Revising lyric subjectivity

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Lynn Keller

Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse

by Linda A. Kinnahan

Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. 277 pages

The subject matter of Linda A. Kinnahan's Lyric Interventions--innovative feminist lyric in Britain and North America since the 1960s--inevitably situates this study in the midst of multiple contentious debates: disagreements among scholars and among poets about what constitutes innovation or experiment in contemporary poetry, about the nature of lyric subjectivity and its relation to public politics, the place of personal expression and the I in poetic discourse, the current viability of the lyric, the role of feminism and feminist writers in recent experimental movements, the goals and strategies appropriate to feminist writing, and the political value and force of linguistically innovative writing. Fortunately, Kinnahan, while making her own positions clear, is committed to documenting carefully the discussions that have taken place in the last 20 years. Her assertion at the opening of the acknowledgments, "To my mind, communities make books possible," proves to be an ethical principle enacted in her summaries of previous conversations, her generous citations from preceding scholarship, and her responsible recounting of recent literary history. In this way, she contributes more to clarity than contention.

Kinnahan began this project when experimental writing by women had received scant scholarly attention. As she explains, feminist thinkers and histories were generally elided from narratives surrounding the recognized experimentalism of Language writing, in part because the Language movement is highly theorized and extensively engaged with various forms of contemporary theory, and theory still tends to be treated as a masculine domain. Feminist experimentalists were even more thoroughly excluded from narratives--and anthologies--of feminist writing, because the dominant feminist aesthetic located feminist activity in poetic content rather than form, insisting on the importance of accessible reportage and authentic personal testimony. Happily, both critical and poetic fashions have been changing, so that by now a good deal has been written on, for instance, the poetry of Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Harryette Mullen (not necessarily from a feminist perspective); significant essay collections by experimental poets such as Howe, Hejinian, Joan Retallack, and Kathleen Fraser have made their mark; important anthologies of women's experimentalist poetry have appeared, along with feminist critical studies or literary histories like Ann Vickery's feminist genealogy of Language writing; and, increasingly, female experimentalists have been able to publish their work through presses with wider distribution.

This book's contributions remain distinctive, however, in the issues the study foregrounds, the blend of feminist and cultural studies perspectives it consistently employs, and the particular poetry it examines. Lyric Interventions approaches experimentalism by attending to the way in which feminist thinking has intervened in poets' conceptualizations of the lyric subject. This shifts emphasis from what Kinnahan calls, perhaps too absolutely, the poststructuralist "banishment" of the I and of the personal (xiii, 12) that was central to early discussions of Language poetry toward consideration of the social and economic conditions shaping female subjectivity and affecting its reformations in experimental poetries by women. Thus, while Kinnahan opens the book explaining that as a reader she is "drawn simultaneously to the texture of linguistic surprise and the risky strategies of social intervention" that energize the "experimental, innovative feminist lyric" (xiii), Lyric Interventions proves more consistently attentive to social interventions than to linguistic textures. Its artful readings of specific poems--which are certainly sensitive to formal and especially visual qualities--remain consistently focused on issues of gendered subjectivity, particularly as subjectivity is defined within specific racial histories, immigration policies, economic conditions, and feminist discourses. The book valuably brings together writers from two continents in order to highlight both the international exchanges and the impact of national context on experimental women's writing. While Kinnahan is to be commended for bringing the attention of American readers to the British experimentalist scene (an effort in which other critics, such as Keith Tuma and Romana Huk, have also been engaged), it is equally significant that Lyric Interventions is broadening the canon of American female experimentalists. We need to hear more about such too-rarely discussed writers as Barbara Guest, Kathleen Fraser, M. Nourbese Philip, and Erica Hunt, the North Americans whose work Kinnahan analyzes, if we are to build accurate understandings of poetry's recent history, character, or accomplishments.

The opening chapter usefully surveys necessary backgrounds, tracing the evolution of feminist poetics since the concept's emergence in the 1960s, the major arguments about subjectivity and specifically lyric subjectivity that have circulated around experimental poetics, and feminists' varying or conflicted positions in relation to those arguments. Many feminists during the 1990s, for instance, were wary of narrow identity politics and essentialist notions of the self, yet questioned whether the lyric I, perhaps not yet available to women, should be forsaken. In terms of poetic practices, the divide between experimental and expressive poetries so widely invoked at the time was, Kinnahan argues, not so sharp among women poets, since a number of female experimentalists were exploring how the intimate realm of private experience is constructed and mediated through the public. Their work contributed to the recent shift Kinnahan observes among both feminist and nonfeminist critics in which "the issue increasingly addressed is not whether lyric subjectivity (or variant traces of voice, interiority, self-history, etc.) is evident but how it is deployed and what that deployment assumes about poetry's function" (13). The history of the journal HOW(ever), with which the chapter closes, provides effective grounding for the more abstractly presented claims made earlier about the double marginalization experienced by many feminist poets who were interested in the experimental practices of modernist women and in generating gender-conscious linguistically experimental poetics in their own time. Not comfortable with the dominant modes of feminist poetry or with what they perceived as the male-dominated Language scene, Kathleen Fraser, along with other editors including Susan Gevirtz, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Francis Jaffer, Beverly Dahlen, and Carolyn Burke founded this feminist journal devoted to experimentalist poetry--a journal whose emphasis on brevity, on the writing process, and on interactive exchange, Kinnahan argues, generated "significant reformulations of poetic expression and literary criticism" (30).