Moxie: Vintage Feminism as poetic method
A project submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Melinda Kim Bufton
BA (English) The University of Melbourne, Grad Dip (Publishing and Editing) Monash University, BA (Hons) (Creative Writing) Deakin University
School of Media and Communication
College of Design and Social Context
RMIT University
November 2019
Declaration
I certify that except where due acknowledgement has been made, the work is that of the author alone; the work has not been submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award; the content of the project is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party is acknowledged; and, ethics procedures and guidelines have been followed. I acknowledge the support I have received for my research through the provision of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
Melinda Kim Bufton November 29, 2019
ii
Acknowledgements
With deep gratitude, I acknowledge the following people -
Dr. Jessica L. Wilkinson and Dr. Bonny Cassidy, who have unfailingly supported, encouraged and guided me through this work with passion and enthusiasm; thank you.
RMIT School of Media and Communications faculty members who have shown support and interest in my work, in particular Associate Professor Francesca Rendle-Short and Dr.Linda Daley.
Associate Professor Ann Vickery (Deakin University), for setting me on this path several years ago and continuing to inspire.
Michael Farrell, Matthew Hall, Ella O’Keefe, Duncan Hose, Zoe Dzunko, Bella Li, Fiona Hile, Tim Wright, Rory Dufficy,Toby Fitch (and many others) for conversations over the years about poetic research. They have generously shared their thoughts and these conversations have sustained me.
Poets – friends, acquaintances, superstars - who have shown me the infinite ways of this form.
The members of the RMIT HELP group, the HDR CPR group and my RMIT PhD peers in general, who have offered fellowship, feedback and kindness across these years.
Mary-Jo O’Rourke AE, who provided copyediting and proofreading services according to the national university-endorsed ‘Guidelines for editing research theses’ (IPEd 2019).
RMIT University for the incredible support of a scholarship that allowed me to conduct this work.
My partner Peter, family and friends for their loving patience.
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Contents
Declaration ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract v
Prologue poem – ‘Too Clever by Half’ vi
Introduction 1
From practice to Creative Practice Research 7
Research questions 9
Overview of chapters 10
Out of scope – a note on the unfolding of recent history 14
Chapter 1 – Feminism and Poetry: inheritance and time 16
Chapter 2 – Making Spaces: offices, epics 40
Chapter 3 – Vintage Feminism: ‘styling’ as feminist poetry practice 63
Conclusion 87
Bibliography 90
iv
Abstract
This practice-based research traces the development of a poetry manuscript and dissertation exploring intersections between women and work, using third-wave feminist perspectives and experimentations with ‘female’ epic forms and found text. It enquires into aesthetic, thematic and stylistic features of feminist poetry and genealogies of feminist ideas, interrogating these together via a critical account of practice. Using an iterative, cyclic research methodology, the project and dissertation seek to advance new, feminist poetic practice that displays its own knowledge of historical precedents via a mode of ‘vintage feminism’. Vintage feminism is a feminist creative practice that reflects ways of being rather than enacting social change.
v
Too Clever By Half1
And then there’s some girl who’s done a mash-up of scenes of Austen, the BBC productions generally and a few things from All the Rivers Run but with Eric Carmen over the top.
Good god.
It presses all our teenage buttons.
But not talking our-lady-of-the-thing here.
We can be tight-smiled pleased or submit to the Emma vs Catherine jelly wrestle while the brown-haired Sarahs truncate and rip as soft as rabbits if rabbits were fangirls and had digital editing software and centre parts.
Here someone else has put the Pre-Raphaelites to
Bowie’s Heroes
Oh. The BBC itself.
It’s always difficult to tell which is the official and which is the not.
Still I strum my fingers across the walnut desk but not with impatience.
1 An earlier version of this poem was published in The Age, 8 January 2011.
vi Introduction
In 1997 I was given a copy of a book called Games Mother Never Taught You: Corporate Gamesmanship for Women by Betty Lehan Harragan.
My boss suggested it would be useful, though also admitted it was ‘dated’. It was a book of career advice for women, published in 1977. I loved its tone, which was pushy and unrelenting: ‘Watch out for female ghettoes’ (274) and ‘The language of business is deadly serious. Any halting linguist who dares laugh or poke fun at a business communiqué may expect to be told to “get down to business”, that is, to be serious’ (98). Instead of using it for the intended purpose – to help me to play the office ‘game’ – I became riveted by this odd page-turner, which revealed interesting office politics between men and women. Between the lines of advice, you could imagine the painful skewering and repeated blocks the author had suffered as she climbed the corporate ladder. I took note, as I always do, of how things were for the women who had come before me. I knew that things were easier for me. Sexism was less overt, but I observed echoes and was curious about the way it persisted, just under the surface of things. Very occasionally, when meeting older men in work settings, I would register a flicker of surprise across their faces when I initiated a handshake. They would pause before reciprocating.
Offices, 1997–2019
That job in 1997 was my first office job, a destination I’d worked towards because it satisfied my teenage understanding of ‘career woman’, which was the alternative to what I saw around me (variations of farmer’s daughter, farmer’s wife, blue collar worker). I gleaned ‘career woman’ as an archetype from movies and TV of the 1980s and planned to replicate their ‘successful’ life choices in my own adulthood.
In my mind, the making of myself into an office worker is forever linked to making books. Getting myself into an office got me closer to this; I was seeking to implicate myself as a cog
1 in the machine of book publishing, however I could, until I could get myself to the ‘other side’ (become the writer).
The business was a small consultancy to the book trade – publishers, booksellers. The process of ‘making careers’ and ‘making books’ was similar: decide on the content, produce the book/career-ready self and sell strategically. I was at the time making myself into a person who was hireable, by tweaking and making other people into a hireable state so that they could go and make and sell books. I wrote poetry secretly. Later I became a poet, which could be considered the ultimate rejection of anything to do with money. And yet.
Poetry, 2010–present
I resisted poetry like it was a bad boyfriend; until I didn’t. What I mean is, I knew that my office work occurred in a part of my life that had nothing to do with my poetry. Poetry found its way into all the spaces that weren’t the office (that is, all the hours outside of 9am – 5pm had the potential to be poetry hours). Poetry was after-hours; it became a productive form of writing for me once I understood it as such: as the knock-off drink, as the assignation, as the party on a rooftop. Poetry was the loosening of my tie (never mind that I never wore a tie). I watched an episode of Mad Men in which Don Draper goes to a Greenwich Village bar after work, with his mistress Midge, for a poetry reading. As he keeps his jacket on and looks bemused, I thought ’there it is … poetry’. By which I mean I was Don Draper, and I was the beat poet on stage, and I was Midge, and I was the club. And it was all poetry.
One night I was at a bar with some local poets, having come from my office job. I had recently sent my work to a poet there; she was sitting further along the table (lighting a cigarette, nodding, talking). I had read her poetry keenly as an undergraduate, eighteen years prior, because it was important feminist work. And because it was electric. A mutual friend now introduced us. ‘Oh’, she said, ‘you sent me that poem. I can’t publish that, it’s completely anti-feminist’.
Everyone’s eyes turned to me, to see what I’d say.
2 *******
In embarking on this research, I decided I had to investigate the impact of that comment: I can’t publish that [poem], it’s completely anti-feminist. The comment presented itself as both a creative challenge (almost a dare, perhaps) and an unfurling of potential nodes of enquiry – aspects such as: the contexts from which that comment arose; genealogies of feminism; the forms that feminist poetry has taken to date; and ways that feminist poetry can be recognised by readers.
This investigation of the above nodes included analysing how feminist inheritance can be traced, across poems. Related to this is the question of how identity has been connected to and with feminist poetry, and how poetry that does not declare the poet’s identity or politics might demonstrate its feminism. I also sourced critical writings on feminism and time to interrogate whether different ‘times’ or eras of feminism, or different strands of feminist genealogies, indicated particular styles of poetry.
The project provided an opportunity to experiment with my own work, whilst exploring the above areas of enquiry. In my poetry writing, I experimented with content (via third-wave feminist politics and themes relating to women in office work), with form (‘female’ epic and mock epic) and with found materials (use of citation from pop culture and other sources, used within and on the margins of the poems) in order to find my own ‘answer’ in real time to what a contemporary feminist poem can be, as a continuation of a genre.
What is a feminist poem?
Caitlin Newcomer says that ‘Poetry both studies and activates new potentialities in language – constantly attuned to the ways in which language makes material, intersecting webs of history and power’; it does this, she adds, via ‘formal experimentation and fluid theorisation’ (Newcomer 2019, 222), whereby the poetry becomes a form of theoretical speculation; the poetry becomes critical theory, rather than relying upon critical theory (only) to do this work.
3 For this project, a poem is a site of discussion between poetry and feminism.
A poem is also a form of research.
I would like to consider feminist poetry as feminism and poetry in partnership, in some way determined by the poetry itself. To define feminist poetry is to enter a set of ‘complex and embattled practices’, as described by Steve Evans. Evans writes this in an introduction to a special issue of the feminist cultural studies journal Differences (2001) and notes that the terms, or keywords, central to the journal’s contents ‘do not settle easily into any stable constellation with one another, and that is precisely why they have been chosen’ (Evans 2001, i). These terms he refers to are ‘contemporary poetry’, ‘feminism’, ‘avant-gardism’ and ‘poststructuralism’. Taken together, they suggest a mix of experimentation, of taking- apart and also of (re)constitution. They suggest the potential developments that can be identified through the testing of familiar terms put to work in new ways.
Newcomer also uses a complex set of terms as an entry point to thinking about feminist poetry; she writes that we can think of feminist poetry as situated in a ‘series of longstanding debates about the intersection of gender, literary production and literary consumption’ but that a productive approach is to open up more questions, such as ‘How have the intersection of feminism, poetry and theory been configured with particular traditions of feminist thought?’ (Newcomer 2019, 218).
And what is the relationship between trying to prove that a poem is a poem and trying to prove that a feminist poem is a feminist poem and trying to prove … feminism? Just as the relationship between all of these terms can be considered unsettled and shifting, the outcome – the poem – could demonstrate tension within itself, between components of its contents. Therefore, in this research I am looking for ways in which the individual poem, or poetry sequence, enacts and converses with feminist poetics. Through practice-based research, I seek for feminism and poetry to show how they operate together; through critical reflection on this process and its methods, I consider how they will continue to be unsettled and, sometimes, contain contradictory material.
When brought together via the act of anthologising, feminism and poetry interact to give clues to the poetics circulating around the time of their compilation. Kate Jennings writes
4 that feminism, in the context of poetry anthology Mother I’m Rooted (1975), should be understood as ‘simply a belief in the full humanity of women, and her right to define herself’ and she follows this up with a statement that she selected poems for this collection ‘on the grounds of women writing directly, and honestly’ (Jennings 1975, introduction). But what does she mean by ‘simply’? And what constitutes ‘directly’? Should we attempt to address selecting poems ‘honestly’, when it comes to feminist poetry? Many years later, in 2016, the editors of the anthology Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry offer a more expansive and enquiring set of statements that clearly locate feminist poetry as anything but straightforward in the twenty-first century: ‘The contemporary feminist poem … will tell us something that reflects the education, mobilisation and authority of women in literary practice … Yet it will also be aware of its own limitations and how the empowered voice sits right next to the constrained one – sometimes within the same consciousness’ (Cassidy and Wilkinson 2016, x).
Clare Buck also points to the complex breadth of the field when she introduces the updated edition of the landmark survey Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s Writing by Jan Montefiore (1987). Buck writes of the significance of the title, for its time: ‘The title defines the project as both an investigation of and a statement about the inter-relationship between the two terms “feminism” and “poetry”. Neither of these terms could ground a critical practice in any simple way because the definition of each was hotly contested’ (2004, vx).
For this project, these definitions remain hotly contested. They do so to allow for continued interrogation, to bring to the surface the assertion that ‘any feminist claim in our present is in harmony and dissonance with a choir of past voices’ (Colebrook 2009, 14), to work against complacency and to allow for the fact that that misunderstanding of intentions is likely, but also productive.
Feminist poetry has in the past relied upon the reader knowing who authored it as a way to assess its feminist potential. Elizabeth Grosz situates this more broadly, as a historical tendency in writing authored by women: ‘The assumption that the sex of the author is some indication, if not guarantee, of the text’s position as feminist or feminine is a common one, made by many feminists in the 1970s and 1980s’ (1995, 13). My research navigates this
5 legacy by asking whether writing can ‘move beyond the use of personal experience as a bridge to [feminism]’ (Meyer quoting Dicker & Piepmeier 2004) and therefore whether my writing can move beyond myself as a feminist poet. In other words, my project charges the poetry with the task of doing the work in place of me. I set this as my own goal to achieve for ‘feminist poetry’, which I aim to elucidate and demonstrate through this research: for the poetry to do the work of underwriting itself as being in some way feminist, rather than the reader being presented with feminist credentials alongside the poem.
As a feminist poet, I see the act of creating feminist poetry as describing and determining the relationship between feminism and poetry. In Chapter 1 I discuss the Lyric ‘I’ and its relationship to women’s poetry, but offer this quote from Meryl Altman, who observes that the nexus between feminist poet and feminist poem can call into question the voice that is operating between them. Her comment, embedded in a review of essays on feminist poetics and poetry practice, concludes that because the feminist ‘I’ is complicated, the feminist Lyric ‘I’ is a difficult space to negotiate as a poet:
But the question has (sort of) an answer: look, I did it, I wrote. I wrote. Here's the poem, or the paragraph. Many of the poets who speak or are spoken of here write from the positions – split, complicated, oppositional, oppressed – where those critiques of ‘subject’ originated; but the power and originality of each individual and yet: rooted voice is also the answer. And part of the answer is, don't worry, write. (Altman 1998, 14)
So, although I will refer to ‘feminist poetry’ throughout this work for ease of reference, I am really referring to feminism and poetry; how they can intersect in different ways, how they operate together, how they complicate one another.
Towards the end of my PhD research, yet another definition of feminist poetry appeared in The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Thought (Goodman 2019). In this volume, Newcomer writes:
The fact that feminist poetics now has such a long history of [theoretical and stylistic] models encompassing multiple aesthetic, political and theoretical commitments, means that we are in the midst of a particularly rich moment for
6 expanding, combining, recombining and rethinking creative possibilities. This seems one of the most exciting paradoxes of our contemporary poetic moment; the ability to use and reuse earlier and potentially competing earlier traditions without being beholden to any particular one. In other words, such a poetics privileges active development … attuned to both the world before it and the world around it. (2019, 225)
Newcomer suggests that contemporary feminist poetry has the capacity to choose to adopt, reuse and rethink what has come before, vis-à-vis feminist poetic traditions, but it tends to do so in conversation with these existing or historical poetics. The conversation does not have to be cordial, there is room to disagree; the kernel of this is her claim that ‘such a poetics privileges active development’. It directly asserts that feminist poetry must acknowledge its histories, but does not specify conditions (for example, language use or affect or form).
This creates a sense of feminist poetry as experimentation, as a series of creative practice (research) experiments. For my research, a feminist poem is a poem that attempts all, or some, of this experimentation, in order to mark itself as a site of active engagement with feminist principles. For my work, seeking to bring the ‘world before’ and the ‘world around’ the present into a poem invites the reader to see the past, the recent past and the present together in close proximity. I want the reader to see that feminism is a continued process and that a feminist poem is part of a conversation which began before it and which contributes to the conversations that may be had after it has been read – including the feminist poems it inspires.
From practice to Creative Practice Research
I came to this PhD as a practising poet, with several individual publications of poems and one sole-authored collection entitled Girlery (2014), which was developed as my creative artefact for a creative writing Honours project over 2011–2012. The academic research context provided me with a way to find new entry points into my own understanding of feminist poetry, though in this first foray into academia I kept the creative component and
7 the exegesis of that project at arm’s-length from one another. Though the Honours project identified that not all feminist poetry sets out with the same political intentions (such as furthering collective feminist identity or challenging male poetic traditions), it did not entirely satisfy my growing list of questions about the ways in which contemporary feminist poetry operates (what is happening in the field, in my community of practice) and could potentially operate (how far can you go in experimenting with feminist poetry and still describe it with this label?). For me, it was never a question of getting to the bottom of what feminist poetry had been before my own contributions to this field but, rather, an investigation into what feminist poetry could be, what it could do, how it could operate.
The decision to undertake PhD research was an attempt to further interrogate this potential for feminist poetry. Whilst a purely literary studies research approach may have yielded a complex map of the field of contemporary feminist poetry (analysing this field with the use of literary theory), I felt that the more compelling investigation for me as a poet would be via creative practice. I was not looking to discover a definitive, irrefutable answer regarding the question of what a feminist poem can be so that I might respond more forcefully to the poet who had suggested my early poetry was ‘anti-feminist’. Rather, I was looking for new ways to ask the question of what feminism and poetry can do in partnership and what kinds of results this might generate. I wanted to be at the coalface of experimentation, making moves in my poetry that were brash, daring, cheeky, provocative.
Everyone’s eyes turned to me, to see what I’d say.
‘It’s complicated’, I answered.
8 Research questions
Early in my research, I came to articulate a series of research questions by way of identifying my assumptions about creative voice and purpose.
1. I did not believe that my own identity was essential to my poetry’s ability to stand on its own two feet, even (especially) regarding whether a poem of mine could be considered a feminist poem. I also acknowledged that my identity was somehow involved in the production of my poetry but being able to identify traces of this was not necessary for others to interpret the poem. This led me to ask, how can feminist poetry use identity creatively instead of mimetically? In other words, how can the poem itself speak of, through and around the feminism with which it is engaging?
2. There was no way I could ‘guarantee’ that a poem was feminist. I didn’t want to set out to prove certain poems were ‘feminist’ or ‘not feminist’, as these seemed to be reductive strategies that closed off other possibilities and were counter to the notion of expanding the definition, or (more likely) definitions, of feminist poetry. I wanted to experiment at the edges of what I knew, to speculate in feminist poetry in order to uncover new possibilities of form or language via intentional creative practice. By doing so, I wanted to stretch out definitions of feminist poetry, in whatever state or condition I found those definitions. This became the research question, what techniques or strategies might facilitate an expansion of the category of ‘feminist poetry’?
3. Poetry that was intended by its author to be feminist had the potential to be read by readers as non-feminist or anti-feminist; I had evidence that this could occur, as noted in one of my prefacing sketches. My own history of engagement with feminist ideas was not available in that one poem that had been misunderstood (see the full poem on page vi following the Abstract). However, engaging with and paying attention to feminist ideas is a key part of my preparation to write; in particular, the histories or genealogies of feminist ideas and poetry that have preceded me and to which I am responding. In addition to my intention to expand the category of feminist poetry, I added to the methodology an enquiry into ways of acknowledging feminist inheritance within poetry. I imagined this as a type of ethical counterbalance to innovation. Initially I speculated that this might perform as a type of in-poem feminist literature review or a way to
9 name-check key feminist theories within the poems. I wasn’t sure how this might be done, but saw potential for seeking methods to create poetry that accounted for its own knowledge of feminist ideas and genealogies within. And regardless of how a poet might use such a method or what the results might be, what I sought became the research question, how might poetry communicate feminism, and account for pertinent feminist genealogies either explicitly or implicitly?
Many of my questions, including my research questions, were about what my poetry might attempt and about what the results of these attempts might show. As I worked through the creation of the poetry, I attempted to describe it through reflection in a variety of ways that arose out of my research into poetry forms, traditions and genealogies of feminist ideas. Most of these descriptions did not fit entirely; yet there was no problem with continuing to produce poetry. My poetry’s resistance to description was a key part of my discovery, which I will discuss through the following chapters.
Overview of chapters
Chapter 1 – Feminism and Poetry: inheritance and time
In their introduction to the poetry anthology Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics, Greenberg and Glenum (2010) note that a key development in international third-wave poetry was the development of the ‘Gurlesque’ style. This poetry is aware of feminist histories because it situates itself in relation to those poetics that came before and renovates feminist poetics via the use of alternative subjective strategies: ‘In place of confessional narrative there [is] fragment and disjuncture, prose and chant’ (Greenberg and Glenum 2010, 4) and its aesthetic features are ‘a feminine, feminist incorporating of the grotesque and cruel with the spangled and dreamy’ (Greenberg and Glenum 2010, 1) . Gurlesque acknowledges its relationship to performativity and to Riot Grrl politics, and the reclaiming of cultural artefacts that had not prominently existed in women’s poetry previously; ‘black organza witch costumes and the silver wornout sequins mashed between scratchy pink tutu-netting and velvet unicorn paintings’ (Greenberg and Glenum 2010, 1). Greenberg and Glenum are describing the aesthetic concerns and content
10 of the Gurlesque style, by way of metaphor, but they are also arguing that one strand of a third wave turn in feminist poetry relates to evoking metaphor.
In this chapter, I explore how metaphors are used to describe feminism, with attention to the ‘feminist wave’ in conjunction with the idea of feminist and poetic inheritances. Additionally, I explore what effect the historical timing of a poem’s writing might have upon its meaning. I explore the effects of second-wave feminism on the third wave of feminism and how this can be connected to feminist poetry’s landscapes. If, in fact, we have entered a fourth wave of feminism, one aspect I trace through my work and case studies is how the poetry that is being written during this current moment continues to be ‘feminist’. Additionally, I look at my exploration of ‘time’ as a way of understanding feminist genealogies in poetry and as a key into furthering my own practice in this project.
Chapter 2 – Making Spaces: epics, offices
Prior to this research, I positioned poetry work as ‘other’ to my office work. I saw them (and continue to see them) as a useful set of gears grinding against each other to generate my work as a poet. I believed that one was required to offset the other: the constraint of office work, the busting out of poetry. My day jobs were what allowed me to write the poetry I came to write (and continue to write) due to this tension: the contrast between the two kinds of work and their purposes. Not being sure what might happen, I decided to drop the office right into the middle of my poetry, dissolving my own hard-won and mythology- drenched dichotomy. I asked myself, what if all the poetry was about the office? What if I put the poetry inside the workday, metaphorically speaking, by addressing the office in the poems and literally by working on poetry (as my ‘job’)? Wanting to keep some sense of generative tension in my process, I realised that the PhD process itself would likely provide this, with its deadlines, institutional requirements and administrative aspects.
This chapter looks at surfaces and spaces, as well as furniture and dress, as ways to understand the office in twenty-first-century career-building, linked with the career memoirs of professional office women I’ve consulted as source material. I also analyse Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic (1998) and Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘Diving into the Wreck’ (1973)
11 as case studies in which I start to consider the epic as a space that might be ironically appropriated and adapted to ‘women’s work’ in the context of office careers.
Chapter 3 – Vintage Feminism: ‘styling’ as feminist poetry practice
This chapter explores the change in direction my research took when I was able to focus more clearly on the poetry itself; this occurred via a chance viewing of a reality TV program concerned with vintage fashion and specifically the repurposing, refashioning, upcycling and styling of vintage clothing as a sustainable alternative to the contemporary phenomenon of fast fashion. The host of the program was older than the young women being ‘made over’ in customised vintage outfits. Often the clothing that was repurposed was taken from the younger women’s mothers’ and grandmothers’ wardrobes, through stealth, and then presented as a newly styled, collaged, curated outfit. Old and new were often combined in one outfit in order to present a unique outcome. This appeared similar to what I was attempting as a feminist poet. It turned my attention towards the way I was constructing the poems from other people’s work, whether this be in the form of ideas, or borrowing from cultural texts such as books and films, and styling those threads into a poem featuring my own words also. This chapter describes the use of vintage clothing and upcycling of clothing as a way to understand how existing feminist and poetic materials – ideas (feminist thinking) and texts (source materials, found text, other poets’ works) – could be restyled to demonstrate an understanding, within the space of a poem, of the genealogies and histories that preceded those poems. This is an attempt to craft poetry that displays its feminist knowledge in a material way. I call this method of creating poetry ‘vintage feminism’.
A key theme of this project is representation of women in white collar jobs, jobs to which they so recently gained entry via the social revolutions effected by second-wave feminism. Many well-known artefacts exist in other media to describe this phenomenon – film representations, TV shows with ‘career woman’ female protagonists and a long history of career memoir (offered in the form of non-fiction business guides). In applying poetry to this theme, my research attempts to push beyond feminist career tropes of ‘ladder-climbing’ or ‘making it’ and move steadily into what Christopher Nealon, in his critique of poetry within
12 late-late capitalism (Nealon 2004) refers to as poems that ‘feel as if they could come to us only from the fragile singularity of the history of the present’.
My research examines the presentation of the self; vintage feminism is an exploration of self-presentation as both a feminist problem as well as a poetic one, linked by how other people will read the poems. In poetry, this may be a matter of categorisation (for example, a decision about whether a poem can be read as feminist) but could also lead to poetic voices being excluded altogether if they fall outside of expectations. Office workplaces often draw on traditions from the twentieth century in their construction of an organisational culture; navigation of gender roles and of feminism are interpreted through dress or behaviour. The traditions being drawn upon, just as in poetry, may no longer perform their original function, but first they need to be seen as this: traditions, rather than dictum.
The question of how poetry can be located within feminist discourse is debated frequently (Greenberg 2014). During the second wave of feminism, new poetic subjectivities arose in line with broader societal challenges to gender politics. For example, much second-wave feminist poetry was a call to bear witness to the lived experiences of women (Vickery 2009, 74) and poetry was seen as a model of ‘formalised but potentially intimate, even transparent, disclosure and exchange, hospitable to autobiography, and in urgent need of reclaiming’ (Lilley 1997, 265). In poetry, second-wave feminist politics may have translated to a lexicon of words and themes deemed out-of-bounds or politically suspect to readers familiar with those originating sensibilities. This research project seeks to tease out these movements; is it possible to identify how poetry can be responsible for expanding, evolving, emerging categories of feminism, and how much for the also-rapid shifts occurring within the field of contemporary poetry? And to what extent does poetry remain poetry, and feminism remain feminism, when new poetics attempts to broker new terrain?
13 Out of scope – a note on the unfolding of recent history
During the span of my research, the #metoo movement was ignited. Although this is a key event in recent feminist histories, I have chosen not to incorporate this into my work in a direct way. This is because I am not trying to write a poetry that calls for change in the way that political actions are calling for change. My poetry is designed to activate thinking, rather than action. Action, I believe, is necessary and urgent, and may come from thinking. Thinking is indirect, and so my treatment of #metoo is indirect.
Eileen Myles has written of political poetry as ‘the intimate balance going on between information, sentiment and aesthetics’ and ‘a complex projection and reception of self and selves onto the moving surface of the poem in its time’ (2009). My research is informed by my critical reading practice of feminist poetry, and my creative practice itself, but it is not focused on the experience of the audience as a critical subject. This is an important distinction, because political poetry carries an inbuilt promise that there will be a readership of those who might engage with poetry because of its politics (not because it is poetry or because they read poetry regularly). I am reminded here of attending a feminist poetry event in 2012 where an audience member raised that the first edition of the 1975 Australian feminist poetry anthology Mother, I’m Rooted sold 10,000 copies. Another member of the audience said, ‘Yes, I remember that … we all bought it because it was feminism in action, not really because it was poetry. I’m not sure if people read it. It was important to buy it, though’. This is a valid deployment of political poetry. I am not arguing for depoliticised feminism; I am taking the position, via my poetry, that feminism is a broad, deep and historical source of materials with which a poem can engage. That is, a feminist poem can be deployed to record, make visible and comment on the events of the world as an important part of its work; but that is not the work my project is overtly attempting. This work I present may shift something for a reader, by way of thinking through feminism and transferring this to the contexts of lived and real experiences, but reporting urgent news feels beyond its scope. The primary field of reference for my research of feminism and feminist poetry is Western and anglophone. My project of ‘vintage feminism’ offers a non- narrative, as defined by Barrett Watten: ‘In works of Art … non-narrative is not simply an undoing, interruption or denial of narrative; it is a positive form of temporal organisation’ (1996, 388). He describes this temporal organisation as ‘forms of discursive presentation
14 [where] both linear and contextual syntax exist but where univocal motivation, retrospective closure, and transcendent perspective are suspended, deferred, or do not exist.’ (388). That is to say: in my work, traces of #metoo exist, but these poems are discursive in their intentions, rather than narrative.
15 Chapter 1 – Feminism and Poetry: inheritance and time
Diagrams and mind maps – making feminist poetry into work
When I began this PhD I wanted to address existing feminist poetry – beginning with the poetry that emerged with second-wave feminism, running all the way to the present – and to create new poetry material in this genre through the narrative and thematic setting of women’s office work. I sought to do this because I am a poet and it is how I make sense of things. ‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking for, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear,’ says Joan Didion, in her infamous UC Berkeley lecture, ‘Why I Write’ (1976). Although Didion is not speaking of poetry but writing in general, I feel a familiarity in her description. I have often felt, in the process of writing poetry, that I can draw together several condensed thoughts in close proximity, and from there the poem may show me what it is that I was ruminating on. I use poetry to confront issues and understand them, to put ideas into dialogue with each other, as a test of their features; as James McCorkle writes, ‘whatever criticisms are levelled at the practice of poetry or the direction that poetry seems to take must correspondingly be levelled at the culture’ (1989, 2). I follow an impulse to see what poetry can do, to test Matthew Zapruder’s statement that ‘The usefulness of poetry has less to do with delivering messages (which we can just as easily get from prose), and far more to do with what poems can do to our language, re-enlivening and reactivating it, and thereby drawing us into a different form of attention and awareness’ (2017, xvi).
I commenced this project with a curiosity about creating poetry within the structure and process of the PhD, but little direct knowledge of where to begin and how to set about this task. In other words, I had limited experience of describing my poetry practice or producing poetry with pre-set intentions. I knew that I needed to articulate what I was doing, while I was doing it, in order to uncover the methodology. As Dallow says, ‘Investigating art practice involves charting something of the doing’ (2003, 50) and he describes this as ‘the process of moving from the unknown of the imagination to the relative known of the artefacts or productions of artistic practice’ (2003, 50). Charting the doing was a logical way
16 to attempt to make process visible to myself, especially as, in my case, my imagination feels anything but unclear: often I have felt as though my imagination and my typing hands are working together in synch, to produce poetry without passing through any steps between. The ‘relative unknown’ of the artefact, in Dallow’s words, becomes very relative (even provisional) as it can be difficult to explain a poem in its final state when I am not sure how I arrived at that outcome.
Nigel McLoughlin charts a number of steps involved in the ‘process of getting poems made’; the first of these is imagination, which he describes as including some or all of the following: ‘the initial intuitive processes which lead to the creative urge to write, and the various associative processes and insights which follow at various stages of the cycle and emerge from imaginative and re-imaginative processes which lead to the framing of the poem within an imaginative state’ (2013, 45); this is followed by ‘structuration’ (‘codifying in language’, into an initial draft), analysis of the draft, ‘validation’ (making a judgement on the draft) and refinement towards a ‘satisfactory’ output. Whilst this sounds logical to me, it is not how I wrote poems before or during this project. For me, most of the steps happened in tandem, with a brief visit back to the poem for ‘refinement’ at a later time. In some cases, when I embarked on a poem everything happened at once; all of McLoughlin’s steps collapsed, circling in and around each other, occurring simultaneously in one sitting.
I assumed that adopting or adapting an existing model would – at the very least – describe or demonstrate something familiar to those awaiting my work. The anxiety to prove that my poetry was operating as research was high. In early presentations of my research, I began with quotations from feminist theorists I was reading and searched desperately for diagrams that could represent a research model.
In the many office jobs that I had held, diagrams in presentations were my way to make concrete something that was abstract; for example, to demonstrate the work involved in a future pilot project that lacked clear outcomes. Whilst a diagram would not actually make the project ‘concrete’, often it was enough to literally keep pointing to the diagram, in presentations, in meetings with colleagues. The diagram stood in for something concrete (for some later time, if or when a concrete project outcome would arrive, the outcome being less important that the fact that the diagram, and therefore the project, existed). This
17 is the territory of satire, as seen in popular culture such as TV series Utopia (2014) and The Office (2001). That is, I have observed and participated in the office culture that spawned this satirical treatment of work, and forward-projections of ill-conceived projects are a key feature of both.
As I prepared to share the early stages of my research at an internal symposium at my university, I was working in a job where I composed short career-advice articles in the morning and worked on my PhD in the afternoon. I did all this work at the same desk; the non-PhD project required me to remain at the office desk in case queries arose from that morning’s work. I discussed the challenges I was encountering, along with how to present my research at this symposium, with a colleague, a business analyst. He emailed through his ‘failsafe’ PowerPoint slide template. The colleague and I had often discussed useful ‘hacks’ to influence outcomes in work environments (we both had a history of talking our way into things, career-wise). The slides consisted entirely of diagrams and shapes without text; it was stylish and convincing, and I began dropping text into the template.
I was looking for a way to transfer workplace ‘hacks’ (from the office) into research ‘hacks’ (into poetry). I was attempting to transfer methods between realms of work that I had performed completely differently; the office was about speed, about templates used in place of purpose-built content, about displacing my tendency to overthink things (to get carried away with a thought or idea) with a short to-do list. Research, for me, seemed to be about thinking, conceptualising and finding ways to demonstrate that I was actively engaged in thinking and conceptualising. This did not lend itself to a ‘hack’ at all.
As mentioned in the introduction, I wanted to bring poetry into the ‘office’ of the PhD, make the poetry into my 9–5, to see what this kind of constraint might bring. I had thought some aspects might survive the crossover, generic skills I had (accidentally) acquired through my office work, such as the tasks of managing a project from beginning to end and interpreting jargon. I expected that these would help me to manage the PhD if the poetry tried to take charge; which is to say, my work practices would revert to something akin to after-hours fun or just plain leisure. I expected that my idea of bringing the poetry into the office was a way to ‘professionalise’ my own poetry practice. I could also have left things as they were – as a poet working outside the academy, I was having no trouble with productivity or output –
18 but the temptation to set up this slightly perverse experiment was too interesting to ignore. Dana Goia describes the two elements of ‘business’ and poetry as mutually exclusive or perhaps natural enemies: ‘American poetry has defined business precisely by excluding it. Business does not exist in the world of poetry, and therefore by implication, it has become everything that poetry is not – a world without imagination, enlightenment or perception. It is the world from which poetry is trying to escape’ (2011, 148). The escape was the part I was familiar with, as touched upon in my opening anecdotes. But this is exactly what I was choosing to invert – to put business in the poetry to see what happened, in the doing and in the outcome.
I was still trying to bend my office tools into a shape that could accommodate or explicate poetry; as I lacked a way to describe what I was doing in research terms, I was attempting to use the PowerPoint template instead of the poetry itself, even though the poetry was the research. Beginning to treat the process of creating poetry as a process of discovery – in and of itself – was yet to occur. I trusted my poetry as an end-product but could not articulate the process of its making.
A recent Australian Research Council–funded project asked experienced poets to describe the process of creating poetry. I was put in mind of my own thinking at this stage of my research when I read these two anonymised quotes: ‘most of my writing comes out of nowhere’ and ‘Something happens to you, you never really know quite what, and your mind starts working poetically. I can’t force it, I just prepare myself for it, and wait for it’ (quoted in Brophy 2017, 11).
After half an hour, back at that desk where I spent half my day on office work and half my day preparing to present my fledgling PhD research, I deleted the whole PowerPoint presentation, template and all. I had been hoping for the template to obscure my own lack of insight to my own process. I was adding words like ‘narrative’ and ‘process’ and ‘practice’ but the slides were empty of meaning because I wasn’t sure what I was describing; for once, ‘making up’ a diagram was not going to cut it. In order to begin telling the story of my research, I sought a theoretical model of creative practice research. Seeking out and turning to ‘expert’ knowledge was critical, in order to position myself in the field (I was not new to poetry, but certainly new to describing my practice).
19 Smith and Dean’s iterative cyclic web provided me with my model – my PowerPoint-able ‘diagram’, the known theory I could point to. Prior to undertaking the PhD, I had never created poetry in a sequential, linear way; in drafting new work, I hadn’t started at the beginning and worked my way through to a provisional end. I wrote small pieces, single lines and sets of lines, and then joined them together, rearranging how and what each fragment connected to, adding words, scooping text up in a cut-and-paste to be placed elsewhere. This was true for all the things I had ever written, including and most notably the academic writing of my previous degrees. Bluntly, I had never started at the beginning and worked my way to the end of anything. Smith and Dean’s model articulated that creative practice in a research context could operate without a definitive direction also. They describe their model as flexible, allowing for a diverse variety of methods that creative practice research has yielded. The model is visually represented by a diagram: ‘The structure of the model combines a cycle and several sub-cycles (demonstrated by the larger circle and smaller ovoids) with a web (the criss-cross, branching lines across the circle) created by many points of entry and transition within the cycle’ (Smith & Dean 2009, ii). One intention of this diagram is to ‘suggest how a creative or research process may start at any point on the large cycle illustrated, and move, spider-like, to any other’ (ibid, 5). This was what I needed; a way to allow for the individual (yet linked) units of ‘creative process’ and ‘research process’ to be treated as equal entry points into my research. It also allowed me to work with a visual prompt, a mind-map created out of the research model’s wheel-shaped diagram itself. In part, this visual format of a methodology provided reassurance; if I could not yet ‘see’ what my poetry was showing me, I could at least return to this visual prompt to remind myself I was working systematically (albeit using a ‘system’ in a tentative, exploratory way).
Smith and Dean propose that in creative practice research, any sub-cycle of the iterative research process may connect to any other sub-cycle. This encourages a state of iterative production, defined in this theory as ‘repeating [a process] several times (though probably with some variation) before proceeding, setting up a cycle: start-end-start’ (ibid, 7). It also allows for entirely new ideas to spring from any stage or aspect of this experimental process. (An example of this is my exploration of feminist theory early in the project, where I read feminist Judith Butler on performativity, read poetry with an eye to finding gender performative work and created small draft poems that attempted to respond to my
20 readings; I saw these as three nodes making up a cyclic movement.) This meant that I was able to keep an open mind as I wrote poetry and looked for non-sequential and non-linear patterns in the work. However, it also introduced a problem, which I will address shortly.
The next stage of the process is key to its usefulness as a productive model: that the researcher much choose some results to focus on and leave others behind. With regard to the above example, of exploring ‘performativity’, there did not appear to be a productive connection between the three nodes I was working with (reading theory, reading for examples in others’ poetry, creating draft poetry), so I moved to other explorations. A ‘result’ in this case was that there was no result that I could discern. In describing the process as a binary, this process of deciding what to focus on and what to leave behind appears simple; however, this set up a tension that would exist throughout the entire research phase of the project. The tension was between keeping my research impulses open – ‘advancing without a theory’ (Dallow, 52) – for long enough to observe patterns in my iterative cycles of research and yet making choices regarding which aspects to focus on more deeply and which to leave behind; to illustrate this with my above example once more, were Butler’s writings more important to keep interrogating, as a priority? What if, by doing so, I found an expository method for making Butler’s theoretical definition of performative as dually ‘dramatic’ and ‘non-referential’ (Butler 1988, 522) into poetry, for example? In the initial stages, Smith and Dean’s model offered a generative frame within which to experiment, but not a direction to move in per se, given its rhizomatic nature. However, it also posed a challenge in that the model’s flexibility created an expansive set of possibilities for my research, in short allowing me to create many new patterns – links between sub-cycles – to keep track of. Aside from those that were developing in the draft poetry, there were multiple, generative ideas occurring in my studio notes as I read feminist theory, creative practice theory, the feminist poetry of others and popular feminist writing.
An example of this is an early note I made as part of an attempt to keep a regular studio journal. I wrote: ‘At the library, browsing the feminist theory titles, I’m always drawn to the pretty ones. Still looking for the best jacket.’ This reflection linked to, and from, the jackets and workwear that were appearing in my poems, specifically workwear as armour. (I was once told by a corporate image consultant that a woman should not leave her neck bare in business dress; a man’s collar and necktie ‘protect’ him in a business setting in the way that
21 armour would in battle, making it harder for the sword or dagger to penetrate.) But there was much more where this came from; this reflective fragment also generated other thoughts (and continues to do so, even now). I think of feminist theorist Angela McRobbie and her claim that late capitalism and third-wave feminism have produced the perfect storm for younger women to use consumerism, instead of Marxism, as the entry point to their feminism, by which she means that narratives of self-care by shopping and salaried ‘empowerment’ displace an essential feminist re-signification (2009). I think of how McRobbie has also written on vintage clothing and fashion. I think of my intention to experiment with quotations in my poems presented in italicised fonts, in order to reference visual artist Barbara Kruger’s 1980s graphics-based art, the iconic work, ‘I Shop Therefore I Am’. I think about how, at one level, I just wanted to purchase the feminist theory books for myself, that they were really nice-looking books and wasn’t that enough sometimes, a nice- looking book ready to sell me its ideas?
My ideas proliferated and my creative work became broader and more difficult to describe.2 I assumed the poetry would lead the way, as that half of the research was moving more quickly. Though this was not to be proven correct in a measurable sense – that the poetry would consistently reveal and dictate the directions I should follow – I nonetheless adopted a practice-led approach of generating poetry drafts whilst testing Smith and Dean’s research model for its capacity to direct the work and provide a framework around what I was continuing to create.
The working methods I was using were being troubled by the feminist self at work; as in the above example, the proliferation of ideas was not deriving from the model I was (nominally) adopting. The thoughts were born of the intersections of feminism with itself; that is, from the wide array of possible feminisms to respond to. Therefore, I looked at the draft annotation version I’d overwritten of Smith and Dean’s model; on one of the nodes I’d written ‘FEMINISM’, so this is what I chose to address first. Out of this arose two thematic categories that came to be the most closely related to the creative artefact in development;
2 I would add here that the revolutions of start-end-start were at times very intricate or tightly focused, for example, if I was testing the writing of one particular poem based on one idea or phrase from a feminist theory I was researching. Therefore, I have taken a primarily macro view of this write-up of the process, as the larger patterns offer a clearer way to observe my process and to view the application of my methodology.
22 they described what I was attempting to show through the poetry, as well as providing further ideas for follow-up. These categories were inheritance and time.
Inheritance
My intention in the early stages of this research was to examine feminist poetry’s relationship to the context in which it was created, and I initially viewed this via the lens of feminist inheritances. Gillis and Munford point to a tendency within feminist narratives for the interrelationships between feminist eras to be cast in a combative model where the ‘leaders’ of each era (for example, Germaine Greer for second-wave feminism and the Pankhursts for first-wave feminism) are compared, thus setting feminist histories in competition with each other (2004, 176). This speaks to my query regarding the impact of when and how (and under what dominant feminist politics) a poem is written on its capacity to communicate to those of different feminist views. I wondered whether certain poetry could be recognisable to a particular generation’s experience or language, or whether there are instances in which feminist poetry may engage with politics that seem to be from an alternative era to the one in which it was written. I had inherited a lot of ideas myself, as a poet and as a feminist (such as ethical behaviours that support other women and the power of language as catalyst for change) that I believed were embedded in my poetry, although my experience of an anti-feminist reading demonstrated to me that these inheritances were not easily translatable, or less obvious than I expected.
I tend to think about historical identity and behaviour in terms of generational categorisation (for example, applying labels such as ‘baby boomer’, ‘millennial’) because this has formed a large part of my more recent office work, working in universities as a careers consultant (primarily with young adults to prepare them for their careers). One of my specialisations is to assist them with navigating the differences of opinions and behaviours that can be found in multi-generation workplaces. These differences are generally clustered around ideas of what is ‘correct’ or ‘appropriate’, for example, taking initiative versus following established work processes, understanding tasks and interpreting power hierarchies within teams. This influenced my thinking; if a poem can be misunderstood in feminist terms, could this be related to different feminist ‘languages’ emanating from the second wave of feminism (poets who had begun writing in the 1970s) and the third wave 23 (poets like myself who wrote through the 1990s and 2000s)? Arielle Greenberg observes a tendency in some North American feminist poetry to display aesthetic choices that read as second-wave feminist or third-wave feminist irrespective of the age and generation of the poet; her case studies are all poems written by younger poets in their twenties. She writes that when this ‘feminist wave’ way of reading is applied to some new contemporary poetry:
My sense is that there is work being written by younger women poets that retains a Second Wave paradigm, even when utilizing postmodern techniques and diction in line with innovative 21st century poetics – and that there is other work being written by other younger women poets that may appear similar on the surface or in its subject matter, or rhetorical strategies, but in which there are the signs of a shift to a Third Wave paradigm. (2013, 39)
Greenberg details this tendency through examples of language use and themes that she loosely categorises as originating from the second or third waves: in the Second-wave samples she identifies the trope of girl as victim or ‘lost’ and needing rescue. Catherine Pierce’s collection The Girls of Peculiar is read by Greenberg as a series of epistles to the poet’s own younger self, attempting to ‘save herself’ from what is to come (which is implied to be an unstoppable tide of misogynist oppression and violence); ‘Look at you/luxuriating in the bathwater of shame’, Greenberg quotes from the ‘Poem to the Girls We Were’ (2013, 16). This focus on uses of the word ‘girl’ performs a coincidental echo with my poem deemed anti-feminist, although to a different purpose. My poem makes use of the term ‘girl’ in a deliberate manner to denote a playful youthfulness, which I intend the figures in the poem to exhibit, as they create imaginary online fan content about BBC historical dramas. In the case of my work, the ‘girls’ are in control of writing themselves into narratives as imaginary protagonists; at that moment they are engaged in recreational writing and fandom. This does not mean ‘girls’ (or young women) are no longer at risk; it means that in that particular poem, a different feminist strategy is being employed – in this case, young women adopting a ‘female gaze’ upon male subjects, actors playing fictionalised versions of Romantic poets in TV drama, which asks the reader to consider the ethics of that gaze.
24 Greenberg is not categorising a poetry that displays ‘second-wave paradigms’ as being somehow outdated, nor the third wave as being ‘more’ contemporary. I take this as a cue to think about the responsibility of the feminist poem, to either/both reinforce or/and challenge expectations of its purpose. It seems to me that a poetry that stays closer to what Greenberg is defining as ‘second-wave’-ish poetry – regardless of when it is written – has less chance of being misunderstood by a reader. In my own case, this may have smoothed the way to my own work being received this way by the older feminist poet. If I had used the word ‘woman’ rather than ‘girl’ it might have ‘passed’ in accordance with a second-wave paradigm, as Greenberg hypothesises, because ‘Second-wave feminism was somewhat of a coherent movement, and organised movements, and likewise, the artistic voices that came out of it can … be seen as having plenty in common’ (2013, 39). For me, however, a key part of my creative ethos is to expand and stretch the feminist poetry category, rather than reassure its status quo, even when that problematises its potential reception.
A specific intention of my research was to amplify this relationship between the time of a poem’s creation and the corresponding feminisms of that era, but also to query whether influences and inheritances work in a less linear or sequential way in feminist poetry across a long period of time. This is due to my own perspective on feminism; I was out of step, out of fashion in my teenage years (the early 1990s) in reading from the second-wave feminist canon without awareness that the third wave of feminism was well underway. I was also (unwittingly) out of step seventeen years later when I returned to writing poetry and created work that was ambiguous in its feminism.
Greenberg is careful to frame her analysis with qualifications; she is not suggesting that all emerging contemporary poetry can be categorised as Second-wave or Third-wave. And when applied to my own situation, my own poetry would be still somewhat ‘out of time’ or out of synch when held up to this measure. But as Greenberg suggests, it may be that there are times when the feminist aesthetics, strategies or subject matter of a poem can be read as originating earlier than the poem itself.
In the case of my own work, this blurred rather than offering a way to understand inheritance and poetry intended as feminist; as noted in the introduction, one of the key influences on my poetry was the poet who later found my poetry anti-feminist.
25 Furthermore, this influence had lasted through time; I had read her work at university, never forgot the impact it had on me and believed this influence to be an important part of my impulse to even write feminist poetry in the first place. However, by the time I wrote the poem that I showed to her, around fifteen years later, I had additional materials to draw upon that likely made their way into the work (no doubt some were conscious and some were not). The poem contained the words ‘girl’ and ‘fangirl’ and was intended as an affectionate reference to young women creating fan fiction and YouTube videos online. These were the terms that were objected to on the basis of ‘girl’ being a derogatory term for an adult woman. I knew that it was possible that I felt comfortable to ‘reintroduce’ a term that had historically been used to diminish and infantilise women specifically because I had not been a direct recipient of this kind of abuse through language. By foregrounding feminist genealogies in my critical thinking, I revealed more questions. What kinds of inheritances does my poetry incorporate? Can these be observed? If my poetry chooses to enact a politics of feminist thought via its aesthetic choices, what does this mean? Does my poetry have a responsibility to show its lineage, the career memoirs, or memories of myself and other women (which I used as a starting point for this research), the feminist theory that promises you an identity, the feminist thinking that critiques a theory of self?
At the time of thinking through Greenberg’s model, I turned back to my poetry in production and began to test out ways I could represent inheritance. I began with borrowing headings and subheadings from the career memoir mentioned in my introduction, Harragan’s 1977 book Games Mother Never Taught You. Its subheadings were arresting and felt like directives from the author to a younger or less experienced operator. In the poem ‘Gold Dust’, I use a subheading from Harragan’s book as part of the poem’s final line, ‘Deportment at the gaming table,’ as it resonates with the poem’s scene of a meeting with unnamed members of a company ‘board’:
My feet, daily my sharp course in order to gain the four-inch advantage.
The flats make me too rapid and the board members must go down to my pace
26 My little test of how I’m doing.
Deportment at the Gaming Table, conspicuous dart.
This poetic strategy attempts to invert a moment in Harragan’s text where she suggests that ‘professional’ women wear flat shoes and clothing that is as similar to men’s as possible. The shoes are important to her instruction that a woman needs to be able to walk quickly when accompanying male colleagues to a business luncheon. My poem seeks to suggest the opposite, that wearing high heels may offer a test to the ‘board members’: will they slow their gait for a woman in heels? Is this a risk or a strategy, to make others slow to your pace and therefore confer something of your power, your importance? In the original context of Harragan’s usage, ‘keeping up’ was important and speed implied that you were as agile or strong as a man. My inversion of this to a slowing of pace represents the notion that in some cases, in the contemporary context, women may be in charge (or at least setting the pace).
Harragan speaks throughout the book of the need to mimic and adopt the strategies of men in order to move through the structures of the 1970s workplace towards a non-traditional (in this case, non-secretarial) career. The book is laid out according to her central thesis that the career-driven structures in an organisation operate like a game emanating from male traditions of sport and military hierarchies. Understanding and cracking these codes are what allows Harragan’s construct of a career woman to move through the game’s stages. By invoking this game, I am asking a reader to consider the very real gender-based oppression that Harragan observed in office workplaces in the 1970s. But in placing this in a sequence of poems, I am also critiquing the perceived ‘end’ of such a journey. Economic independence (and therefore survival that did not depend on a man) has been one part of this narrative. But Harragan writes her ‘career woman’ narrative as an end in itself; this implies that the achievement of seniority and financial reward in this sphere of masculine dominance will provide personal fulfilment. My poetic sequence deliberately eschews this ending; the poems foreground repetition and the circular or mundane elements of office work. There is no pinnacle to reach, because that is the conclusion my own observations reached. These are reflected by McRobbie, who observes that by the early twenty-first
27 century the narrative of reaching fulfilment via ‘career’ is stronger than ever, but has been separated from feminism by the growing dominance of late capitalism:
The abandonment of feminism … is amply rewarded with the promise of freedom and independence, most apparent through wage-earning capacity, which also functions symbolically as a mark of respectability, citizenship and entitlement. The young woman is offered a notional form of equality, concretised in education and employment and through participation in consumer culture and civil society, in place of what a reinvented feminist politics might have to offer. (2011, 7)
In agreement with McRobbie, my poetry asks the reader to consider the precarity of corporate empowerment. This state becomes even more precarious for young women, in particular when considering the ways in which the term ‘feminism’ has (since McRobbie’s publication in 2011) come back into common usage but has not necessarily changed the cultural realities of workplaces.3 That is, usage of the word ‘feminism’ may be more visible, but the terms of feminism have arguably become less clear. Jessica Crispin, in her recent manifesto-style essay collection Why I am Not a Feminist (2017), attributes this to the term losing its power of description, having been diluted through overuse, and for its conflicting (or, she suggests, anti-feminist) purposes. She also speaks to a similar terrain as McRobbie, of feminism ‘changing the rules’ in order to be less challenging to the societal status quo. ‘Feminism was seduced by all the pleasures the patriarchal world has to offer, and overwhelmed by the enormous amount of work it would take to break it apart. So we adapted feminism’s goals in order to live more comfortable lives’ (Crispin 2017, 33).
But what of this slippage into other narratives that can occur for me as a poet, when I consider memories of my teenage-self adopting this challenge – to create myself as a woman with a professional job, in a large city – as a way to escape other options that had no feminist currency for me in that time? For example, many of my high school classmates became homemakers, after short stints in semi-skilled jobs, in our large regional city (and not in the 1950s, as such a description might conjure, but the 1990s). I worried for their futures, from my inherited second-wave feminist understanding of domestic work as a kind
3 In 2017, the Merriam-Webster online dictionary nominated ‘feminism’ its word of the year, due to it being the most searched-for term for that year (Phillips 2017).
28 of sanctioned slavery of women (I had read both Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique and Greer’s 1970 The Female Eunuch).
It is difficult to let go of the office as a valuable space; I acknowledge that my willing participation in office jobs may look like complicity or a less-than-feminist strategy when held up against McRobbie’s and Crispin’s analyses. However badly it has treated me, I have also used it to my purpose (to buy back time to write, as a poet). This is still a complicated position, as expressed by feminist commentator and academic Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist, who does not wish to give up her love of fashion, though she knows that the fashion industry causes herself and others harm: ‘I am a mess of contradictions’ (2014, 320). So many stages and tests were passed in this years-long project of self-making into an office worker, even as I looked sideways at other options (poetry, waiting for knock-off time, for a drink together). And tests can be very compelling, if you pass them.
Moving through stages and tests is also a cornerstone of the epic form in poetry, full of symbolic currency and heroic negotiations (Merchant, 1971). My investigation into this intersection of political and poetic traditions (which I will discuss in Chapter 2) considers the language and texts that make new feminist poetry possible. But before beginning research into poetic form – and specifically the possibilities afforded by writing my creative artefact as an Epic – I attempted to address one more aspect of feminism that emerged from my initial modelling of a practice-based methodology. This was time.
Time: entering the fourth wave, re-using the third wave
In 2019, feminism is closely associated with the amplification of feminist movements via mainstream and social media. Kira Cochrane attributes this to technology enabling platforms where ‘thousands of women can be involved in a single conversation’ (2013, 583). Alongside this, the idea of the feminist wave as an organising principle is still present in much feminist historiography.4 Specifically, this framing suggests that the moment of
4 Contemporary feminist theorists McRobbie, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, and Rosalind Gill all use the metaphor to structure their critical writings, though from different perspectives.
29 feminist activity in which my project has been undertaken is during the rise of a fourth wave.
Is this useful knowledge? Cultural theorist Iris van der Tuin summarises the persistence of the wave metaphor in terms of assumptions which are historically built into feminism:
What is at stake in the question about feminism in the here and now? First, interrogating the existence of ‘a feminist movement’ suggests that feminism is a unified whole that can be neatly delineated in spatial terms [however] feminism today is scattered – just as it’s always been (look at liberal feminism’s emancipationism, radical feminism’s separatism, Black feminism’s intersectionality and so on) … The assumption is that feminism can be pinpointed along a timeline that neatly follows clock-time and the Western Calendar. The second feminist wave is especially picked up in such arguments; this seventies social movement is where and when the entire battle against sexism and homophobia is supposed to have been fought. In other words, the cyclical movement suggested by the ‘wave’
5 metaphor – perpetually curling, breaking and cresting – is discarded.
Van de Tuin demonstrates that the wave metaphor quickly gives way when it is used to describe feminist genealogies as successive because its scope can be difficult to ascertain, that is, whilst we can think of ocean waves rolling in one after another, when does one ‘wave’ end and another begin? Does feminist poetry need to demonstrate its own ‘timestamp’ through its content? Theoretically, this is only important to feminist poetry if it is read as having a responsibility to, or is part of, social reform. There is no way to test whether a poem intended as a political act can be guaranteed to have this effect. Therefore, I sidestep that philosophical puzzle and instead focus on language and form as I approach my poetry by situating its production in the present while also drawing on the past. At the same time, I have taken cues from images or words in the poetry drafts in order to stay true to my decision that this research is practice-led. I have then developed those images and words with structural arrangements suggested by the epic form and Harragan’s ‘advice’, but also by returning to the historical source materials that I can collage directly into the poems.
5 van der Tuin, 2015, p 16
30 An example is within the poem ‘The X Factor That Can Even the Odds’, where the speaking voice prepares for a work meeting (an Epic test, or part of an initiation) by visiting the bathroom on the way, steeling herself. The title is taken from a section in Harragan’s Games Mother Never Taught You in which she unveils her main contention that career success is only unlocked if the ‘game’ is played, is entered into willingly. Later in the book there is also discussion of the ‘executive restroom’ as a publicly seen site of power and status (you either have a key or you don’t). In this poem, the restroom operates as an inner chamber that can only be reached if the protagonist passes the requisite tests; this idea could describe both the idealised career trajectory that Harragan maps for us, as well as structural conventions from Epic quest narratives. From the present day, this no longer holds; I see instead (through years of closer observation) an endless deferral, where women’s careers follow a shape more akin to an endless loop (for example, a woman being assigned to a job role of lower status after parental leave, enacted via an organisation’s manipulation of loopholes, or repeated attempts at promotion being refused; there is a sense of repeatedly ‘starting again’ that seems built into many women’s career progressions). I question what reaching the end, or the pinnacle, means in Harragan’s second-wave construction of career success for women by adding my own poetic intervention presenting professional office work as repetitive and office careers as being loop-shaped.
My poetry practice does not reject these metaphors outright; it claims the position that any present feminism must inherit threads of past feminisms (which is inherently what the metaphor of the wave suggests, that any present ‘wave’ is an iteration of its predecessor). I came of age during feminism’s third wave; as mentioned earlier, I wasn’t aware of the arrival of the third wave but believe its politics continue to inflect my work via cultural allusions, and the strategies and choices I make as a poet.
The moment at which third-wave feminism arrived is contested but is most often located during the early 1990s.6 In their introduction to the essay collection ‘Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism’, Heywood and Drake describe the third wave as containing both choice and contradiction:
6 A moment that is often considered to herald its emergence is the reference to third-wave feminism by Rebecca Walker in her 1992 article for Ms magazine, ‘Becoming the Third Wave’.
31 Because our lives have been shaped by struggles between various feminisms, as well as by cultural backlash against feminism and activism, we argue that contradiction – or what looks like contradiction, if one doesn’t shift one’s viewpoint – marks the desires and strategies of third wave feminists … we define feminism’s third wave as a movement that contains elements of second wave critique of beauty culture, sexual abuse and power structures, while it also acknowledges and makes use of the
7 pleasure, danger, and defining power of those structures.
Choice and contradiction are offered here as ways to understand that the condition of coming after the second wave means that the third wave is always responding to, following on from or rebelling against what came before.
My poetry manuscript, Moxie, takes cues from third-wave feminism as defined by Heywood and Drake; their quote above emphasises tensions between differing or divergent beliefs but frames these as productive, tactical positions. My use of these third-wave ideas as cues translates to a focus on ‘desires and strategies’ as a way of demonstrating agitation; the figures in Moxie are attempting to mobilise the ‘nominal’ power (to use McRobbie’s description) they can access by attaining education and career, but with twentieth-century feminist tools (such as analysing game-play, power dressing, seeking high rank in a managerial hierarchy). In my poetry sequence, this is positioned as a productive – but never failsafe – strategy. The Moxie figure is not given certainty that any specific feminist strategy will be effective, only that she must keep moving towards an idea of a ‘better’ future, and she must keep testing, adapting and critiquing feminist tools as she does so. Theorising a complex subject position in poetry – one that is contradictory or appears inconsistent – writes these complexities of feminist identity and engagement directly into the work. Arising out of the third wave is a question that carries across to the present moment: how to account for feminist histories and notions of genealogy (or era or time) by paying attention to the past but not simply (ineffectively) re-creating it? As can be seen above, language around third-wave feminism can be inclusive of past feminisms and also critical of how this information is arranged, for example, the expression of maternity and matrilineal inheritance (which is increasingly seen as demarcating ‘false’ beginnings and endings to
7 Heywood, Leslie and Jennifer Drake (eds), Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997, iii Introduction.
32 feminist concerns or activities).8 Ideas of matrilineal inheritance suggest that subsequent feminisms are ‘in service to’ the feminisms that preceded them; the feminist wave metaphor also suggests territory claimed earlier by others (which, by default, further suggests mounting a challenge in order to engage with feminism). That is, both set up organising principles that can obfuscate the feminisms they contain. They also add to a notion that feminism is easily traced as a linear phenomenon (where each era or wave can be understood as distinct in features and occurring sequentially); even when under critique this tendency appears hard to avoid, as in Linda Nicholson’s ‘Feminism in Waves: Useful Metaphor or Not?’, where she writes:
Since the early 1990s we have been in a period where the feminism that emerged in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s has both flourished in many areas and stalled in many others and this complexity cannot be adequately captured by the metaphor of a wave. Rather, we need to understand the areas in which it has flourished and the areas in which it has stalled to have a realistic assessment both of where we are as well as to better figure out where we need to go. (2010, 51)
When I look at the puzzle I have created for myself – how to reference the past in a useful way in a poem via expanding the category of feminist poetry – ‘where to go’ suggests a journey, with a destination to be arrived at, just as the figure in Moxie strives to continue her mock epic journey in the hope of clarity: that the ‘reward’ will be clear at the destination.
At an early stage of this research, I also wondered whether ’time’ might unlock meaning for me in how to approach this problem of accounting for, reusing, carrying forward and repurposing attention to past feminisms in my poetry. I did not want to ’throw out the baby with the bathwater’, feminism-wise, but did want to create something new, poetically. Nicholson’s alternative analysis – of areas that have ’flourished’ versus ’stalled’ – may be too binary as a way to understand feminist genealogies and social history, but it does speak to recovering and highlighting feminist concerns that haven’t been recognised or that are still
8 Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters describe the ‘mother–daughter’ metaphor as ‘the most enduring motif within feminist scholarship, and one which has been deployed with regularity in the discourses of Third- wave feminism since Rebecca Walker, the daughter of Alice Walker, announced ‘I am the Third wave’ (2014, 23).
33 unresolved in society. This is also echoed by Crispin (2017) when she entreats readers to be fluent in key historical feminist theorists such as Andrea Dworkin, whom she positions as an embodiment of the contemporary view of radical 1970s feminism as the time when feminism went ’too far’, the cliché, almost cartoonish view of feminism equating with ’man- hating’ women. ’With all the focus now on opinion and personal narratives (over theory, or even fact)’, she writes, ’[feminism] tells young feminists that they do not have to study their
9 own collective and intellectual history’ (Crispin 2017, 40).
Robyn Wiegman describes the question of time in relation to feminism as being ’a [prolonged] meditation on the difficulty of being in time with feminism, by which I mean the difficulty of sustaining a relationship to a political and intellectual project that is itself historically transforming and transformative, and whose transformations are neither produced by, not wholly disengaged from the historical and psychic temporalities of the subjects who act in feminism’s name’ (2004, 163). She states this in the literary context as making both lens and subject into moving targets, that feminism can be used for revisionist histories and projects of recovering texts through a feminist lens almost infinitely and that simultaneous to this, emerging texts on postfeminism destabilise the feminist lens itself (Ferguson 2004, 7). Whilst this circularity and game of ‘catch-up’ is offered by Wiegman as a particular challenge of feminist criticism (that feminism and its subjects/objects morph quickly and constantly), this suggested to me a valid description of both my usage of Smith and Dean’s research method (rhizomatic, with many ‘moving targets’) and Moxie as it was emerging.
Finding ways to work with feminism’s shifting loci and timelines has not yet been fully explored. One writer who has attempted this task, through her critical work and poetry, is Prudence Chamberlain. Chamberlain uses time as a structural device10 in her creative practice research in order to create a repository of recent feminist events, which she argues belong to the early stages of a fourth wave of feminism. She creates poems that directly
9 Crispin is referring young feminists back to 1970s feminist theory as their contemporary; she was born in 1978, which means that she is bringing attention to this feminist thought in 2017 as an act of repurposing. This is in line with my work, which seeks to draw the attention of those who may not be aware of them to ‘existing’ feminist knowledge or feminist texts in a curated way. 10 Chamberlain makes a case for the ‘wave’ metaphor as a useful reference point when building other metaphoric spaces; in the case of her creative practice research, towards a poetics of ‘constellation’.
34 commentate on and record events (such as feminist protest marches in London during 2016 and 2017) and she directs readers to associate them with a specific time by including a date with each poem. By creating these links with actual events, the poet both documents and produces feminist acts.11 She gives feminist protest a materiality by turning an event into a poem. The poem is designed to educate and inform, and to provide a first-person account of contemporary feminist activism as it unfolds.
Poet and academic Cole Swensen suggests we consider ‘documentary poetry’ as being that which ‘unmasks a lie or either intentional or accidental misconception or misrepresentation’; she suggests the poem takes on a ‘burden of proof’ (Swensen 2011, 53). Chamberlain’s poetry seems to imply that a return to activism such as protest marches – most closely associated with second-wave feminism in the 1970s – is required as a feminist intervention now, as in the past. It is not surprising to read a feminist poem about a protest march. An excerpt from Chamberlain’s 2013 poem ‘A Billion Women Rise’ reads:
one billion women violated is an atrocity one billion women dancing is a revolution
-- they’re right –- for all the women grooving around London’s very own panopticon less will be raped when they get home this evening
I’d tango with every last lady in
this city; dressed as a matador or naked
as a bull; kissing the rose between her
teeth & legs – thorns or no – if I thought
11 This invokes the statement ‘Literature is news that stays news’, to quote Ezra Pound in 1934, and later also referenced by to Cole Swensen to illustrate her discussion of the relationship between language and truth.
35 it would make a difference
I would suggest, in line with Greenberg’s (2013) suggestion, that poetic content positioning female figures as victims ensures at least one way of reading a poem as being feminist. We might understand the poem to be feminist because we have encountered other poems that include content about violence against women. Does this make the poem operate as social commentary primarily? Or does this mean it is a poem that contains feminist tropes? Due to her choices of language placed in close proximity – ‘women violated’, ‘atrocity’, ‘rape’ – Chamberlain’s poem may be read as a political device or consciousness-raising effort. However, I argue that her poetics does additional work by expanding the potential for feminist poetry to be understood as having been created in a multidimensional and non- linear manner – that is, my reading of the feminist operations of her work may not accord with her intentions for the work.12 If Chamberlain’s poems did not come with a composition date, could a reader recognise them as recently written feminist poems? And would that matter? Chamberlain’s dating of poems is a recognisable way to announce them as recent; I’m suggesting that her work refers to that past in indirect ways whilst also engaging Gurlesque-style poetics (playful, anarchic, challenging, camp: as seen in the lines where dancing is located alongside rape, where sex is placed in proximity to violence, explicitly, amongst the flirtatious and suggestive) and this may be another way into reading its feminism. Feminist marches, as well as activism more broadly, are features of recent global feminist activity, with the 2017 Women’s March on Washington that followed the inauguration of US President Donald Trump as one of the most prominent of these events. In the first five lines of the above quote, dancing is marching or protesting, and speaks of defiance in the face of violence (both actual and potential future violence). This has a nostalgic tone whereby the act of recovering feminist marches is also the poetic act of referring to the past, nostalgically. The next lines stage a playful, erotic turn towards a kissing frenzy (with costumes) that reads as dream-like and writes the ‘women’ of the poem as valuable and desirable. However, the politics of this poem is not clear-cut; does the
12 Chamberlain’s research was undertaken via creative practice PhD also. This potential gap between what is intended by Chamberlain’s poetry and what is explicated in its accompanying exegesis is a risk that my research also bears. See the results section for further discussion of how my poetry may not always write ‘vintage feminism’ as planned.
36 ‘dancing’ mean that ‘less will be raped’ because these women have protection (safety in numbers while they remain dancing) or because they are dancing on behalf of other women (somehow creating safety in far-flung suburban homes by virtue of raising awareness)? And what of the shapeshifting suggested by ‘matador’ and ‘bull’, which are coded as male and violent imagery: are these references to gender performance, and if so who is speaking? Regardless of the speaker’s relationship to the women, ambiguity is amplified in those following lines: ‘kissing the rose between her/teeth and legs/thorns or no’. This can be read as affirming traditional feminine imagery – roses, female genitalia as a rose – or positioning the rose between ‘her teeth’ to add layers to the matador motif (and reinforcing the suggestion of a masculine, violent presence). ‘Thorns or no’ appears to be flirtatious, but could also be read as obstacles, an invocation of women’s strength, or an allusion to the ‘vagina dentata’ of folklore (and referenced in Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, 1991).
Chamberlain writes a poetics of her work that is constructed from a ‘constellation’ of feminisms. She describes her research practice this way:
The intersections of poetry, academia and activism create a series of confluences and conflicts that are both embodied and explored in my writing. Through immersing myself in current feminist culture, including attending marches, listening to discussions, going to conferences and following online communities, that record and reflect feminist politics … [a] multiplicity of source materials, differences within feminism itself and a range of poetic influences have created a ‘constellation’. In this way my practice rejects a chronology of political inheritance, and resists a linear understanding of avant-garde, feminist poetic precedents.
This idea of ‘constellation as technique’ offers some evidence that for feminist poets, there may exist a need to write poetry that is not bound to traditional understandings of feminist history. This is another way of saying that new feminist poetry does not need to resemble existing feminist poetry in order to explicate feminist concerns. Tradition can inadvertently create limitations when used as a beginning point for creating new feminist poetry. Chamberlain’s research is contemporaneous with my own and also engages with my question of how working beyond metaphors such as feminist waves or inheritances from our feminist ‘mothers’ (or feminist others of any non-matrilineal category) could help us to
37 realise new ways to make feminist poetry. By ‘rejecting a chronology of political inheritance’, Chamberlain attends to the inheritances, but rejects this as a chronological event; she sees immersion in feminist histories, as well as the present, as more productive poetically. Similar to my poetic intentions, she seeks a different way to managing the volume of feminist history that surrounds her, by placing parts of it in relation (in constellation) to other parts.
When my poetry refers to the ongoing project of feminism, it refers to specific aspects of the third wave: inclusiveness and access, broadening of definitions and intersectionality, certainly.13 But, significantly, the third wave seeks to question feminist tropes themselves. Whilst I eventually chose to invoke a metaphor myself to describe my work (noted later as ‘vintage feminism’), I also continue that work of interrogating metaphor as a constructed device. Judith Butler’s theories of gender and performativity provide a view of gender as a construct, a state of being that is only available via repetition (Butler 1988). Butler posits that what allows the performed act of gender to take place is the repetition of acts, within social and cultural contexts. The repetition is what normalises, that is, the performing of a particular set of acts prescribed by and recognisable to society. Society seeks to reinforce those considered to be normative; normativity is also created by reiterated exposure over time. One assumes the identity of a woman through the reiteration of the particular acts that ‘add up to’ woman (ibid). I wonder whether repetition could add up to ‘feminist’ and whether I am also writing fourth-wave feminist poetry, because I’m writing it now, when the fourth wave is gaining visibility and momentum. I wonder again about how to account for the past within the poetry I am creating.
Feminism and time are inextricably linked for me in this project; this reflects how I perceive my own inheritances. I have inherited a way of comprehending feminism that encompasses thinking across times that preceded me, because many accounts of other women’s experiences preceded my own. Every time I have received feminist information or advice from another woman, or encountered a feminist text, I have mentally stored this information. The information I store away isn’t necessarily from philosophy or theory, but everyday advice for daily practice. These materials accumulate in my thoughts and combine
13 It may be that the emerging fourth wave displays these qualities. I am choosing to make use of third-wave politics as it has been documented more extensively.
38 with the present time. These feminist materials – others’ memories, advice, written texts – are received knowledge that I can consider, critique and make use of poetically from the perspective of the present. For example, I can sift for what is still relevant, or a yet-to-be- resolved feminist issue, or ask what past feminist knowledge can tell us. I have also inherited formal poetic precedents; one of these is the Epic form and its relationship to feminist poetics.
39 Chapter 2 – Making Space: epics, offices
Testing out epic
One thing I had never done in my poetry prior to the PhD was to engage pre-modernist poetic conventions in a deliberate way. For example, I had never sat down to write a sonnet or looked up what a pantoum was, then set about writing a poem using that structure. Having absorbed a broadly free verse style, I had used imagery and favourite words to guide and make a poem, and interspersed these with plenty of pronouns (mainly ‘I’ and ‘you’). I preferred to write from a left-aligned margin and allow the lines to break where it looked visually interesting to me or where a breath might occur if you were reading the poem aloud, creating enjambments down the length of the poem. Then I would come back to that poem sometime later to trim, rearrange and edit words to enhance the overall ‘idea’ of the poem. I was prioritising the use of imagery and language, which, to me, seemed to carry more impact than paying close attention to the structure of poems or developing a range of techniques. Poetry was a single-unit production for me – in other words, I would write one poem at a time, which I would tinker with until I considered it finished. Then I would begin another poem. A body of work could be made from these single units, by placing them in proximity and calling them a collection of poems. Theme, rather than form or narrative, was the organising principle.
Brian McHale addresses the question of how narrative and poetry work together by focusing on the question of how narrative and lyric work together. He quotes James Phelan’s explorations of this via defining narrative and poetry in terms of their intersections:
Lyricality he defines as ‘somebody telling somebody … on some occasion for some purpose that something is’ … or alternatively as ‘somebody telling something … on some occasion for some purpose what he or she thought about something’. (McHale 2009, 12 with quotes from Phelan)
Narrativity, in this context, is ‘that something happened’. My inclination, even at this early stage of the research, was to keep the work in the state of ‘what is’ because of my intention
40 to denote feminism as an ongoing, live and vital strand of politics. I wanted to find a way to collapse the way past and present could be understood inside a poem, in order to demonstrate that a moment of everyday sexism, such as those described in Harragan’s text by way of warning,14 might occur in the present, or the near future. I wanted to ensure that Moxie would not become the telling of ‘something that happened’ only; I was aiming for a way to ‘tell something’ and ‘tell what I thought about something’ without relying on relaying events from life (my life or the lives of others). So, in other words, poetry that would continue to arouse considerations of feminist living and the negotiations with this that must take place.
‘What will keep people reading on, through the poems?’ asked one of my supervisors, referring to the growing manuscript of poems I was constructing. ‘Perhaps it’s a kind of feminist epic or mock epic,’ suggested my other supervisor, drawing attention to the way there appeared to be a protagonist striving or pushing against or yearning for something unnamed. Both were responding to the work growing in volume but maintaining a kind of uniformity; I was aware of this also, the tendency for many of the poems to look and sound similar. The use of the pronoun ‘I’ was everywhere, although I had been paying specific attention to this while reading about the history of the Lyric ‘I’ and also feeling sure that this ‘I’ voice could not be understood as ‘the poet, Melinda Bufton, writing about her work in offices’. I decided to keep this part of the research in a holding position, to leave ‘I’ where it was in the draft poetry, and stuck a sticky note scrawled with the phrase ‘decentred self – Annie Finch’ on the wall above my desk; I would temporarily decentre myself (my own lived experiences and my own feminist politics, which I will discuss in Chapter 3) in order to shift my attention to another research phase.
I also kept a bookmark in McCorkle’s analysis of Rich’s negotiation with her own poetic subjectivity in her collection Diving into the Wreck (1973). He writes that ‘The “I” is a disembodied marker and does not establish an identity or ethos. The narrating “I”, instead, forms a mask at once allegorising the condition of the individual in the quest for knowledge
14 In the present day, these warnings are also regularly offered in the context of office work. A recent article in the popular media quotes the Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins’s description of common ‘types’ of everyday sexism at work, including ‘unmerited gender labelling’ and ‘de-valuing women’s views or voice’. This term is also known from the Everyday Sexism Project, an activist website for people to record and submit descriptions of sexist events they have been victim to, forming a user-generated archive.
41 and the history of the feminist project’ (1989, 109). Rich herself writes in the title poem of this collection:
I came to explore the wreck
The words are purposes
The words are maps
I came to see the damage that was done
And the treasures that prevail.
(McCorkle 1989, 109, quoting Rich)
McCorkle’s analysis suggests a way to understand the poem as a comment on Rich’s political ‘I’ rather than her personal ‘I’. She is aware that as a female speaking subject, she is embarking on a mapping exercise, amongst the ‘wreck’ of patriarchal language and its exclusionary effects. The ‘damage done’ and the ‘treasures’ in the above lines could also refer to knowledge that women poets held regarding their own work and capabilities, but that required sorting out of the patriarchal system, towards and into the light of public recognition of their work. This deployment of ‘I’ may be a tactical avoidance of adopting a male-derived ‘authoritative “I”’, as Jeremy M. Downes describes the use of ‘I’ within women’s epic poetry of the twentieth century: ‘by avoiding it, women have allowed [their poetry to present] a more precise delineation of the shifting processes at work in the formation of the self’ (2010, 24). Taken literally, the imagery also reminded me to maintain faith that following the poetry – following a practice-led approach – would result in something insightful. Rich has employed a scuba mask to enter the space of this poetic process, the act of writing the poem and referring to the poetic politics she navigates in doing so; my ‘I’ has donned a corporate skirt suit. The same poem’s opening lines read:
First having read the book of myths
42 And having loaded the camera
And checked the edge of the knife blade
I put on
The body armour of black rubber
The absurd flippers
The grave and awkward mask.
Either way, entering the poetic space as one’s self, as I explored in Chapter 1, can be fraught when dealing in the materials of poetry and feminism at once; there is the assumption that the ‘I’ as author in a poem equates the politics of the poem with the author. The need for metaphoric protective clothing suggests this, that it is inherently dangerous to go into the realm beyond the expected boundaries of poetic practice.; it invites criticism or potential silencing. McCorkle frames the subjective position the poem takes as pragmatic, as a temporary state to get the work done: ‘suspension [of self as part of a feminist community] does not deny connection but affirms the identity of self through the empirical process of observation and critical reflection’ (1989, 109).
I prepared to ‘read the book of myths’, as Rich writes in the above poem, or at least research some genealogies of feminist epic form. As I did, I thought on the resonance with myth in Harragan; in good faith, she has created a blueprint for women’s equality in the office workplace. In doing so, she inadvertently contributes to the myth of a fully resolved endpoint, which is the eradication of discrimination against women via the efforts of women themselves. This endpoint is the ‘fully vested citizenship to the American economy’ that she imagines for her daughter Kathleen’s future, inscribed in the book’s personal dedication. This is tenuous at best, as we know now that this pipedream of equality in the workplace was far from realised by the 1980s, the time at which Kathleen was slated to enter the corporate world. It continues to be unrealised.
43 The idea of a ‘female epic’ appealed for its frameworks that resembled the way that the career journey had been sold to me through film and media images; I had been raised on the promise and excitement of a white collar job. Later in my life, when I became a careers consultant, I encountered further metaphors about careers. Two of the descriptors for contemporary career theories are ‘constructivist’ and ‘protean’, meaning that the individual is the agent of the career’s construction (the literal steps, such as getting a job) and construction of meaning. Clients are encouraged to write their own ‘career narrative’ in order to reframe the past and write their way into their ideal future. This is in stark contrast to a cornerstone career theory of the twentieth century called ‘lifespan theory’ (mapping a career as five consecutive stages, with white collar men in mind: growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, decline) (Inkson, Dries and Arnold 2014). Informal information, such as advice offered by another woman, as well as scholarly theories of career, contained the same message of a trajectory that went upward, that there was a set of transformative, challenging steps to be followed in order to achieve a ‘good’ career, and that this would result in a final and visible outcome as its reward. I saw ‘epic’ as a way to potentially and simultaneously address two aspects of my research; first, that it might provide a good fit as a form to follow or borrow from (and therefore deliberately, consciously moving into an experiment with poetic form) and second, that the epic conventions might do useful work towards demonstrating the received ideas of career-building that had been part of my office narrative for years, and that I was now critiquing as flawed; that they might demonstrate
15 the upward arc of moving towards the mythical and ubiquitous idea of the glass ceiling, the story of this progression.
The Cambridge Introduction to Poetic Form defines epic form as displaying ‘a turbulent sense of struggle and outcome, of murky doubt and attempted prophetic clarity;’ further, ‘[epic] form provides a means through which massive countervailing forces can find expression. Central to its generic identity is the sense of task’ (Hurley and O’Neill 2012). The same struggle can be found in the narrative of women’s work as a conduit to feminist liberation and the reality of this ‘epic’ instead being circuitous, fragmented and layered with
15 The term ‘glass ceiling’ first appeared in published form in the title of a Wall Street Journal article in March 1986, ‘The Glass Ceiling: Why Women Can’t Seem to Break the Invisible Barrier that Blocks Them from the Top Jobs’ (Hymowitz and Schellhardt). The article described opaque promotion processes that allowed for discriminatory practices against women to flourish in organisations.
44 empty or drained promise. A further layer to this struggle is corporate culture adopting select elements of gender equality as policy, and in service of itself, as ‘the institutionalisation of particular forms of feminism, most notably liberal feminism, which some feminists argue has become the dominant approach to gender oppression and is thriving’, as ‘feminism is now walking the halls of corporate and state power’ (Budgeon 2018, 1139). This is epic where no one can be trusted, no matter how encouraging the language or how sleek the setting.
The ‘female’ epic poem is traced as its own category of epic poem by Downes in The Female Homer: An Exploration of Women’s Epic Poetry (2010). Downes says that female epic poetry is not a tradition as much as a set of disparate texts networked via affinity (borrowing from Donna Harraway’s (1985) use of the term, meaning that ‘tradition’ in the context of the epic suggests masculine, hierarchical form that ‘focus[es] on the concerns of elite minorities [of] communities’ (Downes 2010, 30). He defines affinity in this context as being an innovative and generative alternative to tradition, that in place of ‘tradition’ the term ‘affinity’ more accurately describes the category of women’s epic, as ‘it suggests relationships rooted not in blood or biology, but in desire or choice’ (Downes 2010, 23). Affinity refers to the way that female epics can be understood in relation to each other, sharing features or having like intentions embedded or read into them. In Downes’ female epic, epic traditions such as length of poem, war themes, elitism and legends are added onto (and at times supplanted by) features that include mixing of genres, women as speaking subjects, feminist discourse and ‘nonlinear conceptions of time’ (32).
Downes’ ‘female epic’ and affinity
Affinity provides another way to understand a poetics of contemporary feminist poetry that does not rely upon purely historical feminist identification; feminist poetic affinities do not rely upon the poetry being written as part of a defined community of practice, or in the same year (or decade, or century). Neither do works operating in ‘affinity’ necessarily draw from the same historical precedents as if contributing to a linear progression of feminist politics. Downes’ emphasis that the relationships between poetic texts, and between poets alongside or at the same moment be understood as having originated in ‘desire or choice’
45 puts emphasis back on the authorial process or method, and not on the analytical or hermeneutic experience. Downes offers this in place of the idea of a ‘tradition’ belonging to our understanding of form, where this may be read as a masculine construct of poets writing in response to one another directly, along a linear progression of relationship. It emphasises the poet, instead of the critic, reading public or literary commentator. The most feminist thing about a poem may be the intentions that drive or shape the work.
Affinity, as suggested by Downes, provides a way to consider both the intentions of a poet – how they makes decisions and place their work in a community of practice, in a deliberate and defined way that forms part of the practice itself – and also how works of different poets interact with each other. For instance, I have placed my own work of Moxie in affinity with Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘Diving into the Wreck’, though we are not contemporaries, not equal in status, writing in a different time (almost fifty years apart), and Rich is responding to a different feminist context. Affinity here lies in the fact that both pieces of work arise from a similar concern regarding subjective voice in a poem, and the nexus of feminism and poetry in operation together. Both examples of poetry are attempting to explore the conditions of these concerns; Rich from a position just prior to a proliferation of feminist poetry (that gathered momentum through the 1970s) and my work seeking to find new ways to demonstrate feminist material, from a plethora of historical and contemporary examples.
Affinity felt important, as a notion that provided an entry point to not only female epic poetry but feminist poetry. However, this was not progressing my tacit attempts to create movement or shape in the poems as a sequence. I attempted two analyses of the poems to find another way of assessing their epic potential. The first was to name the action or idea I was looking to express in each individual poem, across the sequence. This resulted in a collection of short sentences such as, ‘When you have to meet with someone who needs something from you and you meet in case you (later) need something from them’ and ‘Ordering office equipment using complex internal forms’. This set of descriptors (affectionately referred to as ‘stubs’ by my supervisors) somehow reduced my ability to see what was in the work; they were too literal and obfuscated linked information between poems, or ideas that were intended to operate in multiple ways, that I knew I had worked into the poems. Although these descriptors could have been retained and operated with
46 some degree of irony or ambiguity, they felt too stark and descriptive. The second technique was to draw up an Excel spreadsheet that listed ‘contents’ of the poems as I found them (themes, ideas, objects) and then tallied up how many times that particular aspect appeared across the poems in total (see Figure 1). I anticipated that this method would demonstrate, via naming content thematically, what direction I could take text, that perhaps by adding some new ‘themes’ into the work this could suggest a form for the whole poetic sequence. At the very least I speculated that I would be able to ‘read’ or see the poems differently, devoid of full lines of text, somehow instead reduced to more granular components. The contents included descriptors such as ‘money’, ‘suit jackets’, ‘report-writing’ and ‘projects’. Not surprisingly, this was as reductive as the first technique, in the same way. That is, both techniques dealt with potential material for the poems in a manner that was too direct; draft poetry felt like prose with line breaks, in service of the themes that I was deliberately shoe-horning into them.
These analytical approaches did not seem to shift the form of the (subsequent) new poems as they were emerging. If the approach to include themes or content more deliberately wasn’t working because this caused a ‘prose-ification’ of the poems (they began to lose their rhythm, and began to ‘tell’ rather than ‘show’ their preoccupations), I wondered if I were looking for gravitas, leveraging the epic as a short-cut to giving the poetry a description that contained historical resonances, that could be easily recognised in a scholarly (creative practice research/literary/poetics) context. I was combining elements of two patriarchal structures to make my work; one was epic, which originated as a male storytelling mode of male journeys, and the other was ‘office’, traditionally patriarchal. Within these, I was placing ‘woman’ at the centre. I was not entirely sure of my methods, and recognise my dilemma in poet Alicia Ostriker’s opening lines to the chapter ‘I Made My Psyche from My Need’ in her essay collection Writing Like a Woman (1983):
When a woman rewrites an ancient myth it is not because she yearns for a heroic past (where men were men, etc.) She is not Ezra Pound, and she probably knows that she is happier in the twentieth century than she would have been between the ages of Homer and Pericles, locked in the gynaecium ... In all likelihood she has two motives in mind, [one is to] be taken seriously as a writer. It happens that to deal with ancient myth is to assume intellectual authority [and the] other is that she
47 wants to get at something very deep in herself … deriving from a flash of connection. That story, that figure, that pattern of action (132–133).
To gain a firmer foothold on the concept of female, or feminist, epic I looked to another case study of a female epic poem in the hope that they might highlight elements of epic already present in my developing manuscript, or else inform the next stage of the poetry creation. In doing so, I realised that I was very interested in getting at ‘something deep’ via a flash of connection to these epic archetypes, as Ostriker speculates.
Case study – Debbie: An Epic
She has Smoothed Her Rants No End
This is the light Debbie steps into. Her toffee flanks roll with greatness and sustenance in their sockets and her hearty hands bear the bruised sea. Mighty amazing beauty moves her and all the whirling majorettes are her marvellous squadron: their bare throats spill analysis.† Dactylic eastern desks pom-pom from puddles of yellow mud. For rhetors bathed in scent of chrome and split hide her senses coin dictions:
48
If Luck’s nameless girls love me
I’m happy. My city minting history and so on
…
I will do lovely things in taxis and count myself among the lucky, I will comb the pale hair of boys with muttering hands wanting only the satiate fact of that silk, I will discuss perfidy with scholars as if spurning kisses, I will sip the marble marrow of empire.
I want sugar but I shall never wear shame and if you call that sophistry
Then what is Love
† Toast!
Whence! giddy swish so skin-like as a dress trailing theft as a spill
49
Riddled, cloaks this pink text: for her we could be female
(who love
With tripled
Pronouns know
Pomposities
In gender
(Debt))
We toast her armies from our beds.
Lisa Robertson (1997, 110)
In Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic the speaker declaims; the first-person voice speaks in the form of rhetorical speech-giving and makes use of conventional epic effects such as periphrasis, or talking around the poem’s content, for example, ‘giddy swish so skin-line as a dress’ (which could have been written as ‘giddily swishing dress’, for example). The poem makes sly gestures towards epic conventions by including words such as ‘rhetor’ and ‘dactylic’, referring to the role of dactylic hexameter in the ‘Homeric epic’ form, significant
50 for rhetoric’s intentions to persuade, and dactylic form’s classical origins. In addition, the opening stanza of this poem describes Debbie with hyperbolic adjectives such as ‘greatness’, ‘sustenance’, ‘mighty amazing beauty’. Debbie/the speaker is located as the hero; she is both described by, and uses, language and effects that create a sense of the epic. The title also has an alternative meaning of Debbie as an Epic herself; in this usage, Debbie embodies the epic, suggesting a challenge to the reader that her subjectivity itself is something to be reckoned with. This subjectivity is constituted by action and movement, to demonstrate the journey as the outcome, the epic as a never-resolving affective space.
However, in the same stanza she is surrounded by ‘all the whirling majorettes’, ‘her marvellous squadron’. Majorettes and their whirling movement refer to a particularly modern US tradition of women marching in decorative formation, in military alignment that reminds us of the Homerian traditions of epic form as stories of war. The next line, ‘their bare throats spill analysis’, offers a suggestion that the majorettes may not be speaking in this poem but are not a silent presence. They are encoded with histories and if the date of publication – 1997 – is chronologically located in the emerging years of the third wave of feminism, the majorettes are not a neutral presence. They stand with Debbie as she denounces elders who have attempted subjugation or other unnamed violences: ‘I speak to judge crimes of filiation/as hard sky spent cancelled horizon/my own mouth barking/perhaps I am/unmentionable’, a foreshadowing of #metoo (uncannily using the term ‘cancelled’, which has emerged as a term for the mass boycott of public figures who have violated accepted social structures). There is tension between Robertson’s choice of image and the moment of her poem’s composition. A majorette uniform may signify ironic use of codified feminine costume, it may indicate a kind of solidarity between the women and their leader, Debbie (a 1990s ‘girl squad’, perhaps echoing a Spice Girls–like concept of ‘girl power’) or it may be a form of reclaiming the feminine out of the wake of second-wave feminism’s necessary distrust and eschewing of the ‘girlish’. All of these negotiations with the epic form demonstrate Robertson’s usage of and borrowing from it, rather than adhering to traditions. Robertson troubles our understanding of ‘feminist’ representation by her lingering on the pleasures of artifice and dress, which appear to stand in for or represent power in and of themselves. The uniforms may even operate as a ruse, their association
51 with decorative and benign performance masking the fierce subjectivities within (further referencing classical mythology via a Trojan horse trope).
In the above sequence from Debbie: An Epic there is an absence of ground. In a literal sense, Debbie is ungrounded; in the opening phrase she ‘steps into light’, she appears to ‘hold the sea’ as a kind of female Atlas figure. In later lines she moves into a taxi, then later still the majorette squadron (the ‘we’ chorus of the poem) toasts Debbie ‘from our beds’ in honour of their hero’s aura. In terms of locations, there is a perpetual mixing of the contemporary and the classical, but even these are provided sparely. Whilst Debbie and her squad rarely seem to touch the ground, the poem’s connective material is mainly constructed by description. This is where the action is: the interplay between fragmented descriptions of decorative effects (such as clothing) and what reads like subconscious thought processes (from both the collective voice of those observing Debbie and the first-person voice that we understand to be Debbie). The weightlessness or lightness of movement of Debbie and her chorus across the pages is created by use of a flippant tone and lines that signal a self- reflexive engagement with form by addressing the reader directly on this matter: ‘I’d like to think of narrative as a folly – a classically styled folly – whose conspicuous inutility might decorate and articulate the idea of the present. Much in the way that the library – at some trouble to justify profligacy – is a folly’ (Robertson 1997, lines 61–65). The folly is also Debbie and the chorus; they challenge us to locate them as ‘characters’ when they have undone the trail of narrative and collapsed epic, historical versions of epic (as well as whole libraries) into a flattened, description-filled realm. This challenge to the reader could be understood as another example of eliding the assumption of female figures in a poem being understood as ‘real’ or equating to the author; ‘Debbie’ does not equal ‘Lisa Robertson’, in the same way that Moxie’s ‘I’ does not equal me.
As the poem shifts across places and voices, Robertson challenges a clear epic narrative.16 As readers, we often cannot be sure where we have moved to or from, which unhinges any reliance we might have had on understanding the purpose or relational effect of settings. This could be read as a deliberate blurring of strata, in the sense that a hierarchy of
16 The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012) denotes a key convention of epic form as the use of contrast between settings such as the underworld, ‘earthly paradise’ and heavens that the hero will move between in order to propel the narrative.
52 underground, ground and ‘heavenly’ suggests a clarity of quest, which Downes has described in female epic as often rejecting in place of other settings, such as domestic dwellings (2009, 32). In Moxie I have chosen to work from a type of ‘ungrounded’ place also, which is a merged space of an imaginary office and a discursive engagement with feminist texts of many kinds. By ‘ungrounded’ I mean that I wish for the ‘I’ voice to float through the poem, rather than being anchored in actions interacting with the spaces in a fixed way; ungrounded here means the antithesis of what might be found in a literal description of an office and its inhabitants such as ‘she walked across the room’, ‘they sat at desks’, ‘the open-plan office was lined with workstations’. In addition, towards the end of the research I chose to engage multiple voices rather than a singular perspective, which will be discussed further below in terms of my understanding of collage, my use of intertextuality and citation, then finally my own use of a hybrid technique (vintage feminism; see Chapter 3).
However, it also speaks to the result of my attempting to engage form in a deliberate way and to the fact that my deliberate consideration of a set of poetic conventions did not guarantee a particular outcome; though I have described here the manner in which I interacted with feminist epic traces, ‘feminist epic’ did not at this point of the research seem to be the best descriptor for my poetry (or perhaps did not seem to be its primary description). Eavan Boland observes this interplay between form and the poetry itself as a generative subversion that women poets may undertake when writing through, or in response to, male poetic traditions. To Boland, this relates specifically to what does not make it into the final version of the work:
The elements of form – those pressure changes in the immediate environment of the poem – are often not what goes into the finished piece at all. Rather they are the ghosts at the edges of the piece – the excluded, the barred, the banished particles of an experience whose relation with what is included is crucial to the authority of the completed poem. (Boland 1997, 187)
Boland is describing this in the context of a personal-experience-made-poem (responding to her young daughter’s serious illness, in which the ‘hospital corridor’ and ‘October dusk’ did not feature but were transmuted into a dream journey to the underworld, featuring a preface from Virgil’s The Aeneid). For my work, I felt that what didn’t make it into the poetry
53 were my own direct experiences also, the years of memories of working in an office. They were a starting point, as with Boland. In Boland’s case, she is speaking of trauma and this suggests her need to find indirect language and imagery to express this poetically (in order to protect herself or to find a way out of the original trauma). My work was not based upon traumatic experiences, but I was also looking to shift what I could say (for example, the story of a woman’s career in offices or accounts of misogyny in office workplaces) into different language. In my case this meant writing in the present tense, blurring the subjective voice and, as Boland describes, leaving behind or leaving as ‘ghostly’ particles the traces of the poetry’s formal setting. This description is a useful comparison for describing this stage of the research, in two ways. It echoes the Smith and Dean model of iterative cycles of enquiry in that deciding when to leave or discard parts of the research (or parts of the artefact being created) was as important as following other parts further, towards potential outcomes. And secondly, my intention to go beyond my own story was a key part of the feminist ethics this research was seeking to articulate.
The soft office
Practice-led research can mean that patterns or kinships emerge between what I have created and what is discovered in others’ work, and can result in a kind of retrofitting of my compositions through methods of analytical evaluation. I was seeking, for example, to account for the way I continued to resist imagery that situated the poems in actual buildings, or the action in more detailed ‘actual’ office work. To put this another way, I had imagined that adopting or making use of epic conventions (such as visits to the underworld or overlaying a hero’s journey structure upon the poems to) might give me clarity. This was a retrofit in that I would have bent the existing poems to fit this form or structure (by editing them) and then written new poems in accordance with these new rules. As mentioned above, I was interested in what my poetry might have in common with feminist epics, but I wasn’t convinced that my work was becoming a feminist epic. I analysed the poems individually for narrative action, looking for ways to convert the poems into a story, keeping in mind my supervisor’s question about what would keep a reader reading; what would compel the reader to stay with the poems? My desire to create an ‘active’ (and
54 activating) poetic affect sits at the centre of what feminism can be as I understand it. Neither feminism nor poetry sit still for very long, nor should they; both are updated by new developments in their spheres, and both seek to find ways to respond to or convey such change. I decided to shift my thinking instead away from the epic; I moved to thinking about the poems as a different kind of operation to the epic: rather than the site of a battle (the ‘epic’ career journey) I considered the site to be that of work – in this case, the office. I wanted to test the capacity for ‘office’ to deploy similar strategies of epic, in terms of demonstrating movement; shifting towards or away from goals. In the case of my work, often indeterminate goals or strategies without a clear end point (for example, the restructure of a work department with hazy intentions attached).
When searching for critical writings regarding Debbie: An Epic and Robertson’s representations of space and place, I found another of Robertson’s works proved to offer a better explanation for the virtual or ungrounded or spatially experimental site of Moxie’s epic. This is Robertson’s ‘Office for Soft Architecture’, ‘a fictional architectural office interested only in studies and proposals rather than built structures, [which] investigates sites (like shacks, scaffolds, fabrics, furnishings, the weather) that make the impermanence of structures visible’ (Fitzpatrick and Rudy 2013, 155). Ryan Fitzpatrick and Susan Rudy note that Robertson’s poetics of physical space is ‘not reducible to singular, official narratives but is the result of a complex and contradictory accretion of multiple historical trajectories’ (2013, 174). This can be seen also in Debbie: An Epic, where space is conveyed by references to spaces tumbled together in proximity within a few lines, such as in the sequence from lines 305–325 where ‘bridges’ and ‘rivers’ are both repeated several times punctuated by ‘bodies’, ‘landscape’, ‘forest’, ‘earth’ and ‘trees’. Additionally, the forest is given ‘archival plenitude and entanglement’ and the earth is deemed ‘clerical’. Soft architecture, for Robertson, is an impossible, multiple space, so can never be realised as physical. These are constructions, Robertson is telling us, where the words are being employed as part of a set (as in a play).
Although I came across Robertson’s ‘Office’ during the creation of Moxie (as mentioned, many poems were already written at this stage), it accords with my poetry’s representation of the ‘office’, that is, the imagined setting of the poems is not one, literal office but a hypothetical space made up of offices I’ve seen or worked in and visual images from
55 photographs, art and film. This is an idea of an office, rather than a physical representation, and furthermore is defined by missing pieces or promises of physically reliable structures, just as Robertson’s ‘office’ deals in hypothetical building proposals in lieu of actual buildings, which she conceives as a series of poem/essays in response to living in Vancouver during a period of urban renewal, representing the city in flux (Fitzpatrick and Rudy 2013). I wanted to represent the office as an idea (rather than a description of something physical) because I am deconstructing all the offices in my memory as I write, to ensure I am not simply recreating autobiographical material; the poetry is evoking ‘offices’ (multiple, overlaid offices) rather than providing a report of my memories. Additionally, this is an attempt to leave space for the reader to imagine what ‘office’ means for them, in accordance with their own ideas. This is a deliberate enacting of, or reference to, third-wave feminist poetics as a site of choice and a deliberate move away from feminist essentialism. I negotiate this concept in the poem ‘The X Factor That Can Even The Odds’ by attempting to demonstrate the poem seeking other spaces instead of floors and walls:
They are beguiling times when you weave enough non-ferrous materials amongst the axioms and the cosmos. What of the cosmos?
The org chart is an Atlantic map. It is melting Antarctica ice masses breaking, bergs beneath the surface. The melt metaphor designs our feelings. Decisions float in and out of my consciousness as I tamp them down with viognier and your thousand-yard stare.
By the end of this section, the speaking voice is elsewhere, namely, at home or at a bar (somewhere wine is being drunk). This sequence reflects the idea that the most solid thing present for the speaker is their perpetual thinking about work. Not the work itself and not the physical space; these are ephemeral. The melting-ice metaphor attempts to represent
56 that those aspects of office work which were once considered solid – the building in which this work was performed, the rooms in which this took place and the furniture that was placed there – are ideological constructs. The field of career research spawned the chaos theory of careers, as a response to a work world that the authors construct as fundamentally and perpetually shifting: ‘[the theory] construes both individuals and the constructs in which they develop their careers in terms of complex dynamical systems [which] influence stability both internally and in relation to each other’ (Pryor and Bright 2011, 5). One of the realms of these ‘systems’ is culture; Pryor and Bright use this term loosely to mean either a culture such as that within an organisation or shifts and difference within society. The onus, in this theory, is upon the individual to retain rationality in the face of the ‘chaos’ (the general lack of stability in work, via trends such as casualisation and the ‘gig economy’) which the authors posit is a fact of the contemporary working world. In my own professional work, where I use this theory with clients (tertiary students seeking career advice) as a metaphor to describe contemporary career trajectories, it is doubly flawed as a strategy; the ‘rational’ agency that the theorists insist upon is difficult to translate and as with most career theory, it contains ghosts of the white middle class man as its subject.
The theory makes no reference to gender and its operation within this normalised ‘chaotic’ career. Making this connection myself in poetry means making explicit the tenuous nature of work; these speculative career theories such as Pryor and Bright’s and my own construct of ‘office’ that I created from childhood onwards. This construct held ideas that an office provided promise, of financial security, of respect, that it was clean (cleaner by far than working class jobs) and that it occurred in a solid building, was reassuringly permanent. As I write in the poem ‘Mass Opportunity’:
I feel crunching rubble underfoot where the others feel smooth.
Or, another way to put this is that surfaces, however well-presented, may not contain what they promise beneath.
57 The poem-office
My next chapter describes the idea that I considered imaginatively constructing a ‘poet-self’, ‘decentred self’ or ‘speculative self’ as a method to write the poetry. Having moved through that stage and allowed the poetry to keep proliferating, and having done this by envisioning a decentred self, to borrow from Annie Finch, I went to the idea of thinking of the poems as a space to work in.
I speculated that, in order to write the poems, I would ‘enter’ the hypothetical space of the office by thinking about my source materials; for me, this meant thinking about a space with no walls or floor in which someone sits at a desk that floats in mid-air. I then also thought about makeshift or temporary spaces that occur in the source materials I refer to, for example, Sophia Amoruso describing how she created her online vintage clothing store on a laptop in a pool shed in her #Girlboss memoir put me in mind of makeshift workspaces in contemporary life and temporarily commissioned workspaces. Whilst there are walls around Amoruso, she also sleeps and lives in the same space, which has the effect of disappearing the office altogether (Amoruso 2014). In this way, my evocation of office is intended to mimic the contents of the poems: emanating from multiple places, borrowed and resituated, placed together via a curated process and embodying contradiction or contrast (with no architectural logic in the real world). ‘It makes you stick your eye with fork/nothing happens/under the desk where you have commando-fled’, I write in the poem ‘Symbolic meanings of windows and walls’. This evocation of ‘office’ is just as collaged from other sources as the feminist identities that Moxie seeks to demonstrate and deconstruct.
Gideon Haigh describes the history of the office as a multi-point-of-origin historical shift from merchants conducting business in their home to other purpose-designated spaces which slowly accrued their own technologies (business machines) and amended varieties of furniture that were conducive to work (2012). The fictive space from which my poems are written also references the more recent rise of open-plan office space or workspaces configured at the outset to be changeable, dismantled or decommissioned (or spaces such as commercial co-working offices where independent workers gather to re-create a sense of employment alongside others in an office) (Sander 2016). Harragan’s advice to women in 1977 is to not only create a game plan towards the acquisition and ‘settling’ of a visible,
58 well-located office, but to ensure that you are not pried out of that space once you have claimed it. That is, to lose this office would mean a loss of potential career gains via a loss of status and, most importantly, a loss of the visible trappings of power (in this case, personal space, quality furniture, a deliberate lack of overtly feminine decorative objects and an uncluttered desk). In her chapter ‘Deportment at the Gaming Table’, Harragan describes these material terms:
The slightest changes in office décor can telegraph impending changes in an employee’s relative position or favor. Draperies of better-quality material or exclusive design signal an upgrading, as does a carpet or a pushbutton phone, or a solid wood desk in place of veneer imitations, or plastic-topped steel (Harragan 1977, 284).
After going on to describe the corporate offices of senior-ranking workers as being like ‘veritable living rooms, or complete apartments’ by virtue of extreme luxury and excess, Harragan also foreshadows the open-plan office trend yet to fully arrive by including an anecdote about a former workplace that demonstrates the spatial moves and countermoves designed to destabilise hierarchies:
In one corporation where I worked, the tip-off to mounting managerial status was the appearance of the building carpenter. The ageing office layout was a legacy of a long-dead chief executive who believed in unfettered employee communication, so no offices had doors. A later breed of executives, to whom privacy denoted superior position, installed doors as soon as they reached the requisite level of authority. In that company, an ordinary office door became a telling signal that this was a high stakes table (ibid).
The arbitrary (though symbolically loaded) nature of the physical office and its shifting physicality are other cues for Moxie’s rare forays onto solid ground. Within the poems there are interactions with some components of the office (furniture, activities such as report writing) but the inhabitants of the imagined Moxie office are unsure, unsecured and moving through this landscape. There is no assurance that this hazy, office-like, imagined space is in any way actual, just as early-twenty-first-century physical offices are configured, dismantled, reconfigured, renamed or demolished or their contents sent to landfill. The
59 central voice of Moxie, navigating the office career, can only rely upon her wits and her accumulated observations as a ‘space’ from which to work. In my poems, small tokens as they appear and reappear – such as the furniture of a newly demarcated department or workplace equipment – are held onto with sardonic observation, mixed with resourceful making-do and what can be scrounged (desks, office stationery, temporary partitions for placing between desks).
I am interested in how far these tokens can assist the epic journey at any stage. In ‘Mass Opportunity’ one of these tokens takes the form of software, a project management system of some sort. ‘JIT’ is the acronym for ‘just-in-time’, a workflow management theory developed in Japan in the 1980s to save costs and increase profits. Whilst this term (and theory) are old-fashioned, they emphasise ‘doing more with less’ (a phrase I have consistently heard in offices for years) or ‘lean’ business approaches. This is further emphasised by my reference to ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’, as stated by model Kate Moss in 2009. Both of these ideas are presented in the poem lines as wily and strategic, as well as unsustainable and potentially destructive. The software is a token that is temporary, adds pressure and yet may achieve a rewardable outcome in the office:
Nothing tastes as good as systems feel
I have adopted a JIT across that I steer
Like a big goddam ship
Harragan’s tokens are physical, rather than computerised. As well as the carpenter employed to re-make spaces in custom (power-play) layouts, Harragan also makes mention of administrative staff who ‘decorate offices’ and establish standards within corporate codes of power. Anecdotally, I recall a colleague (an economist with a PhD) in 1995 responding with deep shock at having to order her own stationery from an online inventory in a Victorian state public service department. This is an example of feminist contradiction in play; she was expecting that there would (still) be women working as administrators to
60 complete this lower order work so that her time was free to complete professional tasks. Several times in the years following this I was, and observed others to be, periodically engaged in the task of acquiring office chairs and desks (as non-administrative staff), sometimes from an onsite furniture store of pre-used items located somewhere remote or in a basement. This seemed to create a counter idea to the economist’s experience, that to be ordering office supplies or arranging space might now denote some kind of status (that is, your desk is being ordered and therefore you exist in an organisation). This is a kind of echo of Harragan’s instructions, downgraded (acquire a desk, any desk!). As well as the tools of the epic journey, items such as furniture can be read as a kind of earthly burden or swag of encumbrances that drag and delay the career trajectory that Harragan’s blueprint offered in 1977. Within Moxie, this can be seen in references to office partitions – which separate space temporarily, but often stay in place for long periods of time - the anxiety of ordering office chairs (under time pressure; while there is a brief window of available budget). How is position or status to be understood amongst this, Moxie asks? And does this even matter, so many years after Harragan has suggested that these accoutrements are as important as the actual work conducted in a particular job? Drained of their status-giving powers, they become the junk, or at best temporary accommodation, of the contemporary workspace. I explore this in the poem ‘Office Décor is a Tip-Off’, which includes references to both the ‘disappeared’ specialised administrative staff who knew the processes, as well as the acquisition of desks written as this aforementioned delay in the career ‘journey’ of Moxie.
Office Décor is a Tip-Off
Oh boy she says. All day she was wrangling with getting office chairs that complied with standards. Both internal, public-service friendly chattels of the right adjustment potential, and the external squeeze of the budget as it moved further away like the most come hither finger.
Money mirage.
61 The internal intelligence existed, but each time you begin a task again you must reinvent that wheel with patient alacrity. The people who did those jobs once have slid down a shute, never to fill a requisition form to its dry hard full state again. Fill in all sections. Phone someone to get the right phrase to fill into that section. There is a code that must be cracked for this or it will trick you down the river. A shadow across your heart and then the cheering wash of thought, later on the train, when a coming pay increase is recalled. Yes please my pussycat.
The epic elements of Moxie invoke a type of journey, but one that is crafted from movement and shifting, unpredictable components that speak of a continual re-configuring rather than resolution. Harragan’s advice all but guarantees that an upward-moving career was possible for women with hard work and strategic, wily use of surfaces displays; office furniture and ‘power-dressing’ are the cornerstone of this personal campaign. In my poetry, this is presented as untenable in the present day, and is critiqued by my suggestion that the office surfaces are temporary – its walls, ceilings and contents. I have purposed these as epic tokens, but they are unreliable, do not retain their symbolic value and cannot provide assurance or passage to a successful ‘career journey’. The epic is a continuum, unresolved and, as in Debbie: An Epic, suggests that reaching a ‘goal’ has been superseded by moving through and surviving momentary situations.
62 Chapter 3 – Vintage Feminism: ‘styling’ as feminist poetry practice
The starting points from which I began writing the Moxie poems – a sequence of feminist poems for a contemporary moment – could be said to be personal, yet this poetry is not me; it is not intended as a depiction of myself. It’s not, for example, a set of memoir poems or a traditional lyric suite.
If the poetry is not depiction of myself, but as a poet and feminist I am nonetheless undertaking the task of producing a series of feminist poems, where is the ‘I’ located in this creative process? My formative experience of having a poem read as ‘anti-feminist’ prompted my thinking around whether a poem as a standalone artefact has capacity to demonstrate its feminism, particularly an artefact that might not be declaring its feminism in an easily understood way and without additional explanation (for example, the conversation I had with the poet subsequent to her comment). This in turn led me to explore feminist genealogies and histories (in Chapter 1) and poetics (via the epic and mock epic, in Chapter 2), as well as attempts at narrative poetry and my alighting upon key concepts of poetic space. Whilst I was working through those phases of the research and reaching for theories to describe what I was (perhaps) doing, I continued to create the poetry that forms Moxie. My work was still practice-led because I was writing poetry first and then attempting to discover its purpose through analysis. However, even through this method I was still not able to identify what I was doing when I created a poem and how this related to the other research (theoretical, critical) that was feeding into those poems.
This led me to question how we might classify our expectations of what a feminist poem is. In her chapter ‘Sexual Signatures: Feminism After the Death of the Author’ Grosz asks, ‘what enables us to describe a text as feminist...?’ and the critical literature that she surveys leads her to address this question in relation to four categories: the sex of the author, the content of the text, the sex of the reader and the style of the text (Grosz 1995). Grosz argues that when a reader sees the female author’s sex as the entry point to understanding their text as feminist this is an attempt by the reader and perhaps also the author to manipulate the
63 text’s effect. She invokes the thinking of Roland Barthes (on the ‘death of the author’) and Michel Foucault (on ‘the author function’) to demonstrate this manipulation: ‘judging a text in terms of its author’s intentions, wishes, biography, historical location, sociological position, and so on is an attempt to fix and control the meaning and inherent ambiguity of a text’ (Grosz 1995, 13). With regards to the content of the text, she notes the tendency amongst some feminist critics towards regarding a ‘distinctive set of preoccupations’ in feminist writing, undercutting this with a logic she draws that there is ‘no special set of objects or topics that define women’s writing [and that] it is plausible that any object or content, ranging from nuclear physics to market fluctuations, could be dealt with in a feminist manner’ (Grosz 1995, 15). All of Grosz’s categories are presented in order to critique and demonstrate their limitations, and as ur-categories they accord with those offered by Martin Langford in his 2017 Meanjin review of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry. Langford said ‘I did have some difficulty deciding what was feminist about some of these poems’. His classifications from what he sees in the anthology are: poems that are arguing overtly for feminist change, poems that meditate on matters of enduring feminist concern, poems that engage the ‘ancient political act of speaking freely’ and poems that ‘focus on things that are feminist only because of the identity of their speaker’. This is not offered as an exhaustive set of categories of feminist poetry, rather it represents Langford’s own analysis of what he found within the pages of that collection, meaning that these are timestamped to the moment of publication (which is another way to say that a different anthology, produced at a later time, may have yielded different ‘data’ for him). Even so, arguably these categories provided the kind of contemporary meta-framework which I had been searching for in the earlier stages of my research. Though my poems may contain traces of both Grosz’s and Langford’s categories (see the Conclusion), they were blunt instruments for my purpose; many of these categories still required that a poem come with identifying or instructive information: a statement of purpose, a poet’s bio, links to their social media streams.
This dissertation is an attempt to offer a set of instructions for understanding my work as feminist, how the poem might ‘speak’ to a reader of a feminist politics or vision without needing external framing or justification, so that the poems can take responsibility rather than an author or a reader. Though this the goal, I may not achieve this. It may also be that
64 the poem does contain meaning that exceeds a hermeneutic reading; that the poem is interacting with a reader response, but in a way that goes beyond the reader’s expectations of feminism in a poem. Either way, this effect may also be understood as, in part, finding ways to communicate to the reader that assist them to locate the feminism in a poem. There is a tension here: a critical or cultural pressure to display guarantees of ideology alongside or in addition to the poetry which is to work against the stylistic expansion of the category of ‘feminist poetry’. I attempt to balance the tensions of the simultaneous ‘displaying’ of feminism and the expansion of what feminist poetry can mean through the following definition of my own work’s mode, ‘vintage feminism’.
Annie Finch’s decentred self
Finch contends that a ‘coherent decentring’ of the self is one way to move more freely as a feminist poet negotiating poetic traditions:
Like many contemporary writers, I find the Romantic poetic construct of the fixed, central self and its point of view to be extraordinarily limited ... I am aware that my own selfhood, let alone the self-voicing in my poems, is not a clear and simple unit separate from everything else in the world. Our ‘selves’, insofar as they seem to exist at all, are more likely to come to our awareness as a shifting progression of moods and thoughts, contingent on circumstance, culture, and context, open to many interpretations (2005, 95).
A ‘fixed’ or central self could be understood as the Lyric ‘I’ prior to or excluding any interventions to this tradition. In addition, Finch points to her own observations of a fixed ‘I’ being a false notion; that the idea that the self is a separate entity from its context (for example, the physical environment a poet is sitting in or the poem they are writing) indicates that ‘self’ refers to one definable, singular thing; ‘Our “selves”, insofar as they seem to exist at all, are more likely to come to our awareness as a shifting progression of moods and thoughts, contingent on circumstance, culture and context, open to many interpretations’ (ibid). When a fixed and singular self is assumed, this can mean a poem is read as traditional lyric; that the speaking ‘I’ represents the poet who authored the text;
65 that the poem is autobiographical (or represents the poet in some way). In her review of Linda Kinnahan’s exposition of the Lyric ‘I’ and feminist poetry, Lynn Keller summarises this conflation of poetic use of ‘I’ with the poet’s self in relation to third-wave poetics: ‘Many feminists … during the 1990s were wary of narrow identity politics and essentialist notions of the self, yet questioned whether the Lyric I, perhaps not yet available to women, should be forsaken’ (2004, 326). Kinnahan herself maps the decades-long treatment of the ‘I’ in women’s poetry as containing different strategies enacted by different poets concurrently. For example, she draws comparison between the attempts of Language poets (such as Lyn Hejinian) to dismiss the ‘I’ in their work as occurring simultaneously with ‘efforts to problematize and complicate [these] earlier stances against the “I”’ (2004, xx). In other words, even as the Lyric ‘I’ was being dismantled, it was also being revisited and complicated (where complicated is understood to mean the use of ‘I’ in unclear ways, where ambiguity is intended). This is well expressed by Nealon’s statement regarding those emerging and writing in the 1990s, following this dismantling: ‘these poets have also grown up with the peculiarly postmodern admixture of identity-based liberation movements and poststructural critiques of identity’ (2004, 583). Nealon contextualises this generation working in response to the Language poets’ critique of the ‘authenticity of lyric utterance’; that, in some ways, the next generation of poets are critiquing this critique. That is, they are not reversing back to language as ‘transparently truthful medium’, he notes that they ‘write with an acute knowledge of the susceptibility of their materials to historical change’ (Nealon 2004, 594).
For me, this points to the potential to adopt an array of identity positions as a poet, acquired over a period of time (or as the poet becomes aware of these histories of identity in poetry and their attendant contradictions). Although Finch dates her own initial awareness of the ‘split’ she felt between the (Romantic, fixed) idea of poet and a more complex subjectivity of the 1960s (when she began writing poetry), the sentiment is similar. My reading of Finch’s decentring of the self is a response to this problem of feminist and literary theory, when one attempts to practise within the field of these (often) competing ideas. She does this via tools she employs consciously in the making of poems, namely, ‘syntactic density and innuendo, lexical and metaphorical subjects, and the questioning of “objects” and multiple speakers’ (Finch 2005, 305). Finch’s deployment of decentring is to
66 use what she describes as dense but ‘coherent’ syntax to describe ‘decentred, multiple points of view’ (305), syntax that attempts to deliver meaning about complexity in a straightforward way. She gives the example of a poem, ‘Wild Yeasts’, where she uses conventional syntax to problematise the speaking point of view by blurring the line between self and bread being made: ‘Rumbling a way up my dough’s heavy throat to its head/seeping the trailed, airborn daughters down into the core/bubbles go rioting through my long- kneaded new bread’ (2005, 100). Whilst this example resonated with me as a way to deliver information about the complexity of feminism in a poem, it was the notion itself, of decentring – and Finch’s own experiences that had led her there – that took hold for me.
My engagement with this idea formulated a position that it was not only a new body of work I was creating in Moxie but also a decentred self in order to create this work. What I mean by this is a kind of work-poetry mindset, styled specifically for the project at hand, one that decentres other parts of my history as a poet, other parts of myself as a feminist and any other parts of my life that are not relevant to my poetic intentions at that moment. The resulting poetry could be understood as a portrait of the self in this moment in time (in this moment of the project, of the poetry’s creation). This was intended as a conflation of three elements: the traces of my voice emanating from material composed from memory fragments, material composed from other sources (such as scenes from movies and conversations overheard in public) and material that originated from neither my intentional voice nor any other conscious source.
What I imagined was a kind of ‘stepping into’ this mindset by immersing myself in materials. This stepping into the work-poetry mindset I am describing was an attempt to blur the line between myself and the poetry by making myself – and all of my attendant histories, experiences and intentions – somehow less central to the process of creating. Just as I went through the process of exploring ‘office’ as an ‘ungrounded’ and temporary imaginary space, I was now attempting to articulate an imaginary writing self that could be called upon and set aside at will, that is, to continue my engagement with making space – making space in a definition or tradition – via stretching it out, inverting it or deconstructing it.
I was looking for a way to be less present in the poetry, to operate more from a mindset where my history, self and knowledge are set partially to the side, providing room to work
67 on something new. For me, this was to add in other content that did not originate with my own experiences, to blur the pronoun ‘I’, pulling it away from its lyric traditions to loosen expectations emanating from confessional forms and their intertwining of personal and political. Importantly, a decentred self in this context is not image, identity, public reputation or brand.
Finch’s view is that in adopting a decentred self, the problematic histories of poetic subjectivity for women remain, but can also be put aside at will through the creative process (here she invokes shamanistic imagery to illustrate such a movement):
Once I became more aware of poststructuralist theory and postmodern literary conventions, I experimented with pastiche and fragmented syntax in an attempt to convey the decentred self. But the more I worked with language, the more I wanted to accept all of its common limitations. I had read that a strong shaman is able to return from a vision and live normally, to talk coherently and do business intelligently, to follow the laws appropriate to the ordinary world as well as the dream world. It seemed to me the strongest strategy to work within the honestly conventional and artificial constraints of the language, twisting and turning their qualities to my advantage, rather than pretending that those constraints don’t exist at all (2005, 99).
Finch conceptualises the ‘constraint’ of language as being the tendency she observes in others’ poetry for fragmented syntax to operate as a comment on a fragmented world, that materialising ‘fragmentation’ in a poem takes care of needing to delve further into the question of, for example, a poststructuralist identity. After early attempts to follow this model, Finch speaks of using traditional syntax instead to write her way into a representing fragmentation, dissolving of boundaries and her own experience of decentring. My own poet-self was somewhere between the two positions … I was oscillating between creating an imaginary poet-self that would be composed of fragments (thinking my way into work by focusing on my poem materials) and poetry that was fragmentary to represent either a speculative version of myself or multiple selves. That is, as I was sitting with the idea of poet-self, I was also toying with multiple selves: that the ‘I’ of a poem can be multiple at any one time and cannot be understood as just one voice or perspective (and that, within this
68 ‘multiple’ I, parts of the poem may compete with or contradict one another; for example the lines ‘poetry is not a project’ (Dorothea Lasky) and ‘Documentation is a feminist project; a life project’ (Sara Ahmed) which are sitting adjacently in my poem ‘Company Policies on Getting Laid’.
Both of these poles that I was moving between, and testing out, were working towards the same goal: a poetry that did not rely upon my treating my own identity as a compass point or as a ‘true north’ from which to write an ‘authentic’ feminist poem. As with Finch, it was already too late for that; I had already questioned that I was a unitary self long before setting out to write poetry. Not only that, but I had consciously set out to create versions of myself in the lived world – most notably in creating my ‘office’ self as a young woman – as this seemed a logical way to survival in a capitalistic culture. Finch’s description of self as a state of awareness, rather than an actuality, speaks to this as a permanently evolving set of possibilities: to reiterate the quote used in the opening of this, self as ‘a shifting progression of moods and thoughts, contingent on circumstance, culture, and context, open to many interpretations’.
A kind of ‘speculative’ self may have been what I was attempting by deploying Finch’s decentred descriptor. A speculative self in this sense would be a ‘possible’ self, one that doesn’t represent my life (or moments in my life) as memoir or autobiography. The notion of speculative self would also capture the ‘I’ as multiple selves, the other option I had been considering. Late in the research, my treatment of self and the ‘I’ of the poems emerged more fully as an informative approach to writing, which I will discuss in the Conclusion.
Further attempts to compose a self/finding a way out
Making use of Finch’s decentring, I continued to test the idea that the set-up of a poetic self is part of the poetic practice that I am establishing and referring to as ‘vintage feminism’. If identity (including feminist identity) is a dynamic, shifting site in poetry, then one of the methods of this research is to establish a poetic self for the purpose of writing this poetry. I was working on the notion that this poetic self might be the key to creating new feminist poetry, that a decentred self would allow me to decentre feminism long enough to attempt
69 something new in a poem. That is, I have been living with feminism for so many years that I was conscious it is very ingrained in my thoughts; and whilst that provides me with an ethical basis for living, it does not necessarily facilitate innovation in the act of creative practice.
Around the time I completed the first full draft of the poetry component, I reflected that:
I see ‘poetic self’ as a tool of creative practice that operates alongside other tools such as my use of the Epic form, my adoption of collaging practices and my repurposing of other texts. Additionally, as my research continually points to the practice of sourcing and assembling as being temporal acts, this notion of poetic self is also temporary, that is, assembled and established for the time it takes to write a poem, for example, and for the specific purpose of this project. For example, think about the writing of ‘Acquisitive, Adjusted’; this required me to foreground ideas of budgets and think through conversations I’ve observed (brainstorming ‘money’ words as I did so) and simultaneously drop my actual self out of the memory fragments that float up when doing this. This operates in two ways; the first is that it allows for artistic freedom when working with historically dense material such as feminist theory and writings on feminist experience (including poetry). And it also allows for other selves to operate alongside the poetic self.
I saw this as a way to circumvent the problem of needing to attach my work to my own recent experiences to demonstrate its feminist currency, as poet-researcher Chamberlain had done in her doctoral thesis. Where she had, for example, integrated her own experiences of feminist direct action into her poetry (literally walking out the door to attend the rally, in preparation to write the poetic response) I tendered the idea that the poetic self is the ‘space’ I go into to create. This is a space of imagination, where I may use memories, experiences, opinions or thought processes about things I have observed to create a poem.
I wanted to explore how the design or constitution of poetic self – or ‘I’ as multiple selves or even ‘speculative’ self – can replace the idea of identity and become instead a tool of poetic practice and therefore remain more elastic than other forms of feminist engagement (such as political affiliation), allowing space for the poetry to evolve from a different starting position. Whilst my intentions were in line with my research – looking for a way to make
70 more space within the category of feminist poetry, and doing this in a manner that didn’t rely on my identity – ultimately constituting a poetic self as an act of imaginative mindset was a too-complex method and it wasn’t clear to me that this was actually how I was creating the poems.
‘Thinking through feminism’, grappling to describe practice
I continued to seek a way to describe my ‘self’ in relation to my practice as a feminist poet. However, I recognised that I was falling back into the trap that my earlier research had sought to navigate through more freely; that is, I was still trying to demonstrate that I needed to ‘compose’ a self before I could compose the poetry. This suggests the question of whether the composition of a self comes before the poetry or through the poetry. Therefore, I was still stuck on feminist identity and poetic identity even while I was looking at Finch’s deconstruction.
I returned to an introduction to an essay collection which arose out of the conference ‘Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism’ held at the Institute for Women’s Studies, Lancaster University, in 1997. The idea espoused by the collection’s editors that feminism may be considered a mode of thought rather than an ‘object’ to be resolved – where ‘object’ is read as the concrete problems of societal inequities and political landscapes – shifted my thinking to a different frame of reference: ‘As an object for discussion, feminism slipped in and out of focus: even disappearing, on occasion. What emerged instead, both from the conference and from this book, were explorations of possibilities for thinking through feminism’ (Ahmed et al. 2000, 8). They posit this shift as a dynamic response to the constraint created by some previous positions in feminist thought: ‘rather than critiquing the assumption that women “have” an identity as “women”, or that feminism should overcome the strictures of identity (assuming that such an overcoming was possible), feminists are beginning to think through how politicised identities are lived, felt and practiced, and more precisely what animates the desire for a politics of identity’ (ibid, 15).
From this idea of feminism no longer being an ‘object’ (in this case, a seemingly enormous body of written texts in the form of feminist theory and thought) I attempted to see
71 feminism as a lens I could use, rather than a set of problems to be solved via my poetry. This potentially allowed for a different approach: to loosen the categories of feminism as an entity, or how it is engaged with, could allow for freer movement in understanding it and
17 therefore conceptualising it for the purposes of art.
This leant extra weight upon how I would ‘use myself’ as the poet, still harbouring questions about what I’d inherited by way of feminisms and poetry (still feeling the heavy expectations of each) and what my responsibility was to these within my practice.
At this point of the research, I turned to a phase of intensive focus on generating the poetry component only and again waited to see what the poetry might tell me.
This Old Thing
While I continued to write new poetry, I watched TV. A program I’d been watching avidly was This Old Thing: The Vintage Clothes Show, a BBC4 UK reality program about vintage clothing. The program was created by the host, journalist Dawn O’Porter, who wanted to demonstrate that vintage clothes have ethical and aesthetic value. In each episode, she would meet a young woman with no interest in vintage (usually with a weekly ‘fast fashion’18 habit or an overflowing wardrobe but a sense of needing more new clothes) and take that unwilling young woman shopping for vintage clothes. She would also secretly meet with their mothers, or grandmothers, to mine their wardrobes for good-quality items that could be remodelled and source other vintage clothes online. Meanwhile, O’Porter would be amassing accessories for putting the whole outfit together and then, in the tradition of reality TV makeover shows, would reveal the young woman to herself, in the mirror, to film her reaction. The program is about making choices; O’Porter would source and style a complete outfit that was a composite of old and new components (for example,
17 This idea of how to think beyond feminism as a ‘object’ and the challenges of definitional assumptions is described by Dennis Altman in an opinion piece regarding the (inaccurate) use of the acronym LGBTIQ in sexual health contexts. Although this is a different context, his statement that ‘Desire, behaviour and identity are distinct and they do not always overlap’ echoes my critique of the idea that ‘being’ a feminist and creating feminist work are the same thing and are congruent in their aims within/from the same person. 18 ‘Fast fashion’ is a term for cheaply manufactured clothing with high environmental impacts. The term is used as both a critique of mass-produced, high-turnover clothing as well as in business contexts to refer to the supply chain models it creates.
72 a 1980s leather skirt and T-shirt worn with new shoes and jewellery). Adjustments would be made by tailors to existing garments, to allow for fit and updating of features, but their original elements still showed. The updating of features would often entail the modification of a style element that was too overtly out of fashion to current tastes; for example, changing a bell-shaped sleeve that was 1970s in style to a less era-specific tapered sleeve. With every outfit a set of aesthetic choices were being made, regarding what pieces would go together, that also had positive ethical qualities: that is, that every time a vintage garment was being incorporated into an outfit, this was an environmentally ethical choice of recycling existing clothes. As O’Porter walked the aisles of vintage clothing stores crammed with clothing, she pulled out individual items. She was selecting from an archive that felt overwhelming, both to the viewer and also to the young women she was making over. However, she had ideas regarding what she was looking for; because she is a lifelong consumer of vintage and second-hand clothing, she could anticipate some of the clothing she might find. She had control of the field of possibilities and the confidence to create mash-up outfits that prioritised aesthetic effect over ‘correct combinations’ according to the fashion dictates of a particular time; that is, rather than attempting to recreate a full outfit of vintage clothes belonging to one era, she could jump across eras by placing 1960s boots with a 1940s dress and the combination was new. By adding new pieces in with old, she created outfits that blurred the lines of their originating year of creation for the palatability of her younger make-over charges (but which those familiar with vintage clothing would recognise and admire). She was demonstrating an ethics of clothing consumption by decontextualising the vintage clothes and recontextualising them to a purpose-created and personalised outfit.
My grappling with history and inheritance could be dealt with in a similar way if I foregrounded making choices from materials that were already there. Additionally, the program reminded me of my own feminist history; as I have observed, read, narrativised and accumulated feminism over a timespan of over thirty years, this was also like a stuffed- full, many-levelled room of vintage content, some of which is outmoded or ‘old-fashioned’. In some ways, as described in the previous chapters, I had tried to classify this content, first in line with other people’s systems of classification, then in examining ways I could stretch
73 out, bend or sidestep my own history by locating the attention to ‘the office’, by decentring myself and then by attempting to artificially construct an alternative ‘poet-self’.
Instead, perhaps I could up-end any notion of linear systems and finally move away from problematised Lyric ‘I’ or feminist identity by using citational content – found material – within the poems themselves.
This led me to thinking about styling existing materials (other people’s words, instead of other people’s clothes) into a poem for my own poetic intentions and also upcycling other materials (such as my own memories, now altered and adapted to the purpose of the poem). Nancy L. Fisher describes the rise in popularity of vintage clothing in the late twentieth century as being part of an ‘authenticity discourse’ where the seeking out and wearing of vintage clothing are seen to represent ‘exceptional quality’, to express originality, to value something handcrafted and, notably, ‘to provide continuity with the past’ (2015, 46). Fashion researcher Gail Jeanne Myers maps the use of the term ‘upcycling’ in the space of the vintage clothing repurposing industry; she refers to upcycling researchers defining the process of remaking vintage clothes as occurring ‘through the eyes of the designer who can determine the real value of the discarded materials through their transformation in design’ (2014, 3).
The styling that was occurring on the program This Old Thing incorporated this notion of a value being determined by someone with contextual knowledge (the vintage clothing enthusiast, O’Porter) where pieces were selected for their individual value (a garment, an accessory) and reconfigured as a part of a something else, a curated outfit that held information about the past collaged into a contemporary moment. Just as these outfits are a composite, my understanding of where I could position my ‘self’ in relation to the work opened onto a composite, multiple self (rather than a poet-self, rather than a decentred self). Reminding myself again of Nealon’s observation of poets writing with ‘acute knowledge of the susceptibility of their materials to historical change’, the inclusions I make in assembling a poem are designed to create tension between the pieces. The choices are intended to heighten the tension through contrast, and in doing so enact my learning to live with the ‘waste’ (or unclaimed ideas or forgotten lessons) of the past. In my poem ‘You Are Possible’ I place lines describing an upcoming negotiation in an office via an aching head,
74 determination and unease – ‘All things equal we should have a good run’ – with lines quoted from Ann Summers in a recent interview describing 1970s feminist direct action: ‘We broke into houses, smashed the windows, changed the locks and occupied them.’ The office negotiation suggests gaining permission and Summers’s quote describes historical activism where power is taken, unceremoniously and unapologetically. We cannot return to the past, but we can consider it as a valuable repository from which to source ideas; what can (or could) be reused, what needs to remain a historical curiosity?
The materials O’Porter draws from, by trawling specialist vintage fashion shops, are not discarded so much as dormant, just as older feminist knowledge might lie dormant in books or with individuals who have memories of earlier eras. ‘Styling’ in the fashion industry setting is understood to refer to the work of the ‘stylist’, a (usually freelance) consultant who is charged with ‘researching and borrowing garments from [fashion] designers, curating and taking care of those clothes’, sourcing accessories, combining all of these elements together for a purpose such as creating a photographic advertisement and conducting these activities towards ‘promot[ing] an idea, or to persuade us to buy into’ something (Griffiths 2016, 9).
This seemed to describe what I was already doing in my feminist poetry-writing attempts. In realising this, I was finally able to rest my attention on my practice as it was emerging in the writing of Moxie. Although I had in fact created a new metaphor, thinking of my practice as being ‘vintage feminist’ was a useful way to encapsulate how my poetry was making use of ‘old materials’ in a way that no other frameworks had so far provided in my research journey. It also allowed me to see my feminist poetry practice as somewhat rhizomatic, reflecting both the methods I had identified as part of an iterative research loop, as per Smith and Dean’s model, as well as Moxie’s resistance to closure, linear narrative and form. Smith makes a case for feminist writing as a form that can ‘morph’ beyond its own boundaries: ‘Feminist writing, I believe, is rhizomatic: it is about multiple aesthetic and culture linkages in which feminist ideas may be one element. And experimentalism must always be concerned with exploration and making it new … not simply about identifying with an avant-garde/experimentalist tradition or adopting a set of anti-conventions which characterise that tradition’ (2008, 45). I will explore vintage feminism via an example from
75 my own work Moxie, then show how this mode can find affinity in Izzy Roberts-Orr’s poem ‘An Imagined Stand-up Set’.
Case study – ‘Mirror Stage’ from Moxie
To illustrate my writing method below, I provide examples of materials collected together for styling (in the case of my memories and reflections) and upcycling (in the case of the quote from Fay Weldon’s 1997 novel Big Women) into a poem.
Memories of fax machines
I wanted to include fax machines in a poem because of their neat ability to transmit what appears as an almost unmediated version of a page – the page is transmitted exactly as it looked (perhaps with small changes, such as crooked alignment), but is still another version (a facsimile). Once email had become prevalent as an office communication method/tool, fax machines were quickly maligned; my evocation here is of the fax machine as a nostalgia machine. An early model I used in my office job (the office job where I was given the copy of Games Mother Never Taught You) required paper to be kept loaded at all times; there was no memory function, so if a fax was sent and the paper wasn’t there to receive it, the fax was lost but appeared to have arrived. I spent a lot of time with that machine, making sure it had sufficient paper.
This became the line ‘Easy to mock the fax’. I added a quotation later in the poem from a business profile of a woman who had specialised in dealing in printer toner (‘the toner queen of Chicago’) as this echoed the fax and duplicate copies of information.
Fay Weldon’s Big Women
The use of this quote from Weldon’s Big Women is dense with references that connect to my overall project; the novel describes the creation of a 1970s feminist publishing house called Medusa (a fictionalised version of British feminist publishing house Virago). The novel contains themes that link back to my memories of working in the office where we recruited people into publishing industry jobs: women in offices; women creating themselves into feminist versions of publishers and editors; making the work of individual writers into
76 feminist texts; recuperating ‘lost’ women’s writing; paying attention to what came before in earlier feminisms; and redefining the notions of structure in the business context with and via feminist political intentions. Weldon uses this setting to critique second-wave feminism from the safety of the 1990s (when she wrote and published the book). She sets up and allows her characters to undermine each other, to refer to the ‘sisterhood’ but carry out underhanded, competitive acts under the cover of solidarity. However, I also kept in mind as I wrote the poem that Weldon worked in an advertising agency for many years, which is also the industry that Harragan worked in, which fuelled Games Mother Never Taught You; this is another kind of business that deals in constructed, upgraded or amended selves via consumerism.
In this poem, this quote is included to contrast with the ease of receipt/anxiety of written materials not received (the fax), attempts at affirmative action such as naming boardrooms after women, years after Virago was created and then still years after Weldon’s fictionalised version was published. This demonstrates a genealogical echo between histories of feminist publishing, women in offices spaces and the office-based production of selves. For me, this is a landscape of disquiet; Weldon critiques the politics that also enabled some of her own trajectory as a writer and a feminist. Here she describes one of the characters, a young academic aligned with the feminist press Medusa; there is both derision and exposition in the tone, a feature that runs throughout the novel: ‘Alice is not idle. Alice has decided to change the world. It is easier than changing herself. She has been awarded an honorary degree by her alma mater. She is a Doctor of Philosophy. See her now process through cloisters, a small figure in a black gown’ (Weldon 1997, 99).
Mirrors
The resonances of the ghostly faxes of my memories, refracted through the layered and resonant quote from Big Women, bounce off the surfaces of the poem like light off a mirror ball. By this I mean that I want the poem to evoke hard surfaces that reflect and for the poem to carry the idea of reproduced ‘texts’ from the faxes arriving in the fax machine – messages incoming – and moving ‘through’ to the subjective voice, to the surrounding office and all the way to the present, the ‘robots’ arrival’, which is to signal the past conversing with the present (when much white collar clerical work is being replaced by automated
77 processes and this is the work that has often fallen to women in office settings). I had in mind the title of a New Yorker profile on the poet Bernadette Mayer, ‘How to Look in the Mirror without saying “I”’; its author, Daniel Wenger, quotes from Mayer’s poem ‘Beware of the Killer Dog’, which opens with the lines: ‘Today I’m just like/A person with a device’ (2016). This is read as ironic (Wenger points out that Mayer isn’t referring to a smartphone, but a typewriter) but infused my poem with another layer of older communication devices communing with future devices. The Lacanian allusion in the title of my poem substitutes the mirror for a fax or conflates the two; in my memory, the fax machine constituted mirror- images and reflected back fragments of the day’s business. It felt as though each fax was constituting me, the way that looking in the mirror could confirm your existence somewhere.
Styling the materials
As described above, there are a number of core elements I used as starting points, or foundation pieces, for the poem. They were chosen for their potential, the way that in Episode 3 of This Old Thing O’Porter ‘steals’ Emma’s grandmother’s 1980s salmon-coloured blazer from the family’s attic wardrobe and takes it back to the sewing studio to be reworked. The jacket is a foundation piece, containing resonances; it was worn by Emma’s grandmother to Emma’s parents’ wedding. O’Porter comments on ‘that particular pink’ which is a shade now not seen in newly manufactured fabrics. In its current form the jacket would not be worn by Emma, and the TV sewing studio team conspires to shorten and narrow its sleeves, remove the self-belt and shorten the hem. It is styled with an altered skirt from Emma’s own wardrobe, and shoes and other vintage items (1970s, 1990s) thrifted from elsewhere. Together, these components drawn from disparate eras form a one-off outfit. They point to the present, via the way they’re styled together, but incorporate the past. The clothes have been worn by other women before, have a made a statement before and now they make a new statement on a new body, and in a new era. The clothes are like a skin, having accompanied women’s subjective experiences. O’Porter has the tools to make selections that re-purpose items of value and create new subjectivities. As a poet, I can similarly recognise gestures made in the past and assess these for re-purposing, considering
78 their possible effect. In this way, we are conducting similar work, and could both be considered feminist scholars (using different tools to someone authoring feminist theory).
Taking the three foundation pieces for my poem, I began with the fax machine. I already had the idea of mirrors, as I’d been reading the Wenger article and thinking about how he has written that Mayer is ‘investigating’ her own mind through her poetry. Her mind is like a machine, he seems to imply, which reminds me of William Carlos Williams’s famous statement: ‘A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words’ (Staff 2012). I laid down a line about the fax, as the fax is my ‘Grandmother’s salmon jacket’, to equate this with the above TV anecdote. I brought in ‘digital’ and ‘ink’ to remind of past technologies and emerging communication which pertain to this imagined office space and Wenger’s framing of Mayer’s practice. I turned to ‘mirror’, the second of my pieces, and made a literal use of it, creating the title, ‘Mirror Stage’. I wrote lines around these first fragments of poetry to create a poem shape. These were altered and tweaked – I might lop the ‘sleeves’ of my fax foundation piece, take out a third use of the word (‘fax’, ‘facsimile’ both occur in the first two lines) because enough of it sits in the beginning of the poem; it did not need to be explicitly repeated throughout. Instead, I accessorised it towards the very end by including a found text quote (a coordinating pair of shoes in a slightly different colour) referring to toner, the ‘ink’ of a fax. Additionally, the quote from Weldon was incorporated last: an unexpected piece of jewellery, another piece of found text which sharpens the look. It contrasts with the poem’s orderly office ‘machines’ by introducing a second-wave voice, a character speaking from the 1970s, that throws out the corporate ‘book of rules’ – Medusa, an all-women fictional publishing office that casts its culture from feminism, not business traditions.
The poem contains internal conflicts; the fax machine memory has me performing secretarial tasks, representing a feeling of being stuck; stuck with the machines, stuck with the ‘women’s work’ that permeates offices even now. Weldon is criticising the fictional publishing house for basing their ethos and culture on feminism, and demonstrating the demise of what she constructs as the folly of doing so. The mirror references pin the poem’s content back to itself; the poem’s content cannot escape being observed, and cannot escape the way that the mirrors are constituting the female subjectivities contained in the poem. In short, no one is winning here, though all – Weldon, the fictional characters, myself
79 – are attempting to articulate the difficulty of re-writing this narrative of women as less powerful than men, in structures such as workplaces.
Case study – ‘An Imagined Stand-up Set’ by Izzy Roberts-Orr
An Imagined Stand-up Set
(with thanks to Patricia Lockwood)
Let me start with a joke.
I know: I know. Female comedians, right?
Ok, the joke’s coming.
It’s – ah
The joke is that you’re almost eighteen and drinking vodka.
Absolut. Classy.
The joke is funny, like not ha-ha funny, but kind of weird funny.
The joke is that once, when it was sleeping serene and sprawled on a couch in the bush that held your childhood, your Dad told you it looked like Rimbaud. Even though it didn’t.
80
The joke had puppy-dog eyes, like green cut glass, and long, curly hair.
The joke was beautiful and delicate, and didn’t look like anyone who
Could hurt you.
The joke took you to your high school formal and wore a silver suit to
Match your silver shoes because you asked it to.
The joke is that you couldn’t leave the party, no money for a taxi.
You’re drinking vodka in his apartment, and you’re all there together.
Recklessly breaking into the neighbours’ pool, running wild by the
River, making jaffles. All together.
The joke is that you were almost eighteen.
The joke is that he was your boyfriend, before that.
When the sun smashed through the curtains the next morning and you caught
The first train home, the joke is that he was the one crying on the train platform,
And you were the only one who knew why.
The joke clings to you, sticky and fetid.
It’s hard to scrub off.
81 It’s ‘come on, why am I doing all the work here?’ not ‘are you ok?’
You smoke, and say, ‘everyone needs a vice’.
You walk home, daring the night to try and take you on in Docs and a miniskirt,
Imagining a burning cigarette butt is enough to protect you. The joke is that it wasn’t
The night or the streets or the skirt that were dangerous.
You visit him at work in the casino, and he tut-tuts your cigarettes, your skirt, your
Docs. The way you’ve cut your hair short.
The joke is he tells you, ‘you used to be so beautiful ‘, by which he means pure,
By which he means clean, by which he means something not broken.
The joke is holding hands with you, years later.
You’re hanging out, thinking about getting back together but you can’t put your
Finger on why the idea of being naked together is no longer appealing. Why that body
You’d known the first and loved the most – that had felt like an absent half – suddenly seemed like a
Large and terrifying thing. Why it scalded.
82 The joke tried to forget, and it could.
The rape joke is that he gave you an astroboy t-shirt the next time you saw him, and
Bought you a smoothie.
Astroboy.
That’s kind of funny.
Izzy Roberts-Orr (2016)
Izzy Roberts-Orr’s ‘An Imagined Stand-up Set’ takes Patricia Lockwood’s high-profile 2013 poem ‘Rape Joke’ and uses it as a beginning point for her own poem. Roberts-Orr uses Lockwood’s poem as a blueprint to acknowledge recent acts of feminist poetry; she has created a tribute poem which has substituted in material that tells the same story, but with different props and characters.
As a reader and a poet, I can see this as a form of vintage feminist poetic practice; the poem starts with an existing poem, written by another poet, removes its contents so that there is only the shape and central concept left, and installs content with similar imagery. Instead of using direct quotations of others’ words, in the manner that I’ve used in my creative project, the poem makes a direct quotation of an idea and credits this usage (‘with thanks to Patricia Lockwood’). In presenting this poem as a direct response to the original, repetition is a key ingredient and this mimics the arc of Lockwood’s poem, culminating part-way in the central reveal (or rather, macabre ‘punchline’ of the joke): ‘The joke is that he was your boyfriend, before that’ analogous to ‘The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend’ (Lockwood).
This is a form of homage, but could also be read as joining-in, or ‘act of solidarity by poem’. This could be a poem-isation of #metoo where the poem stands in for a social media post with a #metoo hashtag, making the poem do the work of communicating compassion and
83 respect for the original poet, at the same time as expanding this respect to other women, victims of sexual violence, other victims of violence.
Roberts-Orr demonstrates that you can literally insert/include yourself into the poem by writing an adapted version of the original poem. She is suggesting that memories or knowledge of others will be triggered by reading this poem. The form – the original poem, the original idea to write about rape in a different way – can be endlessly updated by the reader’s own thought-processes or responses. There are direct homages as well as substitutions throughout the poem. The key motif of the ‘joke’ is repeated throughout and is treated similarly to Lockwood’s usage in terms of switching between the ‘joke’ being a personified act of rape and the person who has perpetrated this (in both cases, a man with some sort of relationship to the poetic ‘I’ voice). There is a difference between Lockwood’s Joke adjusting his goatee in the mirror, from which we are meant to experience a horrified kind of dark humour (as in caricature) and Roberts-Orr’s ‘good boyfriend’ giving over his choice of prom outfit to his partner. Roberts-Orr’s poem is more earnest and in being so writes back in some of the pathos that Lockwood undercuts with her use of humour.
The poem locates itself in time and feminist history by using an established, high-profile poem as a model. Roberts-Orr may be performing a repetition that attempts to make a specific point regarding the ubiquity of rape that we still need to convey, or restage a feminist poem, in a way that has been done before in order to keep the message active and alive and ensure that feminist poetry is telling us these messages as a priority. It is a single- message poem, but it enacts an idea that the work of calling out violence is never done. This mimics the #metoo movement in its poetic act, as well as paying tribute in the same way that many #metoo stories posted on social media sound similar and in some cases could be read as interchangeable, but are made powerful by their repetition and number. This similarity underlines the point the movement is making, as a mass statement: a repeated message, re-created and also individually authored, and shared for maximum impact (Pazzaneze & Walsh, 2017).
Roberts-Orr’s poem supports my thesis that vintage feminism is a way of viewing and writing-in feminist histories in order to demonstrate the poem’s knowledge of what’s come before and thus demonstrate a feminist lineage. It does this by providing a model for
84 bringing feminist materials of various eras closer together by placing them in tight proximity within the one poem (or suite of poems). It pays attention to what it’s sourcing and from whom. Additionally, the titling ‘An Imagined Stand-up Set’ amplifies the original title from one joke (akin to one singular calling-out of a rape) to a whole public comedy act, so to speak; the joke suggests a one-off event, to be repeated if the joke is retold. The second poem stages this as a public and sustained performance. It claims more space, it takes up more time and it has an audience.
In the case of my creative artefact Moxie, this is carried out by the use of poetic styling and upcycling, where my own words are styled with materials from other sources. When writing about the office I create in Moxie, the process of sourcing means reading for lines that describe identity construction, quest-like moments or clothing described as though it is armour or costume. I watch a clip of the opening sequence of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, pausing on her driving into her new town with the lyric ‘You’re gonna make it after all’ on repeat, or I dip again into a biography of Helen Gurley Brown, founder of Cosmopolitan magazine, and re-read a scene where she meets with feminist protesters who oppose the magazine (a poet who was present reported that she took off her jewellery and sat down cross-legged on the floor with the women to negotiate). As described above, sometimes these are direct quotes, things that others have said or written. I use these found materials from texts displaying women at work, women in engagement with feminism or social histories of women. This closes a perceived gap between feminist waves; it writes around the need to treat feminist history as a knowable, chronological history. It does this by disrupting narratives of feminist chronology and creating space alongside existing metaphors of feminist waves and inheritances. The poems leverage and make use of feminist materials that may belong to any feminist era. I am not proposing that as a poet- researcher I can be outside of the feminist wave metaphor; I am proposing an alternative method to navigate it, to open possibilities and broaden the scope of feminist poetics.
85 Conclusion
My intention to broaden and open the scope of feminist poetics was sparked by my own recognition that the style of feminist poetry cannot be easily assumed; as such, it has the potential to be misunderstood in its intentions. My dissertation describes the accumulation of insights I reached – as well as those resolutions I didn’t reach - in seeking answers to how I could make feminist poetry that accounts for itself.
Experimenting with Lyric ‘I’ – poet self, decentred self, and towards a speculative self - ultimately led me to the decentred self, opening onto the evocation of multiple voices, made material through my use of found texts. This has potential to read more multiple voices into poems that appear to be (or may have been assumed to be) a singular voice, due to the presence of the ‘I’ pronoun.
Specifically, I sought to demonstrate that a poet’s identity was not necessarily the key to understanding their poetry as feminist. Establishing a community of practice by way of affinity, rather than of hierarchical, temporal or otherwise sequential arrangement of poets in a field of feminist poetry has offered me the critical and creative potential to create links between different poets’ texts. Additionally, models of understanding affinities, which de- prioritise precedents or traditions, create more space within a genre such as feminist poetry; the example I draw this from is Downes’ used of the term ‘affinity’ itself, to describe a network of poetic epic texts authored by women over a span of centuries, and across the world. As mentioned in the introduction, my scope differs from Downes’ in that my research of feminism and feminist poetry is Anglophone and Western in focus, however the concept of affinity is deployed to the same end; to demonstrate networks between poetic texts.
Moxie ‘thinks through’ feminism, and in doing so, sources and samples from feminism as a deep historic source of ideas and material. It uses these materials to write and ‘style’ poems that enact ways of being and seeks to suggest feminist themes to readers. I cannot know whether the two types of material I’ve used – my own words and others’ – carry the same level of affect. Nor can I know whether they meet my aims of carrying and demonstrating their feminism through language in a manner that the reader can access, whilst also explicitly seeking to experiment with feminism in poetry, via form and metaphor.
86 However, in doing so, I welcome the debate that a reader might fight themselves having in response to these affects.
Moxie does not explicitly reveal my own feminist politics; it gestures towards them, and I offer clues to them by using poetic strategies that align with third-wave feminist politics, and by positioning myself in a feminist genealogy by references to my age. It also seeks to enact a poetic ‘I’ that expresses multiple selves (via first being decentred, as per Finch’s term). Finally, it draws other voices into the work, providing a kaleidoscopic effect in place of a singular voice seeking witness to (her) experiences. The feminism of Moxie comes from a number of sources, and seeks to describe ‘finding one’s way’ (‘making it’, as Harragan would say) in a manner that doesn’t necessarily have its roots in feminist philosophy, but from my own experience of needing to cobble together feminist strategies from others’ hard-won knowledge. The title, Moxie, suggests energy and action rather than referring to a person or character; it suggests ‘hustle’, a measure of shrewdness, and survival.
In this way, Moxie meets my intention towards the creation of feminist poetry that does not rely on the ‘sex of the author’, or ‘knowing who the author is’, as Elizabeth Grosz writes.
Paradoxically, this may also be the reason the work may not be read as feminist poetry. If the reader has difficulty locating the ‘I’ or the voice of the work (or if they assume there is one, singular voice within the poetry), it may prove difficult to connect the work to feminism. Regarding feminism, the field this one word now describes is a veritable universe of potential meaning, with stakes that are political and philosophical, and that span urgent, global concerns right through to (as always) the very personal. Therefore, locating the feminism of Moxie may elude any reader who operates from a different part of said feminist universe.
Where Moxie succeeds is in explicating a feminist poetics that recognises the impossibility of addressing all of feminism, all at once. Where it fails is in doing the same; failing to locate, name and attempt to encompass the enormity of the project of feminism. Instead, it offers a practice-based model for sourcing, recycling, upcycling, and styling of feminist- aligned words and feminist ideas as a way to look at feminism – to look at materials that may be familiar - from different angles.
87 My own research has led me to demonstrate that going beyond my own words – to found text, others’ words – is one method to show a feminist genealogy within a poem. It also opens the way to a deeper emphasis on conversation within a poem. What I mean by this, is the introduction of debate, in poem form, by further use of multiple voices and diversity of citational source materials or found materials. As far as my research led me, this straddles my intention of seeking a way to both stretch the definition of feminist poetry and also provide reference points as to some of its feminist origins. In doing so, it contributes to fields of scholarship that encompass feminist subjectivity, creative practice research enquiry, experimental poetics, feminist poetry, citational poetry, lyric poetry, found and intertextual poetry, and contemporary feminist politics.
In the spirit of my own preference for creative innovation in poetry, future research that would build on this work could investigate a speculative feminist self, as a way of negotiating with and furthering the capacity for invoking the first-person subject in a feminist poem. My research has attempted to trace a line away from one’s own lived identity as being the precursor to writing a feminist poem, and towards a poetics where various lives, various texts (including fictional), observations, theories and ideas may all have equal potential currency in representing feminist viewpoints. Like Harragan, I have collected small fragments, asides and observations over time in my journey towards a feminist self rather than only relying upon critical and philosophical literature. I would like to imagine a feminist poetics with room for even more speculative expression and intervention, with licence to engage in poetic proposition. There is much to be explored: what voices are yet to be sourced? How might a poem contain intersectional feminisms? How might the #metoo movement be represented by poetry? What form might the poetry take? Are there other material ways to understand a poem as feminist? Whose feminism is yet to be referenced?
Vintage feminism is a method for giving voice to feminist selves via materials styled together with purpose, through poetry. This is intended as a method that can be taken up by others, and as such contributes the notion of ‘styling’ as an endlessly generative mode of poetry creation. I offer this to other poets, as my own contribution to a cycle of inheritances in the field of feminist poetry.
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93 Plumly, Stanley. 2003. “Narrative Value, Lyric Imperatives.” The American Poetry Review no. 5: 33- 50.
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95 Moxie Melinda Bufton
Scramble Your Signals to Protect Your Plans
Be careful where you place the symbols. See, that time I went to Art after Dark and tried on the moon musk perfume in the gift shop. I don’t mind being married to my career and I don’t expect it to hold me in bed as I sleep, I just don’t want to settle I also imbibed quite a lot of the JPG exhibition I’d gone there for ̶ slantily ̶ and purchased a small pair of legs in brooch form. It had been a tough year. My bearings were if not broken then skewed hellishly close to hypertension. The breathing under my hillocks knotty at best. If I’d admired the European techno under the stained glass roof I would’ve died with pleasure spots encircled round my pupils. As it was, in buying the small legs which drew a charming (small picture) of my own legs (encased in spicy nets)
1
meant that that brand of Voodoo tights ’I d been buying on repeat for three years were at that moment being discontinued. What a crap scenario. I was to look for alternatives across the summer, little did I know that instead I would stop wearing them. The intrinsic nature of torn and shredded denim does The blue jeans cometh. And the sequential pairs of grey Deuce sneakers. not translate well to a professional office look.
This is the spell that has undone me. Now, on the 1st of the 11 of the 17th year here I come down with heaven’s downpour if heaven were a seamless wraith, trying very hard to smile most of the time. The technicolour has returned, and the peaches to my cheeks are only hours away. So mote it be.
2
‘The Jobless Edit’
Those were the shoes I bought after my redundancy, stepping out into the spring sun each day with questions marks scribbled all over my countenance. Perhaps a big one dangling like a button over my head, halo. Every day I wore the same thingos. Rubbery lace shoes. Grey unyielding jeans That same black t-shirt with edges. Indeed. There’s no such thing as a maryjane. There were several ways to unquash my head. How could all that was important just days ago pfft like a powder puff. Time to be an artist. And yet no smock. Do you still wear dresses? said my friend from work. When I am blue, I don’t say. When I need to feel the restrictions again in order to know how far I’ve come. Yet this detox will never work. Like food addiction. You need to eat so you will never conquer this. My quest to earn was internal and external. There is a small bag in the bedroom, it’s a plastic bag full of the things you have brought home from your workspace.
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It’s only in the movies that people take out a box with a plant on top. But also, the ticket to freedom felt wet like angel cake and heavy like a demon. There she goes folks, the duality pops again. Do you remember close to the end, when you attended that meeting with the PVC – Ms Name-Initial-Name – and you were taken aback at how mermaid her Italian knit slubby suit was and how charmingly right her matching nail polish and you lost focus for 1-maybe-two seconds, she took off marks re your lack of understanding of VE because ‘you used the wrong language’. I had. I was slipping in my energies. I also believe the comely powers of a heel can heal everything and in that particular meeting as the dust motes spun along the board room table and I wondered at my gently dangling jelly-knelt future, in that meeting I was in Helen worked on her own issues but she never worked them out. Her insecurity was cellular, so much a part of her flats. that it was practically its own organ. Due to that excited skip I had made down the aisles of the Dan Murphy’s anticipating the first drink’s first tingling burn and had torn my monkey muscle in the step-top ball-change, some days before. Anterior challenges are not what we expect.
4
Mirror Stage
Easy to mock the fax machine, facsimile was so un-trenched in desire. The top sliced completely off. The way we were was inky. The digital platforms crowd usefully amongst us as we try to say we are happy for the robots’ arrival. Meantime the matching project continues. The rooms have been named for women; ‘Medusa is the point where the strands meet. Our policy here at Medusa is […] they are brass-plating the legacies on, now, in the corri- no party headquarters, no policy documents, no book of rules. ‘ dors of hell. Come on now. Let’s not pretend it was fun. It was ‘You must have some sanctions’ said another male journalist. blood sport. But kinder on the carapace, and with less ignominious ‘We have a policy of constructive self-criticisms,’, said Stephie. plans, less awakened trysts and placed atop the cherry icing. Like cosmic children they were led into the boardroom like it was a safe space for dreams. Not wrong but not
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the fulcrum. Might be now my cherry time. I can be glib about usefulness. God my restrictions. I dance through the mentors with nary a breath. I can’t handle neatness and aplomb in the same room as one another. You ask me to decorate this document with enticing remarks. I wallpaper it with quotes I have manufactured regarding The Toner Queen the quality of your ideas. She saw an opportunity for printer toner, seized it, and cofound- ed one of the fastest growing companies in the Midwest. Nicole Meet me at the Japanese emporium became known in the industry and around Chicago as ‘The Ton- er Queen’. I’ll tell you what I know about the plans… I know nothing about the plans. What plans? Did you hear the new Director.
6
Ask Forgiveness Not Permission
Prithee pass the sidewinder, the normcore of my altitude. I got briefed while staring idly at my own chest, which sat above the documents before me. Someone had typed up a series of briefing notes that went like ‘we’re not sure of the scope The copy reads ‘You can’t set her free. But you can make her feel less anxious’. In 1972, one of Australia’s largest advertising firms, as yet, we will need to feel our way’. There is a lot of support for this project. George Patterson, released a report which summed up the female You will need to speak to a few people. There are key people. market this way: Gimlet eyed you stare outwards and see the devil girl on a branch she is waiting for you to come play. Don’t be good, office lady! Don’t be bad. You scotch up the first page with your eyes at the in-tray none of that matters. What is seen to be happening is the seen to be doing, and pleasant all about the effort. What outcomes? Are they free? She is ratty with the ideas she can place
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Can you do a one-pager to send out when people are interested and a longer more calculated explanation of why we do why we do. There are a number of benefits. Here are the stakeholders now, unlit as a silent night, backlit so you can see their silhouettes how now frown stakeholders.
I sometimes find myself thinking that if the worst comes to the worst , I can always earn a living by my hands.
All you have in the end is
your labour.
8
Public Appearances Build Prestige
People network at me now. there is the curious slip, request sliding into bask, or intended, from across the ethernets. I want them to want me. Let’s make it smoky;
We take a line from the great contrarian songbook
It is 10am in the steam box, and latte vapors swish our
Pores like hot attacks to our keeping nerve. Base level this could be taken care of in three mins, it always can. It’s the dance that’s important, and the way you lick your spoon after stirring the milk froth into tricky peaks. Time is honey.
Watch me through your fingers as you hold them in your imagination before your eyes.
We parle parle re the current strategic shifts in big picture terms, it’s the leadup.
Glancing is an art when done professionally. You have taken some hits in recent times and present like damaged bantam weight. The cut on your lip still fresh but when you must gasp with intake of breath through sharp pain, you cut a tight chest.
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Buttonweight is When did you begin to put the pieces together? Perhaps when you put the pieces back together you are putting yourself back together. not my style. We assemble something.
This tangy heaven between what u want what I want what’s not shared poses brakes of longing more stylee than your Chelsea boots.
What now your arms’ length you say. I have an arm as long as all get-out.
You can’t even see when my fingers end.
I take the receipt to claim it on tax. You have put the first deposit down towards clemency in the realm of my influence. Boy star, keep it in mind.
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Colours are Ambivalent
This can be one aspect or slice that I present to you as a contained snack, on a plate that will not jar in its pattern. She invited my worldly self in nonetheless...
In one week I produced two bios of different worlds and reveled in how regular I sounded.
In the one in the other; endless relief at the output of poems not looking too disrupted.
In the realm of my displaced-self I want a continuous narrative. My baptism by fire helped me to find comfort in many different environments How funny I have always thought that an artist’s CV is so plain and you’re meant to get extra points for the continuity of story, and something in for each year, or close.
And yet this is the constructed world – both you, and the work – striving to achieve something the commerce devil world has known for ever does not exist. RESUME does not mean history of my life, and
this is the term you use over on this side. Work of my life, what a tease.
In the small enclave a border in the brain.
You will divide off what you are willing to do for the coin and what not. 11
Skeleton Key
People who believed in their education had a risk of becoming snobbish but poor. I came fom a long line of merchants and shepherdsfolk but dearly wanted to have power and wear a suit. Neither I had ever done and in part lay the allure of that pretty duo. Fortunately I had no idea what one would do in an office because popular culture does not help out with the details. Before the dawning of the information worker I had a fearful but hopeful hunch I could make cash from my wits. Twist and turn Humour isn’t a new tactic[…] It was used by the suffragettes when they posted them- away from actual professions each time they nipped selves as a letter to Downing Street... my heels. Sought out something so vague I could always lay my head on my pillow at night and say I’d done it. The sales targets of my family’s travails were impossible to take in their concrete face; indeed I tested those waters for long enough and anyway, was reminded each time I stepped into the watch repair counter that haters will hate.
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Company Policies on Getting Laid
Documentation is a feminist project; a life project On the day that I come across Poetry is not a project by Dorothea Lasky I have also been perusing a ‘Six methods to perfect your to-do list and get organised’ which introduce me to The Action Method, amongst others (ivy lee method, Eisenhower box, note card to-do list method) and it turned out that ‘The Action Method begins with a simple premise: everything is a project. Every project can then be broken down into three components: Action Steps, References and Backburner item’. It is to ‘help you live and work with a bias toward action’. This is a bias like a bias binding, all the way round a rounded, difficult seam. When you say project, what exactly do you mean?
To get ready often means being prepared to be undone. In time, with work, things begin to make more sense.
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Inspiration-ality
Sashay the idea in before they can’t explain themselves. ‘I did three years in this project, documenting every success-bomb. It took me a wide-eyed eternity to see that the fresh-lipped certainty was nothing on the value of the known. Erotic capital is multifaceted. Quantity is not quality, but people want the fresh in their salads, not core business.’ She moused awake her screen with a gentle tszuj and she opened it, showed me her bookmarks, which were interleaved with pages of draft modules of the kind that people send to others, once their variegated leaves are seen for what it’s worth.
What is it worth? Not everyone knew, for instance, that she grew up She sits on her tuffet of salary “without much money”. and waits for the feedback.
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Always Collect Your Earned Medallions On occasion your whore it up a bit I can look at myself without shame (but with endless bills to pay) be- cause I circumvented the exploitation rampant in my industry, some- For a strategic move. Two of the panel how. like you. The third is the boss-in-waiting, But what do I tell my students? luxury choices at her feet. She has triaged all her emotion out of the skin, so that you are left For nature, in which they are locked up under the pretext of being eternalised, is with husky shank. She learned to do it nothing but Usage. years ago when her heartbeat drew men like mosquitos to her warm. Like, you cannot unturn the beauty of a young neck. How do you drain the sex out just for the business hours? She did her job, breasts remaining tacit while she rocked a series of big sensible glasses. She waited to get older. and for her brain to tighten against whimsy. The Beloved Ego in the plummy light You, on the other hand, have fought the good war of the is you. When I see you in that light, precariat, for a veteran’s length. Anticipating being ripped out I desire all that has been kept from me etcetera. By the professional roots, you became the mainstay of contract skip-hop. Arbitrary gangsta. Miscellany. Loose.
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Gold Dust
Archival searches yield straw, gold dust
This is the time when parts got jaggy and wander trust becomes your Idlewild
I pore the deliverables with scathy eye. This letter makes no sense, I don’t know why they’re changing the terms. Lisbeth, changing the terms of reference we’ll need to draft a response.
This is the counter lob that I wait in thought for. Times are to pace my office carpets and bring the forty container loads in limbo. This is not the delivery we need. This is not the end-to-end slip-point that was contained, that was amended.
The Terms-of-reference is holey and I need a darning need le the size of what
To make this hold. How then the international markets, just in terms of bilateral understandings. We don’t want too much of their help to risk beholden…
Filthy in the pick and mix We must admit to ourselves that success under this system is suspect Secret jar in top drawer
Languishing in cognac when the client is buying and the meeting must save.
That 30% yield takes care of the quarter and my rising blush takes care of the consumption.
Later in the taxi car I slip off my shoes because they hurt me in the place I can bear most.
But hot cramp will out.
It is not an unstoppable feed.
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My feet, daily my sharp course in order to gain the four inch advantage.
The flats make me too rapid First greet the queen. and the board members must go down to my pace
My little test of how I’m doing.
Deportment at the Gaming Table, conspicuous dart.
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Five minutes ago is my worst nightmare (Sophie Amoruso’s Lion Park)
Sophia Amoruso in a beat up (cardigan) All gone into animal rights she once read a biography of Brigitte Bardo Or at least the blurb on the scruff-hearted back
And now she knows the biz. No wait, See how my Aphrodite, child of Zeus, is disrespecting me how did we start history? for being lame
The capitalists are taking all my stock again. The lions are restless and if nobody looks after This flock, the lambs are fucked. Brigitte taught her how to go fetch. I was a dumpster diver too, says B, all the way across the centuries. Sophia knows she can keep her hair the same even when she is a compagne road map of lines cross her gorgeous witch face.
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A mud map of ideas ‘I am what I say you are’ she calls as she winds a ribbon in a Pekinese My cousin pulls all-nighters in the design office she has talked her way into again Sophia says ‘Baby, pull the assholes inside out of a porthole at winter, and you’ll know who’s girlboss then?!’
A satisfied person has never seen a Goliath and dared to craft a perfect slingshot The lions paw at their furlined whatsits and wonder when they’ll see the operations plan, let alone the prospectus for the float that’s apparently ‘at the printer you guys, I need special gloss on the cover that takes hours to dry?!’ When Richard Branson needed tubular bells for Mike Oldfield, his accountant queried the receipt. It’s just the same but bitchier. Come over here my leo friends we don’t know how we got here
But it tastes so good.
19 Acquisitive, Adjusted
‘I’ve never known more words for ‘planning’ in my life. But, herewith I've been given my own budget, my carte blanch directives.’ Is it the boss? No it’s the big boss my boss’s boss. Ah. You can’t skip out on that. Command and control grabs you by the wrist even with these slippery hierarchs. While you walk to the ladies you think up new ways to write the email so it’s a foregone. You want no part in email daisy-chain forbearant play. Meanwhile, the communications co-ord cannot believe her luck at 1200 dollars just found in the budget by the wiley controller. ‘It was “unaccounted for”. This translates to available for me. I’m sitting pretty right now. Grew my project by 320 per cent this year.’
No is easy. ‘Not yet’ is a cakewalk’. ‘Maybe but probably not’ is our delicious She will not engage in the hair splitting. bread and butter. She will take the figures and round up.
20
Face-offs at the Line of Scrimmage
The humblebrag has become something new it’s devolved into a stickier jam that has the perpetrator willingly lying prone with underground under- whelm. I sacrificed authenticity for safety and it worked. You have to look bored in your most momentous announcements. Like when a roast chicken recipe calls for ‘buttering under the skin’ and you wonder how this happens. How to lift and claim a space but leave it Right from the beginning, the assumption was that silkily intact. work was a good thing, a fulfilling thing, that we were missing out on. I guess at some point trusting that this heady and base existence unfolds in the direction it should. (should – said my counsellor friend – is closely aligned with shame, remember by how they start with shhhhhhhh)
21
Office Décor is a Tip-Off
Oh boy she says. All day she was wrangling with getting office chairs that complied with standards. Both internal, public-service friendly chattels of the right adjustment potential, and the external squeeze of the budget as it moved further away like the most come hither finger.
We must stop telling each other stories that equate money with value Money mirage.
The internal intelligence existed, but each time you begin a task again you must reinvent that wheel with patient alacrity. The people who did those jobs once have slid down a shute, Respect, like money, is not given until it is applied for. never to fill a form to No is often an invoice for respect. its dry hard full state again. Fill in all sections. Phone someone to get the right phrase to fill into that section. There is a code that must be cracked for this or it will trick you down the river. A shadow across your heart and then the cheering wash of thought, later on the train, when a coming pay increase is recalled. Yes please my pussycat.
22
Stacy London on Styling the Life of Your Dreams with Lewis Howes [Aka ‘Comparison is the thief of Joy’]
[‘ you know we are this amazing arrangement of atoms’] At 50.02 Stacy London’s head becomes illuminated Bathed in the glow of possible as she talks about Being at the start of a phase. It is powerful fluff, and nothing to be downcast. I wish and want this kind of sun streaming into my brain-skin. I want this trust in the process. I want to style my best life. I have reverted to the ordinance frame, or just the way I make you feel. Parlay your greatest hopes into an observant chatter, alright. See me this and raise me an acorn. This rei of light is amongst the gnarliest objects in your armory.
Ok. So, 15 mins. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do I can withstand all manner of speaking here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in speaking thus (your wonder current). vain through one’s marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act At everyone’s twenty-first into which one had been shamed.
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At everyone’s ceremonial behest you danced to sweetness and light and tugged those furtive forelocks the way that we came licenced. Southpaw in the undergrowth, she wears it well; Horology lights her cognisant craze.
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New criteria for specified heights
The clear-headed gamester can bypass the thicket of job abstractions which masquerade as worthy goals
Filing the thicket,
Never to the end. I’ll get a girl for that no wait.
Do I take her on release her into this paper …. gorm wire, the part to play here is the neat citizen of the tidy space. When there are more files, we order more filing cabinets.
The glass ceiling allows women to see what goes on We lock them and swirl them around like busy chambers with no mouth. No rumours. at the top but does not
The best sentinels allow them to reach no advice. Measure the stacks of the neat-o documents create rules for their resting places.
More than A-Z and less than Company chambers. I have stood filling the thicket, and it is my penance for asking re more tasty work.
Or, no: it will come because it is the by-product of the visual proof required to ease the minds who are not sure what it is we produce.
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I have stood at the cabinets. If I can retrieve the page at the right time that’s required, I am a good terrier with impeccable training.
We’ve been expecting you.
Mass arrears do apply to this sphere, though blank faces are met when queried re the content. If I put a girl on this and then she grows
We have no room on the executive floor, let alone a key to the centre.
The upper prestige boundary—the tolera- ble-effort boundary— is determined by the amount of effort a person is willing to exer- cise in pursuit of a desired high-prestige occupation, and the lower one—the tolera- ble-level boundary—is determined by the lowest level of prestige the person is will- ing to accept. The tolerable sex-type boundary reflects the degree of masculini- ty or femininity of occupation the person will accept.
The theory is thus
a theory of acceptable
career
boundaries.
26
Teenage Secretaries
Which sounds like porn or what-have-you. My dad even had one, Her name was Tiffany and he shared her With another life insurance salesman. I read that Jasmine Sewell the fashion buyer And Influencer Left school at 16 to be secretary to a real estate magnate and I exclaim ‘yes! Go you tough biscuit!’ If you’re old enough, you had other girls leave school out of your year 10 class and go and work down the road as a junior secretary. This girl called Colleen mucked around in legal studies as she’d secured a job such as this. She had to work out her notice period of school, as it were. (what was that about…legal requirement?…Friday at school then Monday at the new job, otherwise unaccounted-for delinquent?) One day she came back, on her lunchbreak, and hung over the school fence to chat with whomever was around. It wasn’t clear whether she missed us or wanted us to see her Sportsgirl suit, her burgundy handbag.
27
Consultation Period
Eyelashes curled round your incendiary tanlines, I watch and wait as you unfurl the bragdown, taking your time to get to the point. Patience is my white light; I will get my direction.
Business look makeup tutorial—ALEXACHUNG
28
What’s a Job, Anyway? We must raise both the ceiling and the floor. (Tavi Gevinson’s apartment versus Reality Tuttle’s apartment.)
They are not the same. Tavi Gevinson at the Met Ball in her Coach dress. SHE PUTS HER JOURNALS AND OTHER WRITING NOTEPADS AND OTHER WORK IN A SAFE That is epic. It’s made by Bunny Lake Films. Good. (It turns out there are a finite number of ways to create piecey waves. nearly always beginning with serum) Other things of the week The magic tools of asking men to listen to another women when she’s trying to speak which I call ‘the power of Incey’ (after the spider) And the other, the founder of Spanx who now that she’s rich as fuck says to her Investors, or other people wanting in, ‘let me see what my instincts say and I’ll get back to you. I feel like some sadnesses that hadn’t been previously addressed, still haven’t. Try and get some PD and some rest, sweet.
29
Some Things To Action
Waves of fresh thinking, Social media archetypes The things that could harken; that I use Washi tape to hold in place my forehead. How will I know burnout if it taps me on the thigh? Where is my mind? 16 ways to get to the top. Faster. A costing for my quarter life. Breezing by are the comms girl from the electro daddy. I will never know when I’m finished? What about it angel socks
30
how you going with your flim-flam strategy? These were softer claims past a seasoned interlock of bare-nested plays. Sardonic Is all you have left, or whispy is your principle. This is a play-for-play situation and hoary as a furry throat lozenge from the
By almost a score. Her career is the same length bottom of your bag, caught short. as a millennial’s life span. Restfully washed and emerged from the thicket of the admin lounge, we learn songs our tongues have never wrapped onto. Is this the million harps we expected in our wake? They lift our suites and shine torches on our pearly assets to see if
31
we’re telling. telling what? These jobs are no fun. Harpies of the claims to sureity. Let’s put on a show. Peopled as we are with sanctimonious claims, this is what’s known as a minimiser. though she herself
Is
decidedly un-millennial.
There’s something magnificent
about her
social media
disengagement.
32
Sure sure, but no.
Here we see a group of employees in the Discovery phase. Note the There is a generation gap btw the older, most hallmarks: openness, dialogue, confidence, flexibility, teamwork. esteemed performance artist And a lucid, non-defensive assessment of capabilities. and this shining tribe of collecteds. (those stitchy fillers, her lips propped about your psyche). She is so sure of her practice. I want to love her whole blanched almond. The kids just want to develop stuff on their little macs. This would be fine if it were fine. But it’s a really visible publicly privately funded art project, with collaboration and doing-while-people-watch kind of deal. One girl comports a mattress. In another moment, it’s 1979 in somewhere that looks like Bacchus Marsh, the godforsaken thistle country with dry grass and tank water. And artists. So much artist, who just by witnessing each others’ acts with Intensity and later with beaujolais, it all comes together.
33
What now the gritty pitch? A pitch is not doing. A pitch is a carefully crafted statement that we have trained them from babes to pop, in order to get validations of my feelz. The exposure without time to craft hurts like the one person who went to the country in the kombi but actually, has never yet produced any art. Or not any that she is happy to stand by. Later she would become something like an art teacher, or an arts manager or an insomniac.
34
Salary or bust
She had a friend who concocted a new idea for her career. It was called extreme limitations. She created this dastard plan where she was now only allowed the careers of her childhood dreams. This left ‘academic’ And ‘hairdresser’. She hoped to manifest it through some means not yet clarified.
35
(Already dead: making money from a blog, crowdfunding, lip service, patronage. Still possible: blind revolt, faith, earjacking, mindjacking) This is not the rational way forward. Expect the pleasance bomb. When she was 5 she heard the phrase ‘twist of Fate’ one too many. And thought it meant a mind flip of headonist proportions. Like if you pray hard enough you get the pony.
36
‘I used to hitch my Wagon to any old charismatic nut Who wanted to lead the Charge. Gorgeous girls he bleeding tiger of ratified claims did not help me leave the year with my Whole Best Self. Or enough. ‘When you put up your hand for Women in Leadership, what did you expect?’
37
Symbolic meanings of windows and walls
Hanging from the window with sprung attitude all aplenty you do not know which way is up. But you forge through the moss of your recent dream state. Experience, our identity-bound students retort, offers precision about the realities of women’s complicated lives and so each morning I wake up Demonstrate the feminism’s political power arises from as I put on my makeup Consciousness born in the materiality of the everyday.
I say a little ballad for the self Methodologically, this produces strange effects I’m to become. Today. Mantra this, bitch Juicy from the undergrowth of emails that grow like blackberries, pretty to the auditors but sharp with their kuwai greatness. You do a course on email management it makes you stick your eye with fork/nothing happens under the desk where you have commando-fled. Ha. Not not really. You just want to. Each time you arrive in the office the lickety split, this is hard. I need to scope the project that hasn’t been defined yet. Another day, another deelio.
38
Don’t garble the locality message
Plurally I have the answers; alone I have none. This is not the way you should be calling me when I’m ahead of the game pack. Even as I must replay the trickle effect: most of it’s folklore and the dimensions sublime. Sublimate is the way to go Whether this is spreadeagle or whether it’s chaste. If this work keeps its legs together We’ll all win. The price goes up the payout’s fantastic.
What would it take to get you to come on board?
39
Watch your Timing
On-boarding. Are you trying to find the truth, or further your agenda? The viscous can lay amongst the scattered When or how will information be deemed valid by you? packaging that the rolodex came in. Are you afraid of the consequences of any information?
Can you tell who will hoard their snacks Are there any self-imposed obstacles keeping you from getting accurate information? or in what kind of equipage. What question runs through your mind several times a day?
40
Use High-Power Binoculars, Not a Microscope
Many signs of budget tangles alight like bouncy pony taily hairbands that have been sprung off by strong follicles. Remember when hair was so big that it was hard to contain. Remember when you were likely to out your own foibles as quickly like the most building capacity? It’s like creating a cave from a peach where There’s a lot of delicious soft flesh you must scoop with a sterling silver spoon. You discard the flesh knowing you will be hungry later. You have no place to store it and anyway even as you go each shimmering mouthful starts to flay, begins its awkward descent into brown. Gooier and sweeter and nowhere to store it. Later you will wish for it hard but it’s too late. You scoop the hole out and then now you have a cavity to sneak into.
41
The walls of the peach can yield if necessary and you can push a long way til They split. Also you can hold the husk as a careful marker and anchor of where you’ve been and where you might go. There is no budget. We’ve applied for some budget from the new fund. It has a more optimistic name and more chambers to hide within. Later we can also rewrite what is original intentions were. It’s that elastic.
But almost every day a moment comes when I remember all my previous jobs—so many years of trying this, trying that. I even sold crepes from a cart one summer. Forgot to mention that. I’m proud of our success, of course. My sister and I have worked hard to get where we are at. But I also realise things could have turned out differently. W
We rode a pair of trends I’d love to claim we anticipated in full, but in fact we did not.
42
Counter Their Sneak Plays
We swing so close to cliché when we invoke the characters of the halls. The truth is a giant scallop, in a dream, where the rules are you must carry it with only two fingers of each hand with a hyperballad playing as soundtrack and a ghost puppet you’ve never seen before dolling out life rules like some makeover show queen (you want him to tell you, you can’t bear for him to tell you). The features of characters sharpen up towards archetypes and you run them down with example. Truth: I have never seen a ‘mega-bitch’ trying to run a department. Truth: yes people sometimes believe a copy of Leaning In plus the Marie Claire ‘career pages’ will bring them to good. Truth: a dabble in a bounty of [professions] hard and fast before you’re thirty can leach into mess-tacular. Messy brand, messy mind. Or, rather the more creative space as long as you can tuck it into something useful. She wrote the phrase ‘young, tight-knit team’ and was hit with something worrying about the phraseology. Hit me up, young tighties. I want your back. To have your back. I want to meet you so I care about your career/s progression/s. Best boss eva.
43
‘Scoring’ Is the Broad Connection
The meanest versions can
Even if we have lost he revolutionary spirit that propelled us, perhaps we can still boldly “parse its promise” with an eye to rethinking its categories of analysis. come from those who’ve brushed up against the working class then rescued themselves out of it, clean as a prizewinner. Insisting their own skills like some sort of anointed headwear.
44
Investigating Australian corporate culture, Sinclair (1994,1998) found that the ‘great man’ or ‘hero’ still Industria dominated the criteria for leadership positions. Any- one embarking of a mission to gain membership of the executive culture was considered to be on
Aspire like your life depends on it a Ulysses-like journey full of grand-scale trials of because it does. Change management unpicks the dead. The heart endurance and tests of strength—the modern day has its pleasure and the fingers, mindset at the keyboard. It’s early. equivalent of You are there before the others. Johnny-come-lately this fate unfolder, the heroic quest! the lazy kinks are post-truth. What you are getting today peals the new structure.
It has ambiguous rooms and largish pockets.
The pockets are best for strategic aspects that have not yet been mapped. You name this with something capitalised and embed this mindfully while serving up other text of this movement. As you sip the next big thing in dandelion heart-start stars gambol from this sleepy player, your critical function.
Where the alchemists removed layers, a similar rhizome grew but ends rescues by destiny; ‘the universal promotion’.
45
Our collective engine fires lanky, gagged shots with a ghost-bidden cordite. We cannot tell because pressing send is so down with conspiracy, and comely splendour of articulated mess. You choose your words like a compositor, each specimen carrying the weight of hope and her probables. Can you offset this demon lode, this removal of all refs to your dept, your profession, your role, the barcode you have instilled inside your wrist (in latin). The policy change drags in a direction away from your livelihood and you create this written wording in shaded aspect to your seniors, who have commissioned with hands quick on handsets, their throats thick with dire.
They are beguiling times when you weave enough non-ferrous materials amongst the axioms and the cosmos. What of the cosmos?
46
The org chart is an Atlantic map, it is melting Antarctica ice masses breaking, bergs beneath the surface. The melt metaphor designs our feelings. Decisions float in and out of my consciousness as I tamp them down with viognier and your thousand-yard stare.
It’s a beautiful evening in the after-hours world, kitten at our feet and ripped t-shirts sunk like impetuous suede on the lovelorn jeans we never throw out.
Feminist experimentalists were even more thoroughly exclud- ed from narratives—and anthologies of feminist writing be- cause the dominant feminist aesthetic located feminist activi- ty in poetic content rather than form,
Insisting on the importance of
accessible reportage
and
authentic personal testimony
47
The ‘X’ Factor That Can Even The Odds
Is it easier to let go of this Saturated bliss you find yourself jewels-deep in? When looking for a new look it has tendrils escaping through your intentions all over the online plan. Yes I trust the Scandinavian stylist I have recently subscribed to, she has the only power base worth crying over (privately, in sacrosanct). I’m sure I have a poem worth about 27 lines. Delicate moment you come back to the height of your dreams and time has melted away that refined adhesive. Welcome to the new Man Repeller series “Office Dress Code Makeover”, in These are not lyfe goals these are more which stringent office dress-code regulations are met with creative, definition- stretching solutions! See how @leandramcoen styled Honey Debelle, 27— who It-looks-nice-if-you’re-cute-looks-nice works at a strategic communications firm that specializes in crisis PR manage- if-you’re-cute. Yeah? ment—in a way that made “corporate casual” do a backflip (swipe), link in bio I guess it’s time for denim platforms. Again. You chickadees line the streetbeds in competition with the world.
48
Artistry has no place in the outer reaches but here, in the Centre every nuance has been tweaked to perfection inside each mind the Framework potential lined with zinc, given the ostentation of knowing what you want before you want it.
What Gabrielle learned from the men in her life MILITARY UNIFORMS SPORTING Until that moment I had no idea ATTIRE PYJAMA DRESSING SYMBOLSM SUITS SUITS SUITS of the locked beauty of aniseed and lavender. Of course, I thought as I washed my hands. My lanyard slipped and almost fell towards the sink. I held my diary, my purse. I was on my way to meet with the project leader. The scent nearly sent me mad. I had just only just read the history of the women’s section which was built later. They are 19th century scents nest past? Was it spectral or was I mad I could not be more sane, locking myself up voluntarily The twentieth century gilding behind me like a glorious hub.
49
In your Spare Time you Climb the Ladder (Competition is the Prize)
The friendliest hour is after your breath has exhaled into many dictations. You have said things with the right clamour and the wrong diction [time to get that voice coach back] You have toughened your syntax until it is The career mys- muscular and your arm reaches for the phone once more, elegant wrist, tique is the belief creamy mannequin hand, square-jewell nail with peach. that working hard and putting in long It’s a really lean structure. hours continuously Its supply chain at its best. throughout adult- hood is the path to To get ahead you climb all surfaces you occupational suc- cess, personal ful- stick to the walls like a monkey surfactant, all filment...this is a areas of your surface area covered. Those sticky pads for your fingers myth, increasingly ended up easy to find on ebay, you go for ‘sweetest tan’ to match your palms or at least what you think your palms look like..? It’s the same with pantihose, which you prefer to call stockings, garter belt notwithstanding as pantihose contains the internationally-hated word ‘panties’. Ah you got panties in a poem. Finally. Others are fixated on the ceiling. I’ve always said, go around to the side door.
50
Walking Away From Commercial Rights to Your Name
This fantasy of the brindled ire this wet sock in the face of destruction harms me if I turn the mirror the wrong way. Kapow. The inimitable juncture of your memory sac, meeting itself on the way to full, full to pussy’s bow. I work for someone I work for myself I work for someone I pelt it with hell I work for someone
I move down a notch. Click with your tongue.
51
Greenfields plights are you coronary. Switchblade sticky because this is the only way. It’s lonely at the top But can be good to try.
I made a mistake I thought this would hot me up from my insides.
We use auto-ethnographic methods to read career stages and feminist collaboration through each other...
We ask how feminist collaboration can claim and dis- rupt the neoliberal temporal logics
of competitively achieving individuals
on upward career trajectories
52
The Winners Circle
We talk about a ‘good one’ we say ‘You should talk to M she’s a good one’ sometimes ‘She’s really good’. Something I never learned in continuing professional development was the way those people are a bit mad in their intensity. Nobody ever says ‘addicted to work’ and means it. Flying one eyebrowe towards the delivery going hard in the consultation phase, or Moving between building with a sense or dire joy, and the drama of the uncontained will. Excess glands might be working away But it’s not jack-a-knife weird shit. This is hysteria; modern age. I have driven that carriage, Sack of blood pumping my little heart towards ambition’s socks. She’s just like you she’s a good one. 53
Mass Opportunity
Nothing tastes as good as systems feel I have adapted a JIT across that I steer like a big goddam ship. I feel crunching rubble underfoot where the others feel smooth. So much of each day smoothing down the glitches like spikened hair follicles if we could see them post tease. But all worth my juicy Pay-up. Bonuses, like truffles occur quietly to the side (make your truffle hounds indispensable). Like eyes, it’s not evil. What’s with this evil trope? Scattered like glitter bomb of indiscriminate hope?
54
Strategy is not new projects not more workstations not more actions dressed as initiatives. t is a bite of the larger, flab fruit when no one is looking. It’s all about the labels you create, and the footing you mandate, for your own health, your own slipdash your own nestled hope dependencies. The accompanying through-line a delicate soup of time, care, flattery, fuzzy, lustful wares, oh my fortified gut persona. What score my negotiations now? Hitting the sharp heights with integrity is so useful for the downtimes. Can only forage for so long. We also have our eyes on other prizes. Gleam in the twilight of my dirty dish present time. What goes down must come
up.
55
Today I open a letter for my column, I read the question, and what do I do? I start shouting and yelling and cheering at the Entrylevel correspondent to pick herself up and go on. And, by God! The correspondent does pick herself up and does go on! Because if she doesn’t, I keep yelling at her. And every now and then I shout at myself, “ Get the hell up, E.Jean! You half-wit! My This is extreme this God! Get on with it! And many women my age just “get on with it” too. It is how we handle things: Chin up! Stop griping! difference btw profession and job. We do not cast ourselves as victims because we do not see Expectedly they line up with them clutched to their hearts, ourselves as victims. While the strategy has worked for me, I wish I hadn’t waited so long to say something about two of young girls straight off the education time machine. my Hideous Men. They are wanting for nothing which is to say they are wanting EVERYTHING because of their untimely soulgaze with meritocracy. Meritocracy is what they were told. What other varieties of golden light can emanate from your spearhead? Your campaigning is drenched with goodgirl.
56
You are possible
Walking through the mint halls I am ocelot again. If this path does not open, golden brick road before me, I will sledge it open in the nearest of time. Come latelies, I am what you plaster your dividers with silent push pins. I am where you congregate, like liquid pooling at lower lid like the line where you can glide a white pencil. Wide openly is the only way to go. I released my chicka to her highest realms (graffiti art, but where she is the aerosol) so with curling tired finger I select, then delete my own appointments. It is done when I say it is done. But for now the briefing. We broke into houses, smashed the windows, changed the Forsooth , my aching temples.
All things equal we should have a good run. locks
and occupied them.
57
Very process-driven
The third drawer is the comely place lined with the milk of reciprocal kindness. I scratch your back we both live another day, we both hire reinforcements with loose-y goose PDs for this prescience flows the nectar. Working around HR is something to be chartered, like walking deep into the forest and knowing which benign mushrooms will kill, with sweet blank skins offered mutely and sanely but spores tucked. I think the older I get the more I realise that when I was young I always thought of a career as a script.
The legislation is untested but Fair Work brings to thoughts the fairer flex, the alms of the postulant the threads just relaxed enough to pounce. If I write this very carefully no one can claim the opposite truth or the literal without my say-so. It is bullet proof as my WIP.
58
Decision Tree
Career is a constructed thing you have no right to. Ownership is contested anyway but career is never more than sandy hysteria in an hourglass of a chape and size you determined before you were too old /old enough to have good taste. Your neighbour did the job. Your mother did the job. The kind teacher left teaching to do the job, and then discussed it in no more than two words, many dark years later. I thought I would enjoy it can be as fleeting as the time it takes for the online form to swallow your keyed in details, the thing that commits you to the exchange of your funds for a dear-life hope.
Work was equally awful, and women are still doing the same Many of the women with well meaning brows thing although the myth has gone.
take to the enrolment like very dutiful spies, hoping that once they’ve mastered spreadsheets and p-n-l statements that the magic will siphon down to their good best intentions. They believe in a system of clemency. It hits you hard in the uncomfortable/unmentionable. Gender departments of your soul, like the time 59
you saw the swarth-glossed man on The Sartorialist wearing the blush coloured blouse with pie crust Princess Diana collar, without her nerves.
With all of the haute nonchalance you are wanting to effect by doing this masters of Business. you stride against this business of girl-toy boy-toy. You are nature not Mistress of trade. Though you have tried to read the Fin Review – once back when it was more of a PD leverage paddle – ultimately there were too many percentages.
60
Event Management
You are stitched together with position descriptions. One thing I’ve noticed in the over-achievers is the hardness they wear. This is not an anti-toughness statement, just the realisation that came to me in downcast moments of transfer. Their hair and skin embody it. You can afford the most expensive straightening treatment and the serums that squinche your strands into shape. I saw them standing at podiums, all the way 1996 through 99, their subtext written all over their high achieving frowns. It is not your fault. The lads want your entrepreneurial sprit to look like their entrepreneurial sprit. That’s where it started, but we didn’t have to follow on from this lurching start. M whips through her old friend’s elevator pitch, stripping out the follows: Although I’m not directly qualified. Although I cannot say I’ve done. Although times like these are hard to come by, I’ve scratched what little piecemeal I can offer with a development course. It was internal, and here is the certificate, which I hope you will accept with reverence. But overall I hope you can see that I have gone to great expense, and time inconveniences, to acquire this lengthy postgrad that I’m not sure but hope makes me impressive. Yours conduitly, etc.
You already have what you need – my mama once said, in a perfectly rendered cloak of creative endeavour mixed with the heat of a positivity coach. But I knew what she meant.
61
Find out what they need and then deliver it to them. Once you have signed the form and you are good to go, that is. Before that, find out what they need and speak it to them. You must rise up into the most beauteous angel of their perceived identities. They have spent long at the boardroom enclave, most likely a windowless room, with no room for their own individual fancies. They have mints in a bowl, and their minds beside their hands on the table. Removed as expendable parts because, well, there are things to do after hours. But in the meantime. They have sifted through many words to get this Later you slide yourself onto the armchair that was once someone’s brand new purchase, and you watch the cat show – the secret life thereof – eat some salty nuts and think about a gin. It’s the second time this week you’ve been called ‘A Professional’. Both times intangible, and both times for a completely different job. You are wearing a t-shirt from the ‘Layrite’ hair pomade brand that your boyfriend gifted to you in last weekend’s wardrobe delve it says ‘Layrite’ over a cheesecake model of retro sufficiencies and as you wear it with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of men’s pyjama trousers. You resemble yourself in a twenty-year loop. You also think idly while you learn about cat language that you might start a boutique t-shirt brand so that there are tops with things like parvenue written on, or very tiny graphix that you can only see upcycled to the armpit seam. Otherwise, blank. That would be a cool mix of patterned-not-patterned.
Also a retail store with office hours, like those old university lecturers who had golden hours per week in an office customised with nice blinds, or at least blinds (if not nice).
62
It occurs to you, in a brief flash, but often, that career narratives are only allowed to pause on the crappy jobs if they fast forward in the same enraptured breath to the end, which is now, which is when things are so definitely better it’s not funny. Which is to say, so definitely better, the charms of the money, the profile, the both. The grownup-hood that hovers like protective jelly against the rivulets of question. The team – again re those values – have constructed them with the kind of care of a newborn’s knitted cardigan, with the hope and languor built in. Contextual to, as soon as we’re born we begin to die. Ha. Same for these values. It would be tawdry for me to complain re these, as they provide a sturdy key into the kind of pickpocketing we all do in securing ourselves into preferred candidate. How to analyse key selection criteria. The thesaurus is your friend. But when wasn’t it?
63
Portable partitions
I will not be recompensed for my mind my intellect with never be paid for my street smarts have been employed as gaiters. My death wishes as you open a project as ‘deepest’. The larger the pond the deeper the throw. At times I had to choose between stockings and wine. I drew a budget to foreshadow these weekly costs to make it clear to the world I had enough and was fulsomely success. And yet, you hold the objects in your basket and you just freakin want to buy the boots you saw in the window through tear-streaked shit-day learnings, the barrage of the everyday pang when you are asked to do something and you fake it, completely fanged, over and over for many tired months before you make it. How much is that doggy in the window
is it worth its long term investment.
64
Destiny tailgater
One thing that we can see very clear is the clearness of eyes on the people who live correct. See them you will always find the whites are pressed egg whites of purest intentions. They are clear ponds amongst however many legions of wrinkles fold and gather casually around the socket. Look too at the way they speak. The recasting of myth by women poets looks like a solution to these paradoxes. For the appeal of such traditional material as myth and fairy-story , especially for feminists, lies not only in its archaic prestige but in its strong connection with human subjectivity, so that using this material seems to be a way of at once escaping the constrictive hierarchies of tradition and gaining access to the power of definition.
65
Fourth Draft
My authorial stamp is all over official documents. By official you must know I mean that someone has commissioned it, and I have produced said creature aloft in my cupped mind at that moment as the thing I must create. At that moment I can pause and see the words as they cover the page as small units of time. But usually, the most enriching- as it speaks to my class hoverings - is that I feel relieved that I can show my workings. The exchange is less neb if you have a document. If I have I document I have chosen the words, a weighting of thought not possible without my nubile approach and this document’s spirit. You do the work and you send it off. The most elegant emails the ones Where you use few words to compose that here now attached That giant thing of a thing: response to a position paper
66
New draft of position paper Referee report Long statement in defence of something
Impacting hard on our sense of who we are and why we do this That you join the throng and say, in order, those things we would be expected To say But better. Because this is the service and you crave for the fee. There is a keening in your heart to deliver it and see the money flow dandy fine to your account. What is it? You don’t mind. You like the recipient’s tears of joy or relief that it could be fashioned after all The impossible thing of a thing You made it pixels. You made it flesh.
67
Fake it til you make it
Naomi Wolf pronounces, with more than a touch of bombast, that Sex and the City is in fact the first global The should female epic the should have remonstrated through her livelier-hoods. Masked rarely as they are arrogant, like that one colleague who is never afraid to show their patchy intellect, bolstered as it is by popular dictums of daily trends. No matter. The shoulds have insisted and you They embody a mode of public femininity that has its ancestry in Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl have bitten them down in a variety of manner ‘daughters of the women’s movement’ But never – please this is no hero narrative – with alterity and success like a ringing post-tax return calm. They are gritty and supposed to be there, like good bacteria.
68
On-boarding, bringing the glitz
You can’t method act your way through this one baby. As in, which role to subsume yourself into anyway? I can’t become this any more than I can un-become a woman. Which is to say again, we can’t assume that the actor is a pure space vessel to begin with. As the employee, recently freshly signed on, is not before the first day of the job. You do a new job like this – one part pain one part mechanical memory of things you’ve done before, through the show reel of time on earth. One part enormous upset stomach. Or neckache, your particularity there is something you CAN choose, wink, or at least anticipate. You may that joke early and often regarding you being the specialist (or at least the leader of an unknown but possibly weak field). You laugh with good natured mouth and then on day two you offer the other joke, the one about Having ‘turned up again, so it must be ok’. You laugh again until the edges seem a little pop-eyed and then you pull it right back in. Time to review another piece of background information. Time to delve the potluck of your offerings.
69
Pattern Placement
When the part time internship pays the jackpot and multiplies to a full timer, you go shopping on Bridge Rd, cognisant of serious and how to be taken so. You are keen for the dress suit, which is dress and suit which seems so great, so sixties and tight! It does not fit like glove. The working apps are like dating apps You need to make yourself bespangled to catch a break. You want to be wanted, in that juggling multiple offers kind of way.
The adrenalin could be wiped from your skin Fighting against the entire structure, though, means that we will probably not see true success in our and wrung out, as the sweat of BAM-I-am-the -greatest. lifetime.
I will smile that small smile, the one You use when you are onstage already and being intro-ed by an MC And progress might be so slow that we rarely feel it. but have not yet said anything. That is why we need to be cunning about where we put our
intellectual energy
70
You Might Just Make it After All
On the cover, or inner pages of Conquest Mary Tyler Moore would grin at me, gleaming teeth, and she was our dated but only sugar-fly heroine. People would want to be Mary, not Rhoda. People would want to be Carrie, not Miranda. ‘Take care of yourself’ ‘…I think I just did’
The only viable notion of self
that the poem can offer, a model
that will contain all the disparate parts
is one that comes at the cost of clarity.
71
1973 to the present
Patronym. This little cogent sweetie pie. This raker of words. Everything comes with baggage even your nom-de-guerre. ‘A-historicity my astrakhan’ . You sink into an article of loathing you sink into a past participle. The first bit of pastry in the sparkling morning dew looking over sunglass edge at your misplaced friend who is having trouble finding the building. She is wide off the mark, but gives good story while you nod and sip from your brew, smile. Because you were born the year that things were legislated in a slant towards favour, you don’t even know how to find your oppression. And yet.
72
Would you like to buy a vow?
Deep in the filaments we take our aim. Imagine if you were clicked upon directly, the like kissing your skin with pink natural glow. Oh me. You go into the Feminism shop And there is someone behind the counter, perched on a dainty bar stool. What can I help you with, the person says v perkily. (they are perky because this is F’s time)
Betty dedicates this collection to her millennial students—you know who you are
It’s easier to get a profile today, she says tapping now quickly because later there is not enough of a breadcrumb trail, they will find you all go-wanting. You cannot have no digits, no footprint.
73
Troubleshooter
The lighting is glossier over my mane on those days when mind gives way to the truth. Sure it may be a do-do list of comely proportions or cleaning up someone else’s gaffe (we had worked with that department for sixteen years before you blew your stack in that meeting there). You are hoping for a bliss bomb to attack you from one finds a guiding conviction that resonates at the heart of the tradition of the in- sides. Imagine feeling a passion so deep everyday-life poetics...the everyday is inexhaustibly rich in value, strange- for your ness and consequence. passion project that it speaks in sherbet. Like to write the proposal and the funding apps is to rub your incipient gums with the presently holding glitter powder. Fruit tingles don’t go half the way to explaining this. The tastiest trip of our times.
74
Sticky Interface
Gently caught in my tender hooks. One way to increase take-up is the do-ability of including more international hashtags. The broader the catchment the neater the flow. What about those hero stories. I thought I had made it when I got my [insert] job. Four pages of inky Rorschach tests. The only way I can improve this is to say ‘there is nothing I can do’. After that, the incoming avalanche of confirmations.
75
Unsolicited Application
Willingly I get to be the winged monkey, all dressed up in scratchy jacket, for the fat packet of currency. It takes what we know about humanity and sometimes constraint is the only way to get there. If all the artistic materials gathered around you in a circle they would whisper their filthy snippets and you would have a right Go/of way. I mean, when are you not in the mood for Moments in Love? ‘Honey, we say ‘always keep your resume up to date’, like always wear the good knickers in case’. The app pays off that day, and the hook-up comes to fruit. But frankly, all you need is a scant half hour to get those factoids in line. I mean, add those action words in at the top, give it a nice heading and maybe a flattering filter. Remember you once encountered the advice in ‘How to Get that Job’ where it said alter your job titles as much as you need? We’d all been doing that anyway, the devil kittens. Last one to hit send is the odd one out.
76 The Room Of One’s Own
Pitch instead that future self. I remember having the micro business fantasy for sometime. That August of the interlude, it began with the ad, I HAVE A MEETING WITH A CLIENT AND ENOUGH FOR A GRANDE DOUBLE SHOT. For a bank, or a laptop. What was enticing over the coffee enigma was the pleasant converging lines: right now, I only do this. I have on a crispy white shirt – tick – but over its top I wear a tough basque (still a look that pays). Once you remove the abject negatives All we are left with is the creamy waves wish wash. I gotta learn to make my own fun. Make my own logo I did this once without any of the skillset. Had I secured my own leasehold, I would stare out the window through the plastic Wooden blinds. The universe was bright that day and the cartoon thought bubble gesticulated wildly. Come ON! You have to join us?!
77
Let me count the ways that I did not think I could ever fill in a tax declaration again. The little rented office was secret cave. I thought again about Faith Popcorn. When she started one of her consultancies, early on, she and her associate quicksilvered a downtown office space (may or may not have been theirs) and showed the prospective client through, garnering the contract with desks-full of unplugged phones. There was no connection.
Love, Beauty, Nature, Seasonal Change, Beauty Raked by Time, Mediating Vision or Muse, the pastoral, the carpe diem motif, the satire—all these prime themes and genres from the history of poetry seem to have swirls of gender ideas and gender narrative blend- ed like the marbelized endpapers of old books. It’s so beautiful, so oily with colour, who would want to pick it apart?
The spiral cords hung down lifeless behind the modesty panels, like fingers crossed behind the back. Hasten the brillo. And the entrepreneurs that had only enough petrol to get them to the pitch with the people. I’ve almost run out of petrol, too. Romantic, we call it when we’re on the way to earn our pie crust. Bootstrapping, we cry we when cannot pay the outgoings. Overheads are tugging at our waists; they are more like desk height, all the better to grab you with.
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‘It’s best if you have your own lines’ . The way it’s like a Find-your-purpose Find-your-passion Be your Best Self. Who invented that? Where did best come from, when artfulness was always juicier? I mean. Candour. Please. It has inbuilt obsolesce, my self. If I’m always working towards the best version. What happens, I, when I reach my goal though? You set another one. I saw this as a series of diminishing returns, where my flesh is exchanged in melted form For nothings. This is what also happens to ambition. It starts out a solid, and then is undergoes Spirit cosmos jam up. What is to say you can claim a post. ‘When I was 22 I used to talk to my friend about having a little work persona. She didn’t have one and would look with interested curiosity At me, over her lit rollie. See was a social worker. Our friend the economist got it, though, vomited each morning with the effort. Once the lawyer amongst us, hit with the full force of being
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squeezed into a too-tight identity hole and a non-human workload asked me to take up her skirt hems as high as possible, and then some (I knew how to do running repairs). She got a lunchtime nose ring and an armful of polyester shirts and a fuck-you- all over her pretty brow. How about when you can’t find the pause button On the soundtrack you created. Palpitate. Nifty play. This article argues that at a point in time when feminism (in a variety of its forms) has re-entered political culture and civil society, there is, as though to hold this threat of new feminism at bay, an amplification of control of women, mostly by corporeal means, so as to ensure the maintenance of existing power relations. However the importance of ensuring male dominance is carefully disguised through the dispositif which takes the form of feminine self-regulation. The ‘perfect’ emerges as a horizon of expectation, through which young women are persuaded to seek self-definition. Feminism, at the same time, is made compatible with an individualising project and is also made to fit with the idea of competition. With competition as a key compo- nent of contemporary neoliberalism, (pace Foucault) the article construes the violent underpinnings of the perfect, arguing that it acts to stifle the possibility of an expansive feminist movement. It recaptures dis- senting voices by legitimating and giving space in popular culture to a relatively manicured and celebrity- driven idea of imperfection or ‘failure’.
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Potentiality can help us see our relationships bleed- ing out, haemorrhaging from the invisi- ble inside, spilling outside Discretion is the better part of valour. My claims cannot rise to the top unless they align the neat axioms of theory. with something else. Something from someone else’s Poetry is theory. pen. Because. Otherwise.
They will not feel validated. Poetry can have us experience the social You have to make some shit up if you’re a senior lead structures and ruptures in situ as we read, as we listen, as we hold our breath in a knowledge based economy. waiting for the next line. Poetry is band- Tosh to the knowledge based free for all. age and salve.
She says, ‘The main problem with this is portability. Poetry lets me goodwill my secure These people have jobs cos they knew to hold that card tight to their chest once they got it. cloak of citations I’ve also seen extreme individualism be tolerated But for the time you wait for this, you could have built a theme park of entities.’ Better to enjoy this burden that I’m somehow mean to be ‘entrepreneurial’. Every message from the cosmos indicates my inability to take direction and my intolerance for the modicum of routine that may peep its little tongue through. I am so tied up with these business cases, and the provisional rights have not been confirmed. 81
Scopeful Dodger
This thing this pretty thing is it a form of channelling is it going at something with ctrl alt delete Ctrl Alt Delete. What are the keystrokes for this mystery genius. In 2013 that ted talk about your genius, Elizabeth Gilbert, you told me all about how I can externalise this problem externalise this arbiter of my own habits As they sink down so far I can’t see. How do I work? If only there was a manual for my good operations. In locating the genius elsewhere, you are happily working along and it is suddenly not your fault any longer If it’s not too brimful. Bingo! In moving it out you hope for the productivity to drop down like blood pressure in an altitude. It is assumed that a hive-like pressure system is the best for productivity and the downflow of yr work. Electric pressing of the wireless thoughts. You cannot produce when pressed you must produce when pressed and then you smile pleasant at this new creature on the page. Oh look it has my eyes.
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Notes
The following poems have found text included in them, and the found text used is italicised. These notes supply their original source. Where there are multiple sources in a poem, these are listed in order of appearance.
‘Scramble your signals to protect your plans’
1. Taken from 2009 film Up in the Air, a comedy-drama about a consultancy that specialises in downsizing and redundancy within their clients’ businesses.
2. Taken from www.40plusstyle.com/how-to-wear-jeans-to-work.
‘The Jobless Edit’
Taken from page 200 of Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman by Brooke Hauser (HarperCollins, 2017).
‘Mirror Stage’
1. Taken from page 149 of Big Women by Faye Weldon (HarperCollins, 1997).
2. Taken from ‘The Toner Queen Unmasks Herself’, page 34 of What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson (Vintage Books, 2002).
‘Ask forgiveness not permission’
1. Taken from page 44 of Bad Girls: the media, sex and feminism in the 90s by Catherine Lumby (Allen & Unwin, 1997).
2. Taken from page 31 of Landscape for a Good Woman: a story of two lives by Carolyn Goodman (Virago, 1986).
‘Public Appearances Build Prestige’
Taken from page 560 of Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed (Duke University Press, 2017).
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‘Colours are ambivalent’
Taken from pages 205 and 206 of #Girlboss by Sophia Amoruso (Penguin, 2014).
‘Skeleton key’
Taken from page 823 of All The Rebel Women: the rise of the fourth wave of feminism by Kira Cochrane (Guardian Books, 2017).
‘Company policies on getting laid’
1. Taken from page 560 of Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed (Duke University Press, 2017).
2. Taken from page 560 of Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed (Duke University Press, 2017).
‘Inspiration-ality’
1. Taken from page 13 of Honey Money: the power of erotic capital by Catherine Hakim (Allen Lane, 2011).
2. Taken from page 368 of Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman by Brooke Hauser (HarperCollins, 2017).
‘Always collect your earned medallions’
1. Taken from an interview with actress Ally Sheedy in The Age newspaper on October 21, 2018.
2. Taken from page 252 of Monuments and Maidens by Marina Warner (Penguin Books, 1996).
3. Taken from line 180 of Debbie: an epic by Lisa Robertson (New Star Books, 1997).
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‘Gold Dust’
1. Taken from page 148 of Why I’m Not a Feminist by Jessa Crispin (Black Inc Books, 2017).
2. Taken from page 210 of The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson (W.W.Norton and Co, 2017).
‘Five minutes ago is my worst nightmare (Sophie Amoruso’s Lion Park)’
1. Taken from page 230 of The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson (W.W.Norton and Co, 2017).
2. Taken from page 302 of The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances White (Little, Brown, 2018)
‘Acquisitive, Adjusted’
Taken from page 122 of The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances White (Little, Brown, 2018)
‘Face-offs at the line of Scrimmage’
1. Taken from page 89 of The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances White (Little, Brown, 2018)
2. Taken from page 27 of Why I’m Not a Feminist by Jessa Crispin (Black Inc Books, 2017).
‘Office décor is a -tip off’
1. Taken from page 148 of Why I’m Not a Feminist by Jessa Crispin (Black Inc Books, 2017).
2. Taken from page 209 of The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances White (Little, Brown, 2018)
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‘Stacy London on Styling the Life of Your Dreams with Lewis Howes [Aka ‘Comparison is the thief of Joy’]’
Taken from ‘On Self-Respect’ by Joan Didion, from Didion: Collected Works (Norton, 2006).
‘New Criteria for Specified Heights’
1. Taken from page 83 of Games Mother Never Taught You by Betty Lehan Harragan (Warner Books, 1978).
2. Taken from page 39 of Understanding Careers by Kerr Inkson (SAGE Publications, 2014).
3. Taken from page 45 of Understanding Careers by Kerr Inkson (SAGE Publications, 2014).
‘Consultation period’
Taken from the title of a YouTube video, ‘Business look makeup tutorial – ALEXACHUNG’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZMtwJ4-ak.
‘What’s a job anyway?’
Taken from page 179 of Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg (Knopf, 2013)
‘Some things to action’
1. Taken from an interview with Kate Moss, April 2017, https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/kate-moss-interview-vogue-2017.
2. Taken from an interview with Kate Moss, April 2017, https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/kate-moss-interview-vogue-2017
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‘Sure, Sure but no.’
Taken from page 113 of The Change Cycle – How People can survive and thrive in organisational change by Ann Salerno and Lillie Brock (Berrett-Koehler publishers Inc., 2008).
‘Symbolic meanings of windows and walls’
Taken from page 163 of ‘On Being In Time with Feminism’ by Robyn Weiman (Modern Language Quarterly, 2004).
‘Watch Your Timing’
All taken from page 66 of The Change Cycle – How People can survive and thrive in organisational change by Ann Salerno and Lillie Brock (Berrett-Koehler publishers Inc., 2008).
‘Use high power binoculars, not a microscope’
Taken from page 159 of The Change Cycle – How People can survive and thrive in organisational change by Ann Salerno and Lillie Brock (Berrett-Koehler publishers Inc., 2008).
‘Scoring is the broad connection’
Taken from, page 84 of ‘Risky Business: Feminism then and now’ by Felicity Nussbaum (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 2007).
‘Industria’
1. Taken from page 25 of The Language of Female Leadership by Judith Baxter (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
2. Taken from page 324 of ‘Revising Lyric Subjectivity’ by Lynn Keller (Twentieth Century Literature, 2004)
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‘The ‘X’ factor that can even the odds
1. Taken from Instagram post made by ‘Man Repeller’ fashion website, September 19, 2019, www.manrepeller.com.
2. Taken from LinkedIn account for Chanel fashion house, the text taken from a video. The text in the post itself read: ‘Gabrielle Chanel drew inspiration from the male figures in her life, what they wore and the way the lived, to liberate women and enrich her own life. Discover how she learnt to release her talent through creative conversations with her masculine muses’. LinkedIn, Chanel account. Posted on LinkedIn.com on 21/10/2019.
‘In Your Spare Time You Climb the Ladder (Competition is the prize)’
Taken from ‘Beyond the Career Mystique: “Time In”, “Time Out” and “Second Acts”’, by Phyllis Moen (Sociological Forum, 2005).
‘Walking Away from Commercial Rights to your Name’
Taken from ‘Feminist collaborations in higher education: stretched across career stages’ by Maddie Breeze and Yvette Taylor Gender( and Education, 2018).
‘Entrylevel’
Taken from ‘Hideous Men’ by E. Jean Carrol (The Cut, June 21, 2019).
‘You are possible’
Taken from ‘The Feminist Leader’, Interview with Dr. Anne Summers AO (www.engagingwomen.com.au, October 30, 2019).
‘Very process-driven’
Taken from ‘Not lost in translation: Managerial career narratives and the construction of protean identities’ by Carola Wolf (SAGE journals, 2018).
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‘Decision Tree’
Taken from page 251 of ‘Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon’ by Mary Eagleton (Contemporary Women’s Writing, 2017).
‘Destiny Tailgater’
Taken from page 54 of the chapter ‘Women and Tradition’ in Feminism and Poetry by Jan Montefiore (Pandora Press, 2004).
‘Fake it til you make it’
All taken from pages 48-49 of the chapter ‘Postfeminist Haunts: working girls in and out of the urban labyrinth’ in Feminism and Popular Culture: investigating the postfeminist mystique by Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters (I.B.Tauris, 2014).
‘Pattern Placement’
Taken from page 306 of Jess Crispin Why I’m Not a Feminist by Jessa Crispin (Black Inc Books, 2017).
‘You might just make it after all’
Taken from page 193 of the chapter ‘Gig Ryan – Knife Edge’ in Bridgings: Readings in Australian Women’s Poetry by Lyn McCredden and Rose Lucas (Oxford University Press,
1996).
‘Would you like to buy a vow?’
This is a personal dedication from Betty Kaklamanadou in the essay collection edited with Margaret Tally, HBO’s Girls: questions of gender, politics and millennial angst
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).
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‘Troubleshooter’
Taken from page 278 of Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture by Andrew Epstein (Oxford University Press, 2016).
‘The Room of One’s own’
Taken from page 327 of ‘Otherhow (and permission to continue)’ by Rachel Blau DuPlessis in Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry edited by Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber (Cornell University Press, 1997).
‘It’s best if you have your own lines’.
Taken from ‘Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times’ by Angela McRobbie (Australian Feminist Studies, 2015)
‘Potentiality’
Taken from ‘Crank up the Feminism: Poetic Inquiry as Feminist Methodology’ by Sandra L. Faulkner (Humanities journal, 2018).
Titles
The following poems’ titles (listed here by number of appearance) ) are taken from chapter headings/sub-headings in Games Mother Never Taught You (Warner Books, 1977).
Poems 1, 5,8,10,15,17,24,25,27,28,29,31,32,52.
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