Lyric↔L/language: essaying the poetics of contemporary women’s poetry.
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Date
2011
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
UNISA Press; Routledge/Taylor & Francis
Abstract
Using the deliberately provocative strategies of “essaying” and “error”, which have become central
to the poetry and poetics of women experimental writers such as Kathleen Fraser, Lyn Hejinian
and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, this essay charts the writer’s slow understanding that lyric voice and
linguistic-formal experimentalism in writing by women poets form a problematic, yet productive,
interrelation. Lyric, suggests Kinnahan, is at once an apparently unmarked, naturalized poetic
mode and, for women poets, a curiously over-marked, gendered category. At the same time,
female experimental poets have not found a comfortable space within the avant-garde poetics
loosely derived from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The essay moves to explore the challenges of
the lyric-language conjunction in relation to the writer’s second collection, open season (2006),
and suggests, through a method of trial and error, that a re-turn to lyric through the lens of
international scholarship on contemporary experimental poetry by women writers can invigorate
our take on the persistence of lyrical voice in poetry by South African women writers.
Description
Keywords
Women poets--History and criticism., Poetics., Women poets, American--20th Century.
Citation
Murray, S-A. 2011. Lyric↔L/language : essaying the poetics of contemporary women's poetry. Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 16(2) pp. 12-31.