity can certainly be read as a kind of ‘instinctive navigation’. Originally running to nearly 120 pages, Interregnum is epic in both scale and scope. Reading it is arduous and challenging. Its emotional range and impact are equivalent to an opera cycle, and the text is constantly changing in form and voice. Without the intermediation of Monk’s performing voice, the reader is dropped into a language world of uncertain bearings. A contrast with opera is, again, instructive. In the theatre, the mise en scène is immediately visible so that when someone speaks or sings complex pieces of language they are located for the audience. Monk’s performances of her texts, with their combinations of voicings and usages, partly provide such a mise en scène. Without Monk’s performing voice, the arduousness or potential arduousness of the performance for Monk herself is thrown back on to the reader. Similarly, in contrast to 71
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 71
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum conventional re-imaginings of historical events, Interregnum deprives readers of the comforts of quaint historical language and trappings. There are no ‘ye olde this’ or farthingales here. The reader not only has to confront the material head on but is also unable to perceive Interregnum’s scale and scope because the book’s sequential organisation necessarily compresses them. A witch trial is also a site of contested meaning par excellence and, as Sean Bonney has noted about Monk’s work in general, ‘much of the power of [her] poetry comes from what an unstable meaning does to the possibilities of content within the work’ (Thurston, 2007, 64). Interregnum is divided into three parts: ‘Nerve Centre’, ‘Palimpsestus’ and ‘Interregnum’. ‘Nerve Centre’ contains eleven poems which are divided across three subsections: ‘The Hill’, ‘The Hill People’ and ‘Hill Outriders’. The ‘Nerve Centre’ section focuses on Pendle Hill where the Pendle witches are believed to have met. Pendle Hill has other supernatural associations because it was there that George Fox, founder of the Quaker movement, had a visionary experience in 1652: ‘From the top of this hill the Lord let me see what places he had a great people to be gathered’ (Quakerinfo.com). It is still a place of Quaker pilgrimage today; it also attracts those interested in witchcraft, particularly over Hallowe’en. In the words of one modern local witch: It’s practically not safe to go out that night! The lanes round Pendle are stiff with traffic. It’s traditional to go wild on Pendle Hill that night but […] for reasons of personal safety I wouldn’t want to be on the hill. I’m not a person who likes crowds or people out of control on drugs. (Pendle.net)
The Ribble Valley Borough Council website confirms that, on Hallowe’en, local police have to set up a one-way system to control traffic over Pendle Hill, but whether this traffic is earthbound or aerial is not stated. The preceding paragraph may also seem something of a digression, but ‘Nerve Centre’ presents a portmanteau of stories and voices to establish this modern scene orbiting round an ancient place. The intrinsic (and perhaps extrinsic) atmosphere is not only written deep into the environment, but quickly becomes a part of the emotional geography of anyone who goes there. The eleven individual poems of ‘Nerve Centre’ introduce some of the latter-day groups drawn to Pendle Hill – for example, ‘Good Friday Hikers’, ‘Hallowe’en Bikers’, ‘Fox Hunt’ and ‘Flyer’ (Monk, 2003, 101, 102, 108, 110). The poems produce powerful portrayals of the physicality of the people and the materiality of their activities. In fact, the poems are full of disconnected body parts and objects. At first sight, ‘Nerve Centre’ seems designed only to reflect these varied groups via a disparate collage of techniques: conventional free verse, open-field composition, double-columned text and centred text. However, ‘Nerve Centre’ does much more than give 72
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 72
04/10/2013 10:22:47
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum a species of ‘user’s guide’ for Pendle Hill; it establishes the concerns that will be worked out over the rest of Interregnum. Pendle Hill itself is established as an environment whose components – both material and atmospheric – are supremely durable and capable of perpetuation. The wish expressed in ‘Good Friday Hikers’ – ‘(will-we-see the Irish sea / beyond Blackpool tower) – is echoed in ‘Fox Trot’, where ‘(IT) the hill (I) / saw sea to top it the hill’ (Monk, 2003, 101, 109) reworks the actual words of George Fox: ‘When I was come to the top, I saw the sea bordering upon Lancashire’ (Quakerinfo.com). The durability of Pendle Hill is capable of surviving even the slaughter perpetrated by the age of the automobile: in the words of the opening poem ‘Pendle’, ‘odd creatures / sometimes missed sometimes hit / warm runny things / cold unmoving tarmac’ (Monk, 2003, 99). This also serves to establish Pendle Hill as a micro-, multi-verse of oppositional forces: the social versus the natural. The purposeful activities of bikers, hikers and hang-gliders are placed against ‘nature’s / rambling / incoherence’ (Monk, 2003, 101). The opening section also implies that Pendle Hill is a place where ancient and modern forces are forever mutually energising and reinforcing. ‘Nerve Centre’ establishes, then, strong senses of geography and landscape, of the body and of social and natural spaces. As we read through Interregnum, it becomes clear that all paths and tracks through the text go through these areas. ‘Fox Hunt’, in the voice of a hunted and killed fox, portrays the consequences of the exercise of the prerogatives of power, which is a theme running throughout Interregnum . At the end of the poem, the mutilated and dying fox describes itself: ‘staggering and bled / I rose red / a reversed emblem’ (Monk, 2003, 108). ‘Reversed emblem’ does more than commentate punningly on ‘rose red’. It presents an image of life as a ‘hanging on’ between life and death and of such ‘between’ moments as crucial points of transformation. This highlights the way that ‘Nerve Centre’ establishes an extremely high emotional key for the rest of Interregnum. Like the transfigured fox, it resonates with agony and ecstasy and currents of exchange between the two. A between state is, of course, a species of interregnum.
Interregnum: ‘Palimpsestus’ – portals From the beginning of Part 2, the exterior world that was established in ‘Nerve Centre’ starts to progressively disappear. Where Good Friday hikers walked a ‘hillside track’, an ellipsis takes us into ‘perpetual / dreamdrip-backdrop / pooling centuries’ (Monk, 2003, 101, 111). As its title suggests, ‘Palimpsestus’ is a fragmentary collection of writings and voicings. A ‘dreamdrip-backdrop’ is at once a pre-linguistic space, a space outside linear time and a space that can only exist in 73
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 73
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum language. Bracketed commentating or narrating statements in bold uppercase punctuate sections in lowercase. All sections and statements are introduced and end with ellipses signalling their incomplete nature. The reader immediately begins wondering about the exact nature of the palimpsest being presented here. A palimpsest can mean either a manuscript where the original text has been effaced in order to make way for a second text or a manuscript in which portions of earlier erased writings are found. There are clearly two texts here but their exact identities – primary and secondary – remain unclear as does the question of whether the ellipses figure effacement and erasure. In the original Creation Books edition (1994), ‘Palimpsestus’ was spread across thirty-four pages, with the commentating statements – for example, ‘… (STUMBLING SURVIVAL) …’ – each receiving their own separate left-hand page. In the Salt edition (2003), the whole section is run-on which changes the way that the text is read. The layout of the original edition suggested a number of possible readings. The capitalised commentating statements could be read as introductions to the lowercase text on the right-hand pages. They also suggested an antiphonal, call-and-response structure. Finally, the capitalised commentating statements also signalled a possibility that the section could be read in both directions. The layout of the Salt edition has the paradoxical effect of seeming to invite only a linear reading, while at the same time emphasising that there are, in fact, two poems intertwined. The differing effects of the old and new layout are worth noting, because ‘Palimpsestus’ replaces what might be called the vox pop of ‘Nerve Centre’ with a largely mediumistic register. This is made explicit in ‘piercing second sight / chucking up visions from / ectoplasmic mists’ (Monk, 2003, 112). It can be described as mediumistic because the fact that readers are invited to voice this writing within themselves means that, like the text itself, they cross the boundary from observation to full participation. Where ‘Nerve Centre’ presented descriptions of different lifestyles and external descriptions of geography and place, ‘Palimpsestus’ articulates life experiences and inner life or lives. What seems to be happening in this section is that we are given a kind of linguistic portal back to the experiences of the Pendle witches which, like Pendle Hill, have always been present. The opening sections of the text refer to ‘… perpetual / dreamdrip-backdrop / pooling centuries’ and ‘unstopped centuries / seep / unbearable sorrowlove’ (Monk, 2003, 111, 113). The portal opens because the ‘unbearable sorrowlove’ of the past connects with similarly unbearable feelings in the present or very recent past. The poem moves into what might be termed a perpetual temporal unconscious. We get glimpses of an unhappy home life in ‘… Three o clock Good Friday dinner / hits / floral wallpaper’ and ‘young blood / wetting scrubbed floorboards’ (Monk, 2003, 114, 117). There also seem to be references to what might be termed memoirs of 74
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 74
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum a Catholic girlhood in ‘… Three aves / rise / Rise / RISE’ (Monk, 2003, 114) although this passage, like the later ‘[t]hree biters bitten’ (Monk, 2003, 116), is also a quote from a charm which Anne Whittle or Chattox admitted that she had recited to lift a curse. Similarly, a suggestion of limited opportunities for working-class women blurs with an evocation of the three Fates – Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos: … Three women Three mill workers. spin. wind. FATE. FATE.
Three sisters. cut. FATE.
(Monk, 2003, 120)
The opening of the portal between past and present, collective and individual, is at its clearest in the following passage towards the end of ‘Palimpsestus’: can’t breathe even moan girl-mind hooks on transference out-of-body trance crawls into cool dreams of future disconnected bliss (Monk, 2003, 118)
The portal opens because the collective experiences of the Pendle witches offer both a means of identification and the possibility of escape. In this context, the capitalised commentating statements – for example, ‘… (LEGIONS OF FRANTIC MISERIES) …’ (Monk, 2003, 113) – almost work as portals themselves because they can be read as descriptions of the distant past, modern present or very recent past. They can also be read as doors, with the past pushing on one side and the present pushing on the other. In the context of our discussion of ‘Nerve Centre’, they are sites of currents of exchange. ‘Disconnected bliss’ works in the same way. One can read it as a present-day girl’s dreaming of a state which, we might imagine, the Pendle witches experienced. Such a reading underlines how Part 2’s drama, composed of discrete scenes, is complicated by the poetry’s working impressionistically, with things flickering in and out of focus, voices reverberating distantly or close by. This demonstrates how, in Chris Emery’s words, Monk’s poetry is at ‘[its] best in the high-risk environment of evocation’ (Emery, 2003, 2). It is usually uncertain who ‘owns’ the life experiences and inner life or lives being articulated. Individual and collective voices move in and out of each other. Similarly, there is a distinct impression, but never direct portrayal, of coven activities. As in ‘Nerve Centre’, there 75
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 75
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum is a constant exchange between agony and ecstasy but it is, again, left unclear as to who is experiencing these states: … meretricious bleedings fruit-dew body-bunch sex-shiver fever. fever. fever. (Monk, 2003, 113)
This derives from the way in which the whole section is voiced. Where the eleven poems of ‘Nerve Centre’ were generally clever and witty impersonations, there is, here, a powerful sense of the poet seeing as the speaker or speakers. Although never explicitly stated, it is clear that ‘Palimpsestus’ seeks to take us inside a magical experience. We are in a textual and psychological space, where ‘internal / external / fused con fused’ and where there is ‘withdrawal of logical progressions’ and ‘the anonymity of outer space’ (Monk, 2003, 120). The individual consciousness moves between ‘light divine’ and ‘Good Friday dinner’, between what might be called transcendent form and earthbound meaning (Monk, 2003, 118, 115). This converges with reports of magical experiences. For example, Maya Deren’s famous account of participation in a voodoo ceremony talks in terms of ‘the white darkness’ – a space which is simultaneously a void and place of absolute clarity, of ‘form […] without the shadow of meaning’, where she sees ‘everything all at once, without the delays of succession’ (Deren, 1975, 246). Similarly, the anthropologist Susan Greenwood reports going on a ‘trance journey’ outside everyday reality when participating in an Autumn Equinox ritual (Greenwood, 2000, 108). The language of ‘Palimpsestus’ also evokes images of powerlessness (for example, ‘dispossessed daughters’ (120)), which reminds us that, as Susan Greenwood observes, some people enter magical groups ‘as a substitute for kin or family relationships; others may want to change political or social structures’, while ‘most people become involved with magic because it is associated with the acquisition of power’ (Greenwood, 2000, 134–35). ‘Palimpsestus’ also performs an important structural function. ‘Nerve Centre’ established an unchanging natural and, to a large extent, psychological environment. This is developed in ‘Palimpsestus’ through the idea of the past being durable and accessible. ‘Palimpsestus’ introduces speakers who seem to demonstrate militancy and extreme resistance and the ability to move into parallel realms of ‘visions’, ‘fantasy worlds’ and the ‘future’ (Monk, 2003, 112, 115, 118). This not only connects with the unchanging environment of ‘Nerve Centre’, it also looks forward to Interregnum’s final section.
76
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 76
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum
Interregnum: ‘Interregnum’ – descent into hell Interregnum’s final part was originally also called ‘Interregnum’ and was divided into eight subsections. The subsections were originally titled ‘The Great Assembly & Feast’, ‘Chantcasters’, ‘Annexation’, ‘SpeechSnatchers’, ‘Out-Thoughts’, ‘Wish-Boned’, ‘Interregnum’ and ‘Touching the Everywhere’. The Salt edition has no title for the final part and has retitled some of the subsections while preserving their original order. ‘Spread’, originally part of ‘The Great Assembly & Feast’, becomes a new second subsection. ‘Wish-Boned’ is transformed into the ‘Out-Thoughts … of ALL’. The penultimate ‘Interregnum’ is now retitled ‘The Replies’. These subsection changes are minor, but they have the effect of tightening the drama of the work and giving it a sharper focus. The decision to drop ‘Interregnum’ as the overall title of the final part is perhaps less judicious as its absence tends to dilute the important meaning of a period of freedom from customary authority which the Pendle Witches exemplify. ‘The Great Assembly & Feast’ and ‘Spread’ encompass an introduction that takes the form of a mega-mix of body parts and speech parts, human and animal bodies, poetic re-imaginings and references to the Pendle Witches’ confessions at their trial. For example, ‘stolen mutton / (done to a turn)’ refers to an event described in James Device’s confession, while ‘Tib’ and ‘Fancy’ are names of two of the witches’ familiars (Monk, 2003, 123, 124 / Pendlewitches.co.uk). No clear perspective is offered here. What seem to be external criticisms of the witches are mixed up with mediumistic recreations of their experiences. Physical horror and emotional exuberance are two sides of the same coin, but it is unclear which one is the dark side. This makes for a powerful sense of uncertainty regarding whether the witches are acting out or being acted upon by forces that they cannot control. The witches’ confessions and other historical evidence suggest that they lived as beggars and were often close to starvation – a state which swings its sufferers between hallucinatory elation and abjection. Just as ‘Palimpsestus’ marked a reduction from a geographical space to an often fevered inner life, so ‘The Great Assembly & Feast’ and ‘Spread’ mark a further reduction in which the lived environment of Interregnum’s actors and speakers is shrunk to their own bodies. The overall effect of the two sections is to leave unanswered any questions about what the so-called witches actually did. Or to put this another way: if witchcraft is a fantasy, then whose fantasy is it? ‘Chantcasters’ is divided into ‘Demdike Sings’, ‘Chattox Sings’ and ‘All Sing’, which read simultaneously as cries of affirmation and resistance and recognitions of, and resignations to, fate. Demdike’s hymn to the ‘sapphire-shot / charged, steep sky’ (Monk, 2003, 125) suggests that individuality rests in the ability to perceive intensely. Chattox’s song is much more of a lament with its recognition that everything ‘seems
77
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 77
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum to us sweet of us, / and swiftly done away with’ and its bleak: ‘So beginning, / be beginning to despair’ (Monk, 2003, 126, 127). The final ‘All Sing’ is even bleaker, with its ‘delights buried deep / Tell us where?’ answered by ‘[i]n the deathdance in the blood’ (Monk, 2003, 128). In strictly narrative terms, the four ‘gaol songs’ of ‘Annexation’ depict the immediate period of incarceration. The sensory deprivation of prison is powerfully conveyed. Most importantly, the section portrays the law as a discourse. The lines ‘plot holes / to fill dynamite / blow bleeding syntactical / structures to smithereens’ (Monk, 2003, 131) refer to an actual plot to release the witches, but ‘syntactical structures’ emphasises that they are confined as much in a worldview as they are behind ‘impenetrable walls’ (Monk, 2003, 129). This is further emphasised in ‘Speech-Snatchers’ which depicts the witches’ interrogation: ‘this space sucks speech-magic’ (Monk, 2003, 133). The opening lines of ‘Blind Talk’ sum up the encounter between ‘speech-magic’ and syntactical structures: ‘we only believe / your truth telling / it like we / want to / hear’ (Monk, 2003, 134). If the final section of Interregnum starts with a mega-mix of languages and bodies, then it ends with the clearly audible voices of the witches in ‘Out-thoughts’ and ‘The Replies’. ‘Out-thoughts’ is made up of ten monologues and a chorus. The multiple voices converge with Kristeva’s call ‘to emphasise the multiplicity of female expressions and preoccupations’ that are effaced by the word ‘woman’ (Moi, 1986, 193). The monologues can be characterised as inadmissible evidence: clear descriptions by the alleged witches of what actually happened and/ or what they thought they were doing. Once Chattox and Demdike were called witches, there was no ‘syntactical structure’ to contain the former’s account of her ‘unchallengeable leaps to / lucidity’ (Monk, 2003, 140) or the latter’s assertion that the clay models, which were alleged to have caused the deaths of local people, ‘were my art’ (Monk, 2003, 141). It is also clear that Chattox’s ‘lucidity’, Demdike’s ‘art’, Alice’s ‘unspeakable wow’, Anne’s ‘contagious dreamscapes’ and Jennet’s ‘giggle-game’ (Monk, 2003, 142, 144, 149) are all precisely the sort of aesthetic practices which Kristeva argues are needed ‘to demystify […] the community of language as a universal and unifying tool, one which totalizes and equalizes’ (Moi, 1986, 210 [emphasis in the original]). It is notable that the natural world of ‘Nerve Centre’ returns in many of the ‘Out-thoughts’ and gives a picture of life as a hanging-on, an in-between, because most of that life is lived out in the open, exposed to the elements. Whatever collective activities the alleged witches were actually engaged in, ‘Out-thoughts’ makes clear that they were a much-needed, albeit temporary, escape from such exposure until ‘rain spat and scattered us / back to predictability’ (Monk, 2003, 147). Predictability is also associated with linear time. Alice’s discovery of ‘rootless ease’ and her own ‘ungovernable core’ helped her fight the ‘regime’ and ‘stifling niceties’ of life (142). Alice is a woman who – to 78
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 78
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum borrow from Kristeva again – finds ‘no affect’ in the socio-symbolic contract and the functions that it demands of individuals (Moi, 1986, 199). ‘Behind / closed doors / systems echo’ is an image of the witches’ incarceration but it is also everything that is not ‘the rolling dream hills’ (Monk, 2003, 138, 149). The unconscious of the individual has been exchanged for the unconscious of state power. Where ‘Out-thoughts’ presents evidence that is inadmissible within authority’s ‘syntactical structures’, ‘The Replies’ present the alleged witches within the culmination of those structures: their trial. As with many other sections of Interregnum, ‘The Replies’ moves from mediumistic recreations of actual speech to the poet seeing as speakers without necessarily impersonating or inhabiting them. Anne Whittle, Katherine Hewitt and James Device all fall into this first category, the Hewitt and Device sections being respectively comic and unbearably moving. Elizabeth Southern falls into this second category: Their movement formed our position. We slid to the edge without heaving or flutter. Without motion or commotion. We hadn’t the learning to read us right. (Monk, 2003, 154)
The tension between them and us can be found in other ‘Replies’, such as those of Katherine Hewitt and Elizabeth Device, which refer, respectively, to ‘talkin do-dah-lah-di like’ and ‘your fantasies of flight / and ugly imaginings’ (Monk, 2003, 156, 159). The so-called witches are denied an autonomous existence in language by the linguistic constructions of others. No wonder they sought to escape into a parallel language world.
‘The situation still surrounds’ The reader closes Interregnum. The book of belated ‘raw foresight’ answers to the cooked books of official record. The fate of the Pendle witches is an historical fact but what remains in the mind is a powerful impression of a shared triumph in the continuation of existence. The witches’ achievement is to ‘Out-last you’, just as it is Alice Nutter’s achievement to speak ‘through the centuries / of unrecorded silence’ (Monk, 2003, 151, 155). This is what makes Interregnum such a remarkable text and makes reading it such an arduous experience. Interregnum’s challenges come not from its mixing of voices, registers and poetic forms, but from the way that they combine with its 79
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 79
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum emotional pitch. It is a montage of bodily, linguistic, perceptual and temporal transformations which is keyed by one dominant current of transformation: from ecstasy into suffering and back into ecstasy. The suffering of the witches’ existence as starving beggars leads them to escape into ecstasies of allegedly transgressive collective behaviours and practices. In turn, these collective behaviours and practices lead them into further suffering at the hands of the authorities. ‘Out-thoughts’ and ‘The Replies’ demonstrate the resistance of all concerned and how this transforms suffering into ecstasy, both in and as an act of defiant will. When Elizabeth Southern says ‘We hadn’t the food / for big-boned words to / kick mule-like / the wisest fool’ (Monk, 2003, 154), it is also a reminder that all the accused had were their bodies. Those bodies, their interiors and exteriors, therefore became the sites where the Pendle witches’ original suffering and ecstasy were tied together. Those bodies became sites where suffering and ecstasy were re-tied together because the original suffering and ecstasy took place in social spaces that the witches did not control. It was perhaps their mistake to assume that control over their bodies and perceptions would give them total control over their status as social actors. Reading poetry that explores such concerns is as difficult as reading, say, an account of the last days of Simone Weil and raises similar questions, such as: at what level can we relate to it? To what levels of personal and social experience does it speak, if any? It is difficult because we cannot answer those questions without inevitably raising others about our own bodies and status as social actors. The continuing pertinence of such questions is underlined by the note in the Salt edition which advises readers that Interregnum draws on the words of ‘The Birmingham Six and Stefan Kiszko’ (Monk, 2003, 235). Indeed, this suggests that cyclical time or what Walter Benjamin called Messianic time can, to some extent, be understood and experienced via the body because the state apparatuses of power keep on doing the same things to bodies. Monk’s references to recent miscarriages of justice also serves to underline how such miscarriages are mediated to us via the language of the powerful and their media and how, in contrast, Interregnum has sought to remove such mediation from the text through the experiences and emotions that it transcribes and seeks to inhabit. The emotional content of the testimonies of the captured, interrogated and tortured characters of Interregnum is difficult for the reader. This is because it places the reader – or can place the reader – in a relation with the text that is parallel to the relationship of the tortured captive and interrogator/gaoler. The reader is likely to experience emotional resistance to full imaginative participation in this process. The captive is dependent upon the gaoler for survival, receiving simultaneously life-sustaining nurturing and life-threatening abuse within the same relationship. The consequent production of emotion within the captive is intensely ambivalent and this ambivalence can only be understood 80
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 80
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum as a traumatic experience in itself. The agonised and ecstatic emotional currents that flow simultaneously through the text give form to this trauma. They also point beyond the period of captivity to the ‘outsider’ liminal activities and emotional experiences of the witches. In all of these dimensions, the emotions of the text are likely to be difficult for the reader to access and acknowledge. As Sean Bonney has noted: ‘Monk seeks to speak within, rather than about the incident’ (Thurston, 2007, 65). Interregnum puts us, then, inside what it felt like to be one of the Pendle women. We do not mean by this that the poem allows us to feel what it is like to have magical powers, but rather that it enables us to understand that so-called witches, in the words of Mary Douglas, ‘attract the fears and dislikes which other ambiguities and contradictions attract in other thought structures’ and that ‘the kinds of powers attributed to them symbolize their ambiguous, inarticulate status’ (Douglas, 1970, 124). Over time, Interregnum has increased in its potential of unsettling emotions and thoughts for the reader. Since 9/11, and during the ensuing so-called War on Terror, the West has yet again become troubled by the official practices of detention and interrogation for the extraction of confessions and information – activities undertaken in response to fears of other ideologies wreaking unspeakable disasters through unimaginable devices and behaviours. The West has been challenged anew regarding the boundaries of human rights and legislations. In this respect, Interregnum ’s emphasis on the individual’s body as the place where power and ideologies fight for authority and dominance seems as prophetic as David Lynch’s film Dune (1984), that critically reviled, gargantuan, violent, body- and word-based fantasy of semi-mystical otherness. Whatever expectations the reader brings to the text, such a discomforting experience is probably going to produce an emotional distancing. This might be characterised by a response to the text that avoids discussion of the emotions contained there or the brutal, abusive basis of the narrative. There is a deeply ingrained assumption that the reader’s experience of a text is likely to be nurturing. The reader would probably prefer a text which reassures them, both of the stability and propriety of the pleasures to be experienced in the text and of the uncomplicated and unchallenging nature of pleasure itself. But the emotions that experimental poetries express are likely to be of a different order than the collections of what Peter Middleton has termed ‘the poetry of mass observation’ (Middleton, 2003, 9). These collections are full of feeling, but it is feeling that is commodified, easily consumable and, crucially, largely indistinguishable from the life of feeling obtainable from a range of other cultural products such as films, soap operas, docu-soaps and the weekly chart of bestselling secular spirituals. It is a life of feeling presented as a diversion from the contemplation of the cultural, economic and political roots of feeling. Regular immersion in 81
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 81
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum this ‘diversion’ version of the life of feeling leaves us ill-equipped for feeling that cannot and, indeed, refuses to be commodified. The final words of Interregnum, spoken by Jennet Device, are: ‘OH MA / the word all round / is // TOUCHED’ (Monk, 2003, 164). ‘Touched’ certainly has its colloquial meaning of eccentric mental imbalance or dysfunction. ‘Touch’ also evokes a huge range of meanings, from the archaic, meaning ‘performing a melody by playing or singing’ to ‘disturbing or affecting by handling’ or ‘gaining access to’. Indeed, it is notable that touch has meanings of both brief and sensitive contact and more lasting damage (for example, ‘I never touched her!’). In terms of an earlier point concerning Interregnum figuring an alternative linguistic sociality that connects with experimental poetry in general, we might say that the sequence performs and invites readers to experience the feeling that, in the opening words of ‘Nerve Centre’, there is always a ‘(brooding dislocation)’ behind the ‘limits’ of language. The relation of language and society to place and time are also made explicit in Monk’s use of some of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry in the ‘Chantcasters’ section. For Monk, this raises a number of questions: [I]f Hopkins had written what he did in the seventeenth century would he have been hanged? If the witches had written in the nineteenth century would we hail them as poets? How much does the balance of a life hang on its placement in time, social position and gender? (Thurston, 2007, 180)
Placement, position and their relation to poetic form speak to the underlying concerns of the current study. Like many of the texts we discuss, Interregnum, to some extent, proposes itself as transitional – that is, it works towards a visionary natural and cultural redefinition that tests the boundaries of experience, form and expression and, by extension, the accepted categories of self, place and time. Monk’s sequence explores the feminine as a space where society projects an abject Other who encompasses the polarities of the agony and ecstasy of being. The poet’s and the Pendle women’s quest is how to be and remain autonomous and pleasure-centred, even when world is experienced in the extremes of suffering and deliberate malice. A text like Interregnum asks questions about, and tries to create answers to, the problem of how women and humanity in general can construct an active, intelligent relationship with the suffering world. One thing that Interregnum offers in answer to this is the possibility of transformation via the insights enabled by a richly performative language.
82
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 82
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Chapter 6
Denise Riley: Corporeal and Desiring Spaces
In Act IV, Scene II of John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi (1614), the eponymous heroine asserts, just before her execution, ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’ (Webster, 1996, 170). There has been much debate about whether this is a defiant statement of independence or an expression of the self defined by external roles and others’ expectations. The Duchess’s assertion remains ambiguous because, as Frank Whigham argues, the play dramatises ‘the shaping of the social self in the abrasive zone between emergent and residual social formations’ of the Jacobean world (Whigham, 1996, 223). However we choose to read her words, they are certainly not a disruption. To move from Jacobean drama to the poetry of Denise Riley may seem like a huge leap of critical faith, but the early modern stage’s dramatisation of a struggle with ideas of worth versus degree and of the self emerging into new social contexts can also be read as a dramatisation of language’s affects. Indeed, in her most recent critical study, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect, Riley uses Cordelia’s responses to Lear in the opening of Shakespeare’s play to emphasise that Cordelia, ‘like any speaker’, is ‘already practised in instinctive accommodation to the greater power of an expectant context’ (Riley, 2005, 78). One might add that Cordelia and the Duchess of Malfi are, to some extent, victims of what Riley identifies as the ‘tension, unease, or a feeling of dispossession [that] can result from the gulf between the ostensible content of what’s said, and the affect which seeps from the very form of the words’ (Riley, 2005, 2). Seeping affect is precisely what Cordelia and the Duchess are unable to control and, in both plays, it becomes simultaneously property and pervading presence, open to ownership and interpretation by others. This opens up fascinating questions: is part of the continuing seeping affect of these early modern dramas a sense that the feminine is always being shaped in an abrasive and wounding zone between emergent and residual social formations? And 83
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 83
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces is the feminine-as-expression itself an abrasive zone between instinctive accommodation to, and resistance of, expectant contexts? Or, to ask this in another way, is the feminine always-already a calculation of the rewards available for accommodation or resistance? If the answer to these questions is ‘yes’, then Cordelia and the Duchess show how difficult it is for the feminine-as-expression to be right about expectant contexts. The former refuses to say what she thinks is obvious and thinks should be obvious to others; while the latter says what she thinks and wants, acts on it and finds herself literally stripped of everything. Both are punished.
Receiving Denise Riley Expectant contexts that seem designed to invite or provoke failure are particularly pertinent to the poetry of Denise Riley. As she remarked in her interview with Romana Huk, ‘there is a heavy burden of ascribed femininity to carry’; and ‘A writer who is a woman has the additional labour of trying to distinguish her sociological and her historical situations from her aesthetic inclinations’ (Riley, 1995, 18, 22). Denise Riley’s poetry has received sustained critical attention since the early 1990s but critics have been sharply divided about its merits. Some critics have struggled with her insistent use of a lyric ‘I’ in a poetry that simultaneously rejects the lyric’s claims to authority and coherence. For James Keery, Riley’s poetry is undermined by a ‘fatal reflexiveness’ (Keery, 1994, 2). Similarly, John Wilkinson finds her poetry overly and overtly narcissistic and, for him, this leaves the reader feeling ‘tormented, as by the spectacle of a behavioural experiment, the food snatched from the yearning mouth’. Wilkinson is also critical of the way that some of Riley’s poetry appears convergent with the behaviours of what he terms ‘borderline personality disturbance’ and a ‘pathological logic’ (Wilkinson, 1994, 69, 68). Parts of Riley’s own critical writings, it should be said, seem to support such a view. She describes ‘a characteristic excess in working with lyric’, an uncontrollable in-rush of ‘sound-echoes’ akin to ‘speech disturbance described in the literature on aphasia or schizophrenia’. The poet needs ‘to process them into a controlled mania’ (Riley, 2000b, 104). In contrast to Keery and Wilkinson, Linda Kinnahan draws attention to Riley’s ‘lyric engagement, which consistently proclaims an “I” while holding up for inspection the discursive determinations of subjectivity’ (Kinnahan, 1996, 655). Clair Wills sees Riley’s poetry as marked by a period in which ‘the reconfiguring of the relationship between public and private spheres […] makes the “private” lyric impossible, and in effect opens it out towards rhetoric’. Other discourses are cut up and/ or deformed in order to show how ‘fault-lines or weaknesses in the individual are the grit or irritant around which personal meanings are 84
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 84
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces produced’ (Wills, 1994, 39, 45). David Herd argues that the apparent excess of subjectivity in Riley’s poetry derives from a conception of ‘the poem as a response to a specific encounter’ – an encounter that is the precondition of a wider and, ultimately, democratic communicativeness (Herd, 2000, 242). Herd perhaps comes closest to answering the two questions that even Riley’s most positive critics have shied away from: what is her poetry for? And who is her poetry for? In what follows, we intend to argue that seeking answers to the ‘what for?’ and ‘who for?’ in Riley’s poetry is inextricable from the question that her work as a whole poses: what corporeal and desiring spaces are available for women? It is important to note that Denise Riley’s poetry presents the critic with a number of formidable challenges which are inextricable from that very large question. First, all reading practices, from Leavisite to poststructuralist, rely, to some extent, on the pulling out of statements or quotations which are then read as exemplary or revelatory. But Riley’s poetry clearly expresses an anxiety over the making of statements or, having made one, over how to live with it. For example, the opening of ‘Dark Looks’, ‘Who anyone is or I am is nothing to the work’, performs a manifesto-like certainty, but the rest of the poem quickly shows it up as a simplification (Riley, 2000a, 74). Second, Riley’s engagement with lyric immediately opens up questions of authenticity and honesty. Each reader has to decide how honest the poetry is being in its dwelling on the fantasy life of the subject and presentation of the subject’s areas of obsession, rage and frustration; and whether this dwelling on and presentation amount to a valorisation. Honesty is crucial because the speaker of ‘Wherever you are, be somewhere else’ suggests that self-presentation is intimate with theatricality: ‘I can try on these gothic riffs, they do make / a black twitchy cloak to both ham up and so / perversely dignify my usual fear of ends’ (Riley, 2000a, 48). Taking David Herd’s argument to its logical conclusion, this can only refer to a specific encounter with both the circumstances of inspiration and the reader and so can only be read in isolation. However, the poem then reveals a specific desire: ‘give me one more go at doing it all again but doing it / far better this time round – the work, the love stuff – ’. This tempts us with the possibility that Riley’s poetry can be read as an interrelated series of such ‘go’s’. And this, in turn, raises the question as to whether the poetry can and should be read as co-extensive with Riley’s critical work on identity and language in The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony and Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. Riley seems to endorse such a reading by devoting Chapter 3 of The Words of Selves to a discussion of her poems ‘The Castalian Spring’ and ‘Affections of the Ear’. For Cathy Wagner, the language-derived theory of identity that we encounter in Riley’s critical writings ‘[insists] that the subject’s very multiplicity is what allows it to take an ironic stance, to feel dubious about what it and others call itself, and that this slippery 85
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 85
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces zone is where the subject’s agency can be said to originate’ (Wagner, 2012, 2). The other challenge is that Riley’s engagement with lyric is, inevitably, an engagement with the history of lyric and its innate assumptions. Her poetry takes seriously and questions lyric transcendence, the possibility of being true to the particulars of the self and yet, through the discipline of lyric, giving those particulars a wider significance. Simultaneously, with this familiar Romantic turn, Riley’s poetry gives us a strong sense, albeit a contradictory one, of the poet working through, live on the page, explorations of subjectivity that are seeded by her own turns of thought and feeling. These explorations are not necessarily meant to be projected back at the reader and wider culture as a portrayal of the self. Understanding the challenges of Riley’s poetry certainly goes some way to explaining the range of critical responses to it. But is there a way of reading the poetry that will do justice to those challenges without attempting to smooth them out or ignore them by being overly literal or selective? We want to argue that two bodies of theory are useful: the work of Christopher Bollas on hysteria; and the writings of Julia Kristeva, in particular About Chinese Women and ‘Women’s Time’. Bollas is useful because he provides a context for understanding the experience of reading a poetry which often, in its words, seems to cry: ‘So take me or leave me. No, wait, I didn’t mean leave / me, wait, just don’t –’ (Riley, 2000a, 74). He demonstrates how the self both constructs itself and is constructed as a desiring space. Kristeva is useful because she tries to map out new social and political contexts for female desire.
Bollas: rewording hysteria It is important to emphasise that in applying ‘hysteria’ to a literary text we are talking about how the text conducts itself and how readers may respond to it as a psychological atmosphere. Christopher Bollas’s conception of hysteria ‘rests fundamentally on Freud’s conceptualisation’, but also differs markedly from it. Bollas’s reconceptualisation responds to a growing dissatisfaction with borderline personality diagnosis, which he interprets as ‘an unconscious demand in the therapeutic community to reconsider hysteria’ (Bollas, 2000, 2). Like the historical hysteric, well-known through Freud, Charcot and others, the contemporary hysteric is sexually repressed. However, this sexual dysfunction derives not from abuse or trauma but from a failed eroticisation of the self at the beginning of the oedipal stage of the mother-child relationship: Specifically, the mother experiences intense ambivalence towards the infant as a sexual being, especially towards the genitalia, which cannot be sensorially celebrated. Maternal care is in
86
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 86
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces this respect a ‘laying on of hands’ and the mother … cannot eroticise her infant’s body through her own hands. From this perspective we would have to conclude that the original paralysis that enervates the hysteric comes through an enervation of the maternal touch. (Bollas, 2000, 46–47)
Unable to express an erotic relation to her infant, this type of mother ‘instead substitutes voice and performance, giving the child a scene of a mother’s love, in which portrayal substitutes for embodied love’ (Bollas, 2000, 107). The mother ‘transforms everyday life into theatre’, both producing and encouraging performance and highly emotional verbalisations (Bollas, 2000, 119). The result is that ‘the hysteric transforms the self into an event’ and will often interpose a highly seductive and intricately constructed ‘intermediate self, between the true self and the social order’ (Bollas, 2000, 128, 94). The self as performed event represents a continuing re-enactment of ‘the self’s arrest, or fixation, at the point when the mother’s language and the child’s sexuality are meant to fuse, in the acquisition of words that one can live with and which are psychically transformative’ (Bollas, 2000, 51). Bollas makes the same point from a different direction, when he observes that the hysteric ‘cannot accept the link between the body’s expressed sexuality and the other’s worded desire of it’ (Bollas, 2000, 51). This can also manifest itself as attempts to maintain loyalty to an originary, innocent self, which means, in turn, that the hysteric can be highly ambivalent about, or actively resistant to, new experiences. Hysteria involves ‘a double action that confers desire and anti-desire at the same time’ (Bollas, 2000, 92). We spent some time in our introductory chapter discussing how Kristeva focuses on the ways in which an originary cultural scene is replicated. Before turning to Denise Riley’s poetry, it is worth remembering two points from Kristeva’s argument. First, she argues that ‘recognizing the unspoken in all discourse’ and ‘emphasizing at each point whatever remains unsatisfied, repressed, new, eccentric, incomprehensible’ enables a critique of established powers (Moi, 1986, 156). The unspoken might converge with the unvoicing that we have identified. Second, Kristeva argues that women are left with an ‘urgent question … What can be our place in the symbolic contract?’ (Moi, 1986, 199) [emphasis in the original])
Reading Riley – 1: ‘The Castalian Spring’ The ideas of Christopher Bollas on hysteria and Julia Kristeva on woman’s entry into culture together offer a greater understanding of how the self is required to live with words, in words and through words. Both Bollas and Kristeva shed light on the relation between the 87
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 87
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces expectant context, ostensible content and seeping affect of language with which we began our discussion. In Bollas’s conception, the hysteric provides an extreme version of what happens when the self enters the social order. In the non-hysteric, the self-as-event or self-as-performance has been integrated with the self-as-words-thatcan-be-lived-with by the self and others. Drawing on Kristeva, we can say that these words-that-can-be-lived-with or, perhaps more correctly, be-lived-as are what enable the self to live and experience itself as linear, when its overriding impulse is to experience itself as cyclical and monumental. In the context of the castration argument referred to in Chapter 1, the acquisition of words-that-can-be-lived-with or be-lived-as are the moment when the self is first cut off from its desire for event, performance and cyclical/monumental temporality. Kristeva makes clear that, where this moment of cutting gives men access to power, for women, it produces the experience of the self as lack. This is followed by the project of trying to find a new and better role beyond lack. What Kristeva does not make obvious is the extent to which woman has to continue trying to experience herself outside of the socio-symbolic contract that is founded on castration, even though there is no ready convention with which to articulate or represent such a position. In this context, then, Denise Riley’s poetry asks two related questions: how is the self to be worded and where do those words come from? And what happens when the self words itself as lyric? It could be argued that, like Bollas’s hysteric, the act of writing lyric turns the self into an event and that this moment is also a double action involving desire and anti-desire. Finally, if we accept Kristeva’s argument that culture is founded on castration, sacrifice and separation, can a wording of the self within culture do anything other than reproduce that foundation? Indeed, this is one reason why Romantically derived lyric poetry has enjoyed such an enduring life and influence: it offers the possibility of moving beyond such a conflicted double action and separation. Two examples are worth quoting here. First, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron asks: ‘Are not the mountains, waves, skies, a part / Of me and of my soul, as I of them?’ Second, in Book IV of The Prelude, lines 397–9, Wordsworth describes walking on a summer’s night and attaining ‘A consciousness of animal delight, / A self-possession felt in every pause / And every gentle movement of my frame’ (Wordsworth, 1970, 64). The world is intensely apprehended and, as a result, a newly coherent and exemplary self can be attained and projected. Crucially, the self is felt and possessed through being in a specific locale. It is worth pausing here to ask oneself what happens to those words if we imagine them written by a woman and if we imagine them written by a woman in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The words that Denise Riley does write in her poetry certainly seem to suggest an unfinished and unfinishable dialogue with ideas of self-possession and the relation between outer 88
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 88
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces world and inner self. As in Romantic lyric, her poetry explores the relation between locale, self and voice. However, what she writes is a lyric that is totally radicalised in its attention to language and sound as producers of a provisional self at the moment of the poem. ‘The Castalian Spring’ (Riley, 2000a, 87–91) is one of Riley’s most extensive and fully argued explorations of self-possession and, what she terms in her account of the poem in The Words of Selves, ‘ideas of lyrical self-presentation as they emerge in some contemporary dilemmas and compulsions of style’ (Riley, 2000b, 93). The poem is atypical of Riley’s poetry in having an objectively identifiable, real locale: a spring close to Delphi on Mount Parnassus. The female speaker of the poem drinks from the spring, magically transforms into a toad, explores a variety of voices and is then transformed back. Several things need to be added to this immediately. First, although the poem’s locale is the site of the spring, it is also the body of the poet – her toad-body – and what stanza 3 calls ‘the lyre of my larynx’ (Riley, 2000a, 88). Second, the poem conveys a powerful sense that the body is multi-functional – that is, it is not just what produces the voice and, consequently, poetry. The body is a species of gateway to where the self exists and to its relations with others. In the words of stanza 7, the poet ‘sank down to throb / On my pitted hindquarters while my neck with its primrose striations / Pulsated and gleamed. The beauty sobbed back to me […] I had heard a fresh voice’ (Riley, 2000a, 89). The voice is not just throat and neck, but a total body manifestation – a full embodiment. Third, the poem makes plain that the sounds produced by the toad-body are meaningful in sexual, physical and aesthetic senses simultaneously. This is an understanding of voice that is present throughout Riley’s oeuvre. Finally, as the transformation into a toad ‘cool and newly / Warty’ (Riley, 2000a, 87) suggests, the poem exhibits much good humour and comedy. This is a particular feature of Riley’s oeuvre that many critics have missed, although Ian Gregson has noted the wry statements and comic elements in ‘Dark Looks’ and ‘Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else’ (Gregson, 1996, 204–06). Denise Riley’s own account of ‘The Castalian Spring’ presents it as the working-through of a range of linked questions and dilemmas – for example, ‘is the lyric “I” an irretrievably outdated form’?; ‘some positions in contemporary poetics’; ‘worries about social responsibility’; and ‘closely related uncertainties of writing and self-description’ (Riley, 2000b, 94, 97, 99, 100). However, it makes more sense to say that the poem dramatises one single dilemma: in the Greek countryside, the transformed poet achieves a natural voice, experiences and explores herself as a natural voice embodied, but wonders whether that voice can move into society and the built environment. In the words of stanza 4: ‘Or had I a responsibility to / Speak to society: though how could it hear me? It lay in its hotels’ (Riley, 2000a, 88). Although the stanza begins with the transformed poet trying to accommodate her ‘gratuitous new 89
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 89
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces instrument’ to acceptable ways of writing poetry, the contrast, at the poem’s close, is still one of self-possession versus transience. Indeed, the traveller and the city is an image that can be found elsewhere in Riley’s work. In ‘A Shortened Set’: There is the traveller, there the decline and his sex that the journey strips from him. A perfectly democratic loneliness sets out down the mined routes of speaking to its life. (Riley, 2000a, 37)
Similarly, in ‘A Drift’, the poet asks the reader to ‘Wait, lean from the topmost window, see all over this city / in its gravely vigorous life the moon hung orange’. What the moon illuminates is a city of ‘houses’, ‘traffic’, ‘sirens’ and ‘buses’, where ‘a single / traveller flies home through everything inside one life, its / fearful hesitations, pouncing leaps of speed’ (Riley, 2000a, 69). Society would seem to be figured as movement that diminishes the self, and speaking to it would similarly diminish the self’s instrument – the voice. Nonetheless, what Riley calls in her critical account ‘the she-toad’ tries to address political considerations. In stanza 5, she rhymes ‘Sieg with Krieg, so explaining our century’, although this seems playful and exploratory rather than polemical (Riley, 2000a, 88). The ‘she-toad’ feels driven to it because her ‘sound ribbons’ have been met with silence. In stanza 6, she is ‘close by a cemetery’, observes the Greek custom of lamps being lit in shrines containing photographs and hears her ‘monotone croaking [ring] crude in such company’ (Riley, 2000a, 89). Riley glosses this by saying that the speaker feels her voice is unequal to talking to the dead and that she feels both a lack of rhetoric and ‘civic song’ (Riley, 2000b, 98). It is worth adding that Greek cemeteries are often at the edge of towns, so the speaker finds herself between nature and the built environment. Her natural, embodied expression is inadequate because speaking to, or of, the dead is not natural but cultural. The ‘she-toad’ poet is confronted with the question of how poetry is to be conducted. The stanza is perhaps another way of asking the question posed in ‘Knowing in the Real World’: ‘Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed’ (Riley, 2000a, 53). Clair Wills has called the volume in which that poem first appeared, Mop Mop Georgette, ‘an extended meditation on what is inside and outside the self, and the purpose of lyric’ (Wills, 1994, 46). To speak poetry is inextricable from wanting to speak publicly. In stanzas 7 and 8, the transformed poet has ‘nothing to do but sound’; gets lost in the ‘beauty of utterance’; hears another voice, as we have already noted; and ‘No longer alone, not espousing Narcissus, I answered each peal / In a drum of delirium’ (Riley, 2000a, 89). Riley’s account of stanza 7 can only be described as a piece of misdirection. 90
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 90
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces She writes that ‘[t]his dazzling immediacy has for a moment stilled her problem of knowing that to speak is to settle to be heard under some designation’ and mounts a lengthy discussion of what it means to speak and write as ‘a literary social subject’ (Riley, 2000b, 99). But this seems much more relevant to what happens in stanzas 10 and 11, when the she-toad considers ‘[trying] on that song of my sociologised self’ (Riley, 2000a, 90). Taken together, stanzas 7 and 8 make clear that the calling out of the voice is an erotic and libidinous activity. This is due to the force of words and phrases like ‘strong swelling’, ‘gave tongue’, ‘oozed out of me’, ‘shooting out stiffly it quivered’, ‘ravishing’, ‘throb’ and ‘sobbed’. Various voices are tried out within the poem, until a response is produced, and the implication is that this how the she-toad poet understands what the production of poetry is about and what it is for. Stanza 8 ends with the poet wailing In sheer vowels. Aaghoooh, I sloughed off raark, aaarrgh noises, Deliberately degenerate; exuded ooeeehaargh-I-oohyuuuh, then Randomly honked ‘darkling blue of Dimitrios’: I had dreamed that. (Riley, 2000a, 89)
Riley’s account tells us that the she-toad, searching for originality, ‘tries to use pure noise like some contemporary sound poets may do’; next, tries ‘big, random sounds’; and, finally, harks back ‘to earlier surrealist experiments’ and quotes one of her dreams (Riley, 2000b, 100). This is not, however, how the stanza strikes one on first reading. The production of ‘sheer vowels’ and ‘noises’ in response to the nearby presence of a potential love object demands to be read as sounds of an urgent, yearning demand or as pure pleasure. At the same time, returning to Bollas, since all erotic encounters reproduce the originary erotic encounter between mother and child and since that encounter involves the acquisition of language, it is equally possible to hear ‘Aaghoooh ’ and ‘ooeeehaargh-I-oohyuuuh ’ as the unshaped sounds of the infant about to become language. We might also say that each voicing, each poem, is another attempt at making an adequate set of sounds that will go out into the world to elicit a response. The collection of sounds is perhaps a way of asking what sounds, form and meaning are adequate and appropriate. Stanza 9 re-emphasises that the production of sound, of voice, is not self-centred – ‘I was not that Narcissus’ (Riley, 2000a, 90) – but is directed outwards at another. At the same time, the producer also gets pleasure from the production. Riley does not comment on the image of ‘sloughing off’ the sounds in stanza 8, but this is important in two senses. First, it suggests that the production of the voice is akin to shedding a layer of the self and that the voice may be sensitive like the skin. Second, the shedding of a layer of skin is also an image of the cycles of the natural world. 91
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 91
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces This sense of natural cycles is present throughout the poem – for example, ‘mosquito larvae’, ‘pounding dusk’, ‘a wind rose’ – and this makes an important contrast with stanza 10, which begins: ‘Did I need to account for myself as a noise-maker?’ (Riley, 2000a, 90) The stanza gives us another specific locale – ‘Clerkenwell clock shops’ – and is full of references to time and clocks. The she-toad remembers seeing watchmakers’ oils ‘made for / Easing the wound spring’. Riley comments that: ‘It’s almost impossible not to pronounce this piece of the innards of a clock to yourself as “woond” spring, with the sound of a wound as a hurt’ (Riley, 2000b, 102). This pun suggests that an encounter with, and submission to, clock time – that is, linear time – is the originary cut or separation proposed by Kristeva. Line five’s subsequent description of ‘my horror of time ticking by’ is also a clear reference to linear time, as opposed to the cyclical time referenced in the preceding stanzas of the poem. Cyclical time is not horrible, but the neat autobiography with social labels, geographical origins and subject positions that linear time demands clearly is, and this is what is rejected at the end of stanza 10 – ‘Should I wind up my own time?’ – and throughout stanza 11. The horror is produced by trying to describe the self in social terms, but such an account would be as seductive as it is repulsive. This is the point of the ‘song of my sociologised self’ being described revoltingly as ‘[flopping] lax in my gullet’ and of the lines ‘“But we’re all bufo bufo ”, I sobbed – / Suddenly charmed by community – “all warty we are.”’ (Riley, 2000a, 90) Riley’s own account of the stanza, again, seems distant from the experience of reading it. The stanza is, she says, simultaneously an example of how lyric derives from the processing of sound into ‘a controlled mania’ and a portrayal of the she-toad’s discovery of ‘an ideal of social identification […] a hymn of togetherness’ (Riley, 2000b, 104). However, what seems to be suggested by ‘“Du mit Mir” [you with me] was / A comforting wheeze of old buffers, all coupled, one breed’ (Riley, 2000a, 90) is a sense of inadequate conventions for articulating love, passion and relationships. In this context, the poem implies that the search for an embodied natural voice is also the search for a language that can articulate and facilitate relationships. Indeed, it is not hard to imagine an ‘old buffer’ making a complaint about the inadequacy of the term ‘partner’ in articulating the signs and benefits of love and passion within the social scene that is the subject of another Riley poem, ‘Curmudgeonly’ (Riley, 2000a, 92–93). ‘The Castalian Spring’ ends with the she-toad transformed back – ‘reflated’ (Riley, 2000a, 91) – into the tourist poet, in ‘[m]y usual skin’, hearing other choirs, ‘odd pockets of sound’, but now shut out from them. Her last words to the choirs of toads are: ‘“Don’t fall for paradox, to lie choked in its coils / While your years sidle by.”’ To understand the nature of that paradox, we must revisit the order of events in stanza 11. The she-toad’s attempt at singing the ‘song of my sociologised 92
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 92
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces self’ is answered by the ‘low booms’ of ‘Du mit Mir’. Romantic love by and for another may be identified culturally as that which makes the self bearable, but it can only be attained by submitting to the subject positions demanded by the ‘sociologised self’ and linear time. We started our discussion by drawing attention to the poem’s good humour, and the ‘reflated’ poet may be an echo of Alice returning to her full size at the end of Alice in Wonderland . Lewis Carroll’s story ends with a trial to discover who stole the tarts and an important new piece of evidence is introduced: verses written by nobody and addressed to nobody. The King of Hearts attempts to find meaning in them, in particular the line ‘Before she had this fit’, but having discovered that the Queen has never had fits, he asserts: ‘“Then the words don’t fit you,” said the King, looking round the court with a smile’ (Carroll, 1930, 101). Without wishing to make too much of this, it is clear that ‘The Castalian Spring’ is concerned with how ‘you’ and the language of poetry can fit each other. Riley calls ‘The Castalian Spring’ ‘an unresolved composition’ (Riley, 2000b, 105), and the ending does seem rather sudden. However, as we suggested at the start of our close reading, the poem does have similarities to Romantic poetry. It is a meditative night piece that portrays a characteristic Romantic movement between inner self and outer world. The use of ‘piping’ and ‘piped’ inevitably evokes the line in Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: ‘Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone’. Keats’s line sounds like an early version of the comment by Lacan, which Riley puts in the ‘Note’ to another poem, ‘Affections of the Ear’: ‘In the field of the unconscious the ears are the only orifice that cannot be closed’ (Riley, 2000a, 110). In this context, it may be that ‘The Castalian Spring’ simply mounts itself the impossible challenge of writing a Romantic lyric in the light of what we now know about language, voice and affect.
Reading Riley – 2: wounds and colours In the context of the theoretical framework by Bollas and Kristeva that we proposed at the start of this essay, ‘The Castalian Spring’ dramatises a number of things. First, it portrays the voice going out into a locale as an inevitable recreation of the first erotic encounter between the mother and child. Second, this locale is social or, perhaps more correctly in terms of the language of the poem, ‘sociologised’. Therefore ‘The Castalian Spring’ dramatises the self’s desire to remain cyclical and monumental coming up against not only social roles but also the way that those roles are located in, and determined by, linear time. Submitting to both a ‘sociologised’ self and linear time is a species of rupture – the same rupture which Kristeva identifies as inherent in civilised values and institutions governed by the socio-symbolic contract. 93
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 93
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces We now want to explore two other notable ways in which Denise Riley’s poetry dramatises these meetings of yearning and rupture: imagery of bodily harm and the use of colour. Our discussion will focus on ‘Laibach Lyrik: Slovenia 1991’ (Riley, 2000a, 29–32) with reference to other poems where appropriate. The subject of ‘Laibach Lyrik’ is the violent fragmentation of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. David Herd comments that ‘the Yugoslavian conflict prompts questions about contingency, communication, and the manner in which they interlock.’ He goes on to characterise the poem as an enquiry into whether a poetry rooted in an abstract expressionist aesthetic can produce a meaningful contribution to a real-world political problem, or whether the two registers in which the problems of contingency and communication occur are so radically different as to render the former irrelevant to the latter (so further reiterating the isolation of the experimental poet). (Herd, 2000, 242–43)
Herd’s account of the poem takes place in the context of a larger, Habermas-inflected exploration of ways past Peter Bürger’s pessimism concerning the role of the avant-garde. It is also worth adding that Herd’s summary of the poem’s project is a clear echo of Richard Rorty’s extended argument in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity – namely, that theoretical inventions and reinventions have little relevance or efficacy politically. Similarly, the title of Denise Riley’s critical study The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity and Irony is a clear echo of Rorty but her book never refers to him. Herd does go on to discuss Rorty but does not acknowledge his own debt or comment on Riley’s apparent debate with him. Richard Rorty would seem, therefore, to be something of an ‘elephant in the room’ in writing about Denise Riley. ‘Laibach Lyrik’ is much more complex and interesting than a theoretical exercise in politicised poetics. The poem is divided into four sections: six tercets, a long section of free verse, a shorter section of what looks like prose poetry and six final tercets. The first sentence of the poem – ‘The milky sheen of birch trees / stepping forward’ – introduces a highly lyrical account of an idealised pastoral that is ‘careless of distant provinces / and the guns of rebels’ (Riley, 2000a, 29). The atmosphere of the scene is conducted by colour and sound. Bright flashes of colour – ‘orange light’, ‘raspberry smoke’ – catch the speaker’s attention in the diminishing light of dusk, while ‘goldfinches rattle’ and ‘fields chat quietly’. There is a definite movement from the indeterminacy of ‘milky sheen’ through to the final image where ‘herdsmen […] wheel about / the plains in scarlet’. This concluding colour is the strongest and most mobile. The ‘scarlet’ of the wheeling horsemen – and ‘wheel about’ is a phrase with distinct military 94
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 94
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces connotations – changes the mood in anticipation of the description of the war in the poem’s second section. The closing image of the first section describes a rupture in the colour world. ‘Scarlet’ is the colour of clothing, a cultural covering of male bodies, and this has the effect of dismissing the colour world that precedes it. The poem’s earlier colour world is seen mostly in terms of the mouth and orality. Another person is present in ‘a faintly orange light / slides on your lifting smile’ – an image that describes a gesture of the mouth, which is also a wordless gesture of pleasure and recognition. Similarly, the majority of colours – ‘milky’, ‘orange’, ‘raspberry’ and ‘cream’ – evoke simple and innocent foods, such as dairy products and fruit, thereby alluding to the pasture, garden, orchard and the overall locale of pastoral idyll. Colours, we might say, seem to feed back into the mouth, and the result is that they work as articulated emotions. Nigel Wheale has noted how Riley’s use of colour is a way of avoiding a ‘recurrent default mechanism to any one characteristic locale’, and ‘a perceptual recourse which can be claimed as a possible way of behaving’ (Wheale, 1993, 70, 71). In the interview with Romana Huk, Riley gives some indication of what ‘behaving’ with colour might mean. The work of abstract painters, such as Ian McKeever and Gillian Ayres, relies heavily on brilliance of or density of colour, or the floating quality of colour, as well as a roughness or visibility of brushwork. So that you get a feeling of speed and heaviness and immediacy just by being in the same room as those paintings. And is it possible to do it with poetry? My attempts are always going to end in tears; black and white typography on the page is so remorselessly different. (Riley, 1995, 21)
She adds that she means ‘speed as trace, or gesture – something that doesn’t have a marmoreal quality’. Writing, of course, is also trace and gesture, so colour might be an articulation of the self that does not say ‘I’ with all the egotism and vulnerability that involves. The wound that produces ‘a red blossom’ in ‘Knowing in the Real World’ does not answer the question of what produces other colours. Other colours may be a way of describing what the same poem calls the ‘liquid behind speech’ that is not simply blood (Riley, 2000a, 53–54). Colour as orality – the ‘orange birds’ with ‘swollen throats’ in ‘Well All Right’, say, or the ‘toothpaste green’ sea in ‘Disintegrate me’ – is also a way of possessing the world, of taking it into the self, without recourse to elaborate figures (Riley, 2000a, 67, 83). The second section of ‘Laibach Lyrik’ begins: ‘Cut the slavonics now. Cut the slavonics’ (Riley, 2000a, 30). ‘Cut’ suggests a violent rupture and, accordingly, this line takes us into a scene of chaos: ‘Entering Yugoslavia we aren’t there, we are straight into Slovenia instead.’ The chaos is emphasised by the speaker misplacing her passport and by 95
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 95
04/10/2013 10:22:48
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces the placing of erotic disruption – ‘instantly crazy with obsessive and terrible tenderness’ – in the midst of historical and political description. As in ‘The Castalian Spring’, the locale of utterance is important – a designated place changed and renamed. The passage is also notable because it presents violence and rupture as the starting point of nation and culture. Videos of bombings are on sale entitled ‘How a Nation Awoke’, along with T-shirts showing state logos. The poem goes on to describe unsuccessful attempts ‘at national music’ in restaurants. Taken together, these images present identity as shared spectacle, fashion accessory and socially performed sound. The locale shifts abruptly to London and a gathering of ‘temporary exiles’, some with ‘forced new names’, ‘others worn down with dislocation’ (Riley, 2000a, 30). In terms of our earlier arguments about rupture and ‘women’s time’, it is notable that the two exiles who speak about the situation are a young girl and an older woman. Both exiles contrast the present and the past. The young girl’s opening words are ‘This time last year’, and she observes that ‘The last war stopped / before my mother’s birth.’ Her comments seem to blur linear and cyclical time in an attempt to present meaningful time in terms of the life cycle and reproduction. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that her complaint is partly that something has violated cyclical time and made it linear. Her confused attempt to place herself temporally is connected with her changed originary locale: ‘where / I came from, which I never used to know’. She is forced to take on ‘new designations’ as the result of ‘these killings’. As with Kristeva’s view of castration, identity is imposed through inflicted injury and sacrificial bloodshed. The older woman also equates identity with violence: The deaths of twenty thousand make me this that I don’t want to be. But that blood lost means I must take that name – though not that politics – must be, no not a nationalist, yet ambiguously Croatian … (Riley, 2000a, 30–31)
‘Blood lost’ seems to be another clear image of the sacrifice that, Kristeva argues, underwrites the socio-symbolic contract. The second woman’s struggle with her new identity also echoes two observations that Riley makes in The Words of Selves: first, she proposes ‘the figure of the wounded self, wounded by an aggressive description which it may then itself take on’; second, she speculates on the possibility ‘that my living self is made vivid to me largely through my bad name’ (Riley, 2000b, 124, 126). The poem writes out the political reality of both poetics and philosophical speculation. In the context of Bollas, we might say that both speakers are forced into new selves which are both events and performances. 96
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 96
04/10/2013 10:22:49
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces The final two sections of ‘Laibach Lyrik’ explore what David Herd terms the relation of ‘context’ and ‘aptness of utterance’ (Herd, 2000, 243). What the exiles articulate for the speaker of the poem at the end of section two is ‘present history […] at work’ (Riley, 2000a, 31). This could also be termed a problem of temporality: the monumental time of history is the here and now. Boundaries, territories and nations are happening literally as, and because, we speak. In Section 3, the speaker – a ‘nation-sheltered onlooker’ – leaves the party with other outsiders and returns to ‘native non-community’. At the same time, she carries the memory of having stood ‘outwardly silent but vibrantly / loud inside with others’ gossip about itself, like “the unconscious”’ (Riley, 2000a, 31). There is certainly a nod here to Lacan’s proposition that ‘The unconscious is the discourse of the Other’ (Lacan, 1966, 16). At the same time, Riley’s lines stress that it is not possible to go on living and thinking as a ‘nation-sheltered onlooker’. The last section of the poem returns to the opening tercet form, with the lines: ‘The settling scar agrees to voice / what seems to speak its earliest cut’ (Riley, 2000a, 31). Herd calls this ‘a formal gesture that signals Riley’s conviction that poetry, properly adjusted, has something meaningful to such situations’ (Herd, 2000, 244). But this ignores the last line of the preceding section: ‘This evening’s tongues go scrapping on till dawn:’. The colon is important, because it means that the last section is what is said in the ‘scrap’. Exactly what the ‘scrap’ is and who it is between is left ambiguous. It could mean either that the ‘tongues’ go on working inside the speaker against her ‘irony’ and ‘non-community’ or that she is trying to give a true account of what she heard the ‘temporary exiles’ say. Herd is right, however, in his view that the closing section attempts ‘an integrating rhetoric’ (Herd, 2000, 244). The poem moves ‘past damage […] / where it was, I will found my name’ and through the realities of the conflict – ‘flares’, ‘spent shells’ and ‘obliterated’ cities – to an assertion of collective identity: ‘through these // opened and reopened mouths that form / the hollow of a speaking wound, we / come to say, yes, now we are Illyrian’ (Riley, 2000a, 32). The closing tercets integrate the lyrical language of the opening section with the political reportage of the second section but what results is less certain. For Herd, the closing allusion to Twelfth Night suggests ‘an image of identity unrestricted by conventional borders’ (Herd, 2000, 244). John Wilkinson, in contrast, notes that the Illyrians were the people of an extinct and unrecorded language, so to speak Illyrian would be to speak something unknown, to stutter and halt and bring to light, to speak in tongues ‘like “the unconscious”’.
He states that Illyria is a ‘not-place’ (Wilkinson, 1994, 63–64, 66). 97
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 97
04/10/2013 10:22:49
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that the use of ‘Illyrian’ and the earlier ‘Istrian’ adds ‘an archaism of diction which exactly situates the poem between the new social subject and the older affirmative, lyric subject’ (DuPlessis, 1996, 65). This seems closer to the effect of the closing section. Linda Kinnahan also engages with the unresolved ambiguities of the final section. She reads in it a clear suggestion that ‘moving beyond a yearning for “wholeness” and autonomy can lead to a selective construction of history that enables an “I”’; and that fragmentation can be explored ‘as a politics of identification and communication’. At the same time, she acknowledges that the Yugoslavian conflict demonstrates that ‘a reified self-creation can be as destructive as it is enabling’ (Kinnahan, 1996, 662). The closing affirmation, ‘now we are Illyrian’, is, to adapt Wilkinson’s term, an affirmation of a ‘not-identity’. This makes the preceding seventeen lines conditional – a conditionality that is emphasised by the repeated phrase ‘I will’. The Yugoslavian conflict makes ‘present’ the history of culture, language and nation – that is, that all are founded on violence and rupture. It will go on happening, which is the point of the ‘spent shells’ one day providing material for ‘future curious songs’. If we could accept this in both the personal and politic spheres, if we could make speaking from our wounds positive instead of conflicted, then we could communicate from the ground of this newly recognised, common identity. To return to the language of ‘The Castalian Spring’, if lyric is ‘embodied’ hope, then the most hopeful lyric is one that integrates both the gossiping tongues that ‘scrap’ in the unconscious and the self’s originary wound. The uncertainties of ‘Laibach Lyrik’s’ closing tercets – ‘settling’, ‘seems’, ‘some wholeness’, ‘hesitant’, ‘whether we will or no’ – suggest that its integrated rhetoric can only mime the embodiment of such a lyric. Until that time, we are all hopeful citizens of an imaginary country. The reading we have proposed makes ‘Laibach Lyrik’ sound not only as if it reaches a point of arrival and a hopelessly hopeful settlement, but also as if it offers a species of ontological manifesto for humanity in general. It is important to emphasise that neither is the case. In both the Mop Mop Georgette and Selected Poems volumes, ‘Laibach Lyrik’ stands in front of a body of work that is full of images of wounds and what reads like self-harm. The seeming unwillingness of critics to engage with this aspect of the poetry is itself something of a traumatic hole in writing about Riley. Similarly, it is important to remember that the ‘we’ who comes to speak at the end of the poem can only be women: the writer of the poem and all those who speak within it are women. At first sight, this seems pessimistic, as if women are condemned to act out the rupture of the socio-symbolic contract and go on speaking through the ‘opened and reopened’ wound mouths that they carry as a result. However, the context of the Twelfth Night reference suggests something very different. Viola discovers that she is in Illyria in Act I, 98
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 98
04/10/2013 10:22:49
Corporeal and Desiring Spaces Scene II – a scene that ends with her asking her friend, the captain, to help her serve Duke Orsino in disguise: Thou shalt present me as a eunuch to him; It may be worth thy pains; for I can sing, And speak to him in many sorts of music That will allow me very worth his service.
This also seems pessimistic: a woman disguised as a man, in order to serve another man. However, the ability to ‘speak […] in many sorts of music’ is also something that a woman can do, which a man cannot; and this sounds very like Robert Sheppard’s comment that Riley ‘articulates voices’ (Sheppard, 2005, 163). Indeed, we can perhaps imagine Viola’s ‘many sorts of music’ coming to us, like Riley’s voices, via the body at the beginning of ‘Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else’: A body shot through, perforated, a tin sheet beaten out then peppered with thin holes, silvery, leaf-curled at their edges; light flies right through this tracery, voices leap … (Riley, 2000a, 47)
Tony Lopez has argued that, in this poem: ‘The self is in a way established in the process of rejecting its representations […] an “I” of emptiness, of fluent pretending’ (Lopez, 2006, 124). But it is important to add that, as with a woman pretending to be a eunuch, the self here is also spectacular, in the sense of being worthy of attention. And since, as Riley has argued in her critical writings, even emancipated subject positions can be fatally ‘sociologised’, such continuous performance may offer one way to articulate the female affect that Kristeva terms ‘the unnameable repressed by the social contract’ (Moi, 1986, 200). ‘Fluent pretending’ converges with the uses of irony that Cathy Wagner identifies in Riley’s poetry: ‘Irony is an instance of enacted agency that does not operate from an exterior location; it does not need to transcend the text in order to create a different perspective’ (Wagner, 2012, 9). In this context, trying to make an effective discursive space for poetry may be the same as trying to make one for woman, since both are located in the margins of the cultural locale as it is habitually constructed.
99
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 99
04/10/2013 10:22:49
Chapter 7
Maggie O’Sullivan: ‘Declensions of the non’
The work of Maggie O’Sullivan (b.1951) eludes the usual categories of criticism, listening and reading. Peter Manson begins a review of In the House of the Shaman (1993) by noting that ‘There are books whose interest can be gauged by the difficulty a reviewer has in finding anything remotely useful to say about them’ (Manson, 1994, 65). Andrew Duncan writes that ‘I remember how scared I was of Maggie O’Sullivan’s poetry when I first saw it […] I didn’t have the energy to form the motions it was calling’ (Duncan, 2003, 266). Finally, Charles Bernstein’s description of listening to a forty-second recording of O’Sullivan reading ‘To Our Own Day’ reports how Each listening brings something new, something unfamiliar; and the rational part of my ear has a hard time comprehending how this is possible, how such a short verbal utterance could be so acoustically saturated in performance. To be sure, this experience is produced by the performance of the poem and not (not so much) by the poem’s text, where fixed comprehension (however illusory) comes sooner. (Salt, 2011, 7)
Three male critics teeter on the edge of the sayable in the face of experimental writing by a woman. It is notable that, until the publication of The Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan (2011), which included six women out of fourteen contributors, the UK reception of her work had been largely framed by men. Both In the House of the Shaman (1993) and Body of Work (2006) have blurbs or forewords by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Peter Manson and Robert Sheppard. However, gender (as it is usually understood in cultural and literary criticism) is largely absent from O’Sullivan’s work. Duncan’s and Bernstein’s emphasis on looking and listening and on an apparently fixed text’s ability to call forth mobile and multiple 100
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 100
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ meanings underlines both the importance of gesture and performance in O’Sullivan’s works and the way that her works exist both on and off the page. Duncan and Bernstein also speak to the effects of a textual and/or sonic body on the body of the reader or listener. Isobel Armstrong’s account of O’Sullivan’s reading/performance of murmur: tasks of mourning at Birkbeck College, University of London, 2003, notes that her work uses ‘oral looking and visual hearing’, so that words placed side by side begin to intensify as sounds and sights. They tremble against each other, revealing the components of anagram and anaphora dormant in the letters. To work at the level of phrase, syllable, morpheme and particle, rather than sentence or clause, as Wendy Mulford has noticed, is to shatter the logos and radically remake it. The poetry does not use words to get anywhere but turns back upon the words. (Armstrong, 2004, 59)
This is in marked contrast to our usual expectations of poetry – even experimental poetry – in which an individual word can have, for example, a metrical function, syntactical function, be a rhyming word and have a phonic relationship with other words. O’Sullivan’s work challenges us with its reconception of poetry as a textual body. In the words of Peter Manson: ‘the poem is a unique physical object of which printing can only give us a glimpse’ (James, 2006). The emphasis on visual text or text as visual artefact and what sort of bodies works of art might be is discernible in the early ekphrastic poems, collected under the title tonetreks (1975–1977). O’Sullivan’s subjects are paintings by Munch, Malevich, Van Gogh, Monet, Gorky and Rothko and a sculpture by Giacometti, but she eschews the usual ekphrastic strategies of, say, giving an image a voice or deducing narrative from a gesture. These eleven poems focus on aspects of art that are generally of little interest to ekphrastic poets: the spatial impact of a sculptural form and the organisation and play of colour within the picture plane. At its most extreme, this focus produces four Monet poems, which parallel paintings in concrete poetic form, as in ‘ an oblong of pink ’, or a poem about a Giacometti figure made of one-word lines snaking downwards over one-and-a-half pages (O’Sullivan, 2006, 17, 20–21). In the words of ‘Elegy’, for Ashile Gorky, the poems say to the reader: ‘Permit me my making, there is no meaning here’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 23). The work of art is a record of a process and can only be read as such. A similar conception can be found in her contribution to These Pages are Marked by Woman: An Anthology of the Contemporary Experimental Women’s Poetry Festival 2006 – a centralised column of ten words, justified alternately left and right: ‘Watching / Spinning / Doubting / Cutting / Wheeling / Shaping / Shining / Tying / Pondering / Rinsing’ (Critchley and Pattison, 2006, 63). The participle form emphasises process. One could 101
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 101
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ group words of physical making (spinning, cutting, tying, rinsing) or psychological preparation (watching, doubting, pondering). But the layout suggests interweaving and no separation of thought and action. In her early poems, then, O’Sullivan follows what Romana Huk identifies in other experimental poetry of the 1970s as an ‘attempt to fuse deconstructive impulses with revised incarnational ones’ (Salt, 2011, 45). The play of colour on the picture plane mimics a broadly deconstructionist view of the play of meaning in language forever escaping the immobilisation of interpretation. But incarnation also means embodiment in flesh, and tonetreks is particularly focused on bodies. Body words are used throughout the sequence, and the Munch and Van Gogh poems are focused almost exclusively on the bodies that the painters portray. Similarly, Ashile Gorky’s palette both ‘unfurls […] a tenderness of breasts’ and produces ‘liver-red roses’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 22). This implies that an encounter with a work of art reanimates bodies: the physical body of the work and the body or bodies it portrays. And when bodies feel the world, they do so traumatically. The face of the figure in Munch’s scream is ‘knife-textured’; ‘A draught razors in’ on Van Gogh’s lamplit scene; and the ‘almost / no-/ thing /face’ of Giacometti’s sculpture ‘bayonets our glance’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 13, 15, 21). At the same time, it is O’Sullivan’s words that are weapons, adding this violence to the works that she describes. Representation is an after-image of violence or trauma, because it is itself a kind of violence. The fifty-four pages of From the Handbook of That & Furriery (1986), originally a mixed-media installation, provide a greater challenge. The text contains pattern-cutting instructions and is interspersed with visuals which use shapes from clothing patterns to present fragments of foreign languages and musical scores. There are dots between every word, as well as non-standard four-dot ellipses, which suggest that the text is entirely discontinuous or perhaps cut. The text is a reproduced typescript dense with capitalised words, brackets and underlinings. But, in a reading given in 2007 (see Penn Sound), O’Sullivan reads for conventional sense, ignoring the breaks or cuts that the dots suggest, so that the text becomes more incantatory and oracular. At this point, the critic is perhaps tempted to bow out and use fragments of the text to read metapoetically: ‘the.mind.is.quite.unsayable’ or ‘the.corpse. of.occasion’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 174). But this will not do. There are identifiable strands: lists of furry animals; a vocabulary of trapping, making clothes and wearing; words to do with cutting and bleeding; references to whaling; and flowers, seabirds and coastal imagery. Sections of material are also carefully reworked and recombined:
102
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 102
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ Curled.natron.....(how).cursed.borders.bent rampant/slit/sad.lanterns.easing.axle...... ..........THAT.cling “very.near.genital” in.meetsum/white.amassings beCOMING/ yellish.causeways.of.rot/skull.remain Cerulean Eclipse refusing disposition.as.flame switchblade......covetness.........FUR...... fin.chill/..... CLOUD.BURSTING........... to.kill/to.sentence/to.pardon/to.save/ dare.to.face (O’Sullivan, 2006, 160) in toning.aperture.absence.black. slit.yr.sad.lanterns their.easing.axles THAT.cling “very.near.genital” in.meat.scenes. “a.ruff.of.white.amusements.on.the.front” beCOMING/yellish Refusal/&.the.Gardenias.are.as.high. as.their.roots/ to.refuse &.be.dispositioned, as.flame.....switchblade, covetness.....FUR.... scattered....fin.chill/ CLOUD.BURSTING....
103
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 103
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ (Cerulean.Eclipse) to.kill.........to.sentence....to.pardon...tosave/ the.cloak.of.raw.sorting/someone.dared.to.ask,.the.matter the.face.MASH (O’Sullivan, 2006, 181)
The repetitions and reworkings suggest a ritualistic text and ritualistic activity. The reader might well be the ‘someone’ who ‘[dares] to ask the matter’, and there is a strong sense in which such a text can offer only a complete experience of itself, not deliver a meaning. What the text might give us performatively – and in performance – is, of course, another matter. Nicky Marsh offers a selective reading of From the Handbook of That & Furriery as a complex ‘interrogation of femininity’, in which both femininity and language ‘are deeply complicit with the violent desires – for meaning, for pleasure, for possession – that the poem is concerned with both critiquing and embodying’ (Salt, 2011, 93). But desire for meaning does not seem quite right in the context of lines like ‘(there.is.no.word.for. / SUN) / it.is. // (gone.to.deep.cloud)’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 176–77). This seems closer to saying there is no word for an absent sun, just as there is no word for a broken pot and its lack of ‘potness’, only the words ‘broken pot’. It is perhaps more useful to say that O’Sullivan’s text rejects language as an articulation of sublimated or repressed desires and seeks to remake it as an arena of action for primitive drives. Parallel to this is a conception of culture as formed by violent separation into categories and registers of expression and a corresponding determination to critique this separation performatively. Indeed, to return briefly to our earlier discussion of Denise Riley, if Kristeva’s argument that culture is founded on castration, sacrifice and separation is correct, then how do we avoid doing anything other than continually rewording that foundation in language? O’Sullivan’s text seems to come to a stark conclusion: if we reject sublimation and repression, then we must be prepared to embody drives in all of their unacculturated force. The fur trade, present as a kind of ‘back story’, offers a metonym for how beauty is founded on cruelty and destruction. This poetry disables habitual aspects of repression and sublimation involved in psychological functioning. Absence/presence or deconstruction/incarnation provides, then, an identifiable dynamic in O’Sullivan’s work. In a 1999 conversation with Andy Brown, she describes a preoccupation with what can be done underneath, behind, with-in the multidimensionality that is language, my work is driven by the spoken, sounded or breathing voice. Particularly I have always been haunted by issues of VOICELESSNESS – inarticulacy – silence
104
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 104
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ – soundlessness – breathlessness – how are soundings or voices that are other-than or invisible or dimmed or marginalised or excluded or without privilege, or locked out, made UNofficial, reduced by ascendant systems of centrality and closure, configured or Sounded or given form & potency: how can I body forth or configure such sounds, such tongues, such languages, such muteness, such multivocality, such error – & this is perhaps why the non-vocal in mark & the non-word in sound or language – make up much of the fabrics & structures of my own compositions. (Brown, 2004, 159 [emphasis in the original])
O’Sullivan locates her work in a relation between the non and the multi; and, as she goes on to say, her use of neologisms, contractions or parts of words is a means of resisting ‘a restrictive culture where the dominance of notions of poetry are centred around the referential’. And, crucially, for work that is ‘bodied forth’, it enables her to explore ‘the body & skin that is language’ (Brown, 2004, 160). The play of absence and presence, of non and multi, has implications for the page, which becomes a play of site and non-site. We are accustomed to the page as the place where the poem exists, but while ‘stances’ from murmur: tasks of mourning (1999–2004) might be a plural, it is also a word whose other part (‘circum-’) is somewhere else, outside the poem. The poem’s page is more than a container or record. One is reminded of Kathleen Fraser’s observation that several generations of women poets have produced verbal-visual work, where the ‘page [is] a graphically energetic site in which to manifest one’s physical alignment with the arrival of language in the mind’ (Fraser, 2000, 186 [emphasis in the original]). A word like ‘stances’ or an almost-word like ‘accumu/’ (also from murmur) turns the poem into something akin to a telephone call breaking up or digital image freezing. But this may be just a superficial description of the appearance of the text. The manifest incompleteness of words tugs at the reader to produce a completing component – tugs up what must be another partial word or broken part of a word, which might attach to the given fragmentary word of the poetic text. This activation of the reader’s internal broken parts of words may stir profound psychological and emotional effects. Over extended reading activity, this semi-vocalising/ sounding drawn from the reader sounds a depth echo which may reach down to the earliest states of language acquisition and bring forth the fragments of psychological life attached to them. This may be a potentially disorganising and/or terrifying experience. Such non-words or almost-words are often placed singly on a line or centred singly on a page so that their positioning suggests that they are central to meaning while their form suggests that they are, in fact, marginal to it. Kathleen Fraser is again useful here for her identification of work, ‘in which the absence of reliable matter (as it represents meaning) is 105
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 105
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ given visual body’ (Fraser, 2000, 188). Parts of words become objects on a page that is a visual field. Forms like ‘accumu/’ or ‘(tles’ are also broken or damaged, and it is notable that murmur refers at several points to ‘savaging salvaging’. Indeed, one striking feature of O’Sullivan’s work is a vocabulary of violence or words and phrases that suggest it. Here is a sample from a range of works: staunch, laceration, bloodied, madder bled meat, nailed, wounds, impaling, butchery, knifing and scalded. (From murmur, ‘Hill Figures’, ‘Busk, Pierce’, ‘Birth Palette’, ‘Giant Yellow’.) The poem becomes a place where forces that we do not expect to find in poetry are violently in play. As Keith Tuma notes of O’Sullivan’s ‘Starlings’: ‘The poem unsettles discourse, narrative, and the comforts of “traditional” lyric subjectivity’ (Tuma, 1998, 23). But loading what we expect to be a poem with a language of violence, often located in natural landscapes where forces do what they will, has other effects which O’Sullivan’s critics have been less willing to explore. One of the comforts of ‘“traditional” lyric subjectivity’ might be its reaffirmation of humanism. Therefore, does this mean that O’Sullivan’s work is non-humanist or even anti-humanist? To put this another way, is her breaking open of language to release what she calls ‘its multiform abrasions, magnetisms, beauties & musics & incertitudes’ (Brown, 2004, 160) apocalyptic or utopian in intent and effect? One answer might be that capitalism equals violence, and works such as A Natural History in 3 Incomplete Parts (1985) and that bread should be (1996) have dealt with the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ and the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1852. These works imply that it is naïve to imagine that poetry, by definition, involves what Seamus Heaney calls ‘the perspectives of a humane reason’ (Heaney, 1980, 56). At the same time, the presence of violence as evidence of natural forces seems at odds with what Robert Sheppard calls a project ‘to discover a further productive unity: one between culture and nature – to replicate the productive exertion of the natural forces she celebrates’ (Sheppard, 2005, 242). Violence as productive exertion is uncomfortable and risks replicating Terry Gifford’s reading of post-pastoral literature: ‘Embracing the forces of life and death in nature should lead to a moral expansion so that the very notion of humanity is extended’ (Gifford, 1999, 168). This reading not only raises questions of ‘how?’ and ‘why?’, but seems to have forgotten that there is no such thing as nature separable from culture. There is another way to look at violence and that is to say that there are forces at work in language and culture that are primal. If we could experience these forces in an unmediated way, their energies would terrify us. The natural world is the nearest that we can get to unmediated experience because it might allow us to experience exposure and understand nature’s processes as ultimately transformative. O’Sullivan is explicit about this in her conversation with Redell Olsen. She says that ‘close relation beside other-than-human 106
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 106
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ sentience has deepened my trust in the provisional, the precarious’. Her description of the page sounds very like a description of the natural world: ‘A place of damage, savagery, pain, silence: also a place of salvage, retrieval and recovery. A place of existence, journeying. A sacred space of undiminishment’ (Salt, 2011, 203, 204). These concerns are at their starkest in the four-part sequence States of Emergency (1987). The four parts are: ‘Lottery & Requiem’, which is ‘for Basil Bunting’; ‘Headlights’; ‘Busk, Pierce’; and ‘Plight’, which is for Joseph Beuys. Scott Thurston has noted that ‘Busk, Pierce’ includes a numerical table from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology (Salt, 2011, 185). The title page and each section page features what look like black-and-white photocopy collages depicting animal or bird jawbones or skulls. The sequence is ‘for Barry MacSweeney’ and has a found graffiti epigraph ‘an eye for eye – in the end the whole world goes blind’. MacSweeney, like O’Sullivan, shared an interest in giving voice to the excluded and the outsider. Also like O’Sullivan, his poetry relies on cutting away, in order to intensify possible meanings. As Robert Sheppard notes, in MacSweeney’s work: ‘Condensation is so acute, its resultant autonomy frustrates the processes of naturalization’ (Sheppard, 2005, 69). The poet himself spoke of ‘this condensing of language, this cutting across meaning, not having words next to each other which are supposed to be there’ (Sheppard, 2005, 69). Similarly, the dedicatee of ‘Lottery & Requiem’, Basil Bunting, argued that the poetry could be described as an equation: ‘Dichten = condensare’. The evocation of MacSweeney, Bunting, Lévi-Strauss and Beuys suggests different sorts of structuring principles – condensation, rhythm/music, myth and shamanic transformation – all of which are, in turn, different ways of paying attention to the world and experience. There would seem to be an emphasis on working with primitive materials and/or working with very little. And the work of Beuys, Bunting and Lévi-Strauss, in particular, can be said to collapse habitual distinctions between, say, outside and inside or culture and the primitive. The 2006 Reality Street reprint of States of Emergency reproduces typescript pages which use the whole page as a verbal field. The text uses lowercase; capitalised words; words that mix lower- and uppercase, as in ‘reSTAINED’; underlinings; long dashes; and long centred lines, which look like subsection markers. Short lines, long lines and single underlined words or underlined phrases (the old typescript convention for italicising) are all present. Sometimes the text sounds like Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, such as, for example, ‘peril/pebble’ or ‘Cockerel cream’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 267, 286). Every page features words or phrases that, at first sight, are very old or neologisms – for example, ‘laund’, ‘Bannying Ashery’, ‘Rivenstuff’ and ‘moochpennybreeze’. This is not writing that is going to produce paraphrasable meaning. In an interview with Scott Thurston, O’Sullivan has called States of Emergency ‘improvisatory’ and ‘collages’ and, in response to a question about the 107
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 107
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ word ‘TLOKETS’ (which seems to suggest tickets, tokens and lockets), adds that ‘so many of those words came as you see them in that book’ and that ‘huge sections’ of the book came to her ‘in clusters of words and sounds. They seem to come together by some magnetic force.’ Those parts remain unchanged in the process of ‘bringing [the work] to a body’ (Salt, 2011, 242, 248). ‘Lottery & Requiem’ can be said, like the work of its dedicatee Basil Bunting, to give equal value to music, rhythm and meaning. Tuma’s account of ‘Starlings’ notes the use of alliteration, assonance and a reliance on short phrases with one or two stresses (Tuma, 1998, 23–24). These are also present here and, as in ‘Starlings’, suggest primitive verse forms. This might seem an appropriate sort of echo of Bunting’s poetry in a poem which is, after all, a kind of elegy for him. ‘Flick’ is underlined and might evoke ‘spray flick / to fields we do not know’ in the ‘Coda’ of ‘Briggflatts’, but such a reading seems a little desperate, unless ‘Lottery & Requiem’ is itself to be read as a field of language that we do not know. ‘Laund’, for example, is an ancient word for clearing or glade, and ‘crowle’ is also an ancient word, meaning a dwarf or something stunted. What we have, perhaps, is a kind of homage to Bunting’s poetry as music, as if the story of ‘Briggflatts’ had been edited out: ‘Conifer, come caistor, crowle, winter / in creases // the bound paw’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 267). As Bunting might have said, this is not poetry for ‘southrons’. ‘Lottery & Requiem’ takes up one page. The second poem ‘Headlights’ takes up ten. As Scott Thurston notes in his thoughtful account of ‘Busk, Pierce’, any reading ‘necessitates a focus on local intensities – as the poem is structured in an accretive, musical way, rather than by narrative or lyric argument’ (Salt, 2011, 179). So ‘fuck and tear /’ is echoed in ‘plucked, fucked’ and the last two words, ‘fucked branches’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 271, 277, 280). Blood circulates throughout the poem in known or new verbal forms: ‘BLOODLYING’, ‘teethy bleds’, ‘bloods’, ‘bleeded’ and ‘BLEEDING’ on the penultimate page (O’Sullivan, 2006, 271, 273, 274, 275, 279). ‘Plunge of wing’ would seem to connect with ‘falcon’ and ‘BLOODEN PLUMMET ’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 271, 272, 274). ‘Falcon’ is not the only bird: ‘Headlights’ also references jays, owls, crows and rooks. There is also a kind of commentating, sometimes journalistic, language – for example, ‘savage contraventions’, ‘enforced ignitions’, ‘unauthorised bleeding’ and ‘no proper employment’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 271, 272, 276, 278). This contrasts with words and phrases which sometimes sound like Gerard Manley Hopkins (‘CLAPPED PALADIN PURPLE ENACTORS’ (272)) and sometimes sound like something which might have been English long ago: ‘skelped’, ‘cloughsmut’ and ‘how bladden duffled’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 273, 274, 275). The layout of the pages focuses attention on words as objects. The effect is to emphasise patterns, as opposed to meaning. Two patterns that powerfully emerge are references to the natural world and to violence and/or violence done to bodies. ‘Busk, Pierce’ 108
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 108
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ seems to portray an aftermath to this. The previous poem’s references to ‘Bier’, ‘burial’ and ‘lamentations’ are echoed by the opening page’s ‘mourn’, ‘NECRO ’ and ‘Grief Entry’. Scott Thurston argues that the page’s ‘verbs and potential verbs […] seem to sketch an impression of a funerary rite vitiated with exchanges, deceit and injury’ (Salt, 2011, 181). But such a reading has to exclude ‘badgered Rioja’ and ‘ICY florist’; and it is doubtful that ‘vulned butchery, / face / impaling wing / each buckle / quilted flute / lemoning / catched / ICY florist’ can be read as a stanza, even though it is laid out like one. Such language resists paraphrase – although that is clearly part of its challenge – but, more than that, it resists reformulation as anything that we might immediately recognise as a portrayal of – to borrow the title of Wallace Stevens’s poem – ‘How to Live. What to Do.’ (Stevens, 2006, 125) That is, it resists reformulation as anything that could be described as ethics. We are so used to being able to do this with poetry, we hardly think about it. Part of this resistance derives from the language of violence – explicit or implied – both here and elsewhere in O’Sullivan’s work, but this resistance also derives from an important effect of the poem’s language combined with layout. The one- and two-word lines make the already strange ‘belenders’, ‘fetched silvers’ or ‘X/tinct – / ure’ start to look like fragments of highly specialised discourses. Thurston’s description of a ‘provisional semantic context’ (Salt, 2011, 181) seems particularly appropriate to the next section: O how the filthy Keepsakes Truckle Back Tripling Ash. Ink, launjer, red on leash, BLOOD.
Crooked Swatch (ish.yellow)
Fling Flaunden
Sheenies Quick Poppy Tie of Axe
Drumcut strip strung twists
brooch &
pen Funerary tabletter, armistice,
Drown! (O’Sullivan, 2006, 284)
Thurston suggests two provisional contexts. ‘Ash’ may suggest the 109
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 109
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ burning of bodies in a camp such as Auschwitz. A yellow swatch of cloth may suggest the yellow star that the Nazis made the Jews wear, particularly when we note that ‘Sheenies’ is an abusive term for Jew. Similarly, the terms ‘Poppy’ and ‘armistice’ might evoke the First World War (Salt, 2011, 182–83). One can add that, in the context of the opening poem’s dedication to Basil Bunting, ‘pen Funerary tabletter’ sounds like a distance echo of the famous lines in Briggflatts: ‘Words! / Pens are too light. / Take a chisel to write’ (Bunting, 1970, 53). Thurston hears a ‘righteous anger that is evoked as much by the sheer energy of sound and rhythm as by its connotative possibilities’ (Salt, 2011, 183). The pattern of pararhymes made by ‘Back’, ‘Ash’, ‘Swatch’ and ‘Axe’ is a good example. One can also hear anger in the movement from the broadly iambic rhythm of ‘O how the filthy Keepsakes Truckle Back’ to the tongue-tangling difficulties of everything after ‘Swatch’. The next page reproduces the number grid from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology (1968): 1
2 2
4 3
1 1
7
4 4
2
6 5
7
5 3
4
8 8
7 6
8
The table is a greater challenge than Tony Harrison’s rhyme of ‘at by its ticks’ with ‘Aeneid VI’ in ‘Study’ (Harrison, 1987, 115). Do we read the numbers horizontally or vertically? Are they meant to be read at all in the way that Harrison’s ‘VI’ is? Lévi-Strauss uses the numbers to illustrate his thinking about myths and how they rely on recombinations of a finite number of elements. The numbers represent elements that can be read both horizontally or diachronically and vertically or synchronically. It would seem that O’Sullivan is suggesting that the writing in States of Emergency might be read in the same way and that there are clusters of relationships within it. At the same time, we might respond that, as readers, our experience of the sequence is nothing like this: the number grid says nothing about the dynamic nature of the reading experience. Indeed, the grid seems to be a formula that actually reformulates very little. Another meaning might be that, as Thurston suggests, O’Sullivan is suggesting an equivalent functionality between her use of language and myth (Salt, 2011, 187). The number grid is at the mid-point of ‘Busk, Pierce’, so that the numbers can be said to point both backwards and forwards. The next two pages depart from gestures of ritual and global conflict, returning to the language world of ‘Headlights’. The effect of the placing of the number grid is to suggest not only equivalence between the two halves of the text, but also the possibility that human behaviour and the processes of the 110
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 110
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ natural world might be read in the same way. Two pairings – ‘GRIEVED, GROUND’ and ‘FLAME & WILDERNESS ’ – along with ‘Expulsions’ suggest the kind of narratives that can be read in the earth. The final section of States of Emergency, ‘Plight’, is ‘for Joseph Beuys’ and begins with the words ‘Conjure / alumni’, which is an echo of the previous section’s first words: ‘Injure Tinglit ’. Words-as-objects are highlighted by the presence of German words: ‘Stunden Jugend’ and ‘GEISTLICHES ’. ‘Jugend’ is youth or young people. ‘Stunde’ is an hour or lesson (although ‘Stundenbuch’ is a prayer book), and ‘Stunden’ means to grant a respite. ‘Geistliches’ has meanings of religion or clergyman. The first page seems more hopeful in tone than its predecessor. There is a language of energy and healing in play and the closing ‘FLARE —————— // Burn/ALL grimey blood —— / beast epic fuses of death’ suggests not the disaster of the preceding ‘FLAME & WILDERNESS ’, but the possibility of a cleansing fire. Drawing on Thurston’s reading of ‘Busk, Pierce’, we can say that the intensities of ‘Plight’ are located within a greater range of references to the natural world and in more references to ‘stone’ and ‘rock’, which also characterised earlier sections. There is a greater incidence of longer rhythmic phrases, as in ‘Rotch purpled grease / glooming’ and ‘crunched calico stanchion’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 292, 297). And the text is punctuated by repetitive capitalised and italicised phrases, which might be instructions or incantations, as in: ‘DOWN. DOWN. DOWN. DOWN ’, ‘BANNED BANNED BANNED BANNED ’ and ‘GOBBLE. GOBBLE. GOBBLE GOBBLE ’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 292, 294, 295). The suggestion of healing on the first page of ‘Plight’ is not sustained. As the piece progresses, we get the sequence’s most explicit account of violence done to bodies. This account is conveyed through groupings of words on particular pages. So, for example, we read of ‘Bloody dead / decased hells’, ‘Common destruction’ and ‘tormenting conscript’; ‘BE HOLD OUR THROATS CUTTING ’, ‘MUTILATION ’ and ‘THE EXPELLED ’; ‘The Suffocates. / The Strangles. / The Terrifies’; and ‘ROT PERFUME’ and ‘EXILE’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, 295, 296, 298, 299). The sequence ends like this: Cantabile, Inverted quartz, Grilled Rage of nail/tide of grim torn internments
BLITZSCHLAG:
So numerous, the Banded Stuttery Traffic Lung Fanched Fugitive Speak of Dying.
(O’Sullivan, 2006, 300)
111
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 111
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ ‘Blitzschlag’ or ‘flash of lightning’ is an event in the text. It is also an image of a process whereby possible meanings and individual words are suddenly and starkly illuminated but only for a moment. The dedication to Beuys also indicates process. His emphasis on ‘Bewegung’ or ‘movement’ as a transformative force implies a newly made chaos as a starting point for transformation, and, for Beuys, this chaos was involved with language. Beuys spoke of wanting ‘to switch off my own species’ range of semantics’ (Rosenthal, 2004, 33). The emphasis on species also connects with Beuys’s various ‘Actions’ with live and dead animals, which were sometimes works of mourning and sometimes attempts at rapprochement between man and the natural world. Just as Beuys’s work often used rubbish or insignificant found objects as offerings to more significant forces, so O’Sullivan’s broken, remade and imaginary words suggest language itself as a kind of litter that results from trying to engage with primal forces in the world or with political power. Language is literally broken by the force of this engagement. O’Sullivan has also written approvingly of Kurt Schwitters’s use of ‘the dismembered materials of culture’ (O’Sullivan, 1995, 68). Crucially, Beuys’s ‘Actions’ focused on what he called ‘the part the artist can play in indicating the traumas of a time and initiating a healing process’ (Rosenthal, 2004, 33). It is clear that States of Emergency registers trauma, but it is less clear whether it initiates a healing process. It is hard to get the sense, which one gets from many of Beuys’s works, of the work itself or the processes that made it as templates for new social and political organisms. As we suggested earlier, the answer to the question that one could pose about O’Sullivan’s work – ‘in which world is this language possible?’ – could be either apocalyptic or utopian. The convergences with Beuys suggest two important things. First, O’Sullivan is less a poet in the sense of, say, Denise Riley or Marianne Morris and more an artist who happens to use language as her primary medium. Second, like Beuys, she is working through an irresolvable exploration and renegotiation of the relation between culture and nature. In this context, Nicholas Royle’s reading of part of ‘Headlights’ – ‘what may have been caged by humans cages them in turn’ (Royle, 1995, 17) – seems a little eco-simplistic. O’Sullivan’s work performs a belief and consequent action. The belief is that the human drive for signification is indivisible from drives for mastery and violence. The consequent action is to find ways of working that allow forces in the world something like free rein. At the same time, this is where the influence of Beuys becomes harder to discern. Where Beuys’s overall project could be described as the construction of a house of healing, O’Sullivan’s emphasis is unrelentingly focused on a house of suffering. Indeed, the language of violence and trauma that we have identified in her work might ally her, not so much with Beuys, but more with Hermann Nitsch (b.1938) whose actions and performances celebrate sacrifice and violence. 112
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 112
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ In the House of the Shaman (1993) throws some of these areas into sharper relief. The experience of reading, say, ‘Another Weather System’ or ‘Starlings’ is to find oneself asking: what are these poems? They are not, for example, narratives. They exist as environments made out of language, partly constructed and partly disordered, either systematically or unsystematically, and as journeys through those environments. In this sense, the text could be understood as a shamanic, visionary utterance. As with From the Handbook of That & Furriery (1986), the reading experience is one that makes the mind move around on the page and work backwards as well as forwards as one tries to decipher meaning. There are clear points in the text that are utterances, but they are utterances in the wrong order, as ‘Of Mutability’: ‘Ill not the taller small feet-away on the face / face of the body’ and ‘take this gift on the cheek / the meaning of bodies cut the hand at work the face many / days / i have / eaten’ (O’Sullivan, 1993, 39). Similarly, in ‘Another Weather System’: ‘Wolf / pattering / tabor / this / appeared / act / i / this / locate / space’ (1993, 21). This last quotation suggests a moving around in space and time, just like the shaman does. Reading is, then, turned into a disordered experience, and one starts to understand what Andrew Duncan meant when he wrote that he ‘didn’t have the energy to form the motions’ that O’Sullivan’s poetry ‘was calling’ (Duncan, 2003, 266). Such a crisis in reader energy connects with our earlier point about the experience of partial words tugged from the reader and how the experience of that activity potentially requires, and draws upon, huge and unaccustomed reserves of the reader’s psychological energy. The sense of spatial and temporal journeys is conveyed by repeated references to time and weather. Shamanic travelling involves the ability to fold time and space, and shamanic practices involve bringing beginnings and endings together. So, for example, we get ‘Embryonic’ sharing a page with ‘the grave has never been’ (O’Sullivan, 1993, 59). There are numerous references to entrances, chambers and dwellings in both of these poems. Collectively, the texts under discussion here suggest that the house of the shaman is, in fact, the shaman’s body. The shaman’s body is where all boundaries (between time and space, man and other animals) are broken down. There is, again, some connection with the practices and beliefs of Joseph Beuys. ‘Hares’ make an appearance in ‘Of Mutability’, and references to ‘birds & their habits’ and ‘systems of the fox’ (1993, 61, 65) evoke different ordering principles within the poem. It is tempting to read O’Sullivan’s work as the embodiment of a longing for nature and a seeking to restore it to ourselves (and us to it) through aesthetic forms and a compensatory aesthetic practice. But such a reading would have to ignore the presence and workings of a disordered and disordering practice that is rarely present in Beuys’s work. However, the presence of the shaman suggests that her work can be
113
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 113
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Declensions of the non’ read as a very late ‘spin’ on Romanticism’s idea that there is something to be found in nature that is not available through either human society or institutions. Byron puts this simply and directly in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Book 3, stanza 72): ‘I live not in myself, but I become / Portion of that around me: and to me / High mountains are a feeling, but the hum / Of human cities torture: I can see / Nothing to loathe in nature …’ The Romantics found healing force in nature’s elemental energies. O’Sullivan’s work enacts a powerful belief in, and desire for, disorder as that which will heal us.
114
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 114
04/10/2013 10:22:49
Chapter 8
Harriet Tarlo, Elizabeth Bletsoe and Helen Macdonald: ‘Being Outside’
Harriet Tarlo sees nature, in Maggie O’Sullivan’s poetry, ‘moving from its position as resource or thing in order to become an agent in the production of knowledge’ (Tarlo, 2007, 2). The idea of nature as knowledge converges with the ‘radical landscape’ poetry with which Tarlo has been closely associated and that she has done much to define. The radicalism of this poetry involves what Tarlo describes as a mingled sense of exposure and genre: ‘writing outside is also being in it, being aware of where it is … the inter-linking elements … to carry on your back the history of the sublime, beautiful and close-your-eyes-to-all-therest aspect of pastoral’ (Johnson, 2000, 386). Genre is re-energised by re-exposure to what it seeks to contain. Radical landscape poetry tends to use more dynamic open forms or styles of writing. Tarlo argues that use of the whole page-space […] is particularly suited to reflecting on and engaging with the spatial. For me, this has indeed been the openness of a field, moorland, cliff or hillside, those spaces in which we see human and non-human elements at work as on a canvas in the open air. Here, poets might even attempt to embody the vast, complex, inter-related network of vegetations, insect and animal life that such a space contains … (Tarlo, 2007, 11)
Radical landscape poetry also involves a Cagean belief that we can learn from nature’s manner of operation. We can learn that nature is not chaotic. Carol Watts speaks to this directly in the first section of Wrack (2007). Looking at the shore, the speaker thinks ‘there must be a key / in the writing of barnacles where fibonacci / makes sense of the 115
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 115
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Being Outside’ spread of bladderwrack’ (Watts, 2007, 7). This echoes a much older poem, Tom Raworth’s ‘Tracking (Notes)’ (1973), in which ‘fibonacci numbers’ are offered as one solution to the fact that ‘the connections (or connectives) no longer work’ (Raworth, 1988, 89, 91). Watts continues with this abiding interest in Zeta Landscapes, which explores land by the River Vyrnwy in Powys via ‘a different harmonics: the language of an imaginary zeta (Riemann) landscape’, derived from Bernard Riemann’s work on prime numbers (Watts, 2009–2010, 26). Watts belongs to the significant number of women writers producing either post-pastoral or radical landscape writing. This reflects, in part, a wider history, leading from the women’s movement through to the peace movement and on to Green activism, but it may also reflect what Wendy Mulford identified thirty years ago as the woman writer’s particular ‘part in [the] struggle to survive’ (Wandor, 1983, 41). In a British context, radical landscape poetry and the conception of nature as an agent in the production of knowledge are ways of avoiding a well-established, broadly Conservative cultural poetics of person and place. Within this Conservative poetics, the individual is constructed, in Patrick Wright’s words, by ‘the experience of meanings which are vitally incommunicable and undefinable’ (Wright, 1985, 83). Landscape and place give access to a mythicised and mystical nation of timeless moments and unchanging traditions that stands outside politics and society – a nation that Wright characterises as ‘Deep England’.
Harriet Tarlo: writing outside Tarlo’s account of her own work identifies the beginning of her poetry with radical landscape work. She names a number of both UK and US poets as influences: Basil Bunting, Geraldine Monk, Wendy Mulford, Maggie O’Sullivan and Frances Presley; H. D., Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Kathleen Fraser, Harryette Mullen, Lorine Niedecker and Gertrude Stein. This not only places Tarlo’s work within a transatlantic context, but also reminds us that the US has a much longer tradition of radical landscape poetry. One can point to writers such as Theodore Enslin, as well Niedecker. Niedecker is a clear influence on what Tarlo calls her early ‘very short lyrics, edited almost to vanishing point’ (Etter, 2010, 115), but there are important differences, too. Niedecker favours short forms that are packed full of material detail, evoke larger systems of meaning and inquiry and often link the past and present. Tarlo also uses short forms, but distributes words widely over the whole page, often favours generic description (for example, ‘moon’s gone in’; 2004, 14) over specifics and generally writes in a continuous present. Tarlo is also less likely than Niedecker to title poems with anything except their opening line and generally eschews capitalisation, except for proper names. She also favours open punctuation. 116
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 116
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Being Outside’ The distribution of an unpunctuated poem across the whole field of the page certainly preserves the sense of a poem as live jottings and welcomed indeterminacy. Thus, the poem is a lived and experienced process, rather than a finished form or object. Tarlo’s open forms therefore imply a belief that an encounter with nature will have an impact on the form of a poem. Some of the poems seem almost map-like, with the words functioning as co-ordinates. The arrangement of the forty words of ‘blue blue blue (for Julia)’ gives a powerful sense of moving through space in a rhythmic way, of being paced through something (Tarlo, 2004, 15). Similarly, the arrangements can be diagrammatic or emblematic, as in ‘Camellia House’, where ‘North stone face’ and ‘South glass face’ are on either side of four centred lines, suggesting a compass (Etter, 2010, 118). Finally, Tarlo’s poems often invite new ways of reading. The second phrase of ‘open the back door’ is arranged in descending steps from right to left, but can only be read in reverse as a rising phrase ‘climb / to / the / top / branch’. Three quarters of the title ‘mid may through june’ are dispersed throughout the poem as an italicised right-hand column. The effect is repeated in ‘early words’, where ‘side’, ‘home’, ‘up’, ‘down’ and ‘wet’ form a dispersed, italicised left-hand column (Tarlo, 2004, 10, 21, 31). What such poems attempt, primarily, then, are verbal simulations of spatial and temporal encounters with locales and their conditions. The self is merely a perceptual registering of the environment. Seeing and the eye are constantly evoked, either directly, as in ‘my eye’, or impersonally, as in ‘eye wants’ or ‘eyes squint’ (Tarlo, 2004, 11, 12). At the same time, the poet’s body does not tend to be present, apart from passing references, such as ‘my neck’ or ‘I fall’ (Tarlo, 2004, 11, 14). It is as if the attention is so dispersed amongst exterior conditions and in the environment that the reader shares the poet’s concentrated experience of a place directly. However, this is not a straightforward matter. The open form of the poems seems to record and offer the reader the experience of a new type of self-embodiment, but because Tarlo’s language is minimal and often plain to the point of being generic, this experience seems withheld. Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that the sensibility in many of Tarlo’s shorter poems seems almost anaesthetised by the environment and experience of ‘outside’. The two longer poems collected in the anthology Foil: Defining Poetry 1985–2000 (2000), ‘brancepeth beck’ and ‘coast’, give a fuller sense of Tarlo’s practice. Both are walking poems. Where ‘brancepeth beck’ is a solitary meditation, ‘coast’ involves interaction with other people. Both poems use stepped lines or stepped blocks of text to give not only a sense of movement through a space, but also a visual mimesis of the tracking of eye, walking pace and attention in a space. The visual and emblematic elements of Tarlo’s poetry are also more marked in the two sequences. Some of the writing comes close to concrete poetry in its attempts to evoke its subject as a visual image. Sometimes this is 117
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 117
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Being Outside’ done quite simply, as in a passage describing hacking through dense vegetation that uses forward slashes to mimic this. At other times, it is more complex: looking up cloud circle trees shine above (Johnson, 2000, 267)
This might look like a crude representation of a tree or it might represent something passing overhead. At the same time, we can say that this is perhaps less a picture of its subject, than a picture of eye and body motion. As in the shorter poems discussed above, different senses of body, feeling and consciousness are implied by the writing. So, for example, emotion (when it is present) is only a bodily effect of exertion. Consciousness of events in the environment is experienced as the body’s passage through a space. It is as if the body’s breath of utterance evokes only exertion. Identity, in these longer poems, is presented as physical movement through natural environments, although the body itself is scarcely discussed. A passage such as from ‘brancepeth beck’ catches something of all this, but the effect is generally cumulative: catching against breaking branch thick pulling bramble steady hand stinging sharp leaves down slip mud (Johnson, 2000, 263)
Where ‘brancepeth beck’ gives a sense of the coming and passing of summer and a sense of the cyclical (beginning with ‘rained itself / out’ and ending with ‘(2 days rain)’, ‘coast’ is, at first sight, more paradoxical, although there is a movement towards winter. The text seems much more chaotic. Phrasal units are distinctly more various in both size and positioning. There are variations in font size, as well as the use of capitalised words. Closer attention reveals discrete subsection titles, which echo essays and odes: ‘on starting in april’, ‘on wanting what you see’, ‘on having a license to print’ and ‘on moving to july’. There 118
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 118
04/10/2013 10:22:49
‘Being Outside’ is also a ‘coda’. The first words of the sequence are ‘radio static’ (which suggests a channel that is open, but not yet tuned) and the statement ‘that you can just go there / if you want / its all yours’ (Johnson, 2000, 270). The sequence collages lists of supplies, guidebook text, boat names and signage. In contrast to ‘brancepeth beck’, we get a much stronger sense of what the poem called ‘outland / coming inland’ (Johnson, 2000, 268) as exterior observations seem to stir up language about relationships (‘friendship’, ‘darling’) and other people. ‘coast’, like many of Tarlo’s shorter poems, challenges us to come up with a way of reading that can include all of this material. Despite references to other people and a ‘you’, the body and self are barely Tarlo’s concern. Therefore, they are lacking as a guide through the linguistic structure. In contrast with many of Tarlo’s other poems, there is a clear vocabulary of mind and feeling and accumulating hints of a narrative of memory, forgetting and loss. So the challenge is partly an interpretative one and partly one of location, in that the poem’s primary concern is to perform a space by performing movement through that space and recording movements felt or observed within it – for example, weather, the sea. As Kathleen Fraser has written of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson (clear presences behind Tarlo’s work), the page is ‘a graphically energetic site in which to manifest one’s physical alignment with the arrival of language in the mind’, ‘in which the absence of reliable matter (as it represents meaning) is given visual body’ (Fraser, 2000, 186, 188 [emphasis in the original]). In this context, Tarlo’s ‘writing outside’ poses, but does not answer, the questions: ‘how, why, where and when is this writing reliable matter?’
Elisabeth Bletsoe: ‘at the edge of the body’ The poetry of Elisabeth Bletsoe (b.1960), to some extent, resists easy positioning within contemporary British poetry. At first sight, poetry which can include ‘skin’, ‘petechial’, ‘feeling’, ‘abrades our flesh’ and ‘anastomose in a tholian web’ (Bletsoe, 2008, 9, 10) seems reminiscent of Prynne’s post-1960s work, where, as Anthony Mellors observes, ‘an uncompromising textuality’ means that any sense of ‘an organizing principle […] gets dispersed in the mêlée of mutually exclusive utterances which now make up the poem’ (Mellors, 2005, 167). At the same time, Bletsoe’s focus on what one poem terms ‘a locus of transitions / a constant state of mutagenesis’ (Bletsoe, 2008, 45) and her tendency to view landscape as body and vice versa or to voice speakers who can feel the land’s ‘magnetic core’ (Bletsoe, 2008, 78) are highly reminiscent of the visionary transformations and symbological working of Peter Redgrove. Similarly, her interests in plants, plant lore and homeopathy and her poetry’s location in south-west England all combine to associate her with a largely neglected strand in post-war British poetry, which, 119
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 119
04/10/2013 10:22:50
‘Being Outside’ like Redgrove’s work, draws on that geographical location and blurs experimentalist practices with what used to be called ‘new age’ beliefs. The various poetic likenesses sketched out above mean that, unlike Prynne, Bletsoe is not writing poetry where, to quote Anthony Mellors again, ‘[t]he prospect of meaningfulness is always shadowed by the spectre of meaninglessness’ (Mellors, 2005, 167). Bletsoe’s mêlée of apparently mutually exclusive utterances seems to work transformatively: the utterances are either mutually transformative or work to transform expectations of the poem. This process is highly visible and audible in the title sequence of Landscape from a Dream (2008) which is ‘After Paul Nash’, has an epigraph from a Leonard Cohen song and a brief endnote: ‘Purbeck coast from Swanage to Kimmeridge’. On a simple level, the sequence is a record of a coastal walk, but its opening lines – ‘intelligence lies / at the edge of the body / in the skin / along the littoral / feeling’ (Bletsoe, 2008, 9) – open up a range of questions about knowledge and limits. It is not merely a sense of ‘body=landscape=body’, but rather that the location allows the self to be experienced in different ways: as permeable and connected with cycles and movements outside itself. It is also clear that lines like ‘fissility of shale, its / slaking, / plasticising when wet’ (Bletsoe, 2008, 9) are there as much for their sound as anything else. Indeed, Part 1 of the sequence is highly sibilant. The coast is sounded as much as it is described. Part 2 might be ‘about’ swimming or, at least, ‘our bodies’ that are underwater and looking up at the surface. There are references to plant growth (‘grafting’) and foetal growth, which typify how Bletsoe’s poetry evokes narratives or the possibility of narratives but is not a clear narrative in itself. In Part 3, the sequence returns to dry land and moves away from an awareness of ‘the genealogies of dispossession’ towards a sort of mythic narrative or, at least, engagement with its residues. The self and body are here allied with the natural world (‘my nocturnal body’) and its energies (‘carried on peristaltic waves / towards the horizon’) (Bletsoe, 2008, 13, 14). A brief quotation in Part 3 from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ (‘o my chevalier’) suggests that Bletsoe’s poetry may be as much about erotics as it is about hermeneutics. This is another aspect of her interest in transformations: vocabularies of explanation and interpretation are used sensually. The final section returns to ‘the small coastal town’ and its ‘architectures of barbarism’ which are also, one presumes, ironically, ‘a state of grace’ (Bletsoe, 2008, 15). The town ‘is a lie’, but not one ‘that can cause any damage’ (Bletsoe, 2008, 16). We have journeyed from a philosophical lyric about knowledge to a high-toned cultural overview which seems a little too pleased with its own superiority. The sequence does not seem to be saying that ‘the town’ or limited ideas about ‘intelligence’ have resulted in ‘dispossession’. What is implied by language that piles up references and shifts abruptly between them is that ‘dispossession’ is the state that we are currently in. Possession and dispossession can also 120
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 120
04/10/2013 10:22:50
‘Being Outside’ be related to references to writing, both throughout the title sequence and Landscape from a Dream as a whole. ‘Marginalia’, ‘palimpsest’ and ‘dermographics’ suggest writing that is either a note or is threatened with erasure. But this is not merely postmodern self-reflexiveness, ‘writing about writing’. As ‘dermographics’ suggests, the medium for writing in Bletsoe’s work is the skin; it is where we can write on each other ‘with our fingernails’, where we are written on by the world and where we can see evidence of inner life (Bletsoe, 2008, 12, 59). Kathleen Fraser has used the example of H. D. to show how the palimpsest can have a particular meaning for the experimental woman writer: H. D. introduced the concept of the palimpsest: writing layered into the before and after of other writing […] In H. D.’s poetics, a particular moment in history may often be re inscribed by a contemporary woman writer over the faded or dimming messages of a female collective consciousness, unearthing in this process a spiritual and erotic set of valuing essentially ignored by the dominant culture. The imaginative part of the palimpsest notion is that some of the imperfectly erased writing from ancient female texts and myths may still come through – bits and pieces of language, single words, alphabet fragments whose traces and marks suggest the challenge of coded hermetic messages, both from recovered past writings and from one’s own word history. (Fraser, 2000, 144–45 [emphasis in the original])
In H.D.’s and Fraser’s conception, the woman writer is particularly concerned with revaluation and a kind of archaeological project to recover the female/feminine, both in and within culture and language. One is reminded, for example, how Frances Presley’s poetry works to portray ‘a community of women across times, cultures and artistic genres’ and register ‘the effect that articulating that community might have on poetic form’ (Kennedy 2005, 91; 2012, 109–13). Spiritual and erotic valuing are certainly present in Bletsoe’s poetry and are particularly prominent in the quartet of poems that gives voices to four of Thomas Hardy’s female characters: Bathsheba Everdene, Marty South, Teresa Durbeyfield and Eustacia Vye. These are also poems of place, whose titles are places and whose endnotes locate their characters in the Dorset landscape. ‘Maiden Castle’, ‘Melbury Bubb’, ‘Cross-in-Hand’ and ‘Rainbarrows’ are not, however, impersonations of Hardy. What seems to happen in the poems is that women and place voice and envoice each other. To put this another way, place speaks through self and thereby gives self a voice. So it is partly the case that, as Harriet Tarlo has identified in radical landscape poetry, Bletsoe’s reconceptions of Hardy’s women mean that 121
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 121
04/10/2013 10:22:50
‘Being Outside’ the characters ‘embody the vast, complex, inter-related network of vegetation, insect and animal life’ that a place contains (Tarlo, 2007, 11). At the same time, both self and place are palimpsests – a restless dynamic of depth and surface, interior and exterior. Just as ‘the rinsing content of my soul / [is] released to an eloquence of skin / rising in bubbles’, so ‘splinters of history continually discharge / at the surface of the present’ (Bletsoe, 2008, 59, 76). Similarly, Bathsheba Everdene’s ‘terebration [i.e. breaching] of / the psychic envelope’ is echoed by Eustacia Vye’s ‘I have lanced my flesh with barbs of Ilex ’ (Bletsoe, 2008, 62, 77). Bletsoe’s Hardy heroines are, like their originals, restless walkers and obsessive markers out of space. At first sight, this seems to risk convergence with critical tropes, common in the mainstream, of the woman poet as wild and unsocialised – for Bletsoe has, effectively, turned Hardy’s characters into poets. It may be, though, that Bletsoe’s poetry suggests something more complex and harder to delineate: it is only in nature’s vast palimpsest that woman can hear herself as palimpsest and hear her own palimpsestic history. As Michael Peverett argues in a thoughtful review of Landscape from a Dream, a ‘re-envisaging of shape/space/time may be particularly connected to regionalism’ in Bletsoe’s poetry and various other experimental poets. At the same time, ‘regionalism becomes a distant thing because of the action of the poem’ (Peverett, 2010).
Helen Macdonald: lyric taxonomy The natural world also features prominently in the poetry of Helen Macdonald (b.1970) who has worked in avian management and conservation. Her poetry is suffused with these expertises and their discourses and she has a larger public profile in these areas than in poetry. In contrast with most of the poets in this book, she is rarely discussed in the context of other women writers. Like Bletsoe, Macdonald often combines what appear to be mutually exclusive utterances – for example, ‘fuzzy’ and ‘palearctic’ (Macdonald, 2001, 44) – but her work exhibits a much stronger sense of these utterances continually revising each other and of utterance continually revising itself. This is very much the case in ‘Taxonomy’ – the opening poem of Shaler’s Fish (2001), a book which collects work from the early 1990s onwards: Wren. Full song. No subsong. Call of alarm, spreketh & ought damage the eyes with its form, small body, tail pricked up & beak like a hair trailed through briars & at a distance scored with lime scent in the nose like scrapings from a goldsmith’s cuttle … (Macdonald, 2001, 7)
122
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 122
04/10/2013 10:22:50
‘Being Outside’ The poem continues for another seven long lines of between fourteen and twenty-one syllables, which are mainly made up of one sentence containing seven subclauses of varying length. Taxonomy promises orderly classification in a system that has moved from Linnaean fixity through Darwinian dynamic speciation to Mendelian variation. But orderly classification is precisely what we do not expect from a poem, although we might expect experience ordered. It is interesting to place the poem with part of Edmund Hardy’s recent attempt to respond to it: Alarm becomes form. What is a song, or what gives it its consistency? Does a signature become a style, and how is territory en-faced? Taxonomy is the first act & is all of the imagination, says Borges […] ‘Call of alarm’ – a predator, a human observer; the lyric poet’s uncertainties over any self-singing presentation, projecting an alarm? […] Distance is a possession. The poem enacts our distance from the wren, and performs its own call of lyric territory after registering the wren’s own ‘full song’. (Hardy, 2006, 1)
Hardy’s quick notation of his responses emphasises how Macdonald’s poetry resists paraphrase, while being highly musical. Later in the poem, starlings ‘steal the speech of men […] / a spark that meets the idea of itself, apparently fearless’, which seems to revise the idea of alarm. Hardy reminds us that pet starlings, taught to speak, can be found in both Pliny and Shakespeare. The poem has moved from the scientific language of ‘subsong’ to bird lore. If ‘Taxonomy’ can be said to establish a lyric territory, then we might recall lyric poetry’s special engagement with birds and birdsong – for example, Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ and the unlovely sedge-warbler, crow and corncrake present in Seamus Heaney’s ‘Serenades’ (Heaney, 1980, 85). Drew Milne argues that such poems, particularly Keats’s, ‘are pitched at the limits of a known estrangement from the ecstasies evoked’. He goes on to argue that ‘an unreconciled affinity between birds and humans’ in perceptions of spirit in natural beauty ‘allows the lyric poet to explore both the limits of humanism in our conceptions of song and the limits to disenchantment in the human domination of nature’ (Milne, 2001, 20, 23). In this context, ‘Taxonomy’ is not only or perhaps not even about our distance from the world and language’s role in producing that distance. Indeed, such a reading seems flat-footed in comparison with the poem’s dynamic movement; such arguments are, anyway, so widely made in our period as to be almost cliché. On the other hand, what if song or, more correctly, lyric is itself a form of taxonomy? ‘Full song’ would be able to include enchantment and disenchantment, alarm and apparent fearlessness and to range, in taxonomical terms, across fixity, speciation and variation, even though fixity, speciation and variation 123
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 123
04/10/2013 10:22:50
‘Being Outside’ involve apparently exclusive utterances. This is why song ‘ought’ to ‘damage’ us, but somehow does not. This is not to say that ‘Taxonomy’ is a self-reflexive poem about poetry, but rather that it is a lyric about envoicing and singing. This is crucial in a body of work which simultaneously enacts the ‘briefest credo: the assumption of immanence in all objects’ and sees ‘flying things / dumb objects’ and ‘a blaze of mute objects / in the pure suburban heavens’ (Macdonald, 2001, 53, 51, 62). No wonder ‘Skipper/copper’ asks and answers a despairing question: ‘what propensity for metaphoric expression / is left? None. None’ (Macdonald, 2001, 51). Nonetheless, if lyric poetry is one of humanism’s last working and workable taxonomies, then the poet is compelled to seek out ‘analogies to the brittle / chatter of my heart’ (Macdonald, 2001, 53). Birds – which are numerous in the title section of Shaler’s Fish – are a sort of analogy, because as ‘Taxonomy’ notes, they are prompted to sing. Their songs are responses to stimuli and the acting out of behaviours. So, what prompts the contemporary poet? At many points throughout Macdonald’s work, speaking seems hardly possible: ‘To speak whatever word was required / a difficulty akin to poverty’ (Macdonald, 2001, 53). The physical location of the voice is often under threat or barely functioning: ‘clearing the throat’, ‘the sobbing throat’, ‘ripping out a throat’, ‘circumspect at the throat’ and ‘a pin in the throat’ (Macdonald, 2001, 34, 39, 42, 53, 56). The world is composed of ‘small worlds / where death has music in a vice-like / I think not’ (Macdonald, 2001, 61–62). The difficulty of saying and singing is emphasised by Macdonald’s habitual use of the forward slash to show multiple meanings, as in ‘Shakespearian arrows / the ruin of france’ (Macdonald, 2001, 44); this is at its bleakest in ‘form / information’ (48). The poetry is full of the technology of communication: satellites, radio telescopes, shortwave radios, monitors, screens, CNN and faxmodems. The air, the location of birds and birdsong, is now the place of airwaves and frequencies. Poetry that registers this also registers, as Milne notes, ‘the conflict between poetic antiquity and modern rationality’ and ‘the energy of uncertain identification’ (Milne, 2001, 26, 28). There is some convergence here with Andrea Brady whose work also explores poetry as a precarious scene of knowledge. (Interestingly, Macdonald shares Brady’s interest in the history of warfare.) Uncertain identification may also underlie the poetry’s uneasy mix of careful form, patterned sound used both rhythmically and alliteratively and irregular punctuation. Long gaps between full stops suggest long sentences, which, on close reading, are found not to work and seem more akin to cut-ups. The energy and conflict that Milne identifies is perhaps also registered by the fact that two poems are called ‘Morphometry’ and ‘Variations on Morphometry’ – the morphologic measurement of lakes and their basins – and that another poem can speak of ‘the sodden lake of the heart, and its sharp depths / up for retching on sweetness’ (Macdonald, 2001, 8, 43, 42). 124
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 124
04/10/2013 10:22:50
‘Being Outside’ Macdonald’s poetry, then, explores the avian as a parallel singing which can tell us something about poetry and lyric’s potential in the modern world. Her testing of lyric’s potential is very different from that of, say, Veronica Forrest-Thomson. The older poet made a seductive performance of vivid wit and self-deprecating, agonised humour. Macdonald’s poetry also declares itself as work of high intelligence aimed at a sophisticated audience, but the narrative spectacle of individual poems is often obscured. It is worth noting how the endings of the most recent poems in Shaler’s Fish also perform the uncertain identification that Milne notes in ‘Earth Station’. Some endings seem highly rational: ‘I cannot remember banality ever existing’; ‘a miracle behind glass discarded on reflection’; or ‘the mouth is an applied science’ (Macdonald, 2001, 33, 34, 35). Other poems seem closer to the elegiac note that sounds through so much contemporary British poetry and speaks not to loss per se, but to inoperative desire – for example, ‘the video slips and marshalled antics fade’, ‘let the wind renege & the fields upturn to the sky’ and, perhaps most tellingly, ‘the score wet, the lyre broke’ in ‘Variations on Morphometry’ and the falling space station in ‘MIR’, which ‘passes behind clouds and enters the shadow of the world’ (Macdonald, 2001, 36, 38, 43, 59). ‘MIR’, which can be read as a postmodern version of the Fall, is, in fact, one of the few Macdonald poems to end with a full stop, which suggests that, even if we open poetry up to a range of utterances and taxonomies, lyric’s singing can only be snatched at by the page. To return to Harriet Tarlo, what she identifies in radical landscape poetry as ‘the desire for cosmic possession and/or erotic engagement with place’ is, in part, what lyric also sings for.
125
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 125
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Chapter 9
Caroline Bergvall, Elizabeth James/Frances Presley and Redell Olsen: Virtual Spaces
Gail Trimble begins a stimulating review of two accounts of ancient reading practices by observing that ‘the physical form of what we read affects the ways in which we engage with a written text’, and that recent shifts from page to screen are but the latest in a long series of changes in how we read (Trimble, 2011, 24). One can add that the relatively quick shift from large cathode-ray screens to small portable touch screens highlights how the act of reading involves learning an unfamiliar technique for understanding what is written. This certainly converges with the readerly expertise demanded by the spatial organisation and physical form of many experimental texts. Trimble goes on to argue that ancient books in the form of rolls of papyrus paper – which had to be unrolled, read sequentially and then rewound – in fact offered greater possibilities for ‘checking back and skipping ahead’ than has previously been thought (Trimble, 2011, 24). Trimble also reminds us that the unpunctuated streams of letters typical of ancient writing meant that books were often read out loud by individual readers as the easiest way of making sense and that books were also read out loud by groups of friends or scholars (Trimble, 2011, 24). Reading something out loud, whether to oneself or others, is a species of performance. The relationship between performance, reading, writing and sounding is crucial to an understanding of the work of Caroline Bergvall (b.1962) – a body of writing where visual presentation and sound performance keep her texts in a condition of fluctuating existence. At first sight, Bergvall’s work offers the critic a number of clear approaches. It can be discussed in terms of performance writing, a sub-genre that she was instrumental in establishing and theorising. It is co-extensive with Bergvall’s own significant body of writing on the practice of writing and a number of lengthy interviews. It is informed, 126
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 126
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces on her own admission, by theoretical writing by Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Michel de Certeau, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Gerard Genette, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Rancière and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, amongst others. Her work delivers a number of things for which there continues to be high demand in early twenty-first century academic criticism: it is located across and between languages and genres; it is more interested in process and writing than in product and text; and its often emergent practices question the status of both writing and text as narratives of identity and readability and of text as a stable entity. Bergvall has spoken of ‘finding the law of the work in the methods and materials of the work. There’s an internal logic to a piece that takes it to a certain place’ (Thurston, 2011, 92). This implies, of course, that no two works are likely to end up in the same place. The apparently clear approaches to reading Bergvall are frustrated by the way in which her faithfulness to ‘internal logic’ can elude obvious points of reference and by odd gaps in the way that her work is identified and discussed. For example, just as critics of Denise Riley and the poet herself have been largely silent on her poetry’s engagement with contemporary philosophy, so writers on Bergvall and Bergvall herself have been curiously silent on the explicitly queer nature of some of her works. Sophie Robinson (2009) is a notable exception. Similarly, discussions of Bergvall have tended to ignore the question of how her innovative practice fits with the historical avant-garde. As her interviews with John Stammers and Scott Thurston reveal, this is at the heart of what she calls ‘how to be true to one’s project, to one’s questions, as an artist, as a writer, and not one’s allocated cultural slot’ (Thurston, 2011, 80). Her work is often published outside the UK, both in Europe and Scandinavia or by independent US presses such as Krupskaya and Nightboat Books, and can be hard to obtain. The challenges and rewards that we have just outlined are written into, and through, Éclat (1996). The earliest version of Éclat was commissioned as a site-specific work for the Institution of Rot ‘Literature Live’ series during May 1996 and installed as an audio-guide tour in a Victorian house at 109 Corbyn Street, London. It was published in the same year by the British small press Sound & Language as a 55-page, 150mm square, perfect bound book. The publisher cris cheek reports that this version was approximately two-thirds longer than the original commissioned text, and that this version resulted from ‘a conversational and playful exploration of working on the book’s design and formatting together’ (cheek, 2009, 21). The artist Sally Tallant’s documentation of the original installation became part of the ten-page version of Éclat published in the journal Performance Research (see Brown, 2004, 55). At the time of writing, Éclat is available as a 2004 Ubu Editions e-book, designed in collaboration with Marit Münzberg. Where the Sound & Language version used thick 127
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 127
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces black lines to show walls, doors and a staircase, the e-book version uses yellow lines. Similarly, Éclat ’s explicit interest in what Bergvall calls ‘constructing a writing which acknowledges (not takes it for given) the page environment as its foremost specific context’ (Brown, 2004, 53) is given added emphasis by the e-book’s use of text boxes made up of thick black or grey, solid or broken lines. Bergvall noted, in 1998, that Éclat ‘[is] in part the result of a string of collaborative moments’ and that it ‘has taken so many forms that I couldn’t today trace up an original, the first, the main text of this project.’ (Brown, 2004, 55) Éclat is, then, literally, a virtual text in its e-book form, but it is also virtual because it exists both across and between its several versions and different contexts of publication. As a text, Éclat uses non-verbal elements such as the graphic representation of a staircase or page of speech marks. One page (page 22 in the Sound & Language version) has a footnote for which there is no primary text. Not every page is numbered and, where page numbers are printed, they follow no regular position pattern and are often incorporated into the text. Grey, black and partially obliterated text is used. The Sound & Language version also exploits and incorporates the possibilities of show-through from one page to another. Such features are another means of articulating the text’s concerns. These concerns include: precision and imprecision/definition and blurring; presence and absence; instructions/fixatives versus their opposites; occupation; cloned and reconstructed bodies; inside and outside the body, connected with internalisation and externalisation; and queer textual spaces. The following extracts show how some of these concerns come together: You’ve reached the first landing. White walls. A regular
spatial arrangement for domestic passage. 5. Where are you not who. Is a regular spatial arrangement for domstic paage. Beyond. That. A couple of. Still. Beyond that. Who lives here. Was a sister a sister. What ap.ears tb. here. A couple of doors. Twins not twins. What you see & what you …’t. Show caution. Ze cloth does make ze monk. (24)
* ”THERE’S NOTHING ON THESE NEGATIVES!” Was this a surpr ise) pendulums not spells (Bah. Was it a surpr… that was a surp. never still long enough to
128
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 128
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces grasp your own contours. You’re not here with any great precisio anyway. -yes no yes no. I’m walkng towards you. Can I see myself who cannot flly see you: Nabokov had a point whose Narcissus [here] you’re no [here] no [here] no [here] no [here] no [here] mistakes his own suicide for a murder. (27)
* Who looks you up and down and sideways. I CAN SEE STRAIGHT THR.... ..U. A sister was not a mister. Was this a surprise. Yes no. It was. A sister was not a mister. Was this a surprise. Yes no it was. A sister was not a mis… Wa this asurp. Ye. Noit wa. A sist wa no mms. Wtis urpr. NYo was. Asist wno m. Tis urp. Yas. (36)
There is a clear emphasis on location, as opposed to identity (‘where […] not who’), and on the page as an environment and space to be walked through and across (‘passage’ loses two letters to become ‘paage’). This relates to a play with ideas of presence and absence: ‘you’ is ‘never still never still long enough to grasp your own contours.’ The ‘[here] you’re no [here]’ line is a clear echo of the famous ‘fort/da’ [gone/ there] game in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Our occupation of a domestic space involves continual cycles of departure and return. The three extracts also demonstrate what Marjorie Perloff has identified in Bergvall’s work generally as an Oulipian ‘desire to decompose words so that their phonemic, morphemic and paragrammatic properties emerge’. Bergvall, Perloff continues, ‘takes the semantic to be produced aurally and visually’ and plays with the fact that ‘what is sounded cannot be properly seen ’ (Perloff, 2004, 41, 42 [emphasis in the original]). And the opposite is true, we might add. Being ‘properly seen’ relates to how Éclat questions ideas of domestic space – space that demands, in the words of an earlier section, ‘we carry & conduct ourselves as if originating from resolved gender and normal art.’ (Bergvall, 1996, 13) ‘Domstic’ in the first of our quoted passages looks back to the earlier ‘Wonderment domastication’ (Bergvall, 1996, 13). As Sophie Robinson argues, Éclat takes both domestic space and the space of the book as a home for words and makes ‘a politicised social space in which neither writer nor reader are always at ease’ (Robinson, 2009, 4). There is an 129
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 129
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces element of the unheimlich here, although Robinson does not use that term. ‘Resolved gender and normal art’ can also be related to the ‘sister/ mister/surprise’ material in the three extracts which echoes a famous passage in the ‘Rooms’ section of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914): The sister was not a mister. Was this a surprise. It was. The conclusion came when there was no arrangement. All the time that there was a question there was a decision. Replacing a casual acquaintance with an ordinary daughter does not make a son. (Stein, 1997, 44)
It is possible to read Tender Buttons as a coded lesbian narrative or, as Lisa Ruddick suggests, as a coded account of Stein’s break with her brother Leo and the start of her relationship with Alice B. Toklas (Ruddick, 1990, 191). Tender Buttons certainly registers a struggle with the heterosexualised and conventionally feminised discourse of domestic arrangements; indeed, the opening words of ‘A Table’ from the ‘Objects’ section signify this shift: ‘A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it likely that a change’ (Stein, 1997, 15). Stein’s text, then, on one level, is about the search for a new language for new domestic arrangements. Reading Tender Buttons and Éclat together underlines Bergvall’s relationship with the historical avant-garde. Tender Buttons poses still largely unanswered questions about the gendered nature of language and, particularly, how gendered language constructs domestic space and vice versa. Éclat ’s use of a domestic setting shows how the avant-garde cannot, contra Peter Burger, be said to have been domesticated by its availability as another style. Tender Buttons is also concerned with movement between inside and outside the body: with what the body produces and how its inner feelings are to be externalised in the world of objects. Just as Stein’s text contains references to menstruation, urination and bowel movements, so Bergvall’s text contains a passage where ‘you’ exclaims I! be! could! happy! here! and quickly lift up your and pull down your and squat and press out your happening vaginals, your instinctual drive, your cultural reticence, your dutiful intelligence, your cautious elaborations, your impeccable taste, in shots of urine all over the surface of this very perfect spot. (Bergvall, 1996, 43)
It is almost as if the passage sets out to both say and do explicitly everything that Tender Buttons sets out to say and do covertly. Éclat marks a territory in much the same way that Stein’s concern 130
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 130
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces with stains and marks evokes images of writing as marks of an internal process, not a finished cultural product. Bergvall’s text goes even further with its exploration of inner and outer space: (On the way up to the second landing, you’re thinking that Aaah that was a to fit oneself perfectly quite is one thing but to deploy insides out one’s own extensiveness now that’s now that’s) (Bergvall, 1996, 45)
Éclat seems to suggest that the answer to how ‘to deploy insides out one’s own extensiveness’ is to reconceptualise the body. Where Stein sought to reconceptualise domestic spaces, Bergvall seeks to reconceptualise the body that can inhabit such reconceptualised space or, rather, to reconceptualise body and space as each other. The text climaxes (literally) with a lesbian sexual encounter in which desire changes the physical locale: Was a she a she now lying on the sofaaa. Seems to be talking takes up more room laughs as clicks open a fully clit clot clited like a fat cigar, the sofa’s popping out are the walls extruding the air seems hotter, tighter. She or she is pressing with her fingers and pulls the flaps apart. Coming out fast, she’s conversing face down across a table her legs pushing a handful of her own up her indescribably big, her space-surround ambient organum. (Bergvall, 1996, 49)
Body and locale put each other into activation through locale becoming the place of desire. After the moment of orgasm in an unpunctuated passage that mixes together mouths, cunts, throats and ‘Mary immaculate’:
131
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 131
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces
Your skin pops back to its curr ent conv entio nal dime nsio ns with a shlu rpy soun d
(Bergvall, 1996, 53)
But even this apparent return to conventionality involves language being differently articulated. So the question remains: if you really could bring out everything that was inside you, what would that mean? How would it mean? There are references to ‘reconstructed flesh’, ‘interchangeable body parts’, ‘who-what are you cloning one limb at a time like’ and ‘This 3rd arm of yours’ (Bergvall, 1996, 13, 30, 42, 46). These look forward to the cloned and differently articulated bodies of one of Bergvall’s most important texts Goan Atom (2001). As in Goan Atom, there is a clear reference to Hans Bellmer and his doll images in the phrase ‘interchangeable body parts’. Bellmer’s photographs of his perverse recompositions of his doll’s body raise questions of artistic form (how is the body usually portrayed?) as well as questions of corporeal form. Bellmer wrote that he wanted to make explicit ‘what I called the physical unconscious, the body’s underlying awareness of itself.’ (Tiffany, 2000, 92) We have already seen numerous examples in Éclat of language being treated as recomposable parts in order to reveal what we might call a spatial unconscious. This unconscious converges with what Sophie Robinson, drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work in Queer Phenomology, calls an examination of ‘how “orientation” is variable and biased towards white heterosexual experience.’ (Robinson, 2009, 2) However, the implications of Bellmer’s ‘physical unconscious’ have a different emphasis and raise such questions as ‘is the body a given or a potentiality?’; ‘is identity stable or a question of articulations and positions?’; and ‘is representation about the world as it exists or about unconscious potentials?’ 132
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 132
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces The most recent publication of Goan Atom can be found within the ‘new and selected’ volume Meddle English (2011). Epigraphs from Frank O’Hara, Marcel Duchamp and Bergvall evoke queer sexuality, art and shitting and the body as polymorphous. Goan Atom, like many of Bergvall’s works, has been published in a number of different versions. Early versions appeared as the book Jets-Poupée (1999) and as ‘Les Jets de la Poupée’ in the Oxford Anthology of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry (2001). The version published in Meddle English incorporates a reworking of Ambient Fish, an installation text from the 1990s. This means that, as with other Bergvall works, it is not only the form and contents that change but also the focus and effect. It also means that, perhaps uniquely in contemporary poetry, critical responses are often limited by particular manifestations of a work. As Drew Milne observed in a July 2000 review of the 1999 publication: ‘Future parts of Goan Atom may reveal the relevance of the political geography of Goa and an-atom-y’ (Milne, 2000, 2). The ‘Caroline Bergvall’ who exists critically and textually is also, uniquely, a work in progress. This seems appropriate for a work that deals with identity. Keith Tuma, introducing ‘Les Jets de la Poupée’ for the Oxford anthology, saw a poem ‘situated exactly at the center of questions destined to be crucial in the twentyfirst century and involving sexuality, technology, agency, ethics, and identity.’ (Tuma, 2001, 912) For Drew Milne, ‘the book’s alternatively erotic games also foreground the performative slipperiness of the subject’ (Milne, 2000, 3). Ian Davidson also focuses on the text’s erotic aspects and reads its references to slits as examples of what Lacan calls ‘erotogenic’ zones – that is, the areas of the body where there are cuts, gaps and slits. These mark, for Lacan, points of crossing between inside and outside and sites of cultural regulation (Kennedy and Tuma, 2002, 142). Goan Atom is slippery enough to elude many readers. Bergvall’s note to the Meddle English version references Hans Bellmer, Dolly the cloned sheep, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu plays, Unica Zurn’s anagrams, Cindy Sherman, Louise Bourgeois, Gertrude Stein and Georges Bataille (Bergvall, 2011, 163). There are other allusions that she does not note: the coded diaries of Anne Lister, for example, and Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’. All this assumes a pre-existing cultural foundation in the reader that is at once very broad and extremely specialised. For readers who recognise these references, it might be possible to read Goan Atom as, for example, a linguistic equivalent to a range of art practices and/or a reworking of aspects of the historical avant-garde. Similarly, the text can be read as an attempt to mimic in language the transformative nature of an encounter with those sources. Even so, some of the text seems designed to defeat reading silently or reading out loud, as in the five pages which feature a single lowercase ‘s’ ascending from lower to upper right (Bergvall, 2011, 82–86) or in this passage: 133
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 133
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces s pleine didely Suc ha clever holly polie penny sits on the cha irk daisy stickin gout and a big bal looms in the cranny (Bergvall, 2011, 87)
It is hard to make the text cohere because a lot of it remains enigmatic. This is paradoxical because it is clearly highly organised and composed. An example of this is the grids that open the work proper. These are composed of the titles of three subsections – ‘Cogs’, ‘Fats’ and ‘Gas’ – and produce, in the first grid, the word ‘Sofa’ in the right-hand column, but nonsense in the other two columns. The second grid reproduces the subsection titles read from the bottom up. The letters might have been rearranged to produce ‘Cats’, say, or ‘Toss’ or ‘Ass’. One assumes that the point here, in part, is that, just as Bellmer’s rearticulated doll might or might not produce a recognisable body, so Bergvall’s linguistic remodulations may or may not produce meaning. The question is an erotic and linguistic one: how does one get one’s tongue around this? A text that refers to ‘a dirty doldo’, ‘fanny face’, ‘workable pussy’ and ‘Ambient fish fuckflowers bloom in your mouth’ repeated four times (Bergvall, 2010, 90, 93, 99, 116) is clearly focused on the ins and outs of pleasure. It also clearly sets out, as Milne notes, to ‘[challenge] dominant reading practices associated with “seriousness” and the sexual politics implicit in types of avant garde textuality’ (Milne, 2000, 2). The challenge to seriousness is obvious enough, but Milne’s other point is more provocative and sets one off making a quick mental checklist of sexuality in experimental poetries. No, one thinks, there is not, for example, much ‘workable pussy’ in Allen Fisher’s poetry. In this context, ‘fanny face’ might be a riposte to a range of poetic practices that are quite po-faced when it comes to sexuality or seem largely unaware of what might be termed ‘s/textuality’. Indeed, the more one reads Goan Atom and considers Bergvall’s work generally, one starts to think that it is breaking a particular set of taboos within experimental textual practices. It is notable that the profound changes in interpersonal relationships and sexual identities from the mid-1960s onwards, which are charted in a book like David Cohen’s Being a Man (1990), hardly feature as subject matter in the poetry of the British Poetry Revival or in most experimental poetry written after it. Work by Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Denise Riley would be highly visible exceptions. 134
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 134
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces To return to getting one’s tongue round Goan Atom, it does register other profound changes. In a 2008 lecture given as part of the California College of the Arts (CCA) Graduate Lecture series, Bergvall notes that ‘readers are first and foremost listeners’ who participate in an ongoing ‘radical shift in perspective’ from ‘the eye to the ear, from the seen to the heard’. This suggests that Goan Atom might be essentially lifeless on the page. Or to put it another way, it is a set of variations whose initial theme can only be discerned by hearing the variations performed. As Bergvall writes in the essay ‘Middling English’: My personal sense of linguistic belonging was not created by showing for the best English I can speak or write, but the most flexible one. To make and irritate English at its epiderm, and at my own. Something crosses over comes. (Bergvall, 2011, 18)
There is perhaps something here of what Jared Wells sees in Bergvall’s ‘Via: 48 Dante Variations’ – a Deleuzian minorisation of a major language by subjecting its apparently authoritative structures to performative variations so that meaning is replaced by continual becoming (Wells, 2010, 2). The reader, then, is invited to perform and experience Bergvall’s flexibility and self-creation, but this raises an awkward question. To what extent can reading a text like Goan Atom really create a multi-lingual and performative reader who is not already both multi-lingual and performative? The reader who does not already self-identify in those ways will have a reading experience that is barely tolerable because of resistance: the resistance of the text to mono-lingual and non-performative readings and the resistance that the reader experiences within themselves in response to the non-standard text. Indeed, one is tempted to skim through the text for places to, in its own words, Lean on facts in favour in cited Hold on to pRoven limbs when hitting on drifting object mater (Bergvall, 2011, 110)
In the interview given to Scott Thurston, Bergvall says that ‘primarily I consider the piece to be an abstract play’ and that ‘It also shows my interest in how plays as a literary form reproduce speech, or rather, stage it’ (Thurston, 2011, 95, 96). It might be more correct to say that it is about how the body is staged through speech. The text also stages a range of bodies: erotic, artistic, queer, military and maternal. The implication seems to be that it is only culture and language that keeps them separate and categorised. Having performed a polymorphously perverse blurring, the text seems to yearn for change: 135
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 135
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces Rub the genie tales Some dream off kin for kind want a better make (Bergvall, 2011, 120)
But in the end, Goan Atom remains defiantly performative: And the spac eB ween’s solids & the spac in solDis peed s Peech (Bergvall, 2011, 121)
‘Space between’ is highly relevant to Cropper (Kropper) which exists in three versions (2006, 2008 and 2010) and is, in Bergvall’s own words, ‘an autobiographical take on multilingualism.’ (Thurston, 2011, 97) The text combines English, Norwegian and, in the 2010 version, French. The 2006 version (Etter, 2010, 89–95) is more conceptual, more explicitly writing about writing. Although there is extensive evocation of Bergvall’s own experience of living across and between languages, the primary focus is on the author’s description of attempting and failing to write Cropper. Within this descriptive flow there are clear moods and emotions: frustration, anxiety, procrastination and incapacity. Bergvall imagines impossible texts: ‘three texts that a reader wouldn’t be able to read but could perceive, three texts that would function perceptually, as perceptual texts, hand-coloured blotches’ (Etter, 2010, 93). The reading of such texts ‘would rest primarily on the experience of density and contrasts’, and ‘the texts would enhance linguistic recognition at the level of a neurological response’ (Etter, 2010, 93). Her conception then changes to texts that ‘could in fact be read but would by virtue of their seductive visual organisation, mostly be viewed glanced at, their visual look edging towards verbal meaning’ (Etter, 2010, 93). The text that describes the failure to write a text and imagines impossible works comprises paragraphs of English, punctuated only by commas and ending with dashes, which are interrupted by short emboldened phrases in Norwegian. Reading Cropper out loud highlights how its movement between the two languages invites an identification of expression: the ‘I’ of the reader performs, and thereby temporarily becomes, the ‘I’ of the author. We are orchestrated through the two languages into becoming two Bergvalls – one English, one Norwegian. The short Norwegian tags – for example, ‘nå som en er kroppslig’ or ‘som en stadig er’ – are invitations to try a bit of Norwegian for oneself, to sound it out. This becomes more marked in the middle section, which Bergvall calls ‘anthemic’ (Thurston, 2011, 97), where English and Norwegian sentences are placed in an antiphonal relationship:
136
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 136
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces Some never had a body to call their own before it was taken away – som hadde aldri en kropp de kunne kalle sin egen før den ble revet bort
Some never had a chance to feel a body as their own before it was taken away – som fikk aldri oppleve en kropp som sin egen før den ble revet bort
(Etter, 2010, 91)
Reading this out loud becomes both a musical experience and a strange mouth-and-body experience for those who do not speak Norwegian. The reader tries to make links between the two languages, and this becomes a very physical thing. As readers, we ‘live’ through our own performance, which is something close to what Bergvall has experienced and addresses in Cropper. We are aware that sound groups are tied to meaning and the experience of repetition stitches language to experience and identity in general terms. Cropper demands that we perform this and, through performing it, remind ourselves of it. Cropper invites a sequential reading and yet describes again and again different points of entry and false starts: the invitation from the magazine Nypoesi that prompted the work; not being able to find a book that might help the writer get started; initial arrival in London in the late 1980s, and so on. This emphasises the extent to which Cropper and, indeed, many of Bergvall’s other works are not works per se but records of interlocking processes: reading, writing, travelling and performing. The first sections of Cropper are concerned with entry into English and see this in terms of the body. This entry is at once the opportunity to ‘create a developing infancy’ and an anxiety: ‘could I make sure that what I called my body would remain in transit from other languages’ (Etter, 2010, 90). This converges with her comments in the interview with Scott Thurston that an increasing interest is ‘language belonging or cultural belonging’ and that ‘belonging is the main issue of bilingualism or biculturalism’ (Thurston, 2011, 97). Cropper (2006) moves from hands that ‘balloon to the size of small waterbombs’ to an image of diving off the hyphen in French-Norwegian and ‘[waking] up mid-stream, […] streaming, inside the skin, under the skin of her time’ (Etter, 2010, 89, 95). The 2010 version is divided up into three sections: ‘Corpus’, ‘Croup’ and ‘Crop’. ‘Corpus’ is a single page printed with ‘show through’ of the first page of ‘Croup’, with the middle of the sentence removed and only the ascenders and descenders showing. Language is made gestural and reduced to movements and marks that are visible both above and below the line. ‘Croup’ focuses on 137
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 137
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces Bergvall’s entry into three languages: French, Norwegian and English. French is associated with language learned from the mother, Norwegian with an entry into culture and English with an entry into avant-garde poetry and performance subcultures. The language of the 2010 version is fractured and tries to reproduce the English of a trilingual person – for example, ‘valléy’ and ‘déserted’ (Bergvall, 2011, 141). Indeed, the English is, at many points, literally broken: ‘Misprnouncd words sometimes freez up in-btween, dormant sphers intrud on the trajectory of use, sudn trance-outs’ (Bergvall, 2011, 144). But, of course, this may also be the representation of an actual sounding, a real way of speaking. ‘Crop’ reworks the anthemic, antiphonal middle section of the 2006 Cropper so that the English phrases are now accompanied by Norwegian and French versions. What is notable is that the French phrases do not always exactly reproduce the English: Some tried their body on to pleasure in it before it was taken up beaten violated taken away som tok sin kropp på for å nyte den før den ble løftet opp slått krenket revet bort sont ceux au corps choppé violé arraché (Bergvall, 2011, 148)
The French ignores the ‘pleasure’ part of the English phrase. Similarly, ‘[s]ome bodies like languages simply disappear’ becomes ‘disparaissent comme les langues’ (Bergvall, 2011, 150). It is unlikely that there is a simplistic point being made here about things being lost in translation. Rather, the reading ‘I’ is being asked to inhabit the authorial ‘I’ and its experience of being able to move across and between languages.
‘To catch a parsnip’: Elizabeth James and Frances Presley Performance, performativity, blurred identities and virtuality are important aspects of Neither the One nor the Other – a collaboration between Elizabeth James (b.1957) and Frances Presley (b.1952). Both poets have been associated with a broadly London-based experimental scene but have quite distinct practices. Presley’s work is more drawn towards open lyric forms, while James’s is clearly influenced by US Language writing and procedural poetics. Like many of Bergvall’s texts, Neither the One … has multiple manifestations. An authors’ note tells us that: ‘This collaboration was conducted by email, during the financial year 1998–9’ (Presley, 2004, 110). In 1999, it was published as both a sixteen-page chapbook and a CD with music by William Morris. The chapbook and CD are now out of print; however, the collaboration was republished in Frances Presley’s ‘new and selected’ volume Paravane (2004). The collaboration was also published on the HOW2 e-zine 138
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 138
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces website as part of Frances Presley’s article ‘Neither the One Nor the Other : a collaboration by: Frances Presley and Elizabeth James: Working Notes’ (2001). Neither the One … has an epigraph from Luce Irigaray’s essay ‘The Culture of Difference’ (1987): Normally, women only exchange remarks to do with children, food, or perhaps their appearance and sexual exploits. These are not exchangeable objects. Yet to speak well of oneself and others, it helps to be able to communicate about the realities of the world, to be able to exchange something. (Presley, 2004, 95)
This implies that women are normally excluded or self-excluded from dominant mechanisms of cultural exchange. To be able to exchange is to participate in larger economies of access, transmission and recognition. Presley has published two essays on the collaboration and notes that ‘[t]he main antecedents for our type of collaboration are the Dadaist and surrealist collective games’ as ‘a means of defeating logic and rising above personal subjectivity.’ (Kennedy and Tuma, 2002, 173) The collaboration can be read as an updating of historical avant-garde procedures. Presley stresses the improvisational nature of the collaboration and the collaboration as a species of performance (Kennedy and Tuma, 2002, 174). The improvisational feel of the text is often striking: We need to approach the pastoral with care and remember that it’s not a convenient utpoa
we need we need to approach we need to approach the past to approach the past we need we need to approach the pastoral we need to approach the pastoral in a car o approach the pastoral with care we read to poach the pastor to cart toward aporia approach the waste and pare the weed to the core to catch a parsnip and remember that it’s not and remember that it’s not a convent and remember that it’s a con (Presley, 2004, 102–03)
This is tremendous fun, as the two poets bat almost-homonyms (past, pastoral, aporia, parsnip) back and forth to evoke and circulate a range of meanings around and within history, language, religion and 139
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 139
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces environment. In the words of the collaboration, it ‘is an orbiting style’ (Presley, 2004, 108). The CD version allows this play and emergence of meaning to take place in real time for the reader. Collaboration and play may, of course, be one way out of an aporia. There is also extra fun to be had with the sound-spectacle of two female, educated, middleclass, warmly witty and authoritative voices deconstructing language in this way. Voices that speak in a major idiolect are heard in the act of subjecting that idiolect to minorisation. The pastoral passage is one of the more closely worked sections of Neither the One … Elsewhere, the text is often much more fragmentary and, on the page at least, risks seeming diffuse and undeveloped. What the performance on the recording both reveals and emphasises is the collaboration’s thoughtful and explorative nature. A late twentieth-century experimental work will almost inevitably participate in cultural and linguistic deconstruction, but, in fact, whatever subject is introduced into a collaboration is subjected to punning playfulness – for example, ‘the chemise-en-scène’ (Presley, 2004, 105). Language is experienced as a self-consuming desire for itself and becomes a kind of perpetual questioning: ‘what are these other episodes / these other subjects?’ (Presley, 2004, 97) One is reminded of a line from the collaboration between the US language poets Lyn Hejinian and Carla Harryman in The Wide Road (1991–2011): ‘Desires are perceptions more than motives’ (Vickery, 2000, 249). One effect of this is that when ‘I’ appears, it is questioned or mocked: ‘“there is no ego in collaboration” / it seemed egoistic to ask him about it’ and ‘I do & I don’t’ (Presley, 2004, 101, 104). Whatever is voiced is immediately unvoiced or revoiced by the next turn in the collaborative process and by either the originating poet herself or her collaborator’s responses. As Presley notes: ‘[we] acted both as readers and writers, as well as rereaders and rewriters. We were free to respond or not to respond to each other’s contributions’ (Presley, 2001). Nonetheless, subject areas can be tracked through the text. One of these is art and culture. As Presley notes, ‘we shared London’s art spaces’, either together or the same space at different times (Kennedy and Tuma, 2002, 175). There are references to a concert of music by Hildegard of Bingen, an exhibition by Louise Bourgeois, a performance by the Merce Cunningham Company, a pantomime based on Angela Carter’s version of the Cinderella story and Mrs. Brown, a film about Queen Victoria’s relationship with a Scottish servant. Another notable strand is non-verbal expressivity: ‘Reverberations’, ‘mime’, ‘wide melodic leaps’, ‘datasurge’, ‘dance’, ‘the subvocal’ and ‘dum dum dum dum b-dum dum dum dum’ (Presley, 2004, 96, 98, 100, 101, 109). These are things that are languages in themselves or which work under, or in parallel to, language. The other notable strand is a set of references to mothers and maternal inheritance. These references include: ‘mark lines / her eye eyes / poor authority / straight heir / clings to me // ma / man / maudite’ 140
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 140
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces (99); ‘morgan is my / mother’ (100); ‘(post card from my mother)’ (105); ‘My mother could not catch her breath’ (109); and the final line of the collaboration, which echoes the last line of Frank O’Hara’s ‘Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed)’ (O’Hara, 2009, 234): listen ‘oh mother we love you get up’ (109)
The image of one of the collaborators looking into the mirror underlines how the collaboration itself is a form of mirroring: either plain reflection or witty distortion. The jointly produced text and its processes become a place where concerns may be projected and reflected. One is reminded, too, of Michèle Roberts’s poem of a French winter landscape, ‘New Year’s Eve at Lavarone’, in which ‘the myth’s heart’ is ‘a perfect circle / of glazed grey ice’: ‘the mirror / of the mother, she who goes away / comes back, goes away’ (Roberts, 1986, 120). There is a nicely constructed reference to Freud’s famous ‘fort/da’ game. We have not encountered many mothers in the poetry discussed in this book, but, in the context of subvocal rhythms and their possible convergence with Kristeva’s ideas of the choric, it is perhaps not so surprising that mothers rise into the text of Neither the One … Presley’s article emphasises what she calls ‘collaboration in the feminine’ – a title borrowed from a collection of writing within the Canadian journal of women’s writing, Tessera (Presley, 2001). She quotes one of the journal’s editors, Lorraine Weir, who argues that: In setting aside the illusions of closure, completion, stasis, perfection – the ideals of a patriarchal society – we enter the possibility of the open text, the so-called ‘fragment’, the writing of which exists not to valorize its author/ity […] but to be activated in the process of reading/making/collaborating. (Presley, 2001)
The Australian critic Ann Vickery makes a similar point, calling female/ feminist collaboration ‘an imagined space in which identity [can] remain in flux’ (Vickery, 2000, 249). At first sight, this seems perplexing. The open text and fragment are common to experimental writing by both men and women. Are women really more invested in ‘flux’? But what is being proposed, we would suggest, is not a counter-position, but a sense of identity as something that is constantly being put into activation. The ‘we’ of James/Presley is a virtual one, as illusory, ungraspable and perhaps ultimately unknowable in the real spaces of the world as the queer-English-French-Norwegian ‘I’ of Bergvall’s texts. The work of all three writers offers an arresting paradox: it is words fixed on the page that seem to offer the clearest access to the everyday flux of identity.
141
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 141
04/10/2013 10:22:50
Virtual Spaces
Redell Olsen: conceptual writing Redell Olsen (b.1971) has a prominent profile as a critic, editor, poet and teacher. She convenes the MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London, and is managing editor of the important e-zine How2 . Her poetry stands at some distance from most of the work discussed in this book. As Allen Fisher notes in a review of Secure Portable Space (2004), her work ‘develops aspects of concrete poetry, addresses the dematerialisation of objects proposed by some conceptual art’ and ‘considers the machines of Mac Low, Darragh, Cage and Retallack’ and ‘the displays and performances of Susan Howe’ (Fisher, 2005, 1). Secure Portable Space includes the text of ‘Era of Heroes / Heroes of Error’, which is a list of contemporary heroes and superheroes that Olsen read aloud while wearing Mickey Mouse ears and walking in circles around the Bookartbookshop in Pitfield Street, London, on 26 March 2003. Her voice was relayed into the bookshop so people could hear her speaking as she passed them in the street or as they stood in the bookshop. Throughout the performance, a neon sign in the bookshop window alternated between ‘eraofheroes’ and ‘heroesoferror’. The text and accompanying note converges with an important definition of conceptual art in which the description of a work can stand in place of the work itself. Olsen has spoken of her interest in ‘the decision by conceptual artists in the 1970s to replace objects with words and lists’, with the result that ‘what they saw as the dematerialisation of the art object [became] paradoxically a rematerialisation of text and language’ (Olsen, 2005, 1). Secure Portable Space comes with blurbs by Joan Retallack, Carla Harryman and Kristin Prevallet. This locates Olsen firmly within US Language writing as opposed to a British experimental tradition. The language of these blurbs is barely comprehensible, with references to ‘recombinant surprise’, ‘[t]his angle of attention “renders ajar” a full, empathic visibility’ and ‘refigures gender covers’. Retallack, Harryman and Prevallet write Olsen’s work into the specialised discourse of Language criticism – a form of writing that is itself a type of conceptual work standing in place of the work. To borrow from Fisher’s account of conceptual art, language in this type of writing (whether creative or critical) is dematerialised as a carrier and performative medium of meaning and rematerialised as a kind of art object. This type of writing will not answer the question we might pose to Secure Portable Space : ‘what do we have to help us read this?’ However, Kristin Prevallet comes close when she describes Olsen’s writing as ‘stretching poetry’s power and capacity to play with and expose the shapes words make on their way to making meaning.’ Of course, one wants to add that it would be difficult to think of experimental writing that did not claim to do that to some extent. ‘Era of Heroes / Heroes of Error’ suggests 142
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 142
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Virtual Spaces that Olsen’s primary interest may be public language and public space. To put it another way: what kind of language can the individual own and inhabit publicly? And what kind of public language might poetry be, if it is not specifically and obviously lyric? Lyric poetry is, after all, the private, intimate moment of heightened apprehension made public. These sorts of questions seem highly pertinent to the sixteen-part sequence ‘Corrupted by Showgirls’ (Olsen, 2004, 9–34). Film is a medium that claims, among other things, to make the inner life public through physical gesture. It is also the medium that, in the heyday of Hollywood, produced profound emotional affects via mechanical reproduction. The sequence can certainly be read as a gender politicssavvy critique of the representation of women in musicals and film noir. Olsen mingles descriptions of real and imagined films and shots, jumbled synopses and technical instructions from screenplays. Busby Berkeley, Esther Williams, Marlene Dietrich, Alfred Hitchcock and Tom and Jerry all appear, and the film-literate reader will spot references to films such as the Joan Crawford vehicle Mildred Pierce (1945). There is a lot of fun to be had with the writing, such as: This attention to herself instead of the man is the obvious fault of the story. Emit flows of understanding for how she feels about stockings. All the footpaths were closed down for fear of muddy boots. (Olsen, 2004, 17)
In a perceptive review of Secure Portable Space, Edmund Hardy likens Olsen’s compositional procedures to machines: ‘The machine’s operation foregrounds the process of poetry itself, its arrangement & intervals’ (Hardy, 2006, 2). One wonders if Hardy had in mind Sol Lewitt’s famous ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ (1967), which stated that: ‘In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work […] The idea becomes a machine that makes the art’ (Lewitt, 1967, 79). ‘Corrupted by Showgirls’ does contain a remarkable range of references to machines or communication apparatus, but it seems more likely that Olsen is exploring and enjoying the paradox that, in film-making, machines produce and transmit emotion. What the sequence also catches very well is film’s reliance on close-ups of small, but telling, physical gestures for its most powerful emotional effects: ‘hand on the door handle as if to go out and looks up’; ‘she puts her hand to her chin’ (Olsen, 2004, 15, 27). Film, in this aspect of its narrative procedures, turns small physical movements into a powerfully eloquent public language. Indeed, it is able to make movements visible that are usually too small or quick to see. However, whether this ‘says’ anything about poetry as the insignificant made large and valuable or femininity as posed gesture is left unclear. What is certain is that the significant achievement of the sequence rests in its creation of a virtual 143
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 143
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Virtual Spaces cinema that has never previously existed and never could exist except as a textual space. ‘The Minimaus Poems’ also explore textual and virtual spaces in variations on, re-writings of, and writings back to, Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems. This poses a similar question to that raised by a contemporary Britsh artwork, Sarah Lucas’s Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992), which places said foodstuffs on a table in an allusion to a crudely sexualised female body: is it more than just a joke? If the answer to this question is ‘yes’, getting the joke requires an extensive knowledge of Olson and his poem. Olson’s Maximus is an epic poem, and an epic poem is a public space of sorts, although one that is scarcely recognised in contemporary culture. Olson could draw, in part, upon American readers’ recognition of poetry’s public importance, whereas Olsen must, in a British context, necessarily refer to epic form ironically. Olson’s Gloucester, Massachusetts, becomes Olsen’s Gloucester, Gloucestershire. Edmund Hardy sees Olsen’s project as an exploration of ‘the idea of writing a place poem of the Now’ (Hardy, 2006, 6), while Allen Fisher locates it in an overall use of kitsch and bad taste as critique in Secure Portable Space (Fisher, 2005, 3). Such a critique might be urgently needed because there is much that is, as Olsen puts it in ‘Song 3’ of ‘The Songs of Minimaus’, ‘all / wrong’. The song continues: And I am dialed up – dialing myself up (I, too, vector graphic with the spite of it) where going stagnant anywhere is possible, where personal shopping is an art form of trust Sing modemly! Whine! How can we go anywhere, even across-town without our data bodies knowing, (flesh no object) cards in shallow casings singed heartening stories of love and romance our chests across (Olsen, 2004, 89)
Minimaus sings or, more correctly, is an involuntary singing in virtual space. Being or having a ‘data body’ means being turned into a public language in a different kind of public space which is beyond our control. This echoes the ‘datasurge’ that Elizabeth James and Frances Presley have to participate in and the financial year that framed their collaboration (Presley, 2004, 100). These are, perhaps, very modern and very precarious versions of what Caroline Bergvall’s Cropper (Etter, 2010, 89) calls ‘linguistic physiognomy’.
144
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 144
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Chapter 10
Younger Women Poets 1: Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson
Temporalities and chronologies We began this book by suggesting that it is difficult to write a history of women that produces either the contemporary woman or contemporary experimental woman poet. Denise Riley’s designation ‘the temporalities of women’ – that is ‘that identities can only be held for a time’ – seems crucial in understanding how and why that task is difficult (Weed, 1989, 136 [emphasis in the original]). If Riley is right that ‘Woman is placed outside History’, but ‘at the same time thoroughly embedded in and also constitutive of the newer “social”’ sphere, then that embedment places her forever at the edge of something that is changing too quickly and may be simply too ephemeral to be codified as history (Weed, 1989, 138). The task of describing women’s experimental poetry in Britain is complicated further by difficulties in saying what it once was and where it has come from. An argument that such poetry’s own interest in provisionality militates against history not only converges with meta-critical approaches and using provisionality to excuse marginality, but risks homogenising a wide range of practices. With experimental poetry, it is more often the case that, as Caroline Bergvall notes of a moment in her own writing history, ‘contacts and friendships within the circuit evaporated’ (Bergvall, 2005, 113). ‘Circuit’ suggests that temporalities (in Riley’s sense) involve the release and circulation of energies that may or may not continue to have power. 145
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 145
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson What can be described with some certainty are differences between ‘then’ and ‘now’. Poet and translator Glenda George (b.1951) recollects that, when she began writing and publishing at the end of the 1960s, it was doubtful whether the actual environment in what I will call for the sake of brevity the radical arm of poetry was very hospitable to women. […] The tribulations of being a female poet matched quite closely those that women in all walks of life faced at that time in the 60s and 70s and into the 80s. Feminism was a banner under which a lot of women poets pushed their work. (George, personal email, 11 October 2011)
Just to be visible with an autonomous utterance was radical both in and of itself. We have argued for a reassessment of the relationship between feminist and experimental poetry, but it was clearly possible to feel, in George’s words, ‘alienated’, if one was ‘into ideas and theory and experimentation’ and felt one’s poetry ‘to be political in a very off-the-wall sense’ (George, personal email, 11 October 2011). Limited role models are something that Geraldine Monk reports encountering in a different way, noting that, when she began writing, the influence of Sylvia Plath was still overwhelming. Monk argues that Plath’s ‘technical exactitude and stark emotional dissection and brutality were irresistible to a generation of women […] who were discouraged from having any kind of opinion let alone opinions with such a kick’ (Monk, personal email, 6 May 2012). George’s and Monk’s recollections suggest that women’s temporalities have complicated origins and consequences. An interesting case in point is Anna Mendelssohn (1948–2009), who also published under the name Grace Lake and whose poetry is inevitably preceded by the sensational aspects of her biography. Mendelssohn was tried on conspiracy charges as one of the Stoke Newington Eight in 1971, accused of carrying out the bombings attributed to the Angry Brigade. She was one of four accused found guilty of conspiracy and was given a prison sentence of ten years, of which she only served four. This unbalances any reading of her poetry, because it is difficult not to read either ‘My attentive concern for stolen time’ or ‘Interrogated, relentlessly / & remorselessly, until one is too weak / to move’ (Mendelssohn, 2000, 9, 84) as speaking directly about those specific experiences. Indeed, the continuing silence of the Stoke Newington Eight and their friends and supporters since the 1970s (Hilary Creek’s interview with The Observer in 2002 is a notable exception) has the effect of making the poetry the only extensive public utterance by any of the Angry Brigade’s alleged members. This puts Mendelssohn’s poetry in the unique position of evoking in its readers the desire for particular types of revelation. As Eleanor Careless argues: ‘Although 146
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 146
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson a biographical reading risks simplification, frequent autobiographical references in Mendelssohn’s writing encourage an association between poet and persona’ (Careless, 2011, 45). Creative work starts to acquire something like documentary value. One of the poetry’s most striking features is its confessional and autobiographical forcefulness, as in ‘I was the object of her hatred. I object / to being hated’ or ‘[i]t is / no disgrace for a practising artist to attend a formally chaired meeting / on Equal Opportunities for Women’ (Mendelssohn, 2000, 22, 77). Implacable Art contains numerous references to children and child-rearing (Mendelssohn had a son and two daughters) and also contains a recurring narrative of the female self dealing with various public agencies and feeling oppressed by their need to label. As the two quotations suggest, there is also an explicit narrative of this self being oppressed by other women. At the same time, Mendelssohn’s poetry works to unbalance any settled reading from the start, with its sudden movements between a suffering body and psyche and what Peter Riley’s Guardian obituary calls the ‘ecstatic and expostulatory’ (Riley, 2009). The poetry collected in Implacable Art (2000) presents a persona deeply immersed in art, aesthetics and the pleasures of language. There are no simple answers to questions such as ‘what kind of poet is she?’ and ‘what place does she have as a poet?’ However, the answer to the second question is becoming clearer. The Paper Nautilus (October 2011) ran a special feature on her work, alongside new poetry by Marianne Morris and Frances Kruk, two younger poets, whose work seems equally invested in mixing the personal and political, the aesthetic and discursive, the rhetorical and emotional. As in Mendelssohn’s poetry, there is a powerful sense of the poet letting thoughts come and go, as if they do not belong to her, to the extent that thoughts and feelings become objects with which she can realign her relationship. The energy of Mendelssohn’s poetry, then, seems to have consequences in a different timespace to her chronology. Her poetry, published primarily between 1988 and 1997, seems to look back to earlier generations’ struggle for autonomous utterance and forwards to a poetry which embodies energy that challenges what Emily Critchley terms ‘dilemmatic boundaries’ (Critchley, 2006, 5). The challenging of such boundaries has much to do with the contemporary experimental poetry scene’s staging in and through the academic world. The younger women poets who we will discuss in this and the following chapter are poet-critics and, primarily, scholars of literature who are interfaced with academia and have careers in the public articulation of cultural ideas. So while we are not, of course, arguing that Anna Mendelssohn should be regarded as a younger women poet, we are suggesting that her poetry and its largely delayed critical reception reveals much about the temporalities of women. The Paper Nautilus shows creative and critical practice as the practice of community. In contrast, what Mendelssohn’s 147
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 147
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson poetry often speaks to most powerfully is the difficulty of holding an identity in the social sphere, if the social sphere is all you have to rely on. In the words of ‘at the moment’, ‘clasping the sight of art to shore up civilization, I do that, with a desire that makes me reel with vertigo’ (Mendelssohn, 2000, 66). Without community, how is one to challenge the fact that ‘life has been made to / lose for any who have not chosen / to belong to anti-life’? (Mendelssohn, 2000, 123) Mendelssohn’s poetry registers an experience of the social as profoundly dilemmatic because it is full of possibilities of experiencing oneself as abject. The challenging of Critchley’s dilemmatic boundaries also has other effects. So, for example, Andrea Brady describes how her poems plot ‘the contour lines of international argument as ripples and distortions of the local’ (Etter, 2010, 148). This finds an echo not only in the atmosphere of personal and global trauma that pervades Marianne Morris’s Tutu Muse, but also in her comment that ‘the only reasonable way in which I am capable of explaining my poetry is – as movement-’ (Etter, 2010, 193). Movement as a definition of poetics also appears in notes by both Sophie Mayer and Rachel Lehrman (Etter, 2010, 164, 170). The emphasis on ‘movement’ is reminiscent of Joseph Beuys’s theory of sculpture, in which Bewegung (movement) is a transformative axis between chaos and order; undetermined and determined; organic and crystalline; warm and cold; and expansion and contraction (Rosenthal, 2004, 25). It is also possible to discern a focus on physicality and renewed concern with emotion, whether written straight or critiqued as what Sophie Robinson terms ‘the concept of “feeling”’ (Etter, 2010, 201).
‘Daughter’s inconsequence unloosed’: Emily Critchley’s quest for presence Jennifer Cooke’s ‘Steel Girdered Her Musical’ uses alternative social fictions of the female/feminine as a starting point for exploring the facts and fictions of truly radical political action (as we shall see in the next chapter). The poetry of Emily Critchley (b.1980) is also tightly focused on pre-existent roles for woman. Her approach is perhaps more explicitly feminist because she sees these roles as the products of professionalised patriarchy as well as Cooke’s culturally privileged ‘masculogic’. The note that originally accompanied her poems on the Archive of the Now website spoke of rejecting the phenomenon, rife in Cambridge (though prevalent elsewhere too), of a kind of gratuitous self-promotion amongst men: would-be establishers of ‘a Tradition’, which boils down to little more than intellectual arrogance & cliquishness. Disgust with/observation of these male attitudes, along with my long-term academic interest in feminism, collide with/slide into
148
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 148
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson the fact of my father’s mental collapse (& subsequent sectioning) … (accessed 14 September 2006)
In this context, Critchley’s poetry both poses and tries to answer a big question: how can the female/feminine be embodied as triumphant assertion? As Critchley noted in her introduction to These Pages Are Marked by Women: Anthology of the Contemporary Experimental Women’s Poetry Festival 2006, in contrast to male writers, it seems to be all too easy for women to fall out or be kept ‘out of the loop of critical explanation and/or self-promotion’. She goes on to quote the late Leslie Scalapino’s observation, that, apparently, women ‘must speak a language recognised as discourse before it can be regarded as public & germane’ (Critchley and Pattison, 2006, 5). This kind of demand causes some women to opt out of the loop. The work of US women Language writers, like Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian, is a constant source of reference for Critchley, and she has written that: ‘American daring, largesse even (from Pound to Berryman, Olson to Mayer) is something I’ve long since been drawn to in poetry’ (Etter, 2010, 176). Critchley also remarked in an email to one of the authors of this study, that, as a beginning poet, she found the older generation of British women experimental poets to be largely invisible and/or inaccessible. Critchley’s work can be characterised, then, as feminist in the sense that is recognisable as regards British feminist poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, but with this feminism somehow filtered through Language writing’s sense of poetry as a mode of production complicit with capitalism’s power relations. Our discussion of Critchley’s poetry focuses on ‘When I Say I Believe Women …’, which is probably the key text in her œuvre. By our reckoning, it has appeared at least seven times in different locations (magazine, chapbook and the Internet) and variant forms over the last ten years. This, in turn, emphasises how Critchley’s career, like that of many other younger women experimental poets, is contemporaneous with a new surge of small press publishing and reading series. The frequency of the poem’s utterance makes it into a point around which things happen or can be focused – for example, the Cambridge festival of 2006. The poem attempts to counter women’s invisibility by combining the creative/poetic with the academic/critical. The poem seeks a unity of the two, which will, in turn, provide a poetic solution to a pressing life problem: the work of being a woman writer in this form within this milieu. The poem is both an imaginative remedy for women falling or being kept out of the loop of critical explanation and self-promotion and an example of opting out of the loop. Crucially, it exemplifies what Critchley identifies in her e-book Dilemmatic Boundaries: Constructing a Poetics of Thinking in the work of, amongst others, Kathleen Fraser, Carla Harryman and Leslie Scalapino, as a decision ‘to theorize “differently”, that is to say, poetically’ (Critchley, 149
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 149
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson 2006, 5). The scare quotes around ‘differently’ alert us to the fact that this decision is conscious of similar attempts in poststructuralism and deconstructionism. The ‘differment’ that ‘remains, remains and’ as something unknowable and barely sayable at the end of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s ‘On reading Mr. Melville’s Tales ’ is here given a partial berth in both poetry and theory. The poem can be said to articulate a longing for integrity as a woman, writer and academic. Critchley has noted both similarities (for example, male careerism) and tensions (British doubts over epistemological rigour) between Language writing and Cambridge (Etter, 2010, 176). We would argue that this is what, in part, makes ‘When I Say I Believe Women…’ a highly unusual space that questions conventions, lines and demarcations by presenting short paragraphs of declamatory text with footnotes and discursive notes in the left-hand margin, both of which are often presented under erasure. The text is presented to us as something that is simultaneously completely transparent and entirely compromised. There is no indication of when to leave the main text and enter the margin or footnotes. Different levels of talking and thinking are mimed by the relation of main text, marginal note and footnote. The footnotes make the poem look like academic discourse, but the main text is an unstable combination of complaint and manifesto. There is tension between apparently learned apparatus, the personalised language that is sometimes put into that apparatus and the main text’s use of ‘gut’, ‘puke’ and ‘bullshit’. Similarly, the poem is full of questions that are generally not signalled by question marks. There are emphatic uses of language, such as italics and capitals, and the text is given a sense of urgency through the use of ampersands instead of ‘and’. The effort required to read and navigate through the text means that we receive it very much as work. ‘I would long to work on soundly besides’ says the narrator at one point, and there is a sense of women’s work as literary work and work with language (Etter, 2010, 184). This is what women must do and where they must start. And this work is paralleled by traditional women’s work: ‘nursing & cooking & following you around’ (Etter, 2010, 181). Other strands can also be traced. ‘When I Say I Believe Women…’ is a very ‘hot’ poem: images of burning, fire, heat and cooking occur throughout, as in Section 6: Woman’s a floating island round an imperfectly-baked dessert. In an oven you get burnt. Is this too obvious are you getting warm or even angry. This isn’t metaphorical, I mean it to be true statements, shook up like inside hurt. (Etter, 2010, 182 [emphasis in the original])
150
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 150
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson This can be read as an example of what Lyn Hejinian has termed ‘an integrated style’ and what Leslie Scalapino called ‘poetic-critical theory’ (Critchley, 2006, 14), but its emphasis on ‘true statements’, as opposed to metaphor, is a way of resisting how easily woman can be shut away into existing systems of representation. The ‘hurt’ in ‘When I Say I Believe …’ is clearly different to the post-traumatic hurt that ‘lies everywhere’ and permeates every affective realm in Marianne Morris’s poetry. But it does converge with aspects of Jennifer Cooke’s ‘Steel Girdered’. For both Cooke and Critchley, the acts and place of consumption and sustenance are an agonised setting, where personal agony is related to both social agony and questions of hypocrisy and injustice. As in Cooke’s sequence, this leads Critchley to questions of space: space that is habitable or from which one is excluded; or space that is a possibility or a constraint. This is mimed by the poem’s layout, which causes the reader to feel both possibility and constraint. As we have already noted, the main paragraphs are set high up on the page with a wide left-hand margin, but can feel strangely hemmed in by both marginal notes and footnotes – notes which themselves are often erased like cancelled possibilities. ‘Space’ appears four times in the poem – three times it is capitalised – and is, of course, partly the space that the poem makes for itself by exploring how ‘to theorize “differently”’. But it also evokes the limitations (‘There is almost no SPACE left’) and temptations (‘The hostile space around each name beckons’) of existing cultural spaces. Spaces have boundaries that are either policed by others or invite us to police ourselves so that those boundaries are internalised. The poem’s second stanza asks: ‘Were you never crushed & leant on by another? I guess that’s why my weariness comes from & distends’ (Etter, 2010, 178). This echoes Veronica ForrestThomson’s weariness in ‘The Garden of Prosperine’, which, in turn, refers to Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’. Critchley’s line is a skewer going back through time and through poetry’s history. This referentiality is central to ‘When I Say I Believe Women …’, which obsessively repeats and reworks its own materials, so that each piece of main text becomes a new context and the sequence itself becomes something akin to a chamber with echoes. Critchley’s observation that ‘at times the effect is supposed to trample even the poetry’s thinking’ (Etter, 2010, 176) converges with the strategy of simultaneous voicing and unvoicing that we identified at the beginning of this study. This is mirrored by the way that the sequence’s addressee – an unnamed ‘you’ – becomes polymorphous. As the speaker herself says: ‘Whenever I write you it blends & morphs into so many others’ (Etter, 2010, 179); a morphing that becomes more pronounced the further that the writing drifts from formality. The sequence’s existence as a chamber with echoes is also emphasised by the fact that its primary locale is temporal. ‘When’ or ‘whenever’ recur throughout and usually signal a new examination of the same or similar material. But through that re-examination, each 151
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 151
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson ‘when’ or ‘whenever’ becomes a kind of portal back through time, which, like the oblique evocation of Tennyson, allows for a refocusing on the present. And what this looking back and refocusing reveal is often felt in the body: the speaker’s ‘weariness […] distends’ (that is, swells due to internal pressure); thinking about academic power networks makes her ‘laugh and puke’; and the speaker wonders whether ‘women have a subordinated relationship to power in their guts’ (Etter, 2010, 179, 177). We have already noted Maggie O’Sullivan’s interest in ‘voices that are […] reduced by ascendant systems of centrality and closure’ (Brown, 2004, 159). The opening stanza of ‘When I Say I Believe Women …’ asserts: ‘When I say there is a centre into which exclusion bends I mean nothing ’ (Etter, 2010, 177 [emphasis in the original]). But where O’Sullivan’s work has, on her own admission, started to move towards a position similar to Eva Hesse’s desire for ‘non art, non connotive, / non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non, nothing’ (Salt, 2011, 203, 212), Critchley remains sharply focused on how culture already has an infinite number of ‘non’ positions available for women. ‘I don’t know about presence (metaphysically), I never felt any’, she writes in stanza 3. Precisely where and how presence is to be felt is what drives this remarkable sequence and its footnotes and erasures. Theorising ‘differently’ is one place to start.
‘remember losses all over losses ourselves’: Sophie Robinson’s elegies The poetry of Sophie Robinson (b.1985) has some immediately identifiable and striking features: ampersands, dashes, square brackets, words capitalised for emphasis and contractions, such as ‘w/out’. Robinson studs this syntactical surface with words and phrases which are simultaneously familiar and neologistic, such as ‘traxx’, ‘nocturno-suspicious’, ‘betamax tears’, ‘quelle-o-matic’ and ‘thirst-o-rama’ (Byrne and Pollard, 2009, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145). She is also an enthusiastic coiner of new verbs: the speaker of ‘Preshus’ (Robinson, 2010, n.p.) ‘must remember to ART’. These words and phrases disrupt her poems. There is a nod to surrealism here in the sense of disparate things meeting in an incongruous environment and a phrase like ‘malachite bellies’ seems to evoke decadent and symbolist practices. On a simple level, these features perform Robinson’s desire to express ‘my subjective relation to the world […] in non-standard ways’ and ‘begin a process of writing and rewriting which untangles’ the personal and everyday ‘from habitual language, or complicates them, in order to explore the politics around them and the implications of the given’ (Etter, 2010, 201). At the same time, the regular references to vomit (both as action and matter), which we also find in the work of both Jennifer Cooke and Emily Critchley, suggest that the ‘politics’ around the personal and 152
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 152
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson the everyday is a powerful affect that causes the self to experience itself as abject. Robinson’s poetry registers politics partly as a felt environment, which is variously ‘a century of the self defiled’, ‘the freak economy’, ‘postwar thirst-o-rama’ and ‘the end of days’ (Byrne and Pollard, 2009, 141, 143, 145; Robinson, 2010, n.p.). Our account might suggest something grim and rebarbative, but, as ‘postwar thirsto-rama’ might suggest, the reading experience is closer to Andrew Duncan’s description of Grace Lake’s poetry: ‘The poet constantly raises punishments and accusations only to ridicule them. We see an administration falling apart, its fictions sent up and set as skits, with no trace of a new one coming down the road’ (Duncan, 1997, 7). The ‘administration’ is represented in Robinson’s poetry by reference to a bewildering range of locations, methods and sites of cultural and economic production: film, post-war, radio, timeshare, industrial, media, flea markets, history, billboards, urban cosmos and century. There is some passing similarity to the post-traumatic arenas of discourse in Marianne Morris’s Tutu Muse, but Robinson’s references remain both fleeting and conceptual. There is a passing similarity, too, with Morris’s emphasis on ‘hurt’ or as Emily Critchley has it, quoting Terry Eagleton, on registering ‘psychic fragmentation and social alienation as […] wounding.’ (Critchley, 2011a, 6) Robinson’s poems in the Bloodaxe anthology Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, in Carrie Etter’s Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets and in her chapbook The Lotion share a language of cutting, razors and scars. Robinson’s focus is, though, very different from Morris’s. First, her poetry inhabits a world where the failure of the ‘administration’ forces the self to live as the interrelation of body, time and locale which we proposed at the outset of this study. The loose sonnet ‘Geometry No.1’ portrays its addressee as both lost in and surviving temporal and economic forces. You are ‘missing out’, yet ‘the crude urban / cosmos misses you’. In ‘Disorder’, the poem’s location, ‘this place’, is ‘a tiny / lobe of history’ (Byrne and Pollard, 2009, 140, 141, 142). The primary connotations of ‘lobe’ are bodily, either a rounded projection of a body part or organ or a division of an organ marked off by a fissure on the surface. However, the image does more than suggest that history is a body that we inhabit. The two meanings of lobe suggest that history is both external and internal. Later in the poem, an unnamed ‘she’ ‘screams w/ / disease & time & nothingness’, and ‘memories’ are ‘wired into your knees’ (Byrne and Pollard, 2009, 140–41, 142). There is something similar happening in ‘anecdotally yours’ where the choice is between ‘[c]utting holes in ourselves’ or purchasing ‘large desktop organisers to // store our recollections of the past’ (Etter, 2010, 202). Finally, in ‘duet in darkness’, the body of the second speaker produces a ‘damp heaviness of discourse weighing up / our universal meat’, where ‘universal’ has clear temporal connotations, as well as internalising categories that ignore difference (Byrne and Pollard, 2009, 145). 153
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 153
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson Second, her poetry explores and inhabits what ‘our schizoid isolation’ – isolation produced by the failing culture – does to poetry as both the place of solitary self-possession and safe location of desire. It is not surprising that one of the writers that she most admires is Frank O’Hara, a poet who explores desire and loss in a kind of perpetual ‘fort / da’ game. However, as William Watkin points out in a careful rereading of Freud’s famous game, the real game when talking about loss is ‘proximity/metonymy’ (Watkin, 2004, 164–65, 194–95). For Watkin, ‘proximity’ is best understood by the title of Frank O’Hara’s poem ‘A Step Away From Them’. The poet’s dead friends – Bunny Lang, John Latouche and Jackson Pollock – ‘are close, just a step away, but what a step he seems to be suggesting, a distance wide enough to remove their presence from our world permanently.’ (Watkin, 2004, 63) Proximity becomes the closeness of distance – and the inverse is obvious. Proximity becomes, then, ‘not a measurable or geometric distance’ (Watkin, 2004, 63) but a kind of restlessness brought about by the presence of death and loss and one’s responsibilities in the face of them. In O’Hara’s great elegies, the restlessness is literal: walking through Manhattan, looking and shopping. Shopping and buying gifts for friends is a useful way of understanding metonymy – that is, the way that objects and behaviours come to stand for the whole operating system of our desire. We will turn to Robinson’s explicitly elegiac writing shortly, but it is clear that many of her other poems register the interrelation of desire and loss as what ‘synthesis’ calls ‘the price of being a woman’ and ‘the sharp price of being’ (Byrne and Pollard, 2009, 147). So, in ‘tetris heart’ (Etter, 2010, 203), ‘my tickly desire’ can only be experienced as ‘a love wrought in small units’. ‘Tickly’ also appears in ‘anecdotally yours’, which ends with ‘all of the world slipping down the k-hole / of our minds, our tickly loose connections’ (Etter, 2010, 202). ‘Disorder’ portrays ‘starry starry nausea as a / Manifestation of potential desires / We can’t afford’ and in ‘we too are drifting’, although ‘your mouth is a place to go’, ‘we’ are ‘in our separate spaces’ and surrounded by ‘death by values by / economix’ (Byrne and Pollard, 2009, 142, 146). Desire and loss, distance and proximity, are also signalled by phrases like ‘supraorbital bed’, ‘lovecraft’s abstract ideals’, ‘conceptual heart’ (Byrne and Pollard, 2009, 145, 146) and ‘abstracted feeling’ (Etter, 2010, 207). No wonder, perhaps, that ‘Suicide Tuesday’ ends with ‘the question / why am I here / what did my tidy heart want / to witness?’ (Etter, 2010, 207) What the heart wants or what the heart does not want to witness and how tidy or scattered such witnessing might be seem particularly pertinent to elegy. Robinson’s book-length a (2009) commemorates Aerin Davidson (1985–2007) but stands at some distance from elegy’s habitual movement from grief to consolation and from anything that we might recognise as an English elegy. Diane Ward’s ‘Afterword’ 154
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 154
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson refers to the notes that Mallarmé made for an unwritten poem to commemorate his eight-year-old son, Anatole, who died in 1879. Robinson’s book brings to mind one of the French poet’s notes: ‘no never will the absent one be any less than present –’ (Mallarmé, 2003, 13). One is also reminded of another French sequence of elegiac notes, written and published just over 100 years later – Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque Chose Noir (Some Thing Black) (1986), in memory of his wife, Alix Cleo Roubaud. In ‘Inside Me’, Roubaud writes that: ‘Your death goes on completing fulfilling itself’ (Roubaud, 1990, 132 [gap in the original]). This describes part of Robinson’s project. Roubaud’s book concludes with seventeen black-and-white photographs taken by his late wife which depict young naked women, often as ghostly presences, in empty rooms. This connects in a surprising way with the work of the late American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958–1981), who specialised in similar images and is a powerful presence in Robinson’s book. For if Robinson’s a writes itself in a non-English tradition of elegy and memorialising, it also positions itself within an American, notably queer tradition of experimentalism. Robinson uses epigraphs from Frank O’Hara, Kathleen Fraser and Woodman referring to Stein, as well as using procedures that echo Stein. Francesca Woodman’s limited edition artist’s book Some Disordered Interior Geometries (1981), which combined photographic image, collage and text, provides Robinson with the titles of a ’s three parts – ‘Interiors’, ‘Geometries’ and ‘Disorder’. The final section also uses some of Woodman’s images. Disordered geometry certainly describes many of Woodman’s images in which naked young women are shot from surprising angles or are blurred by long exposures. In one striking image, a young woman appears to hang from a door frame by her fingertips. But it might also describe what has to happen to representation if queer desire and queer loss are to be registered. Stein’s influence and example are crucial here too. Robinson’s ‘Interiors’ draws on the ‘Objects’ and ‘Food’ sections of Tender Buttons (1914) so that, for example, Stein’s ‘A PETTICOAT’ is echoed in Robinson’s ‘TOOTHBRUSH’: A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm. (Stein, 1914, 13) A cherry split end a peachy a cat a remorse a dreadful glee (Robinson, 2009, 10)
As we shall see, Robinson’s ‘Interiors’ is more concerned, like Stein, with portraying objects as effects in the spaces where they are located or as the feelings that they evoke. But there are important contrasts too. Stein’s Tender Buttons can be read as a coded and sometimes not-socoded autobiographical narrative of the blossoming of queer desire. 155
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 155
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson Indeed, the famous sentence – ‘The difference is spreading’ – which ends the first section, ‘A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS’, might be an early way of saying ‘this sex which is not one’. However, where Stein portrays queer desire coming to fulfilment, Robinson’s forty short prose poems, as Cristiana Baik observes, sometimes pair objects and non-referential descriptions to ‘[leave] a clear impression of absence.’ (Baik, 2010, n.p.) For example, ‘FINE-TOOTHED COMB W/ HANDLE’ and ‘MAROON LEGWARMER’ are, respectively, ‘My obtuse love left behind’ and ‘Where are you gone quick and cruel’ (Robinson, 2009, 9). Six photographs spread among the poems show such things as hairs in a hairbrush. ‘Interiors’ moves from items of clothing through to items of bodily care (make-up) and then back through clothes and toiletries, before ending with marks and traces, such as ‘LIPSTICK MARK ON MEDIUM MUG’: ‘Losses what we losses remember losses all over ourselves’ (Robinson, 2009, 18). A kind of pause is marked by ‘DESK’, which summons ‘taciturnity’ in the face of ‘sum/up empty’ (Robinson, 2009, 15). It is as if the writer sits down in distraction and then slowly returns to an awareness of the world in ‘MORNING’, ‘ROOFTOP’ and ‘CUL-DE-SAC’. These poems are followed by ‘GLUE’, which evokes how things can be fixed in place, and ‘PHOTOFRAME’, which is a way of containing things. The next poem, ‘LABIA: Tincan lover spraying on brick & plastering over the messier ones’, is a real jolt. It is the only body part in the section. The second section, ‘Geometries’, comprises ten loose sonnets set as prose blocks and continues the combination of word and image. Each sonnet is juxtaposed with a shadowy black and white image. The images can be used to make a simple flick book in which a young woman reaches out or withdraws her hand across a surface. The quality and content of the images sets up dialectic of embodiment and ghostly presence. The sonnets have the distinctive linguistic surface that we noted at the start of our discussion, and all but one is a single sentence. There is, again, an interesting convergence with Gertrude Stein. Just as around forty-two of the fifty-eight sections of the ‘Objects’ section of Tender Buttons contain references to light, shadow, colours, seeing or spectacle, so Robinson’s sonnets contain references to machines, media and the production or reproduction of images. Images, it seems, are a species of eternity, but they are not reality or actual presence. All that they can do is to provide a record of what the penultimate sonnet calls ‘our bodies & how we leave details of them behind’ (Robinson, 2009, 42). Just as the images arrest a gesture of love, so the poems seek to arrest time by reconceiving it. Stein was concerned with the representation of what she termed the ‘continuous present’ or ‘prolonged present’ in which time is not a linear progression but a succession of steadily shifting present moments. ‘Geometries’ attempts to catch what the last sonnet calls both ‘an unavailable profusion’ and ‘this eternal progression’ (Robinson, 2009, 44). 156
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 156
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson The final section, ‘Disorder’, comprises thirteen collages which combine fragments of Woodman’s images with fragments of Robinson’s poetry, thesaurus pages and pages from French dictionaries of film. The contemporary reader is, of course, habituated to fragmentation, but what is of interest here is how things are disposed, ordered and brought together. Adhesive tape is clearly visible in two of the collages, and several collages use different kinds of stitching in various arrangements. The sixth collage displays pieces of text, on what is clearly a crude pocket held in place with cross-stitch and slip-stitch, and the ninth collage has a patch showing the word ‘be’ (Robinson, 2009, 54, 57). The simple stitching gives a sense of very provisional, quite chaotic attempts at mending. The pocket itself is something where, like a poem, things may be put and held. It is worth noting that the stitches are a functional vocabulary, as well as a skill. For example, slip-stitch is typically an invisible joining for a lining, while cross-stitch is usually a decorative stitch. Similarly, running stitch is the most elementary stitch. Stitching also involves repetition, and repetition is a common feature of more conventional elegy. The crudeness of the stitching makes the rawness of the loss visible, as does the use of what appears to be dictionary entries (twice) that focus on the word ‘zero’. Text that is on its side or upside down mirrors reversal and disorientation. The collages move from a hand and a foot (the latter overlaid with the first two lines of Robinson’s ‘Disorder’) to a final one, which combines a fragment of a Woodman image with the last two lines of ‘Disorder’ and a page from what looks like a French dictionary of film noir. ‘Disorder’ is a sequence of visual poems that ask the reader to read back and forth. As the reader does so, he or she identifies things and meanings emerge, but not all of the collages are clear. Some elements remain obscure and unidentifiable, and it is impossible to know whether the grunginess of some of the images is deliberate or simply the result of poor image reproduction. The result is an emphasis on how Robinson’s a converges with what Julia Kristeva calls the ‘thetic’. Anna Smith provides a useful definition. The ‘thetic’ is the threshold of language. Neither fully semiotic nor symbolic but a place of articulation, the thetic is produced by a break or rupture in the signifying process, and so mediates between something exterior to language and its interior. (Smith, 1996, 94)
We are clearly in the realm of Mallarmé’s notes for Anatole – ‘suspension – rupture – part –’ (Mallarmé, 2003, 67) – and Roubaud’s Quelque Chose Noir, which has poem titles like ‘Theology of Nonexistence’, ‘Aphasia’ and ‘Non-Life’. Like her French predecessors and Stein, too, Robinson’s focus on positions and spatialisations explores the difficulty of speaking. Like Stein, Robinson’s writing mobilises both play and meaning. However, whereas Stein often aims for what might be called 157
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 157
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson a complete download which would produce a verbal entity – herself as a verbal being – Robinson’s being-in-language remains dispersed across the demands of others and of culture and society. Desire and loss, queer or otherwise, can only ever be voiced at, and as, thresholds. At the same time, a implies that the experience of loss allows a portrayal of the self and other selves in all their inconvenient messiness. Indeed, a embraces mess as a means of resisting the politics and cultural poetics of ‘a century of the self defiled’ and ‘the freak economy’.
158
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 158
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Chapter 11
Younger Women Poets 2: Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke
Against added value: Marianne Morris’s Tutu Muse Marianne Morris writes that her poems may be prompted by ‘any combination of the following: the day’s news, the temperature of the air, the nature of things stirring my heart, something about caterpillars or spoons or missile shields, media obsessions like obesity or terrorism, an emotional image’. She goes on to say that, in the act of writing, these things may be ‘tempered’ by ‘theoretical concerns’, which may include Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière, negative capability and ideas of right and wrong (Etter, 2010, 193). This is a way of saying that everything is fair game, but it is also a refusal to order what is in front of her according to accepted hierarchies of poetic appropriateness or comfortable ways of making meaning. Tutu Muse: prophylactic poetry for the last generation, written and set in London during 2007, can be read as both a comic and anguished negotiation with a culture full of pre-worn and pre-digested meanings. Making poetry make meaning is going to be uncomfortable in a culture where, in the words of ‘Little Rabbit and the Argentine Doctor Get a Room’ (Morris, 2008, 37–38), ‘[p]eople enjoy being lied to’. The poem’s opening phrase – ‘It’s wholly absurd’ – seems to mimic it, because the poem immediately abandons a light tone with a variation on the doctor’s traditional question: It’s wholly absurd. Where does the hurt lie, where does the hurt lie goes the voice, when clearly it lies everywhere, strewn on the ground under which the city’s pipes and drains have complexity.
159
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 159
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke The idea of hurt ‘clearly’ lying everywhere identifies a recognisably contemporary post-traumatic world. Roger Luckhurst has argued that this world is distinguished by the ease with which one can track ‘the affective transmissibility of trauma […] across virtually every arena of discourse, whether scientific or cultural, professional or amateur, high or low’ (Luckhurst, 2008, 119). Morris’s poem, like many poems in Tutu Muse, effectively moves across ‘virtually every arena of discourse’: love, economics, culturekritik, cosmetic surgery and television. Similarly, Philip Tew finds in recent British fiction ‘an emerging aesthetic of cultural threat and upheaval, a collective economy of repetition and symbolic return’ (Tew, 2007, xviii). Tutu Muse has an index, and an index is something that reveals repetition and mimes symbolic return. Luckhurst argues that, because of the dominance of postmodernism as a critical paradigm, criticism ‘has lagged behind [the] new literature’ of trauma (Luckhurst, 2008, 86). In an acute reading of Tutu Muse drawing on Terry Eagleton’s critique of postmodernism, Emily Critchley makes a similar point, but makes it more tellingly. Despite postmodernism’s forceful marketing of the surface, the interiority of the individual life continues. Tutu Muse ’s desire to make poetry make meaning is partly located in insisting that interiority remains meaningful. The ‘hurt’ or variants of it that appear ten times in Tutu Muse signal, Critchley argues, that the collection ‘is poetry which, in Eagleton’s description of modernist work, is “still agonizingly caught up in metaphysical depth […] still able to experience psychic fragmentation and social alienation as […] wounding”’. The state that we are in – to borrow the title of Will Hutton’s recent bestseller – may derive, in part, from misplaced attempts to deny the existence and validity of subjectivity and alienation (Critchley, 2011a, 7). To return to ‘Little Rabbit and the Argentine Doctor Get a Room’, the reader is presented with the recognisable cliché of lovers ‘getting a room’. What appears to be discussed in the poem is unlucky, failing or compromised relations. The love relation is merely one local manifestation of a wider unluckiness, failure or compromise. The poem is detached and discursive (‘But then, as I was saying’ appears three times) and holds forth on cultural, political and economic issues. It weaves these issues in and out of a free discursive framework to achieve a very striking handling of variation in mood and tone. The poem is able, then, to move easily from one cultural sphere of imagining into another and through a series of fantasies and propositions. The language of games is used – ‘I impose things on him’, ‘Then I pretended’ – until we end up with an actual TV quiz show, ‘Jeopardy’, and the catchphrase ‘fingers on buzzers’. ‘Breast implant’ appears both in this poem and the index, so that the index invites the reader to make a playful (‘wholly absurd’) entry into the poem and its discussions. The index also invites the reader to conceive of a book of poems as a group of concerns modulated through different contexts. The index announces the book 160
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 160
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke as discursive, but it is something of a mock index. It is incomplete: ‘culture’ appears several times in Tutu Muse, as does ‘hate’, but neither is indexed and nor are variations of ‘fuck’, which appears nearly twenty times. The most frequently occurring words are ‘love’ (13) and ‘death’ (10). Viewed from, and through, the index, Tutu Muse is a book of poems as a snapshot of a particular cultural moment and the forces in which individuals living through that moment are caught. At the same time, the index’s incompleteness plays with ideas of how our reading and experience can be steered. It invites us to read poetry only in terms of what we are interested in or maybe, naughtily, it casts the reader as voyeur: will you turn to ‘breast implant’ first? The index suggests, then, a culture that can be entered through a number of points and be found to be the same. It also makes us sensitive, and re-sensitises us, to the way that words are fields of meaning that accrue in all kinds of contexts and settings. In one sense, then, the index works in a similar way to the dream in ‘The Russians Come’: ‘On the flipside the dream allowed me to consider the ways in which certain modes of being were / infringements upon my sense of self’ (Morris, 2008, 33). This echoes Denise Riley’s ‘inside a designation there are people permanently startled to bear it’ in ‘Affections must not’ (Riley, 2000a, 20). The items listed in the index, to some extent, represent the forces and designations that would infringe upon the sense of self. The ground of these forces and infringements is urban: in the words of ‘La Partida’: ‘It’s the city that’s done it to me’ (Morris, 2008, 41). City appears five times within Tutu Muse – twice as ‘the City’ – and it is clear that the city is where we are daily offered opportunities to be infringed upon and participate in the ‘hurt’. Or as the prose poem ‘Standard Life’ has it: ‘I remember the city. The gallows are still there, roped with the bloody threads of shopping bags’ (Morris, 2008, 43). What governs the world where Morris’s cities are located is, as the title of Tutu Muse ’s opening poem has it, ‘De Sade’s Law’ (2008, 7). It is possible that the whole collection is a simultaneous demonstration and exploration of what such a law might be. As Emily Critchley notes, sadism is the law of the market stripped bare (Critchley, 2011a, 12). We can also track the word ‘law’ throughout Tutu Muse : ‘the peril of the law’ (2008, 7); ‘the new book of laws’ (2008, 12); ‘without grammar there are no laws’ (2008, 13). The exact nature of de Sade’s law is never made explicit, but outside the context of capitalism-as-sadism, we can deduce what it might involve from texts like The Adventures of Justine and of Juliette, Her Sister and The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom . In these texts, women are allowed rights to free sexuality and often function as powerful individuals. At the same time, they are victims, both of others and themselves, in just the same way that, in de Sade’s world, punishment and gratification are acts that continually transform each other. The idea of continual transformation keys us into the idea of a 161
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 161
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke law that is always in the process of formulation. This is partly the effect of lines four to eight: They were expensive because everyone wanted one. They were inexpensive because everyone had one. They were inexpensive because everyone wanted one. They were expensive because everyone had one.
‘They’ refers to the ‘frog ties’ made by ‘angels’ that were introduced earlier in the poem. The repetition is comic, but it is also terrible: a vertiginous revision of meaning into meaninglessness. It is also worth pausing to consider de Sade’s view of the law. One can point to his oft-quoted assertion that laws are dangerous that inhibit the passions, but the discussion of law in La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795) seems more pertinent to Morris’s project. Here, de Sade argues that universal laws are palpably absurd because all men are individuals. Since it would be impossible to devise laws for each individual, we need fewer laws that are easier to observe and should be applied according to each individual’s ability to observe them. Bearing in mind Tutu Muse ’s setting in the city and the City of London immediately before the 2008 financial meltdown and its use of financial language, Morris’s collection seems to suggest that deregulation is a savage parody of freedom. The lines mimic the structure of a formula and, at the end of the poem, we have a word that relates specifically to the idea of a formula: ‘There is no quotient of lust’ ([emphasis added]). A ‘quotient’ is the product of dividing one thing by another but, more specifically, it means ‘how often one thing is contained inside another’. Inside this poem there are a number of repetitions or lists, as in the ten-line central section: The fuck-you is remonstrance for the violence of your dullness, the violence of your numbness, your easy forgetfulness of injustice, your efficient hoovering up of flesh blown from Fallujah to the front page, and then the mince pies and larks. (Morris, 2008, 7)
This is like a process of division that might produce a quotient, as well as being akin to formal rhetoric, where there is a list and then an ‘and’ at the end. But this is deceptive, as the poem continues to work its transformations, particularly as to where these things are taking place and who is speaking to whom. It would seem that the poet is speaking and is speaking to the readers: ‘you inattentive lovers’. The frog-ties made by angels are exchange objects which, in turn, evoke Christmas since the poem refers to mince pies and mulled wine. The angels are traditional images of Christmas with their message of ‘peace on earth 162
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 162
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke and goodwill to all men’, but that message is very distant from what is figured in the poem. At the centre of the poem are the Iraq War and the word ‘remonstrance’. The term ‘remonstrance’ is very specific in this context. The word means a formal statement of public grievance and derives from the Grand Remonstrance made by the House of Commons to the Crown in 1641. ‘De Sade’s Law’ is, then, in part, a political poem, and we know that, too, from the index, which gives Iraq as a heading. In the reading game that the index proposes, readers are asked to think about how and where words are occurring and how language is employed. This particular poem shares a characteristic present in many other poems in Tutu Muse : media vision, the mediated view of the world – for example, ‘flesh blown from Fallujah to the front page’. The poem’s central section demonstrates what happens in so many of the poems: we are given a compilation of unprioritised competing concerns that mime our experience of media culture and thereby evoke the way that we, as readers and social beings, are randomly steered through different moods and issues placed in brutal and casual juxtaposition. The next line in the central section – ‘A template of blown wind’ – is quite hard to decipher, but it would seem to be an image of how the world in the poem works: a shifting relation of tangible and intangible, of real and virtual, of flesh and media. The shifting relation is partly what is indicated by the juxtaposition of ‘blown wind’ and ‘impacted and hard-hitting’. ‘Beef powder’ relates to explosions and body parts that are elsewhere in this poem and other poems. The passage that begins ‘A template of blown wind through the mouth of a cloud’ looks like a definition, but is hard to pin down as one and yet it powerfully evokes a sense of the poem’s world. In many ways, this exemplifies the texture of language in Morris’s writing and experimental writing generally: language that never quite satisfies in terms of formal, grammatical structures, but seems to activate affective domains in ways that are often close to unbearable. At the end of ‘De Sade’s Law’, the narrator asserts that ‘it would be / easy for Jimmy Blair to say that he thinks the poem is a cunt’. The index allows us to use ‘cunt’ to toggle to ‘Underneath those helmets they could be anybody’ (Morris, 2008, 32). This poem feels more random and cut-up, but offers the same thematic run-throughs. For example, ‘culture and me together we hurt’ echoes the end of ‘De Sade’s Law’ (‘No one else needs to know where it is that you feel that particular pain’), which echoes the ‘where does it hurt’ and ‘the pain that lies everywhere’ in ‘Little Rabbit and the Argentine Doctor Get a Room’. The individual body and the social body are one, but, at the same time, dispersed. The pain is dispersed as the body is dispersed. The end of ‘Underneath…’ seems more specific in terms of places and times (clubbing and Friday night), and this highlights the overall importance of pleasure as a subject in Tutu Muse. The poems present 163
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 163
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke and explore culture and the body as places of pleasure and pain. ‘Underneath…’ closes with a grand finale of everyone singing and dancing, ‘all of us […] hurting and dancing’. Here, as in several other poems, pleasure and love are explored through the life of the body. Libido is the central concept that ties together love and pleasure, and libido is also a type of energy that runs through culture, as well as through the individual body. In a sense, the poems’ sudden shifts and juxtapositions mimic libido as the driving force that keeps things going, keeps them alive. However, from the very outset, we are also alerted through ‘De Sade’s Law’ that libido is a force that is not straightforward and that the idea of love is totally compromised. Do Morris’s poems want us to believe that libido produces cruelty? Or is it that postmodernity’s desire to decentre the subject partly results in libido doing what it will? The answer remains uncertain, but we can say that the poems leave libido totally ambiguous and leave the individual subject as ‘a symptom of a much greater force’ (Morris, 2008, 43). Morris’s poems want to believe that ‘we are not all made in the absence of depth’ (Morris, 2008, 26), but, at the same time, wonder how we can resist if there really is ‘something inherently sexual about forward interest curves’ (Morris, 2008, 30). Or, as Emily Critchley argues, this is one of the ‘questions put to us throughout Tutu Muse in a glorious race against [what “La Langue s’abandonne” calls] “added value”’ (Critchley, 2011a, 12). Tutu Muse is, on one level, an anguished cry of resistance, in the words of the same poem, against the ways ‘they demand that you add value, without saying / that the added value is directly correlative to the destruction of you’ (Morris, 2008, 26). The poems’ anguished cry is: ‘yes but I am here now and this is how I’m here now’. The collection’s repeated words enact both postmodernist play and its consequences: the anguished cry of palpable hurt.
‘The untruth of discourse’: Andrea Brady’s Wildfire John Hall describes Andrea Brady’s Vacation of a Lifetime (2001) as ‘a text in which structure declares itself as texture, so that a localized reading is always reaching back and forth, aware of replay with variations of terms and figures’ (Hall, 2003, 49 [emphasis in the original]). For Robin Purves, one poem from that collection, ‘Post Festen e/thanksgiving seasonal 9i ’, typifies how Brady (b.1974) uses ‘a presentation and critique that combines the personal with the historical to construct a precarious kind of narrative that […] is invested with substantial critical force’; functions ‘like a model of dialectical criticism’; and ‘declares […] [a] determination to become as writing and body […] a total resistance to American power’ (Purves, 2004, 180, 182, 185). Brady’s own comments on her work in an interview with Andrew Duncan sound less certain:
164
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 164
04/10/2013 10:22:51
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke we live in the subjunctive mood, the present as a waiting-room for our acquisitions and hopes (both mendacious and gentle). So I’m untrustworthy, even to myself, because my relations to the order which keeps me fit, clothed, and idle are wholly contradictory. (Brady, 2007a, 2)
The poetry she writes is ‘formally and lexically inscribed with the conditions of its production as an isolated and boutique pastime which is largely irrelevant to the social and economic processes on which it comments’. Poets have ‘to keep drawing attention to the freedom of language which resists totalizing exploitation, as a sign of the possibility of a genuine lived freedom’ (Brady, 2007a, 3). This often means that, as Purves notes of ‘Post Festen e’, within individual poems, ‘the surety of the “I” […] appears to be advertising agency while its surroundings scream subjection and the reduction of identity to shared consumer profiles’ (Purves, 2004, 184). Similarly, the poems in Cold Calling (2004) exhibit a strong narrative drive, but often pile up words that revise each other in some way – for example, ‘occasional still life coffins the head / with pleasure’ (Brady, 2004, 31). A poem’s perspective on, and knowledge of, ‘the possibility of a genuine lived freedom’ is constantly changing. Questions of identity, complicity, knowledge and narrative dominate the book-length Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination . The ten-poem sequence was first published online as a work-in-progress in 2007 with hyperlinks to research materials and notes by Brady. For Jennifer Cooke, the poems are portals to ‘scenes of knowledgeacquisition and impartation’ and ‘[practise] a kind of poetic pedagogy […] exposing their readers to new knowledge encounters.’ (Cooke, 2011, 3) Brady’s ‘Note on the Text’ tells us: ‘I was thinking about an aerial map, plotting contours of history and relaying the coordinates for a surgical strike. But I was tired of trying to position “us” on the ground, like actors in real carnage, where being “implicated” is also a way of sharing the spoils’ (Brady, 2010, 71). As John Wilkinson has noted of Brady’s collection Embrace (2005), she denies us ‘we’ as a ‘conventional exit route’ out of the poetry (Wilkinson, 2007, 106). ‘We’ are asked to turn dialectical critique on ourselves because ‘we’ are living proof of the action of opposing forces. Brady’s concerns over how ‘to position “us”’ extend to how ‘we’ should read Wildfire. Her ‘Note on the Text’ identifies three important formal aspects: the integration of found text, the use of tabs and the selected bibliography. Found text is introduced by open-ended single apostrophes that ‘mark the beginning of quotations and not their end – the quoted text picks up what follows like a magnet’. Tab spaces act as ‘heuristic breaks’ and ‘[spaces] for critical thought’. The bibliography seeks to counter any desire on the part of the writer and reader to turn external sources ‘into mythopoeic spectacle. The bibliography should 165
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 165
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke stabilize that tendency to sublimate’ (Brady, 2010, 72–73). Brady’s ‘Note on the Text’ is, then, a manifesto of reading. Telling us about the writing of the poem sequence is an instruction on how to experience it. Wildfire is truly experimental, because Brady is not only trying to write differently, but also to create a reader or, perhaps more correctly, readerly identity. This readerly identity involves disruption. On a simple level, the reader is disrupted because Brady’s ‘Note’ points him or her to a full bibliography on the publisher’s website, so that the reader is encouraged to become a researcher. Research may make the reader as knowledgeable as Brady, and it will certainly reveal everything that is not in the poem. The reader is encouraged to develop what the opening poem, ‘Pyrotechne’, calls ‘the learner eye’ (Brady, 2010, 7). On a more complex level, once one’s attention is drawn to ‘mythopoeic spectacle’ and ‘sublimation’, one starts to think about how deeply they are involved in both reading generally and in reading poetry specifically. Would you want to avoid them? A more pertinent question would be: how would you do it? And if ‘mythopoeic spectacle’ and ‘sublimation’ are not involved in the poem, then how is the poem to gain ‘the power to illuminate or obscure’? (Brady, 2010, 72) Wildfire is rather dismissive of its own potential in this area. It might be the case that ‘clerical resistance can flow perpetually’, but ‘an experimental / poem dashed onto political density’ is given the same value as ‘an ice-cream sandwich’ (Brady, 2010, 10, 51). Poets are consigned to ‘the artist colony’, where ‘there is nothing / […] worth burning’, ‘attached to a hose / of advantageous melancholy’ (Brady, 2010, 52). In the sequence’s final section, ‘Illuminated’: ‘These are images / in a poem: tooth, rust, paranoia you may / insert your translation here, if the acquittals service / is still taking applications’ (Brady, 2010, 65). The new readerly identity that Brady wants, then, is going to be more or less traumatic. Her style is often highly elliptical, although she uses plain, relatively clear language. But when an image does appear, it is often impossible to conceptualise: As if the planet were a woman, living, turned against us, and the stars pin-hole cameras in a lacquer of burning bark around a tree… (Brady, 2010, 10)
This is partly because, as the sequence says in its final pages, ‘We have no idea how to speak / clear truth’ (Brady, 2010, 67). For Brady, the poem is but one more example of ‘how we all think now’ which ‘removes the room for conjecture, the pleasure of being smart enough’ and ‘maybe even puts readers in a weak position, predicting the failure of their concentration on the top-layer text’ (Brady, 2007a, 4). The 166
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 166
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke poem is, as Jennifer Cooke argues, highly performative of ‘a “poetic epistemology”, committed to reproducing the desires which drive our knowledge-acquisition, with their concomitant pleasures and dangers’ (Cooke, 2011b, 3). The passage quoted again, to return to Wilkinson, denies ‘us’ as an outlet: if we can’t conceptualise the image, then how can we join in the supposed collective identity? ‘Tunic’ is particularly hard on ‘us’. After an opening section that runs together state surveillance, enumeration and ‘foreign dying’, the speaker asks: ‘If I tell the one about Byzantine armies, promise / not to believe that we are all human’ (Brady, 2010, 14). ‘We’ then becomes a ‘we’ who ‘wait in a nest in Tora-Bora / for the samey future in which we’re trained’. Section 2 of the poem uses a language of consumerism and fashion: ‘The hope drunk in which we dress ourselves / for a day labour gaming / with maximum power and killer graphics’ (Brady, 2010, 15). ‘Day labour’ projects the image of the worker with bitter irony onto the consumer. After the image of ‘[w]e can do no more / vote with our feet dragged over the gap / to NίΚή’, the poem reminds us that: ‘The consumption loop is politics’ (Brady, 2010, 16 [emphasis in the original]). The point is made again in the poem’s final section which connects oil and politics: ‘Our family is known to worship the well. / Our turn to nominate the victim is magic / as a campaign donation gives vulture funds / for a reconstruction’ (Brady, 2010, 17). The reader’s identity is disrupted by trying to locate him or herself as part of the ‘we’ revealed by the author’s knowledge. The knowledge that is both laid within, and lies behind, Wildfire includes classical and Biblical texts regarding naturally occurring fire and ‘Greek fire’; phosphorous jaw amongst Bryant and May match girls in nineteenthcentury London; and current manufacture and uses of chemical weapons. This range of reference in a ‘verse essay’ recalls other verse essays in English – for example, Pope’s ‘Essay of Criticism’, which also ranges from the ancient to the contemporary. As an aside, Pope’s ‘Essay’ also relies on tropes of illumination and obscurity, as in famous couplets like: ‘But true expression, like th’ unchanging Sun, / Clears and improves whate’er it shines upon’. ‘True expression’ and its ability to ‘clear and improve’ is certainly a recurrent motif in Wildfire. In ‘In Law’, experimental poetry’s strategies are placed against public political language: Are law’s best or worst meanings concealed in wood, barbed, poisoned, the points blazing with fire? My paper is bogus – no pre-nup is airtight, and its mark holds you in confusion as its proof-weight of harmlessness. The wicked speak clearly, broad-faced as the court of appeals, so is obscurity an option now? Danger burns up the outside.
167
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 167
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke […] These are the gradations of obscurity in public discourse, our work the endometrium that binds the naked surface to a dark displaced richness of fact which may or may not sustain the future. (Brady, 2010, 56, 57)
Jennifer Cooke notes that ‘endometrium’ (the lining of the womb) makes ‘our work’ specifically women’s work (Cooke, 2011b, 6–7). Women poets are as much involved in risky works of illumination as were the Bryant and May match girls. The early image of the planet as ‘a woman, living, turned against us’ initiates a chain of female presences, either generic – ‘the doting wife’ (17); ‘slummy mummies’ (63) – or named, as in Mary Reeser (33). What Brady’s ‘Note’ calls Wildfire ’s ‘commentary on itself, on culture as revolutionary praxis’ can be located in its focus on ‘categories of happening’ (Brady, 2010, 72, 57). These are alternately personal, historical and contemporary and converge with the sequence’s combination of self-doubt about writing and identity; evocation of legal and political institutions; and the paradox that clear public language is a mode of concealment. Brady argues that poetry’s value may be located in its practitioners’ being ‘forced to ferret out little sideways circumventions of the untruth of discourse: these might be our escape routes’ (Brady, 2007a, 2). But the reader is offered little in the way of escape. The fact that Wildfire seems entirely cynical in its negation of the power of the imagination as something that can envision human progress and positive relations is hard enough to take. Crucially, the readerly identity that the text produces is a paranoid one in its mixture of self-aggrandising expertise, self-distrust and self-effacement. Wildfire ’s relentless focus on violent power-seeking begs the question of who is the reader who can experience the depths of its unpleasure.
Globalising the personal: Jennifer Cooke’s impossible revolution introducing la lady tray ordinaire et plastique open wide for business fun blasts and cleaning products buff the glass up in this niche of geographic depression. Head of Magrot Thatcher 6/6 /87 or bust of Adonis, Lord, who was prohibited from urination despite funny walking and covert clutching. The rats be happy, human-free, here where – JULIE! – the place is fucking firing up your pantry! It burned up down, the dozy mare. […]
168
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 168
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke you’re getting a picture now, right, of metal rafters, glass up to them, rats aground pillars of news and plastic chairs with our heroine here where the A1(M) can meet the M25 and they make dirty love under the thin light in All Days rooms among the dried biscuits (survival will be on condiments only but wait a chopper) this is the erstwhile intro of place famous faced for anonymous & democratic need to pee: it is the spot an ordinary woman climbs upon a plastic table from plastic chair, steadies her heels, looks ahead and is cleaved in two, a midair cartoon pause before dropping to the left half a weakly victim of masculogic, limp hand still outstretched to steady; the other half a policeperson of language, flapped floorwards uniformed and truncheoned for the faux-furred. So: two rubbery skin-images crumpled either side on quick-clean tiling; table-topped is the oval egg slight blood warm ish (Cooke, 2011c, 23–24)
This is the opening section of Jennifer Cooke’s sequence ‘Steel Girdered Her Musical: in several parts’, entitled ‘Her Anatomy Split of Weil’s Discourse’. One way to read and hear the opening is as a description of an important political shift: the moment when feeling (independent experience) starts to become affect (feeling fixed to idea). A feeling fixed to an idea is one of the starting points for praxis. Affect and praxis are crucial to the sequence that Cooke (b.1977) has described as being about the possible impossibility of a revolution beginning at South Mimms Service Station, a motorway convenience situated on the M25 and A1(M) near London. It explores, sometimes passionately, sometimes irreverently, and often obliquely, the relationships between theory and praxis, art and revolution, anonymous space and potential resistance, and the force of rhetoric operating within these fields. (Cooke, 2011a)
The twelve-part sequence includes sections that use signs, silence and, in performance, a computer-generated voice. The atmosphere is dynamic and chaotic, with almost Manga-type energy. The text is highly allusive and richly associative. Throughout, there is a kind of highly charged alternating current between, on the one hand, energised extroversion, 169
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 169
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke declamatory productivity, satire and genuine entertainment and, on the other, an unsettling hesitancy, awkwardness and provisionality. Why South Mimms as the location for this possibly impossible revolution? It is one of the anonymous spaces that Cooke refers to her in synopsis. An anonymous space is different from the non-places of fleeting occupation that Marc Augé argues characterise twentiethcentury and twenty-first century modernity (Augé, 1997, 75–80). South Mimms is anonymous because there are many other places like it and because individuality is smoothed out into a limited number of things to do and ways to behave: spend, consume, evacuate and work. The ‘discourse’ of the opening section’s title demonstrates some of the energies at play in the sequence. Is it ‘Weil’s discourse’, as in Simone Weil? Or is it ‘Weil’s discourse’, as in ‘Weil’s disease’, which is contracted by coming into contact with water contaminated by animal urine? There are two clear presences in one word. How do you read it? In the context of ‘Steel Girdered’, this might also be phrased ‘how do you do it?’ Reading the ‘discourse’ as Simone Weil focuses our attention on the service station as a place of consumption and repetitive labour and on Weil’s idea that consumption and repetitive labour block revolutionary action. For Weil, eating represents our wilful attachment to the world: we consume when we should just look and then act on what we see. But, as we have already noted, the ‘discourse’ is also Weil’s disease. Rats are one of the main carriers, and there are rats in Cooke’s South Mimms. In Cooke’s own words in an interview, rats are ‘the ones who tell us that something alarming is happening, like the plague, you know something bad is going to start happening if the rats start running’ (interview with authors, 15 April 2011). Perhaps we could say that Cooke’s rats are signals or that they could function as affects of place. Cooke’s rats evoke irrepressible anxieties and dissatisfactions erupting into the apparently untroubled wonderland of ‘goods and services’. South Mimms, then, is a place of commercial and social fictions. The heroine of ‘Steel Girdered’ is born as a way of getting past crude, binary social fictions of the female/feminine: either victimhood caused by ‘masculogic’ or the empowered political correctness of the ‘policeperson’. The word ‘kittenista’ is a version of this: neither ‘fashionista’ nor ‘Sandanista’. The kitten has a complex set of associations: the association of feline with feminine; phrases such as ‘sex kitten’; the kitten as playful, soft, young and weak, as in ‘weak as a kitten’, but also not without resources, as in the phrase ‘kitty has claws’. There is perhaps even a distant association with the riddle-speaking sphinx being added to the heroine’s monstrous composite of transformational potential. Her new female body, born whole, is an answer to a question that might be phrased thus: how does woman put her body in a public space and demand attention? Cooke’s text, unlike so many other cultural products, is not a fantasy of containment for female desire; it is, at this opening point, a presentation of containment that tries 170
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 170
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke to move beyond it. But this is not just a question for women: as the rest of the sequence progresses, it is clear that this is a question for all bodies. And the place where much of the sequence’s action takes place is within or on the body. The body, in this sense, is not metaphor but the actual site of action and reaction, in and out, external and internal. The woman born from an egg, and later references to her ‘feathersprouting lips’, make the heroine sound mythological. This new body is not quite human, not quite animal, and it is a body that is stripped, at least in part, of the everyday. In the second section of the sequence, ‘When We Imagine the Revolution v.3.2’, the heroine, ‘the kittenista’, is described as ‘proud, tall, womb removed’. This figures a body that is, as it were, de-inserted from the social order, in order to be reinserted into it in a revolutionary manner. This body has not internalised or, at least, seeks not to internalise the external demands (cultural, political and social) made on the self to sacrifice its desire for self-determination. The title of the second section, ‘When We Imagine the Revolution v.3.2’, might easily be, Cooke has remarked in an interview with us, the title of the whole sequence. Imagining revolution might be, to return to her synopsis for a moment, a question of a possible impossibility, just as ‘v.3.2’ suggests the possibility of failure. However, the section remains focused on a revolutionary body. The ‘kittenista’ speaks in what the poem calls ‘majestic’: ‘the people have / spoken. i am the will of them whose needs / i speak from feathered lips, the sacred man / date in my guts.’ Then the poem tells us in a stage direction, ‘her pelvic floor drops, cracks / the carpark in two’ (Cooke, 2011c, 26). The next section, ‘Everyone Sings a Lullaby’, is a four-line poem that begins ‘you are my fuckling my only fuckling’ and, in performance, is spoken by a computer-generated female voice called ‘Audrey’. This section is one of three where affect, text and praxis seem to come together. The other two are ‘The Invention of Space’, which comprises a diagram, and ‘Everyone Stops Singing and There is Silence (for twenty-one of my heart beats)’, which is the title, a space on the page and a silence in performance. Cooke has said in an interview that: I wanted a lull, and […] thinking about how the poem’s been working alongside or within the recent demonstrations, there’s always a lull, whether there’s a lull in chanting when everyone’s quiet, or whether there’s an action, there’s a reaction and there’s a lull, and so I wanted the way the energy of the poem as a whole works [to have] […] these lull points … (Interview with authors, 15 April 2011)
Modulation of energy is, then, highly important in the sequence. But what might Cooke mean when she talks about ‘how the poem’s been working alongside or within the recent demonstrations’? One answer is that, while we can locate the text of ‘Steel Girdered’ in a time of 171
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 171
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke composition and premiere during the summer of 2010 at Greenwich, its living signification and association are oracular of the actions in early 2011, such as the occupation of Fortnum and Mason. Cooke remarked in the same interview that The Kaiser Chiefs hit of 2004 and 2005, ‘I Predict A Riot’, was piped over the speaker system again and again during a research visit that she made to South Mimms. The so-called ‘indie anthem’ represents protest assimilated into the world of commercial objects and services. It becomes congruent with the oppressions to which it pantomimes resistance. The next section, ‘We’ve Tasted the Inside of Her Thigh’, returns us once again to the carpark at South Mimms services. Whereas ‘When We Imagine the Revolution v.3.2’ referred to unarticulated and inchoate ‘needs’, here we get something like the beginnings of articulation: ‘fuck i’d prefer not to passively resist’; ‘i stutter to say i want less than violence and more’ (Cooke, 2011c, 28). Cooke has said that the thigh in question may well belong to Beyoncé, whose hit ‘Single Ladies’ was ubiquitous during the sequence’s composition. One can also point to the fact that you can find the video for the song online soundtracked and perfectly synced with ‘The Birdy Song’. Feathers feature again: a grotesque female articulating form, perhaps recalling the feathered lips of the kittenista. Similarly, feathers, like a woman born from an egg, also evoke Sophie Fevvers – the heroine of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984). Beyoncé is named in the poem, together with Georges Bataille, Mary Wollstencraft and Catherine M. They populate the scene of the revolution and figure a collage of identity, form or articulation, from which a more coherent utterance of desire in its true form might emerge. This collage-college might be the aim of the revolution itself and an indicator of the means to that end – that is, both the chaotic struggling emergent process of revolutionary form within language and public presence for the female self. Cooke’s unlikely crew might be said to represent a continuum of discomfort. It is not just a question of ‘good’ desire vs. ‘bad’ desire or ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ union with others. Wollstonecraft’s plea in A Vindication of the Rights of Women for women to see beyond being either the slaves of tyrants or the playthings of sensualists certainly converges with the kittenista’s identity as neither victim nor policeperson. Bataille’s writings present eroticism as an encounter with the Other, which strips away the self and reveals what he calls ‘fundamental continuity’ between individuals. Similarly, Catherine M.’s book The Sexual Life of Catherine M. presents the erotic as a transgression of boundaries and frontiers, an anguished search for fusion with others. And is not Beyoncé’s song ‘Single Ladies’ with its refrain ‘if you liked it you shoulda put a ring on it’ a naked and simplistic expression of ‘girl power’ as an invitation to women to oppress themselves and each other? Cooke’s motley crew perhaps also figures the difficulty of constructing an historical continuum that produces a revolutionary present. 172
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 172
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke ‘We’ve Tasted the Inside of Her Thigh’ also references ‘animals in furs’ and ‘a sheep-in-mink longs for your future’. Without wishing to over-read these lines, animals figure cycles of life and death, sacrifice and generation and possibly hopefulness and fertility. The sheep seems like a distant cousin of a sacrificial lamb: ‘mink’ is something exquisite and valuable, while ‘future’ may allude to the oracular and prophetic. And in the context of the sacrificial lamb, this ‘future’ is a salvation bought by blood. After this, the emphasis of the sequence changes from the possible impossibility of revolution and the articulation of desire to politics and the workplace. Poetry – one of Bataille’s ‘others’ of the system – here registers what the system (global capitalism) does to bodies. There are references to a strike by workers who make airline food, managerial self-help books and to the suicides of workers at a Chinese factory making i-Phone components. In the section entitled ‘Getupoffyourmattandfuckingwalkmyson’, the speaker says: sometimes I want to vomit in my food and yours which is waste’s fruity gesture but as I type people work making it and I make fuck all typing this and there is no bottom line for my kind of hypocrisy or for the happiness of my life except that people die for it but not in my name only in theirs and what the fuck is there to do in the face of that? (Cooke, 2011c, 35)
The kittenista and her chaotic/inspirational oratory are replaced by something that feels much more like a personal statement of despair resulting from consciousness of how the world is organised. To return to Marianne Morris for a moment, Cooke’s speaker rails against her location in a global system of added value. This stream-of-consciousness prose describes how the writer’s privilege is the result of, and is facilitated by, other people’s sacrifices. The writer’s salvation is not bought by the workers’ sacrifice. They have sacrificed themselves for themselves: ‘not in my name only in theirs’. Inspiration for revolution – symbolised earlier in the poem by a surge of energy and physical transformation – seems to drop away into failure mode. Version 3.2 is winding down, and we are at some distance from version 3.3. Writing equals awareness of violence and exploitation. And this leaves a question: what active position is there to be taken? An answer needs to be sought and a solution needs to be tried, if one is going to make (or write) version 3.3. It may be that recognising connections between ‘me’ and the unknown ‘them’ who make my existence possible is a starting point. Cooke’s evocation of the self in a global context converges with what Nicky Marsh sees in recent experimental women’s poetry as a recognition that political responses need to be articulated in a ‘sharply sophisticated and reflexively aware’ manner. She adds that ‘this sophistication requires a careful negotiation of the gendered implications of the local-global axis of contemporary 173
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 173
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke political critique that so nearly parallel feminism’s politicization of the personal’ (Marsh, 2007, 201). Similarly, at the end of the sequence, Cooke’s poetry speaks as a ‘we’. In the final section, ‘Massaging our Digressions’, ‘we creatures create much / we dislike and then sit on it’; ‘ours is a lividity / awaiting someone to have a better idea’; and ‘us rejects of repressive desublimation’ (Cooke, 2011c, 37). ‘Sit on it’ cycles us back to the beginning of the sequence, recalling the plastic chair that the kittenista climbs on to get onto the table. This reminds us that the sequence is a powerful argument for the world to be used differently in order to explore new identities and functions. The clichéd image of a revolution – someone standing on a table haranguing a crowd – is also an image of the transformative use of objects and transformative communication. And we are also reminded of this by being returned to South Mimms: we are left locked down in that world with all its functions and potentials until v.3.3. ‘Lividity’ is dynamically associative with connotations of being furiously angry as well as looking bruised or having a deathly pallor. The word perhaps signals Gramscian ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. And this is perhaps not so surprising at the end of a sequence that asks, in so many words, ‘how to stay alive in a system that takes desire and makes it into an instrument of oppression?’ Cooke’s sequence powerfully registers the discomforts involved in the emergent articulation of desire in its true form. And that, we would suggest, is one indicator and project of experimental poetry. The ‘possible impossibility’ of embodiment manifested in the ‘kittenista’ and the narrator’s politically abject body, the emphasis upon suffering and yearning for a new collective ‘we’ that could transform the individual and society, return us to Josh Robinson’s Adorno-inflected reading of Douglas Oliver, as discussed in Chapter 2. We might recall, here, Adorno’s ideas about the reification and illusions involved in commodity capitalism. The illusory life of goods and services and the horrific tragedy perpetuated by the consumer’s disconnection from the conditions of labour that produce them is powerfully present as a driving force in ‘Steel Girdered’.
174
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 174
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Bibliography
Acheson, James and Romana Huk, Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). Allnutt, Gillian, Fred D’Aguiar, Ken Edwards and Eric Mottram, eds, the new british poetry 1968 – 88 (London: Paladin, 1988). Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London and New York, NY: Verso, 1991). Armstrong, Isobel, ‘Maggie O’Sullivan: The lyrical language of the parallel tradition’, Women: A Cultural Review, 15.1 (Spring 2004), pp. 57–66. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989). Ashton, Jennifer, ‘Our Bodies, Our Poems’, American Literary History, 19.1 (Spring 2007), pp. 211–31. Augé, Marc, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London and New York, NY: Verso, 1997). Baik, Cristiana, ‘a ’, untitled review of Sophie Robinson’s collection, The Boston Review (March/April 2010), http://bostonreviewnet/BR35.2/robinson_ micro.php (accessed 20 November 2011). Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1961). Barry, Peter, Contemporary British Poetry and the City (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1973). Bergvall, Caroline, ‘No Margins to this Page: Female Experimental Poets and the Legacy of Modernism’, Fragmente, 5 (1993), pp. 30–38. Bergvall, Caroline, Éclat (Lowestoft: Sound & Language, 1996). Bergvall, Caroline, Meddle English: New and Selected Texts (New York, NY: Nightboat Books, 2011). Bergvall, Caroline, ‘In conversation with John Stammers’, Jacket, May 2003, http://jacketmagazine.com/22/bergv-stamm.iv.html (accessed 26 June 2011). Bergvall, Caroline, ‘Lecture in CCA Graduate Lecture Series’ (11 November 2008), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gwEw39HEiI (accessed 17 January 2012). Bernstein, Charles, ‘Colliderings: O’Sullivan’s Medleyed Verse’, in Salt Publishing, ed, The Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan (Fulbourn: Salt Publishing, 2011), pp. 5–9.
175
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 175
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Bibliography Bletsoe, Elisabeth, Landscape from a Dream (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2008). Bollas, Christopher, Hysteria (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2000). Bonney, Sean, ‘What the Tourists Never See: The Social Poetics of Geraldine Monk’, in Scott Thurston, ed, The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2007), pp. 62–78. Brady, Andrea, Cold Calling (London: Barque Press, 2004). Brady, Andrea, ‘“Meagrely Provided”: A Response to Don Paterson’, Chicago Review, 49.3/4 and 50.1 (Summer 2004), pp. 396–402. Brady, Andrea, ‘Interviewed by Andrew Duncan’, The Argotist (2007(a)), http:// www.argotistonline.co.uk/Brady%20/interview.htm (accessed 23 October 2011). Brady, Andrea, ‘In Conversation with Rosheen Brennan’, How2 , 3.1 (Summer 2007(b)), http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/ vol3_1_no1/mew_media/archive_ofthe_now/bradybrennaninterview.html (accessed 8 July 2012). Brady, Andrea, Wildfire (San Francisco, CA: Krupskaya, 2010). Brooker, Peter, ‘Postmodern Postpoetry: Tom Raworth’s Tottering State’, in Antony Easthope and John O. Thompson, eds, Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 153–65. Broom, Sarah, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry: An Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Broqua, Vincent, ‘Delineating a “Non-Place” in the UK? 10 Notes on Experimental Poetry Written by Women: Caroline Bergvall and Redell Olsen’, E-rea (Revue électronique d’études sur le monde Anglophone), 6.1 (2008), pp. 2–12, http://erea.revues.org/201 (accessed 30 March 2011). Brown, Andy, ed, Binary Myths 1 & 2: Conversations with Poets and Poet-Editors (Exeter: Stride, 2004). Buck, Claire, ‘Poetry and the Women’s Movement in Postwar Britain’, in James Acheson and Romana Huk, eds, Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 81–112. Bunting, Basil, Collected Poems (London: Fulcrum Press, 1970). Butler, Thomas, Writing at the Edge of the Person: Lyric Subjectivity in Cambridge Poetry, 1966–1993 (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Notre Dame, 2005), http://etd.nd.edu/ETD-db/theses/available/etd-06302005-113210/ unrestricted/ButlerT082005.pdf (accessed 27 July 2011). Byatt, A. S., A Whistling Woman (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002). Careless, Eleanor, ‘“I Shall Not Prove and Neither Shall I Be Proven”: Anna Mendelssohn’s PY’, The Paper Nautilus, 2 (October 2011), pp. 43–54. Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and Other Comic Pieces (London: Dent, 1930). Carter, Angela, ‘Notes From the Front Line’, in Michelene Wandor, ed, On Gender and Writing (London: Pandora Press, 1983), pp. 69–77. Churchill, Caryl, Top Girls (London: Methuen Drama, 1991). cheek, cris, ‘Reading and Writing: The Sites of Performance’, How 2 , 3.3 (December 2009), http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_ no_3/bergvall/pdfs/bergvall-cheek.pdf (accessed 30 March 2011). Cohen, David, Being a Man (London: Routledge, 1990). Cooke, Jennifer, Programme Note on ‘Steel Girdered’, presented at the
176
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 176
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Bibliography English & Welsh Diaspora: Regional Cultures, Remembered Lives conference,
Loughborough University, 13–16 April 2011(a). Cooke, Jennifer, ‘Poetry and Knowledge: The Exhibition of Andrea Brady’s Wildfire’, unpublished paper, 2011(b). Cooke, Jennifer, *not suitable for domestic sublimation (London: Contraband, 2011(c)). Critchley, Emily, Dilemmatic Boundaries: Constructing a Poetics of Thinking (London: Intercapillary Editions e-book #1, 2006). Critchley, Emily, ‘When I Say I Believe Women …’, in Carrie Etter, ed, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Exeter: Shearsman, 2010), pp. 177–84. Critchley, Emily, ‘“This method is / not personal it’s just different to yours, ok. Don’t worry”: Tutu Muse and “the dream of cultural authenticity”’, unpublished conference paper presented at ‘Legacies of Modernism: The State of British Poetry Today’ at Université Paris-Diderot, June 9–11, 2011. Critchley, Emily and Neil Pattison, eds, These Pages are Marked by Woman: An Anthology of the Contemporary Experimental Women’s Poetry Festival 2006 (Cambridge: Contemporary Experimental Women’s Poetry Festival, 2006). Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics (London: Robert Kennedy Publishing, 1975). Davidson, Ian, ‘“Occasions for Additional Apparitions”: Performing Poets and the Performed Poem’, in David Kennedy and Keith Tuma, eds, Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance & Site Specificity (Sheffield: The Paper / The Cherry on the Top Press, 2002), pp. 129–44. Deren, Maya, The Voodoo Gods (London: Paladin, 1975). Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1970). Duncan, Andrew, ‘Nine Fine Flyaway Goose Truths’, review of Grace Lake’s Bernache Nonette, Angel Exhaust, 15 (Autumn 1997), pp. 105–10. Duncan, Andrew, The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (Great Wilbraham: Salt Publishing, 2003). DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, ‘Knowing in the Real World’, review of Mop Mop Georgette: New and Selected Poems 1986–1993 , Parataxis, 8.9 (1996), pp. 63–69. Easthope, Antony and John O. Thompson, eds, Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1991). Eliot, T. S., Selected Prose, edited with an introduction by Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). Emery, Chris, ‘Circles of Art’, review of Geraldine Monk’s Noctivagations, Jacket, 21 (February 2003), pp. 1–3, http://jacketmagazine.com/21/emery-monk. html (accessed 7 May 2012). Etter, Carrie, ed, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Exeter: Shearsman, 2010). Evans, Dylan, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996). Farmer, Gareth, ‘Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s “Cordelia”, tradition and the “Triumph of Artifice”’, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 1.1 (September 2009), pp. 55–77. Fisher, Allen, Becoming (London: Aloes Books, 1978). Fisher, Allen, The Topological Shovel: Four Essays (Willowdale: The Gig, 1999). Fisher, Allen, ‘Minimaus: In Reponse to Cultural Malaise’, review of Redell
177
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 177
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Bibliography Olsen’s Secure Portable Space, Pores, 4 (2005), http://www.pores.bbk.ac.uk/4/ fisher.html (accessed 11 February 2012). Forrest-Thomson, Veronica, On the Periphery (Cambridge: Street Editions, 1976). Forrest-Thomson, Veronica, Poetic Artifice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978). Forrest-Thomson, Veronica, Collected Poems and Translations (London, Lewes and Berkeley, CA: Allardyce, Barnett, 1990). Fraser, Kathleen, Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (Tucaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2000). Freud, Sigmund, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, The Pelican Freud Library Vol. 11: On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, [1917] 1984), pp. 245–68. Gifford, Terry, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999). Gray, John, ‘Whatever Happened to Englishness?’, Times Literary Supplement (4 November 1994), p. 26. Greenwood, Susan, Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology (Oxford: Berg, 2000). Gregson, Ian, Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and Estrangement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Hall, John, ‘Eluded Readings: Trying to Tell Stories about Reading Some Recent Poems’, The Gig, 15 (2003), pp. 35–54. Hamilton-Emery, Chris, ‘Untitled Posting’, Pages (29 October 2007), http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/chris-hamilton-emery.html (accessed 11 November 2012). Hampson, Robert and Peter Barry, eds, New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). Hardy, Edmund, ‘Helen Macdonald, “Taxonomy”’, Intercapillary Space (2006), http://www.intercapillaryspace.org/2006/03/helen-macdonald-taxonomy. html (accessed 19 December 2011). Hardy, Edmund, ‘Redell Olsen, Secure Portable Space ’, Intercapillary Space (2006), http://www.intercapillaryspace.org/2006/03/redell-olsen-secure-portablespace.html (accessed 11 February 2012). Harrison, Tony, Selected Poems, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1987). Heaney, Seamus, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980). Heaney, Seamus, Selected Poems 1965–1975 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980). Hechter, Michael, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536–1966 (London: Routledge, 1975). Herd, David, ‘Occasions for Solidarity: Ashbery, Riley, and the Tradition of the New’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 30 (2000), pp. 234–49. Hewison, Robert, Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties 1960–75 (London: Methuen, 1988). Huk, Romana, ed, Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003). Huk, Romana, ‘Maggie O’Sullivan and the Story of Metaphysics’, in Salt Publishing, ed, The Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan (Fulbourn: Salt Publishing, 2011), pp. 36–70. James, Elizabeth, ‘Report on Contemporary Experimental Women’s Poetry Festival 2006 ’, UK Poetry listserv (18 October 2006). Jarvis, Matthew, ‘Saving the Earth: Wendy Mulford’s Salthouse’, ISLE
178
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 178
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Bibliography (Interdisciplinary Study of Literature and the Environment), 16.3 (2009), pp. 469–86. Johnson, Nicholas, Foil: Defining Poetry 1985–2000 (Buckfastleigh: Etruscan, 2000). Jones, Peter and Michael Schmidt, eds, British Poetry since 1970: A Critical Survey (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1980). Keery, James, ‘Well, There Was, And Wasn’t, And There Is: The Third Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry’, PN Review 95 , 20.3 (January– February 1994), pp. 11–15. Kennedy, David, ‘Forms of Enquiry’, review, inter alia , of Frances Presley’s Paravane: New and Selected Poems 1996–2003 , PN Review 163 , 31.5 (May–June 2005), p. 91. Kennedy, David, The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Kennedy, David and Keith Tuma, eds, Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance & Site Specificity (Sheffield: The Paper/The Cherry on the Top Press, 2002). Kidd, Helen, ‘The Paper City: Women, Writing, and Experience’, in Robert Hampson and Peter Barry, eds, New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 156–80. Kinnahan, Linda, ‘Experimental Poetics and the Lyric in British Women’s Poetry: Geraldine Monk, Wendy Mulford, and Denise Riley’, Contemporary Literature, 37.4 (Winter 1996), pp. 620–70. Kinnahan, Linda, ‘Feminist Experimentalism, Literary History and Subjectivity: “This Lyric Forever Error” of Kathleen Fraser and Denise Riley’, in Romana Huk, ed, Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), pp. 275–83. Kinnahan, Linda, ‘Feminism’s Experimental “Work at the Language-Face”’, in Jane Dowson, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 154–78. Lacan, Jacques, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966). Ladkin, Sam and Robin Purves, eds, ‘“The Darkness Surrounds Us”: American Poetry’, Edinburgh Review, 114 (2005), pp. 1–240. Larrissy, Edward, ‘Poets of A Various Art ’, in James Acheson and Romana Huk, eds, Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 63–79. Lewitt, Sol, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, Artforum, 5.10 (June 1967), pp. 79–83. Lisette, Francesca, As the Rushes Were (Brighton: Grasp Press, 2010). London, John, ‘Veronica Forrest-Thomson and the Art of Artifice’, fragmente, 4 (Autumn/Winter 1991), pp. 80–88. Lopez, Tony, Meaning Performance: Essays on Poetry (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2006). Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008). Macdonald, Helen, Shaler’s Fish (Buckfastleigh: Etruscan Books, 2001). Mallarmé, Stéphane, For Anatole’s Tomb, translated by Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2003). Manson, Peter, ‘Untitled’, review of Maggie O’Sullivan’s In the House of the Shaman, Object Permanence , 2 (May 1994), pp. 65–66. Mark, Alison, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry (Tavistock: Northcote House/Writers and Their Work, 2001).
179
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 179
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Bibliography Marsh, Nicky, ‘Going “Glocal”: The Local and the Global in Recent Experimental Women’s Poetry’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 1.1/2 (December 2007), pp. 192–202. Marwick, Arthur, British Society since 1945 , 2nd edn (London: Penguin Books, 1990). Mellors, Anthony, Late Modernist Poetics from Pound to Prynne (Manchester: Manchester University Press/Angelaki Humanities, 2005). Middleton, P., ‘On Ice: Julia Kristeva, Susan Howe and Avant Garde Poetics’, in Antony Easthope and John O. Thompson, eds, Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 81–95. Middleton, Peter, ‘Imagined Readerships and Poetic Innovation in U.K. Poetry’, in Romana Huk, ed, Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003(a)), pp. 128–42. Middleton, P., ‘Silent Critique: Tom Raworth’s Early Books of Poetry’, in N. Dorward, ed, Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth . The Gig, 13.14 (May 2003(b)), pp. 7–29. Mills, Sara, ‘“No Poetry for Ladies”: Gertrude Stein, Julia Kristeva and Modernism’, in David Murray, ed, Literary Theory and Poetry: Extending the Canon (London: Batsford, 1989), pp. 85–107. Milne, Drew, ‘A Veritable Dollmine’, review of Caroline Bergvall’s Goan Atom 1. Jets-poupée, Jacket, 12 (July 2000), http://jacketmagazine.com/12/milnebergvall.html (accessed 16 January 2012). Milne, Drew, ‘In Memory of the Pterodactyl: The Limits of Lyric Humanism’, The Paper, 2 (September 2001), pp. 16–29. Milne, Drew, ‘Performance over Being: Frank O’Hara’s Artifice’, Textual Practice, 25.2 (2011), pp. 297–313. Mohin, Lilian, ed, One Foot on the Mountain: An Anthology of British Feminist Poetry 1969–1979 (London: Onlywomen Press, 1979). Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1985). Moi, Toril, ed, The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Monk, Geraldine, ‘Author Page’, British Electronic Poetry Centre , http://www. southampton.ac.uk/~bepc/poets/monk.htm (accessed 7 May 2012). Monk, Geraldine, Interregnum (London: Creation Books, 1994), reprinted in G. Monk, Selected Poems (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2003), pp. 97–164. Monk, Geraldine, Noctivagations (Sheffield: West House Books, 2001). Monk, Geraldine, Selected Poems (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2003). Monk, Geraldine, ‘Collaborations with the Dead’, in Scott Thurston, ed, The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2007), pp. 178–87. Monk, Geraldine, ed, Cusp: Recollections of Poetry in Transition (Bristol: Shearsman, 2012). Morris, Marianne, Tutu Muse (New York, NY: Fly By Night Press, 2008). Morrison, Blake, ‘Young Poets in the 1970s’, in Peter Jones and Michael Schmidt, eds, British Poetry since 1970: A Critical Survey (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1980), pp. 141–56. Mulford, Wendy, ‘Notes on Writing: A Marxist/Feminist Viewpoint’, in Michelene Wandor, ed, On Gender and Writing (London: Pandora Press, 1983), pp. 31–41.
180
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 180
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Bibliography Mulford, Wendy, Late Spring Next Year: Poems 1979–1985 (Bristol: Loxwood Stoneleigh, 1987). Mulford, Wendy, ‘“Curved, Odd … Irregular”: A Vision of Contemporary Poetry by Women’, Women: A Cultural Review, 1 (Winter 1990), pp. 261–74. Murray, David, ed, Literary Theory and Poetry: Extending the Canon (London: Batsford, 1989). Oakley, Ann, Subject Women (London: Fontana, 1981). O’Hara, Frank, Selected Poems (New York, NY: Knopf, 2009). Oliver, Douglas, Three Variations on a Theme of Harm: Selected Poetry and Prose (London: Paladin, 1990). Olsen, Redell, Secure Portable Space (Hastings: Reality Street, 2004). Olsen, Redell, ‘Writing/Conversation with Maggie O’Sullivan’, in Salt Publishing, ed, The Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan (Fulbourn: Salt Publishing, 2011), pp. 203–12. Olsen, Redell, ‘Interview Given to Will Rowe’, Pores, 4, http://www.pores.bbk. ac.uk/4/dell.html (accessed 11 February 2012). O’Sullivan, Maggie, ‘riverrunning (realisations’, West Coast Line, 17, 29.2 (1995), pp. 62–71. O’Sullivan, Maggie, In the House of the Shaman (London: Reality Street, 2003). O’Sullivan, Maggie, Body of Work (Hastings: Reality Street, 2006). O’Sullivan, Maggie and Scott Thurston, ‘An Interview’, in Salt Publishing, ed, The Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan (Fulbourn: Salt Publishing, 2011), pp. 241–49. Pattison, Neil, ‘“The Mirrors are Tired of our Faces”: Changing the Subject in the Poetry of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’, Kenyon Review Online (2009), pp. 1–16. Pendle.Net, The Pendle Witches, http://www.pendle.net/Attractions/pendlewitches.htm (accessed 6 January 2011). PendleWitches, The Pendle Witch Trial of 1612 , http://www.pendlewitches.co.uk (accessed 6 January 2012). Perloff, Marjorie, ‘The Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall’, Textual Practice, 18.1 (2004), pp. 23–45. Peverett, Michael, ‘The Under Delineated Anemall’, review of Elisabeth Bletsoe’s Landscape from a Dream , Intercapillary Space (2010), http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2010/08/elisabeth-bletsoe-landscape-from-dream. html (accessed 5 May 2011). Presley, Frances, ‘Neither the One Nor the Other: A Collaboration by: Frances Presley and Elizabeth James: Working Notes’, HOW2 (Fall 2001), http://www. asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v1_6_2001/ current/new-writing/presley-james.html (accessed 11 May 2012). Presley, Frances, ‘‘Neither The One Nor The Other’: Aspects of Performance within a Feminist Collaboration’, in David Kennedy and Keith Tuma, eds, Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance & Site Specificity (Sheffield: The Paper/The Cherry on the Top Press, 2002), pp. 172–80. Presley, Frances, Paravane: New and Selected Poems 1996–2003 (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2004). Purves, Robin, ‘American Change: A Note on Andrea Brady and the Language of Consumption’, in Sam Ladkin and Robin Purves, eds, ‘“The Darkness Surrounds Us”: American Poetry’, Edinburgh Review, 114 (2004), pp. 177–85.
181
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 181
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Bibliography Quartermain, Meredith, ‘The Socio-Poetic Soundscape of Geraldine Monk’, English Studies in Canada , 33.4 (December 2007), pp. 73–76. Raworth, Tom, Tottering State: Selected Poems 1963–1987 (London: Paladin, 1988). Retallack, Joan, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). Retallack, Joan, ‘The Experimental Feminine’, How2 , 3.1 (Summer 2007), http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/ v3_1_2007/current.index.html (accessed 13 March 2012). Retallack, Joan, ‘What is Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?’, Jacket, 32 (April 2007), http://jacketmagazine.com/p-retallack.shtml (accessed 12 June 2007). http://www.ribblevalley.gov.uk/news/article/326/halloween_arrangements_on_ pendle_hill (accessed 27 June 2013). Rich, Adrienne, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–77 (New York and London: Norton, 1978). Riley, Denise, (1989) ‘Feminism and the Consolidations of ‘Women’ in History’, in Elizabeth Weed, ed, Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 134–39. Riley, Denise, Mop Mop Georgette: New and Selected Poems 1986–1993 (London: Reality Street, 1993). Riley, Denise, ‘In Conversation, with Romana Huk’, PN Review, 103 (May–June 1995), pp. 17–22. Riley, Denise, Selected Poems (London: Reality Street, 2000(a)). Riley, Denise, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000(b)). Riley, Denise, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). Riley, Peter, Anna Mendelssohn obituary, The Guardian, Tuesday 15 December 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/dec/15/ anna-mendelssohn-obituary (accessed 15 February 2010). Roberts, Michèle, The Mirror of the Mother (London: Methuen, 1986). Robinson, Alan, Instabilities in Contemporary British Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987). Robinson, Josh, ‘“Innocence and Incapability Impose”: Towards an Ethic of Experimentation’, Jacket, 32 (April 2007), http://jacketmagazine.com/32/probinson.shtml (accessed 12 June 2007). Robinson, Sophie, a (Los Angeles, CA: Les Figues, 2009). Robinson, Sophie, ‘“Now That’s What I’d Call Morphing”: Building a Queer Architecture in Caroline Bergvall’s Éclat ’, How2 (December 2009), http:// www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_no_3/bergvall/pdfs/ bergvall-robinson.pdf (accessed 30 March 2011). Robinson, Sophie, The Lotion (Old Hunstanton: Oystercatcher Press, 2010). Rosenthal, Mark, Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments (London: Tate Publishing, 2004). Roubaud, Jacques, Some Thing Black, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990). Royle, Nicholas, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Rubin, Joan Shelley, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Harvard University Press, 2009)
182
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 182
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Bibliography Ruddick, Lisa, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). Salt Publishing, ed, The Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan (Fulbourn: Salt Publishing, 2011). Sampson, Fiona, Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 2012). Sheppard, Robert, Far Language: Poetics and Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978–1997 (Exeter: Stride, 1999). Sheppard, Robert, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents 1950–2000 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005). Sinclair, Iain, ed, Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology (London: Picador, 1996). Sinfield, Alan, ‘Tennyson and the Cultural Politics of Prophecy’, ELH, 57.1 (Spring 1990), pp. 175–95. Smail, David, The Origins of Unhappiness: A New Understanding of Personal Distress (London: HarperCollins, 1993). Smith, Anna, Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Stein, Gertrude, Tender Buttons (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1997). Stevens, Wallace, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2006). Strathern, Marilyn, After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Tarlo, Harriet, ‘Radical Landscapes: Experiment and Environment in Contemporary Poetry’, Jacket, 32 (April 2007), http://jacketmagazine. com/32/p-tarlo/shtml (accessed 30 November 2011). Tarlo, Harriet, ‘Provisional Pleasures: The Challenge of Contemporary Experimental Women Poets’, Feminist Review, 62 (Summer 1999), pp. 94–112. Tarlo, Harriet, Poems 1990–2003 (Exeter: Shearsman, 2004). Tarlo, Harriet, ‘“Home-Hills”: Place, Nature and Landscape in the Poetry of Geraldine Monk’, in Scott Thurston, ed, The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2007), pp. 28–61. Tennant, Emma, Girlitude (London: Vintage, 2000). Tew, Philip, The Contemporary British Novel, 2nd edn (London: Continuum, 2007). Threadgold, Terry, Feminist Poetics: Poiesis, Performance, Histories (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1997). Thurston, Scott, ed, The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2007). Thurston, Scott, ‘Interview with Maggie O’Sullivan’, in Salt Publishing, ed, The Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan (Fulbourn: Salt Publishing, 2011), pp. 241–49. Thurston, Scott, ‘States of Transformation: Maggie O’Sullivan’s “Busk, Pierce” and Excla ’, in Salt Publishing, ed, The Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan (Fulbourn: Salt Publishing, 2011), pp. 179–201. Thurston, Scott, ed, Talking Poetics: Dialogues in Innovative Poetry (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2011). Tiffany, Daniel, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). Tiffany, Daniel, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).
183
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 183
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Bibliography Trimble, Gail, ‘How the Romans Read’, Times Literary Supplement (1 July 2011), p. 24. Tuma, Keith, Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). Tuma, Keith, ed, Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001). Upton, Lawrence, ‘Finding Another Word for “Experimental”’, The Astrophysicist’s Tango Partner Speaks, http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/uptontheory/ restless.htm (accessed 24 June 2010). Vickery, Ann, Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000). Wagner, Catherine, ‘Post-Marginal Positions: Women and the UK Experimental/ Avant-Garde Poetry Community – A Cross-Atlantic Forum’, Jacket, 34 (October 2007), http://jacketmagazine.com/34/wagner-forum.shtml (accessed 17 June 2011). Wagner, Catherine, ‘Identificatory Stances and Identificatory Trances’, unpublished paper presented at the Poetry & Poetics of the 1980s conference, University of Maine, 27 June to 1 July 2012. Wandor, Michelene, ed, On Gender and Writing (London: Pandora Press, 1983). Watkin, William, On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). Watts, Carol, Wrack (Hastings: Reality Street Editions, 2007). Watts, Carol, ‘Zeta Landscape and Place’, Poetry Wales, 45.3 (Winter 2009/10), pp. 25–27. Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1996). Weed, Elizabeth, Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1989). Wells, Jared, ‘Caroline Bergvall’s Deleuzian Stuttering: “Via: 48 Dante Variations”’, Spratt’s Medium (December 2010), http://sprattsmedium. blogspt.com/2010/12/caroline-berg valls- deleuzian-stuttering.html (accessed 17 January 2012). Wheale, Nigel, ‘Colours – Ethics – Lyric, Voice: Recent Poetry by Denise Riley’, Parataxis, 4 (Summer 1993), pp. 70–77. Whigham, Frank, Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Wilkinson, John, ‘Cadence’, Reality Studios, 9 (1987), pp. 81–85. Wilkinson, John, ‘Untitled’, review of Wendy Mulford’s Late Spring Next Year: Poems 1979–1985 , Reality Studios, 9 (1987), pp. 92–93. Wilkinson, John, ‘Illyrian Places’, Parataxis, 6 (1994), pp. 58–69. Wilkinson, John, ‘Off the Grid: Lyric and Politics in Andrea Brady’s Embrace ’, Chicago Review, 53.1 (Spring 2007), pp. 95–115. Wills, Clair, ‘Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Experimentalism and the Expressive Voice’, Critical Quarterly, 36.3 (1994), pp. 34–52. Wordsworth, William, The Prelude – The 1805 Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Wright, Patrick, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985).
184
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 184
04/10/2013 10:22:52
Index
A
Acheson, James 6, 36, 37, 57 Adcock, Fleur 37 Adorno, Theodor 28, 174 Ahmed, Sarah 132 Allnutt, Gillian 6, 9, 21, 35, 38, 39, Andrews, Bruce 100 Archer, Martin 70 Archive of the Now 18, 148 Armstrong, Isobel 101 art 11, 12, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 42, 57, 59, 64, 78, 101, 102, 129, 130, 133, 140, 142, 143, 147, 148, 152, 169 Ashbery, John 44 Augé, Marc 170 Ayres, Gillian 95
B
Baik, Cristiana 156 Barque Press 18 Barry, Peter 3, 5, 35, 36 Barthes, Roland 54, 55, 56, 57, 127 Bataille, Georges 133, 172 Baudelaire, Charles 65 Bellmer, Hans 132, 133 Benjamin, Walter 9, 32, 80, 159 Bergvall, Caroline 3, 17, 40, 125, 126–38, 144 Ambient Fish 131, 133 Cropper (Kropper) 136–8 Éclat 126–36 Goan Atom 132–6 Meddle English 131, 132
‘Middling English’ 135 Berkeley, Busby 143 Bernstein, Charles 54 Berryman, John 149 Beyoncé 172 Beuys, Joseph 107, 111, 112, 113, 148 Bewegung 112, 148 Blau DuPlessis, Rachel 23, 52, 98, 115 Brady, Andrea 5, 13, 17, 18, 19, 25, 29, 43, 44, 124, 148, 164–8 Cold Calling 165 Embrace 165 ‘Post Festen e/thanksgiving seasonal 9iI’ 163, 164 Wildfire 13, 29, 163–7 ‘In Law’ 167 ‘Pyrotechne’ 166 ‘Tunic’ 167 Bletsoe, Elisabeth 17, 20, 21, 115, 119–22 ‘Cross-in-Hand’ 121 Landscape from a Dream 120–1, 122 ‘Maiden Castle’ 121 ‘Melbury Bubb’ 121 ‘Rainbarrows’ 121 body 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 17, 23, 33, 34, 46, 55, 59, 64, 66, 72, 73, 76, 77, 80, 81, 87, 89, 99, 101, 102, 105, 107, 107, 113, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 143,
185
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 185
04/10/2013 10:22:53
Index 144, 147, 152, 153, 156, 163, 164, 170, 171, 174 Bohr, Niels 27 Boland, Eavan 38 ‘Nocturne’ 38 Bollas, Christopher 86, 87, 91, 93, 96 Bonney, Sean 72, 81 Bose, Siddartha 20 Bourgeois, Louise 133, 140 Booker, Christopher 31 Brooker, Peter 18 Broom, Sarah 25, 41 Broqua, Vincent 14 Brown, Andy 104, 105, 106, 127, 128, 152 Buck, Claire 6, 36, 37 Bunting, Basil 27, 107, 108, 110, 116 Briggflatts 27, 110 Burger, Peter 24–5, 94, 130 Burroughs, William 33 Butler, Judith 127 Butler, Thomas 51, 52 Byatt, A. S. 32–3, 34, 35, 53 A Whistling Woman 32–3, 37 Byron 88, 114 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 88, 114
C
Cage, John 27, 28, 115, 142 capital 9, 18, 20, 24, 34, 40, 43, 106, 149, 161, 173, 174 Careless, Eleanor 146–7 Carroll, Lewis 62, 93 Carter, Angela 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, 140 Nights at the Circus 172 Cendrars, Blaise 61, 62 de Certeau, Michel 127 Claire, Paula 6 Chapman, George 61 Charcot 86 cheek, cris 26, 27, 127 Churchill, Caryl 31, 32, 33 Cixous, Hélène 21, 64, 127 Clarke, Thomas A., 19 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 65 collaboration 6, 17, 26, 70, 127, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144
collage/s 24, 37, 72, 107, 119, 155, 156, 157, 172 colour/s 25, 93, 94, 95, 101, 102, 156 Cooke, Jennifer 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 29, 30, 53, 67, 148, 151, 152, 165, 167, 168 ‘Steel Girdered Her Musical’ 168–74 ‘Everyone Sings a Lullaby’ 171 ‘Everyone Stops Singing and There is Silence (for twenty-one of my heart beats)’ 171 ‘Getupoffyourmattandf ucking walkmyson’ 173 ‘Her Anatomy Split of Weil’s Discourse’ 169 ‘The Invention of Space’ 171 ‘Massaging our Digressions’ 174 ‘We’ve Tasted the Inside of Her Thigh’ 172–3 ‘When We Imagine the Revolution v.3.2’ 171 Corcoran, Neil 21, 22, 34, 35 Couzyn, Jeni 9 ‘The Message’ 9 Crawford, Joan 143 Critchley, Emily 5, 15, 17, 27, 44, 45, 63, 101, 147, 148–52, 153, 160, 161, 164 Dilemmatic Boundaries: Constructing a Poetics of Thinking 149 dilemmatic boundaries 147, 148 ‘When I Say I Believe Women…’ 148–52 Crozier, Andrew 19, 22, 35 Cunningham, Merce 140
D
Darragh, Tina 142 Davidson, Ian 133 death 10, 56, 59, 60, 63, 66, 73, 106, 154–5, 161, 173 Delaunay, Sonia 61 Deleuze, Gilles 127 Deren, Maya 76 Derrida, Jacques 54, 127
186
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 186
04/10/2013 10:22:53
Index Dickinson, Emily 22, 44 Dietrich, Marlene 141 Donaghy, Michael 24 Douglas, Mary 81 Dove, Rita 44, Duchamp, Marcel 24, 133 Duffy, Carol Ann 38 Duncan, Andrew 100, 101, 113, 153, 164 Duncan, Robert 119 Dunn, Douglas 16
E
Eagleton, Terry 153, 160 ecopoetics 27, 28 Edwards, Ken 6, 68 elegy 13, 66, 101, 108, 154, 155, 157 Eliot, T. S., 12, 20, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63 embodiment 17, 55, 58, 59, 63, 89, 98, 102, 113, 117, 156, 174 Emery, Chris 20, 75 Empson, William 56 Enslin, Theodore 115 Etter, Carrie 18, 20–1 Evans, Dylan 8
F
Fainlight, Harry 20–1 Farmer, Gareth 53, 60, 61 Fell, Alison 36, 38 Fisher, Allen 5, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 142, 144 Place 26 The Topological Shovel 25–7 Fisher, Roy 19, 22 Forrest-Thomson, Veronica 3, 13, 17, 35, 39, 40, 43, 51, 52, 53–63, 125, 134 ‘Cordelia or ‘A poem should not mean, but be’’ 54, 58, 60–3 Language-Games 55 ‘L’effet du réel’ 54–6 ‘On Reading Mr. Melville’s Tales’ 13, 52, 63, 149
On the Periphery 52, 53, 54, 55,
58 ‘Pastoral’ 43, 58 Poetic Artifice 54, 60 ‘Richard II’ 40 ‘Sonnet’ 52 ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 58 ‘The Lady of Shalott: Ode’ 55, 56 Fraser, Kathleen 11, 23, 45, 105, 106, 116, 119, 121, 149, 155 Freeman, John 19 Freud, Sigmund 8, 10, 43, 86
G
Garrity, Jane 14 Genette, Gerard 127 George, Glenda 38, 39, 68, 146 Giacometti, Alberto 101 Gifford, Terry 106 Gilfillan, Caroline 37 Gioia, Dana 44 Golding, Arthur 61 Gorky, Ashile 101, 102 Greenwood, Susan 76 Greer, Germaine 32 Gregson, Ian 35, 36, 60, 89 Guattari, Felix 127
H
H. D. 12, 116, 121 Hague, Gill 36 Halliday, Caroline 37, 38, 39 Hamilton-Emery, Chris 20 Hampson, Robert 19 Hardy, Edmund 123, 143, 144 Hardy, Thomas 121, 122, 123 ‘The Darkling Thrush’ 123 Harrison, Tony 16, 110 Harrison, Wendy A., 36 Harryman, Carla 140, 142, 149 Harwood, Lee 19, 22, 37 Heaney, Seamus 16, 23, 106, 123 ‘Serenades’ 123 Heidegger, Martin 8 Hejinian, Lyn 5, 23, 43, 45, 140, 149, 151
187
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 187
04/10/2013 10:22:53
Index Hennings, Emmy 25 Hepburn, Audrey 34 Herd, David 85, 94, 97 Herbert, W. N., 20 Hildegard of Bingen 140 Hoch, Hannah 25 Hitchcock, Alfred 143 Hoggart, Richard 32 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 82, 108, 120 Howe, Susan 43, 142 Huk, Romana 84, 95, 102
I
Irigaray, Luce 21, 139
J
James, Elizabeth 17, 138–41, 144 Neither the One nor the Other 138–41 Jarry, Alfred 133 Jarvis, Matthew 66 Jennings, Paula 36 Joyce, James 62
K
Keats, John 93, 123 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ 93 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 123 Keery, James 10, 84 Kidd, Helen 5 Kinnahan, Linda 4, 11, 41, 84, 98 Kristeva, Julia 9, 10, 11, 17, 21, 42, 43, 78, 79, 86, 87, 88, 92, 93, 96, 99, 127, 157 ‘About Chinese Women’ 9, 86 La Révolution du langage poétique 41, 43, 46 the thetic 157 ‘Women’s time’ 9, 86, 96 Kruk, Frances 147
L
Lacan, Jacques 7, 8, 93, 97, 133 Lake, Grace 146 land 38, 116, 120
landscape 16, 21, 51, 54, 57, 66, 73, 106, 115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 125, 141 De Lauretis, Teresa 41 Leech, Mark 20 Lehrman, Rachel 148 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 107, 110 Lewitt, Sol 143 libido 60, 61, 62, 164 Lisette, Francesca 13 As the Rushes Were 13 ‘Shutter/Target’ 13 locale 7, 8, 17, 46, 63, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95, 96, 99, 117, 131, 151, 153 London, John 57 Lopez, Tony 99 Loy, Mina 12, 24 Lucas, Sarah 144 Luckhurst, Roger 160 Lynch, David 81
M
M., Catherine 172 McCabe, Chris 21 McGuckian, Medbh 37 McKeever, Ian 95 MacDonald, Helen 17, 114, 122–5 ‘Earth Station’ 125 Shaler’s Fish 122, 124, 125 ‘MIR’ 125 ‘Morphometry’ 124, 125 ‘Taxonomy’ 122–4 ‘Variations on Morphometry’ 125 Mac Low, Jackson 142 MacSweeney, Barry 20, 21, 107 Magnani, Anna 34 Malevich, Kazimir 101 Mallarmé, Stéphane 43, 155, 157 Manson, Peter 100, 101 Mark, Alison 53, 54, 57, 58, 60 Marsh, Nicky 29, 104, 173, 174 Martinez de las Rivas, Toby 20 Marwick, Arthur 32, 46 Mayer, Bernadette 44, 149 Mayer, Sophie 148 Mellors, Anthony 24, 36, 119, 120 Mendelssohn, Anna 146–8
188
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 188
04/10/2013 10:22:53
Index ‘at the moment’ 148 Implacable Art 147 Middleton, Christopher, 22 Middleton, Peter 3, 19, 22, 42, 81 Mills, Sara 39 Milne, Drew 56, 123, 124, 125, 133, 134 Milton, John 61 Mitchell, Lorna 37 Mohin, Lilian 36–7, 38, 51, 52 One Foot on the Mountain 36–7, 38, 51, 52 Moi, Toril 42 Monk, Geraldine 4, 6, 17, 30, 38, 43, 44, 68–82, 116, 146 ‘Hidden Cities’ 71 ‘Poem for August – or for my birthday’ 38–9 Interregnum 68–82 ‘Interregnum’ 76–9 ‘Nerve Centre’ 71–2 ‘Palimpsestus’ 72–6 ‘Manufractured Moon’ 71 Morris, Marianne 5, 14, 17, 65, 112, 147, 148, 151, 153, 159–64, 173 ‘De Sade’s Law’ 161–4 ‘He Who Works Is Happy’ 14 ‘La Langue s’abandonne’ 164 ‘La Partida’ 161 ‘Little Rabbit and the Argentine Doctor Get a Room’ 159, 160, 163 ‘Standard Life’ 161 ‘The Russians Come’ 161 Tutu Muse 12, 148, 153, 159–64 ‘Underneath those helmets they could be anybody’ 163 Morris, William (musician), 138 Morrison, Blake 37 Motion, Andrew 37 Mottram, Eric 26, 27 mourning 43, 101, 105, 112 Mulford, Wendy 6, 7, 8, 15, 17, 21, 33, 36, 38, 40, 51, 52, 53, 56, 63–7, 101, 116 ‘Age’ 64 ‘Blossom Dance’ 63 ‘Facing the Writing: Hommage à Gautier, for Jane’ 53, 66
‘Goblin Coombe’ 66 ‘Heimat’ 64 ‘How do you live?’ for Hélène Cixous, who gave me the question (1979)’ 64 I China Am 66 Late Spring Next Year: Poems 1979–1985 63–4, 66 ‘My Mother in May & Hawthorn’ 66 ‘Notes on Writing’ 65–6 ‘Poem at the Time of Festivals, Molesworth Peace Chapel, Dec. 1984’ 66 ‘Red into Green’ 53 ‘Sun-Drenched’ 65 The East Anglia Sequence: Norfolk 1984-Suffolk 1994 66 ‘The Green Chateau’ 38 ‘The Meaning of Blue’ 64–5, 66 Mullen, Haryette 116 Munch, Edvard 101, 102 Münzberg, Marit 127 Muybridge, Eadweard 27
N
New British Poetry, The 6, 35, 38,
39, 68 Niedecker, Lorine 116 Nitsch, Hermann 112 Nuttall, Jeff 33
O
Oakley, Ann 34 O’Hara, Frank 56, 133, 141, 154, 155 Oliver, Douglas 22, 28, 174 Olsen, Redell 17, 106, 142–4 ‘Corrupted by Showgirls’ 142–3 ‘Era of Heroes / Heroes of Error’ 141–2 Secure Portable Space 141–4 ‘The Minimaus Poems’ 143–4 Olson, Charles 22, 23, 24, 118, 143, 149 O’Sullivan, Maggie 3, 17, 25, 29, 38, 68, 69, 100–14, 115, 116, 152
189
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 189
04/10/2013 10:22:53
Index A Natural History in 3 Incomplete Parts 106
‘Another Weather System’ 112–13 ‘Birth Palette’ 106 From the Handbook of That & Furriery 102, 104, 113 ‘Giant Yellow’ 106 ‘Hill Figures’ 106 In the House of the Shaman 100, 113–14 murmur: tasks of mourning 101, 105 ‘Of Mutability’ 113 ‘Starlings’ 106, 108, 113 States of Emergency 106–12 ‘To Our Own Day’ 100 that bread should be 106 tonetreks 101–2 Oswald, Alice 20 Ovid 61
P
Paterson, Don 18 Pattison, Neil 57–8, 101 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, The 37 performance 17, 18, 25, 56, 57, 68, 70, 71, 87, 88, 89, 100, 101, 104, 125, 126, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 169, 171 Perril, Simon 61 Peverett, Michael 122 Perloff, Marjorie 129 Pixner, Stef 51 place 4, 35, 55, 71, 72, 74, 82, 96, 116, 120, 122, 125, 143 Planck, Max 27 Plath, Sylvia 146 politics 13, 18, 19, 28, 29, 37, 51, 52, 64, 67, 96, 98, 115, 152, 153, 158, 167, 173 Pollock, Jackson 21, 154 Pope, Alexander 167 postmodern 17, 18, 21, 40, 121, 125 postmodernism 19, 57, 62, 160, 164 Pound, Ezra 12, 22, 24, 57, 62, 149
Presley, Frances 17, 21, 115, 125, 138–41, 144 Neither the One nor the Other 137–40 Prevallet, Kristin 142 Prynne, Jeremy 5, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 35, 58, 62, 120 Purves, Robin 164–5
Q
Quartermain, Meredith 71
R
Rancière, Jacques 127, 159 Raworth, Tom 5, 18, 22, 37, 116 Redgrove, Peter 119–20 Retallack, Joan 14, 15, 27–8, 142 ‘What is Experimental Poetry and Why Do We Need It?’ 27–8 Rich, Adrienne ‘A Woman Dead in Her Forties’ 66 Riley, Peter 147 Riley, Denise 3, 5, 6, 8–9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17, 21, 24, 27, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 45, 46, 83–99, 104, 112, 127, 134, 145, 161 ‘A Drift’ 90 ‘Affections must not’ 39, 161 ‘Affections of the Ear’ 85, 93 ‘A Shortened Set’ 90 ‘Dark Looks’ 85, 89 ‘Disintegrate me’ 95 Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect 83, 85 ‘Knowing in the Real World’ 35, 90, 95 ‘Laibach Lyrik: Slovenia 1991’ 94–8 Mop Mop Georgette 90, 98 Selected Poems 98 ‘The Castalian Spring’ 17, 85, 87–93, 96, 98 The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony 85, 89, 94, 96 ‘Well All Right’ 95
190
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 190
04/10/2013 10:22:53
Index ‘Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else’ 5, 13, 33, 85, 89, 99 Riemann, Bernard 116 revolution 6, 7, 9, 13, 14, 25, 29, 40, 42, 43, 53, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174 Roberts, Lynette 24 Roberts, Michael Symmons 20 Roberts, Michèle 36, 38, 141 ‘New Year’s Eve at Lavarone’ 141 Robinson, Alan 34, 69 Robinson, Josh 28–9, 174 Robinson, Sophie 13, 17, 20, 23, 127, 129, 132, 145, 148, 152–8 a 152–8 ‘anecdotally yours’ 153, 154 ‘Disorder’ 153, 154, 155, 156, 157 ‘duet in darkness’ 153 ‘Preshus’ 152 ‘Suicide Tuesday’ 154 ‘synthesis’ 154 ‘tetris heart’ 154 The Lotion 153 ‘TOOTHBRUSH’ 155 Rorty, Richard 94 Rothenberg, Jerome 23 Rothko, Mark 101 Roubaud, Jacques 155 Rowbotham, Sheila 34 Royle, Nicholas 112 Rubin, Joan Shelley 44 Ruddick, Lisa 130 Rumens, Carol 37 Rukeyser, Muriel 5
S
Sade, Marquis de 161–2, 163, 164 Sampson, Fiona 20–1 Scalapino, Leslie 23, 149, 151 sexual politics 31, 134 Schwitters, Kurt 112 Scott, Diana 36 Shakespeare, William 57, 62, 83, 122 Sheppard, Robert 3, 4, 19, 22, 26, 54, 69, 100, 106, 107
Sherman, Cindy 133 Shuttle, Penelope 37 Sinfield, Alan 58 Smail, David 4, 8, 15 Smith, Anna 43, 157 Smith, Stevie 60 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 127 Stammers, John 127 Stein, Gertrude 27, 28, 52, 116, 130, 131, 133, 155, 156, 157 ‘Orta or One Dancing’ 27 Tender Buttons 129, 155–6 The Making of Americans 27 Stevenson, Anne 37 Stevens, Wallace 109 stitching 157 Strathern, Marilyn 46 Sutherland, Keston 18, 21 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 58, 59, 62
T
Tallant, Sally 127 Tarlo, Harriet 17, 25, 40, 41, 66, 114, 116–19, 121, 122, 125 ‘blue blue blue (for Julia)’ 117 ‘brancepeth beck’ 117–19 ‘Camellia House’ 117 ‘coast’ 117, 118–19 ‘early words’ 117 ‘open the back door’ 117 Tauber-Arp, Sophie 25 Templeton, Fiona 6 temporalities 8, 10, 14, 46, 145, 146, 147 Tennant, Emma 33–4 Girlitude 33–4 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 58–9, 152 ‘Mariana’ 59, 151 ‘The Lady of Shalott’ 59, 60 Tew, Philip 160 Thurston, Scott 40, 107, 108, 109, 111, 126, 134 136 Tiffany, Daniel 69–70 time 7, 8, 9, 10, 17, 46, 73, 78, 80, 82, 92, 93, 96, 97, 113, 122, 140, 145, 146, 151, 152, 153, 156 Torrance, Chris 19
191
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 191
04/10/2013 10:22:53
Index trauma 81, 86, 102, 112, 148, 160 traumatic 81, 98, 166 post-traumatic 151, 153, 160 Trimble, Gail 126 Tuma, Keith 68, 106, 108, 133
U
Upton, Lawrence 25
V
Vanderborg, Susan 23 Van Gogh 101–2 Vickery, Ann 141
W
Wagner, Cathy 43, 85, 99 Wandor, Michelene 7, 36, 38 war 29, 38, 95, 96 Ward, Diane 13, 154 Warner, Ahren 20 Watkin, William 154 Watts, Carol 25, 115–16 Wrack 25, 115 Zeta Landscape 115–16
Webster, John 83 Weil’s disease 170 Weil, Simone 80, 170 Weir, Lorraine 141 Wells, Jared 135 Welton, Matthew 21 Wesker, Arnold 31 Wheale, Nigel 95 Whigham, Frank 83 Whitman, Walt 44 Wilkinson, John 10, 47, 64, 84, 97, 165, 167 Williams, Esther 143 Wills, Clair 39, 40, 43, 45–6, 84, 90 Wollstencraft, Mary 172 Woodman, Francesca 155–7 Woodward, Mary 37, 52 Wordsworth, William 88 The Prelude 88 Wright, Patrick 116
Z
Zanditon, Barbara A., 39 Zurn, Unica 133
192
Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain CS5.indd 192
04/10/2013 10:22:53