Abstract
Rae Armantrout’s poem “The Garden,” from her collection Necromance, opens with an allusion to “lipstick ads in the 50s.” The neat image evokes the potent iconography of consumerism and femininity in the postwar period: the ambivalent twinning of America’s ascendant capitalism with the new social movements of which feminism was so influential.1 The taut irony of these opening lines, and the more complex interrogations that characterize Armantrout’s writing, are consistent with the critical tenor of much of Language writing and particularly the role of both consumption and gender within it. From registering the costs of Eve’s lapsarian knowledge, to the “insinuating and slangy” presence of masculinity, Armantrout’s poem unflinchingly teases out the associations of femininity with both desire and violence. Like so much of Armantrout’s poetry, the tartness of this critique is further ironized by its demure, diminutive presentation.
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Notes
Rae Armantrout, Necromance (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1991), 19.
Rae Armantrout, “Why Don’t Women Do Language Orientated Writing?” In the American Tree: Language, Realism, Poetry, edited by Ron Silliman (Orono: National Poetry Foundation Inc., 1986), 544.
Rae Armantrout, “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity,” Sagetrieb 11, no. 3 (1992), 9.
Miriam Hansen, “Foreword” to Negt and Kluge’s Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxxvi.
Ron Silliman et al., “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry,” Social Text 19, no. 20 (1988), 271.
The shift has been variously narrated by its participants: one of the most obviously controversial accounts was the public discussion that followed the publication of Bob Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) in The Impercipient Lecture Series 1, no. 4 (1997).
Andreas Huyssen’s “map” of the postmodern suggests that the potential that the apparent loss of modernity’s authoritative narratives had proffered to the radical political and cultural movements in the 1960s had given way by the following decade. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1988), 170.
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984).
Charles Bernstein, “The Conspiracy of ‘Us,’” The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 187.
Ron Silliman, “Canons and Institutions: New Hope for the Disappeared,” Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, edited by Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof Books, 1990), 160.
Andrew Ross/Barrett Watten, “From Reinventing Community: A Symposium on/with Language Poets” In Aerial 8: Contemporary Poetics as Critical Theory, edited by Ron Smith (Washington DC: Edge Books, 1995), 192.
Ron Silliman et al., “For Change” In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986), 486.
Linda Reinfield’s relatively early Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue maintains that the “commitment to rescue” that Language writing brings about is its “restoring [of] the reader.” Linda Reinfield, Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1990),
See also Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 31, and Hank Lazer, Opposing Poetries: Volume One—Issues and Institutions (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 40.
Andrew Ross, “The New Sentence and the Commodity Form: Recent American Writing,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 375.
Andrew Ross, The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 211.
Terry Eagleton damned theories that privileged the reader in this way, suggesting that they are “equivalent in some sense to worker’s co-operatives within capitalism, readers may hallucinate that they are actually writers, reshaping government handouts on the legitimacy of limited nuclear war into symbolist poems” and that the job of “socialist criticism” should “not be primarily concerned with the consumer’s revolution. Its task is to take over the means of production,” Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: Verso, 1986), 184.
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 31. Jameson’s attack upon the implicit political abeyance of Language writing found sympathy within practitioners of the avant-garde American poetic itself. Later critics such as Vernon Shetley suggested, more cautiously, that Language writing’s reliance “on the academy to produce the sophisticated, theoretically inclined readers it assumes” was evidence of the limitations of its efficacy.
Vernon Shetley, After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 159. For Shetley, the necessary “knowingness” of the reader reveals a “high and unargued value” upon self-consciousness rather than literary value, and that what differentiates the work of Robert Frost from Charles Bernstein “is the latter’s superior awareness of the many ways of reading his poetry,” 141.
Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 27, 28.
Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Between Community and Institution (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999);
Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995);
Walter Kalaidjian, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Lazer, Opposing Poetries,
Jed Rasula, The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects 1940–1990 (National Council of Teachers in English, 1996).
Charles Bernstein, “Community and the Individual Talent,” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 26, no. 3–4 (1996), 177.
Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the U.K., edited by Maggie O’Sullivan (London: Reality Street, 1996); Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, edited by Margaret Sloan (Jersey City: Talisman, 1998); Megan Simpson, Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women’s Language-Orientated Writing (Suny: State University of New York Press, 2000);
Ann Vickery, Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Geneaology of Language Writing (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000); We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics, edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001).
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
Marianne DeKoven, “Male Signature, Female Aesthetic: The Gender Politics of Experimental Writing,” Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, edited by Ellen G. Frideman and Miriam Fuchs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 79.
Joan Retallack, “:RE:THINKING: LITERARY: FEMINISM: (Three Essays onto Shaky Grounds),” Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, edited by Lynn and Christanne Miller Keller (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 375.
Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1986).
Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” The Inner World and Joan Riviere: Collected Papers: 1920–1958, edited By Athol Hughes (London: Karnac Books, 1991).
Daniel Miller, “Consumption as the Vanguard of History,” Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, edited by Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 1995).
Teresa De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (London: MacMillan, 1987), 26.
Teresa De Lauretis, “Guerrilla in the Midst: Women’s Cinema in the 80s,” Screen 31, no. 1 (1990), 6–25, 16.
Lyn Hejinian, “The Person and Description,” Poetics Journal 9 (1991), 167, 170.
Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” Poetics Journal 4 (1984), 134.
Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 106.
Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry. See also Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2001).
Lyn Hejinian, My Life (2nd ed.) (New York: Sun and Moon Press, 1987), 101.
Lyn Hejinian, “Reason,” The Language of Inquiry, 340. See also Peter Nicholls, “Phenomenal Poetics: Reading Lyn Hejinian,” Postwar American Poetry: The Mechanics of the Mirage, edited by Christine Pagnoulle and Michel Delville (Liège: Université deLiège, 2000).
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xvi.
Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 108.
Lyn Hejinian, Michael Davidson, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman, Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (San Fransisco: Mercury House Incorporated, 1991), 34.
Lyn Hejinian, Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (Great Barrington: The Figures, 1991), 63.
Lyn Hejinian, “A Local Strangeness: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian,” Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative Authors, edited by Larry McCaffery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 129.
Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino, Sight (Washington DC: Edge Books, 1999), from unpaginated introduction.
Leslie Scalapino, The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), 16.
A Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 50.
For Merleau-Ponty it is in the act of perception that physical existence turns into “being”: “I grasp myself, not as a constituting subject which is transparent to itself, and which constitutes the totality of every possible object of thought and experience, but as a particular thought, as a thought engaged with certain objects, as a thought in act […] Thus I can get outside the psychological cogito, without, however, taking myself to be a universal thinker.” M. Merleau Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenal Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 22.
Leslie Scalapino, that they were at the beach (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 3.
Marjorie Perloff, “Soundings: Zaum, Seriality and the Recovery of the Sacred,” American Poetry Review 15, no. 1 (1986), 45.
Mark Jarman, “Singers and Storytellers,” The Hudson Review 39, no. 2 (1986), 335.
Gary Lenhart, “Avant-Garde or Postmodern?: Review of Leslie Scalapino’s that they were at the beach and Fanny Howe’s Robeson Street,” American Book Review 9, no. 1 (1987), 14.
Leslie Scalapino, R-hu (Berkeley: Atelos, 2000), 100.
Leslie Scalapino, The Front Matter, Dead Souls (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 1.
Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991);
Zillah R. Eisenstein, The Color of Gender: Reimagining Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
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© 2007 Nicky Marsh
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Marsh, N. (2007). Against the Outside: Language Poetry as a Counter-Public. In: Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607156_4
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