Revising lyric subjectivity

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).

Not tightly unified, the rest of the book proceeds essentially as a series of case studies of significant and significantly representative poets. Each figure serves clear functions in Kinnahan's overall argument, though the practices of the poets in different chapters may not be closely linked. Thus, the first poet taken up in chapter 2, Barbara Guest, demonstrates the ways in which gender, feminism, and experimentalism can affect literary stature. A significant figure in the New York School and an important example for younger writers like Fraser, Guest nonetheless suffered decades of extreme critical neglect until feminists of the 1990s helped revive interest in her writing. In this section, as throughout the book, the argument is first laid out theoretically and then demonstrated through detailed examination of a few texts. Guest's reception in the 1960s--seen as determined by a gendered set of aesthetic values--is presented primarily through analysis of one review (by William Dickey in Kenyon Review), and her reconstruction of the love lyric and the gendered conventions of reading it is shown through analysis of one poem from that decade, "Belgravia." This method has obvious limits--one has to take on trust that the texts analyzed are representative, and one misses a fuller flavor of the poets' work. But the compensation is that Kinnahan, who is wonderfully alert to ways in which poets play with lyric conventions, provides marvelously insightful close readings.

The second poet discussed in that chapter, Kathleen Fraser, is linked to Guest especially through a shared interest in visual art and its resources for poetry, so that her early work produced in the 1960s

serves to demonstrate how page space was being configured to communicate distance, intimacy, presence, and absence in order to refigure the textual self. Kinnahan, who attends to visual experiments a good deal in this study, develops her argument about page space in the era of Olson's insistently masculine practices of field poetics via intriguing analogues with Joan Mitchell's contemporaneous canvases and their resistance to the "masculinized field of the canvas erupting in Pollock's wake" (62). (It is too bad that the book contains no illustrations, a lack also evident in the succeeding chapter's work with woodblock prints.) Contextualized in this way, even poems that are conventional in their arrangement and typography may, through their use of especially large white margins, challenge those conventions. Kinnahan observes, for instance, that the "visual tightness" of "Notes for a Voyeur," a narrow column of text relaying disconnected pieces of a narrative concerning betrayal in love,

     reads as a kind of enforced constraint, a silencing that the poem
     itself suggests through its gaps in narrative. At the same time,
     the wide margins variously promise possibility, other versions,
     other spaces for comprehending the language on the page--the
     silence can be read as a social dynamic, a formal register of the
     vulnerability of the speaking "I" within a relationship mapped by
     an active, visible, male "you." (69)

Even if Kinnahan sometimes risks reading too much into the visible space, her provocative interpretations unfailingly register how much the vitality of a poem emerges through attention to the material text and to the interplay between printed words and white spaces.

The next chapter, a particularly interesting one, continues to consider the visual as a resource for "ordering cultural meaning and organizing frames for readable identities" (79), now in more recent work by two poets of African descent, Erica Hunt (in her collaboration with visual artist Allison Saar) and M. Nourbese Philip, and in the context of the black female body--the material body constructed through historically specific visual orders. As Kinnahan skillfully demonstrates, Hunt's and Saar's Arcades and Philip's She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks use the visual to denaturalize race as a specular phenomenon. Because these works, which explore how constructions of the visual infuse systems of power and meaning, respond to quite specific "sociohistorical conceptions, uses, and manifestations of the visual in relation to theorizing, categorizing, and naturalizing race," they encourage "readings of innovative form as socially, politically operative" (83-84). Through her convincing and nuanced readings of visual and verbal elements and their possible social meanings, Kinnahan argues that these artists (and others, such as Mullen) resist the constructed dichotomy that opposes experimental and accessible, challenging notions of experimentalism as exclusive, elitist, or unreadable. Partly by fostering a multiplicity of voices instead of a univocal subject, they seek to create new forms of accessibility that will encourage communities of readers rather than autonomous individual readers.

Kinnahan's sense of what constitutes experimentalism emerges most clearly in chapter 4, where she makes her most provocative claims on the subject in relation to the 1980s work of the British poet Carol Ann Duffy. In Lyric Interventions Kinnahan valuably presents experimental as a label that needs to be defined contextually and that should not be narrowly associated with Language writing. Duffy's poems seem less formally innovative than work usually considered experimental, but Kinnahan argues that the more extreme marginalization experienced by female poets in Britain and the less sustained experimentalist tradition there mean that British work must not be examined through an American lens, particularly not by "framing innovation through American Language writing" (133). Readily granting the differences between Duffy's poetics and those of the "alternative" British writers on whom she focuses in the book's final chapter, Kinnahan claims:

     It is the texture of social discourse [economic, nationalist, and
     socially conservative discourses that position the individual]
     that these poetries each mine and undermine through formal
     experiments with discourse. Such considerations [including
     awareness of social and discursive contexts affecting innovative
     strategies] necessitate a differently nuanced category of the
     experimental. (134)

Kinnahan's emphasis on discourse and the "situatedness" of poetic conventions is crucial here. Without it, she might seem to be identifying as "experimental" any writing that challenges the establishment--so broadening the category as to render the label virtually meaningless. Her position, however, rests not so much on the views expressed in Duffy's poems--specifically, their critique of the culture of individual enterprise cultivated in the Thatcher years--as on their calling attention to poetic conventions such as voice and self-utterance as functioning within discursive systems with particular histories shaped by specific ideologies. Kinnahan's focus remains on the manipulation of language, both in economic rhetoric and public policy that construct national identity and in Duffy's poetic responses.

Whether or not readers are ready to embrace Kinnahan's inclusive sense of experimentalism, they will find compelling this chapter's linking of lyric voice to public discourse. Kinnahan ties Duffy's approach to lyric subjectivity with notions of the subject promulgated by the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, who claimed "there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families" (148). Fascinatingly, Kinnahan demonstrates the poems' engagement with the rhetoric that marked the demise of the collectivist, Keynesian economic model dominant since World War II and its replacement by market entrepreneurialism and privatization as well as British nationalism. The self-sufficient individual constructed by the Thatcherite rhetoric of self-reliance and private enterprise was in fact a member of a select group--prosperous, male, heterosexual, white, nonimmigrant. Duffy uses inherited forms like the dramatic monologue to disrupt the dominant rhetorical constructions of that individual or of roles, like those of mother, supporting it.

The closing chapter, also devoted to British writing, returns to work that most would recognize as experimentalist--formally unconventional feminist work informed by poststructuralist and socialist/Marxist theory--though the dominance of male-centered formulations of "experimental" has deprived this poetry of its due attention. Like the first chapter, this one treats poets of two generations, Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford, who have been publishing since the 1970s, and Geraldine Monk, a younger poet better known in the US for her work as a performance artist. Again paralleling earlier discussions of North American dynamics, this chapter examines the double marginalization of feminist experimentalists, now in a British context, and the complex positioning of feminist alternative writing in relation to the lyric I. Tracking the interactions between British and American avant gardes, Kinnahan argues convincingly for the need to attend more carefully to gender in mapping those relationships. I would have enjoyed more extensive treatment of Monk's poetry, but the three poems showcased here will no doubt prompt others to provide it. The discussions of Riley and Mulford with which the book concludes emphasize an oscillation between the "re-articulation of identity" (180) and various forms of interrogation, repositioning, and reenvisioning subjectivity, a fitting way to end a work intent on developing an appropriately complex picture of how the lyric subject is being not avoided but refigured by feminist poets uncomfortable within the constraints of conventional lyric.

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