The Wreading Experiment: Performative Strategies for Teaching Women's Innovative Poetries

The dream of an uncommon reader: 1

I recently designed an upper-level, special topics English course as a "workshop" in wreading contemporary women's innovative poetries.¹ I was inspired to "wreading" by Charles Bernstein's essay "Creative Wreading: A Primer," in which he offers interactive and reactive responses to assigned texts as the grounds for subsequent critical interpretations and argues that "you can't interpret what you don't experience" (276). "Wreading" thus implies not only a merging of the acts of reading and writing but also, and more importantly, an investment in experiential learning. I teach at a large Canadian research institution that privileges "practical" pursuits like business and medicine and that continually asks humanities instructors to justify class size and student-teacher ratios. I therefore find myself reiterating the argument that, because of their small class size and their purported "impracticality," literature and writing courses are ideal spaces for creating engaged learning opportunities in which students can experiment with self expression; here they can rehearse strategies for learning to find and hold on to a voice; they can develop a point of view and argue that point of view elegantly, persuasively, and effectively; and they can practice modes of communication that are not market- or consumer-oriented.

My primary pedagogical goals for this course were twofold. First, I wanted to unsettle students' reading habits and offer them strategies for approaching the poem as a process rather than a product, asking, "How is it made?" rather than "What does it mean?" By choosing texts by living writers with revisionist but not necessarily overtly feminist projects whose work has been variously labeled as experimental, innovative, oppositional, or avant-garde, I hoped to teach students not only to be aware of sexuality as a discursive construct but to intervene in sexuality's discursive construction. Innovative female poets are doubly displaced; although, for example, women poets—like Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding-Jackson, Susan Howe, Carla Harryman, and Lyn Hejinian—have been radical innovators throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they continue to struggle for recognition by their male colleagues. Only two decades ago, American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Ron Silliman wrote:

[ … ] women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the marginal—have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to who is the subject of these conventions, illuminates the relation between form and audience.

(63)²

An innovative woman poet is thus relegated to writing about her subject, in her voice, which, because it has not traditionally been the subject of history, must be "conventional." It is assumed that her audience consists of members of groups who, like her, have been objects of history and who are not yet ready, as their white masculine heterosexual counterparts, to challenge narrative conventions. Within the broader context of Culture-at-Large, she continues to be at a disadvantage, her writing quickly glossed and discarded even by colleagues whose ethical and political commitments she shares.

My second pedagogical goal was thus to illustrate to students their responsibility as university students and as, specifically, students in an English classroom, to intervene in the discursive practices that make such assumptions about women's writing possible, to, in effect, talk back to the white male heterosexual discourse that continues to dominate Culture-at-Large. Poetry is a particularly apt medium for this lesson because students are so unfamiliar with it and, for the most part, have very little notion of the wide range in contemporary poetic praxis. Students expect, when talking about poetry, to read outside their comfort zone; they know and fear they won't "get" it. Half of the battle is thus already over. My task is to teach them to take pleasure in not "getting" it and in creating individual points of entry and strategies for interacting with poetic texts that push language, subjectivity, gender, and sexuality to their expressive limits. The course thus became a temporary social space in which...