American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form

Introduction

Introduction This book is an analysis of the concept of hybrid poetics as it circulates in the current critical discourse surrounding contemporary American poetry and as it informs innovative work by several American women poets in particular. I argue that, far from being new, hybrid aesthetics— most frequently defined as the playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies—have a firm foundation and a distinct history in the work of radical women poets from throughout the past century, poets who have created such mixings as part of a resistance to being fixed in any particular school or camp, sometimes (as in the case of Alice Notley ) on the grounds that such camps are most often dominated by male poets. Yet even though many of these important poets are acknowledged and anthologized in the two major venues for hybrid poetics, the Norton anthology American Hybrid and Fence magazine, repeated claims to the newness of hybrid poetics decontextualizes this work and renders it in a curiously apolitical light. Indeed, I argue that the current debate raging around the politics of hybrid poetics—one part of which comprises the post-Language, “Post-Avant” community claim that hybridity is a watering down of the avant-garde in its appropriation of politically engendered forms for presumably apolitical ends—is provoked if not justified by proponents, enthusiasts, and marketers of hybrid poetics who celebrate what they claim is new on the grounds that it simply is new, altogether ignoring the history, context, and political implications of the work itself. That the avant-garde community has not looked more closely 2 / introduction at the work assembled under the sign of the hybrid, preferring instead to bicker with editors’ often reductive descriptions of the concept, is nevertheless something of a curiosity, suggesting as it does the avantgarde community’s anxiety surrounding its legacy and future. And so, with the editors of American Hybrid and Fence magazine pointing to ostensibly new aesthetics on one side, and the avant-garde community pointing to a perceived erasure of politics on the other, the work that has been labeled hybrid—much of it political, much of it by women writers —goes thoroughly unexamined. The fact that some of these writers have lately received critical attention as experimental writers makes their subsequent erasure as poets creating innovative hybrid works somewhat ironic, but also of a piece with a literary history in which writing by women in any school or movement goes unexamined for far too long. Throughout this study I explore the ways in which hybrid aesthetics have been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order—as well as implicitly masculinist avant-garde dogma—in ever-new, innovative, and formally subversive ways. In my discussion of the work of the five poets discussed herein— Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine—I show the ways in which hybridity can be understood as an implicitly political strategy, one that forces encounters between hitherto incompatible literary traditions and that thereby brings to the surface competing ideologies and their implications for lived experience. At the same time, I argue that it is precisely because these poets have mixed forms that entail disparate ideologies (consumer culture with the avant-garde, low culture forms with theory-based poetics, speakerly prose poetry with linguistic experimentation) that their work has largely gone unnoticed by leading members and critics in experimental poetry circles; such mixings of high with the feminized low are rarely treated as serious forays into oppositional art, as the current debate surrounding hybrid poetics reveals. Analyzing this intergenre, interformal work for the ways it crosses aesthetic and ideological boundaries, I show how hybridity can entail a mixing of the high and low in defiance of those highly gendered modernist values that still hold sway (all claims to the contrary); dialogical play with the competing aims of discrete genres; expansion of the limits of established forms; and attempts to complicate the notion of selfhood—and the politics of citizenship—as articulated in the literature of our current moment. Throughout the book, then, the concept of hybridity is explored in terms formal, cultural, historical, and introduction / 3 political, as I locate the work of a select group of women writers both in a history of literary experimentation and a current constellation...