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NWSA Journal 14.1 (2002) 185-195



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Review Essay

Poetry Matters

Kathryn Kirkpatrick


By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry edited by Molly McQuade. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2000, 425 pp., $16.00 paper.
Contemporary Women's Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice edited by Ali-son Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, 275 pp., $ 59.95 hardcover.
We Heal From Memory: Sexton, Lorde, AnzaldĂșa and the Poetry of Witness by Cassie Premo Steele. New York: Palgrave, 2000, 220 pp., $45.00 hardcover.
Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women's Language-Oriented Writing by Megan Simpson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000, 222 pp., $57.50 hardcover.
White Women Writing White by Renee R. Curry. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000, 184 pp., $62.50 hardcover.
The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women edited by Susan Aizenberg and Erin Belieu. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, 464 pp., $49.50 hardcover, $24.95 paper.

Any review of recent feminist scholarship on contemporary women's poetry must look back to Alicia Ostriker's groundbreaking study, Stealing the Language: TheEmergence of Women's Poetry in America (1986). 1 Taking as her subject "the extraordinary tide of poetry by American women" in the 1960s and 1970s, Ostriker likens a group of breakthrough books by writers Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Denise Levertov, Margaret Atwood, Mona Van Duyn, Gwendolyn Brooks, Diane Wakoski, Maxine Kumin, Carolyn Kizer, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Nikkie Giovanni, and June Jordan to a literary movement "comparable to romanticism or modernism in our literary past" (7). Ostri-ker examines this movement in the context of nineteenth and early twentieth-century women's poetry as well as attitudes towards women poets and finds contemporary women struggling in their poetry with a history of oppression and silence: internally conflicted by a literary legacy and culture that defines the thinking, speaking, writing, sexual woman as monstrous. These poets seek autonomous selves free to express anger, [End Page 185] represent the female body and female eroticism, and explore the possibilities of female language and genres. Ultimately, Ostriker defines a women's tradition in poetry as "explicitly female in the sense that the writers have chosen to explore experiences central to their sex and to find forms and styles appropriate to their exploration" (7). Although some of the authors of the books reviewed here react to the limits they see in Ostriker's work, particularly her faith in the ability of language to accurately reflect women's experiences, her valuing of sameness in female experience over difference, and, implicitly, her blindness to the privileges of whiteness, all have built on ground that she helped prepare.

In the fifteen years since the publication of Stealing the Language, feminist literary scholars have not rushed toward critical studies of women's poetry. 2 Indeed, poetry as a genre was neglected in favor of prose in the academic theory explosion of the 1980s. This has something to do with the genre's history as an oral and even oracular medium, solemnized by poets of the Romantic and Modernist literary movements who believed in poetry's visionary and healing powers. The condensed language of poetry, its reliance on sounds and rhythms, its association with realms of powerful and even profound feeling continue to involve readers and listeners in the transforming potential of ritual. This is not an aspect of poetry that most of the writers here wish to give up, but nor is it easy to reconcile with analysis of poetry as historically-specific writing with its own silences and cultural agendas. Perhaps this ambivalence over the appropriate roles of, and approaches to poetry accounts for writing about poetry that often slips outside clear disciplinary or even academic bounds. Most collections contain essays by poets themselves, who if not always priestly are certainly exuberantly iconoclastic, ditching methods of analysis familiar in academic writing for associational vignettes, personal narratives punctuated by insights into process and technique, and linguistic experiments in the materiality of language.

In her edited collection, By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry, Molly McQuade, poetry columnist for Hungry...

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