Dim Sum: Rachel Levitsky[1]

Counter-production

“The many futile letters. (Humans proliferate so glibly.)” [2]


a.      Stupid, Lazy, Fearful, Sensitive, Weary, Proliferating, Childless (childbearing, childrearing), Petty, Predictably Feminine Females


No, I do not think these things about women nor do I think we are in fact women at all, though in many ways we practice as women (or not) and are practiced upon as women (or not). It would be more interesting for us to talk about ‘no gender’ to quote kari edwards, or ‘infinite gender’ to quote myself (two very different ideas but emerging from a similar concern). I do think that most of the responses that ask the question, “Why don’t women submit?” are subject to qualifying women in one of the ways listed above, which makes me feel sensitive, weary, fearful, lazy, childless and yes, a little bit stupid, as in ‘made to feel dull’. Yet, there is a continuous stream of energy generated by this issue (what is the issue?). I suspect this is because it (Is it representation?) is an easily recognizable catch-all (I could say metonym, but I mean receptacle) for a host of anxieties. One big one is this experience of practicing gender and having gender practiced upon us, which very much shapes the conditions in which we are poets and writers in the various communities in which we are poets and writers. I myself recently found my work included in a magazine that had only three women representing among twenty or so writers, and thought ‘ick’ before being able to read it, and learned or relearned from the experience, that it matters to me in what context my work is published, more than that it is published, that I fear less not being published than being published out of context and therefore, this is personal. I am more concerned that I not be the only-woman than that I am amongst women-only since it is more likely amongst women-only that I am in a conversation, since writing as writing is not doing, it is its relationship to the conversation, which is its doing and which is to me more relevant and energetic than any pure product--which might be judged ‘contingent’ or ‘essential’ or worse still ‘a mistake.’ I am ahead of myself.

b.      Our Bodies, Writing

As I understand it, this forum comes out of a volley of essays. I would like to say how I read these essays. In her essay, Our Bodies Our Poems, Jennifer Ashton makes the point that there can be legitimate intervention either on behalf of women or on behalf of language but that asserting the double intervention: editing poetry as both innovative/avant-garde (as well as) by women implies a feminist essentialism proven regressive by gender theorists since the 1980s. She states most explicitly that this double intervention is contingent and therefore ‘a mistake.’ The Chicago Review published an article by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young which in part responds to Ashton’s points and which is called “Numbers Trouble.” For that same issue, Ashton wrote a second piece, “The Numbers Trouble With “Numbers Trouble,” in which, feeling misunderstood by Spahr and Young, she reiterates her thesis for clarification, “the most visible purveyors of women’s “innovative” writing end up with an “innovation that is itself gendered.” (Though it’s clear to me that Spahr and Young understood her thesis the first time.)

I don’t know if Ashton’s argument is motivated by irritation over the banality of anthologies, or a keen eye for academic and poetry world ado over nothing, or a real resentment toward feminist gathering and organizing. It certainly is intellectually and culturally nonproductive (we are not going to stop gathering and organizing, and there is no intellectual work that will come out of what she imagines her argument ‘proves’), a negative argument in apparent (to me) bad faith, which were it not for the power of these journals to shape trends, to be seen as ‘knowledge’ to pass onto young college student poets, would not be worthy of a response. Its reading of ‘innovation’ or ‘avant-garde’ is de-historicized, so that ‘woman’ reads as a genetic or social function, and ‘innovation’ an aesthetic practice. The bodies in Ashton’s argument seem to no longer be actual places, only sites of inscription. Her argument reminds me of one that a friend of mine who’d become ba’al Tshuva[3] used to ‘prove’ to me the existence of god. I remained unconvinced, though it is true that this proof was meaningful to this friend who’d been seeking out a reason to become more religious, and she cited it often. Likewise, Ashton’s proof of an error in our work, in our conversation, in our desires to group ourselves, won’t stop us from erring (I doubt as well that we would have been convinced of the orthodox god) but may be useful to the uninformed anti-feminism we are often faced with in our classrooms, on editorial boards, in poetry organizations, committees...

Spahr and Young write that their motivation for responding to Ashton is their concern that “her dismissal of female community parallels a larger cultural dismissal of feminism that shows up in peculiar and intense ways in contemporary writing communities” and that women (of many genders) feel desire to form and define these communities for all sorts of reasons, some of which may (goddess forbid!) be essentialist, and which no matter what, are desires difficult to explain and justify clearly and aesthetically without saying something that will in the next moment cause one to contradict oneself, or at least, to blush. They then show, by reviewing the ‘numbers’, that Ashton’s assertion of some divine disappearance of patriarchal structures in poetry, has little bearing. If god exists, ready to neutralize the gender bar, he hasn’t shown himself, nor shown himself equal to the task just yet. Then in a wonderfully problematizing though problematic turn,[4] Spahr/Young conclude their work on numbers by negating its relevance, stating that by itself, numbers are a slight fact, asserting that the more important work that we, as benefactors of exploiter/polluter nations, must do, is to commit ourselves to the various causes of global justice.

c.      Aesthetic Community, Avant-garde Action

Before continuing, I would like to name the aesthetic community that I consider myself a part of, in general and in my work with Belladonna*, as avant-garde and feminist, both, but not in any particular order. Avant-garde and feminist, in this context, are not identities, they are correspondences, and as correspondences they are not contingent, they are over-lapping. Furthermore, and what seems to be missing from the Ashton framework, is the fact of politically radical intent in both demarcations. As such, on one hand, we group together not as women as outer limit, but as feminists, for all the ambiguity that ism connotes.[5] On the other, by naming ourselves ‘avant-garde’ we mean to indicate toward a practice of making, in revolt against aestheticist disassociation from everyday life and toward the building of new practices in our everyday with and by our makings.[6]

It occurred to me on the third day thinking about this response that I finally understood what theater people like Fiona Templeton mean to do when they produce large works for an “audience of one.” Of course they are resisting commodification, proliferation, alienation. They are being inefficient, slow, considered. It is inherently anti-puritanical and anti-capitalist. It doesn’t make good sense. It resists temptation to show off how brilliant, talented, beautiful. It is difficult to find, silly to sell, unlikely to institutionalize and probably near-impossible to fund. The only response one can have to it is a personal one, having been just a one and therefore face-to-face.

Groupings are not incidental, and not merely social, they are how we build the world we would like to live in. On the night of the first Belladonna* reading I believe I said something like “without justifying a women’s series, I’ll just say that it feels good.” I’ve since justified it many times for in fact, I was partly, directly and intentionally, responding to the situation for women poets under overwhelmingly male curatorial power in the 1990’s NYC downtown/avant-garde poetry scene. But more importantly, and more sustaining for me and for Erica Kaufman, my co-curator/editor since 2002, has been the gathering of some sort of tribe, the conversations en-gendered, the awkward stutters we soldiered through to get to a new thought, the pleasure we’ve had in supporting an avant-garde and feminist community which is perhaps most unjustifiable and so deeply personally political. I am sure that Jennifer Ashton, should she come by, would find that indeed our gathering is no “mistake”--an illogical possibility perhaps, but not a mistake.

These days I am reading Lorine Niedecker. It’s possible Niedecker would have enjoyed herself very much at an event curated as a feminist avant-garde reading, despite possible initial hesitations. How, if such a community existed then, would she have been cared for in ways which she was not. Many if not most of the women that have read in Belladonna* have expressed relief. Of these expressions, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s comment that “it’s not paranoid” is one of my favorites. Such responses suggest we want more feminist inventions, not less. We cannot imagine how stilted and tense we feel in ‘essentially’ designed-by-men institutions until we find ourselves in something else.

Yes, in this banter we are tense. Like those television talk shows where the players scream and repeat themselves. Where nothing ever changes.

Which is how I’ve read the responses to Spahr and Young by the various parties that blog etc., pit-bull like, defensive, gazing towards no new horizon but rather into their own navel. Missing their point. Yes, Spahr and Young, establish that garden variety sexism (numbers inequality) lives on, that gendered behavior in poetry community looks pretty much the same as it has always looked in that (quoting S&Y’s altered quoting of K. Silem Mohammad’s response) “men and women get threatened and aggressive when men and women speak up about these things.” Again, it is at that moment in their piece that (Juliana) Spahr and (Stephanie) Young finish their piece by asking how folks in “poetry or poetry communities...might do more to engage the living and working conditions of women in a national/international arena.”

I have several thoughts on this—and since Elizabeth Treadwell asked for this in time for AWP (apologies for being so late) I will list them in honor of the 7,500 of us who (obediently?) registered for the AWP. I think as poets we should proliferate less and demand less production from each other, and that we should organize more with others, and we should be thinking about the new activism that will be necessary to rebuild a polis that has a political nature, and write and read poems that are heard and talked about, and talk about each other’s work when we hear it. I think we here in NYC should have less readings and more meetings, reading groups, meals together, public and radical self-education. I think we spend too much time only with poets. I think we should be organizing for better working conditions for ourselves, and others (we should participate in the union or organize our workplace). We must aggressively challenge being swallowed into academia, and question ourselves when we professionalize and promote ourselves as poets. I want us to begin to collectively name some registers we might consider requisite for resistance and opposition to full-on consumer, capitalist culture. I think we should write letters on paper and keep our worst thoughts in our private journals, not on blogs. I think we should heckle at readings as a form of loud love. I’d like us to reinvest and rethink the scope, shape and import of the local as a political arena--as a place where it is possible somehow to do meaningful work. (Here some poetry examples come to mind, Debunker Mentality, Poetry is News organized by Anne Waldman, Ammiel Alcalay, and Tonya Foster, work with youth done at Bowery Poetry Club and Bushwick School for Social Justice--much more.) As for me, I’d like to get to these things, and I might if I were running around less with poets. I’d like to ask Bloomberg why his very rich city can’t return the Brooklyn Central Library to it’s pre-cut hours, so the kids hanging out waiting for it to open (at 1p.m on a Sunday) could enter. I’d like to be part of campaigns of demand and outrage over the easy sale of our neighborhoods.

And I would like us to have the time and the conditions to continue and expand our interrogations on Language, Feminism, the reinvention of the Left, what shape the next revolution, or how we can possibly live in the world without one.

In other words, to be present.

--------------------
TEXTS CITED

Ashton, Jennifer. “Our Bodies, Our Poems.” American Literary History 19: 1 (2007) 211-231.

Ashton, Jennifer. “The Numbers Trouble with “Numbers Trouble”.” Chicago Review 53:2/3 (Autumn 2007). 112-120.

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw; foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Stephens, Nathalie. The Sorrow and the Fast of It. Cold Spring, NY: Nightboat Books, 2007.

Spahr, Juliana and Stephanie Young. “Numbers Trouble.” Chicago Review 53:2/3 (Autumn 2007). 88-111.

Templeton, Fiona. YOU-the City. New York: Roof Books, 1990.

Von Flotow, Luise. "Legacies of Quebec's 'écriture au féminin': Bilingual Transformances, Translation Politicized, Subaltern Versions of the Text." Journal for Canadian Studies. 30:4 (Winter 1996). 88-109.

NOTES

[1] I refer to Belladonna* a bit in this piece. By way of quick explanation: I started up Belladonna*--a feminist avant-garde poetry matrix, as reading series August 1999, at the Bluestockings Women’s Bookstore, which was, the same summer, opened by the street activist Kathryn Welsh. In 2003 the store became Bluestockings Radical Books. Both bookstores were and are managed and peopled by unpaid collectives. There is a good account of the demise of the bookstore’s radical women’s collective and the birth of the bookstore’s radical collective here.

Belladonna* is now many more than me and Erica Kaufman is my co-worker in everything, our events are at Dixon Place and we make all kinds of publications. For more information about Belladonna*, its mission, activities and history, see here. My reasons for responding: Interested in continuance and expansion of activities of political resistance in poetry community.

[2] Nathalie Stephens. 19.

[3] Mainly referring to a generation of young Jews who’d grown up more or less secular turning to Orthodox Judaism or Chasidism. The term itself more or less means ‘repentance’ and connotes ‘returning’ to an observation of Jewish law.

[4] I realize in re-reading this that what is ‘problematic’(to me) may not be clear and, rather than expanding the piece which is already late and to which this is only tangentially relevant, I’ll quickly address it here, in this footnote. I begin to get at the ‘problem’ later when I stress the work we must do locally, beginning with making the space we’re in a better space, the conversation we’re in a better one. There is another conversation that we might want to take up that is a critique of the notion that to do a thing, one must go to a different place, which requires a great deal of fuel.(I’m thinking a lot about how frustrated I am that it seems that one must go to New Orleans to fight for New Orleans.)

[5] In the middle of the paragraph where I am presumably defining myself, I use the word ‘we’ because I can’t group by myself. I am confident, because I am in an ongoing conversation with several, that there is a we that I may claim, though no doubt each has her own variation of interpretation on terms. The variations of intent on the word Feminism make for some difficult positioning. For myself Feminism is an analysis of patriarchal power, in which patriarchy is hierarchy and hierarchy is power over, which is domination, which requires submission.

[6] Avant-garde is probably used as variously as Feminism. Rightfully so. For my purposes here, polemically and historically, I’ll rely on Peter Bürger’s notion that that avant-garde differs from mere aestheticism in its “attempt to organize a new life praxis from a basis in art.” (49) I also find support for my interpretation in the work of experimental feminists writers in Quebec, aka ‘l’ecriture au feminin’ which was committed, in addition to a radical “writing in the feminine”, to the generation of multilingual “texts of the street” and translation of work by invisible or less visible communities, as activism. (Von Flotow)

Dim Sum: Joyelle McSweeney

Against Anthological Thinking

1. The noncompatability of Ashton’s acute if single-minded thrust and Spahr and Young’s digressive parry suggests a mutual block which is itself the result of the traditionalist literary practice of ‘anthological thinking.’

2. Anthological thinking is inherently hierarchical and patriarchal; the apparatus of the anthology--the title, the introductory essay, the carefully selected and truncated texts, the credits of its editors and contributors--all present a single argument, an analytical model in which all the components docilely comply. Anthological thinking refers both to the editorial practice of designing and publishing the anthology and to the mindset of reading the components of an anthology as in compliance with its apparatus. Accordingly, when Ashton performs her critique of various anthologies of women’s writing, she turns her attention to the governing metaphors and allusions implied by their titles, to the introductory essays written by the editors, and to the roster of included poets. She does not analyze the poems inside the anthology. She does not, say, open to a poem in the book, pick a line or stanza, and read outward or at random from there to see what occult patterns or flows may be discovered. Such an approach is outside the practice of anthological thinking.

3. Yet, this is how many students make use of anthologies: whether bored or piqued by the analytical model presented by the teacher who assigned this anthology (which may already be a partial or entire revision of that proposed by the editors), they leaf through the leaves, reading fragments, titles, whole poems in an order governed only by their own prerogatives and attention span, and thus undermine the hierarchical, patriarchal pedagogical model of which they are assigned the bottom rung. They move out through the territory according to their own lights, or at random; they make associations between the poems at hand and music they like; they write their own poems; they look things up; they annotate or graffiti the pages; they close the thing and go back to other media.

4. In fact, this is how I myself became interested in (invested in?) poetry at an early age. My parents gave me an anthology of Best Loved American Poems, through which I leafed at random, pausing on those poems (first-lines, really) which demonstrated attention-getting techniques like epithets and exclamation points. One epithet remains with me: “Icarian bird,” though it was only a few years ago that I realized “Icarian” was supposed to refer to Icarus, let alone that the device was an epithet. I didn’t even wonder about the poem’s title, what the "Icarian bird" was supposed to refer to, or who wrote this poem until a few years ago. (Answers: “Smoke,” smoke, Thoreau). At the time, “Icarian bird” sounded vaguely archeological to me; in the Victorian 1980s, signs of dinosaurs were everywhere. At any rate, a definition of "Best Loved American Poetry" as a concordance of epithets and exclamation points is at odds with the chronological, New-England-bound yet nationalist model the anthology itself was presumably intended to evince, but I don’t know, I never read the introduction.

5. My point with the above anecdote is that there is nothing wrong with the anthology per se, only with anthological thinking, and I feel both the editors of the anthologies Ashton critiques and Ashton as a reader participate in this programmatic approach.

6. A serviceable alternative to anthological thinking is the Deleuzian assemblage. If we begin by reading the index to A Thousand Plateaus, its author (oh, but he is a "compiler," not an author; oh but it is dirty, this filling station, and not an able-bodied text at all!) Hassan Melehy, directs us to following capacious quote:

A book has neither an object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All these, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity--but we don’t know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed [...]

7. One nonbook example of assemblage presently online and becoming is How2. To be sure, How2 has a mission statement, but, happily, the mission statement is already a participle: “Extending HOW(ever)’s original spirit of inquiry into modernist and contemporary innovative writing practices by women.” It describes How2 not as an object but as an adjacency, a contingent motion. If How2’s relationship to HOW(ever) is one of adjacency (an extending), How2 is an assemblage, a multiplicity. It’s utterly porous. Its visual interface is crammed, nonallegorical, nonlinear--one is not directed to read anything in particular first, one cannot (or I cannot) even hold the entire interface on my screen. I have to scroll through and interact with this page to get a sense of the contents, and so diverse are the contents that I can’t get a single sense at all; eventually, recalling my nonanthological reading of Best Loved American Poems, I just pick a point of entry. And what’s true of this page is true of all the content of How2; unlike in a conventional anthology, I cannot hold the entire model or map in my mind by way of metaphor, analytical model, or roster. In this sense How2 is unattributable. The various components have different densities, some sections quite dense, critical panels on a given body of work, others a more singular, fluid presentation of one person’s extended project such as Judith Goldman’s multimedia project on the sightlines of statues. Proximity on a given screen does not imply and yet creates the possibility of unpredictable relationality among components and explicitly and implicitly links and references material beyond How2, suggesting further unknowable assemblages. In this sense, How2, for all its hugeness, seems partial, always pointing to something beyond itself. We don’t yet know what kind of multiplicity this is. The mission statement on the homepage cannot really serve to organize or even summarize so much flux; it’s just one more component, one more screen to be clicked away from or back to.

8. My point in dwelling on How2 is not to suggest that paper anthologies be thrown over in favor of online assemblages (although that would be excellent) but instead that we begin to shift in all our reading and editorial practices from anthological thinking to thinking through assemblage. This would begin to alleviate the anxieties expressed by Ashton as well as those expressed by Spahr and Young. In the former case, thinking through assemblage invites us both to dislodge the poetry from its apparatus and to enter into its assemblage with texts and poets and periods and, yes, genders, beyond those admitted by the particular editorial hand. The book is unattributable, simultaneously filling with and draining to multiple tributaries. From the perspective of Spahr and Young, thinking through assemblage also frees us from thinking in the delimited, representative, quantitative terms implied by "numbers trouble." It admits that there is no tally sheet, no ultimate numerical stasis, and, most importantly, no ultimate adjudicator to whom we apply. It allows for distortion, for flows in multiple directions, deterritorializations whose effects and implications we cannot direct or know in advance. Most practically, we affluent first-worlders cannot merely author or stage discrete "exchanges" with "others" of whatever nationality, gender, or class, without admitting we are deformed by participation in assemblages already becoming, an "extending" whose multiplicitous reach and whose directionality we do not author or control.

--------------------
NOTES

[1] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translation and foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

Dim Sum: Sina Queyras

Gertrude Stein makes a speech to the future:

Do not argue: do. That's what I said and did. The shape of arguing isn't interesting. Sentences flag. Assaulting isn't being. Being assaulted isn't interesting either. Nor is turning away. The blind have vision but those with heads in the sand have sand in the head. Turning away isn't interesting, but walking with purpose is. Walking with purpose is creating. The best response is being and doing and creating. Many consider being an attack, someone different being themselves is sometimes attacking without even doing. That is not the fault of the person being it is about the person not allowing other forms of being. Attacking as I said, isn't interesting, nor is responding to attacking. I have said elsewhere that sentences on there own are without emotion but interesting sentences leap over attack. So you see, being is a kind of leaping because it is reaching. Sentences need air. One builds a paragraph like one builds a fire: a log, a log, a log, and a place for air and a place for flames. It is the same with being. That day with Hemingway at the door it was words that enflamed his ear. There was no point in arguing. The sentences exposed a feeling in him. That feeling then was attached to my being. He was seeing my being in a way that improved his own but was squinting. That is why getting out in the world is always better than hiding indoors. When a person squints he takes in what he needs and nothing else. When his ears become enflamed he opens his eyes with purpose and suddenly he finds the world is less convenient. Nothing changed with myself you see. And not arguing made it possible to be and create. My sentences advance. There are two paths in the desert and mine continues long after Hem had stuck his head back in the sand.

After that there was a long bumpy ride. People say I didn't mention enough of life. When one is being life, one doesn't worry about hitting other people's notes. One doesn't worry about other people reading one's notes either. One simply is and by being and doing one makes space for difference. Small gaps aerate culture and new ideas grow. Sand-filled heads are heavy and mostly without vision. No danger of a brush fire there.

My life was long and well-fed, with a second pair of arms and legs, with ample belly. It helped that she could cook and I could appreciate her. Appreciating properly is underestimated. Loving is an art as fine as any other but mostly invisible to everyone but the one adored. And not in hiding or in code. No less coded than any of the wives and more famous in the end, a name her own. She too lived with force. With equal force. When she and she come together with equal force there is no mistaking. That is what you didn't know. Or trust. Making sense is not the same as being simple. Clear is clear is clear, I said it and I did it.

Now you may or may not appreciate that being and doing are not the same as complying and not arguing is not being truthful but I am here to say that being is more forceful than arguing and even better than saying is writing down, but not quite as good as being though it is doing and useful because it makes a map for others. Feeling full for it, that's what to do. And do again.

And that is how to be yourself and make a difference.

Dim Sum: Linda Russo

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.

Dim Sum: Sandra Simonds

The Academy of the Future

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.