"Present, Infinitesimal, Infinite": The Political Vision and "Femin" Poetics of Marilyn Hacker

The revolutionary poet loves people, rivers, other creatures, stones, trees inseparably from art, is not ashamed of any of these loves, and for them conjures a language that is public, intimate, inviting, terrifying, and beloved.

Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics¹

All I can know is the expanding moment,
present, infinitesimal, infinite,
in which the late sun enters without comment
eight different sets of windows opposite.

Marilyn Hacker, "August Journal"²

Feminist and "Femin" Poetics

Poetry was "feminist," Marilyn Hacker wrote in 1989, if its "largest concern appeared to be the re-vision of history through the perspective of the historically powerless and silenced."³ Implicitly and, I think, intentionally, this raised the possibility that poetry not obviously having anything to do with women could still be feminist in spirit and definition. Eleven years later, Hacker would add that feminist poetry is one "in which the subjectivity and the agency of women are foregrounded."⁴ Conjoined, these definitions limn the poetics that she had been developing and exploring, more and more deeply, book by book, since at least 1980—and it is a poetics that needs a name.

But "feminist" feels like the wrong one, although she has been associated with feminism for decades through her writings, editing, and self-assertion as a leftist and lesbian. Her vision is broader in some respects, narrower in others, than the term has connoted over time when applied to literature: an accessible, purposeful articulation of a vision of women's equality, strength, and value. Such literature seldom calls for specific reforms (though it may), but it usually has didactic intent and seeks to raise women's consciousness of their commonalities as either a primary goal or a desirable by-product. Very few of Hacker's poems, and of those mostly early ones, obviously conform to this definition, which is my own. Her dominant vision is not symmetrical with any "agenda" or theory, and her exploration and expression of that vision is profoundly personal. However, she is sensitive to the distribution and uses of power, and her work depends upon an informed awareness of history and contemporary society writ broad. Hence, it is both "political" and "academic" in those words' most general meanings. "Femin" is surely the right root concept, as the most immediately striking aspects of Hacker's brilliant verse are its sex and gender: vibrantly female physicality, pervasively feminine sensibility. Yet "feminine," too, is inadequate: its denotations are too narrow and in any case have been corrupted by centuries of limiting, often degrading, connotations.

I propose a literally radical coinage, a return to the linguistic root. Let us say that Marilyn Hacker's work exemplifies a "femin" poetics, and let us pronounce the second syllable of "femin" as the French would. This will simultaneously evoke the country where Hacker has come to feel most at home; pay tribute to the rightly controversial but brilliant and pathbreaking French essentialist feminists; and join "fem" with a sound that to American ears resembles "man," thus implying the comprehensive vision underlying this poetic.

Femin poetics is sexed, gendered, and political, yet also individualized, and fully free and unpredictable in almost all of its aspects. Interpretable through feminist epistemology, it understands, absorbs, and implicitly critiques the masculinist perspective. Its knowing is uncontained. Its insistence upon autonomy is absolute. Though centered in every aspect of women's traditional lives and concerns, it transcends all traditions, societal and academic, and ascribes high value to what may seem unremarkably routine, finds universal significance in what may seem reductively personal, and emanates from a place deep within self, where nothing—no experience of subjugation, no expectation or demand, not even any conscious belief—can reach to distort the lyric sensibility and voice.

By the light of the definition I have cobbled from two of Hacker's utterances, one would certainly term her poetry "feminist," but the formal feminist theories that best illuminate it are those that shade into near-essentialism at their margins. In her classic theoretical work, Stealing the Language, poet Alicia Suskin Ostriker insists that...