Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Desert Island Texts

The following contributions came in response to a request, sent to a number of key figures in feminism today, to write on a text that had been formative for their thinking as feminists. The chosen ...

H.D. and revisionary myth-making

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle [Aldington], 1886-1961), with these initials as her authorial signet, had a literary career as an author of lyric poetry, long poems, essay/memoirs and novels and, briefly, as a film-maker and actress. Born in the United States from a well-to-do, intellectual family, adherents of Moravian Protestantism, H.D. became an expatriate writer and British citizen, living in London and later in Switzerland. She had a complex relational life as a bisexual woman, was married with one daughter (from an affair), enjoyed a number of erotic relationships with men and women, and lived in a companionate, lesbian relationship with Bryher (Winifred Ellerman, 1894-1983) for the majority of her life. She was theoretically and personally invested in psychoanalysis, archaeological discoveries, classical culture, cinema, the occult and comparative religious study; she also meditated the array and meanings of her erotic and relational ties in richly layered prose and poetry, including memoirs of her brief but important analysis with Freud. Both world wars profoundly affected her writing. Indeed, many of modernisms most distinctive long poems were written in large measure to confront these wars, to give accounts of their damage and to construct alternative meanings. H.D.s critical reputation, like that of many other modernist women, was quite uneven until the advent of feminist scholarship. Despite her full writing career and panoply of fascinating texts, she was seen as Imagist (or short-poem writer) only, localised to some work in the 1910s as fully representative, with her total oeuvre sometimes marginalised and discredited. Some poets and fewer academics (like Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov and L. S. Dembo) always insisted on her pertinence; H.D.s own careful archive at Beinecke Library, Yale University, set up by H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson, assisted the recovery of her importance by a growing number of scholars.

Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language

1 Introduction 2 Mrs Dalloway 3 To the Lighthouse 4 The Waves 5 Between the Acts 6 Conclusion.

A Review of “The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde”

Ruth Jennison, at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, has written a deft, intelligent and suggestive book making a particular and necessary intervention about the objectivist poets of the late 1920s to the mid-1930s. She reclaims and deploys the accurate observation that they were, variously, Marxists (whatever they meant by this at the time) and, thus, insists that their poetry must be considered an expression of the Marxist approach to the real. Jennison carries out this task in a sturdy, theoretically compressed, and sometimes overly schematic way. Her basic tactic is an argument by homology—in Lucien Goldmann’s terms. In her stalwart argument for revolutionary literacy, she maps three key, well-articulated concepts in Marxist thought onto specific texts of three poets as mediated through their formal methods (such as parataxis), arguing that these socialist concepts infuse the poets’ choices of poetic mode and express their interpretations of real historical conditions. The concepts are the interdependence of geographical zones of uneven development, the commodity and its “defeatable tyranny” (203), and the construction of a nuanced revolutionary subject coming to consciousness. The work is quite well informed about the materialist theories and historical observations of Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, Perry Anderson, and Karl Marx, which are variously evoked in and melded with Jennison’s interpretation of the goals of the poetry. The title (The Zukofsky Era) refers to a brief moment in the construction of objectivist poetics (short, as eras go, but with a long shadow): the time when full radicalization of modernist literary strategies was on the agenda. Louis Zukofsky’s radical ideas were of intense interest to both George Oppen and Lorine Niedecker at that time; both further developed their own social observations and pragmatic-left theorizing throughout their lives. Part of the excellence of Jennison’s recuperative project toward left-inflected modernist studies is its uncompromising interpretation of the uses and functions of certain poetic tactics associated with highmodernist and conservatizing art for a materialist poetics infused with Marxist analysis. Of course, with the flaws of its virtues, this same interpretive insistence can be problematic, as the uneven pertinence of the concepts to the specific works of the poets is sometimes revealed. The first idea—of the uneven social, economic and geographical results of the historical moment—is illuminated by Jennison’s important analysis of radical parataxis in two sections (“A”—6 and “A”—8) of Zukofsky’s long poem A, which juxtaposes the observed facts of political economy. The jump cuts and paratactic montage of contemporary cinema provide Jennison with an analogy for Oppen’s Discrete Series, which is also termed postnarrative deictics, in one of Jennison’s expert summary phrases. The question of “A”9 and the commodity form (the second main idea in his book) is given a brave airing, but the exegesis is as allusive as the poetic text; this chapter is the most difficult and makes most sense as a generalization of interest, not as a close reading. Niedecker’s surrealist works serve as a bridge among several of these practices. particularly, the construction of a critical, materialist, and psychologially alert social subject, but also the use of surrealist disjunctive phrases to emphasize uneven historical particulars. The short poems of Zukofsky, particularly “Mantis” (but not “Mantis, an Interpretation”) and such works as “To My Wash-stand” and its matching poem are studies under the rubric of a revolutionary social subject. Jennison’s position is that such poems show “the process by which the subject comes to find itself in possession of its current consciousness” (192)—which makes more sense than the proleptic hope that this consciousness is necessarily readied for “repairing the commodified world” (203). Certain lacunae help this book’s focus. In the chapter on “A”-9, only the first (Marx-inflected) half of the poem is discussed; the matching Spinoza-inflected section of “A”-9, perhaps because it was written outside Jennison’s period, falls by the wayside. Still, it might have been worth a mention; certainly the so-called “Interpretation” of “Mantis” was written within the period. Jennison has a suspicion of the sociality that comes from personal relationships—the one most avoided is the dangerousfor-permission-to-cite bond between Zukofsky and Niedecker. It is amusing (and perhaps ironic) that, in general, the society-wide sociality of revolutionary desire can be discussed, but the specific poem-and-theory-creating sociality of several people is off the agenda. Jennison writes, “I am suggesting a revision of modernist alignments that is less concerned with psychobiography and epistolary exchanges than it is with global ideological and aesthetic patterns” (138). Whatever else one might say (how about both tasks dialectically inflecting each other?), such a statement differentiates Jennison’s purpose crisply from the interesting spate of studies of poetic communities, dyads, and sociality in poetry linked to ideological and historic tasks (e.g., those concerning gender, sexuality, and social uses of poetry), and yet, in her discussions of Oppen and of Niedecker, Jennison devotes some interesting analysis to gender, despite her contention that class is the fundamental contradiction. Jennison also has two writerly tics that might be examined. One is her use in text of general terms, such as critics (rather than specific names, such as Michael Golston), and not specifying who they are until the notes. There are a few moments when the work of Bob Perelman and Peter Quartermain on Zukofsky and the work of Libbie Rifkin and myself on gender and the objectivists and modernists might well have been noted. Jennison seems to fence off her own analysis from the infusion of other writers on objectivist poetics, rigidly titrating their influence on her work. Another issue is her very challenging, tight, overly dazzling prose style, with its fascinating, almost precious choice of verbs. Perhaps her second book will exhale somewhat in both areas. As a first book, however, this is a real and serious achievement; it deserves to be an instant classic, even if some of the specific readings are too thesis-bound.

Reading Lines Forum

Of the various texts that led to my adopting a cultural studies approach to my field—nineteenth-century American women’s poetry—the two that affected me the most were The Heath Anthology of American Literature, edited by Paul Lauter, and The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, edited by William Truettner. A revolutionary rethinking of the standard college textbook, the Heath (first edition 1990) radically altered the landscape of American literature as taught in classrooms throughout the U. S., since its emphasis on marginalized writers virtually mandated that teachers address the cultural work such literature selections did. Given the uncontested hegemony that the 1991 exhibition organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art for which it served as catalog, represented an equally revolutionary intervention into its field. Overflowing with images whose ideological content was as undeniable as was their aesthetic appeal, the exhibit successfully argued the political role that even “great” works of art— landscapes by Thomas Cole and Alfred Bierstadt, for instance—could and did play in nineteenth-century American social life. Since the Heath’s importance to U.S. cultural studies is inarguable, I will focus here on why my reading of The West as America and art books like it, most published in the 1990s, was no less important in making me rethink my field, especially with respect to the relation between the aesthetic and the political in it. During the same decade in which The West as America appeared, academic interest in poetry had reached its nadir. Despite all the evidence to the contrary accruing elsewhere in the culture—not least, the active role poets played in the Reading Lines Forum

The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics@@@'My Toughest Mentor': Theodore Roethke and William Carlos Williams (1940-1948)

Correspondence and poems exchanged between the great American poets Roethke and Williams between 1940-48.

Women Poets and the American Sublime

Preface Acknowledgments 1. From Emerson to Whitman: Engendering the Sublime 2. Another Way to See: Dickinson and the Counter-Sublime 3. Dickinson, Moore, and the Poetics of Deflection 4. Marianne Moore: Toward an Engendered Sublime 5. The Piercing, Melting Word: MooreOs Octopus 6. BishopOs Sexual Poetics 7. PlathOs Bodily Ego: Restaging the Sublime 8. Of Woman Born: Adrienne Rich and the Feminist Sublime Notes Index