Dear Poet or Friend of Poets,
In the last year, we have co-written a paper that deals with representation of women in the US experimental poetry scene. (This paper was recently published in the Chicago Review as “Numbers Trouble” and we’ve put a draft of it and some supporting documents here. Right now, this is accessible only to users outside of North America. So, North Americans, get the Chicago Review issue here.)
One of the things our paper does is end up being a catalogue of what’s missing; a catalogue of some of the limits of a mostly white, mainstream US feminism in experimental poetry scenes. We see a myopic lack of attention to women’s issues outside of the US and a lack of collective action. We need more feminisms.
We end this paper asking people to write to us with suggestions about how to overcome this. Our intention is to try and compile a bunch of these suggestions for publication in order to start a conversation.
Would you be interested in being a part of this conversation?
Our plan right now is to start this conversation outside of the US.
There are several ways you could help us.
We are looking for local co-editors for different regions (right now, regions outside of North America) to gather brief statements from local writers about feminisms in their communities. Would you be willing to be one? What this means is that you would gather together some responses from writers in your area around this issue. You could gather as few as two or as many as twenty. It would be up to you. We like the idea of more but we’re flexible.
If you are not interested, do you think you could suggest someone who is?
If we were to get these responses, we then would need to get them translated. If you wanted to do this work with us (like if you translated these into an English that we could then smooth as necessary), that would be great. We might be able to pay you a small fee. If you don’t want to do it, we can probably pay someone else to translate it.
There are two ways we think it might be easiest for co-editors to get these responses. One is to just ask friends. The other is to put an ad in a local paper or journal like Jen Hofer did when she was editing her anthology of Mexican writing. If you are interested in putting an ad, again, we might be able to pay for the ad. It depends on how much it costs.
We think an ad might say something like this:
“FEMINISTS: TELL U.S. POETS
We’re a group of feminist writers who are curious what it is like to be a woman poet in _____. What should U.S. poets know about the living and working conditions of ____ women poets? What can be done? Is there anything to be done together? Send an email to telluspoets[at]gmail.com.”
But you could do whatever you thought was most appropriate.
We’d also like to know if there is anything you think we should say to US poets. At some point we will probably do a similar process-solicit responses from our friends and place ads to reach those we do not yet know-inside the US and any feedback you can share would be helpful.
If all of this seems too much, then can we talk you into just sending us a response? Or if you think of anyone you know who might be interested in doing this work, forward this and let us know.
Our deadline on this is somewhat flexible but not infinite. Our goal is to get this material into book form sometime in 2009. We would like to start getting responses sometime between now and spring of 2008.
Hope to hear from you.
Best,
Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young
October 29, 2007 * 11:02 am
October 29th, 2007 at 11:20 am
“… being a catalogue of some of the limits of feminism in US experimental writing. Among these limits is a myopic lack of attention to women’s issues outside of the US and a lack of collective action.”
Is this really evidence of the LIMITS of feminism? like something feminism can’t get beyond? seems more like a case of not enough feminism(s).
October 29th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Cool!
Awesome project, I bet you’ll get a lot of great stuff!
November 1st, 2007 at 10:47 am
i noticed when talking of US women poets, ‘experimental’ was there and when expanding out to non-US women poets, experimental part was dropped. i’m trying to figure out if that’s just a matter of only having interest in the experimental poetries of US but being interested in all types of poetries elsewhere or whether “the experimental” means different things in different regions and would complicate the issue which is the feminism part, or if experimental was implied throughout and i just didn’t get it, or if it was unintentional and what that means for the space between US experimental women poets and then women poets internationally, like why that space is there.
November 4th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
hey estaiti… to be honest, i hadn’t noticed it; so it wasn’t deliberate. but my general take is that the term “experimental” has a specific US resonance and history and i’m not sure how far out it extends but i wouldn’t want to presume that the “experimental/postmodern/avantgarde/innovative” (?) and “national”/”conventional”/”SoQ” (?) rupture defines literatures in other places. this rupture might show up in Canada? UK? but doesn’t make as much sense in the Pacific, even US occupied parts of it. and there are lots of places that i don’t know enough about.
November 6th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
re: experimental/postmodern/avantgarde/innovative doesn’t make much
sense outside of US, possible Canada & UK… ?
assuming this is correct, then i’m wondering why it means so much to me to assert myself as such if this construction is limited to place? was it created as an excuse/apology for our first-worldness? is it another victim of that kind of ‘liberalism’ that is guilt-ridden for its privileged role that it feels the need to position itself inside a marginal context? in many circles i see the marginal perspective coming to mean one of enlightenment, for better or for worse. so have we created the experimental/postmodern/avantgarde/innovative reality within our own already tiny community of poets and writers in order to claim some one-up from the mainstream, to place ourselves in the position of enlightened ones, even if we fail to realize that the reality of the scene only exists in US/Canada/UK?? i certainly recognize it’s importance in the regions in which it exists, but i am thrown off when i think that it fails to sustain itself in other countries/scenes. note: i’m more than hugely put off by the conversation going on at stan apps comment box but nevertheless, it IS discussing, along w/ mark wallace, and maybe others i’m not aware of, the ‘avant-garde’ question.
November 6th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
i guess i’m thinking here of a purely aesthetic avant-garde that seems somehow unattached to politically-driven avant-garde work that has come out of various forms of fascism throughout time.
November 6th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
I’m not sure I can think of that many writers for whom the idea of an avant-garde is purely aesthetic and divorced from political concerns. Does anybody know of some examples? Which is not of course to say that there aren’t plenty of writers associated with avant-garde aesthetics who have had politics that are very questionable.
November 6th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Thinking about what estaiti writes … it seems like “experimental” functions, is generative enough (if you keep it lubed) here in realm where like jspa said it has a history and relevance. You could think of “experimental, “avant garde” as a kind of latter day “indigenous” to an affiliation of Western Peoples — it doesn’t have to be universally valuable to be valuable to us.
But when people try to export it …. look out! And i’m thinking it gets exported by as little just looking at a non-first world, non-Western culture with too strong an identification of liberation with experimentation. Or i feel like i’ve seen “experimental” get “offshored,” i.e. techniques were adopted, sometimes by people trained in the US, and applied without the context that makes them meaningful. That’s why it makes sense to me to drop any such qualifications in the international call, if the interest is in broadening US feminist practice/awareness.
November 7th, 2007 at 10:18 am
It should be noted that Spahr and Young initially drafted this paper for the Feminaissance conference, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, in conjunction with the exhibit, WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution. Feminaissance brought together 15 contemporary women writers—Caroline Bergvall, Wanda Coleman, Bhanu Kapil, Dodie Bellamy (to name a few)—to discuss issues of gender, feminisms, literary forms, subjectivity/objectivity, social responsibility and yes, writing. The conference was organized by Christine Wertheim, Matias Viegener and myself (Teresa Carmody).
Mention of this conference is noticeably absent from all posts connected to the “Numbers” essay, nor is the conference referenced in the essay as published in the Chicago Review.
And I’m wondering why.
November 7th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Hi Teresa,
You’re right, mention of the Feminaissance conference has been absent from the internet conversation around the numbers essay; this is true of many things we mentioned in the paper.
We do acknowledge (and want to reiterate here, thank you again!) the Feminaissance conference/organizers in the notes at the end of the essay:
“NOTES
As we wrote this, we emailed many people and asked them questions. Thanks to Rae Armantrout, Michael Basinski, Taylor Brady, David Buuck, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Steve Evans, Erica Kaufman, Deirdre Kovac, Rachel Levitsky, Pamela
Lu, James Sherry, Mary Margaret Sloan, Elizabeth Treadwell, and Martha West for their quick replies. Sara Wintz helped us some with counting. Thanks to Jen Scappettone for sharing her forthcoming essay and also for the long conversations about various issues in this essay. Thanks also to Teresa Carmody, Matias
Viegener, and Christine Wertheim for organizing the conference Feminaissance(where the first draft of this paper was presented).”
November 8th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Stephanie and Juliana,
Your ideas about the representation of women in the (to use a shortand) experimental poetry scene — and the thinking about what to do about it — might be better served if you coupled statistics about the percentages of women in various anthologies with a discussion of what the percentage should have been.
Your essay isn’t clear on this point, at least to me. Should it be equal to the percentage of women in the general population? Or (to articulate another possible benchmark) equal to the percentage of those who self-identify as women who further self-identify as experimental poets?. Or, another alternative, the percentage of self-identified women experimental poets who actually want to be included in anthologies or awarded prizes?
To frame my question another way: was the fact that 19% of writers in the LANGUAGE book were women reflective of gender bias by Andrews and Bernstein, or the fact that only circa 20% of LANGUAGE writers were women? Figuring that out is critical to figuring out how the problem might be addressed. You seem not to address this issue.
This of course assumes there’s a problem in disparate gender representations in (to use the shortand) experimental poetry. Of course, it is a cocnern. Yet at some level, the gender of the discoverer of the new can’t be controlled. For example, that Curie pioneered in radioactivity and Gaposchkin in astrophysics and Einstein in regular ol’ physics were great for everyone, and their particular sort of miracles in human thinking and articulation were unique to them, and none of us can coplain that there wasn’t a man or women who also did what they particularly did.
Finally, regardless of how the problems realted to gender disparties in experimental poetry is defined or what causes are identified, I hope the solution does not too much involve poems. On page 101 of the CR you seem to suggest the possibility that poems should address certain issues, or work toward certain goals. I strongly disagree, at least in the main. Poems, at least the ones I mostly like (and their are exceptions) should be autonomous things, unencumbered by preconceived agendas or social/political/cultural/reformative goals.
November 9th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Hi,
I’d love to attempt gathering some replies in Croatia & possibly other countries of former Yugoslavia, depending on the response. Could you e-mail me to confirm interest, & I’ll begin to ‘get on it’, as it were? Thx!
Ana
November 9th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Hi from Australia…very interested in your project, experimental writing community thin over here…very hard to find connections.. have been to the states and find the scene much richer there.. desperate for it when i return…what next? put me on your list as interested and will to help…http://that-unsound.blogspot.com/
November 10th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Hi, very interesting debate/discussion/project. I realize that the focus of your Feminaissance/CR paper was not to address Ashton\’s argument about feminism, essentialism, and experimental aesthetics, but that charge still feels like a sticking point with me (in part because it could be leveled at any aesthetic formation that organizes itself around identity, whether biologically or socially determined), and I\’m curious as to what you thought about her characterization of your \
November 10th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Hi, very interesting debate/discussion/project. I realize that the focus of your Feminaissance/CR paper was not to address Ashton’s argument about feminism, essentialism, and experimental aesthetics, but that charge still feels like a sticking point with me (in part because it could be leveled at any aesthetic formation that organizes itself around identity, whether biologically or socially determined), and I’m curious as to what you thought about her characterization of your “version” of essentialism:
“To be more precise, I would say that the essentialism they describe involves the (usually unacknowledged) assumption that the contingencies of a poet’s situation,
including her sex, necessitate certain choices—including choices about the forms her poems take.”
Did she get your thinking right here? If so, this version certainly doesn’t seem that damning to me, it seems like the obvious pragmatic situation to me– except that tracing it down to its root terms can appear to reveal an underlying theoretical contradiction that Ashton clearly wants to pounce on. And is it important to rebut this charge of contradiction, to disprove it, or to prove that it’s not relevant to the situation of feminism and poetics, or to rearticulate the terms of experimental feminist poetics so that it’s theoretically self-consistent? Or do the pragmatic concerns of on-the-ground feminist poetics/politics outweigh these academic axioms?
Again, I realize this was not the focus of “Numbers Trouble” so please pardon the possible irrelevance of my questions. I think I’m really posting them more as open questions to anyone who might be interested in responding to them.
November 10th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Hey Steve, Hey Pam.
Thanks for your responses. I am for 2nd time attempting an answer before I leave for a much needed webbernet free vacation. (Last response got rejected because I typed in wrong code.)
Steve,
You ask what percentage of women is the right percentage. And you note we don’t answer. And you are right. We couldn’t begin to answer that. I’m not sure anyone could. The paper is less an accusation and more an observation (we hear over and over, even said it ourselves sometimes, that women are equally or over-represented but when we counted it, it wasn’t true).
When you ask this: “was the fact that 19% of writers in the LANGUAGE book were women reflective of gender bias by Andrews and Bernstein, or the fact that only circa 20% of LANGUAGE writers were women?” I would say that it probably is less reflective of gender bias and more reflective of how LANGUAGE writing got defined so that 20% of those included under its name were women. We hint at this in footnote 20. Not sure it is directly related, but I keep thinking of that wonderful jokey essay by Rae A., (http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/LANGUAGEn1/pictures/025.shtml) “Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?” (originally published in L=A=N=G… magazine but not in the Book) where she talks some about how the definition doesn’t really hold.
I don’t read much that is “unencumbered by preconceived agendas or social/political/cultural/reformative goals,” but we’re not demanding certain content.
Pam,
I’d probably side with the “the pragmatic concerns of on-the-ground feminist poetics/politics.” Ashton’s probably right there is a contradiction (but again I think there are more reasons to do single gender things than she allows). But I’ve never been good at being consistent and I’ve also had to accept that I’m somewhat essentialist at moments.
November 12th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
what does it mean to think voices need to be heard? whose hearing does such thinking privilege? can’t each group & individual hear its/his/her/our own being? if a group cannot hear itself is outside listening the most apt salve?
if a conversation is being started from inside north america how can it start outside north america?
love, Elizabeth
November 17th, 2007 at 9:54 am
A question:
What is the point of including, in your footnote re. “anecdotal examples of the sorts of dismissals that discussions about gender or feminism or women’s writing has provoked in recent years,” a decade-old web-spat involving Dale Smith, and David Hess’s “St. Buuckethead” essay, which—while you don’t mention this in your footnote—actually appeared in a 2001 issue of Mungo vs. Ranger?
The reason I ask is, there seems to be a fallacy at work here, in the sense that certain male poets (like Ron Silliman, who’s referenced in quite a bit more contextualizing detail in the very next graph of the footnote), are vetted as properly providing critical space for / promoting feminist voices, after having undergone an “intervention”—see p. 95 of your essay—while Smith is once again hoisted on a decade-old petard. As you yourselves note in the essay, there seemed to be somewhat of a learning curve at work in Silliman’s case; while he was thought of as “progressive,” the ratio of male-to-female posts and critical writings were skewed heavily towards males in the early years of his blog. Referencing numerous “interventions” that took place in response to that, you continued to examine his blog and found that over time, the numbers changed, Silliman’s consciousness was further heightened, etc. etc.
Was there a similar examination of the critical, editorial, and poetic work that Dale Smith has done in the past ten years prior to including mention of this ancient feud? I’m guessing there was not, but knowing Dale, and being pretty familiar with the work he’s done in publishing, critical and poetic writing, and hosting readings over the past decade, I can testify that he’s hardly the snarling jerk of the “angry reply” that your footnote implies; in fact, he’s one of the most generous, inclusive people I know. It’s especially ironic (if) you didn’t do a follow-up, because the source of the feud—the charge that an issue of SP did not include enough female writers—is so similar to what prompted interventions with Silliman.
Were this merely an innocent oversight, it would be bad enough. Taken in the context of absurd poetic-political arguments whose terms and dramatis personae can be sifted pretty well from the new Dorn book critique and angry posts it engendered on (here’s that name again!) Silliman’s blog, it seems downright mean-spirited. I think it’s wrong to perpetuate those feuds and give new life to old arguments. It reeks of agenda and coterie. The mention of the Hess essay—astonishingly bereft of dates and context—seems like more of the same. I don’t know Juliana Spahr but I do know Stephanie Young, and I can’t believe that you’d intentionally wade into such a bucket-o-worms.
The context of “Buuckethead” is worth looking at, by the way; it responds, in part, to an attack on Dale by David Buuck in the latter’s “Against Masculinist Privilege” essay in Tripwire 3 (1999). That attack, incidentally, had to do with Dale’s critical response to an all-female issue of The Hat—which, again, focused with tortured logic on a few phrases of Dale’s ABOUT the notion of male editors publishing an all-female issue, rather than on what he actually wrote about the poets and poems themselves. In the same essay, Silliman was also criticized, but treated with much more generosity and understanding. And round and round we go. The question I asked at the beginning of this note then becomes, what is the point of fanning the flames of this old feud? Whose agenda does it advance? Ten years from now, if and when the issue of gender and feminism comes up in the context of poetics (by writers in magazines, blogs, etc.), will the usual suspects once again be rounded up?
November 17th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Addendum:
Reading the “Silliman” portion of your essay more carefully, I realize you actually assert that the numbers of his “single author posts” actually have NOT changed all that much in response to interventions; nevertheless, the very generous consideration of his efforts on behalf of gender equality is still apparent, especially in footnote #14.
November 20th, 2007 at 2:27 am
For what it’s worth, and for those few outside of Austin who may care, I’ve pasted below the section on Dale Smith in my 1999 essay in TW. The issue is out of print, though SPD may still have some copies, & I can try to make a PDF to email to interested folks.
Readers can draw their own conclusions, but I might add that I’m not sure how genuine debate & criticism about something DS wrote becomes an “attack” on him, but it does seem to be part of a general tendency to personalize such criticism, such that historical moments in ongoing debates can thus be dismissed as “old spats” or “feuds” – i.e., something personal and only worth looking at if one has some other agenda. Perhaps I am naive, but I simply don’t share such a world-view – I don’t see critique and debate as about combat or personal attack or score-settling or any of that. I simply felt that Dale’s remarks about an all-women issue of the Hat were similar to someone saying something like, “Wow, this issue of Interlope really holds together, even though it’s restricted to Asian-American poets” or “Even though it only publishes writers from the African Diaspora, nocturnes is still pretty good!” I’ve spoken to too many poets & editors on the receiving end of such “praise” and “surprise” to think that this is not somehow reflective of a broader (often paternalistic) tendency to still view so-called “identity” poetics through aesthetic frames that simply don’t do justice to the historical & contingent contexts through which different modes emerge.
Anyways, the excerpt (slightly over one page from a twelve-page essay):
“In a December, 1998, posting to the SUNY-Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center Poetics List, Dale Smith presents a favorable review of the first issue of The Hat, a small-press poetry journal edited by Jordan Davis and Chris Edgar. Most notable in Smith’s post is his (apparent) surprise that a journal edited by two men has published an issue consisting entirely of women. He writes:
“Two male editors publishing a first issue with only women is quite notable and the results are not what I expected. [...] I understand building an issue of women’s writing is no easy task. To find a grouping of work that corresponds or echoes internally is difficult enough. Restricting that to a particular, traditionally under-represented gender, is moreso.”
It is a curious argument. It seems that a poetry journal (or anthology) featuring only women writers is “notable” only because the editors in this case are male. This would seem to imply that a selection of women-edited women’s writing would not be notable, read instead perhaps as some kind of “political” move (rather than aesthetic). Here male editorship is assumed to be somehow beyond or above this kind of politic, perhaps even “objective,” such that publishing “only women” would in and of itself be notable (because one assumes that such “objectiveness” would surely favor a masculinist poetics?). Again, Smith’s assumption is that the selection under discussion here came about by “restricting that to a particular … gender.” Why? Because only due to such a restriction could one explain the absence of male writers in a male-edited journal?
Implied in Smith’s argument is that a journal or anthology of women’s writing is somehow more validated by its having male editorship. Surely, it seems to be suggested, if female editors produced an all-women’s journal or anthology, it would come about based on some process other than merely “aesthetic.” Likewise, one assumes, for other kinds of “identity-based” editorial interventions.
In a later post on this topic, speaking to issues of representation, Smith claims that “sheer numbers strengthen the political movements, but at the loss of qualitative production.” Besides the implied separation and privileging of “qualitative production” (judged how? by whom?) over the “political” (understood how? for whom?), the condescension in this attitude is troubling. The assumption that a feminist politics (to take but one contested site) is somehow to be furthered only at the (likely) expense of aesthetic practice is to reinvoke some unspoken privileging of what could only be understood as a masculinist aesthetics. As the still-dominant aesthetic and interpretive regime, such an aesthetics has the virtue of inhabiting the “center” that all “others” (assumed to be “other” aesthetically by virtue of coming from “other” identity-positions) might aspire to. Thus being a woman writer in a male-edited journal is more “notable” than to be in a woman-edited journal.”
David Buuck
November 21st, 2007 at 9:16 am
David–
I’m hesitant to reply to this, partially out of a reluctance to “personalize” this debate (any further?)–such was not my intention. I do so only to clarify those intentions.
I referenced the context of your essay merely to point out that the Hess footnote is linked to the mention of Dale Smith, in that it also involves criticism of Dale and a response to it. Perhaps “attack” is too strong a word; I don’t deny your or anyone’s right to enter into critiques or debates etc.
Whether your criticism of Dale in that essay is valid is another matter, and again, I wish you had included the whole essay (at the risk of its taking over this comments thread), because the consideration with which you treat Perloff and, to an even greater extent, Silliman, even while criticizing them, makes the criticism of Dale seem much harsher.
To which you might reply, that’s because Perloff and Silliman had a long track record of being progressive, nuanced, understanding of gender issues and so on, while Dale Smith did not.
That might have been true at that time. Since that time–as he’s written on his own Possum Ego blog in response to being footnoted–much has changed. Much has been written. Many millions of words worth of books, magazines, readings, reviews, from Dale’s own pen and through the wonderful and wonderfully diverse SP press, have been produced. How is it fair to mention a ten-year-old “historical moment” without providing any of this context, especially when such an effort is being made to contextualize a figure like Silliman? (I’m talking about the Spahr/Young essay now.)
This is the whole of my question in a nutshell. The notion that Dale gets frozen, Han Solo-like, in a “historical moment,” while others are treated more fairly–and that there’s a pattern of this sort of thing–is what makes it seem to be more than just an objective sifting of moments and facts.
November 21st, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Hi, and thanks to everyone who’s responded here. It’s nice to see the conversation moving more slowly than elsewhere. I’m around and listening (except that I’m in the process of moving and packing so will be off the internets for a weekish beginning, uh, after I press post).
Ana and Majena, backchannels to come. Very glad you’re interested in participating.
And – Juliana and I remain interested in suggestions/critiques about how the language of the call (original blog post) might be edited or re-framed.
*
David (Hadbawnik), hi, and briefly, thanks for providing publication info/context around David Hess’s paper in your first comment. I found Dale Smith’s recent blog post (in response to the footnote where he’s mentioned) thoughtful, and quite helpful in re-understanding and contextualizing that (historical) moment on the buffpo list we point towards in the footnote.
There are plenty of other anecdotal examples we might have included. And it can be problematic to cite anecdotal, individual moments (as your fears about coterie and agenda demonstrate.) A few more contemporary moments, some from our respondents, were removed before publication.
But neither did we include what we did in the interest of fanning old fights. Those fights certainly aren’t mine; I wasn’t a participant, or even in conversation really with poets at the time. But those moments, along with others, still did and do contribute to the construction of a field and communities I’m part of now.
As David (Buuck) pointed out, the examples in the paper (and there are many, many footnotes and examples) are historical. The paper isn’t titled “Sexist Male Poets Trouble” and it’s not ‘about’ any one personality or person. We look at Silliman comprehensively b.c. we’re trying to think about the internet as a site of reception and production, and his blog is a central location, or ‘lightning rod for all kinds of issues.’
We welcome more histories and narratives of contemporary poetry scenes, and this conversation has already provided an opportunity for you to give more context. And I’m glad for that.
February 3rd, 2008 at 2:37 am
Hi Juliana and Stephanie,
I’m interested in getting on board in India. I think I’ve also sent you an email, and I’ll be looking forward to hearing back from you!