Seeking (and Taking) Exception to Ashton’s Logic
Jennifer Ashton’s logic is seared shut–-I do believe there’s no convincing her that a minor turn or two in her argument are missteps. Yet I must say that she does misrepresent the rationale for the selection practices she critiques in the following assertion: “If you know it’s a mistake to think that your sex determines your artistic choices, why accept a theoretical framework for your projects that entails making that mistake?”(“The Trouble with ‘Numbers Trouble,’”115). Or, putting it another way, Ashton accuses editors and critics (and readers) of falling for the mistaken “thinking [that] there is something distinctively feminine about one formal innovation or another”(116)--this is the heart of the logical paradox Ashton adroitly frames. She claims that anthologies of women’s poetry are unnecessary because their logic fails to make the case for their necessity. This is a very academic argument, except it doesn’t hold up in the real world in several ways.
It seems painfully clear that the impulse to gather poetry by innovative women is not rooted in gender essentialism--to collect the “distinctively feminine.” So how does an experienced scholar like Ashton arrive at this diagnosis of the anthologizer’s (or literary critic’s) logic? I see at least two ways: first, I can only guess that she overlooks the fact that women poets are paying more attention to how gender and language intersect at this moment in time. This would make the rationale circumstantial (or situational) but not necessarily essentializing. And second, Ashton makes the mistake of conflating this shared situation (women poets attending to gender and language) with the formal outcome (innovation), when these are just axes of interest. Anthologies of innovative women poets map this intersection.
That is, “women” is not an arbitrary grouping; women do have “shared ideas” (to borrow a phrase from Ashton’s second footnote) and thus are a community. Further, a community that is both gender-conscious and innovation-conscious presents one “index of these shared ideas” (another footnote phrase) about gender and language – and therein lies the reason we single out “innovative women” and read them as a group. (I hope this logic isn’t too obvious to bear repeating). It is true that the rhetoric (and gestures) of inclusion that demarcate the framework of critical projects like anthologies is more inclusive than this, as Ashton points out; and true that this is not all that anthologies of women innovators accomplish. But there’s no denying that critics, readers, and poets are thinking about poetry by women with good reason; because there’s a notable phenomenon motivating this collective work, one that women poets respond to variously. Some even deny that their gender is insignificant to their work. That in itself is significant.
Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young take exception to Ashton’s academism by pointing to statistics derived from the “real world” of concern. Author Ashton and co-authors Spahr and Young clearly have different stakes in approaching the topic of gender, poetry, and publishing. To my mind, one extremely useful question we can gather from the exchange published in Chicago Review is whether or not focusing on “women” narrows our view of the ways gender – as a set of ideas and practices, and as a “situation” that a particular poet writes consciously out of – may appear in formally innovative poetry? Spahr and Young were quick to advocate a paradigm shift that would bring attention to non-Anglo, non-US women writers. But presumably a poet of any gender configuration could share the ideas of the feminist-innovative community; the work of some number of men, or even a single male poet, might be as “essential” (i.e. crucial) to our current consideration of gender and poetic form. Such work would speak to the success of “feminist intervention” in an entirely different manner.
February 7, 2008
Dim Sum: Elizabeth Treadwell
[in the opinion bauble] [trajectoryville]It’s possible that the concept of essentialism is so deeply embedded in Europatriarchal thinking that I can’t relate to it at all.
I might like to declare that there’s nothing uncool about my feminism, but that’s probably not the case.
I did not pursue poetry in order to invest in drab hierarchies or peruse dreary quibbles.
“Much of what we call history is the success stories of madmen.”
--John Holt, Instead of Education
As I’ve written elsewhere, “it is very painful to be taught that persons of your type have had no agency across vast expanses of history.”
And as I’ve continued: “It is very boring to listen to your boyfriend revel in a version of literary history that glorifies his type.” [1]
Human literary expression is continuously flowing from a great multiplicity of sources and toward a great multiplicity of possibilities. That said, any notion of progress is surely a human illusion, a tic even, and one that’s been used destructively.
It would seem to me to go without saying that any idea that there could be one Important Literature, selected by a few, relevant much less revelatory to a captive many, is an idea so whack its time has come undone, at least several times over now. Neither margin nor center is an actual place. That equation’s a construct, and a miserly one. It’s a construct, with its own beauties, strengths, delicacies, residents, ghosts, landlords, trades- and repairmen; but it is not the only (actual or possible) construct, and we needn’t inhabit it.
As a society we are afflicted by punditry and expertism, with the occasional mild detour into hipsterism and other estranged places, so that all these necessary elements, like history and myth, are all the more easily crushed and cubed into merry tacky soundbites that serve the willing and the few. In fact to even begin to have conversations such as this one, our bodies have to be pretty darn well attended to, though in other ways entirely untended, abandoned even, and our thoughts oddly divorced from. This disembodies us, you see, so that histories can be made and maintained by inertia and flip accounting. So that although such asides are hardly the total culprit, I find such things as Andrea Brady’s charmingly sourpuss characterization of the macho modernists (in last fall’s Jacket), and Spahr & Young’s placating overattention (in text & note) to Ron Silliman, to be rather defeatist, in terms of recording female literary history and in terms of feminist envisioning. Why? Because quite frankly nearly all of the modernists I myself consider were women, and most of them queerly. Why? Because I can think of many more than a few of Silliman’s loose generation who’ve been much more daringly and consistently feminist and inclusive.
“But before we can talk sensibly about transcending difference, we must first transform the conditions that give these differences meaning.”
---Gary Younge, The Nation, 2/11/08
For centuries, in places, by habit and by creed, by design and by greed, women are systematically, linguistically, and whither random, shut out of the record and of the crowd. They’re swamp set the streets of London, chapbooked and de-flea’d. It’s wicked weird though, and so intimate. There are other systems also used for ill, my fellow creatures. And so Ashton’s lonely set machine, and so what Spahr & Young call the failures of feminism I’d be more likely to call the victories of more insidiously violent forces.
“And LOVE -- there would be no sustained true love without feminism.”
---bell hooks, Ms., Fall 2007
And certain things simply confound me. For example, in Stephen Burt’s kind and perceptive review of my book Birds & Fancies, in the Believer last September, he writes “the poems stand as far as they can from the cold dictates of adult necessity, reason, government, patriarchy, authority.” I kind of like this sentence, but it also rankles because I do not see how the fact that my energy is so centered in motherhood these years somehow exempts me from the public world, or any “cold dictate.” I have more at stake than ever, I think children should not be treated as second-class citizens, and I do not mean for my poems to be hermits. For example, in Patrick James Dunagan’s review of Traffic, which I edit, in last August’s Galatea Resurrects, he claims there was only writing by women in the second issue, which I expect would come as a surprise to contributors Jules Boykoff and Shanxing Wang, both of whom I am fairly confident self-identify as men. For example, when I reminded Stephanie Young that we’d always published the writing of men as well as women in my earlier magazine, Outlet, she took it off the “Numbers” article’s list of “feminist interventions.” Now I could surely not complain of not being noted in the Spahr & Young, but I also do not see how the inclusion of men necessarily renders a publishing project outside the realm of “feminist intervention.” Not to put too fine a point on any of these.
So as I’ve written elsewhere and ages ago still, “I guess I’m arguing for a wider vision of history, for an absolute refusal of the ‘academentia’ (see Mary Daly) that would have us forget…[that] those of us who find ourselves figured as Other – in whatever era, in whatever way: We are never silent to ourselves.” [2]
How do I know this? Research and common sense, Horatio; which might be to say living and reading and the fact that we are all alive and it was the bodies and stories of our ancestors that brought us here.
I don’t think I can see any way round it: we are our stories and we are our bodies. I don’t say this to deny or diminish or simplify anyone’s idiosyncratic being; in fact quite the opposite.
We arrived here via the bodies and the stories of our ancestors and of our closest relations. And so here we are. What more to say? These birds used to be dinos and we used to live in the sea.
--------------------
NOTES
[1] My 2003 essay formerly known as “Secret Mint: an exposition,” about studying with Paula Gunn Allen at UC Berkeley, which will appear in Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts & Affections (Iowa UP, forthcoming this year) and be excerpted online at How2 this spring.
[2] Letter to the editors on the gender issue, Tripwire #4, 1999.
Dim Sum: Carmen Giménez Smith
We are in need of our subject, the substantive, our predicates: our elementary sentence, our basic rhythm, our morphological identity, our generic incarnation, our genealogy.
--Luce Irigaray
“Numbers Trouble” was one of many signs I’ve lately taken from the universe that I should be thinking about my work as a poet and writer and publisher in relation to feminism. My feminist pedigree extends far enough--into the late eighties and early nineties--in order for me to recall some of the anthologies mentioned in Spahr and Young’s essay; I also recall the thrill I felt at reading much of this work, of discovering the project of telling women’s stories toward the end of fighting for equality for women. I came of age as a feminist under the tutelage of charismatic women’s studies professors who told me about my cervix and about God being a woman, and in retrospect I yearn for that idealism. I now hunger for work that does that kind of work. What if our poems really could remake the culture around us? Or, dare I say, remake the world? Why have I lost touch with this ideal? What happened to the utopian in feminist aesthetic thought?I think “Numbers Trouble” should serve as an occasion for a second look at the world of women’s poetry, but I think that numbers don’t tell the whole story. What if the journals were publishing 70 percent women or 80 percent women? What would that suggest, exactly? The mere fact that women are being published does not address the dearth of contemporary avant-garde work that explicitly addresses feminism, work that enacts the strategies of a feminist project, of a feminist politics. Where are the poems being published that work to advance the agenda of women’s rights? Simply being a woman and being published doesn’t guarantee feminism.
Perhaps this is distasteful. I find this very difficult to write about. How can I write about the politics of rape, of birth control, of child care without seeming like some out-of-date harridan-confessional poetess? Feminism (in its original incarnation) is out of style, and what I’d really like to see are poetries that bring it back. And what I’d really like to be doing is writing some of these poetries. Being a poet offers a kind of agency that is not available to many people: perhaps it is time to begin making different use of mine. By problematizing gender, or even by solving it, we haven’t done much to effect change in the day-to-day lives of women, have we? Where’s the praxis? I yearn to see the feminism-on-the-ground in poetry.
I’m imagining a poetry that imagines syntax as a tool to fashion a feminist politics; I’m remembering Gertrude Stein remaking grammar, presaging Irigiray’s call to
Turn everything upside down, inside out, back to front. Rack it with radical convulsions, carry back, reimport, those crises [the] "body" suffers in her impotence to say what disturbs her. Insist also and deliberately upon those blanks in discourse which recall the places of her exclusion and which, by their silent plasticity, ensure the cohesion, the articulation, the coherent expansion of established forms.
A poetry that exists along the continuum of experimentation and narrative, perhaps akin to Stephen Burt’s elliptical poetries; a poetry in which language works to accommodate the feminine, yes, but a poetry that also works to accommodate the stories of women, to bring to light the struggles of women as explicit subject matter. I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that many of the battles that feminists waged in the sixties and seventies have been won: We’re still fighting--a losing battle, it would seem--to have the Constitution ratified to suggest to its readers that women are considered by this government to be equal to men. At a presidential debate the female candidate is asked, "Diamonds or pearls?" Is this the best we can do?
To establish my participation in this process, I invite poets to envision the most radical potentialities of a new feminist poetry. I will publish manifestoes, polemics and plans under the imprint Womanifesto, and I’ll distribute them like a suffragette. Anyone interested in writing or helping publish this work, please write me at: carmen [at] noemipress [dot] org.
Dim Sum: Catherine Wagner
As the coeditor of a recent anthology of poems on motherhood [1], I felt for a moment roundly tsk-tsked when reading Jennifer Ashton's essay in American Literary History, "Our Bodies, Our Poems." The essay identifies an apparent hypocrisy in recent anthologies of innovative poetry by women. On the one hand, says Ashton, by endorsing so-called innovative poetry, editors imply an allegiance to contemporary critiques of identity. On the other hand, when the editors use the category of "woman" to limit the types of innovators who appear in their anthologies, they buy into the very critique of identity they claim to distrust. As Ashton puts the point in her rebuttal of Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young's response to the article, "the moment you're in the business of celebrating a poem for the situation in which it was produced at the same time that you're celebrating its form as such, you've got a machine built for nothing but the business of essentializing." That is, the anthologizers must, according to Ashton, think that there is "some necessary connection between the forms that count as 'innovative' and the bodies that count as female." I recognize the urge Ashton tries to document: it's common while arguing for the value of something (homosexuality or heterosexuality, say) to make the case for its value by claiming that it is natural. I'm not surprised that some who support innovative poetry have used this effective rhetorical strategy in order to assert the significance of their favored mode. I do quibble with some of what Ashton gathers as evidence—the bodies in the Spahr/Young "Foulipo" performance, for instance, seem to me to be heavily coded. They're used as tools and work as metaphors; Ashton's reading is too literal. Too, I think her reading in "Our Bodies, Our Poems" of Mary Margaret Sloan's introduction to Moving Borders misses Sloan's rhetorical purpose: by asserting (at a time when recognition of their importance was not at all general) that the women in her anthology were no longer marginal, Sloan was pushing for them to be accepted as central to an innovative tradition. Despite these and some other difficulties I have with the development of Ashton's argument, I agree with her that some people have sought (whether they are aware of it or not) a necessary connection between poetic innovation and womanhood, and that attempts to make such connections are suspect. Ashton's essay may make anthologizers and feminist poets in general look more carefully at their motivations and assumptions. That can only be good. [2]
Though I appreciate Ashton's intervention, I'm left wondering about her agenda in making it. So far, I can't work out what larger issues are at stake for her, so her critique ends up feeling sharp, but small. As I understand essentialism, it means the problematic assertion that a particular property of an object is natural to it. Innovative poetry production is clearly not a necessary attribute of the category of woman; the question then is whether the editor of any given anthology of innovative poetry by women must be assuming that it is so. Ashton's most important evidence for her argument is not textual—that is, most of it is not based on a reading of what editors have offered as their reasons for publishing their anthologies. Her main evidence is the sheer fact that such anthologies continue to be produced. If you are producing a woman-centered anthology with a particular aesthetic bias, it must mean, says Ashton, that "the contingent relation between the sex of the authors and the forms of their poems [has been transformed into] a necessary one." I'm not convinced that when any editor of any anthology of innovative poetry invokes "the situation in which [a poem] is produced" by printing only poetry by women, it necessarily means that he is, willy-nilly, essentializing. Unless, that is, we essentialize any time we connect aspects of poetic production to issues surrounding gender.
To dismiss women-only spaces on the basis of such a rigid anti-essentialism seems to me unhelpfully limiting. Are the demonstrably different social practices that surround different gender categories not sufficient reason for investigating possible relationships between those practices and aesthetic production? Ashton thinks not: you wouldn't create women-only anthologies of innovative poetry, she says dismissively, "unless what you cared about most was the relationship between the form of the poems and the gendered situation of their authors"—and Ashton thinks you shouldn't care about that. But can I not, as an agent making choices about how to write, be influenced by my situation (including the ways in which my gender affects it—and including my body) in ways that might be identifiable and describable even if they are not a necessary result of my situation? And then, if someone draws attention to a possible relationship between my gendered situation and my poetry, are they therefore essentialist even if they understand that I do not produce my poetry as a direct result of my possession of a vagina?
Such investigations are risky, and we may fall into essentializing traps as we attempt them, but anti-essentialism should not become a bogey that frightens us into abandoning attempts to describe the relationship between culture and aesthetics. Anthologies of women's poetry—like recent anthologies of African-American innovative poetry and critical books on the same (I imagine Ashton would make the same argument about these)—may provide useful ground for such attempts. I agree with Ashton that we need to be cautious about the assumptions we make when we address the relationship between aesthetic form and the situations from which it emerges; we should make no claims that the aesthetic productions of a subject are related in an essential way to her sex. But anti-essentialism should not mean we decline to address the nature of the relationship between cultural identity and poetic production in complex and nuanced ways. Rendered this broadly, anti-essentialism may wear out its usefulness.
--------------------
NOTES
[1] I might be wrong in assuming, despite my initial case of nerves, that I am off Ashton's anti-essentialist hook because though the anthology (Not for Mothers Only, co-edited with Rebecca Wolff) contains only writing by women, we did not define it as an anthology of "innovative" work. It is an anthology of poems on the subject (loosely defined) of motherhood. If it's essentialist to assert a connection between mothers and their writings on motherhood (though of course mothers do not all write on motherhood), it's so straightforwardly essentialist that it makes the accusation uninteresting: "Hey, you guys said mothers write about motherhood!"
[2] I'm not addressing here Ashton's claim—which I think is false—that sexist publishing practices are a thing of the past, partly because Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young have done so, and partly because I agree with Ashton that the claim is not the main force of her argument.
Dim Sum: Christine Wertheim
Dear Delirious Hem,Thank you for providing a space for this important discussion, and thanks also to Elizabeth and all the respondents for taking time to formulate and give us your thoughts.
As the organizer of the conference for which the Numbers paper was commissioned, I have been saddened by the lack of community-spirit displayed in the surrounding debates. The paper seems to have become just one more item around which to stage a status contest. In some ways I feel this applies to the authors themselves, who effectively failed to acknowledge the community out of, or for which their article was generated, (i.e., the Feminaissance conference organized by myself, Matias Viegener and Teresa Carmody at MOCA last Spring) an event on which large amounts of money, time and labor were expended; all we asked in return was a paper to which we would have first publication rights. (The book from this conference in currently in progress and will appear in Fall, with outside responses to all the papers.)
On the issue of essentialism--as many on Delirious Hem point out, gender is a political issue. We live under a form of patriarchy in which (subjects who inhabit) bodies 'seen' as marked, eg. female or black or queer, are treated differently from those seen to inhabit the only kind of body this patriarchy recognizes as neutral. Whatever we ‘liberated’ individuals like to think about ourselves, we are hailed by the world from outside our bodies as deviants from a norm that is politically determined by an extant power structure based on specific non-neutral ideals which effect the lives of people very differently. The fact that reference to such political matters can now be dismissed under the slur of essentialism is testament to the even greater power accorded the universalist rhetoric of neutrality since the inclusion, and abuse, of contemporary critiques of power into discourses on the arts.
On the designation of work as innovative/ avant-garde / experimental, etc. This, also, as many point out, is a political issue. Just as mainstream culture is still heavily rooted in patriarchal myths, so are many culture pools seen as marginal, or tangential to the main. What is interesting, (or perhaps it is not), is that, post-1850, western society has proposed that the aesthetic productions of some (special) marginals can act as indices of all that is holding us back from true liberation. That is, by their own demonstration of what they themselves have let go, they point us all towards the future. As far as I understand contemporary ideas about history, the enormous value placed on aesthetics in the modern era is largely grounded on this myth: that a group, (whether affiliated or not) of uniquely charged marginals, can act as the lightening rods to a better future, by providing new social imaginings for what we might become (given the assumed discontent with what we currently are).
Whether there is any evidence for the actual effectivity of this idea, of art as a tool for transforming the social imaginary, is a complex question. However, recent literary debates demonstrate that the idea of an aesthetically neutral-subject, or even the erasure of subjectivity from art altogether (which is of course quite different from losing the ego) is still considered by many cultural workers as one of the most important indices of futurity, and the place to which we should all be heading.
In other words, innovative/AG/experimental/future-oriented/liberatory artwork has become equated in some parts of the culture industry with the notion of subjective erasure. This is problematic for feminists and anyone else who conjoins with others to resolve an oppression specific to one kind of subjectivity. For if there are no subjects, there can’t be any female or black or perverse subjects either. Hence there can’t be any oppression, including the types of subjectivity which develop from the experience of being seen as a (lesser) other.
So, I think what I’m saying is this: while the terms ‘experimental / AG / innovative / etc.’ could be rethought, the question of whose Imaginary is cast as the index of our collective future is a highly important political matter. Marge Pearcy gives a brilliant look at two possible futures based on two current imaginaries in her book Woman on the Edge of Time. I wish we could collectively come up with some less militaristic terms to describe this problematic, but just as we must actively make space for the voices of those whose bodies are seen as marked, i.e., unneutral, we also need discursive spaces where other kinds of future can not only be imagined, but also dispersed for consideration; futures where even if we are all still given particular designations, no one group will be privileged as the Norm-al, neutral, non-contingent, ahistorical against whom all the rest are measured as falling behind.
Yours sincerely,
Christine Wertheim
Dim Sum: Biographies
Esther Belin, a writer and two-dimensional artist, graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2000, she won the American Book Award for her first book of poetry, From the Belly of My Beauty. She recently completed her MFA in creative writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles. She lives in Durango, Colorado with her four daughters and husband.
Susan Briante is the author of Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta Press, 2007). She is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas.
David Buuck lives in Oakland. He is a founding editor of Tripwire, and Contributing
Editor at Artweek. He runs BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. Recent publications include Paranoia Agent, Ruts, Runts, and Between Above and Below.
CAConrad is the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull, 2006), The Book of Frank (Chax, 2008), (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX, 2008), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock, The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems, (Factory School, 2008). He can be found on PhillySound.
Michelle Detorie lives in Goleta, CA where she edits WOMB and Hex Presse.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Ph.D., Columbia University) is known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry, and as a poet and essayist. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, a book of essays, was published by University of Alabama Press in 2006; in the same year, Alabama reprinted DuPlessis’s classic work The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Another recent critical book by DuPlessis is Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Her recent books of poetry are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and DRAFTS. Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis and Torques: Drafts 58-76 (Salt Publishing, 2004 and 2007, respectively).
Tonya Foster lives in Harlem and New Orleans. A student in the PhD in English program at the CUNY Graduate Center, she is currently teaching "Where Y'At: Imagined and Imagining Place," a course which explores poets' articulations of geographical differences, and tries to explore how those differences may be useful in constructing political, economic, and ecological alternatives to here as currently mapped.
Look for Joyelle McSweeney there,, there, there there, there, and elsewhere, including there.
Sina Queyras edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets for Persea Books in 2005 and is the author of Lemon Hound, which won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Her fourth collection of poetry, Expressway, will be published with Coach House in 2009. She is currently Markin-Flanagan Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary where she is working on a novel, Autobiography of Childhood, and a collection of short fiction titled A Story with Severe Anxiety and Other Stories. When she isn't pawing and chewing the latest arts and writing news on Lemon Hound, she likes to wear a cape.
Linda Russo is the author of MIRTH (Chax Press, 2007) and o going out (Potes & Poets, 1999), among other books. She has published essays on Joanne Kyger, Bernadette Mayer, and Hannah Weiner, including the preface to Kyger's About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation, 2007). She likes the sunny winters in Oklahoma where she currently lives.
Evie Shockley is the author of a half-red sea (2006) and a poetry chapbook, The Gorgon Goddess (2001), both published by Carolina Wren Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including 1913: a journal of forms, Hambone, HOW2, nocturnes (re)view, No Tell Motel, PMS:PoemMemoirStory, Studio, Talisman, and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. In 2007, she guest edited ~QUEST~, a special issue of MiPOesias featuring the work of contemporary African American poets and is currently serving as a guest editor of jubilat. She is at work on a critical book, a study of race and innovation in African American poetry that attempts to redefine "black aesthetics," supported by fellowships from the ACLS and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Shockley, a Cave Canem graduate fellow, teaches African American literature and creative writing at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Carmen Giménez Smith is publisher of Noemi Press and assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University. Her chapbook Casanova Variations is forthcoming from Dos Press (2008) and her full-length poetry collection, Odalisque in Pieces, will be published by University of Arizona Press in 2009. She lives with her husband and their two children in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Elizabeth Treadwell's seven books include the poetry collections Birds & Fancies (Shearsman, 2007) and Wardolly (Chax, 2008); her sixth chapbook, The Graces, was published by Dusie wee in 2006. Drafts from her current projects sometimes appear at her semiretired blog, Secret Mint.
Catherine Wagner is the author of two books from Fence. Her latest chapbooks are Hole in the Ground (Slack Buddha) and Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large (Bonfire Press). A forum she organized, Post-Marginal Positions: Women and the UK Experimental/Avant-Garde poetry community, is available at Jacket here. She teaches at Miami University in Ohio.
Christine Wertheim is a former painter with a PhD in literature and semiotics from Middlesex University, (UK). She teaches critical theory and feminisms on the undergraduate program in Critical Studies. For the graduate writing program she teaches classes on the relations between ideas of modernity, Art and femininity. With Matias Viegenser, she co-organizes an annual conference: Séance (2004), Noulipo (2005), Impunities (2006), Feminaissance (2007), ArText (2008), and has coedited two anthologies of contemporary experimental writing: Séance (Make Now Press, 2006), and noulipo (Les Figues Press, 2007). Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including La Petitie Zine and Five Fingers Review. Her book of poetics +|’me’S-pace was published by Les Figues Press in 2007. Christine also co-directs the Institute For Figuring, which organizes presentations and exhibitions on the intersections of art and science, recently at Machine Project, the MJT, and the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Susan Briante is the author of Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta Press, 2007). She is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas.
David Buuck lives in Oakland. He is a founding editor of Tripwire, and Contributing
Editor at Artweek. He runs BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. Recent publications include Paranoia Agent, Ruts, Runts, and Between Above and Below.
CAConrad is the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull, 2006), The Book of Frank (Chax, 2008), (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX, 2008), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock, The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems, (Factory School, 2008). He can be found on PhillySound.
Michelle Detorie lives in Goleta, CA where she edits WOMB and Hex Presse.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Ph.D., Columbia University) is known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry, and as a poet and essayist. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, a book of essays, was published by University of Alabama Press in 2006; in the same year, Alabama reprinted DuPlessis’s classic work The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Another recent critical book by DuPlessis is Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Her recent books of poetry are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and DRAFTS. Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis and Torques: Drafts 58-76 (Salt Publishing, 2004 and 2007, respectively).
Tonya Foster lives in Harlem and New Orleans. A student in the PhD in English program at the CUNY Graduate Center, she is currently teaching "Where Y'At: Imagined and Imagining Place," a course which explores poets' articulations of geographical differences, and tries to explore how those differences may be useful in constructing political, economic, and ecological alternatives to here as currently mapped.
Look for Joyelle McSweeney there,, there, there there, there, and elsewhere, including there.
Sina Queyras edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets for Persea Books in 2005 and is the author of Lemon Hound, which won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Her fourth collection of poetry, Expressway, will be published with Coach House in 2009. She is currently Markin-Flanagan Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary where she is working on a novel, Autobiography of Childhood, and a collection of short fiction titled A Story with Severe Anxiety and Other Stories. When she isn't pawing and chewing the latest arts and writing news on Lemon Hound, she likes to wear a cape.
Linda Russo is the author of MIRTH (Chax Press, 2007) and o going out (Potes & Poets, 1999), among other books. She has published essays on Joanne Kyger, Bernadette Mayer, and Hannah Weiner, including the preface to Kyger's About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation, 2007). She likes the sunny winters in Oklahoma where she currently lives.
Evie Shockley is the author of a half-red sea (2006) and a poetry chapbook, The Gorgon Goddess (2001), both published by Carolina Wren Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including 1913: a journal of forms, Hambone, HOW2, nocturnes (re)view, No Tell Motel, PMS:PoemMemoirStory, Studio, Talisman, and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. In 2007, she guest edited ~QUEST~, a special issue of MiPOesias featuring the work of contemporary African American poets and is currently serving as a guest editor of jubilat. She is at work on a critical book, a study of race and innovation in African American poetry that attempts to redefine "black aesthetics," supported by fellowships from the ACLS and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Shockley, a Cave Canem graduate fellow, teaches African American literature and creative writing at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Carmen Giménez Smith is publisher of Noemi Press and assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University. Her chapbook Casanova Variations is forthcoming from Dos Press (2008) and her full-length poetry collection, Odalisque in Pieces, will be published by University of Arizona Press in 2009. She lives with her husband and their two children in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Elizabeth Treadwell's seven books include the poetry collections Birds & Fancies (Shearsman, 2007) and Wardolly (Chax, 2008); her sixth chapbook, The Graces, was published by Dusie wee in 2006. Drafts from her current projects sometimes appear at her semiretired blog, Secret Mint.
Catherine Wagner is the author of two books from Fence. Her latest chapbooks are Hole in the Ground (Slack Buddha) and Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large (Bonfire Press). A forum she organized, Post-Marginal Positions: Women and the UK Experimental/Avant-Garde poetry community, is available at Jacket here. She teaches at Miami University in Ohio.
Christine Wertheim is a former painter with a PhD in literature and semiotics from Middlesex University, (UK). She teaches critical theory and feminisms on the undergraduate program in Critical Studies. For the graduate writing program she teaches classes on the relations between ideas of modernity, Art and femininity. With Matias Viegenser, she co-organizes an annual conference: Séance (2004), Noulipo (2005), Impunities (2006), Feminaissance (2007), ArText (2008), and has coedited two anthologies of contemporary experimental writing: Séance (Make Now Press, 2006), and noulipo (Les Figues Press, 2007). Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including La Petitie Zine and Five Fingers Review. Her book of poetics +|’me’S-pace was published by Les Figues Press in 2007. Christine also co-directs the Institute For Figuring, which organizes presentations and exhibitions on the intersections of art and science, recently at Machine Project, the MJT, and the Andy Warhol Foundation.
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