What Would the Community Think?

Emily Warn asked me to re-post my entry on the Chicago Review articles by Young/Spahr and Ashton so it can appear alongside hers and Alicia's. I just want to add a caveat: I wrote this post under the assumption that the CR articles to which it refers would be online. They are not. I'm not sure how much sense this post will make to you unless you have read those articles, so please keep that in mind as you read my argument (below the fold) that the avant-garde is more sexist than the mainstream. You can look at the chart, at any rate, to see some evidence for my claim. Thanks for reading.

The issue of unequitable representation wouldn't exist if women themselves a) threw more money around poetry and b) hustled more (editing, pitching, essaying). This very site is named for Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry magazine; it is funded by Ruth Lilly’s bequest. The editors who solicited my work for this site have been women. So my presence here does not feel like an accident, much less a demographic token. But among the more academic and avant-garde publications, which are supposedly more progressive and ideologically transparent, only a quarter to a third of contributors are women.
Women, it has been said over and over, are shy of blanketing editors with submissions. I myself am guilty of this – I haven’t knocked on any new doors all year (though I have responded to solicitations). Most women I know who withhold their work are proud of not hustling, not playing the game, keeping themselves pure.
In addition, poets intensely aware of the “innovative tradition” are by definition conflicted about success and notions of purity. I remember a pseudonymous female commenter congratulating me on being co-opted when I first appeared on the Poetry Foundation website. (But plenty of experimental poets had chequered histories, so to speak. Several got their start at Harvard. Objectivists published in Poetry magazine. Language Poets have Pews.)
Female reticence is a quirk; it’s the other part that constitutes what the Materialists (Materialians? Materi-alienists?) like to call “a system.” Hence my contention that the community has created a subeconomy of scarcity (“innovative”) in the larger economy of scarcity (poetry). Scarcity of love and attention in addition to scarcity of award monies and prestigious publication. The “avant-garde” community, drawing from anti-bourgeois, anti-individualist leftist theory, disparages the reward system of the “mainstream” and replaces it with something far more nebulous and neurotic: Are people talking about you? And so we have poets like Elizabeth Treadwell sniping at Ron Silliman for praising Pattie McCarthy. Is this what it’s come to? With our high-minded ideals, we gamble on writing the poetry of the future, only to break down in public when Ron Silliman endorses another female poet working in near obscurity? Am I the only one who thinks that was not exactly a “feminist intervention,” but a sign of madness bubbling up from the insular temple of Small Press Traffic?
I was first put onto the articles by Young, Spahr and Ashton by Brent Cunningham here. I had suggested in this comment thread that Christian Bok’s agenda for innovation sounded fairly masculinist to me. (His list of friends and influences are all men.) My dis-ease found a correlative in Jennifer Scappettone’s complaint that “I’ve been subjected to hours-long conversations or seminars about literature and poetry in which not a single woman was mentioned as agent or matrix of influence.” There are and have been women practitioners of the avant-garde, better ones than Steve McCaffery, and it is dispiriting not to see them listed with the same naturalness that Steve Burt refers to Lorine Niedecker or Denise Riley. But was I too succumbing to neurosis by taking offense? The obvious antidote would be to give Steve Burt more of my attention and Christian Bok less.
At the same time, I was thinking, some of the most famous innovative women poets are more lyric than anti-lyric: Barbara Guest, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Jennifer Moxley, Eleni Sikelianos. This complicates their reception, because the most radical avant-garde is supposed to be anti-lyric above all else (including original). Eventually, we realize, there is no innovative poetry; just “innovative poetries,” with some groups largely invisible to other groups. As groups divide and subdivide, neurosis multiplies.
And so to Ashton’s claim, that the subgrouping of innovative poetry into “women’s innovative poetry” is a categorical chimera. I could have agreed with her. But I now doubt the wisdom of identifying with "innovative poetics" at all, both because I'm more interested in "poems" than "poetry" (an increasingly critical distinction), and because I'm female. For who decides what innovative is? Judging by the blogs, men do. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. (I confess, a few of the comment threads are so indecipherable to me that I have come to the conclusion that when some men argue with each other, they are pretending to understand what the other is saying, and each accepts this fiction because it is so flattering to be argued with.) By this token, the old-school feminist poetry is looking better and better!
A poetic practice that holds us hostage to vague pecking orders and passive-aggressive exclusions is one that abets our worst tendencies, turns underdogs into police dogs, and uses progressive politics as a double bind. Women serious about poems must eventually reject this model in which a closed community offers deliverance from scarcity by positing more scarcity. Otherwise, we are going to have a long boustrophedon to hoe.