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A Study of Contemporary Women Poets

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A Study of Contemporary Women Poets MUSCLING IN : A STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY WOMEN POETS AND ENGLISH POETIC TRADITION VICKI BERTRAM D. PHIL. THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK CENTRE FOR WOMEN'S STUDIES MAY 1992 ii She clambers up four ladders of narrative till she swings free in the vault of darkness, the silence between sentences. Michêle Roberts, 'Restoration work in Palazzo Te', Psyche and the Hurricane. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements vii Abstract viii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Post-Feminism in the Poetry World 7 CHAPTER 2 Writing Lyric Poetry as a Woman: the poetry of Eavan Boland 57 CHAPTER 3 Tender Transformations: Dramatic Monologues in the Poetry of Deborah Randall and Carol Ann Duffy 109 CHAPTER 4 'Love is not the same': The Lesbian Lyric of Suniti Namjoshi 142 CHAPTER 5 'the dirty alphabet of earth': Recasting the Sublime in the Poetry of Michêle Roberts 177 CHAPTER 6 Kicking Daffodils: The Poetry of Grace Nichols 216 A Introductory Matters 218 The Construction of a Canon of Caribbean Poetry 225 iv C The Familiar Omission: 'We the Women' 227 D Black Aesthetics 229 E Black Women Poets: 'sequestered in the monolith' 240 F The Caribbean Poetry Tradition 251 G Academic Pioneers 259 H A 'Poet of the World' 270 CONCLUSION 324 AFTERWORD 330 NOTES 335 BIBLIOGRAPHY 389 V LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Page PLATE 1 Christine Kowal Post. Leda and the Swan. 1989. ii (Limewood. Height 1.83 m.) PLATE 2 Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Les Laveuses. 58 PLATE 3 Sophie Ryder. Minotaur Sniffing A Daisy. 1990. 110 (Wire.) PLATE 4 Marc Chagall. Ecuyere aux Colombes. 143 PLATE 5 Emanuel De Critz. Portrait of Hester Tradescant, 178 second wife of John Tradescant the Younger, and of her. stepson John Tradescant III. PLATE 6 Sonia Boyce. Talking Presence. 1988. 217 (mixed media on photographic paper.) v i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To Jo Evans and Iacqui Mansfield, for their constant love, and inspiring sanity. To Treva Broughton and Nicole Ward Jouve, my supervisors, for their guidance, encouragement, generosity and support. To my family, for their love and tolerance. To the women in the Leeds University External Studies / W.E.A. "Women Writers" class, for giving poetry (and me) a chance. To all my friends, particularly Clare Brant, Judith Dunn, Andrew Evans, Anne Holley, Cathy Kirkwood, Fabrizia LaPecorella, Shona Philp, Merle Storr and Ruth Symes. To all the poets whose work and enthusiasm kept me going; and in particular to the following, who generously gave, up their time to be interviewed: Fleur Adcock, Gillian Allnutt, DebJani ChatterJee, Carol Fisher, Judith Kazantzis, Michêle Roberts and Anna Taylor. Also many thanks to those poets who agreed to be interviewed but whom I never met, due to lack of time and resources. vii ABSTRACT This is a study of contemporary women's poetry published in Britain between 1970 and 1992. It aims to replace the confusion and prejudice surrounding . 'women's poetry' and 'feminist poets' with clear interpretative frameworks that foreground gender as a valid site of inquiry. The introductory chapter considers the place of women poets within the poetry 'Establishment'. A large number of women poets are currently being published, but there is little evidence of the critical interest that is essential to the surviv al of their work. It provides some historical and cultural context for the study that follows, and looks at how and where women poets are reviewed, and misguided preconceptions about both 'feminine' and 'feminist' subject matter. The rest of the thesis is devoted to analyses of six poets: Eavan Boland, Deborah Randall, Carol Ann Duffy, Suniti Namjoshi, Michêle Roberts and Grace Nichols. The central issue in each analysis is an exploration of how each poet creates a female voice within an overwhelmingly masculine lyric tradition. The poets seek alternatives to a liberal humanist perspective and their work is informed by further crucial determinants: for example, lesbian sexuality, questions of racial difference, and the impact, for women, of legacies of nationalism and colonialism within literary tradition. The final chapter is a detailed exploration of the intersections of gender, race, nationalism and poetic tradition. Focusing on Nichols, it examines the emerging Caribbean poetic tradition, and argues that the parameters of current debate are based on patriarchal definitions that are quite inappropriate to her work. Her poetic transcends the barriers of race and class, dissolving oral and literary distinctions in an original synthesis. This chapter illustrates the underlying problem with existing critical frameworks; their unacknowledged gender-bias makes them ill-equipped to do justice to the evaing range of work being created by contemporary women poets. The Conclusion points out the stubbornly persistent nature of the obstacles that block the recognition and appreciation of poetry by women. Neverthaess, it applauds progress made, particularly in educational programmes, to improve their status and visibility. vi i i INTRODUCTION During my first year as an English Literature student at Oxford University we followed a compulsory class in 'Practical Criticism'. A small group of us, seven or eight, met regularly to discuss a text, invariably a poem, selected by our tutor. Towards the end of the year he handed the choice over to us, and each week one student brought along photocopies of a piece they wished to critique. I took a poem by Ursula Fanthorpe. The tutor read it out, as usual; immediately it sounded embarrassingly thin, quite out of place in the beamed, booklined college study with its air of intense, expectant concentration. The words did not sound as they had when I first discovered the poem for myself. They did not resonate. No one appeared sufficiently inspired to offer comment. I didn't understand why, but I knew I'd somehow chosen wrongly. 'Did you write it yourself, Vicki?' the tutor asked, laughing. (1) I did not understand, then, the subtle role played by context in the appreciation of any work of literature. I did not realise that there could be many different registers of poetry, and that they could all be valid. Instead I felt that the poem I had picked was just not very 'good'; by implication, my own critical acumen was faulty, misguided, immature. Everyone else appeared to know, as if by instinct, what Great Art was. I didn't. Many of the classic undergraduate texts struck me as dull and obscure; they did not move nor even interest me. But I learned that these personal reactions were not appropriate guides in the quest for Great Art. There were special, objective tools for that. -2- A learned aesthetic is extremely hard to exorcise. I have internalised the traditional British hierarchy of literary Quality, and still something in me expects the printed and neatly-bound volume of poems to be intrinsically 'better' than the more cheaply-produced pamphlet from a small press I haven't come across before. I have discovered that my trusted techniques of critical exegesis rely upon a hidden aesthetic which is culturally specific and not, in any easy sense, 'universal'. In a society nourished by the infusion of rhythms, imagery and techniques from unfamiliar traditions, a language continually enriched by international influences, such orthodox textual reading can be applied fruitfully to a smaller and smaller selection of conventional poetry. Poet and critic exist symbiotically; each nurtures and facilitates the understanding of the other. It is the critic who, ideally, helps the reader to find a way in to an otherwise confusing text, creating a sympathetic context within which the poem's. full resonances can be explored. There are many poetries presently denied the attention, energy and sympathy of critics, or ignored by the publishing houses and Journals in whose 'high culture' cutting-rooms tomorrow's literary history is made. have chosen to focus on poetry by women in Britain, however controversial the grouping, because I believe that the lack of an accepted and sympathetic context for their work is largely responsible for the continuing neglect and misinterpretation from which it suffers. -3- Feminist criticism gave me confidence to question assumptions I could not begin to challenge as a nervous novice in the inner sanctum of English literature. Gradually I found I was able to dispense with the pretence of the impersonal reader, and to devote more attention to the processes at work in the formation of my own critical responses. (2) Hence the emergence of 'Mr Bingen'. I realised that I was very quick to anticipate the harsh judgements typically made about women poets. The complaints I expected to come from unsympathetic critics certainly came; but I realised that they were also my complaints, my anxieties. Periodically I would lose my conviction that their work was poetry - that poetry could say those things, could be expressed in that way - and a voice would start up in my head, insinuating and expanding doubts. This voice was my constant companion-in-research. Finally I shaped it into a character, and named him Mr Bingen. He is a composite figure, largely fictional, shaped from various male teachers whose benign encouragement and correction have guided my studies in the past. He owes something, too, to Mr Ramsay in To The Lighthouse - for me, the most compelling portrait of the patriarch's curious ability to provoke anger and sympathy simultaneously. This is not a frivolous embellishment, nor a heavy-handed piece of satire. For Mr Bingen is also, of course, in my head; he is part of my own critical history, however rigorous my attempts to expel him might be. It seems important to stress, at a time when feminist politics of whatever description have -4- acquired such pejorative connotations, that a feminist practice is not the oversimplified, dogmatic monolith of dismissive stereotype.
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