delirious lapel

This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like

2009-10-09T00:08:00.000-07:00

Welcome to our third forum, where each day this week you will find new responses.

This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like

To read our introduction, please click here.

And please visit the original This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like!

Monday October 5: Brian Teare, Christian Peet, & H.L. Hix
Tuesday October 6: Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Kareem Estefan,
& Kevin Simmonds
Wednesday October 7: Mark Wallace, Mike Hauser, & Nate Pritts
Thursday October 8: Philip Jenks, Tim Atkins, & Tony Frazer,
Friday October 9: Tony Trigilio, & David Lau

Bibles for the Black Madonna by Tony Trigilio

2009-10-09T00:04:00.000-07:00

Tony Trigilio’s recent books include the poetry collection The Lama’s English Lessons (Three Candles Press) and the chapbook With the Memory, Which is Enormous (Main Street Rag Press). With Tim Prchal, he co-edited Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers University Press). He teaches at Columbia College Chicago, where he also co-edits the poetry journal Court Green.

My poem, “Bibles for Vietnam,” in The Lama’s English Lessons, roiled in me for years before I could write it. I didn’t understand why until I realized the poem explored a crucial moment in my identification as a feminist. I grew up in an old-world, lower-working-class Italian family still too close to its immigrant heritage to make much sense of the social changes of the 1960s except to distrust them as utter betrayals of the tribalism we saw as a matter of survival. Gender politics were not speakable; we literally did not have a language to bring these ideas into being. Our class position? Equally off the map. The invisibility of economic class as a marker of identity in American culture is, of course, a perfect divide-and-conquer mechanism: I’m not the first person to note that in such a situation, you are so busy earning a subsistence wage, and so worried with the consequences of failure to earn this wage, that the possibility of re-envisioning the world is someone else’s luxury. So, as a child, the world I was learning to represent in language was one in which basic sustenance was precarious. As for gender roles, we simply were grateful my sister married above our social class, and we hoped my brother, unable to afford college and a draft deferment, might come home from Vietnam alive.

I wrote my brother letters. Well, no, I didn’t. I was too young to write anything legible, so I dictated my rudimentary thoughts—”I miss you,” “Come home now,” or, my favorite, “Is Vietnam like Brooklyn?”—to my mother, who appended them to the letters she was writing. I’ll never know exactly what she wrote. Those letters didn’t survive. But these moments constituted some of my earliest links between communication and what I would now call feminism. My mother took on a conventional stenographer’s role, and I learned to dictate to her.

But she also inverted the standard passive subject position of the amanuensis—because it was in this role she taught me language. I learned to read by remembering what I had said and reading back those words, in print, after she wrote them. At one level, of course, all I’m doing is recasting in a tidy domestic scene the basic argument of Of Grammatology. It was more than this, though, because my brother’s service in Vietnam—where he did, thankfully, come back healthy and whole, and brought me a lovely souvenir camera from Saigon that stoked my later passion for photography—is also the location where these particular speech acts take on their political tint. In “Bibles for Vietnam,” I’m trying to vocalize my mother’s feminism from that location.

“Bibles for Vietnam” emerges from these memories of learning language, but it’s shot through with other memories—specifically, recollections of the endless parade of Vietnam vets that started showing up in the late-1970s as reformed-drug-addicts-now-freshly-minted-Christians on the televangelist shows my mother used to watch. And my memory of discovering that my mother secretly gave money to Jim Bakker’s PTL Club.

Yes, the poem is funny, especially for those who know me deeply: the devoted Buddhist convert whose mother’s tiny donations helped build the PTL Club’s massive Christian theme park. Even though “Bibles for Vietnam” is, for me, a meditation on social class and religious power—on explorations of the way our immigrant Catholicism privileged obedience over spiritual growth—audiences nevertheless get big laughs at the lines about my mother (Jim Bakker is a punch line unto himself). I was ashamed of what she did; and I’m sure at an unconscious level, I was looking for those laughs as a justification for my anger when I composed the poem. I wanted to write my own shame into the poem.

But this poem also stages my earliest participation in feminism. As I realized this, after a couple years of including the poem in readings, the laugh-lines felt less satisfying. My mother’s family practiced what she described as a “voodoo Catholicism” in southern Italy, and it was a decidedly matriarchal version of Catholic tradition. They moved to the States, where my grandfather worked at a rubber factory and took ESL classes at night while my grandmother—who picked up her barely intelligible English in scraps wherever she could—raised their eight children. My grandfather died of a heart attack when most of the kids were still in school, and my grandmother, once the heir of a matriarchal religious tradition, was left to raise eight children as a single mother who didn’t speak the language of the country in which she lived. Her husband was the family’s language, and now he was gone.

My mother spoke of this matriarchal religious tradition with regret, as something the women of her family lost with the move to the United States. So it was for me that I began to associate substantive religious critique—real spiritual backtalk—with the voices of women, and abstract figures like the Church Fathers became the stuff of unquestioned obedience. These female dissenting voices also were the stuff of danger, because you don’t get the luxury of checks-and-balances in an institution that can claim infallibility anytime it wants. The so-called pagan voice of my mother’s lost tradition confirmed for me that religious authority could offer guidance only when it trusted doubt—when authority was underwritten by messy conversation and backtalk rather than monologue. These early insights helped shape me as a person and a writer. The research for my first book of criticism, on the prophetic poetry of Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg, began really as a book on H.D.’s proto-feminist religious visions and her sense that Freud (her one-time analyst) was more guru than he wanted to admit and could be redeemed by a crash course in gender studies by his most famous poet-analysand. It was in graduate school, studying experimental women’s writing, that one of my professors, Mary Loeffelholz, once came to the exasperated defense of feminist studies itself, against the charges of a female student who demanded that literary production and critical reception stand distanced, impartial, and apolitical in its relationship with everyday life. I remember Mary saying, “Look, feminism is simply the acknowledgment that the lives of women are as much a legitimate object of research as the lives of men.” Seems simple enough; but if women’s lives are a legitimate object of research, then it might follow that women’s subjectivity, their agency, was just as legitimate a mode of inquiry—an almost inevitable corollary. And if this was true, which of course it is, then the matriarchal voodoo Catholics of my heritage were a force of political dissent rather than just an eccentric impulse that could be brushed off by the Church Fathers as corrosive paganism.

It doesn’t take much effort to be skeptical of the Church Fathers’ pronouncement of indigenous matriarchal traditions as paganist. Similarly, it’s no great revelation that I saw my mother’s voodoo Catholicism as a mode of resistance. Later, I would call their mode of dissenting practice “feminist resistance,” but the abstractions of language don’t do justice to the tactile constraint she felt as a working-class woman shaped by capitalist patriarchy. She had no vehicle, no matter how hard she tried, to make her eclectic religious background a legitimate practice of the self. I mean, she wasn’t constantly checking out books on witches from the library just because she was hooked on the vampire soap opera, Dark Shadows. This was more than entertainment; it was an effort to shape and reshape her subjectivity in response to a changing social environment where second-wave feminism had not yet trickled down fully to families like ours waiting in line for welfare cheese, milk, and butter.

I try not to read “Bibles for Vietnam” publicly anymore, because it understandably produces an immediate kind of laugh-track at lines like, “She gave to his theme park, // committed us in monthly payments, / clandestine phone calls from the kitchen.” I’d laugh, too, if I was in the audience. I mean, it’s a poetry reading, after all, and we’re all looking for some kind of humor—something to hijack the sobriety. But for me the poem is funny and more than a joke. It cannot exist without its feminist commitment, and this makes the poem a tribute to the language my mother gave me, an ode to the language of resistance unavailable to her. I describe her affinity for Jim Bakker as a kind of spell, an attraction to the supernatural, phantasmagoric Pentecostalism that framed his entire show—and, more important, an attraction that emerged from her desperation to find a voice that might come close to approximating the legacy of spiritual authority that her foremothers had created and sustained. Of her PTL donations, I write, “A spirit must have taken over: a mare, goblin, // Black Madonna, Italian rustic / voodoo of her girlhood, the old country.” The Black Madonna refers to particular European medieval images of the Virgin Mary painted with black skin, which many scholars attribute to pre-Christian, earth-goddess spiritual traditions in Europe. For my mother, and her mother, the Black Madonna was an image of female power. In “Bibles for Vietnam,” I’m trying to reconsider how the feminist impulse in this tradition is distorted by male religious authorities—Jim Bakker the most obvious, but he also morphs into images of Catholic priests in the confessional, and into the born-again Vietnam veterans he was fond of interviewing (who were nearly always represented as men softened by their religious conversion in ways that actually strengthened their privilege and cultural authority).

The poem is my ode to the matriarchal voice her mother brought to the States from southern Italy—and that was muted by male religious authority to the extent that even the Black Madonna could be co-opted by the Church Fathers and turned into an evil spirit that “take[s] over” my mother and convinces her to give money to Jim Bakker, our “chimp-faced barker” of televangelism. This muting, in my mother’s case—and in the case of many of those cut off from middle-class privilege—was fused to class striving, to the American tradition whose rhetoric attempts to persuade the working-class and poor to vote against their own interests in the hope that they, too, can, like Jim Bakker, transcend their humble beginnings and rise into the middle- and upper-classes: “We all come out from trailers, even Jim, // but some of us build amusement parks / and talk with satellites in the sky.”

My mother never called herself a feminist. I don’t think that matters. In her world, power had been centered at one time on women in the Black Madonna tradition and had been nearly erased from her childhood as her mother struggled with the more pragmatic, day-to-day exigencies of raising eight children alone. But even when I was a child, “a young boy growing out of my own ribs” in the poem as I watch PTL with my mom, I could see my mother trying to reclaim this voice. Jim Bakker was one of the worst choices for this reclamation project, of course. Pentecostal spiritualism recalled the magick of the goddess-centered spirituality of her foremothers, to be sure, but it only recovered this natural supernaturalism in order to immediately re-cover it with paternal versions of religious authority.

Around the same time she was making her clandestine donations to the PTL Club, my mother was re-reading her dog-eared copy of Erica Jong’s 1973 feminist classic, Fear of Flying. I was an inveterate reader, hyperlexic from an early age, so I’d noticed the book when she first read it soon after it was released. But I was seven years old, and I can’t say it made much sense to me. I thought it might be about airplanes; when I snuck a peek at it, I realized I was wrong and, bored that it wasn’t about jumbo jet travel, I put it right back on the lamp table next to her reading chair. But a few years later, during the time of her PTL donations, when I noticed she was re-reading the book, the back-cover descriptions and brief (and rattling, for me at the time) excerpts I read made sense to me: not as a landmark text of the industrial world’s women’s movement, but as a landmark text of my mother’s women’s movement, in which her loss of matriarchal religious authority made her afraid to fly, and this loss constrained her so much that she needed to fly anyway. At its worst, my comments here might suggest that she was seeking a transcendental release from capitalist, religious patriarchy: such a move, though, would be nothing but escape, and would do a disservice to the embodied here-and-now relentlessness of Jong’s book. Instead, I look back on this discovery of her Fear of Flying as something that revealed my mother’s split psyche at the time, her efforts to forge the supernaturalism of her own mother’s tradition—roughly approximated in, but co-opted by, the notorious Jim Bakker—with the necessity of focusing on the material conditions of women that helped shape Jong’s book.

My earliest mentors saw, in some diffuse way, that my embrace of feminism and my struggles with the way it inflected my early self-awareness of male privilege was embedded in something larger and more personal than just the texts of critical theory. It wasn’t until I was reading deeply in H.D.’s revival of so-called pagan goddess traditions—research that influenced poems such as “Bibles for Vietnam”—that I realized I was continuing my own mother’s work, that I was extending the work of her foremothers as a matter of political, aesthetic, and personal necessity.

NOTES ON THE FEMINIST CENTURY by David Lau

2009-10-09T00:03:00.000-07:00

David Lau's book of poems is Virgil and the Mountain Cat (UC Press). He is the co-editor of Lana Turner and teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Cabrillo College.

for Laura Martin and Johanna Isaacson

I

1. If feminism is not politically radical, I’m not sure what it is. The I’m-not-sure-what-it-is condition of the keyword today correlates with cultural feminism having become a certain kind of accepted norm far from its revolutionary heyday, characterized by what Alain Badiou calls a passion for the real. Overt discrimination against women still does occur, but cultural feminism has incorporated itself into every aspect of our lives—from mall, to military, to mega-church.

2. There is yet another problematic with more significance for progressives. Nancy Fraser recently argued in the New Left Review that a neutralized, quasi-reactionary form of feminism has become a integral part of neoliberal global capitalism—women form one more group of needy subalterns to be “represented” in our democratic markets when they are not, as in Afghanistan, an open justification for humanitarian militarism: protecting women in disparate countries from their barbarous men.

3. Democratic capitalism can obviate problems of a more modest feminism, like the one criticized by Fraser. To the extent that such problems dissolve through reforms to the law-business—witness Obama’s equal pay legislation—our amnesiac and atomized culture forgets about feminism as both a reformist and a revolutionary struggle, but not, I think, without having been fundamentally altered by a certain cultural feminism, as in the better and/or improving political situation for women today generally.

4. Actually existing anti-capitalists and radical feminists—we think the way to resolve fundamental questions of justice and injustice, the type raised historically and contemporaneously by radical feminism, is to abolish private property, to surpass and abolish wage labor, those two social mechanisms of unfreedom. And today, even as an unprecedented crisis of capitalism ensues, it is very difficult to see how something like a radical politics capable of challenging these sorts of structural inequalities could emerge in developed nations.

5. The lived history of global feminism in the past century is still very much a politically open horizon of possibility. It may still be the case, as Perry Anderson argued more than a decade ago, that with the collapse of socialism as a global emancipatory project, feminism as an emancipatory project remains viable for the left’s hopes of radical renewal on many distant and variegated fronts.

II

6. There was some notable controversy stirred up by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young’s “Numbers Trouble,” which appeared in the Chicago Review two years ago. At issue was a seemingly simple claim made by poet-critic Jennifer Ashton that roughly half of all jobs, honors, and publications in the American Poetry World now go to women. Through some data collection from a variety of sources, Spahr and Young show that this is far from the case; especially when it comes to aesthetically progressive fora, mainstream po-biz having come closer to equaling things out.

7. Jennifer Ashton’s response to their criticism, also printed in the Chicago Review, was equally disabusing and nonchalant. Her claim about numbers, she now emphasized, was beside the point. She was angling after a contradiction emerging among aesthetically progressive poets and editors about the status of women as poets: “my argument was a response to the fact that the ‘innovative writing community’ on the one hand explicitly embraces the logic of poststructuralist and anti-essentialist feminisms of the 80s and 90s, and on the other spins out an implicit logic that makes women poets’ formal choices look like a necessary function of their situations as women.” This is an astute point. At the heart of contemporary radical identity politics there is a deep contradiction: hybridity, flux, experimentation, and play rule when it comes to the subjective (or with poetry, the aesthetic), until there comes a moment when one must essentialize identity strategically for politically representative purposes. And suddenly we are women, black, Chicano, gay, Asian; suddenly we are a certain kind of poet with similar identity markers. (The complement to Spahr and Young’s analysis in “Numbers Trouble” is Spahr’s splendid talk “The 90s,” where she explores the aesthetics of the dynamic experimental poetry breakout that took place during that decade.)

8. I am sympathetic to Ashton’s criticism as well as that of Spahr and Young. The point I would like to emphasize with respect to their discussion is an implicit point of Spahr and Young’s analysis, one that seemed deemphasized in much of the ensuing discussion and chatter.

9. The 20th century of American poetry will largely be remembered as the feminist century. The first half of the century saw women emerge as some of the leading poetic voices of the avant-garde: Moore, Stein, Loy, H.D. However we measure their politics today, these women remain fixed stars in the firmament, part of our age of poetic heroes. The postwar period of American poetry extended and continued this tendency, so that it’s possible to say today that American women poets lead the way when it comes of progressive aesthetics. (These are the numbers that emerge from historico-aesthetic scrutiny of the poetry.) The number of excellent poems and volumes by American women poets of neo-vanguardist stripes seems a testament to this changed reality; they are my referent.

10. The feminist project is still a vital one for American women poets in the new century (many of these poets, however, are in desperate need of radicalization, which the crisis and meltdown of our way of life may help accelerate). Witness the discussions, posts, and conferences organized around feminism. One of the (if not the) most interesting poetry conferences of the year, ADFEMPO (Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism), took place two weeks ago at CUNY in New York.

Philip Jenks Responds

2009-10-08T00:05:00.000-07:00

Philip Jenks was born in North Carolina and grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia. He got his BA from Reed College, and did graduate work at Boston University and University of Kentucky. He has studied under Susan Bordo, Neil Hagerty, and Stanley Fish. Philip Jenks published two volumes of poetry, On the Cave You Live In (Flood Editions, 2002) and My First Painting will be “The Accuser” (Zephyr Press, 2005). He gratefully collaborates with Simone Muench. Their poems have appeared in a range of journals and in the chapbook Little Visceral Carnival (Cinematheque Press, 2009). He also collaborated with Sasha Miljevic, publishing Distance, an ekphrastic hybrid of prose and poetry (Dutch Art Institute, 2009). He recently completed his third manuscript, Colony Collapse. Last year, his poems appeared in the first Chicago snow, but they blew away.

-How do you see yourself as a participant in feminism?

I seek to continuously rework consciousness and action, my own and others. As with anyone in privilege (and some may argue anyone, let them argue. I know this is the case for me.), I’ve internalized patriarchal discourses of power, at others’ expense and my own. Rethinking, reflecting, and working to speak to it is one way. As Arendt said, we must “think what we are doing” and the grotesque seduction of patriarchy, of internalized oppressions is that it seeks to unthink thought and undo action – and yet make its Logos seem seamless. It may even recast itself as a liberation, as feminist activity. Whenever I affirm the lived lives and the absolute and total equality of women, I may be a participant at some level. If I help eliminate some part of masculinist structures of hatred, gendered hatred, then “I” have done something. How, the operative word, is in everyday language, action, inaction, in how I do and do not treat others. And, how I accept being treated. All of this is written with the caveat that most critically, I must listen and learn more. Part of the struggle is in listening to my sisters.

-How do you support feminism in your role as teacher, mentor, editor, publisher, blogger, poet, etc.?

I’d like to say I always do so, but then again have I? No. In each of these arenas, I’ve made errors – but one role is to learn from them continually as a gendered subject and as a man in relation to power and power structures that inscribe upon us (the) woman as the second sex/gender. As an educator, I have learned that teaching Freire’s critique of the banking system of education – with its superstructure of dictatorial power is insufficient. Rather, by incorporating bell hooks’ reconfiguration of Freire, I have learned an engaged pedagogy that seeks to move away from either/or binaries (also via Patricia Hill Collins’ work) and towards a both/and concept of the educator as facilitator. This isn’t news as a concept but as a practice it is continually challenging. We are pushed to think of the student as an academic unit. Objectification runs rampant in the core of the traditional academic model of education. Are there educators immune to it? No. No. Absolutely not. Rather, it is a continual process of re-learning and improving.

In very practical terms, it may also mean continuing to work to listen in new ways. This may seem obvious, but in a seminar or a q/a lecture format, all too often machismo wins out. In the field of composition, we dwell (importantly) on matters of non-native speaking/participation in class and how we may work as educators with different voices. This effort must include everyone in the room including differences in gender and sexuality, in class, ethnicity, all – it is interlocking and intersecting. In a sense, the answer might be (and this would be a bit rhetorical), how do we undo the power of the panopticon, with its masculinist traits of vision as primary locale for Knowing? This is particularly important to me as a poet, musician, and blogger. Am I over-prioritizing one sensory apparatus? Am I authoring or working to support a range of understandings that are not located within vision? I read in the Norton Anthology about how important vision was in poetry. I suppose that’s true. However, what kinds of vision? And, how is vision being thought about? Is it done so at the expense of the body? Is it done so in ways that separate seer from that which or who is seen? Or, is it as Merleau-Ponty noted, a criss-crossing of relations and senses? Theory aside, if I am writing or educating or mentoring and not listening to the lived horrors of my sisters, then I am a failure as a feminist.

-How and when did you first recognize the importance of feminist issues?

Oh. There are several layers to this answer. I first recognized it because of my mother and my sisters, particularly my mother. She worked laboriously by day as a mother, as a “housewife”, as a part-time worker. Such demands would be enough to exhaust anyone – and are. However, late at night I would find her reading Buber and we would talk about that. I was just a kid. She also worked with some local women’s organizations and is a very strong woman. However, I believe that the structure of the family was such that dad’s interests came first. I saw that yet knew full well (and I think he does too) that had she more time, her career would have exploded. She is a powerhouse of knowledge and quite charismatic. All that said, I received another dose of the importance of feminist issues moving from Morgantown, West Virginia to Reed College. The whole culture there was entirely different. I must give credit to working with Susan Bordo and reading Allyssa Wolf. Without their influences, I don’t think I would have made the connections.

-What branch of feminism, model of feminist poetics, feminist icon, or etc. informs your poetry? Or, from which of these does your poetry diverge?

I know there are compelling third wave feminisms out there and even that term is misleading because third wave incorporates a range of different voices and beliefs – some so crucial – yet, I think second wave feminisms have received a bad rap, particularly in contemporary practices. “They” hate sexuality. “They” view women as hapless victims. Rather, I see second wave feminism as a location where power relations are intersecting in vital ways and yes, there is victimization, disappearing of actual lived lives (not the “disappearance” of the so-called subject in some theoretical discourse), violence. Now, the danger in continuing to answer this question in relation to my above response is that I do not wish to label the following poetics or icons or names as being of any particular “wave.” I love ecofeminist thought and action. That is for them to decide. Perhaps I’m a contradiction or wrong-headed. For me, I love feminist poetics that does with language/poetry(s) what I attempted to say bell hooks does with pedagogy. Thus, the traps of patriarchal formal discourses are undone, sometimes through resequencing, splicing, sometimes through eliding, and sometimes through a lived life that I cannot articulate or understand by stand by. I think highly of Emily Dickinson for these and many other reasons – and for me she’s an icon of strength and refiguring language. Those guys didn’t even know what to do with it. That’s what is so fabulous about Susan Howe’s revisiting of her work as well. I also think highly of Adrienne Rich not only for “Diving into the Wreck” but also for Of Woman Born. I wrote my dissertation on the significance of being-born and motherhood. We men are pretty caught up with dying. Icons are many and few, but I have not One. Maya Angelou. Alice Notley. Simone Muench. Allyssa Wolf. Elizabeth Treadwell. Leslie Scalapino. Jennifer Moxley. Carolyn Forche. So many more voices. They are talking with/to each other but at many junctures there are relations of power and how it is inscribed upon the body. Take Allyssa Wolf’s magnificent Vaudeville for example. On the one hand there are moments of horrific oppression. Wolf’s work does not a-void the truth of patriarchal power. Yet, women, girls, people live there and sometimes they dance. Is there some hope? Absolutely. Apocalyptic? Yes, but never without the redemptive quality of re-imagining new spaces and ways to be.

-Are there specific feminist tactics you employ?

I would say one thing I can do is listen and read, try to find out about women’s voices and experiences not only from the culture that I live in, but across the world. One tactic is to not forget the ways that power works to erase the embodied voices of people on this planet. And be hypervigilant. Be careful because the structures of power are seductive, as Bordo illuminates in Unbearable Weight, so much so that it is easy to confound oppression as a form of resistance.

-Do you think of your work as queer or gender-variant, and, if so, do you think of it as supportive of feminist poetics?

Yes, I do. Which I know is dangerous in and of itself because in so doing, I’ve made a declarative statement from the standpoint of my own ego. I hope so. My work does engage multiple sexualities and transgendered experiences as coextensive and foundational to approaching Circumference. It was my hope that my work on the Hydra series had some contribution to rethinking how we think about both gender and sexuality/s. Of course, whether or not it succeeds as feminist poetics is tough to say. Also, I seek to listen, not as a voyeur but rather to include divergent voices that refuse me myself and I. Furthermore, to the extent I am capable, the elision of the “I” in many of my poems is connected to this support.

-Have you ever felt conflicted about your relationship to feminism?

Yes. I live within a masculinist oppressive structure of the world. Have I ever been attached to my privilege? If so, then I have had a conflicted relation with feminism. And, I have had that attachment. Also, which feminism? Nihilistic hyperprivileged white feminisms sometimes make me ill. But, then I return (when at my best) to what I believe to be an accurate and strong defense of total equality for women.

-Do you have any concrete suggestions for altering the gender disparities in the poetry world (or perhaps the greater world)?

Reformulate school curriculums in ways that are not just “open” to feminism but are feminist – explicitly and adamantly. Gilligan’s research shows the effect of gendering on our youth. There is no question that one method to change consciousness is at the K-12 level. And, affirmative action does not go far enough, nowhere near. Gender disparities exist at the level of income and this must be abolished, permanently.

In terms of the poetry world, why is it that so many liberals are willing to “embrace” affirmative action but when it comes to everything from the institutions of poetry (e.g. editing positions) to publishing work and readings, that the selfsame notions of affirmative action (which is hardly radical) go out the window and into the recycle bin? Men would do well to be listening much more often at poetry readings at their little desks as they read mountains of work that was chosen on its merit, written by women. Is that concrete? Instead, we institute the same “merit-based” approaches of fake equality in the interest of Literature and the Word. But, it doesn’t work that way. It means someone else is being silenced. Most of the time, those voices are the voices of the oppressed.

-What are some things men can do to account for male privilege (either in poetry or, if you're feeling ambitious!, the greater world)? Can these be applied to other categories of privilege (white, hetero, without disability, etc.)?

I think that it’s tricky to fully transfer any discussion over from one dimension of marginalization to another. However, at the same time, privileges and oppressions are interlocking. What Hill-Collins called a matrix of domination where one may be both privileged in one category and oppressed in another (or all too often oppressed in many). As a person who is dis/abled, does that mean I have a full understanding of what it means to be a woman in our society? But, my experiences of privilege are differently informed. Men must interrogate structures of masculinity, which mask themselves as power as well – and often are, but these are complexities that men are often refusing to even entertain or explore. Let the women deal with gender. Men within the poetry world can actually make a substantial contribution. Curators don’t have to feature male readers. They just do not. Is that essentialist? Sure. We can debate that another day. However, the point stands. Part of male privilege is in being….male and deconstructing that isn’t going to make it go away. Men can influence how contests (or what contests) are run and for whom. Men can influence what is not going in the latest anthology. And concretely, we men could do a better job of listening. I’ve said enough.

Tim Atkins Responds

2009-10-08T00:04:00.000-07:00

Tim Atkins is the author of Folklore 1-25 (Heart Hammer), To Repel Ghosts (Like Books), 25 Sonnets (The Figures), Oriental Tapping (Penguin), Horace (O Books), and Folklore (Salt). A forthcoming volume, Petrarch, is due in the new year from Barque Press. He is editor of the online poetry journal onedit, senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of East London, a practicing Buddhist, practicing father, and is lousy at multitasking.

-How do you see yourself as a participant in feminism?

My participation in feminism is (as with all my various engagements in this incarnation) inconsistent, at times comedic, somewhat impressionistic & generally informed by my primary view of my self &, subsequently, all sentient beings, as empty & imbued primarily with non-gender-specific Buddha-nature. A Buddhist prays for the alleviation of suffering in all living beings, & I therefore don’t experience the world as divided along gender lines. This is not meant to be disingenuous – I know that there are many & various discriminations practiced along these lines & I am equally aware of the fact that my view may stem from the fact that I belong to the sex which has traditionally been the oppressor – but I’m of the opinion that all sentient beings are equal & should be accorded equal respect whatever aspect of human incarnation they chose to identify with. As a Buddhist it is important to work towards a world where difference is acknowledged, & discrimination eradicated, but it is my belief that the root cause of suffering & oppression comes from one (always oppressor; occasionally oppressed) having an incorrect (&, again, non-gender-specific) view of the world as opposed to one being of an incorrect gender. There is indubitably plenty of suffering in this world & just because it comes from having an incorrect view doesn’t make it invalid. One Buddhist path is that of compassion (love fixes the world) & another is understanding (see things as they are & you’ll be free). Understanding is said to be higher but I must confess to being reasonable at the former path & in occasional trouble with the latter. It seems to me that Feminism is about love, knowledge, & freedom. How is it possible to be in the world (in Buddhism, all beings are connected) & not be a participant?

-How do you support feminism in your role as teacher, mentor, editor, publisher, blogger, poet, etc.?

I hope that I’m a passionate advocate of all writing which I like. My poetry models are Bernadette Mayer, Eleni Sikelianos, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, & Joanne Kyger. Bernadette & Alice have been particularly important in my understanding of what a poet can write, & I hope that my love for them demonstrates & disseminates their work. (Alice once said “All poets are girls!” & I love that quote, though it’s evident that she didn’t spend too much time in the British poetry scene of the 80s & 90s.) Just as important have been Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, Jackson Mac Low, Bruce Andrews, and Miles Champion. I’ve never thought “is this a man or a woman?” when I have picked up a book. I hope that my writing & poetry presence demonstrates a complex yet ultimately joyful relationship with language & the world (of all genders). Affirming the world & believing in the positive has got to support feminism. …Unless I’ve got my head in either the sand or my ass.

-How & when did you first recognize the importance of feminist issues?

Feminist issues are human issues. It is hard to take the curriculum of being human without seeing injustices perpetrated against people of all types of recognised groupings; & hoping to see an end to those injustices & sufferings. I can’t remember when I first felt that things were not all well with the gendered world, though. One book which changed how I looked at women (& men) was Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room but I already knew (growing up in Worcestershire in the 1970s) that much was wrong.

-What branch of feminism, model of feminist poetics, feminist icon, or etc. informs your poetry? Or, from which of these does your poetry diverge?

Bernadette Mayer is my absolute poetry idol. What branch is she on? Eleni Sikelianos has for many years been my poetry soul mate & my life changed enormously when I met her. I don’t know if it is a coincidence that they are women: to me they are first & foremost my friends & fellow travellers. I loved The Slits, X-Ray Spex, The Raincoats, Patti Smith, & Meredith Monk when I was a kid & their DIY & unshaven ethics excited & inspired me enormously. & then I loved the Japanese court poets, Nina Simone, & Gertrude Stein. But here, again, they were all just a part of a world which I grew up in. I was perhaps lucky to find myself in a world (or an imaginary world of my own making) where gender wasn’t an issue: I simply saw people (or at least my role models) as artists. As far as branches of feminism go, I can’t say I can get much from angry people of any persuasion. The world is most definitely not running on love alone, but it is something which helps it run better. Louise Labe and Sophie Robinson are current enthusiasms as far as poetry goes, but all the folks listed above continue to excite & inspire me.

-Are there specific feminist tactics you employ?

Read without prejudice. (Try to) be here now.

-Do you think of your work as queer or gender-variant, &, if so, do you think this supports feminist poetics?

In my little world, how your heart moves about is more important than whether your bits go in or stick out. I think, also, that the term “feminist” is as vague & open to contradiction as, say, “Hinduism”: one can always find a statement which offers a different view of the world or approach to it. Lumping loads of different streams of thought together seems very often to be both patronising & dangerous. The poet Czeslaw Milosz said “generalisation is the enemy of mankind.” ..& yet we all do it. …& it is often how the world is best changed. My most basic sense of poetry & self is one of emptiness. I want to be filled more than I want to (or feel capable of) doing any filling. I hope that my work (in its openness, doubts, & lack of a solid identity) is pleasing & supportive to beings of all genders. My current work (versions & perversions of the love poems of Petrarch) depicts women as absurd & idealised (only) because they are seen through the much more absurd & idealistic eyes of men. But I hope that this dance is at least as happy in its absurdity & linguistic pleasures as it is harrowing: & I don’t think it’s hetro-specific.

-Have you ever felt conflicted about your relationship to feminism?

Many of my friends have much stronger & more particular views than me. I disagree with many of those views when they advocate a strong / permanent gender separation or essential difference. But I love swimming in these friendships & arguments. What do I know? All labels trouble me, including that of Buddhist. I think it’s more important to be happy & open than consistent.

-Do you have any concrete suggestions for altering the gender disparities in the poetry world (or perhaps the greater world)?

Comrades! Read & write good poetry, have strong opinions, &, in a world where billions of people are starving, keep those opinions in perspective. To have the time & economy to write poems & debate aesthetic (compared to ones of basic human survival) questions vociferously & ridiculously is an incredible privilege. For me, poetry is a utopian practice. If we decide to fall out with one another over differing publication agendas &/or line-breaks, then how on earth can we demand that others behave with any grace or equanimity? Workers owning the means of production is one of the great strengths of poetry. Part of our task is to create the world we want. & we do.

-What are some things men can do to account for male privilege (either in poetry or, if you're feeling ambitious!, the greater world)?

Read beyond one’s comfort zone, read beyond one’s nationality, read beyond one’s gender, & read beyond one’s language. I suspect, also, that it is more pressing that men engage with feminism than women. Ornithology (to mangle a lovely phrase) may well be of greater import to humans than birds.

-Can these be applied to other categories of privilege (white, hetero, without disability, etc.)?

Yes. By extending one’s vision, it is impossible not to see all beings as interconnected. I believe that (almost) all inequality stems from ignorance: people in power not having a right view of the world (& as a result not acting accordingly) as opposed to people having a right view & then acting deliberately wrongly. Only by seeing the world correctly can all beings become equal. But what is this world? & what is equality?

Petrarch #120

I write to assure you that I have not yet felt from whom I & all the world await her final bites

Women who imitate birds

Women who assume knowledge in men when there are none

Women who are searching for some sense in the journey when they meet which may or may not happen

Women unseen may produce the same effect

Women who favor soap

Women who speak to animals in order to have sex

Women who remember the name of 9 to 13 sided shapes

Women who sleep and women who do not

Women nameless to the nearest twitter

Women whose love folds the hole in the stone

Women in Durer

Women adrift in an organ of something’s lightless glare doubt-dried & dreamless

Women who exist versus those in whose Laura possibly don’t

Women whose ovaries contain pearls cars broken off syllables existence & great books

Petrarch #212

Men who dream of children and are satisfied to languish

Men who embrace shadows and lie down with therapists in order to embrace them

Men who swim a sea that knows no depth or shore

Men who insist on the beach high & mincing

Men who live in cocoons & ride scooters

Men who read about glaucoma and are forced to give up yoga

Men who buy books of lists of 10000 stupid things and then do them

Men who struggle with the violence in surrealism

Men who live in ridiculous vivid or South London light

Men whose hypochondria reaches its apex in the hours after midnight

Men who like the smell of sweat on women perfect for Poulenc

Men whose 20 years of long & heavy labour say they have won only sorrow this star bait & the hook

Men who do not see the beauty of the world

Men who tremble before men who tremble before women & those who lose it

Tony Frazer Responds

2009-10-08T00:03:00.000-07:00

-How do you see yourself as a participant in feminism?

I'm not a participant in it, although I respect it. I would caution against the catch-all phrase however, as, from the outside, it appears that there are feminismS, and some of them diverge from the center.

-How do you support feminism in your role as teacher, mentor, editor, publisher, blogger, poet, etc.?

I do not consciously do this, and do not regard it as my role or purpose to do so. I go out of my way, however, to attract women poets whose work is in tune with what I am trying to achieve aesthetically. It is unlikely, for instance that I would wish to publish neo-formalist poetry by a committed feminist, whatever respect I might have for her gender politics. The poetry comes first, the ideology some way after. It is therefore also true that I might well be interested in radical (or indeed, any) poetry by a non-feminist woman writer.

-How and when did you first recognize the importance of feminist issues?

When I was a student in the early 1970s.

-Have you ever felt conflicted about your relationship to feminism?

Not at all, although, as with any ideology, I've had problems with some of its adherents.

-Do you have any concrete suggestions for altering the gender disparities in the poetry world (or perhaps the greater world)?

It will, I hope, be no surprise to you that men make up the greater percentage of the submissions here, and indeed at all magazines and publishing houses with which I have exchanged information. Given that women represent slightly more than 50% of the population, make up some 65% of the readership for poetry (in the UK), and seem, at an amateur level, at least, to make up at least half of the poetry-writing public, this is surprising. In view of this, and given that Shearsman is one of the very few publishing houses with an absolutely open submissions policy, one would have to question what impediments there are, which result in female submissions forming a minority. It would appear that women are more reticent about sending out their work, and still more so if they are sending it to a man. Should I therefore employ a woman as, say, Assistant Editor? Guest Editor? It has been floated a couple of times, and I'm still considering it as far as the magazine goes.

There's been a good deal of public debate about this whole issue (I'm thinking of one involving Juliana Spahr, but don't recall the names of the other participants, in Chicago Review and elsewhere), and none of the debaters addressed the basic issue of what one is supposed to do as an editor, if the work doesn't come in. I invite women poets whom I admire to send me work. By and large, this results in failure, and often in being completely ignored. Richard Owens at Damn the Caesars gave an interesting chapter-and-verse analysis of this last year, with a frightening list of the women writers who'd turned him down. This was after he'd been taken to task for not having enough women in an issue of his magazine.

So what's the problem? I wish I knew. It would be a good idea for there to be more women editors in positions of power in the literary world. On the other hand, women do hold significant positions here in the UK. Five of the biggest-circulation poetry magazines are edited by women; all of the major grant-giving outlets seem to be run by women; a significant percentage of reviewers in mainstream journals are women; the Poetry Society has a woman as Director and a woman as President. At least half of the major literary festivals also seem to have women in charge, either of the whole event, or of the poetry side of it.

One problem in the UK (I cannot speak for the USA) is that, despite all that I've just said, there are very few magazines or presses started by women. In all the above cases, women editors took over existing successful operations. With modern technology, it is easier than ever to start a publishing operation, online or print. If more such new publishers were to come into being, I suspect that, slowly, things would change for the better over all. On the other hand, Sarah Hopkins, Asst Editor of Tears in the Fence, and former Literary Editor of Spare Rib (the first Feminist magazine in this country), has an extraordinary essay in the latest issue (#50) of T i t F, where she describes being harangued and physically assaulted by women whose work she'd turned down at Spare Rib. It's not a statistically valid sample, I know, but I've only been threatened with physical violence once by a male author.

-What are some things men can do to account for male privilege (either in poetry or, if you're feeling ambitious!, the greater world)? Can these be applied to other categories of privilege (white, hetero, without disability, etc.)?

I'm not sure how much more they can do other than be aware of the issues that might be getting in the way of such disempowered sections of the public, and then actively encourage those who are to disempowered to participate, with the assurance that the playing-field is level. How much they can do proactively is debatable and will depend on how much power they have. I would be interested to hear if anyone has valid strategies to recommend.

Mark Wallace Responds

2009-10-07T00:07:00.000-07:00

Mark Wallace is the author of a number of books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and criticism. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. He is the author of a multi-genre work, Haze, and a novel, Dead Carnival. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and along with Steven Marks, he edited Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s (University of Alabama Press), a collection of 26 essays by different writers. Most recently he has published a collection of tales, Walking Dreams (2007), and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion (2008). He teaches at California State University San Marcos.

I was 24 the first time I heard someone use the term “feminism” in a positive way.

That’s not because I grew up in a politically conservative environment. Just the opposite. My parents were religious, but all through my childhood I went on Sunday mornings to the historically liberal New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, in downtown Washington, DC only several blocks from the White House. The main ministers and a significant portion of the congregation had been involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s and remained consistently activist on the subjects of race and poverty. The minister who led our youth group in my junior high and high school years was gay.

In college I was an English major at The George Washington University, also not far from the White House. There I had several excellent female professors, but I have no memory of them speaking about feminism. They taught me Creative Writing or Practical Criticism or The 20th Century American Novel. While those courses featured women writers, no discussions that I recall placed the work specifically in a feminist context. If there were classes on feminism available at that time, I don’t remember them. There may have been, not that I would have taken them.

At both that church and university, a number of women must have been feminists (in fact as I know now, many of my women professors then were). But at the time I knew only of several who—by rumor—were supposed to be, and I never spoke to any of them directly about feminism.

I mention all this because it seems both remarkable and ordinary that a young man growing up in a liberal and sometimes activist urban environment should not have discussed feminism with someone who claimed to be feminist until 1986. It says something about how far removed from the training of most young men in the U.S., both in school and otherwise, feminism was when I was growing up. And it still is.

I had heard about feminism, of course. The main phrase I remember, one I recall repeating back to our mutual satisfaction to several of my male professors, was “Feminism is about allowing women to do all the terrible things that men are already allowed to do.” I don’t know who first told that to me, but it sounded funny at the time, and I’ve always loved a quip.

My first extended encounter with feminism was through a professor in my creative writing graduate school program at SUNY-Binghamton. Gayle Whittier was a short story writer and Shakespeare scholar who spoke openly of herself as feminist. While she didn’t teach feminist theory, feminist issues were certainly highlighted in the texts she taught. I was scornful of that for a few weeks and then, realizing how much she could teach me about writing, I started listening to the rest of what she had to say. As I read more widely and began to interact more consistently with adult women than I had as a boy, I came to see that there were many things about gender politics that I had never noticed.

Today I think of feminist discourse as an essential element (in fact one of the oldest) in the history of human rights activism and the struggle to expand democracy. While crucially and obviously the main goals of feminism have to do with changing the conditions of the lives of women, I think it’s important for more men to understand that feminism also has a long history of creating positive benefits that cross gender lines. Feminist participation has often played crucial roles in working class movements and social services that benefit men. In fact I’ve long since come to believe that feminism has positive benefits even for more privileged men. Interacting with people over whom one has too much power is psychologically debilitating in many instances. Men who enact extreme physical control over others (whether we’re talking about physical abuse or, say, slave owning, as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass among others documented so well) are usually also self-destructive, though admittedly not inevitably. In less extreme cases, learning how to participate in a genuine give-and-take with social equals helps people learn to respect themselves and others in ways that allow for a greater range of friendships and more fulfilling human interactions. People who feel they’ve had some say in the lives they’re living tend to be happier with themselves and others. And people who are surrounded by people who feel happy (or at least satisfied enough) about their own choices have more chance to make positive changes for themselves. These ideas aren’t new: the Greeks, for instance, believed that true love and companionship could only occur among social and intellectual equals, although unsurprisingly that idea in Greek culture was reserved only for relationships between men.

So while it should hardly be everybody’s first goal, I think it’s important, especially for pro-feminist men, to insist (and show how) feminism is a good thing for men, rather than (as many men continue to think of it) as something that’s simply an attempt to seize power from them and use it against them. Many women already know that (they might even find my saying it here odd or elementary) but it’s undeniably clear that most men don’t.

I don’t have much of a specific intellectual theory about what’s the most useful approach to feminism. Sometimes I think that’s a problem but usually not. I’ve read a certain amount of the work of well-known theorists considered important to feminism (I recognize that these writers have various relationships to feminism and other intellectual discourses): de Beauvoir, Butler, Irigarary, Kristeva, hooks, Spivak, as obvious names. I’ve learned a lot from the work of women more associated with psychology and psychoanalysis like Alice Miller, Karen Horney, and Nancy Chodorow, all of whose writing has important implications for feminism. Many of my favorite feminists are poets and fiction writers and playwrights, both past and contemporary, too many to name here. I’m interested in whether there’s such a thing as a feminist poetics on the level of structure rather than simply theme, although I haven’t felt entirely convinced by accounts that say there are. Still, crucial issues in feminist literary and cultural theory (excess, ornament, fragmentation, and multiple voices being only obvious examples) can certainly lead to structuring poems differently.

When Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young’s essay “Numbers Trouble” ( a response to Jennifer Ashton’s essay “Our Bodies, Our Poems,” which claimed that women had now achieved equality in the realm of literary production) caused such energetic debate a few years ago, I wasn’t surprised that resistance even among artists and intellectuals to acknowledging gender disparity remains powerful. I don’t think this resistance comes from the fact that the disparity is vanishing, although in some areas of contemporary American life it has been altered. I think it comes from the fact that gender struggles remain so intense that many people won’t even let themselves see the severity of them (and in fact these struggles remain intense at least partly because people won’t let themselves see that they’re severe).

While social conditions such as jobs and wages have changed (although not nearly enough), at least in some contexts, I don’t think there’s been any significant improvement in the degree to which men and women interact with each other satisfyingly or understand each other’s differences. Gender trouble in the U.S. remains pervasive, not simply in structural imbalances but also in individual interactions (which are of course greatly shaped though not entirely determined by structural imbalances). At best, in the intellectual and artistic worlds, slightly greater levels of awareness lead to problems that might be slightly less severe. But as much as artistic and intellectual communities don’t always operate on the same principles as the larger societies they are part of, they are still deeply enmeshed in those societies. Even poets don’t talk only to poets. I feel skeptical that the literary world can change that much more thoroughly than the larger scale society with whose practices it remains intertwined.

These days I live and teach in North San Diego County, an area where feminist ideas have not spread widely, to say the least. Regional culture seems not so much anti-feminist as pre-feminist, with great emphasis placed on an isolationist traditional family as the source of a happiness granted by God. This belief is significantly at odds with the realities of many people’s family lives: multiple marriages, a high divorce rate, single parents raising children on low wages. Those conditions (which aren’t inherently destructive although the people living through them often feel that they are) are themselves often functions of belief in the family. People get married and have children here often long before they can support themselves financially or handle an adult sexual relationship. Family is a mythical end they rush towards long before they’re mature enough to have a family responsibly.

The culture at the university where I teach, Cal State San Marcos, offers an important contrast within the region. The current university president and provost and many deans are women. Perhaps because the university is still less than 20 years old, 53% of full-time faculty are women, a larger percentage than at most U.S. universities. Courses about women and feminism in various cultural contexts are available. Many students taking those courses are probably encountering feminist ideas for the first time. Still, female students often have significant family pressures that work against their getting worthwhile educations. For instance, these women are urged (beginning when quite young) much more often than men to take caretaker roles for other members of their sometimes struggling families. Nonetheless, at Cal State San Marcos, many more women than men are getting college educations. Although I can’t account for this statistic, 62% of undergraduates at my university, and 72% of the people who actually finish their degree, are women.

As a professor of creative writing who occasionally teaches general education literature courses for non-majors, I don’t teach courses directly on feminism or women’s writing, but all my courses feature some feminist writers and I talk regularly about gender with my students. As just one example, a course I teach that interrogates the concept of civilization includes discussions on the social institutions of marriage and the family through an examination of Chopin’s The Awakening and Freud’s Dora: A Study of a Case of Hysteria (admittedly, Freud’s not a feminist, but his work certainly opens up relevant gender discussion), discussions of religion around H.D.’s ideas in Trilogy about creating (or, as she has it, recovering) a more gender-balanced religious mythology, and conversations about race, gender, marriage and colonialism through the lens of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. Although ensuing conversations sometimes become contentious, most students feel passionately engaged by problems of gender and are eager to discuss them. Even people who dislike feminism care greatly about gender. And when somebody cares greatly about something, they’re often more open to new information and changing their minds than they recognize.

Sometimes I speculate (with only a little irony) whether the greatest effect I may have on students relative to feminism comes simply from the fact that I’m a male professor who thinks of feminism as a positive social force and who talks about feminism that way in my classes. I’ve noted that it really does confuse many students. It takes awhile for some to comprehend that it’s even possible that I could be saying what I am. Even some of the women students interested in feminism and learning a lot about it in other classes may assume that by definition it’s something men don’t like.

Since I’m the one who suggested that Danielle add a question regarding occasions of feeling conflicted about feminism, I suppose I better answer it. Honestly though, while I may disagree with this or that point made by a given writer, I don’t feel conflicted relative to feminist discourse as such. As always, I think problems become more difficult when it comes to putting discourse into practice. Political, institutional, and personal decisions that involve gender issues can be tricky, and feminist theory isn’t any kind of magic formula that can solve all practical problems. Also, some women seem to dislike me because I’m a physically large, semi-successful white heterosexual male, and that response seems unfair. Still, nobody escapes being stereotyped, and I’m hardly subject to a more damaging portion of it than others. When I am stereotyped, most of the time it’s in the direction of assuming that I have more power than I do, which oddly enough in some situations ends up giving me more power. Still, these less pleasant encounters with women don’t occur because of problems in feminist theory. They have to do with the personalities and histories of the individuals involved, myself included.

Feminism is a discourse about power, obviously, who has it and who doesn’t and why. Any discourse about power can be misused. There’s a long history of liberation discourses becoming tyrannical in practice. As many Marxist theorists might attest though, just because a set of ideas can be misused or has been misused at times doesn’t mean that those ideas have no value. And of course feminist discourse is very aware of this problem. Science fiction authors I sometimes teach, like James J. Tiptree (really Alice Sheldon) and Ursula Leguin, have explored in stories like “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” and “The Matters of Segri” scenarios about how power might be abused in societies controlled by women (a situation I don’t think is about to happen on a large scale any time soon). One of the things I like about feminist discourse, again, is that contrary what most men think, it’s rarely about an attempt to take and use power undemocratically. As a liberation discourse, it’s trying to explore ways of giving everyone more autonomy over their lives. Still, I don’t want to underestimate the degree to which many men hate and fear feminism because they believe it’s out to destroy them.
In a blog post on Harriet a few months back, Annie Finch made the important point that it’s a mistake to assume that one can count on any kind of general curve of progress in the status of women (and not just women, I would add). It’s only by paying attention to continued gender disparities that such disparities can be improved. Living in San Diego County shows me on a daily local basis how many social forces would be glad to push back whatever advances women have made. Informed men certainly have a role to play in resisting such anti-women ideas and efforts. Still, one of the reasons I’m more comfortable thinking of myself as “pro-feminist” rather than as feminist is that, as someone whose social experience is closely connected to conventional American male training, what it feels like to be subject to sexism (both individually and structurally) is something I experience mainly second hand, although those second hand experiences often have a powerful effect on me. I know what I’ve been told and I know what I see but I don’t often directly feel what it’s like. So it seems to me obvious that the most essential feminist ideas not only have come from women but will continue to come from them.

I can’t remember now whether it happened after my May blog post in response to the earlier Delirious Hem forum on feminist poets, or during an earlier round of discussion regarding women and feminism, but in any case, during one such discussion on the Buffalo Poetics listserve, fiction writer and poet Anne Bogle (she and I became friends around the time I was sitting in Gayle Whittier’s graduate school class) complimented me by saying that while many men she has known in the world of literature and elsewhere won’t talk about gender or feminism, that I always would. I appreciate the compliment. But I was struck also that her comment set the bar pretty low. That’s not a criticism of her compliment, which was both kind as well as accurate. As much as I feel engaged by ongoing discussions regarding feminism, I’m certainly not an expert on its history. One thing that’s important about this Delirious Hem forum is that it will show us more about what men (at least some) think about feminism and in what ways they feel engaged and active in relation to it. But it’s interesting and troubling that it can still be construed as a compliment to a (heterosexual?) man to suggest that he’s willing to talk about feminism. It almost sets up an echo of Samuel Johnson’s infamously sexist comment about women preachers; the echo would read, “When men talk about feminism, it isn’t done well. But one is surprised that it can be done at all.”

The fact that a man can still be complimented simply for being willing to talk with women about feminism shows exactly how much the gender problems raised in feminist discourse are not behind us, but continue to be pressing.

The Guide To Girls And Boys by Mike Hauser

2009-10-07T00:06:00.000-07:00

Mike Hauser is the author of crets crets crets (Rust Buckle Books), Psychic Headset ( Mitzvah Chaps), and There You Are (self published on demand) among other publications. His work's also appeared in Sprung Formal, Abraham Lincoln, The Hat, and Dusie, among other fine publications. He co-curates the Salacious Banter Reading Series in Milwaukee, where he lives. And he will be editing a Salacious Banter issue of the Milwaukee literary magazine Burdock, due out toward the end of this year.

The Guide To Girls And Boys

Boys like girls who see them only on their assigned day—Mary every Thursday,
Emily every Friday, and Jenny every Saturday.

Girls like boys who travel the aisles with a partially filled cart for greater acceptance.

Boys like girls who monitor the campus, not sit in a steam tray to soak up smooth (preferably crowded) prime pilfering.

Girls like boys who spritz key areas of the illusion of space, and torchieres that reflect light not sold with a contiguous loop ¼ inch from the fabric, securing another active recalling of Jerry Garcia’s birthday.

Boys like girls who do not bottle to avoid spilling.

Girls like boys who snugly cushion the surface of an email with a disruptive promise of the text of the email.

Boys like girls who raise previously-located parents glazed in the waterproof, very small consonant blare the width of the picture-hanging area, and crimp the dropped shaking index, as long as they are willing to bird-call the heel.

Girls like boys who poke several forkholes in the potato to allow steam to escape and reduce the chance of explosion.

Boys like girls who do not use abbreviations or emoticons.

Girls like boys who are a cheap source of excess water while parents are in the room.

Boys like girls who gather clothes in a pile for more than five minutes, then transfer the pile to an agreed-upon spaciousness, opposite the illusion of light.

Girls like boys who sight wandering landmarks.

Boys like girls who bag cardboard.

Girls like boys who will have to say goodnight and cut a square on top of a pizza box to sleep in.

Boys like girls who fluff the incense while losing being smart and rotate the maraschino cherry (against the surging mob).

Girls like boys who drink the sodium from the bloodstream of the doorframe.

Boys like girls who pull the sides apart, remove excessive carrels, and dangle the microbes against built-in alarms.

Girls like boys who have built-in hand-held Texas napkins.

Boys like girls who can be baked, rather than placed under the bed, for prospective oscillating around a crate grid.

Girls like boys who can be found vomiting in nearby hair salons or on large photocopy machines.

Boys like girls who, remembering pleasurable experiences, just passed a bottle of wine through a car wash.

Girls like boys who swim from shore within an oar’s length of the parking tickets.

Boys like girls who reconsider their financial contribution fully forward and stretch the strap until they hear “Toga!”.

Girls like boys who clean pages from a telephone book.

Boys like girls who touch the floor with bare feet.

Girls like boys who touch the middle, and squeak to open the door.

Boys like girls who, forming in the mattress, are sorry to be so unavailable, like a romantic gift, or a quickly dressing oxygen indentation.

Girls like boys who are the maximum sporting door handle wider than the window.

Boys like girls who need square stackable milk crates, an old magazine, or any permanent clutch suggesting (unsuccessfully) “your language”.

Girls like boys who blend high-style shoes with rioting.

Boys like girls who avoid corduroy.

Girls like boys who think of the calorie content of food.

Boys like girls who convey a specific elbow through the flour and the dimly-lit multiple assignations.

Girls like boys who convey the dimly-lit multiple assignations as “our song” only on their assigned pillows.

Boys like girls who spun out gatherings with extra special aids, with arms cut off.

Girls like boys who, with arms cut off, gain empathy five minutes before an understanding of dimly-lit assignations, answering a question for days hence.

Boys like girls who completely cover the seat with paper.

Girls like boys who open a closet or semi-opaque laundry room, and lie down with a friend, still allowing some light to open a dirty perfume, focusing on the goal of joining the group.

Boys like girls who keep active by recalling the lyrics of all the songs they know, remembering pleasurable experiences, and focusing on the goal of joining the group.

Girls like boys who, joining the group, deal with each horror with a machete.

Boys like girls who, joining the machete to a storage area, leaping from floor to alumni association, form a wide V shape.

Girls like boys who trim the photo to fit the photo.

Boys like girls who apply the P.A.S.S. technique to snuff out the flames.

Girls like boys who do not yank on the chord; who do not deal with each dimly-lit assignation with a machete.

Boys like girls who wear clothing in swimming pools.

Girls like boys who hold breath for a bottle opener.

Boys like girls who use the machete to remain upright by a breezy lake.

Girls like boys who turn the torso behind the strap for a proper fit.

Boys like girls who, wearing dark colors, mask body odor with talcum powder, soil, pizza boxes, or dimly-lit assignation.

Girls like boys who, prohibited from painting, thread the perimeter of sponges around the perimeter of the manila folder, and, around a crate grid square, make a stencil to study with and stay alert.

Boys like girls who practice “state-dependent” learning, as though shaking hands through the heel of each sock.

Girls like boys who separate semi-opaque, small furniture from medium-weight, eye-hole screws.

Boys like girls who secure the horizontal territory of electrical germs vertically through the T-shirt pipeline.

Girls like boys who collect chips and pretzels from in the drywall.

[Source text: The Worst-Case Survival Handbook: College]

I Don’t Know What I Look Like; I Can’t Ever Know What I Look Like To You. by Nate Pritts

2009-10-07T00:05:00.000-07:00

Nate Pritts is the author of two books of poetry - Sensational Spectacular (2007) and Honorary Astronaut (2008) - with a third, The Wonderfull Yeare, due in early 2010. The founder & editor of H_NGM_N, Nate teaches poetry at the Downtown Writers Center/YMCA in Syracuse, NY. Find him online at http://www.natepritts.com.

I’m driving to work, the deep middle center of September, & it’s upstate New York outside; it’s cold already & the leaves are starting to change colors. I’m noticing every single leaf, working hard to navigate the quasi-rush hour traffic & not crash, to sing along loudly to the music I’ve selected for the drive without missing a note: dazzling red, stunning orange, brilliant green, lovely lovely yellow & the hundreds of shades of each that go unrecognized & the hundreds of shades of each you could pick out & give names to if you slowed down.

This is what a (pro)feminist [Man Poet] looks like at 9:00 am on a Tuesday: I have blue eyes that are responsive to shifts in weather (today they’re dull); hair that I never thought of as blonde is, sort of, blonde & flies out a little by my ears; my beard has some grey hairs just at the chin, finally giving me a credential toward maturity as I hit 35 in a few weeks; I wear glasses, thick frames that I imagine make me look earnest; I’m 6’ tall in shoes. I don’t often think about my body. I guess I know it’s there. My brain sends signals to make my fingers move. But when I’m walking around, or driving to work, I’m nothing but my brain thinking & my heart feeling. I am, mostly, disconnected from any sense of my own physicality. I wonder if that makes me lucky.

Heather says she has an impulse to balance mind & body. Heather says, “Your hair is definitely blonde.” Heather says she’d rather live on an isolated mountain than on a lost island. Heather says feminism(s) is all about “ensuring equal chances for happiness.” Heather stretches & grabs my arm & my arm is real, suddenly. It’s there where it wasn’t before.

I’m looking into the eyes of each of my students, trying to get them to care about the essay we’re reading. We’re reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s “An Apology for Idlers.” I don’t particularly care if they understand all of it but I really want them to be fired up about it. I want them to be mad at me for making them read it, or grateful. I want my actions to have at least one of the desired consequences & I don’t often think about the fact that I am a man asking this. I wonder if this matters or how I could control the myriad responses this may elicit from the students & I wonder if the fact that I elect to think about this – rather than being forced to confront it daily – makes me lucky.

I tell my students that I’ve never been very good with names but I remember faces. I tell them to say hi if they see me walking around campus. I tell them that I’m friendly even if I look distracted. I tell them I’m going to call each of them simply “Sir” or “Ma’am” depending on their gender. I don’t say that I’m terrified I’ll look directly at someone & call them the wrong name.

I’m navigating three lanes of traffic, powerfully switching lanes with my knees as I reach for my coffee & sing along to the song I’m playing too loudly. “If I could draw a map / of a boy that I would like, / your resume would shine through / like a bright green light.” I can’t explain much of anything to anyone. I’m constantly confronted by the fact that I’m woefully inarticulate – that there is some special kind of bursting inside my me that I can’t translate into human language. Only once do I think I’m singing a song sung by a girl, written by a girl, about how hard it is to be a girl. There are two voices here – Anna & Nate. I can’t be “Ms. Wrong” the way she is.

H_NGM_N, the online journal I founded & still edit, is interested in “linguistic sparks, the slow burn, the zany & the serene […] committed to lively & engaging writing.” What this means, to me, is that the magazine publishes the poetry submitted to it that best fits that pretty general description. I want to support poetry that is saying something vital & amazing. Does it matter who is doing the saying?

Yes, it does. “I am trying to say / What I want to say / Without having to say / ‘I love you.’” This time there are three voices: Torquil, Amy & Nate. I know that the words mean something different, or they mean the same thing in different ways, depending on who is doing the saying. What I’m trying to say is that I am energized by a plurality of voices, by a multitude of saying. What I’m trying to say is I love you & since I love you I have a responsibility to you. What I’m trying to say is that I want you to have an equal chance at happiness.

Heather standing outside looking for rainbows; Heather sitting next to me at the coffee shop; Heather writing about different Heathers while sitting at the kitchen table; Heather gasping, along with me, pointing out early bursts of autumn color; Heather saying “heart” & suddenly it’s something real, & heavy, & red. Suddenly, there’s something beating inside my chest.

This is what a (pro)feminist [Man Poet] thinks about at 12:49 pm on a Wednesday: fall leaves & rainbows & his own body, finally, & his own heart & head, always, & the bodies of other people & their heads & hearts. I think I don’t know what I look like. I think I can’t ever know what I look like to you. I think your mind is racing like a pronoun, from you to you & back again, from he to she to I.

I think I’d like to be better at being me.

Sissifying Signifying (A Reflection by a Gay Black Feminist) by Kevin Simmonds

2009-10-06T00:05:00.000-07:00

Kevin Simmonds is a writer and musician originally from New Orleans. His writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Field, jubilat, Kyoto Journal, Poetry, and elsewhere. His music has been performed throughout the US, Japan, the UK and the Caribbean. Most recently, the Pulitzer Center commissioned him to write the music for the Emmy Award-winning multimedia project HOPE, which premiered at the 2009 National Black Theatre Festival. He lives in San Francisco. www.kevinsimmonds.com

I'm gay and many consider me slightly effeminate. I'm also African-American. While growing up in New Orleans, I was called, among other things, "faggot," "jinny woman," "punk," "sissy" and "girl." It was my perceived effeminacy that people feared and despised and wanted to call out. Exorcise?

Shrinks used to have a commonly held view that homosexual men hated women. I don't hate women. Ever since I was a kid, I've tried to emulate women because I found them the most compelling presence in my life. The most versatile and resilient. The most beautiful and intelligent. Fully present in all their complexities.

Artist Mark Bradford created a performance piece where a black man sashayed down streets in South Central Los Angeles, using the street as a runway. That's a suicide mission for a black man. Kamikaze sissy. This is a gay work, a recasting of blackness, a feminist work.

I am a feminist because of the women who built me, the women in me, my womanish ways, my run(a)way black male self. "Sissy," "jinny woman," "punk," and "faggot" are direct assaults on women. Why is a feminine presence in a man alarming?

Sashaying gay men and stiff-hipped gay men, alike, should be consciously committed to feminism.

Kareem Estefan Responds

2009-10-06T00:04:00.000-07:00

Kareem Estefan is a writer and radio producer. He hosted the radio show Ceptuetics, a WNYU program investigating the poetics of conceptually innovative writers. His own writing shows up in Google searches, on blogs, and soon, in poetry journals called "President's Choice" and "The Physical Poets." He has begun a new blog. It's called disco (not disconnect).

Eileen Myles' new book contains a blog entry on the choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch, who died earlier this year. It concludes with an injunction that feels impossible for me, at this juncture, but nonetheless remains "our job. As a people. To not believe ourselves so much. But to believe our bodies." A difficult occupation, believing our bodies, as our bodies are always already occupied. Reflected in our fluids, amidst the bacteria, are the truly threatening parasites: communications devices that fragment my body and transport "me" elsewhere, a temporal regime that submits my body to external demands of productivity. Now, as before, a feminist approach questions how we have constructed the philosophical, economic, and legal bodies that govern our selves, and demands that we tap our tactile bodies - cyborg, queer, of varying color, age, and form - for the multivocal responses.

As a feminist poet, then, I have failed (so far). I write seldom and less joyously than I'd like. I try to put the body there - in text, online, out loud - but I end up with screen names, disembodied and appropriated figures for the "I" that I attempt to multiply and queer. Instead I affirm the "I"'s hollowness. It is a failure I recognize as a process of testing, trying, and understanding, in this moment where we need to think about the fractured self and its networked relations. Certainly, it is instructive to read contemporary feminist writers like Juliana Spahr, Eileen Myles, Kim Rosenfield, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, and Avital Ronell. Those who tune into the body and perform its rhythms against and alongside the outrages of boredom, bureaucracy, rape and war.

But then little of my time is spent as a poet, being twenty-three and new to poetry and working nine to six for a political talk show. Mainly I raise feminist concerns behind the curtains of the media, in editorial meetings led by two female bosses where, still, feminism is cut off from issues of labor, language, and love. Here it is not an issue of numbers trouble: in our offices and "on our air" women are more than equally represented, though we rarely have women "on air," I notice, to speak about war and peace. Unless they are military wives extolling Facebook for permitting them to 'stay in touch.' What is this touch? I want to ask. Who can and cannot be touched in these networks we have drawn up, now that society has obsolesced?

On a different wavelength, while hosting a show for contemporary poetry, Ceptuetics, I asked feminist poets like Barbara Cole and Juliana Spahr and Anne Tardos how autobiography and anonymity and intersubjectivity figured in their writing. What does it mean to occupy the position of subject and object, something that Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman ask in their Notes on Conceptualisms, an important book for questions of gender and genre. Problems of identity in writing, how "I" or "we" emerge after the author's been distilled into this or that function, remain central even as more poets employ techniques like appropriation, sampling, and plagiarism.

I wonder how Eileen Myles, skeptical of effacing the personal, might respond to the "I" in works of conceptual writing. "I think that only the implicitly powerful can readily bury their sex or their gods," she writes in an ode to musician/video artist Sadie Benning (of Le Tigre), "and not feel somewhat erased themselves as a result." Conceptual poets or mash-up artists or collagists all need to ask how their editing and erasures subvert or re-inscribe modes of domination. Back when the musician Girl Talk was big, around the time Night Ripper first wowed hipsters and critics with its whirlpool of samples (roughly one every ten seconds), I asked Girl Talk aka Greg Gillis whether he thought of his album as a DJ set or a new piece of music. He responded, "I don't want people to think this is, you know, the Ying Yang Twins meets The Verve. I want them to hear this and say, 'oh, that's that song by Girl Talk.'" I agreed that he had put together something fans would remember as his composition, so I asked him if it was then Girl Talk whispering "beat the pussy up, beat the pussy up" over the monumental strings of "Bitter Sweet Symphony." He paused and said it wasn't really a political album.

Of course I still dance to Girl Talk, I still say shitty things to my mom from time to time, and my friends and lovers have rightly pointed to problematic assumptions I inherit from my parents, from cities in the Northeast, from Palestine and Syria and Lebanon. To ask "are you conflicted in your relationship to feminism?" is really to ask "what follows from your conflicted relationship with feminism?" For me, the answer might be hope or anxiety or breathing or love. Don't hold your breath any longer, men: inject your selves with empathy, monthly doses of mortality. We can only live when we feel this connection of everyone with lungs, when we learn what it might mean to believe our bodies.

Square/Plumb/True by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

2009-10-06T00:03:00.000-07:00

Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and Sorcery (Dusie Chapbook Kollektiv). His poems can be found in such places as Crowd, VeRT, Volt, Spork, Cue, Slope, Aught, Fence, Swerve, Dirt, Sweet and Zeek, as well as some more multisyllabic places such as Puerto Del Sol and New American Writing. He teaches in the MFA writing program at California College of the Arts, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven.

My wife Mary and I live in an old coach house in Berkeley that was converted into living space in the 1970’s by this guy called “Sixpack Tom,” so called because he would escape his family in the front house by grabbing some beers and going to work on the horse barn in the back. You can still see his bootprints on the ceiling upstairs above the dinner table, along with the pawprints of his dog. It’s a great house, but nothing about it is square, or plumb, or true. Put a ball on the floor and it will slowly roll to the northeast corner.

The thing is, the house looks fine, everything looks like it lines up the way it’s supposed to line up. You see a corner, you think 90/90/90 because that’s the way corners are supposed to be (even when that’s not how the corners actually are). We’re raised to see interiors a certain way, and when they’re like that way (but not exactly, sometimes not even close) our brains just make up the difference. This is how everything should meet, so that’s how it is (even when it’s not). Because you’re not really thinking about it you start moving towards the northeast side.

I think that’s what patriarchy is: a crooked house you’re trained to think is straight. We think we’re liberal, unsexist, unracist people, and we wind up publishing journals or teaching courses with syllabi that’re ninety percent male and all white.

Or I write a draft of an essay about feminism and the only woman I reference is my wife.

I came up with this extended metaphor as I was teaching the class that produces the journal Eleven Eleven. I was trying to explain why we use quotas: at least half the writers we publish in Eleven Eleven should be women, and at least 10-20% should be writers of color. When I insist that my students do this, am I getting away with something as a male teacher that I couldn’t as a woman (would I be called a shrew?). As a male in a patriarchy I’m supposed to be authoritative, if I turn that authority towards a pro-feminist direction, am I supporting feminism or curdling it? I remind the students of this because last year when my fiction staff (all but one of whom were women) picked ten stories out of the slush pile, all of them were by men.

So for me, one part of feminism is asking questions, and not letting myself get too comfortable with my own answers – are the corners square (or am I just taking them for granted), am I taking our culture’s fuckeduptitude about gender into account – or do I just think I am? As much as I can I try to resist that default mode, of thinking of my life as normal when it’s only singular, one of many, and complicit.

Feminism is about inclusion and equity, empathy and confidence and empowerment – and that fundamentally these concerns involve gender. It’s about being aware of power structures and acting responsibly. To shut up and let someone else speak for a change, to make sure the person who isn’t speaking speaks, even it makes everyone uncomfortable to hear what they’re saying. And to do this not just in the theatre of my head, but in the practice of my life. The short answer to the question “how can I be a (more) feminist man?”, the one you get if you’re standing on one foot, is don’t be a sexist asshole, be a decent human being, but the problem is that most of us don’t think we’re assholes, we don’t spend much time thinking at all. Trained not to see a slope, ignoring the crookedness is the default setting of our culture.

But does any of this make me a feminist poet? Because I don’t know if I am. When I first started thinking about this essay, I wanted to write about a masculinist poetics. I thought I’d mount a defense of Iron John (is there a poet who has done more to sabotage their career than Robert Bly?), but my heart just wasn’t in it. How should I write about my male body? Or of being a part of the patriarchy (and a card carrying member of the worldwide Zionist conspiracy to boot), enjoying its rights and privileges? What if I like all the things ecriture says I shouldn’t, what if I aspire to writing that single, closed, phallic poem, a little bossy, sure of what I’m saying even when I’m full of it, and I’m just not good enough a writer to pull that off? Or I’m not sure that what passes for post-avant writing practice is any more or less feminist than most other writing practices. Or I can’t help it, I really dig closure.

I lean towards ardor a lot more than irony in my writing because it feels riskier to me – to risk coming on too strong as a man is scary in a way being mordant isn’t. I’m more into the utopian/esoteric possibilities of HD than any of the other modernists because it makes me feel strange to believe what she’s saying. The immanence of something better than what we settle for now.

I like to think I apply feminist principles to my editing and teaching when I use the following rules: 1) at least half the authors I publish or are on my syllabus have to be women, and at least 10-20 percent have to be non-white; 2) I try to avoid using the usual suspects. I don’t trust journals that have two well-known women in bold print on the cover and all the unknown writers in the table of contents are men. I don’t want to substitute one sort of privilege for another. I rotate authors out of my syllabus frequently, because unfairness comes in all sorts of forms, including the one where someone is famous not (just) because of the quality of their work, but because they got there first, or they knew someone, and now they’re safe.

So, feminism as fairness, or recognizing the lack thereof – a working method to see what’s crooked. To be a feminist (male) poet (person) is to be conscious of the problem, and do ones best, one act at a time, one student at a time, to overcome it, stay out of corners, and work with anyone who wants to do the same.

This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like

2009-10-05T00:06:00.000-07:00

Welcome to our third forum, where each day this week you will find new responses.

This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like

Monday October 5: Brian Teare, Christian Peet, & H.L. Hix
Tuesday October 6: Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Kareem Estefan,
& Kevin Simmonds
Wednesday October 7: Mark Wallace, Mike Hauser, & Nate Pritts
Thursday October 8: Philip Jenks, Tim Atkins, & Tony Frazer,
Friday October 9: Tony Trigilio, David Lau & Rodrigo Toscano

Our participants responded to the (flexible & open-ended!) query:
-How do you see yourself as a participant in feminism?
-How do you support feminism in your role as teacher, mentor, editor, publisher, blogger, poet, etc.?
-How and when did you first recognize the importance of feminist issues?
-What branch of feminism, model of feminist poetics, feminist icon, or etc. informs your poetry? Or, from which of these does your poetry diverge?
-Are there specific feminist tactics you employ?
-Do you think of your work as queer or gender-variant, and, if so, do you think of it as supportive of feminist poetics?
-Have you ever felt conflicted about your relationship to feminism?
-Do you have any concrete suggestions for altering the gender disparities in the poetry world (or perhaps the greater world)?
-What are some things men can do to account for male privilege (either in poetry or, if you're feeling ambitious!, the greater world)? Can these be applied to other categories of privilege (white, hetero, without disability, etc.)?

To skip this intro and go directly to the forum, please scroll down to the next post, or click on one of the entries above. We hope you'll continue the conversation in our comments boxes. If you post about this forum on your own blog, let us know and we'll include it in our links round-up.

Danielle Pafunda:

In May 2009, I curated the first installment of Delirious Hem's "This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like." This forum featured women discussing the relationship between their feminism & their poetry, and these contributions elicited thoughtful responses from women & men bloggers alike. Mark Wallace was one of those bloggers. In “Post-Millennial Feminist Poetry,” Mark compiled a list of women poets “who were first significantly publishing poetry in this current decade and who are adding new elements to the history of feminism.” It’s a juicy list, and one he invited readers to expand.

What happened next is not unexpected. David Buuck asked, “Wondering why your list only consists of female poets? I guess the question would be can't there be male feminists?” Buuck asked this question aware of the “long history of SWM poaching/colonizing theoretical domains/movements.” And here’s the classic tension. On one hand, many of us feminists would like to know, where my bros at? On the other hand, we’re often wary & weary of the poaching & colonizing. Which I gather most of the feminist men among us know.

Because Mark wondered if a working list of feminist men poets could be assembled; because I myself wondered who these men would be and just how they would describe their participation in or affinity for feminism; because I knew that though no one’s stopping men from having this discussion, there was slim likelihood of someone taking up Mark’s challenge; and because the surely exciting, surprising, and tricky discussion surrounding men’s relationships to feminism might best be conducted in an always already feminist space (like Delirious Hem), I asked Mark if he might like to co-host a special installment of our Feminist [Poet] forum. "This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like."

Mark Wallace:

And I agreed that I would like to. I’m approaching this forum both with trepidation—after all, who knows what these men (including me) might say?—but also with fascination, because who knows what these men might say? Whatever the value or limitations that this forum and the responses in it will reveal, the attempt is certainly unique at least in my experience, although I imagine I’m not alone. I’ve never been part of any large scale conversation, public or private, among men on the subject of feminism, and I bet that’s likely true for many of the writers who are responding. This forum I hope will give those who respond a chance to think through and express ideas that they might or might not have expressed elsewhere. The forum highlights that it’s not simply worthwhile, but important, for men to engage with the question of what role feminism has played in their writing and living.

Yet I agree with Danielle that such a forum runs the risk of seeming like another attempt by men to seize power over women’s lives, in the same way that David’s original discussion with me, however aware we both might have been (I say “however” on purpose, as open question) of the problems involved, still played a role in the complex dynamic of men speaking about women. I hope that the responses here show that taking this risk was the right thing to do, although not having read them before writing this, I have to acknowledge that maybe they won’t. Still, if a wary silence even by men who share principles with feminism is a problem that feminists face, then I suppose the risk of conversation is one that at least some men need to take. Maybe the writers and readers of this forum will even learn a few things that they don’t already know about the ways feminism is working in the world.

Some notes on our diction:

We choose the term “man” to augment “poet” in order to extend the query to all individuals who identify as men, regardless of how their bodies are sexed, and because we are discussing gender, which is the cultural perception of one’s biological sex, not biological sex itself (though I know it is common practice to use the terms interchangeably). “Male poet” reads more felicitously precisely because the term “man” is more often an assumption than an utterance, the assumed quantity in the human figure (poet or doctor or senator or lion tamer). Woman poet. Man poet. We mark the unmarked category, reveal its difference.

The term “pro-feminist,” which some of our contributors may prefer, comes from Mark’s comment on his blog post: “Speaking for myself, I'd be likely to call myself pro-feminist without ever claiming to be a "feminist poet." Not sure what the distinction is, except that while I know a few things about feminist discourse and the history of women, I'm hardly an expert. Maybe more importantly (at least to me personally), I think it's important to acknowledge how much I really don't know about what it is to (feel like) (be treated like) (be) a woman.”

A few links:

There’s good discussion of the pro-feminist vs feminist label at Jezebel's "Can a Man be a Feminist?"

At The Daily Buzz, the Dalai Lamas on topic: “I call myself a feminist,” said the Dalai Lama. “Isn’t that what you call someone who fights for women’s rights?”

When Twisty Faster calls “Blamers, coddle the dudes so I don’t have to,” blamers step-to.

There’s the long-standing xy pro-feminist site run by Michael Flood.

And, of course, your recommended reading, the original forum, Delirious Hem's "This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like." We've scheduled the next installment for November, so please come back to hear more women on feminist poetics. And be sure to catch our December 2009 Advent Kalendar, curated by Susana Gardener. 2008's was a blast!

Rebel Girl by Brian Teare

2009-10-05T00:04:00.000-07:00

I came to poetry by accident. I’d been a studious classical musician for at least eight years when I first studied poetry as an undergraduate during the summer between sophomore and junior years. For the first two years of college I’d avoided taking non-music courses that would “distract” from practice time, but because I had to begin accruing required classes toward graduation, I grudgingly took an “intro to creative writing” workshop. We started with fiction, and at first I was the kind of student I now dread having: I knew very little and had no ambitions to be a writer. I was only mildly interested in class discussion. During the poetry half of the class, however, something shifted. In reading the assigned poems, my earliest encounters with reading poetry began to assert themselves, strong experiences of identification and connection I’d forgotten upon dropping out of high school.

These memories had to do with poems I’d read in textbooks: poems by Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Nikki Giovanni, and Margaret Atwood. Usually the only women in whatever text we were reading, their work was—aside from Dickinson’s—never assigned. These were the only poets whose work touched me. I remember having to keep the book open to the canonical poem under discussion while surreptitiously cracking open the pages at the back where the “new” poems were. In order to maintain the illusion of stealth, I could open the back of the book only enough to see the text, so in each new textbook, I had to read their poems at a slant, the chosen pages half-shadowed by the book’s other pages. So I learned to read the poetry I loved in secret, largely in the dark, counter to all curriculum and assignments, during time I stole from my “real” education. I still think this is how most poets are educated.

I still can’t say why, exactly, I could love only poems by women. Some connection between myself—a nascent queer in Tuscaloosa, Alabama—and women who were, in their own profound ways, outside of the cultural mainstreams of their times and places? Perhaps because I identified with the pain of my mother’s white, Catholic, heterosexual family life? I do think I experienced these poets as voicing inequities and realities that my very Christian, very stoical mother could not—aspects of family life that, it occurs to me now, I might have minded more than she did. If I suffered both with and for my mother, perhaps they were my fantasy of the internal life my mother kept hidden from me? Perhaps they were the mother I wished I’d had? That mother was a doubter, dissenter, lover, and skeptic. And a writer.

* * *

As I began writing poems, I discovered a strange irony about my training as a musician: though I experienced playing music as endlessly expressive, I did not experience this expression as being “about” anything. Playing a Bach Sonata had, for me, no “subject” in the way that writing a poem did, though both activities called upon an enormous range of technical resources, and a poem could be “about” its technique in the way that a fugue or counterpoint was. Nonetheless, I found that I liked having a subject as much as I liked having words. My mind moved differently through a poem than it did through a score; it was more aware of itself and yet more mysterious for that self-awareness. It seems I hadn’t given much time to living the “examined life,” and given the chance, I found myself happily typing drafts of poem after poem, an activity not unlike practicing an instrument: at a keyboard, I spent hours typing out “notes.”

The teacher of my first creative writing class was very encouraging; I signed up for his poetry workshop in the fall, a brief respite from rehearsal and practice rooms. Over the next year, as music slowly receded into the background, he came into the foreground as my mentor. He was queer, which was likely one reason why he was as kind to me as he was, but he was not a feminist. He was of the generation just after the Confessionals, and the only woman solidly in his canon seemed to be Elizabeth Bishop, whose way of being queer was similar to his: “open secret,” but not out. I could respect and admire Bishop, and I could love Randall Jarrell who was himself so identified with women, but I largely could not love my mentor’s canon: Lowell and Berryman and Roethke and Hugo. Sexton he judged as second-rate, and though I suspect he loved Plath, I also suspect he thought she was a model too dangerous to bring into the classroom.

Repeating the pattern I’d started in high school, I largely read poetry outside of his curriculum: I began with anthologies like No More Masks! and Gay and Lesbian Poets in our Time, whose pages I passionately dog-eared. From there I went to the University library to check out the books of poets whose work I’d marked for further study, largely narrative feminist, lesbian or gay poets like Sharon Olds, Audre Lorde, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Essex Hemphill and Allen Ginsberg. But when I finally changed my major to English, the curriculum altered yet again. I took workshops with graduate students, who had us read new books by the generation between theirs and that of our teachers, and I discovered poetry that, without breaking out of the narrative Confessional mode, nonetheless stretched it: Mark Doty’s My Alexandria, Lynda Hull’s Star Ledger, Susan Mitchell’s Rapture, Yusef Komunyakaa’s Neon Vernacular, Deborah Digges’ Rough Music, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song. At the same time I was taking endless survey courses of British and American and postcolonial lit and Shakespeare and Faulkner and the 20th century British novel, then a women’s literature class so boring I made a B- and later in secret I read the queer theory that hadn’t been assigned but was proliferating everywhere as surviving Gay Lib and AIDS activists became academics. In my last year I took a critical theory class and finally read Derrida and Cixous and Barthes and Irigaray and Kristeva and wrote a critical thesis on the feminist theology of Julian of Norwich.

What I’m saying is that, like most folks who studied English in the ‘90s, I was taught to think critically and read literature largely via the frame of gender, sexual and racial politics—even as my creative writing classes remained largely apolitical and New Formalist. If my poetry workshops were concerned with any theories, they were Freudian, but even then the theories were largely implicit and unexamined, as were the gender, sexual and racial politics of our reading lists and discussions. I gratefully participated in this curriculum, which despite itself was a powerful counter to a Deep South whose politics and culture made it a deeply, painfully pedagogical place, and whose social structure, so inured to the manners, mores and privilege of a mythic and very real Old South, was equally teacherly. One year for Pride Month an entire sorority had t-shirts made; “Silly faggot, dicks are for chicks,” I’d read each time one of them would pass by. As a young queer, I could literally feel these educations meet in me as rage and shame and impotence and solidarity with other minorities. The only thing to do about it on such a conservative campus was to become a “student activist,” a marcher in demonstrations and chalker of sidewalks, a member of the ACLU and NOW and of the then-named GLBA, someone who got harassed by the campus police, called in by the dean, someone whose windows were shattered by bricks. It was only a matter of time until my creative writing caught up with—got caught up in?—my critical thinking and fledgling activism.

* * *

At the start of a modest book tour, I’m writing this on Amtrak train 193 from Richmond to Washington, D.C. It’s 11 AM on a Sunday morning at the end of September and we’ve just pulled out of Richmond. I grew up in a town through which the trains came daily, and the sound of our train as it moves north through Virginia calls back nights before bed spent listening to trains sounding the Alabama night, the sleepy iambic rhythm of wheel upon track. And the landscape outside this window is endlessly “like” the one of my childhood: ditches on either side of the tracks lined with cattails rising out of thick brown wastewater, a dense mix of pines and hardwood just beyond, forests broken by small fields of gold grasses and the yellow broad umbels of wildflower or the occasional blue-brown lake divvied up between docking for boats and lightly puckered open water.

This “likeness” to my childhood landscape reminds me of the paradox of identity conferred by being raised in a small Southern town: everyone in the community knows who you are, what kind of “people” you come from, and if you become an adult in that same community, you’re eventually assigned a role and identity within it beyond that of being “one of those Teare boys.” If you come out, you become “town queer”; it’s a role that remains unspoken by those in polite (i.e. middle class) society, but outside of that society you’re free game: smear the queer! Either way, via silent condescension or fag-bashing, you’re well policed.

This in turn reminds me of the tendency of the publishing industry to niche market writers via their identities: feminist, woman poet, gay or lesbian poet, Afro-Am poet, poet of trauma, poet of witness, etc. Many minority writers disdainfully refer to this practice as being “ghettoized,” but the metaphor’s problematic; I’m apt to think it of as enforced integration, as though the writer were, without choice, being assimilated into a pre-existing, prefabricated community they would never choose if given the choice. Many writers feel stranded there: in it, but not necessarily of it. On the reading public this practice often has the same effect as the kind of roles doled out to minority members by small town communities: the illusion of “knowing” a poet by virtue of a priori judgments generated by what’s essentially hearsay. Such judgments might prevent certain readers from approaching the work at all, and those who do approach it might find themselves discouraged from registering complexity: of individual subject position, of politics, of aesthetics.

Such rhetoric risks reducing the experience of reading the poet to a poverty of identity-based tropes, and allows lazy readers a reductive lens via which to read an entire career as though a poet remains unchanging for decades: always one way of being gay, always one way of thinking about being a woman, never a consciously postmodern Afro-Am politics, never a different witness to accumulating ecological and military disasters or an evolving 21st century feminism. This kind of niche marketing can on the one hand market anything, so even subversion can become good ad copy or an aesthetic gimmick to generate its pittance of capital; on the other, it can also unfortunately trick the writer him- or herself into a too-narrow identification with a “given” role. And though s/he might reap rewards from keeping her or himself well-policed, a demanding reader might end up feeling as though the poet had never gone farther than mimicking the few tropes allowed them after being assimilated by mainstream literary culture.

As we leave Ashland, VA I’m listening to Bikini Kill’s Pussy Whipped, an album whose gender ironies, sexual anger and elegy for a gay boy sustained me through the difficult final years of college when I was most involved in direct activism. I’m listening to it because their riot girl anthem “Rebel Girl” neatly encapsulates my own feelings about the activist women and women poets that formed my education: “that girl thinks she’s the queen of the neighborhood/she’s got the hottest trike in town/that girl, she holds her head up so high/I think I want to be her best friend yeah/Rebel Girl/Rebel Girl/Rebel Girl you are the Queen of the World…” And perhaps this is another reason why I identified so much with the few women poets I first read in high school, and why Dickinson was the first 19th century poet I fell in love with. American popular and literary cultures have for almost a century tried to reduce Emily Dickinson to a trademarked niche market, but the whole of the poems always escape their control—even editorial control, as feminist editors like Susan Howe have shown. Though Dickinson’s public image, regrettably clad always in white, does stand trembling at the public threshold of her father’s Amherst house, the poems themselves subterfuge the humiliating reductions of gender, nation, place and religion in favor of existential, cosmological and theological uncertainty, about which she often had an incredible sense of humor. Perhaps this is why she still seems to me courageous and loveable good company.

* * *

These are my roots in poetry, and if the branches are quite different, it’s because I’m a transplant. The decade I’ve spent in the San Francisco Bay area is the decade in which my poetry has come of my age alongside my feminist and political consciousness, one always lagging behind the other, one advancing while the other figures out how to catch up. After entering a region with so many reading series, literary institutions, and bookstores, an area of the country with an exceedingly rich literary history, I was quickly inundated by a new curriculum: the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, the Bolinas poets (many of whom were actually second generation New York School), Language Poetry, poets at Naropa, ecopoets, and poets of no nameable affiliation except to inquiry in poetry. I will likely never be done with this curriculum, but in many respects I’ve found myself a home, at home within it. Why?

Because of Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer. Because of Allen Ginsberg and John Wieners. Because of Alice Notley, Norma Cole, Sonia Sanchez, Barbara Guest, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Joanne Kyger, and June Jordan. Because of Adrienne Rich. Because of Juliana Spahr, giovanni singleton, Carol Snow, Susanne Dyckman, Laura Walker, Lisa Robertson, Barbara Jane Reyes, Jane Mead and Gillian Conoley. Because of kari edwards. Because of Robert Gluck, Rob Halpern, D.A. Powell, Aaron Shurin, Rebecca Solnit, Michael Palmer, Miranda Mellis, George Albon and Nathaniel Mackey. Because of those who were in residence and then left: Elizabeth Robinson, Hoa Nguyen, Yedda Morrison, Rick Barot, Elizabeth Bradfield, Myung Mi Kim and Cole Swensen. Because of Kelsey St. Press and Krupskaya Books and New College of California (may it rest in peace) and Small Press Traffic and Small Press Distribution.

Because all of these writers and institutions are feminist or queer or gay or lesbian or trans or biracial or Asian American or immigrant or Caucasian or working class or Jewish or women or men or African American or otherwise and a friend to them all—but none of them are only that or singly that and their work demonstrates the impossibility of ever describing a writer or institution with accuracy via language not generated by the writer or community or institution itself. Living and writing in the Bay Area has given me models other than the ones I was given by the South and by the academy: rather than undergo enforced integration into a dominant literary and social structure, the writer may define her- or himself via multiple affiliations that agree, conflict with or contradict each other and thus generally enrich her or his life.

The incomparable Erica Hunt has called each of these links a “contiguity,” “a social practice” that “acknowledges the relationship among groups who share an interest in changing the antidemocratic character of the social order.” This proliferation of contiguity’s multiple connections and identifications is where postmodern feminism has brought me and where it sustains me, and it is from this presumption that I read and read, write, teach and value poetry. I have always experienced poetry as our whole lives speaking through our work, but by “whole lives” I now mean our civic, familial, sexual, psychological, biological, spiritual, aesthetic, reproductive, literary, cultural, economic, bioregional, cosmological, ecological, experiential, material, mythological and political lives.

But there are ethical limits to any identification, to any contiguity. The obvious limit I experience in my identification with women and women poets is that though I do experience significant prejudice as a gay man and a poet who writes about sexuality, I am nonetheless a man, and a white one at that, and so I experience privilege that women and folks of color do not, privileges of gender and race as different in kind as homophobic, misogynist and racist prejudices. The long-term failure of Reconstruction and the recent implementation of flagrantly xenophobic and reactionary immigration policies have meant that a lot of people of color are routinely denied access to education, services and employment throughout lives which are fraught with harassment. Women still face extremely unequal pay, the terrors of reproductive health care in a healthcare system created by a misogynist society, and a place within the cultural imaginary largely unfit for living. But all minority communities and subject positions face challenges. Queers are still legally discriminated against on a national level; we are fractured within our own communities along the lines of race and class and assimilation and resistance; still recovering from the devastation of AIDS, gay men have had to begin to deal with the culture and politics of barebacking; all the while queers of all kinds remain largely exotic, occasionally threatening curiosities in the public mind of popular culture.

And there are further checks on contiguities and communities, checks largely imposed by the personal histories of their individual members. Connection falters as often as it succeeds because we are all fallible; we all on occasion suffer what psychologists call “compassion fatigue,” especially because each of us bears such different psychological, social and economic burdens as the result of living in the US. These failures have always attended contiguities and idealist endeavors, and many remember that, within academic and activist circles in the ‘90s, there was a heightened, sometimes inhibiting self-awareness that attended the consciousness of inhabiting an inherited subject position (see Pamela Lu’s brilliant Pamela: A Novel). Suddenly, the interpersonal was political, and few of us were prepared for it. Many people realized their privilege, which turned into a crime for which they and others thought they could never atone; many people realized the extent of their oppression, an equally terribly series of crimes that had been perpetrated upon them, crimes for which they and others thought there could never be atonement.

Insofar as the suffering that attended these crimes often brought complex and conflicting ethical and interpersonal demands upon the organization of community, political and literary efforts, it felt for a long time as though cooperation, compassion and contiguity faltered more than they fostered connection. Many organizational meetings ended in accusation, resentment, and failed reparation, and each failure left its own legacy of distrust, circumspection and division among the accused and the accused alike. But sometimes such a meeting might reconvene later with fewer members whose witness of previous failures had fired them with new purpose. Perhaps because I taught in alternative educational spaces in the early years of the new century, perhaps because I attended cooperative faculty meetings and ran classes with a great many activists in attendance, I often experienced simultaneously what I saw as the progress and the cost of the ‘90s. This experience was the gift I took with me when the organization catastrophically folded in 2007.

* * *

I remain a feminist reader, writer, teacher, mentor, critic, editor and micropress publisher deeply involved with and invested in poetry. At base, my work is to be as aware of how I inhabit my relationships with others, with the ideal being parity and contiguity, becoming as subjects together rather than in isolation, subjected to the alienation our government depends upon for continued cultural power. My work is a struggle against hegemony. On a practical level it means I read, teach, write criticism about, mentor, and publish women writers—in most cases, more than gay writers—probably because feminist questions have mirrored and continue to mirror most closely my own sexual, existential, economic and domestic questions. Community and contiguity keep this practice going, fuel an idealism and an attachment to inquiry that stem directly from all 20th century Civil Rights struggles, without whose legacy I wouldn’t be writing now. Of course the root of this practice is love. I continue to love the work of women poets and the women poets themselves, who seem to me the best equipped to speak to our shared emergence in the wake and anticipation of our shared emergencies.

I’d like to close this essay with gratitude for one the poems I’ve most often returned to in recent years, a poem that serves as a rebuttal to my own political cynicism and a tonic for my failures at building contiguity. “Up Nursing,” by Hoa Nguyen, possesses the canny intelligence, daring, political acuity and persuasive affect of my favorite feminist writers, and like all the poems in Hecate Lochia, it remains with me because of the questions it poses about ethics: how to live? how to write? how to love others? It strikes me that asking traditional “humanist” questions with an explicitly female, embodied voice is still radical. With great authority, “Up Nursing” stages a beautiful collapse of temporal and spatial scale, intermingles domestic scenes of maternity and homeopathic medicine with an awareness of global politics, and juxtaposes musical pattern and rhetorical self-doubt—it’s subtle and fierce all at once. It’s the kind of care we could all take in our work with each other, ourselves and with language:

UP NURSING

Up nursing then make tea
The word war is far

“Furry” says my boy
about the cat

I think anthrax
and small pox vax

Pour hot water on dried nettles
Filter more water for the kettle

Why try
to revive the lyric

Christian Peet Responds

2009-10-05T00:03:00.000-07:00

Christian Peet is the author of a forthcoming memoir, No Evidence, No Jury, No Justice: The Story of Jeremy Barney (GenPop Books, 2011); a collection of postcards, titled Big American Trip (Shearsman Books, 2009); and two chapbook-installments of his ongoing project The Nines, “Pluto: Never Forget,” forthcoming from Interbirth Books, and “The Nines,” from Palm Press. His work is included in the anthology, A Best Of Fence: The First Nine Years, and appears in journals such as Action Yes, Bird Dog, Denver Quarterly, and Octopus Magazine. He is also the publisher and founding editor of Tarpaulin Sky Press (tarpaulinsky.com), publishing hybrid forms and innovative poetry and prose in trade paperback and hand-bound books as well as in literary journals in print and online. Please visit his website at christianpeet.com

How do you see yourself as a participant in feminism? How and when did you first recognize the importance of feminist issues? Have you ever felt conflicted about your relationship to feminism?
I don't think about it enough, actually, so I am grateful for this opportunity. My recognition of "the importance of feminist issues" has developed slowly, over a long time, owing less to books than to the women who have shaped my consciousness. By extension, my consciousness of feminist issues owes something even to the men who have affected those women's lives. I think my consciousness began around the time my father started beating my mother. At the time I had no language for it, however; I was a child.
Later, as a teenager, two years in rehab opened my eyes a bit wider. Many of my women friends were prostitutes. I won't call them "sex workers" because it wasn't "all that," and because none of them wanted to continue working as prostitutes. Most of them were mothers as well. I enjoyed being with them because their Mom vibes were a great comfort, but surely my heart and consciousness also benefitted from their strength, and their wisdom, and their beautiful fucking senses of humor.
I didn't really began to study Feminism with a capital "F" until after college--if you can imagine such a statement coming from a Bennington College undergrad. My mentor at Bennington was Anne Winters, one of my favorite women poets, but I don't think the topic of feminism came up a great deal in our discussions: mostly she taught me all I know about prosody, capitalism, and the Bible. Not to say women haven't had tough rows to hoe, traditionally, in all three of those areas, but it wasnít the focus of my interest while I was in college. I tended more toward issues of class, coming from the working one as I do, and as Anne does, with a certain irony in our finding both refuge and outlet in education and poetry.
If you'd asked me, in college, I might have said: I tend to resonate with the work of men poets. I have no "problem" with most of the women poets I've read. I'm just not really "into" them. [NOTE: The number I'd read couldn't have gone far beyond 10.] I like Sylvia Plath just fine (such chiseled lines! such exacting diction!), and Elizabeth Bishop (such navigation of form!), and some others, but I can't see the fuss about . . . well, I don't know . . . Adrianne Rich, for example. She seems awfully direct. Didactic, even. Her metaphors kinda beat me over the head. . . . Etc.
At the time I was also fairly obsessed with all of Richard Hugo's work (much to the befuddlement, if not dismay, of Anne Winters). And I still like Hugo's work--mostly because it has a lot of trees and rivers and can be enjoyed by working class readers who have not spent $100,000 on degrees. That said, however, few would argue that his work does not evidence something of a "conflicted relationship to feminism."
I might have also said that my okayness with feminism was clearly evidenced by my obvious "love of the ladies" on campus. Who knows what I would have said, though, honestly--I was drunk a lot. Certainly I would have pointed out the feminism of my "Avenger Dildo" commercial, which I wrote and directed for my video production class: two scantily-clad young women kiss and fondle each other before trying out the Avenger Dildo, a stout strap-on they delight in severing with a kitchen knife. Buckets of fake blood ensue, and they canít help but smear it all over each other, laughing. CALL NOW! 1-800-AVENGER.
I was trying. I still am. It's difficult to see through Others' eyes. It takes a long time.
And also: there actually wasn't that much blood. I would have liked "buckets," but instead had only a plastic baggie filled with some red liquid, inside the cardboard boner.
My girlfriend at the time, now my ex--go figure--whom I'll call "Ex," for lack of a better name with which to address her while not muddying her internet presence as a professional in her field--has worked her entire adult life as an advocate for women, in one way or another. So, luckily, I was able to learn a bit by osmosis as she worked for women's crisis centers, and eventually began working directly with perpetrators of domestic violence. Most "DV perps" are men, you will not be shocked to hear, but Ex was one of the few women "to have the balls" to address violence against women by women. A lot of her colleagues wouldn't admit that such a thing existed--go figure.
While Ex was studying for her Masters in Psychology, I also read her books, one or two of her surveys-of-feminism textbooks included, as well as Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, et al. I was most interested in Queer Studies, however, Leslie Feinberg in particular: Stone Butch Blues and Transgender Warriors. Reading the latter, I was fascinated by the history of two spirits, (Google keywords: two spirit and berdache--the latter being an offensive term, though widely used in academic studies). And I think this is key to my brand of pro-feminism--it's part of a larger desire to embrace and foster mixing and mingling and hybridity and coexistence of all kinds. (No doubt my interest in transgenre lit has roots in this transgender lit.)
In 2003 my current partner blew my doors off. What she had to teach me, what she continues to teach me, is mostly beyond words (like it or not, writers), in the realm of physical and, dare I say it, "spiritual" expression, but I can say this: her understanding of identity as regards race, culture, class, sex, and gender (and all else) is the wellspring of whatever I may try to call my own. Nothing prior, certainly no book, prepared me for falling bum-over-teakettle in love with a ethnically indeterminate bisexual immigrant woman writer and teacher born working class and now possessing experience and diplomas enough to lecture on all the above--meaning that she is, in short, still 'Other.'
Nothing prepared me to meet her friends, for that matter. Or for my hetero white guy self to live among them as a minority. Yea, verily I say unto you: this Christian was reborn in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, NY. Feminist indeed. And a whole lot else.
How do you support feminism in your role as teacher, mentor, editor, publisher, blogger, poet, etc.?
I read and teach and am inspired by the lives and works of women: post-feminists, womanists, lesbians, biwomen, transwomen, housewives, whores, and witches; first wave, second wave, third wave feminism; the multiple orgasms of clit lit; L7 riot grrl Donita Sparks tossing her bloody tampon at an English crowd; madness, fornication with the devil, streams of consciousness, the ancient tidal river that swallowed Woolf; the late 1960s, Toni Morrison a single mother raising two boys and teaching full time while writing her first novel, The Bluest Eye; the early 70s, abortion and Margaret Atwood's firstborn novel, Surfacing; genital mutilation, murder, afterbirth; we look inside Annie Sprinkle with a speculum and a flashlight, and if a student says, "Um, gross," or "Fucking pussy," then I ask, "Why?"
We take a moment or two of silence after reading aloud a rape scene.
And when my women students want to discuss women's issues in women's literature or in literature in general, I tend not to keep lecturing at them, but rather shut up and listen.
I also publish the work of women writers. A little more than half of the books in the Tarpaulin Sky Press catalog--including the press's next six titles--are books by women. I haven't done the math, but I'm guessing the magazine's ratio is somewhere in the same ballpark as the press.
In recent years, the magazine has been edited by four women writers whom I am deeply honored to know: Rebecca Brown, Elena Georgiou, Bhanu Kapil, and Selah Saterstrom. Two other women writers, Eireene Nealand and Julianna Spallholz, have been editing and otherwise supporting the press since 2002, assisted in a variety of ways by Caroline Ashby, Lizzie Harris, and Sarah Brown.
Soon I'll be stepping down as editor at Tarpaulin Sky, and though I don't know who she is, I have no doubt that my replacement will be a woman. Since I'm not actually paying anyone at the moment, I think that's even legal.
What branch of feminism, model of feminist poetics, feminist icon, or etc. Informs your poetry? Or, from which of these does your poetry diverge?
My fear, in discussing any ism, is that the discussion will become a discussion of an ism. My relationship to feminism is my relationship to women: present, living, and ever-changing. Rather than quote classic feminist texts, or pretend to be a theory-driven academic, which I'm just not, I'd like to quote a little bit of the great stuff I read however many moons ago, here at Delirious Hem, in the forum that birthed this one: "This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like."
K. Lorraine Graham speaks for me when, in discussing the importance of French Feminism, she says

I'm less concerned with how to get women into institutions and positions of power than how to change the way institutions and power are constructured. Those two goals are connected, of course. Sometimes having women with economic and cultural power can change power structures, but often women with power may identify with those structures just as much as the people who created them: Margaret Thatcher.

Graham could be describing elements of my writing process as well:

I never begin a project knowing how it will end--that's also part of what I consider a Feminist poetics: even though everything I write is going to be inevitably caught up in cultural norms and expectations, I want my poems to push against such expectations, even as they acknowledge that they are caught up in them. So, I don't start with conclusions. Or, if I do have conclusions, I start by questioning them.

Kim Rosenfield's feminism is also remarkably similar to my own, in that it embraces elements from a variety of movements--except that hers is tall and has a moustache, whereas mine is only 5'6" but has a bigass beard. Among other things, says Rosenfield:

Feminism is about reducing the impact of what comes out of the tailpipe of society, putting new systems in place to help it withstand the shocks that come so we can plot a path of elation rather than of guilt, anger, and horror. . . . My feminism can harness the "power of human energy," and address the world's gloomiest challenges without shoving them into denial or depression. . . . My feminism already lives a scaled-down life. It is quite tall, with a ponytail and moustache. It's already bartered, shared, and canned together. Tradesmen, workshops, cultural institutions, and farmland surround my feminism. I make my feminism as self-sufficient as possible. For a generation, feminists have told us to change our lifestyles to avoid catastrophic consequences. My feminism tells us those consequences are now. My feminism can be a bridge to carry us over the terrible time ahead and into a world we long for.

Presently my feminist icons tend to be living, are not always icons for other folks, and often include my friends. The following are but a few, off the top of my head (yet, strangely, alphabetized!): Dodie Bellamy, Aase Berg, Lisa Birman, Ana Bozicevic, Catherine Breillat, Jenny Boully, Rebecca Brown, Jan Clausen, Margaret Cho, Traci O Connor, Angela Davis, Ani DiFranco, Katherine Dunn, Danielle Dutton, kari edwards, Eve Ensler, Sandy Florian, Elena Georgiou, Renee Gladman, Kim Hyesoon, Brenda Iijima, Shelly Jackson, Elfriede Jelinek, Miranda July, Bhanu Kapil, Amy King, Joan Larkin, Joanna Lumley, Joyelle McSweeney, Harryette Mullen, Dolly Parton, Joanna Ruocco, Selah Saterstrom, Kim Gek Lin Short, Juliana Spahr, Annie Sprinkle, Heidi Lynn Staples, Shelly Taylor, Rosmarie Waldrop, Wendy S. Walters, Amanda Jo Williams.
Over the last few years, the work that I've studied the most, and that has had the most profound impact on me, has been work by women. The list is too long, so I'll stick to the living, focus on the most recent reads, exclude Rebecca Brown (whose latest book I just blogged, here), exclude TSky Press authors, exclude also my girlfriend, and from the remaining pick only a few: Aase Berg, Bhanu Kapil, and Selah Saterstrom.
I'm presently rereading Swedish poet Aase Berg's selected poems, Remainland (translated by Johannes Göransson, Action Books, 2005), and for months now I've been walking around with her first book, With Deer [Hos rådjur] (Black Ocean, 2008, also translated by Göransson). Berg's is a feminism of the dark and surreal variety. Think Artaud, Breton, Ernst, as performed by Nico, post-Velvet Underground, making public her spectacular decay. Berg's feminism also springs from images of "the natural world"--but in the case of With Deer, think: watching The Nature Channel on a bad tab of acid. Or even The Weather Channel: today and tonight, nightmares; tomorrow, nightmares with occasional clouds. Think When Animals Attack, think demonic, human-flesh-eating guinea pigs. Think bedtime fables to keep you from ever having children.
Berg's feminism is an ecopoetics, and her ecopoetics not only collapses distinctions between the "human world" and the Other, but also makes room for--how should we say it?--the less savory elements of the natural world. The first line of my notes for an unwritten review of With Deer: "Look up "putrefaction.'"
In Berg's feminist ecopoetics, there is no separation between disease in bodies and disease in cities, social structures, civilizations. No separation of blood and oil. Everywhere fucking and misery. Everywhere miscarriage and cancer. Everywhere, "The Gristle Day":

Black blood is coming. Out of that hole. Thick blood is coming. It looks like oil. And the squirrel screams in the tree.
Black blood is coming. Not very much blood, but undeniably out of that hole in the middle of the white. The hole has walls, swollen and flaccid, and doesn't dare bear down and push out. That's why the blood screams.
The hole doesn't dare open and push itself out of the hole. Black blood is coming. Out of that hole. Mechanisms have stopped, the flesh hangs pale on the hook and has ceased resisting. The squirrel screams all alone as the tumor plug drops into the hole. The blood screams in the tree; the blood screams black in the white.
We are born in the sewers, out of the horrifying dough beyond good and evil. It smells like ghosts, it smells of slop flesh, it smells of placenta and uranium. Black blood is coming. Marsh gas and diarrheas bubble. Out of the hole that screams and screams as gristle encloses the embryo like an eggshell and a jail, and the little squirrel in my little hand has broken all the small bones of its whole skeleton. It lies still and its eye is the hole; the hole spread open and tired. Blood is probably still coming out of the black intestine on the bottom of the flesh.
Black blood is coming. Out of that black old ole. Marsh blood and sludge blood and creamy gunk blood. It looks like oil. And when the squirrel screams one last time in the tree, a moan slowly rises out of the hole.

Berg's feminism collapses distinctions as it explores symbiotic relationships, explores the dynamics of dualities rather than the stasis of antipodes. Excerpted from "In the Horrifying Land of Clay":

There was an evil horse that galloped along the evil river in the horrifying land of clay. There was an evil horse that galloped with me on its back. Beneath the hair-strap his muscles moved and chafed against the muscles of my taut inner thighs which clamped down around his body. . . . There was an evil horse that galloped through the horrifying land, an evil and dark horse with manhood and musculature, and I was thrilled to have him as my enemy.

In Daniel Sjölin’s excellent introduction to Remainland, discussing With Deer, he could just as well be describing the work of Bhanu Kapil: "a bold style, in which water and earth--sorrow-death and the body--mix to form blood, clay, and tar. She detourns the theme of 'the girl in the woods' [a dangerous formula . . .]." As if speaking directly about Kapil's most recent book, Humanimal: A Project for Future Children (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Sjölin describes "a hybrid between woman, language, and animal: a decomposition process at the same time as a creation process."
Kapil's Humanimal is a densely packed, highly-layered, and, I dare say, literally magical, slim volume of transgenre text that is, among other things, part palimpsest, part eulogy, part Shelly Jackson's Patchwork Girl, part nonfiction (cross-)culture study, and part hope. It maps the story of "Kamala and Amala, two girls found living with wolves in Bengal, India, in 1920," alongside Kapil's travels to the region--with her research itself, at that time, being recorded by French filmmakers attempting a documentary of human-wolf contacts. Kapil's source text is

the diary of and Indian missionary, Reverend Joseph Singh, was first published in 1945 as a companion text to Wolf-Children and Feral Man, a book of essays by the Denver anthropologist Robert Zingg. In the jungle, on a Mission to convert the tribal population, Singh had heard stories of "two white ghosts" roaming with a mother wolf and her pack of cubs. He decided to track them. Upon discovering the "terrible creatures" to be human, he killed the wolves and brought the children back to his church-run orphanage, the Home, in Midnapure. For the next decade, he documented his attempt to teach the girls language, upright movement, and a moral life. Despite his efforts, Amala died within a year of capture, of nephritis. Kamala lived to be about sixteen, when she died of TB.

Beyond the initial intrigue of the lives of these two girls as "subject matter," what inspires me is the text's hybridity, Kapil's approach to narrative, which smells a lot like poetry. Like poetry giving birth to biology. As in "nature," there are no straight lines in Humanimal, and a linear once-through of the text's seventy-odd pages will reveal only so much; it doesn't require multiple readings to be appreciated, but it certainly rewards them, and Kapil's narrative invites study from multiple angles. Were I to compare Kapil's form(s) to visual art, I might choose Cubism, except that I would call Kapil's style something like Dodecahedronism, or perhaps even Great Stellated Dodecahedronism, or perhaps, not to be so limiting, I would call it simply Polyhedronism. A hairy, mammalian polyhedronism.
On an angry day, I might see Humanimal as a polyhedronist approach to vivisection, an examination of men examining little girls; a polyhedronist approach to traditional dress, to cooking one's meat and using utensils in the name of God, to training frightening little wolf cunts to piss where the sign says so. But to see it only in these ways would be counter to the very idea of polyhedronism.
Not to mention that polyhedronism itself is in an inadequate term. For all its angles, it is still, well, too angular. In the world of Humanimal all angles bend and curve.

Her two arms extend stiffly from her body to train them, to extend. Unbound, her elbows and wrists would flex then supinate like two peeled claws. Wrapped, she is a swerve, a crooked yet regulated mark. This is corrective therapy; the fascia hardening over a lifetime then split in order to reset it, educate the nerves.

In the world of Humanimal all edges ebb and flow, are "complex horizons," towards which "Kamala slips over the garden wall with her sister and runs, on all fours." They are the absurdity of the very idea of edges, something like the edge of night versus the edge of day; they are membranes through which we (trans)migrate, through which we are born. In the world of Humanimal

Two panicked children strain against the gelatin envelope of the township, producing, through distension, a frightening shape. The animals see an opaque, milky membrane bulging with life and retreat, as you would, to the inner world. I am speaking for you in January. It is raining. Amniotic, compelled to emerge, the girls are nevertheless reabsorbed.

Indeed the surreal feminist ecopoetics of Humanimal's curvaceous and permeable prose engenders all manner of worlds, and all manner of creatures great and small, and all in flux, inextricable from what some humans would like to call their world. In the world of Humanimal, "the moonlight illuminates the termite mound where the wolves have hollowed out an underground cave with their beaks. Sub-red, animal wolves and human wolves curl up with their mother, in sequence, to nurse." Elsewhere, "An animal flowers in the elements. It grows wings. A cat with wings alights on the doorstep, as if to say, I'm off. I don't need your food anymore." In the world of Humanimal, "the cook fed us meats of many kinds. I joined my belly to the belly of the next girl. It was pink and we opened our beaks for meat. It was wet and we licked the dictionary off each other's faces."

I dreamed that night I was crawling on the floor with a circus acrobat from the 1940s. He was Chinese and his eyes were ringed with black lead. As if in a trance, I left my seat in the audience and danced with him. It was a dance based upon the movements of a black panther and a white eagle. We crossed them. This was mating deep inside the market. We danced until we were markets.

It is this mating, this co-creating, this inspiring hybridity that allows me to read Humanimal and not come away simply destroyed, thinking Kamala and Amala simply destroyed. Or, in Kapil's words: "From these stories, I constructed an image of the dying girl as larval; perennially white, damp and fluttering in the darkness of the room."
I read Humanimal and want to write. I want to transform things, perform alchemy. I want give back something in return. I want to create.
A word of warning to the reader: I mentioned already that Humanimal is a magical text. I do not mean "magical" in the sense of Disney's Ice Capades, or a great first date--though maybe I do mean love. What I mean is: this book has magical properties. It is a magnet and a torch. It is also medicine. And a portal. What I mean is: on the Amtrak to the New York City a month ago, reading this book for the first time, I noticed in the seat adjacent to me an Asian woman. She looked around on occasion, down the aisle, out the window--the things we do on trains other than read or sleep. What was different, in her case, is that she had a long ribbon of cash-register paper unspooling from her desk tray, piling at her feet. On the paper there appeared to be scribbles. Closer inspection indicated that she was unreeling the paper ever so slowly beneath her pen, which bounced and jumped and zagged at the mercy of the train.
I've heard that one can be literally blind to things for which one has no language. I donít know if that's true, but I'm certain that I would not have figured out so quickly what this woman was doing, may not even have cared, if I hadn't just read the following:

In the aeroplane from London to Kolkata and in the jeep to Midnapure, I put my nib on the page and let motion wreck the line. My notes were a page of arrhythmias, a record of travel.

Make of it what you will, but that's my kind of transgenre work: out of the realm of literature and dropped at my freakin feet. Huzzah! Which is also one of the many reasons I read Selah Saterstrom's work: both she and it possess an otherworldly ability to punch holes through this one. But I digress--that's for a Halloween piece I'm writing: "Feminists and Other Unholy Witches: Why Are We Still Scared?"
Selah Saterstrom's first book, The Pink Institution (Coffee House Press, 2004), examines generations of women in a particular Southern family, and their varied internalizations of, and rebellions against, the culture to which they belong. In the section "Maidenhood Objects," the whole of the chapter titled "Dining Room" reads as follows:

Willie called his daughters into the dining room. He picked up a dining room table chair and threw it into a closed window. The window shattered. He said, "That's a lesson about virginity. Do you understand?" to which they replied, "Yes, sir."

The bulk of The Pink Institution is occupied by the lives of the women who precede the narrator--her mom, aunts, grandmothers--as well as the men who helped to shape their lives. The narrator does not become a character in the book until three quarters into the novel. Born and raised in a rich history of violation, addiction, and suicide, the narrator is fragmented, and thus, so is the narrative, moving from ablated captions on historical photos to genealogy as plot; from brief snapshots/scenes rendered in spare prose to highly wrought and deeply layered prose poetry; from a childhood sexuality and spirituality inextricable from a desire to write (masturbating via rubbing against a desk, a girlfriend kissing game involving paper, eating an pencil eraser which has stood in for God, the Host), to a hunger inextricable from vomiting and anal bleeding:

Food becomes sublime. It geometrically squares into its complex statistics. This happens in proportion to my growing hunger. The more hungry I become, the more what food looks like and what one does with it becomes alien. Until all food is pure object and eating is apocalyptic Eucharistic. At this point I know I am hungry, but I cannot remember what one does to alleviate hunger so I put my fingers in my mouth. . . .
Food is what you put in your mouth. You put it in your mouth. The rubber slide hidden in glossy food. Red velvet cakes stacked in a corner of a decaying house. Pork, too. Which is fatbread saturated with rancid.
The first time was during the summer I was twelve. I put my fingers in my mouth and bit them until they bled. I was sitting on my mother's bed in the back of her new husband's trailer. I had never felt such relief. It was a cool passing through July's hanging heat.

My experience is this: post-trauma, new pain can be relief, can numb old pain; hypersensitivity transforms into catatonia and back again; that which doesn't fragment, morphs; that which cannot morph, fragments. When her grandfather commits suicide on the front lawn with a shotgun in his mouth, the narrator of The Pink Institution sees, in the aftermath, afterbirth.

After he shot himself, my grandfather's face was a spangle bouquet that made grass die. What is difficult about looking at something like that is not that the mind resists fragmentation in general, but that it is confounded by textures which refuse the tensions one desires through edges. Even when they took his corpse away, his head was still there, some soaking into the ground, some in liver-colored strips and bits unable to be absorbed. It looked like the oversaturated pile of womb waste on the floor between my sister's legs after she gave birth. They could have been the same. They were not but light would not have known the difference.

The rendering of trauma, in literature, is a subject that interests me for personal reasons. The experience of trauma is individual; it takes many forms. It is difficult to render in language without making the reader want to turn away. Even Toni Morrison's expert handling of it, for example, in The Bluest Eye, routinely shuts down some of my students. At least at first. Not because they've experienced similar trauma, I should add, but because they would rather not experience even its telling. There are countless other reasons I am interested in trauma. Here are millions: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burma, Congo, Darfur, Haiti, Iran, Rwanda, USA . . . ; women are abused, raped, mutilated, and murdered everywhere and every day and have been since the beginning of human history.
But I'm going to come back to that. My partner called while I was writing this. We talked about it and agreed that, sometimes, on "good days," we both like to believe that feminism in the U.S. can safely take a backseat to issues of race and class and sexual orientation--but only in the U.S.
The U.S., after all, has Annie Sprinkle. In a perfect world, The Book of Feminism's last page might say: "And then God created Annie Sprinkle and all was well."
Of course it doesn't work that way: even if the last page were written (with or without Annie Sprinkle), there would still be plenty of folks who'd yet to read it. As I said before, the discussion of feminism is always at risk of becoming a discussion of a static ism, rather than a dynamic discussion of dynamic women and their dynamic lives, and while feminism in the U.S. may have come far enough to focus on issues such as not-quite-equal pay rather than systemic, horrific, state-sanctioned atrocities committed against women (for example), it is not difficult to see that almost every issue women have faced in this country, women still face, whether in the job world or in the literary world, etc.
As Juliana Spahr's and Stephanie Young's "Numbers Trouble" pointed out, and as discussed in "Dim Sum," here at Delirious Hem, the literary world remains far from equitable--even the ostensibly forward-thinking, small-press world. Personal example: I know an otherwise hip small press that's published books by fifteen men and two women. The publisher told me that he has nothing against women writers. He just rarely encounters women's writing that he likes. Obviously! Silly me! Not long ago I also had to call him up about a review he'd published online, to ask if he might not at least remove the word "mousy" from his already needless description of meeting the author in person.
One of the questions/prompts for this interview was Do you have any concrete suggestions for altering the gender disparities in the poetry world? That one's easy: support publishers who support women writers. Ignore presses that ignore women writers. Or give them hell. Whichever best suits your personality. I choose to ignore "things I don't agree with," unless those things are actively causing problems for myself or others. I'd like to believe that a press that fails to publish women writers will become only half the entity it might have been and will likely die alone and unloved, with its dick in its hand. And I don't mean only presses run by heterosexual men. See Richard Tayson's excellent article, "Joan Larkin and the Poetics of Lesbian Inclusion," in Pleiades 29.2:

In a 2005 letter to the editor of the The Gay and Lesbian Review, Larkin confronted the magazine about its "Poetry Issue":
"Maybe it's time you renamed the magazine The Gay Male Review or perhaps The Gay & Token Lesbian Review. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised--I've long been chagrined at how underrepresented women are in your pages--but I was stunned and insulted by the lack of any real discussion of poetry by gay women in something calling itself 'The Poetry Issue.' One piece on one lesbian poet out of seven articles. . . is even less inclusive than the abysmal record of The New York Times Book Review."

Nor is it just editors, says Tayson, but also gay men writers whose work ignores women--lesbian or otherwise. "Forty years after Stonewall," says Tayson, "a change of world is still in order. . . . If gay men are not including many women in our poems, who and what else are we excluding?"
That said, the reason I tend to just plain ignore writers and editors who ignore women--well, that goes back several paragraphs to where I left trauma. One has to make decisions, I have heard it said, and more often than not, I'm inclined to apply a sort of triage system to my concerns. Given my limited time to write (or to be on this planet--either way), I want to make sure I devote at least a little of my presently unwounded, unsuffering self to people whose situations are not so lucky.
Hence, I can't finish writing this until I've said this: my thoughts on crappy publishers come and go, but daily I am destroyed inside, reading about ongoing atrocities against women and girls in ___________.
In the five days that it's taken me to complete this article, it's estimated that 250 women and girls have been raped in South Kivu, in eastern Congo. In South Kivu, a doctor, in conversation with Eve Ensler, said the most common wound to woman is a "traumatic fistula . . . caused by insertion of a gun, bottle or stick into the vagina or shooting a gun between the woman's legs," causing a "rupture between the vagina, bladder and/or rectum," and rendering "an uncontrollable leakage of fluids, secretions, urine or feces." The intent is not to kill the woman, but to shame her. This is a "strategy of war."
When I say "I am destroyed inside" it is only a metaphor. In this way, it is a luxury. As it is our luxury to visit websites such as Eve Ensler's vday.org, for example, to better understand and to help end violence against women and girls. As it is our luxury to debate what the U.S. and U.N. should or should not do for the women in eastern Congo, or in ___________.
It is also a luxury for me to read Saterstrom's work. She has done the difficult work. At times I read her second book, The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press, 2007), as a sort of prelude to The Pink Institution--but it's more like chicken-or-the-egg. Part book-length, ekphrastic prose poem framing Rembrandt's The Slaughtered Ox, part sustained meditation on pain, The Meat and Spirit Plan features a narrator protagonist who has much in common with the narrator of The Pink Institution. A young white female from a heavymetal Dixieland, whose experiences with rape, drugs, and reform school precede her enrollment in state college, the narrator's interest in God earns her a chance to study for a Master's Degree in Theology in Scotland, where, when she isn't suffering postmodern dissections of Diderot and the like, she passes her semester sitting in a crumbling museum, getting drunk with a Holocaust survivor and watching the butcher in the town square.
A little more than halfway through The Meat and Spirit Plan, is a chapter titled "And Suddenly I Thought: This Is What It Means to Make a Movie in Sweden."

The Postmodern Seminar for the Study of Interpretive Uses decides to include film as text. . . . After one film I get in a fight with a master's candidate from Washington, DC who is doing his last year of research at the Seminar by invitation. At a departmental gathering to welcome new students he once reprimanded a Theoretical Studies girl for using "Heidegger" and "grace" in the same sentence. Never use the word "grace" he said. It shows your hand. By which he meant ass. He said it like her use of "grace" revealed her trailer park origins when she should try and marry better. Oh, said the Theoretical Studies girl, scribbling a note to herself on a napkin.
The film we got in a fight about ended with a woman being killed by a soldier. She was pretty much dead, but he did her in for good by jamming a gun in her vagina and then pulling the trigger. The film didn't show this but implied it. The question the fight hinged on was this: Did the woman, in the last split second of her life, experience the meaning of her suffering? Washington said yes. The possibility of experiencing such meaning, despite solitude and cruelty, was the rule.
I thought this was a romantic view of what the last split second of life might be like. And I thought it was unfair. It was stealing the woman's death from her, which meant in the end everything was taken. Taken and put in the ghettos of our intellectualizations. Soured thoughts counting more than smears of blood. Why couldn't we sit in the pain of not knowing? Maybe she didn't get the big meaning of her suffering. Maybe she just suffered, then died.
When the fight is finally drawn to a close by the head of the Seminar, Washington has won because he is smart and uses language like an exacto blade. He never raised his voice and has remained calm. My face is red and my voice shaky. As people leave the room they look at me as if they feel sorry for me and look at Washington like he is a great guy who understands theology.
Later, I look out the terrible room's bay window. In my head I say to the people who watch movies that it is a stretch to think that the witness knows what it is like to die. I say: may the story of Washington, DC be a lesson to you.

May it be a lesson to all of us.

Prolegomena to Any Future (Pro)Feminism by H.L. Hix

2009-10-05T00:02:00.000-07:00

H. L. Hix’s verse biography of the artist Petra Soesemann, called Incident Light, is forthcoming from Etruscan Press, due on November 1. He teaches at the University of Wyoming.

I participate in this forum fearfully, recognizing the possibility that even were I not to botch the content of my contribution, the very writing of it may be wrong. For centuries women have listened to men tell them what a woman looks like; that history may entail that the first obligation of a (pro)feminist [man poet] is to listen, to be told by women, rather than to tell them, what he looks like. Reciprocity seems a healthy ingredient of any interrelationship, and for a (person who considers himself) a (pro)feminist [man poet], listening without speaking — just listening — may be the best, may be indeed the only valid, form of reciprocity with [woman poets].

Obviously, though, I am writing this statement, and my rationale for doing so is a nearly unqualified belief in dialogue, one element of which belief is the sense that dialogue entered into in good faith by both parties is a form of reciprocity. Even on a subject about which one party’s speech carries no other authority or sanction, that party may enter into dialogue in good faith, with the full sanction of dialogue itself, as when a student in a survey course ventures into classroom discussion. Listening is essential to dialogue, a condition for its being entered into in good faith, and I speak here after listening to previous posts on the blog, and with the intention of listening to future posts. So, though my male privilege remove from me any other sanction or authority in this particular dialogue, and despite the risk that in the circumstances of this interrelationship listening simpliciter is the only valid reciprocity, I speak, with only the sanction of dialogue itself, clinging to the premise that dialogue retains its validity even in this case.

Dialogue needs common ground in order to be dialogue rather than alternating monologues — to be, in Lyotard’s terms, a “litigation,” not a “differend.” The last framing question for this forum (“What are some things men can do to account for male privilege?”) contains, I think, implicit common ground. Its focus on a broad category term (privilege) narrowed by a qualifier (male) hints that even though we don’t all occupy the specific domain (male privilege) bounded by the qualifier, we may all occupy the general domain (privilege) named by the category. One common ground in this forum, in other words, might be found by viewing male privilege as one species of the genus privilege. Doing so makes it possible for a [man poet], in his attempt to enact (pro)feminism, not to be isolated exclusively among men or among other [men poets], but to be able also to learn from holders of other categories of privilege. There will be differences to deal with because male privilege is a species of privilege, but only insofar as it belongs to the genus of privilege can I learn anything about honorably addressing my male privilege from others who have honorably managed (for instance) their white privilege.

Since all of us who are party in any way to Delirious Hem — as readers, contributors, commentators — enjoy privilege of various sorts, we all are at work on the issue of what privilege looks like, and each of us from both sides, as one who enjoys certain categories of privilege but does not enjoy other categories of privilege. I can imagine, for instance, a reader who does not share with me in male privilege, but who does enjoy class privilege beyond mine (who went to private school, say, instead of a rural public school). I can envision also a reader who does not share male privilege but does share with me white privilege and hetero privilege. It will be best for me, for us all, if I am at least able to learn from any Delirious-Hem-er, not only from others who are (pro)feminist [man poets]. Whether or not I do so learn is then on my head, yes, but also, at least in principle, within my grasp.

Thinking of male privilege as one species of the genus privilege foregrounds its subsumption under the broad problem of distributive justice: what is good for humans ought to be, but is not in fact, distributed equitably (that is, either evenly or according to valid principles of variation). In all the cases we identify by the term privilege (male privilege, white, hetero, able-bodied, etc.), distribution is uneven and on invalid principles, altogether independent of merit. (Even if the privileged person is meritorious — smart, kind to others, whatever — the privilege wasn’t bestowed because of that merit.) My having been born with a penis but without a vagina, and my having acquired at puberty (skimpy) facial hair instead of larger breasts and hips, are not rational or valid grounds for inclusion in a group that, as a group, gets higher pay, more respect, and so on, any more than is my having light skin and straight hair.

The general principle in matters of distributive justice, that we ought to distribute goods (spiritual goods no less than material goods) as broadly and evenly as possible, is defeasible by other principles, such as our society’s principle that we should distribute luxury goods according to the willingness of persons to earn disposable income and then devote it to the purchase of Porsches and penthouses. Such a principle of narrow and uneven distribution can be sound, but — here’s the rub — if and only if the right to earn disposable income and spend it as one wishes is distributed broadly and evenly. We need only one such example to arrive at the intuition that there are “deep” and “shallow” problems of distributive justice, and to see that shallow problems result from deep problems, so that a shallow problem can be solved only by solving a deep problem. “Solving” a shallow problem by itself could only be an isolated and temporary “quick fix” with no impact on the deep problem that provokes it, but solving a deep problem would also solve any shallow problems that arise from it. So in the example just given, regulating the price of Porsches would tackle only a shallow problem, making no impact on the deep problem; minimizing the effect of privilege on earning power, though, by addressing the deep problem of radical disparities in access to disposable income, would also address the shallow problems of Porsches and penthouses. Uneven distribution of Porsches is an effect, caused by uneven distribution of the conditions for earning disposable income. That the latter is causal makes it a deeper problem, and its causes may be deeper still.

I take it that something of the sort lies behind Thoreau’s observation that “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.” Thoreau’s statement points out one threat we face, we who are privileged and would be also just: the threat that we might act out of sincerity and good will, but nevertheless exacerbate the problem of privilege. Fortunately, it also identifies a common ground, namely that we — all of us, those who enjoy a given privilege and those who do not — will be most effective in redressing the inequities of that privilege if we can find ways to devote our energies more to striking at the root than to hacking at the branches.

Easier said than done, of course. (“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do…”) Still, the pattern of contrasts emerging here might help orient a privileged one who wishes to act with, not against, justice:

root branches
deep shallow
given earned
before after
cause effect
gender labor (merit)
conditions result
society individual

In regard to privilege, male privilege or any other sort, we have a term designating the aim of distributing it broadly and evenly: to extend privilege. So another way of formulating this forum’s question would be to ask what it ought to mean to extend privilege: how can it be done? (And particularly, in this forum, how can those who are privileged participate in, rather than obstructing, the extension of the categories of privilege they enjoy?) The pattern of contrasts suggests that doing so most effectively will involve contesting causes and conditions with more energy than contesting effects and results.

Again, this is easier said than done, but the pattern of contrasts may help distinguish good models from bad. Opposing two cases in which holders of other categories of privilege seek to extend that privilege, one case (I take it) obviously better than the other, offers insight about the genus privilege that I propose as applicable to the specific problem of male privilege.

The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the continuing occupation exemplify failed extension of privilege. Surely there are many ways to explicate the failure of this action, but one way would be to note the action’s hypocrisy: its using the extending of privilege as a pretext for exacerbating discrepancies of privilege. The pretext for the U.S. decision was extension of political privilege, under the banner of “freedom.” But the action taken hacked at branches. The U.S. administration apparently took for granted that all persons, individually and collectively, regardless of their history or their current circumstances, will embrace “freedom,” given the opportunity, leaving us with the relatively light obligation to offer the citizens of Iraq (what we understand as) freedom. We offered them, we thought, a Porsche, and were puzzled when they didn’t give us a kiss and take the keys. The premise missing from (or repressed by) the minds of the deciders was that tyranny does not appear spontaneously, but results from conditions that support it. In the case of Iraq, those conditions include a long history of colonization and other intervention. To assume that “we” — the U.S. government and military — could change the result (tyranny) without changing the conditions that brought about the result, to think that we could undo the consequences of past intervention by another intervention, is naiveté, branch-hacking. Consequently, even if undertaken with sincerity and goodwill (as I believe it is undertaken by many of our military personnel, though I myself doubt that it was by the political leaders then in office), the U.S. military action nonetheless has not fulfilled its purported purposes. Instead of extending political privilege to Iraqis, it increases our own economic privilege, by ensuring that Iraq comply with the economic system that sanctions our taking advantage of its natural resources. In other words, instead of adding to the membership of those who enjoy political privilege, it adds to the membership of those subject to the system that secures our own economic privilege. It magnifies, and further concentrates, privilege, rather than extending privilege.

This failure to extend political privilege has analogies to chivalry’s failure to extend male privilege. I the chivalrous male offer the femal object of my interest some of the effects of male privilege (some luxury goods, say) but not the conditions for securing those effects herself. In other words, I give shallow benefits of privilege (and so can tell myself that I am good and she ought to be happy), but do so on terms that hoard for myself the deep benefits of that same privilege.

If the U.S. invasion of Iraq seems obviously a worse effort to extend privilege, as an example of a better effort I propose that of Tom Bloch, a member of the family that started, and still controls, the H&R Block corporation. He joined the company in 1976, and became its CEO in 1992. In 1995, though, he resigned, to become a middle school math teacher at an inner-city parochial school. A few years later, he co-founded a public charter school that now boasts of having sent to college all but two of its graduates from the last five years. Bloch himself teaches 7th- and 8th-grade math there.

Bloch enjoyed — and still enjoys, could not not enjoy — class privilege to an exaggerated degree. He has (to repeat a saying I grew up hearing) more money than you can shake a stick at. Regarding his decision as in any way an economic risk or sacrifice would be to romanticize naively: his being economically secure, to an extent that very few people ever will be, will continue regardless of what career decisions he makes. He did not forfeit class privilege; his being so securely a bearer of class privilege underwrites his taking a low-paying job. For those of us who have not inherited from our parents partial ownership of a Fortune 500 company, salary heavily influences our economic security; for Bloch, the salary of his day job has little bearing on his economic security. But even though he did not forfeit class privilege, he did renounce it, in at least this sense: instead of taking advantage of his class privilege to extend it for himself (to do what we expect the rich to do, get richer), he took advantage of his privilege to extend privilege to others.

He did, in other words, the opposite of what was done by the Iraq war. Rather than using his privilege to magnify privilege, to further its concentration in hands not selected equitably, he used his privilege to extend privilege, to distribute it more broadly and evenly. His labor helps to expand the number of recipients of privilege, and to lessen the discrepancy in privilege between those who have the most and those who have the least. He is striking at the root, rather than hacking at the branches, at least in the sense that, rather than merely donating money, say, which would share with others a portion of the results of privilege but retain the privilege itself within the hands of those (including himself) who possess it already, teaching helps distribute more broadly and evenly the conditions for self-determination. Its resistance to the inequities of privilege occurs “deeper” than does donating money, so that it addresses some of the causes rather than, or in addition to, the effects of the inequities of privilege.

Contrasting these two examples (U.S. invasion of Iraq and Tom Bloch’s teaching junior high) addresses the questions of this forum, especially the one on which I am attempting to focus (“What are some things men can do to account for male privilege?”), only in a preparatory way. The contrast does not answer the question, exactly, but does seem to me to facilitate good-faith attempts to address the question. Without prescribing any one way to account for male privilege, it does suggest that a (pro)feminist [male poet] may generalize from ways of accounting for other categories of privilege to ways to account for male privilege. It also suggests that it is possible to account for male privilege. If I am right to distinguish between forfeiting and renouncing privilege, and to regard as praiseworthy Tom Bloch’s actions in renouncing privilege even without forfeiting it, then males can hope to account for privilege, and be responsible to account for male privilege, because it is possible to do so.

Such possibility is not self-evident. Louise Bourgeois, describing art as a privilege, points to the problem: “Privilege means that you are a favorite, that what you do is not completely to your credit, not completely due to you, but is a favor conferred upon you. Privilege entitles you when you deserve nothing. Privilege is something you have and others don’t.” Privilege is precisely that which one can never deserve, so at least in such cases as male privilege and white privilege, an individual cannot forfeit the privilege (I can’t stop being male or white). That inability to forfeit the privilege, though, does not prevent me from renouncing it.

My hope, my belief, is that it is possible to extend to all poets, regardless of gender, the privilege (such as it is) peculiar to a [man poet] as contrasted to a [woman poet], as I hope and believe that it is possible to extend more broadly other privileges: the privilege peculiar to a [white poet] as compared to a [poet of color], etc. As a [male poet], I will not be (pro)feminist — I will not help extend male privilege — by giving some of privilege’s results (and thus securing for myself its conditions) but by renouncing privilege, by acting in ways that distribute more widely and evenly its conditions. That observation does not answer the question “What are some things men can do to account for male privilege?,” but perhaps there is also value in taking a step back, to a question more like “What sort of thing might a man do toward accounting for male privilege?”