Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America

Introduction

1 introduction Lisa Sewell This anthology has come into being primarily in response to enthusiasm , even excitement about the current state of contemporary poetry in North America and, in particular, that portion being produced by women. It follows up on American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (Wesleyan 2002), edited by Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr, which was inspired by the 1999 conference “Where Lyric Tradition Meets Language Poetry: Innovation in Contemporary Poetry by Women,” though as Spahr notes in her introduction, it was not an actual proceedings of the conference.1 The conference and the collection were explicitly interested in sparking a conversation across the ostensible divisions in contemporary poetry and in delineating an innovative meeting ground between lyric and avant-garde traditions. Where Lyric Meets Language contributed to the interrogation of these categories and also brought important critical and scholarly attention to the work of a range of contemporary women poets.2 It is this second achievement that this new collection, Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America, will augment and advance, featuring the work of eleven more influential women poets: Mary Jo Bang, Lucille Clifton, Kimiko Hahn, Carla Harryman , Erín Moure, Laura Mullen, Eileen Myles, M. NourbeSe Philip, Joan Retallack, Lisa Robertson, and C. D. Wright. As with the first group, these writers have gained national and international reputations, and we hope to contribute to the scholarly and critical attention their work clearly merits. We have followed the organization of the first collection, including poems and a poetics statement by each author, as well as a critical essay and bibliography, but this collection also looks beyond the parameters of the first, extending the geographic scope of the series, including several influential women poets from Canada. We have also been more eclectic in our choices, highlighting work that can clearly be located on either end of the spectrum between Language-oriented writing and the lyric tradition , as well as poets who trouble those categorical divisions. This is a variegated group to be sure, and we know we have created more gaps than we have filled. Each name evokes the name of another poet who could or should have been included—Fanny Howe, Alice Notley, Marilyn Chin, Rosemarie Waldrop, Jean Valentine—and we are already planning another volume that we hope will fill some of these gaps. But we also believe this anthology stands on its own in the breadth of its range and the 2 | Introduction intensity of its engagement with the world; the work collected here is richly representative, highlighting the ways women’s writing reflects and revises current trends in American poetry. Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America does not aim to name a new, coherent community or school but to attend to women’s writing in its various modes, its connectedness and difference, difficulty, and simplicity . Among the poems, statements, and essays are serendipitous juxtapositions and surprising connections but also real notes of dissonance and discord. In the years since the publication of Where Lyric Meets Language, it has become more and more difficult to assign specific labels or rubrics to particular poets. As Stephen Burt suggests in the introduction to a collection of his reviews of contemporary poetry,“descriptions of poets in terms of schools or regions or first principles have rarely been less useful than they are now.”3 This development is especially well illustrated by the recent publication of the anthologies Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries, edited by Reginald Shepherd, and American Hybrid, edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John.4 In her introduction , Swensen suggests that in contemporary poetry today,“idiosyncrasy rules to such a degree and differences are so numerous that distinct factions are hard, even impossible to pin down. Instead we find a thriving center of alterity.”5 Much of the work collected here also resists clear categorization , and many of these poets also appear in these other anthologies. But a narrative that situates all of these poets at the crossroads of hybridity would not account for Carla Harryman, who was instrumental in establishing the West Coast Language poetry movement during the 1970s, or for Lucille Clifton’s plain-spoken but complex lyric “i,” which remained consistent for more than thirty years. While the nature of the lyric—can it be reclaimed from its masculinist origins, does it reflect a solipsistic retreat to interiority or a complex...