Abstract
This book analyzes the contributions of contemporary women poets to discussions about the democratic tradition in U.S. literary culture. It reads the increasingly public interventions of women poets through recent gender theory, specifically the debates about citizenship and publicness that have characterized feminism’s “third wave” and argues that contemporary poetry explores the new kinds of democratic cultures suggested by U.S. poetry’s divergent publics.
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Notes
Sam Hamill, “Introduction: Poets against the War,” Poets against the War, edited by Sam Hamill (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003), 2.
Jed Rasula, The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects 1940–1990 (Urbana: National Council of Teachers in English, 1996), 383.
Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997) and
Meta Mendel-Reyes, Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory (London: Routledge, 1995).
Walter Kalaidjian, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 19. Rasula has damned poetry’s privileging of “the metaphysics of the intimate encounter” (Rasula, The American Poetry Wax Museum, 314) and Altieri has despaired of a poetry that flees into “forms of extreme privacy that we hope are as inviolate as they are inarticulate.”
Charles Altieri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 16.
In his contribution to Rick London and Leslie Scalapino’s edited collection Enough, an Anthology of Poetry and Writings against the War (Oakland: O Books, 2003), Bernstein warned against “being hectored toward moral discourse, toward turning our work into digestible messages. This too is a casualty of the war machine, the undermining of the value of the projects of art, of the aesthetic.”
Roger Weingarten and Jack Myers, “Foreword,” New American Poets of the ’90s, edited by Jack Myers and Roger Weingarten (Boston: David R. Godine, 1991). Similar claims have been made in
Jonathan Holden’s The Fate of American Poetry (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1991);
David Wojahn and Jack Myers, “Preface,” A Profile of Twentieth Century American Poetry, edited by Jack Myers and David Wojahn (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1991).
Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 120.
Samuel Lipman, “Redefining Culture and Democracy,” The New Criterion 8, no. 4 (1989), 18.
Dana Gioia, “Notes on the New Formalism,” Conversant Essays: Poets in Conversation, edited by J. McCorkle (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 180.
Recent “crossover” anthologies and collections suggest how difficult it is to simply read the woman poet through this familiar formal pugilism. A Formal Feeling Comes, edited by Annie Finch (Santa Cruz: Story Line Press; 1994); American Women Poets in the Twenty First Century, edited by Claudine Rankine and Juliana Spahr (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002); Jacqueline Vaught Brogan and Cordelia Candelana, eds., Women Poets of the Americas: Toward a Pan-American Gathering (New York: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999). In addition, critical essays such as Clair Wills, “Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Experimentalism and the Expressive Voice,” Critical Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1994) and Linda Kinnahan, “Experimental Poetics and the Lyric Voice in British Women’s Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 37, no. 4 (1996) point to the reductiveness of reading women’s poetry against terms such as “mainstream” and “experimental.”
David Trend, “Democracy’s Crisis of Meaning,” Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship and the State, edited by David Trend (New York: Routledge, 1996).
William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 193.
Philip Pettit, “Freedom as Antipower,” Contemporary Political Theory: A Reader, edited by Colin Farrelly (London: Sage Publications, 2004), 151.
Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Seyla Benhabib, “From Identity Politics to Social Feminism,” Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship and the State, edited by David Trend (New York: Routledge, 1996), 39.
Chantal Mouffe, “Democratic Politics Today,” Dimensions of Radical Democracy, edited by Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992), 13.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (Ontario: Ansani Press, 1993), 75.
Ken Hirschkop, Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 37.
Robert Pinsky, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 15.
Drucilla Cornell, “Gender Hierarchy, Equality and the Possibility of Democracy,” Feminism and the New Democracy: Re-Siting the Political, edited by Jodi Dean (London: Sage, 1997), 218.
Jodi Dean, Introduction to Feminism and the New Democracy (London: Sage, 1997), 2.
Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995);
Luce Irigaray, Democracy Begins between Two (London: Athlone Press, 2000);
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracies,” Between Borders: Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, edited by Henry Giroux and Peter McClaren (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition (London: Routledge, 1997), 181.
Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the World (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993);
Katie Roiphe, The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1994).
Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
Michael Warner, Publics and CounterPublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 14.
Bruce Robbins, “Introduction: The Phantom Public Sphere,” The Phantom Public Sphere, edited by Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Between Community and Institution (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).
Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 10.
Zofia Burr, Of Women, Poetry and Power (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002);
Joseph Harrington, Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002);
Michael Thurston, Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and
Mark Van Wienen, Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
James Longenbach, “A Response to Michael Thurston,” College Literature 25, no. 3 (1998), 193.
Paul Naylor, Poetic Investigations (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 38.
Elizabeth Long, “Textual Interpretation as Collective Action,” The Ethnography of Reading, edited by J. Boyarin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 206.
Benjamin Bertram, “New Reflections on the ‘Revolutionary’ Politics of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,” Boundary 2 22, no. 3 (1995), 90.
Miriam Hansen, “Foreword” to Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
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© 2007 Nicky Marsh
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Marsh, N. (2007). Introduction. 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_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607156_1
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