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Here we have two recent anthologies of poetry by women,
both of which are edited by ex-patriot American(s) and which are intriguing
for their different perspectives. Women's Work is an enormous tome featuring a vast array of poets, mainly
twentieth century writers, which unsurprisingly includes many Americans. The
material is mainly from a wide mainstream section but includes a lot of names
I'd not previously come across, often those working in the USA. It features
introductions by both editors and Eva Salzman's long essay - split into two
parts - deals primarily with defending the notion of 'a women's anthology'
at a time when many might argue there is no longer a need for such gender
division. It's a convoluted argument, bringing in many strands and although
I think Salzman makes her case effectively - the percentage of women to men
in
mixed gender anthologies, and indeed in other forms of publishing, notably
ezines and paper mags, is very much in favour of male writers - there are
inevitably dangers in such demarcations, namely the possible accusation of
self-imposed ghettoization. Nevertheless, this is an impressive achievement,
a majestic book which is custom-made for dipping into rather than reading in
large chunks. It is organised in terms of subject eg. History, Politics, War,
Society and in this sense is
comparable to Peter Forbes' enormous twentieth century compilation, Scanning
the Century.
Part 2 of Salzman's introduction to Women's Work gives an effective potted history of the
development of 19th/20th century poetry in English,
with particular reference to women's writing. As this vast book contains
material by around three hundred poets it's impossible in a relatively short
commentary to give a worthwhile overview, save to say that its organisation
by theme throws up some interesting juxtapositions. This is a feast of a book
which includes the big names such as Sylvia Plath, Stevie Smith and Emily
Dickinson while tipping its hat towards the more experimental end of the 20th
century - Lyn Hejinian and Lorine Neidecker - and bringing in a host of new
names. If the essential aim of this book is to posit an 'alternative canon'
suggestive of the breadth and quality of modern poetry written in English by
women then it's undoubtedly a qualified success and Salzman is certainly
upfront about her polemical engagement in this project. She's a pretty spiky
polemicist at times which adds to the flavour of the book and no doubt raises
hackles! Questions of taste aside - I'd have definitely left out some of the
light verse, Wendy Cope wouldn't have made it in my version of events, for
example - I think this book is an effective addition to the anthology project
and although I would argue with elements of the introduction and with certain
of the inclusions it's a compilation I'm sure I'll dip into again and one
which I think ought to be widely available.
A few further observations: it was good to see Rosemary Tonks included, an
unusual voice in British poetry who seems to have disappeared from view, it
would have been nice to have had a couple more of her poems in this book.
Although I knew that Margaret Atwood wrote poetry, I hadn't previously read
any and I'll certainly be looking out her collections when I get a chance. I
thought that I knew Christina Rossetti's work pretty well but I was surprised
to discover here that she'd written the lyrics for 'In the Bleak Mid-Winter'.
I'm also a great fan of Edna St.Vincent Millay, whose work I think has been
under-rated through the years. My only other negative criticism is that it
would have been nice to have had a wider selection of material (at least from
some of the chosen poets) but I
guess this is the nature of the beast. This would mean either including a lot
less writers or making the book three times as long! Overall, this is a
cracking anthology which has taken a lot of time and effort to produce and
which ought to stimulate some useful debate!
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Carrie Etter's selection is much more focussed; there are
only 25 writers, for example and these are primarily working within the UK.
Her introduction is much shorter and her argument is essentially that here
lies a largely undiscovered group of women poets, working in various ways at
odds with British mainstream writing, although she is wary of over-polarising
such limiting distinctions. Although she has positive points to make about
the Salzman/Wack anthology
(published a little earlier) she also suggests that the work included
by less orthodox writers - she cites Lyn Hejinian and Fanny Howe here - is
not typical of their writing and that the two anthologies may therefore have
a somewhat different 'target audience', always allowing for inevitable
overlap. While she also suggests that perhaps women have not been entirely
welcome within the British non-mainstream (Robert Hampson is cited here in a
positive sense) she generously cuts across her own polemic by quoting
Geraldine Monk, who feels that 'there weren't that many women interested in
experimentation'.
Anthologies are inevitably idiosyncratic beasts and this one is no exception
although there is an underlying rationale to Etter's selection. The
organisation of the book is in terms of age, a method which produces some
interesting chance meetings. I'm unsure yet if any other generalities can be
deduced from this (questions of influence, perhaps?) but the method seems a
novel one and is probably as good as any other. I won't be able to discuss
all 25 writers but I can say that I found a considerable quantity of quality
writing in this book, which covers a wide range of methods and approaches,
alongside some material which I wasn't so sure about. Perhaps I should start
with some favourites. Several of the writers here produce work which is
related to landscape, in various ways, and there seems to be an interesting
correlation between witty language and 'open spaces'. Frances Presley's work
here is as much to do with the space on the page as with Exmoor (one of her
other subject areas) and she combines the sound aspect of language with the
speed of utterance as indicated by line spacing and across-language jesting:
the monocle
de mon oncle
monkey une
the monkey's
uncle
ape uncle
learn to ape,
boys
the monkey is
the wit
(from 'Learning Letters')
Harriet Tarlo mixes quick-witted, cinematic snapshots and strange jump-cuts
in 'Inside Story' yet is also capable of sheer wordplay pleasure as in this
extract from 'A Spoon for Stein':
around its filling is a centre throw it
a spoon
is a missile
hit and miss a spoon a mush onto and
of banana
rice pear chicken potato apple
again spoon
spoony tune let it go throw
I've written at length about Elizabeth Bletsoe's work elsewhere but it's
worth pointing out again that the sheer pleasure in reading her work comes
from its mix of registers, its
variety of diction and the exceptional way in which she fuses experience with
learning and makes it all appear so easy and as natural as breathing. Her
work is rich and highly-textured and although complex never obscure or
unrewarding:
Paths
of observance
newly laid
through contusions of aster,
sedum & verbena bonariensis,
helmeted with bees; offertories yielding
a roman tessera, three pebbles
from Chesil
Bank & a tennis ball. A smell of burning moxa. Sulphur
being ground
with mercury to form vermilion; glazed with madder,
sealed.
(Roddock, Robin (Erithacus rubecula)')
Denise Riley's work has undoubtedly been
influential to a younger generation of writers and it's good to see some of
these influences at work in this anthology. Her work combines that rare
thing, a strong interest in the lyric voice alongside a sophisticated
awareness of language fuelled both by a deep involvement with various forms
of theorising and also, strangely perhaps, by what I can only call a
common-sense approach. As I read her work I find I'm pulled along by its
pleasures while at the same time questioning her thinking and often pulled up
short by something I'm not sure about. Sometimes you want to go back and
think about what's caused the 'obstruction', more often, perhaps, you are
simply pulled into the next sentence or phrase and keep going to ensure your
pleasure fix. Riley is a writer who makes 'thinking' in poetry a respectable
pleasure, something to be valued for itself yet her work is never stuffy or
'resisting' in a clogged or unpleasant way - you just want it to go on and
on:
And I must
trust that need is held in common, as I think it my duty to.
That every
down-draught's thick with stiffening feathers
with
rustlings from pallor throats
as the air hangs
with its free light and its dead weight equally
This is a little like Prynne yet it's lighter and its questioning mode has a
more breezy lyric touch, mixing abstraction with lyric imagery. It's not as
'over-the-top' or quite as 'tongue-in-cheek' as John Ashbery can be yet
neither is it as clotted or as full of resistance as John Wilkinson often is!
Sophie Robinson is the youngest poet in the anthology and one of those who I
would say has been influenced by Denise Riley's work. She is one of the
better poets in the recent Bloodaxe anthology Voice Recognition. This is poetry which is extremely sophisticated
and rich with literary tradition yet oh-so-easy on the ear:
Thump me
restlessly against the darkling
Drum of your
disquiet, pulse-rattle and
Wheeze a
werewolf-hungry eye a
Stormy
pounding chromosomal ache a
Scratch of
needy charm neglected, named &
Filed away
waiting, charring itself to ruin
To spoil in the
zombie-fleckered dankness,
.....
('Glisten, Glisten, glisten, glisten'
after John Keats & Adrienne Rich)
I liked Zoe Skoulding's meditations on
time and architecture, where the language becomes akin to archaeological
research, questioning and not entirely sure of itself although not entirely
unhappy with uncertainty. This kind of tentative exploration feels very
attractive and there's a tautness to her writing which contradicts the
apparent caution. Frances Presley's work has a similar feel and this sense of
'unsureness', of everything being open and unresolved combines a
phenomenological,
critical approach with a descriptive lyricism.
Emily Critchley appears to be another poet who has been influenced by Denise
Riley, in that a critical, philosophical questioning of language sits
alongside a lyric sensibility and lo and behold the two manage to get along
okay. There's a questioning, inner-voice which is, nevertheless, a public
voice which airs doubt and embraces complexity and is also very playful.
Enjoyable and impressive.
Isobel Armstrong and Wendy Mulford both incorporate collage and working with
existing texts into their method and both are, to differing extents, critical
writers (in the sense of their work having a political element) who are also
interested in the lyric voice. Mulford's open-field poetics force the reader
to focus intently on individual phrases and highlight the text's rhythms
while Armstrong's more openly political poetry fuses landscape (of both page
and 'actual' place) with critique in a cut-up snapshot fashion.
I enjoyed the textures of Marianne Morris' poetry which seem to revel in the
excess of seasonal consumerism - 'Christmas the warm cacophony of spend' -
while retaining an apparently aloof yet critical distance. Perhaps this
suggests that the power of the (Western) individual in a global economy is
limited to observation - 'That selective economic resistance is jokes. That
nothing can stop the buyer'. Not
that I'd want to put words into her mouth, so to speak, but the alienated
'objectivity' of this writing appeals to me. Carrie Etter's 'inner-dialogue'
mixes resonant lyric phrasing with careful observation and reflection, where
feeling is central but filtered through cognition and understanding. It took
me a while to appreciate the quiet nature of this writing but I'm getting
there! I'll have to try much harder with Caroline Bergvall's work here,
though I have enjoyed some of her previous writing and Anne Blonstein's
poetry didn't do it for me either, though again, I have found previous work
by her stimulating. Frances Kruk's visceral experimentations worked for me at
times but I didn't really get Sascha Akhtar's 'distilled essences', despite trying
quite hard. This is likely to be my fault rather than hers. I found Lucy
Sheerman's 'reconstructed fragments' intriguing, resonant and taut and while
the meaning is never fully 'recoverable', as she suggests, there's a haunting
quality to this writing, which also appeals.
This is an intriguing collection of work which makes widely available an area
(or areas) of contemporary British poetry hitherto accessible mainly through
magazine or web publication. I
wouldn't say the differences between the poets in this book are exactly
'infinite' but there is a pretty clear difference between the bulk of the
poetry here and that of the material in Women's Work. Which poses the still interesting question of
whether it's possible for poetries which appear so different and are coming
from such different 'philosophical' places, to talk to each other. One hopes
the answer to this question might yet be yes. Carrie Etter has given reasons
for the non-appearance here of Geraldine Monk and Maggie O'Sullivan but it
would have been nice to have seen Helen Macdonald's work included.
Nevertheless, this is a fine effort which helps to map out the contemporary
terrain.
© Steve Spence 2010
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