I want to play too: the Chicago poetry debates.

Some exciting conversation is happening within the women's poetry community in the States! I am delayed in officially responding, but better late than never. The context of this post are the articles of Jennifer Ashton, which I can't seem to find a link to anymore, and Juliana Spahr & Stephanie Young, found here. Ashton responded to the response and so did Joshua Kotin and Robert P. Baird, both of which you can find here and neither of which I have read yet. There's also a whole blog-worth of responses, and I'm sure much more beyond that. As an advance warning: this post is LONG.

First, a confession: I have not read (and likely will not be able to read) all of the comments, thoughts, responses to the original debate and articles I am writing about. Part of the reason for that is due to the volume of the responses; I wonder that I would be able to write my own comments if I spent all my time reading others’. Also because I know that responses to the Ashton/Spahr&Young essays can go in so many different directions, I fear that I will become caught up in responded to the responses. Which is not my current intention. My [gendered] pre-apology, then, is if I seem to repeat arguments and/or thoughts that have already been sent out into the universe and thus are not advancing the conversation. Additionally, I admit that I am not good at being a “member” of “communities” – scare quotations not because I find that role distasteful, but because, on the one hand, my work necessarily deems me a member of a community, but on the other, I tend not to flesh myself out within particular communities, choosing to float between many. Thus, while the intellectual and emotional pursuit of poetry is not severable from my being (as a noun and a verb), the energy I invest is in the writing and reading of texts and I do not invest nearly enough energy in creating, maintaining, and contributing to a poetry community in its physical, people-form. Because of this, I remain embarrassingly ignorant and/or shallow in knowledge of poetic resources, and will write this from an inside-but-outside point of view. Also, I’ve been reading a lot of Cixous, so excuse me as I only quote her—you can accuse me of being lazy, and I won’t argue, but I will say there is value in using the writing of a non-American, Western feminist from the 1980s for the sake of context. That being said, here I go.

There does exist disconnect between Ashton’s original essay and the Spahr/Young response. For this reason, I’m going to respond more to the two separate essays, less to their conversation. Though I will say that one of the points made by Spahr/Young on which I agree is the lack of the discussion on feminism in Ashton's original essay - and in my very quick glance over Ashton's response essay, I think I caught her saying that her intention was not to discuss feminism. Fine, that's fair, but it's dangerous to title an essay "Our Bodies, Our Poems" (an explicit illusion to the feminist text Our Bodies, Our Selves (and this time I KNOW I am reading the correct allusion into the title. =P)) and not foresee readers' expectations of a prominent, or at least significant, role of feminism (theory of, current status of, effects of, etc. - not that the essay has to be a feminist essay) within the essay.

Because I read the Spahr/Young Chicago Review essay before Ashton’s original paper, I went into the reading of Ashton with an expectation of what the essay would contain. This was discombobulating – Ashton was much narrower in scope than Spahr/Young. Though I, too, was unconvinced by Ashton’s arguments on number equality—partially because I knew, if only instinctively, gender parity exists and partially because there is a concerning lack of hard evidence cited in the paper—the focus of the paper is not on the numbers, but that the recent influx of women’s anthologies imposes the “exceptionalist discourse” (2 posts in a row!!!) that women poets (or at least their anthologizing editors) claim they are working against. This argument is, of course, not all that original and not necessarily incorrect. What Ashton added to the argument was tying female TEXT (by her definition, poetry’s form, structure, and to a lesser degree language) to the female BODY—the physicality of poetry to the physicality of the poet. She believes that the evolution of reading women poets’ (and other artists – she threw in Joan Mitchell, for what I’m not quite sure; perhaps to give a true concrete example) work, specifically the “avant garde/experimental” (I’m not even going to try to define those two terms) work, as a physical reflection of (or, perhaps more aptly according to Ashton, “predetermined by”) women’s body or bodily experience denies female poets the agency to make an intellectual/political decision on a poem’s physicality. This is Ashton’s argument that the poetic community is trending back towards female “essentialism” despite the contradictory claims against it and desires to transcend it.

I personally don’t find arguments on essentialism that interesting. To me, not what I would consider productive. I can’t speak outside of my experience. I acknowledge that I “can’t just get rid of femininity,” but I can’t make another female writer agree with me (Cixous). What I do find interesting is the implied division of body/essentialism from intellectual/political and the omission of language informing/intellectualizing body, as in language creating one’s (specifically female) body within a masculine language and tradition. I don’t I see the same clear delineation between physical representation and creation (text and body) and identity/self representation and creation (words and self). I don’t see a one-way exchange of information: it’s not body --> poem. It’s a circular body-poem; poem-body. And I don’t believe this is applicable only to women poets/writers. The lack of bodily awareness is a privilege and there are many ways in which privilege manifests—whether is gender (male over non-male), class/world (“first” over “third”), location (think: a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – to be Hank Morgan at first arrival!), sexual orientation (hetero over non-hetero). The body is how they who lack privilege know themselves—against other bodies:

“I don’t ‘begin’ by ‘writing’: I don’t write. Life becomes text starting out from my body. I am already text. History, love, violence, time, work, desire inscribe it in my body, I go where the ‘fundamental language’ is spoken, the body language into which all the tongues of things, acts, and beings translate themselves, in my own breast, the whole of reality worked upon in my flesh, intercepted by my nerves, by my senses, by the labor of all my cells, projected, analyzed, recomposed into a book” (Cixous).

The self/body writes, but writing, “a gestation of self,” is a means to create self/body (Cixous).

It also seems dangerous to me to link/limit innovation to “avant garde/experimental” poetry (which I'm not accusing only Ashton of doing - it's just my personal observation). Women writers write and exist in a language that isn’t theirs. Cixous on the inherent masculinity of language: “I said ‘write French.’ One writes in. Penetration. Door. Knock before entering. Strictly forbidden.” This statement extends beyond women writers, of course also applicable to those who fall within the marginalities or the intersections of marginalities of society. “Everything in me joined forces to forbid me to write: history, my story, my origin, my sex. Everything that constituted my social and cultural self. To begin with the necessary, which I lacked, the material that writing is formed of and extracted from: language.” (Cixous). It could be that women will only be able to accurately represent themselves through language by scrapping existing language and start all over. Not practical if possible at all. So as women writers, we necessarily look for ways to form poems/selves within the foreign language available to us—whether it is to strip away meaning and history of words or to build on meaning and history of words. This, to me, is where innovation lies. Not merely in visible structure/form or in the content (if content can be judged without form, and vice versa), but where the two inform each other. For example, how Plath uses sound and repetition to express her claustrophobia, how Loy’s pulsing rhythms enhance and reflect her reverberating images, how Teresa Hak Kyung Cha sets the English and French versions of stanzas against each other so a reader is assaulted by language and uncertain which is a translation of which.

I suppose I am making no arguments for or against Ashton’s position, no thoughts on essentialism, avoidable or not. This was a quick-response, so if there exists holes in my arguments or things you’d like me to think more about, please let me know. As almost everyone believes, I think this is a conversation that is absolutely necessary, not just because it seems to have touched a nerve in the community, but also within the larger context of the national (the way gender and race is being played/played out in the Democratic candidacy race, as a most obvious mark) and international (what do our “Western” identifiers mean within a globalized community and what are their effects), so I welcome the discussion and the opportunity for discussion.

This was very long and I didn't even talk about Spahr&Young's response. That will have to wait for another post. I can already feel your antipication rocking through the computer screen.