Ange, can you explain to me why writers like Lyn Hejinian, Joan Retallack, Tina Darragh, or Leslie Scalapino are or are not writing "women's work"? Obviously they're more explicitly associated with certain kinds of aesthetic extremes than the writers you mention, although Mayer, Moxley, Brady and Guest clearly have/had connections to and interactions with these other women. I'm not quite sure whether you're drawing a line somewhere, and if you are, what it is. it seems like maybe you are, but I can't make it out yet.

Thanks for any clarification you can offer.

Hi Mark. I didn't imply all women did this sort of work (that would be nonsensical, right?) -- I implied that this work was being done only by women. (I think. If you can think of men who write in the vein of Young and dos Anjos, en travesti, with a highly gendered/sexualized response to Tradition, let me know....)

Thanks, Ange. That makes a lot of sense. I think it’s the slippage in the phrase “women’s work” that threw me. I thought maybe you were saying that there was something (fundamental) about women that makes them prefer work of this kind, but you seem to mean that there’s something about this kind of work that makes (some) women the only ones who would be drawn to it.

I can think of a few 20th century gay male poets who have been drawn to a similar aesthetic: John Wheelwright, Parker Tyler, maybe even Edwin Denby? But I can’t immediately think of any male poet who’s doing this sort of thing at the moment, although I certainly could just be missing something.

It’s interesting for me to think about how this return to the old (in new ways?) remains such an consistent impulse within modernism. Of course the emphasis is usually on returning to the old as a way of developing new structures/ideas: H.D. does this perhaps in the most focused way, but Pound does it too, obviously. And of course, later, Robert Duncan obviously takes up this impulse.

Maybe Wallace Stevens is another example of the kind of work you mean, at least in a borderline way? Nada Gordon has been writing recently about Stevens’ interest in the surface and the ornamental; it always strikes me that there’s a sensuality (even a muted sexuality?) in his early poems that makes them texturally richer than his later work.

I’m getting off the subject now, but I always think of Ginsberg’s City Lights version of Howl as one of the first books that acknowledges that the concept of “make it new” has itself become tradition. By invoking Whitman, and also Williams (through having Williams introduce the poet), Ginsberg suggests that his aesthetic and cultural differences are part of several generations of such work. Certainly the problem of what it might mean to “make it new” when the idea of making it new is itself old (some might say “played out,” but I wouldn’t) is one of the issues a lot of poets think about these days.

Thanks again.

Thanks for these thoughts, Mark. They're right on target. Of course, I don't think "make it new" is played out, but I do think there is a tyranny of the present (there always is) and the consistent impulse in modernism to turn to the old for the new is also a way to duck out from under the inevitable heirarchies and conflicts of the contemporary.

I think I'll go read some early Stevens now....

I'm not a modernist, but am inclined to argue that turning "to the old for the new" is also a way to inform the inevitable heirarchies and conflicts of the contemporary.

Or am I being impossibly naive (without the two dots over the "a")?

A Bunting scholar not a modernist??? Or is that a not-now-nor-have-I-ever declaration.

The old is precisely the it in Day by day, make it new. (From Ezra Pound's Godspell!)

Seconding the EM Young cite. And to corroborate the trend, I notice that Dora Malech has some saucy sonnets in Columbia Poetry Review 21. (I also notice the mirror-opposite takes by Mark Halliday and Joshua Clover there on spending time in Europe.)

Jordan, you catch me out every time! Thank you yet again for keeping me honest, sort of.

Ange,

One nomination for a man writing en travesti (and “with a highly gendered / sexualized response to Tradition”) might be Alessandro Porco, in both The Jill Kelly Poems and the newer Augustine in Carthage, and Other Poems (both ECW Press in Toronto). Wild swings of diction, over-the-top content, general lambasting of Romantic tropes and conventions, all done up to a T of untottering Traditional Technique. See something like lines out of “My Sweetest Bi-Curious”:

My sweetest Bi-curious, live and love
Without reprove, and like a dove
Fly, fly high, soar, though to survive,
On occasion, you must muff-dive.

Or see “Jill Kelly’s Titty-Bop Sonnet”:

What’s to stop me, say, from writing
A beauty’s-best blazon, never looking
Above, below, or beyond gianormous
Jugs jugging-in at a C-cup 36?
Well, sure, some critic might claim,
Porco è porcu, his pen unable to sustain
A poetic argument of “real” value;
But that’s no reason not to do as I do,
Which is express a love of bib-bubs
In a fourteen-line song to the God of
Titty-bops—hast thou forsaken me?
Why not hand over a naked Jilly Kelly
So I can finally stop writing this
Thing & slide my this between her thats?

Too, there’re a whole pot of smartly salacious limericks in Augustine in Carthage. Porco, I read, claims to be “influenced by the 17th century parson-poet, Robert Herrick, whose ditties in honour of amorous milkmaids and compliant servant girls were naughtily suggestive.” I’d wager Porco is “turning to the old” not only to sidestep those “inevitable heirarchies and conflicts of the contemporary,” but to thoroughly mock it—it and its most earnest stalwarts, both men and women. And, jeez yes, for fun. So much of the “post-avant” is so abominably (ab homine) temperate.

John

John Latta, that is so great! Thank you! Your own Rubbing Torsos, now that I think of it, shares salient qualities with these chapbooks too. I did use the word "mocking" re EMY, but not the word "fun," because that is the truly dirty word around here.

Don, Jordan beat me to the question.

Jordan: can we NOT speak of poets going to Europe? It makes me more miserable than I have any right to be.

Ange --

since John has recommended my work to you (I think he's correct to do so -- it's in line with what you're discussing here), I'd love to send you a copy of my book -- my treat. Please do get in contact (a_porco@yahoo.ca); if you pass along your mailing addy, I'll send out a copy of _Augustine in Carthage_, which includes those salacious limericks!

Alessandro