H.D. and Poets After

Modern Language Review, The, July, 2002 by Victoria Bazin

H.D. and Poets After. Ed. by DONNA KROLIK HOLLENBERG. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 2000. xxii 309 pp. $39.95 (pbk $19.95).

The work of modernist poet H.D. has encouraged a disruption of the categorical boundaries separating literary criticism from poetic practice. The most influential and groundbreaking responses to H.D. tend to emanate either from poets or from critics who operate on the margins of criticism. One thinks of Robert Duncan's 'The H.D. Book' (Coyote's Journal, 8 (1967), 27-35) and Rachel Blau DuPlessis's groundbreaking The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (New York: Routledge, 1990). H.D. and Poets After continues with this healthy disrespect for such boundaries offering critical and creative accounts of H.D.'s influence on contemporary poetics. The book includes essays by several well-known contemporary poets such as DuPlessis, Alicia Ostriker, Robert Kelly, and Kathleen Fraser. These essays tend to be more speculative, autobiographical, and anecdotal, perhaps necessarily so as these poets are attempting to describe not only how H.D. has influenced their work but also at what stage in their careers they found her. Sharon Doubiago's 'From "Perdita's Father"' is a good example of a poet returning to particularly pivotal moments in her life and registering H.D.'s presence there. In Doubiago's case, it is hearing Robert Duncan reading A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar' that eventually leads her to H.D. (and Duncan's presence is a powerful one in this collection attesting to his role as one of H.D.'s most passionate supporters). The essays by poets are all accompanied by a critical essay that explains the significance of the networks of influence and intertextuality binding contemporary poets to H.D. as their modernist 'mother'. Thus Rachel Blau DuPlessis's 'Haibun: "Draw your/Draft"' is followed by Burton Hatlen's essay 'Renewing the Open Engagement: H.D. and Rachel Blau DuPlessis' and Frances Jaffer's 'A Gift of Song: My Encounter with H.D.' is followed by 'Again She Says Try To: Frances Jaffer and H.D.' by Kim Vaeth.

One of the most interesting contributions is from Alicia Ostriker whose '"A Wish to Make Real to Myself What is Most Real": My H.D.' is a clear and lucid explanation of the formal and thematic aspects of H.D.'s work that influenced her own poetry. She singles out her collection A Woman Under the Surface (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982) as evidence of H.D.'s literary legacy identifying 'a certain silver sheen' in these poems, albeit 'a bit tarnished' that mimics the hardened surfaces of H.D.'s own poetry. She also recalls writing the final poem of 'Message for the Sleeper at Hell's Mouth', recognizing that were it not for Trilogy and Helen in Egypt she would not have been capable of completing this sequence of poems, a sequence that culminates in the acceptance of the coexistence of good and evil. However, rather than dwelling only on the affinities and likenesses between her own work and H.D.'s, Ostriker also considers how she diverges from H.D. She notes the 'lumpiness' of her own style in poems such as 'The War of Men and Women', 'Surviving', and 'The Book of Life', seeing these poems as 'impure', even 'ugly' and therefore in opposition to the carved elegance of H.D.'s work.

These differences are more significant and suggestive than the apparent contiguities between H.D. and contemporary poets. They help the reader to identify how H.D.'s modernism has been adapted, expanded, dismantled, or even rejected in the attempt by new poets to respond to a slightly different set of social, cultural, sexual, and psychic contexts. Thus, in some ways, the rewriting or revising of H.D. can be a potentially destructive act as separation from the literary mother must take place for the poet to find her voice. While several writers point to H.D.'s interest in recovering the lost or forgotten mother, paradoxically, one of the underlying yet unstated themes of this book appears to be the attempt to replace or displace the mother figure as embodied by the 'mother of mouthings', H.D.

VICTORIA BAZIN UNIVERSITY OF NORTHUMBRIA AT NEWCASTLE