Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, eds. Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone,

 

It was also at Naropa in 1994 where I was introduced to Harryette Mullen and was lucky enough to take a workshop with her. A brilliant teacher, Mullen shaped the workshop around her use of Oulipo-based techniques, folkloric influences, and attention to the demotic and conversational word play. That workshop forever influenced my pedagogy and writing. Likewise, that summer I was first introduced to the work of Bob Kaufman, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer, and I took a workshop with Dennis and Barbara Tedlock, who gave a panel on their translation of the Popol Vuk and who said that whenever they speak of their experiences around this work, it involved rain: it did. I took a sonnet workshop with the brilliant Anselm Hollo that initiated my lifelong interest in this form and after which I wrote my first mature poems, a sonnet sequence. It was at Naropa that I heard Nathaniel Mackey give his soul-searing lecture “Cante Moro” on Lorca’s concept of duende. That lecture opened a cross-cultural understanding of bent strings, broken eloquence, and the role of dialogue singing, allowing me to make perceptual links between U.S. Delta blues and the Cham-influenced musical scale of south Vietnamese music, which is also composed of a pentatonic scale with flattened and in-between notes. Delta to delta. (Hoa Nguyen, “WHEN YOU WRITE POETRY YOU FIND THE ARCHITECTURE OF YOUR LINEAGE”)

I’m deeply impressed with the collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone (London UK/Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2024), a collection of original essays “by a range of leading contemporary feminist avant-garde poets asked to consider their lineages, inspirations, and influences.” The list of contributors include Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Nicole Brossard, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brenda Coultas, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tonya M. Foster, Renee Gladman, Carla Harryman, Erica Hunt, Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Levitsky, Bernadette Mayer, Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Sawako Nakayasu, Hoa Nguyen, Julie Patton, KPrevallet, Evelyn Reilly, Trish Salah, Prageeta Sharma, Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Tardos, Monica de la Torre, Cecilia Vicuña, Anne Waldman and Rosmarie Waldrop. “First I had this impression of Leslie Scalapino bouncing outside of language poetry,” Eileen Myles writes, to open “ACCIDENTAL SCALAPINO,” “like she was kind of there but couldn’t quite stay still in the project of it, or the project of hers. I always noticed who one pals around with in the poetry world and she was I think beloved by Alice (Notley) and Ted (Berrigan) though they’d be the first to describe Leslie as ‘a weirdo,’ a phrase they reserved for the best people and they meant it with the utmost affection.” There is such a richness to this collection, one that explodes across a constellation of names, threads, writing communities and commentaries, both a heft of information for the experienced reader and emerging writer, allowing the best of what be possible across an anthology of poets and poetics. Every essay within this collection is exceptional, each articulation on how one begins, how the poems begin, how one establishes relationships to writing, writers and thinking across writing. “What can it mean for a woman,” Rachel Levitsky offers as part of “PUSSY FORWARD POETICS, OR THE SEX IN THE MIDDLE: READING AKILAH OLIVER AND GAIL SCOTT,” “for radical marginalized women, for a Black woman, for mothers, for a poet, for an experimental prose writer, for a poor woman, an aging woman, a queer woman, a woman who holds no fixed idea or surety over the meaning of the category ‘woman,’ therefore a theoretical and theory-making woman, a nonbinary woman, a trans woman, a trans man or masculine who was once called upon to be a female or a woman, a no-longer-cis woman, a poet and artist, solitary woman, a gazed-upon and scrutinized woman, a dreaming woman, a desiring woman, a traveling woman, a reading woman, a homebody, a woman of autonomous intellect, a friend, to perform freedom or more free-ness amid such conditions?” And then there is Stacy Szymaszek, writing in “VIVA PASOLINI!” a sense of the poem and poet connected to civic responsibility: “[Pier Paolo] Pasolini is the first poet who teaches me to turn existing poetry spaces into spaces for poets to be possessed by civic poetry, a poetry that is imbued with reciprocity between the individual poet and society.” Further on, writing:

            Civic poetry is gnostic in its intelligence and shows an uncomprosmising fealty to language. It gives me an ability to intervene, to refuse, to create a more just reality, to rewire the brain into making better sense. These are not new concepts, although they are new in the way that old poetry can be eternally new and new poets can be possessed by old poets.

One of the strengths of this collection emerges from the variety of responses; however much overlap might occur, each poet leaning into their own unique direction or approach, with the assemblage allowing for an opening of conversation or collaboration over any sense of contradiction. There’s an openness to these pieces, one that can’t help spark an enthusiasm for the possibility of further work. “To unmask our history,” Anne Waldman writes, “we also need to go to poetry.” Or, as Nicole Brossard begins her essay “LA DÉFERLANTE”: “What informs my poetry is not necessarily meaning first. It is mostly how sentences of lines disrupt my reading-writing to create a tension in meaning and prepare new paths toward it. Those paths are what I will call the basis of influence, of resonance, of what becomes the appeal in the intimate space of a text, of an author.” Asking contemporary poets to speak to or about lineages and influence suggest that this collection an extension of an idea from a prior collection, another anthology co-edited by Firestone, the anthology Letters to Poets:Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Philadelphia PA: Saturnalia Books, 2008) [see my review of such here], a book she co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax. I recall finding this collection utterly fascinating and a bit envious at the time, equally so for this current work: a book crafted to speak to the best of how community can work, as well as a deeper understanding of each of the works of the contributors, through seeing how their poetics and sense of literary kinship were developed. As the editors offer as part of their introduction:

            The poets in this collection found their ways to their own poetics, identifying their contexts and lineages unbounded by the strictures of their schools, work, and established literary institutions. As Audre Lore states, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crushed into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” This community of writers resists labels: they invite nuance, error, slippage, and even messiness. They take the terms feminist and avant-garde, claim them, and make them uniquely their own. They know deeply that canons change, that inspiration is subtle, that the path is not so easy or clear. This collection is only the beginning of an evolving dialogue, an opening to a new generation of feminist avant-garde writers to connect to, collaborate with, and support each other. ultimately, it is our vision to gather feminist avant-garde poets who engage with language as a point of contention and potentiality.

 

TENDER OMNIBUS: The First 25 Years of Tender Buttons Press: 1989-2014

Tender Buttons was created in a time of radical awakening to feminism, and its complications in regards to race, class, sex, gender, and being “avant-garde” each of which had complex truck with official literary culture.

I remember Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings and how she played with the impulse of the source text of Stein’s poem Tender Buttons to make it completely her own.

I remember the storms of necessary debate Trimmings stirred up, pitting the efficacy of straight-forward political poetry versus poetry which operates on the level of language itself. Like most things, I don’t see it as two poles of “either or,” but as an opening for multiplicity, as are all Tender Button titles in their specific way.

What happens when women get together and take the mode of production into their own hands to create their own terms for living and existing? (Lee Ann Brown, “INTRODUCTION”)

The six hundred-plus pages of TENDER OMNIBUS: The First 25 Years of Tender Buttons Press: 1989-2014 (New York NY: Tender Buttons Press, 2016) includes Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets (1989), Anne Waldman’s Not a Male Pseudonym (1990), Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings (1991), Agnes Lee Dunlop Wiley’s Agnes Lee (1992), Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle (1993), Hannah Weiner’s silent teachers   remembered sequel (1994), Jennifer Moxley’s Imagination Verses (1996), Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups (2001), Laynie Browne’s Pollen Memory (2003), India Radfar’s the desire to meet with the beautiful (2003), Michelle Rollman’s The Book of Practical Pussies (2009) and Katy Bohinc’s Dear Alain (2014), as well as “an Introduction by Founding Editrix Lee Ann Brown.” As the website informs: “Tender Buttons aims to publish the best in experimental women’s writing. […] The poetics of all Tender Buttons books gives rise to an extraordinary range of innovative forms and modes including conceptual projects, cut-up, the boundary between life and art, documenting consciousness, refrigeration of poetic form, radical intertextuality, the question of generations and generativity and how to write against, out of, and around another’s writing.” An incredible collection that deserves to be on multiple course-lists, TENDER OMNIBUS: The First 25 Years of Tender Buttons Press: 1989-2014 highlights both the work of the press and the authors themselves, all produced in part to shift the perception of literature as male-dominated, as Katy Bohinc, “Star Arkestress, Tender Buttons Press,” writes in her “Preface”:

Without a proper history, how can we think about what poetry is? How can we say avant-garde isn’t a spoken-word poem that derives from an ingenious secret-code Underground Railroad song? How can we talk about “what’s modern” when what’s not white & male is barely in the conversation? And how can we look our daughters in the eye and say “sorry, there aren’t any books your color.”

Even if you haven’t read most of the works in this anthology, the individual titles have become well-known, even classic, texts by now-prominent American writers, most of whom are still producing stunning works of literature. The only Canadian comparisons I can make to this collection is the anthology series that Michael Ondaatje began for Coach House Books (1979), that Sharon Thesen continued via Talonbooks (1992, 2001)—The Long Poem Anthology—or even Michael Barnholden and Andrew Klobucar’s Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (New Star Books, 1999), curated volumes acknowledging multiple entire works of contemporary innovative poetry that deserves to remain in print. The anthology highlights, also, through producing a volume of, as the website for the press suggests, its entire back catalogue, the stunning curatorial vision of the press, one that is fierce in its choices, even if occasional in its appearance. Having produced only a dozen titles in twenty-five years, one wonders if the press deliberately works to produce a new title only when something of incredible value comes along, or if there are other factors in play? Given the strength of the work collected here, i would suspect it is worth keeping an eye on the two titles that the anthology lists as forthcoming, suggesting classics even before they’re produced: Julie Ezelle Patton’s B and Truck Darling’s The Hunger Notebooks.

The concept of an inner picture is misleading. Like those on the screen, it takes the outer picture as a model, yet their uses are no more alike than statistics and bodies. Figures, we know, can proceed without any regard for reality, no matter how thin the fabric. True, the missing pieces can be glued in, but if you look for the deep you won’t frighten your vertigo away. An ambition to fathom need not hold water. Stay on shore, put on more sweaters, and let the roar of the breakers swallow your urge to scream. If not the clouds themselves, their reflections withdraw with the tide. Then there is the familiar smell of wet sand and seaweed, debris of every kind, including hypodermics, condoms, oozing filth. My outer self comes running on pale legs to claim my share, while my inner picture stands dazed, blinking behind sunglasses, demanding a past that might redeem the present. (Rosmarie Waldrop)