Jo Gill

Poetry and autobiography

It has become a commonplace of critical studies of autobiography to begin by establishing the difficulties of defining the object of scrutiny. For Linda Anderson, it is an ‘unruly field’ characterised by ‘pervasiveness and slipperiness’ (2). So, too, Laura Marcus highlights ‘the fundamental problem of the instability or hybridity of autobiography as a genre’ (7), while Candace Lang notes how difficult it is to ‘outline or evaluate the various positions on how to define autobiography’ (6 n5). For Sidonie Smith, the closer we look, the less we are able to see: ‘as more and more critics talk about autobiography, the sense of its generic conventions, even its very definition, has begun to blur’ (3). This is an impasse which seems terminal to Paul de Man; he argues that ‘generic discussions [ . . .] remain distressingly sterile’ and inevitably ‘founder in questions that are both pointless and unanswerable’ (920, 919). Given the fluidity and opacity of the terms of the debate, how much more complicated, and exponentially more interesting, it becomes when we add another genre*/poetry*/to the epistemological mix. And although de Man’s point is well made (his argument is that in seeking to define the characteristics of a distinct genre of autobiography, we overlook the possibility that autobiography is ‘not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts’ [emphasis added] [921]) it is precisely in asking questions of the generic (which are also the linguistic and cultural) relationships between these forms that we can best understand how they operate. The essays in this special issue of Life Writing address the relationship*/which might be one of contiguity, overlap, opposition, or identity*/between poetry and other forms of autobiography. They ask what are the gaps that divide the two? What are the areas of common ground? Does widening the term ‘autobiography’ to create a larger, more inclusive field of ‘life writing’ as has been common and useful of late, bring poetry within the same fold as conventional (prose) forms or does it leave poetry still marginalised, still pushed to the edge of an otherwiseexpanding practice? What does it mean to talk about ‘poetry’ in this context? What kinds of poetry have typically been considered and how have they been read? What is the effect of introducing new forms and new reading perspectives? What, the following essays ask, might poetry and autobiography learn from each other about issues of shared concern*/about language, subjectivity, authenticity,

The problem of biography

Because the poems and novel that have made Plaths name came to almost all her readers as posthumous events, her work has inevitably been read through the irrevocable, ineradicable and finally enigmatic fact of Plaths suicide. The challenge for her biographers has been to puzzle out the relationship not merely of her life to her art, but of her art to her death. Biographers promise to expose these relationships for scrutiny, and yet the genre itself is inexhaustible: there is never an end to what the biographer cannot know. If Plaths biographers differ sharply in their readiness to propose definitive and sometimes reductive explanations of her character, they also can be judged by their ability to register the quality of her achievement, to explain what Plaths work revealed so compellingly to readers, particularly women, of her own and the next generation, and why it will remain illuminating and important in the future. Biographers of Plath demonstrate that the genre is always interested, although hers have been more noticeably partisan than most. In fact, each of the major biographies is in part motivated to counteract what is perceived as egregious bias in the one before. Reading them in sequence, we hear an edgy conversation that has lasted for three decades. Each biographer also takes up the story at a different moment in Plaths publication history and growing literary reputation, and not unimportantly, in Ted Hughess oeuvre and reputation. In each decade biographers gained access to new published and archival resources that document in voluminous detail Plaths historical context, her professional and personal correspondence, her education and reading and her creative process in the drafts of her Ariel poems.

‘Quite the opposite of a feminist’: Phyllis McGinley, Betty Friedan and discourses of gender in mid-century American culture

This article examines the relationship between feminist and anti-feminist discourses in the period between World War II and the publication of Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique (1963). It takes as its primary focus the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘housewife poet’ and self-proclaimed anti-feminist, Phyllis McGinley. McGinley was a successful poet who has disappeared from the record since the publication in 1964 of Sixpence in her Shoe—her best-selling retort to The Feminine Mystique. Her example is important because it gives voice to the much-maligned suburban housewife and offers a spirited alternative to Friedans reading of white, middle-class domesticity as always and inevitably oppressive. The article offers a close reading of McGinleys work and situates it in relation to its historical and cultural contexts (specifically the highly charged domain of suburban domesticity) and to its wider readership. It compares her anti-feminism with that of other anti-feminist writers of the period, thereby illuminating the tensions and contradictions in contemporary debates.

The “Poet Laureate” of Suburbia

Having established the historical and discursive contexts in which the suburbs emerged and were understood we turn now to a detailed study of the poetry of this place and time, beginning with the work of once-acclaimed, and now largely forgotten poet, Phyllis McGinley. Popularly known as the “Poet Laureate of Suburbia” (Deedy 22–7)—an appellation that trumpets the apparent incongruity of its terms, even as it attempts to broach them—McGinley was one of the bestknown and most widely read poets of her generation. 1 Her selected poems, Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades (1960), won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for poetry while her prose excoriation of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, titled Sixpence in her Shoe (1964), spent over six months on the New York Times bestseller list (“Telltale” 74–8). For reasons that will become clear below, her work provides a compelling test case—or more properly a limit case—for accepted readings of mid-century suburban life and of the history and readership of American poetry, and it operates in subtle and often unexpected ways to register contradiction and dissent.

Space, Gender, Race: Josephine Miles and the Poetics of the California Suburbs

This essay takes as its focus the rich—if hither overlooked—seam of poetry emerging from and reflecting on the suburbs of the West Coast of America across their mid-twentieth century decades of settlement and maturity. It examines in particular the work of Josephine Miles (1911-1985) and reads her poetry in relation to the historical and discursive contexts in which suburbia emerged and flourished and as a corpus which in its own detail and complexity has much to tell us about the specificities of Californian suburban experience. It argues that Miless poetry traces the changing discourses of suburban landscape, architecture, community, and subjectivity in this period. And by comparing examples of her poetry with work by Langston Hughes, it suggests that Miles engages in compelling, if sometimes disturbing, ways with the processes of spatial, gender, and racial exclusion on which the suburbs were founded.