10 - Feminism’s experimental ‘work at the language-face’

Summary

With what voices do women poets speak? In avant-garde, experimental or Language Poetry (to throw in three assorted and not particularly helpful labels), there is no unified lyric voice – its claims are exploded, its modes of expression done to death. In its place, we … follow the text in all its provisionality, its multiple meanings, its erasures, silences, chora.

I do not want to make it cohere

voices all well put down then

Women’s voices vex literary histories of recent British poetry, whether cast as ‘mainstream’ or as ‘postmodern’, categories routinely invoked and questioned and invoked again, but nonetheless defined primarily in terms of male poets. Familiar narratives paint a picture of poetry retreating after World War II into an insular and provincial Englishness, a rejection of modernist experimentation that really begins before the war but finds its fullest popularity in the everyman poetry of the Movement. That an active continuation of modernist poetics persisted alongside the more dominant Movement – under the various labels of neo-modernism, postmodernism, innovative, experimental and/or alternative poetics – has remained relatively overlooked by critics, ignored by publishing powers and unsupported by arts funding through the later decades of the twentieth century. If the British experimental scene is a ‘stretched and resolutely unnamed map of divergent factions, mostly held together by the poets themselves and a few critics’, what mappings exist focus, by and large, on men, too often ignoring not only the creative work of women but the political, theoretical and activist feminisms mediating their gender-aware constructs of the ‘experimental’.