Hélène Cixous, C. D. Wright and My Own Poetic Struggle

I have been reading a little about ecriture feminine. Some writers in the 1970s and 80s wanted to write in new styles that would express women's sexuality, embodiment and sensibility. They would write more fluidly, with less narrative and be less constrained by reason, they would also employ greater ambiguity and more juxtaposition than prose and poetry normally allowed (Burt, Stephen, "I Came to Talk to you in Physical Splendor" Boston Review, December 1997). Hélène Cixous described this as being able "to use our whole body to enable the world to become flesh."

C. D. Wrights work walks a tightrope between ecriture feminine and "the language poets (i.e.Ron Silliman and David Antin) with a small toe dipping its toe into the pool of concrete poetry. This is what makes her poems so fresh and vibrant.

Cixous and other purveyors of ecriture feminine argue that "patriarchy, and its literary styles, forced writers (especially women writers) to mourn, to look back to resented or idealized pasts, to regret or lament already-lost powers, or even lost persons." (Stephen Burt 1998) I recognize some of these themes in my own writing (mourning, loss etc) and know that I want to raise my writing to new levels of meaningfulness. Not to write joyous poetry exactly but to write poetry that celebrates life and all its nuances.

Hearing Poetry

"We listen to a text with numerous ears...Every text has its foreign accents, its strangenesses, and these act like signals, attracting our attention. These strangenesses are our cue. We aren't looking for the author as much as what made the author take the particular path they took, write what they wrote. We're looking for the secret of creation, the same process of creation each one of us is constantly involved with in the process of our lives. Texts are the witnesses of our proceeding. The text opens up a path which is already ours and yet not altogether ours."

Cixous, Hélène, “Conversations” in Seller, Susan, (ed.) Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of Hélène Cixous, (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988)

Repetition

Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing. i.e.,
the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all
simply views of one object seen from differents angles.

-Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Freedom, Revolt, and Love

I have been reading and listening to interviews with the American poet (and this year's winner of The Griffin Poetry Prize) C. D. Wright for an essay that I am writing for my poetics class. C. D. Wright is probably my favourite poet of all time and what has been really interesting about the interviews is discovering what her inspirations are.

She cites as her main influence the poet Frank Stanford: Stanford like Wright was a Southern poet and wrote in an unusual and fresh way. (Sadly he committed suicide just before his 30th birthday) Reading Stanford's poem "Freedom, Revolt, Love" for the first time it was easy for me to see how he influenced Wright - his work very much reminds me of hers. The poem appears to be written as stream of consciousness - one continuous stanza with no breaks except the punctuation which is mostly at the ends of the lines. Stanford's poem reminded me of a Cubist painting - it's as if we are seeing things from several perspectives at once. It is an oddly disturbing poem about some kind of robbery where the two main characters are shot at their breakfast table. But doubly disturbing because of Stanford's unusual style of writing:

"She told him hers didn't hurt much,
Like in the fall when everything you touch
Makes a spark.
He thought about her getting up in the dark
Wrapping a quilt around herself.
And standing in the doorway."

smoking?

"Don't set in motion a huge poetry factory just to make poetic cigarette lighters." (Vladimir Mayakovsky)

Clinamen

Clinamen: a "swerve" of the atoms so as to make change possible in the universe...

Question

Is there a new underground emerging in British poetry? a post-post-modernism that aims to make poetry more accessible to ALL readers by writing about things that they can relate to but in a surprising way. Poetry doesn't have to be pretty or written in inaccessible language. unfortunately it seems that the general population seems to still have the idea that poetry is difficult and elitist and this myth is somehow perpetuated by the press and the literary establishment.