Introduction 1. See the Excerpts from Revolution in Poetic Language and Desire in Language in the Portable Kristeva, Especially Pages 32–39 and 104–07

Notes Introduction 1. See the excerpts from Revolution in Poetic Language and Desire in Language in The Portable Kristeva, especially pages 32–39 and 104–07. 2. As Deryn Rees-Jones notes in Modern Women Poets (2005), modern and contemporary women poets are often drawn to dramatic mono- logue, “a genre which highlights women poets’ anxieties about their self-presentation and poetic determination” (19). Gill’s critical survey also highlights contemporary poets’ reworkings of the form, which has renewed prominence with the rise of Carol Ann Duffy. 3. Juhasz drew her title from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Blood-Sister.” 4. In 1980, Gilbert and Gubar continued to open the field with the spe- cial double issue of Women’s Studies they co-edited, Women Poets. 5. Emily Stipes Watts’s earlier The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 conveys a similar sense that American women’s poetry constitutes “an opening up, an extending” (8). 6. In Lacan’s psycho-linguistic theory, subjectivity forms through the key transition from the Imaginary to Symbolic order. See Montefiore 97–112. 7. We see a similar position in Sharon Bryan’s cross-Atlantic collection Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition (1993). 8. See, for example, A Dangerous Knowing: Four Black Women Poets (1984), Naming the Waves: Contemporary Lesbian Poetry (1989), Sisters of Caliban: Contemporary Women Poets of the Caribbean 190 ● Notes (1996), Woman Who Has Sprouted Wings: Poems by Contemporary Latin American Women Poets, 2nd ed. (1988), and Yellow Pencils: Contemporary Poetry by New Zealand Women (1988). 9. In addition to Frost’s and Kinnahan’s books, critical work in this key signature includes the collections Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory (1994), edited by Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller; and We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics (2002), edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue. Stein (joined recently by Mina Loy) replaces Emily Dickinson as the foundational figure for this branch of women’s poetry studies, which focuses mostly on American poets. British avant- garde poetry began to receive more attention in portions of Vicki Bertram’s edited collection Kicking Daffodils: Twentieth-Century Women Poets (1997). Recent work on linguistically experimental women’s poetry has begun to question the lyric/experimental op- position. In American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002), Juliana Spahr claims lyric as a site of inno- vation that “avoids confession, clear speech, or common sense” (2), intersecting with Kinnahan’s identification of an “experimental feminist lyric” practice (xiii). 10. Held at Duquesne University, the Lifting Belly High conference was organized by Elisabeth Joyce, Linda Kinnahan, Elizabeth Savage, and Ellen McGrath Smith. 11. The poem is “Käthe Kollwitz.” 12. The anthology title comes from Deryn Rees-Jones’s poem of the same name, which appears in the collection. 13. For a provocative unpacking of f-words in the context of feminism and women’s poetry, see parts 2 and 3 of DuPlessis’s Blue Studios. 14. One finds notable exceptions in anthologies drawn from feminist periodicals, such as A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry (2002), compiled from CALYX Journal, and Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology (2004). Chapter 1 1. The film’s alternate title is The Face that Launched 1000 Ships. 2. Twentieth-Century Fox had ushered in CinemaScope with its 1953 biblical epic, The Robe. Notes ● 191 3. For a useful discussion of how widescreen photography altered cinematic style, see “CinemaScope: What It Is; How It Works” on Martin B. Hart’s website “The American WideScreen Museum.” This unat- tributed article was originally published in American Cinematographer (March 1953), and includes shot sketches for The Robe. 4. Charlotte Mandel and Anne Friedberg brought to light not only H.D.’s participation in the avant-garde film collective POOL, but also her essays for its affiliate journal Close Up. POOL’s best-known production, Borderline, starred Paul Robeson and featured H.D. This cultural work plays a large factor in critics’ focus on avant-garde film. See Mandel’s “The Redirected Image: Cinematic Dynamics in the Style of H.D.” and Friedberg’s “Approaching Borderline.” Subsequent critics such as Susan Edmunds and Susan McCabe draw on mon- tage in their analysis of H.D. and film; see their respective books Out of Line and Cinematic Modernism. For discussions of H.D. and popular cinema, see Mandel’s “Garbo/Helen: The Self-Projection of Beauty by H.D.,” Gallagher’s “H.D.’s Distractions: Cinematic Stasis and Lesbian Desire,” and Hopewell’s “‘The Leaven, Regarding the Lump’: Gender and Elitism in H.D.’s Writing on the Cinema.” 5. Invoking Georg Lukács, Jameson employs the concept of the form- problem to assess the rearticulation of earlier styles in reconfig- ured social conditions. See Signatures of the Visible (133) and The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (33, 45, 133). 6. For example, the film’s intertitles include monument dimensions and citations from Herodotus’s account of Babylonian culture. 7. The heroine of Helena saves Hector from a lion by raising her arms heavenward, as if she invokes the gods. The extended sleeves of her diaphanous gown give her the appearance of a high priestess. She later rebukes Priam for asking her to do “ungodly things”—antici- pating the heroine’s rebuke of her ignoble husband in Helen of Troy. In the later film, Helen saves Paris from Menelaus’s palace guards. Unless otherwise noted, all citations from the films and their promo- tional materials come from my own viewing notes. 8. Like H.D.’s epic poem, Erskine’s novel focuses on Helen’s life after the war, containing far more dialogue than action. The Private Life of Helen of Troy presents an utterly frank and logical Helen who is well aware of the dilemmas her divine beauty poses to herself and 192 ● Notes others. But she disputes her reputation, blaming Menelaus for the war. Surprised that neither the Trojans nor Menelaus killed her, she attributes this “‘ethically confused’” behavior to the double stan- dard of peerless beauty: “‘They always said I was beautiful, but the only effect I could notice was that they treated me as if I weren’t a human being’” (45, 140). She also faults her bumbling husband for succumbing to her legend: “You didn’t spare the woman you loved; you preserved me as an object of art!” (264, 147). In short, Erskine’s Helen needs no Stesichorus or Euripedes to defend her, as she is more than capable of outwitting anyone she meets. Given the novel’s in- ternational success and H.D.’s interest in historical fiction, she likely read The Private Life of Helen of Troy. The book was reissued in a Popular Library edition in 1952, becoming the original impetus for Warner Brothers’ Helen of Troy (Pryor, 13). 9. For example, DuPlessis has assessed the ways that Helen in Egypt (as well as H.D.’s novels and later poems) mirrors the destructive pattern of thralldom in the poet’s own relationships, stressing its capacity to leave “the wounded woman” in its wake (“Romantic Thralldom” 422). Focusing on popular romances such as Harlequins and soap operas, Modleski has critiqued the pattern of “feminine self-betrayal” that emerges from “the mystery of masculine motives,” yielding a narrative system in which the heroine’s “punishment miraculously turns into reward” (29, 31, 34). 10. For example, one head note links “the protective mother-goddess,” Isis, to “her Greek counterpart, Thetis,” helping the reader navigate H.D.’s tendency to merge deities from different cultures. Another head note overlays the Amun temple complex with ancient Karnak, Luxor, and Thebes (HE 13, 11). 11. Although Helen “is never an isolated character, but always a com- pound such as Helen-Achilles, or Helen-Paris or Helen-Thetis,” as Dianne Chisholm points out (169), H.D. links her most consistently with Achilles—the poem’s other half-divine, half-mortal character. 12. Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre enshrined the ancient world with a scale and style rivaling even the most elaborate set constructions. Inscribed columns flanked its gigantic screen, with immense hiero- glyphic designs forming rows across the top. 13. Achilles becomes enraged when Helen invokes his mother—a scene that anchors the poem’s numerous psychoanalytic interpretations. Notes ● 193 See especially Friedman (Psyche Reborn), DuPlessis (“Romantic Thralldom”), Chisholm, and Edmunds. 14. See The Voyage In, eds. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland. 15. For a good discussion of women, Orientalism, and film, see Ella Shohat’s “Gender and Culture of Empire.” She notes epic filmmakers’ “visual fascination with Babylon’s and Egypt’s material abundance, emphasized through a mise-en-scène of monumental architecture, domestic detail, and quasi-pornographic feasts” (24). In this aesthetic, scantily clad women function metonymically as an exotic and accessible East. 16. Here Achilles also draws from cinema to make a graphic match be- tween the ideal couple’s “sea-eyes.” 17. Even this more counterdiscursive component of H.D.’s poem inter- sects with popular epics. In a television spot for Helen of Troy, Warner Brothers presents an anachronistic scene of a modern reporter interviewing a Helen who disputes her legend. Outraged at being misper- ceived, the regal figure insists that “History lies” about her: “I am only the excuse for war, not the reason. My husband lusts not for his Queen, but for the treasures of Troy” (“Interviewing Helen”). 18. My viewing notes. 19. Because Theseus “dogmatically, and one-sidedly, favors ‘Greek’ ra- tionality,” as Jeanne Larsen points out, he is the only major character that never appears in the poem’s “ideal realm of ‘Egypt’” (96).

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