Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women

Modern Language Review, The, April, 1999 by Pat Righelato

Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women. By Lynn Keller. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1997. xi 373 pp. $45; 35.95 [pounds sterling] (paperbound $18.95; 15.25 [pounds sterling]).

Lynn Keller's study is a brave and bracing exploration of the contemporary poetics of the long poem. She shows how women poets are recasting both gender and genre. Resisting a single model of the long poem, her chosen three categories are flexible and illuminating: Sharon Doubiago's Hard Country (1982) and Judy Grahn's The Queen of Swords (1987) are epic based; Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah (1986), Brenda Maria Osbey's Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman (1991), Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons (1986) are lyric sequences; Susan Howe's 'The Liberties' (1983), Beverly Dahlen's A Reading (a serial poem published in stages from 1985), and Rachel DuPlessis's Drafts (also serial from 1991 to 1997) are more radically experimental poems.

The ability to discern both common patterns and instructive contrasts within a category is evident in the chapters on Dubiago and Grahn. Keller argues that Hard Country, an elliptical construct of multiple voices, documents, and historical narratives, is at ease with the universalizing and archetypal modes of epic: the governing myth is that of Isis and Osiris, yet the focus is on individual experience, and in gender and formal terms the poem, dismembering and remembering, reshapes a more positive masculine-feminine complementarity. Grahn, a lesbian poet and gay cultural theorist, has a separatist agenda in The Queen of Swords, identifying exclusively with the female Sapphic tradition as an originary wholeness, yet the stance is inclusive rather than exclusive. Drawing on The Iliad and the myth of Helen, Grahn takes the opportunity to give the female warrior a plot and character (Grahn, herself, was discharged from the American armed forces as a lesbian). There is nothing marginalized about the poem; the perspective is not solitary as in Hard Country, but robust and communal; Keller quotes the raucous, punning burlesque Chorus of Crows, 'I love a just caws' (p. 88) as an example of Grahn's readiness to work within the epic mainstream. The playful force of both these writers is evident in their readiness to inhabit and to deploy mythic cultural stereotypes to very liberating effect.

Keller situates the lyric/narrative sequences of Dove and Osbey, based on African-American characters and communities, within the testifying tradition. Although she provides a succinct review of the critical debate on Dove's multiculturalism, the effect is to place more emphasis on subject than form, underestimating Dove in this respect, whereas detailed attention is given to form in the analysis of Hacker's playful parodying and turning of Shakespearean and Petrarchan models and conventions in her lesbian feminist sonnet sequence.

In Keller's third, radically experimental, category, it is notable that Howe, Dahlen, and DuPlessis all produce what DuPlessis calls 'page poems or visual texts' (p. 278). For Howe, in 'Liberties', this is part of a postmodernist expression of the gaps, or 'points of singularity' (p. 196) in the historical record. In an impacted interrogation of her own family (Irish mother and historian father) and the slippages and occlusions of patriarchal history, Howe configures Swift's Stella and Cordelia. The cultural ambition is matched by linguistic energy, and Keller is indefatiguable in demonstrating how, as in 'Whowe', individual words condense the broad concerns of the whole.

This impressive book shows how confidently women have taken possession of the long poem, repossessing history and myth in the light of feminist concerns; Keller's words, 'the long poem seems a kind of expansive frontier whose ample space and varied formal options invite female poets to explore in uncharted directions' (p. 306), show that the 'Big Country' has become feminine territory.

Pat Righelato University of Reading