The Mystery of the Real

Page 17 January–February 2008 B O O K R e V i e W s The mysTery of The reAl Maria Damon This book is an exciting—thrilling, even—addition to the growing canon of scholarship on contemporary US women’s poetry. innOvative WOmen POets: an antHOLOgy OF COntemPOrary POetry and intervieWs Edited by Elisabeth A. Frost and Cynthia Hogue University of Iowa Press http://www.uipress.uiowa.edu 442 pages; paper, $29.95 This book is an exciting—thrilling, even— addition to the growing canon of scholarship on contemporary US women’s poetry. Though it offers itself as an anthology of “contemporary poetry and interviews,” it is more properly an anthology of interviews with a sampling of working poets from across the spectrum of what could be considered “innovative”; the poetry included, while certainly not slighted, seems to function primarily to illustrate points made in the interviews. This works well, as the close relationship between the interviews and the poetry that follows each one, ably facilitated by the brief intro to each writer, helps to create a strong sense of presence and of the work’s signficance in both senses (meaning and importance)—all of which adds up to an indispensible volume for personal satisfaction and pedagogical utility. Deft and erudite introductions frame each writer’s interview and poetry; this headnote material is exceptionally well written and thoughtful, marked in some instances with a philosophical density relatively rare in this genre. They are marked as well with writerly eloquence and with a sense of the co-editors’ harmonious working relationship (foregrounded in the laughter-punctuated interview they conducted with Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser, but inferrable, as I say, from the grace and acumen of the front matter of each selection). Because of these insightful but lighthanded adumbrations, the anthology becomes an effective teaching tool rather than merely a celebratory compendium. In my reading, the interviews comprise the heart of the volume. Two poet-scholars with strong track records on their commitment to contemporary and modernist “experimental” women’s writing have conducted and/or gathered these interviews—skillful and engaging without exception, and reading like true conversations in that the interviewers’ delighted participation is palpable (providing a reading experience that is both refreshing and stimulating)—in an alphabetically organized roster from GloriaAnzaldúa to C. D. Wright, also featuring Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Jayne Cortez, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Kathleen Fraser, Alice Fulton, Barbara Guest, Susan Howe, Harryette Mullen,Alice Notley, Alicia Ostriker, Sonia Sanchez, and Leslie Scalapino. As it turns out, this list forms an excellent selection despite inevitable exclusions and reflects the editors’ readerly, writerly, and critical orientations.The editors have been conscientious in their attempt to widen the scope of their term “innovative” beyond the expected avant-gardes of NewYork and Language Schools and their various descendants. One fascinating thread that runs throughout is the relationship of poetry to the other arts: in the cases of Jayne Cortez and Sonia Sanchez, music, especially jazz (the interviewer in each case is Sascha Feinstein, author and co-editor of several works on jazz poetry and poetics); in the cases of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Susan Howe, Barbara Guest, and Kathleen Fraser, the visual arts, especially painting, drawing and collage—either because they started out as visual artists, or have collaborated closely with such artists, or have devoted a considerable element of their writing lives to writing about art. Others such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Alicia Ostriker, albeit in very different ways, attend to questions of spirituality and/ or religion and their relationship to history, ethnicity and gender, oppression and repression. Often the issue of vernacular, or “folklore,” or alternate modes of verbal knowledge production are foregrounded as not only resources from which the poets draw, but a body of expressive culture to which their work contributes. And most of the poets show themselves to be philosophically, politically, and/or intellectually engaged, well read, and eager for mind-expansion: no inarticulate writers-who-don’t-read here. The selections of poetry that follow each interview , having been vibrantly illuminated by the foregoing , seem all the more transparent and exciting for these discursive previews. Again, the visual comes...