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v

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction 1

Part I Location

1 Address and Rhythm 21

Part II Vision, Power and Knowledge

2 Alice Notley: Disobedient Cities 43

3 Lisa Samuels: Unknown Cities 63

Part III Language and Locality

4 Geraldine Monk’s Restless Soil 87

5 Ágnes Lehóczky and the Palimpsestic City 109

Part IV Polis

6 Erín Moure’s Irruptive Citizenship 129

7 Lisa Robertson: Prosody of the Polis 153

Part V Acts of Attention

8 Against Background: Reframings of the City 177

9 Performance and Absence in the Heterotopian City 195

Conclusion 213

Notes 217

Bibliography 221

Index 231

Contents

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1

‘Sometimes’, writes Lisa Robertson, ‘I think that the entire history of perceiving is encoded in a city’ (Robertson 2012, p. 57), yet in poet-ry’s relationship with urban space the perceptions and practices of women writers have on the whole been less visible than those of their male counterparts. This book examines poetry as a framing of attention through which contemporary women writers approach not only perception in the city but also political and linguistic aspects of the urban. Its own frame foregrounds writers whose work may in various ways be considered to be ‘experimental’, a term I use in its broadest sense, preferring it to alternatives such as ‘innovative’ or ‘avant-garde’ because of its ambiguous relationships to scientific process, experience and chance. Such writers are often, though not always, sidelined by national narratives of poetry, but instead of defining a genre of ‘experimental women’s poetry’, which would rep-licate the kinds of exclusion I want to address (as well as presenting the bemusing possibility of the ‘experimental woman’), I have aimed here to explore the city itself as a space of experiment inhabited by, or paralleled in, poetic practice. These are not writers who necessar-ily represent the urban in straightforward terms; the city that emerges through their work, as a collective structure, may be linguistic, polit-ical, economic, mythical, symbolic, physical, sensory, or all of these at once.

The relationship between the physical environment of the city and the action of citizenship is a recurrent theme in this book. The Pnyx, a now-crumbling hillside auditorium overlooking Athens, was the place in which the city state was formed as a rhetorical space.

Introduction

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2 Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space

Looking down on the marketplace and up to the Acropolis, it was the site on which the first democracy was formed around 500 BCE through the principle of equal speech – that is, the equal speech of all free male citizens. Citizenship is a rhetorical bonding, existing in an ideal city that is both part of and outside of the city as built envi-ronment, yet it too has a material history, not only in the ruins of the Pnyx but also in the language through which public relationships were formed. Plato’s The Republic, written in Athens a century after the establishment of Athenian democracy, may be a critique of the democratic system, yet is itself a rhetorical text that brings into exist-ence the first Utopia, the no-place of communal hope. Like architec-ture, rhetoric is formed around divisions that enclose and exclude; Plato’s ideal republic famously excludes poets because of their ten-dency to adopt duplicitous multiple voices, yet poetry’s multiplicity is inseparable from rhetoric, and keeps seeping back even into the text he is writing. Plato’s democratic vision also excludes women, and the doubly excluded figure of the poet who is a woman offers a revealing point from which to explore the interwoven aspects of lan-guage and place that form the contemporary city.

As David Harvey has argued, the city is more than its economic and physical fact; as a collective endeavour it necessarily encom-passes utopian vision:

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by chang-ing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exer-cise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is ... one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. (Harvey, 2009, p. 315)

If the transformative urban imagination has been predominantly a masculine one, my intention here is not to demarcate an alternative feminist Utopia but to shift attention to the role of the city and its processes of transformation in poetry by women writers. Through readings of a range of texts, I discuss the ways in which gender, poetic form and urban space may be understood as intersecting practices rather than as containers with clearly defined boundaries.

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I have focused on the city as a nexus of connections that cut across national borders, presenting cities, rather than nations, as points of contact with elsewhere and with a wider poetic community. Several of the poets discussed here, from the UK, Ireland, Canada and the USA, do not have central positions in their own national literatures. They do, however, loosely reflect certain transnational groupings of experimental women writers. Much of the work, though not all, res-onates with the interests of such publications as the online journal of feminist poetics How2, and has tended to foreground the materiality of the text, questioning language’s role in straightforward represen-tation; its formal innovation offers a fruitful area in which to explore metonymic relations between linguistic and urban structures. The problems of how to represent the city, and how to occupy both pub-lic space and public language, are key aspects of the relationship between poetry and embodied space. I examine the significance of this area for women writers and look at how aspects of performance and cross-artform practice have been used to address these issues. Similarly, I look at how aspects of translation become a means of exploring otherness within the city as polis. The inclusiveness of the term ‘city’ inevitably draws attention to what is left out, and there would have been other ways of articulating these concerns. While I have looked at certain transnational connections in English, I have not attempted to address questions of global citizenship explicitly from the perspective of race or the non-Western city, though this would be a valuable project and one that I hope will be undertaken in the future. One city that is often in the background of this study is Paris, a city in which both ‘everyday life’ and feminism have been influentially theorized; another is Plato’s long-vanished Athens, and its complex relationship with his imagined Republic. The poets dis-cussed here bring many different versions of these and other sym-bolic cities to bear on their particular locales, yet certain continuities run through their work.

An awareness of the role of the body in space is central to my discussion. The figure of the walker in the city may recall the nineteenth-century Baudelairean flâneur, or the twentieth-century psychogeographer whose dérive through the urban unconscious, beginning with Guy Debord and the situationists of the 1950s, con-tinues into contemporary literature. The embodied experience of urban space has most frequently been articulated from a masculine

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4 Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space

perspective, but, equally, it has been extensively critiqued by male writers. Always temporary, unpredictable and partial, the body’s relationships with the city disrupt and destabilize the different kinds of unity presented by the map and by the notions of wholeness it implies. Michel de Certeau’s contrast between the map-like view from the World Trade Center and the interwoven paths of pedestri-ans in the streets below offers a valuable starting point for consider-ing the structures of urban experience (Certeau, 1984, p. 92), though an opposition between theoretical overview and ground-level prac-tice, while it resonates with feminist emphases on the body, can lead to oversimplification. Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the production of space avoids this binary through a triadic formula of space as ‘per-ceived’, as spatial practice in sensory experience and through every-day actions; ‘conceived’, as representations of space, for example by the urban planner; and ‘lived’ or ‘representational’ space shaped by the symbolic imaginary of a culture at a particular time (Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 38–40). His work is important to this book in terms of his view that

space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power; yet that, as such, it escapes in part from those who would make use of it. (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 26)

The relevance of his work to the thought and action of poetry has been usefully outlined by Ian Davidson, whose Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry (2007) connects the ‘spatial turn’ in cultural theory with the forms and concerns of UK and North American innovative poetry. However my focus here is specifically on women writers whose work is in various ways and to differing degrees inflected by feminist thought.

A view of the body and subjectivity as intrinsically political is a key factor in the feminisms that have influenced these poets; this in turn inflects approaches to spatial practice. While the emphasis on social relations in Lefebvre’s view of space has been helpful to femi-nist thinking, Elizabeth Grosz has argued that bodies and cities are not, as Lefebvre’s view of spatial production might suggest, related through cause, since this would imply that the body exists before

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the city and is independent of its social construction; neither are they related as analogues that reflect one another, as in the model of the ‘body politic’ which perpetuates naturalized hierarchies (Grosz, 2002, p. 300). In her view the relation is, rather, one of ‘inter-face’, comprising fragmented linkages, or temporary kinds of ‘co-building’; she rejects the notion of body and city as unchanging, monolithic entities (Grosz, 2002, p. 301). Donna Haraway’s explora-tions of the borders of the body reveal an understanding of gender as a spatial construction (Haraway, 1991), while Julia Kristeva’s anal-ysis of body, language and space foregrounds the disruptive poten-tial of poetic language (Kristeva, 1984). Joan Retallack echoes this interest in her exploration of the ‘experimental feminine’, a gram-mar or dynamic within language characterized by multiplicity, fractal geometries and swerves (Retallack, 2003, pp. 110–44). A post-structuralist interest in mobility has been central to feminist cri-tiques of the categories of mapped space, for example that of the feminist geographer Gillian Rose, who, in her discussion of what she sees as the inherently masculinist discipline of geography, argues for ‘paradoxical space […] imagined in order to articulate a troubled relationship to the hegemonic discourses of masculinism’ (Rose, 1993a, p. 159). In the introduction to Space, Place and Gender, Doreen Massey shows how the re-imagination of gender may be related to a re-imagination of place:

The construction of gender relations is also strongly implicated in the debate over the conceptualization of place. The view of place advocated here, where localities can in a sense be present in one another, both inside and outside at the same time, is a view which stresses the construction of specificity through interrelations rather than through the imposition of boundaries and the counterposition of one identity against an other. (Massey, 1994, p. 7)

Through an emphasis on such interrelations in both city space and feminist poetics, I investigate the ways in which poetic practices can challenge and expand theoretical understandings of the city, aim-ing, through this approach, to challenge the hierarchy of theoretical over practice-led forms of knowledge while exploring the extent to which they too are always present in each other.

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If the work of women poets has generally been less visible in the shaping of the urban imagination than that of male poets from Baudelaire to Frank O’Hara and beyond, other kinds of marginaliza-tion have affected women writers in the field of experimental poetry. Whether or not this has changed remains open to debate: from a US perspective, Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young argued in 2007 for the continuing need to foreground women’s writing in an experi-mental writing community in which, as their research showed, sur-prising levels of gender inequality persist (Spahr and Young, 2007). This book is, in part, a response to their findings. However, the nuanced considerations of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Blue Studios (2006) reveal the complexity of the intersection between feminism and experimental writing. If historically there has been a tendency for Anglo-American feminisms to take a more pragmatic approach to questions of social equality, as opposed to French feminisms’ more theoretical focus on discourse, the work of Blau DuPlessis marks a rapprochement between the two. As she remarks, ‘Gender is both a sociohistorical phenomenon in the formation of subjectivity and social status and a set of discourses and modes central to poetry as a practice’ (Blau DuPlessis, 2006, p. 2). Her 29 possible but often pro-vocative definitions of what it might mean to be a ‘feminist poet’ range from ‘woman poet, assuming that to be female is to be auto-matically feminist’ and ‘a person who is a feminist, and who also writes poetry, any kind of poetry’ to ‘[woman] poet who investigates language, narrative, genre, and representation in its ways of con-structing gender and gender roles.’ As she concludes, ‘Feminism in poetry is absolutely not one position’ (Blau DuPlessis, 2006, pp. 62–3). The poets I discuss here all engage differently with the influence and practice of feminist thought, but they are linked by their interest in the city. Gender may be more directly addressed in some poems than others, but in interrogating and dismantling the organizing struc-tures of language and cities, each of these poets also challenges the gender narratives that run through daily life as well as what Blau DuPlessis describes as ‘the persistent gender narrative of poetry’ (2006, p. 95).

There is a sense for some critics that new political demands need to be made within a feminist context. Although Hélène Cixous’ con-cept of écriture féminine remains significant for several of the poets discussed here, the American poet Kristin Prevallet has praised the

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work of Laura Elrick (discussed in Chapter 9) for moving away from a language of the body and towards a language of the ‘body politic’. In this context she writes:

Écriture féminine – the assertion of a singularly feminine mode of writing in which the play of language in and of itself is under-stood as a political act in that it, through the disruptions of syn-tax and logic, usurps patriarchal power structures and foregrounds the text as a living, porous, fragmented, body. Yet, without the looming theoretical context of 1980s deconstruction, where are the inquiries into the effectiveness of ‘the text’ to absorb and reconfigure dominant discourses? With the shocking assaults on individual rights – from the right-wing imperative that a woman’s constitutional right to choose be abolished to the cutbacks on programs for single mothers – surely there is a need for a recontex-tualization of radical feminism and its relevance to everyday life. (Prevallet, 2012)

While women may historically have been excluded in certain ways, in many times and places, from the public space of cities, it is in the city, in the thrown-together circumstances of urban life that the eve-ryday experience of the body politic can be remade.

Precursors: women poets and the modernist city

While my focus is mainly on late twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing, I will consider some themes that first emerge within the modernist period, a time when the city itself becomes, as Léon Trotsky suggests in 1924, the catalyst for poetic transformation:

Language, changed and complicated by urban conditions, gives the poet a new verbal material, and suggests or facilitates new word combinations for the poetic formulation of new thoughts or of new feelings, which strive to break through the dark shell of the subconscious. (Trotsky, 2005, p. 142)

If language was changed by the conditions of the modern city, it changed for women as much as for men, and the reclamation of their work has been significant. Linda Kinnahan asserts, for example,

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8 Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space

that certain late twentieth-century women writers in the field of experimental poetry have constructed alternative lines of influence in the modernist period encompassing Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Laura Riding, Lorine Niedecker and, with most relevance to my interest here in the city, Djuna Barnes, H.D. and Virginia Woolf (Kinnahan, 2004, p. 184). Sounding a note of caution, Ann Vickery points out that this notion of a female tradition over-looks other histories of poetic dialogue, and the fact that women writ-ers are just as likely to be influenced by their male contemporaries (Vickery, 2000, p. 41). Trying to claim a specifically feminine tradi-tion in relation to the city would be counterproductive, since it would simply reproduce from a different angle the patterns of exclusion that have tended to diminish the visibility of women writers. Nevertheless, as it is helpful to consider recent experimental poetry in the context of earlier twentieth-century modernism, I will turn briefly to two modernist precursors, Hope Mirrlees and H.D., along with some themes that emerge in their work.

The flâneur and flâneuse

The flâneur, the detached observer of modern city life, has provided an influential model for understandings of urban literature, particu-larly since Walter Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire (Benjamin, 1999a, pp. 152–96). Deborah Parsons suggests that while important critics of modernism such as Janet Wolff and Griselda Pollock have argued that the patriarchal restraints of urban life made the flâneuse histori-cally impossible, the flâneur is a much more contradictory figure in terms of gender than is often recognized. Key texts such as Baudelaire’s, she writes, exhibit a

paradox of the scopically authoritative yet wandering and place-less flâneur, whose habits result from a mixture of reaction against, dependency on, and anxiety in, bourgeois culture. These com-plexities are essential to an understanding of the flâneur, and are interlinked with the themes of modernity, spectacle, and gender, implying an instability in his sense of superior, masculine author-ity. (Parsons, 2000, p. 19)

This tension between the detached and authoritative outside view-point and the mobile street-view of the pedestrian emerges in several

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of the later texts I will discuss, yet it is never a straightforward dichotomy. Parsons argues that, since Benjamin, the flâneur remains a significant influence as a ‘conceptual metaphor for urban observa-tion and walking that extends even to the present day,’ pointing out its relevance to Certeau’s view of the walker’s fluid and multiple per-spectives on postmodern urban space (Certeau, 1984, pp. 91–110). Considering the flâneur as transcending its historical moment, in being both masculine and feminine, stationary and static, authorita-tive and displaced, is helpful in avoiding a reduction of gendered spatial perspectives to simplified oppositions. I have therefore pre-ferred to use the term flâneur rather than the more specific flâneuse.However, the feminine flâneur becomes more visible at a certain his-torical moment, and one that creates the background against which the poetry I discuss has emerged. Parsons argues that not only do women emerge strongly in this role in modernist writing, but that they bring a new awareness of urban vision as gendered:

Whereas Benjamin’s flâneur increasingly becomes a metaphor for observation, retreating from the city streets once the arcades are destroyed to a place of scopic authority yet static detachment, women were entering the city with fresh eye, observing it from within. It is with this social influx of women as empirical observ-ers into the city street that aesthetic, urban perception as a spe-cifically masculine phenomenon and privilege is challenged. (Parsons, 2000, p. 6)

In prose, Virginia Woolf offers one example of such observation from within, the departure from the traditionally feminine sphere of domestic interiors leading to a sense of raw exposure and defamil-iarization. In her 1930 essay ‘Street Haunting: a London Adventure’, Woolf describes leaving the house on the pretext of buying a pencil on a winter afternoon, although the main purpose of the walk is to observe. If the pencil stands for the workmanlike aspect of her craft as a writer, it is the mobile perspective she adopts as chronicler of the streets that identifies her as an artist. Like Trotsky, she uses the image of the breaking shell to describe the city’s impact on perception:

The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others,

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is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. (Woolf, 2008, p. 178)

This is not a Romantic conception of the artist’s uniqueness of sensi-bility. In breaking out of the confines of architecture and taking to the street, Woolf breaks out of individual isolation into a London that is experienced, on foot, as a place full of vivid sensation but also of collective awareness.

While Woolf’s work was significant in developing the relationship of the novel to the sensory impressions and chance intersections of a freshly experienced urban life, the British poet Hope Mirrlees was the first woman writer in English to combine the vision of the flâneur with the formal potential of European avant-garde poetry. It is significant that her work was a response to Paris, since Parsons has suggested that ‘Paris offered, if not greater freedom then greater tolerance than London for female flânerie’ (Parsons, 2000, p. 20). Mirrlees’ Paris: a Poem was published by Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1920, and has been described by Julia Briggs as ‘a lost modernist masterpiece’ (Briggs, 2007, p. 261). The publication of Mirrlees’ Collected Poems by Carcanet in 2011 indicated that Paris was an isolated event in her poetic career, since most of her writing is more conventional in approach. The disappearance of her work is symptomatic of a well-documented tendency for women writ-ers to slip through the gaps of canonical histories. Paris is worth noting not because it is an influence on the contemporary poets I discuss, who have not necessarily read it, but because it nevertheless prefigures some of their concerns. The early poem has absorbed not only the typo-graphical innovations of Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire and F. T. Marinetti, but also their relationship with urban space.

One of the most striking features of the poem is the incorporation of overheard conversation, posters and signs in French, which fore-ground the experience of the city as a linguistic and social space.

I want a holophrase

NORD-SUD

ZIG-ZAGLION NOIRCACAO BLOOKER

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Black figured vases in Etruscan tombs

RUE DU BAC (DUBONNET)SOLFERINO (DUBONNET)CHAMBRE DES DEPUTES

Brekekekek coax coax we are passing under the Seine

DUBONNET

The Scarlet Woman shouting BYRRH and deafeningSt. John at Patmos

Vous descendez Madame?(Mirrlees, 2011, p. 3)

The opening line ‘I want a holophrase’, refers to a term defined by the feminist and classical linguist Jane Harrison (Mirrlees’ friend and companion) as ‘utterances of a relation in which the subject and object have not yet got their heads above water but are submerged in a situation’ (Harrison, 1912, pp. 473–5). Sandeep Parmar notes that it makes the speaker’s situation indeterminate, and that while ‘The poem begins with the utterance of the self’, it is at the same time ‘a self on the verge of primitive language, precipiced on its own desire, and inundated with communicative and non-communicative lan-guage’ (Mirrlees, 2011, pp. xl–xli). However, this inundation becomes part of a deliberate poetic strategy; Parsons’ comment on the mod-ernist flâneuse who observes the city ‘from within’ is relevant to the use of noise in this extract, where the creaking metro is evoked in ‘Brekekekek coax coax’. If noise can be defined as that which inter-rupts the transmission of a signal, this understanding depends on a certain relationship between the sender and recipient of the signal. Noise is used here to question such relationships, since the various levels of communication in the poem suggest that they are con-stantly shifting. The advertising sign for ‘CACAO BLOOKER’ (a Dutch drinking chocolate) communicates within its time and place but is quoted with the knowledge that it will become opaque in a different context. The ‘Scarlet Woman’ refers to an advert for Byrrh, a wine-based aperitif, featuring a woman in red with a drum; the poster, from 1907, shows a woman with head thrown back in mid-shout against an urban industrial background under a night sky. In this

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case the reference operates in a double sense, evoking both the ephemeral advert and the Whore of Babylon, a figure for the woman in the city drawn from a more widely and permanently recognized source in the Book of Revelations. The immediacy of being ‘within’ the city and fast-paced modern life therefore allows the authorial flâneur to undercut the repressive implications of the biblical image; the woman on the poster whose shouting becomes ‘deafening’ noise to St John is evidently at ease in her urban environment and a chal-lenge to traditionally sanctioned forms of female behaviour. The city is a clash of signifying systems; when attention is drawn by one of them the others become noise, or interference.

The political implication of this is an understanding that the city cannot be contained in a single subjective viewpoint; the movement of the flâneur creates a city of multiple perspectives through embodied impressions rather than panoramic ones that assume total knowledge. Where overview seems to be promised ‘From the top floor of an old Hôtel’ it is quickly shattered into detail as ‘Hawkers chant their wares liturgically: / Hatless women in black shawls / Carry long loaves’ (Mirrlees, 2011, p. 13). Even looking down on the street from above with the detached pleasure of the flâneur, the perspective remains at street level, drawing on sound and the experience of walking as well as on scopic knowledge. Smell is also used to place the speaker in relation to other bodies, for example when sitting on the Grand Boulevards that ‘smell of / Cloacae / Hot indiarubber / Poudre de riz / Algerian tobacco’ (Mirrlees, 2011, p. 9). The switch of languages and the interna-tional sources of the smells present the city as simultaneously immedi-ate and global; the uncomfortable physical closeness implied by the smell of sewage blends with the more exotic scents of rubber, rice and tobacco that reveal the colonial relationships inherent in locality.

The visual layout of the poem relates to several strands of experi-mentation current in Europe at the time. Initially it brings to mind the use of white space in Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1914), which as Maurice Blanchot has observed, presents a ‘wholly new essence of mobility’ (Rothenberg and Joris, 1995, p. 49). The eye physically moves around the space in a dérive that mirrors the experience of the walk as disparate elements are drawn together. Apollinaire’s verbal-visual experiments and particularly his Calligrammes are recalled in the vertical alignment of ‘There is no lily of the valley’, a reference to the strikes on 1 May which stopped the flower sellers from plying their trade (Rothenberg and Joris, 1995,

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p. 119; Mirrlees, 2011, pp. 10–11). Marinetti’s Futurist interest in the sounds of modernity and their typographical transcription also appears to be a significant influence on the poem and its excited approach to the technological aspects of the city (Rothenberg and Joris, 1995, p. 199). This poem, in its fusion of influences and sensory alertness to the city, assimilates forms of experimentation to be pur-sued by later generations. The effective disappearance of its author, or at least of its author’s bold commitment to her contemporary envi-ronment, may be coincidental, but it may also be indicative of the cultural pressures that make this text so noticeable as an apparently isolated event in early modernist women’s writing.

Archaeological memory

A much more widely known work, H.D.’s Trilogy, is located in the London of the Second World War. Responding to the destruction of architecture, it draws on Christian, Judaic and Egyptian imagery to forge a mythology of collective hope (H.D., 1984, pp. 505–612). It is significant in its ambition, especially when we consider that the writer’s reputation has only gradually been recovered from the loom-ing shadows of the men with whom she was associated, as fiancée (briefly) of Ezra Pound, as an analysand of Sigmund Freud, and as a friend of D. H. Lawrence. This act of composition on an epic scale, late in her career, is an assertion of control of literary spaces as much as a comment on the actual space of the devastated London streets to which it refers. Its interest in the effects of war on civilians bears comparison with works such as T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Pound’s Pisan Cantos yet it approaches its themes from a consciously femi-nine perspective (Eliot, 1963 pp. 187–224; Pound, 2003). Tracing the relationships between H.D.’s work and that of Pound, Yeats, Williams and Eliot, Susan Stanford Friedman places H.D. ‘squarely in the center of this modernist mythmaking tradition, even though her first substantial poem in this mode came twenty years after the earli-est examples of it’ (Friedman, 1981, p. 209). At the same time, she was ‘“different” as the only poet in this circle of mythmakers to write from a woman’s perspective – not the woman’s perspective since there is no monolith of female experience any more than there is a single male perspective’ (Friedman, 1981, p. 211).

In The H.D. Book, Robert Duncan takes issue with Randall Jarrell’s dismissal of Trilogy’s mythological dimension as ‘silly’, arguing for a more complex vision of what might be considered ‘real’ (Duncan,

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2011, p. 523). Whatever the immediate reality of London as the locus of composition, the ‘city’ of the poem is Rome, Jerusalem, Venice, Vienna; it is always ‘other’, as in the lines ‘tell me, in what other city / will you find the may-tree // so delicate, green-white, opalescent / like our jewel in the crucible’ (H.D., 1984, p. 557); it is a space repre-sented through literary and symbolic associations, rather than as one that is directly lived. The poem works through Egyptian, Jewish and Christian mythologies, recentring them from a feminine subjec-tivity. As Friedman remarks,

The city aflame functioned hermetically as the crucible in which she could transmute into art many years of psychoanalytical prob-ing, several sequences of psychic experience, multiple sources of esoteric lore, and the questions raised by the harsh realities of the modern world. (Friedman, 1981, p. 207)

It is the destruction of the physically immediate city that proves an enabling space for this form of creation. The first section, ‘The Walls Do Not Fall’ carries the note ‘for Karnak 1923 from London 1942’, referring to the temple site in Egypt, visited by H.D. in 1923. This link between locations places the wartime city in an expanded con-text and a longer historical perspective. Susan Gubar has noted that the title ‘reveals the primacy of spatial imagery in H.D.’s analysis of a splintered world where “there are no doors” and “the fallen roof / leaves the sealed room / open to the air”. All of civilized history has failed to create forms that can protect or nurture the inhabitants of this wasteland’ (Friedman and DuPlessis, 1990, p. 299). Although the poem begins with the language of reportage and observable detail of the city at war: ‘An incident here and there / and rails gone (for guns) / from your (and my) old town square’, the city that concerns H.D. is usually not the empirically observed space of the everyday but a fusion of architectural and textual spaces in which past and present are juxtaposed from the viewpoint of the contemporary crisis.

we pass on

to another cellar, to another sliced wallwhere poor utensils showlike rare objects in a museum;

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Pompeii has nothing to teach us,we know crack of volcanic fissure,slow flow of terrible lava,

pressure on heart, lungs, the brainabout to burst its brittle case(what the skull can endure):

(H.D., 1984, p. 510)

In a reversal of the usual feminine setting of the interior, the action is placed outside and in the collective, as implied by her use of the plural first person. Rooms are ‘sliced’ to show not only the damage to domes-tic spaces but also their value, as ordinary household objects take on the aura of museum pieces. If Pompeii was regarded as part of a cultur-ally valued classical past, London now takes on that momentous cen-trality and historical depth, as if it is being excavated.

Freud’s archaeological conception of the unconscious informed modernist understandings of the city as a site of collective memory, where pasts are juxtaposed in the space of the present, as for example in Civilization and its Discontents, where he describes the unconscious in terms of a modern city superimposed on its own different stages of development:

Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past – an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest ones. (Freud, 1989, p. 18)

The archaeological dimension of the city as a site of cultural memory is crucial to H.D.’s work and its response to the trauma of war, and her interest in Freud is well documented as foundational to her poetics. Yet if the Freudian archaeological project is, according to Christine Buci-Glucksmann, concerned with ‘rediscovering a primal scene that recon-structs a complete logic of the real/unreal unconscious’, a different approach to archaeology is suggested by Walter Benjamin, who in The Arcades Project conceives of the city as an active and dialectical space of engagement with the past (Buci-Glucksmann, 1994, p. 48; Benjamin,

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16 Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space

1999b). His concept of the monad, the crystallization of past and present within a single point of revolutionary disruption, might pro-vide a more helpful model for the subversive reordering of H.D.’s archaeology, and is an idea to which I will return in the discussion of Geraldine Monk in Chapter 4 (Benjamin, 1999a, p. 247).

Women writers and the city

For contemporary women writers, these modernist concerns with per-ception and symbolism in the city have since been inflected by the development of various strands of feminist thought. The term ‘women writers’ is used here to describe a particular set of coordinates, but not to limit the ways in which this position may be inhabited. There are social and aesthetic threads linking the writers on whom I have chosen to focus but also many differences, and I have not aimed to describe a particular grouping. Rather, I have considered the ways in which a view of gender as process and performance, an element within a matrix of interactions through which subjects and cities are constructed, opens multiple possibilities for the poem. In Chapter 1, I begin by considering the use of named locations in poems, and the ways in which names become part of a set of relationships in language. Moving on to con-sider some contemporary UK poets, I examine the means by which the poem may locate itself less through naming fixed points than through becoming part of the rhythmical, social exchanges that constitute the city as it is lived. Denise Riley’s various explorations of naming and address, as poet and philosopher, have profoundly shaped this book’s concerns. She has also been a significant influence on the work of Carol Watts, Marianne Morris and Emily Critchley, who share her interest in reinventing the lyric voice, and its dialogic potential for producing as well as responding to urban space.

In Chapter 2 I discuss the work of Alice Notley, who sees the chal-lenge for the woman writer as being to ‘take up space’ (Notley, 2005, p. 6), a phrase that questions the nature of ‘literary space’ and its rela-tionship to material and political spaces. In challenging the scope and scale of canonical epics with feminist reconfigurations of form, her work engages with the public space of the city. This chapter explores the connection between the extended poetic forms she uses in these two books and ways in which her work conceptualizes relationships between the body and language. The third chapter, continuing with

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Introduction 17

the theme of epic narrative, focuses on two recent poetry collections by the US American poet Lisa Samuels. Tomorrowland (2009) and Gender City (2011) present an approach to city space that both reso-nates with and departs from earlier writings on the city by Certeau and Lefebvre. I explore the means by which Samuels’ poems resist traditional forms of knowledge, suggesting instead the possibility of the text’s performative engagement with cosmopolitan urban envi-ronments. Retallack’s concept of the ‘experimental feminine’ provides a gendered perspective on how a poetics that problematizes represen-tation and knowledge, insisting on multiple and collaborative possi-bilities within the text, can enable an understanding of lived space that is oriented towards the future.

The relationship between language and locality underlies Chapters 4 and 5. Geraldine Monk’s excavations of Manchester and Sheffield become a dérive through past and present that turns over the ground to uncover histories of class and regional oppression in which the suppression of the feminine is a critical element. In a city defined by modes of linguistic encounter, Monk’s work uses forms of translation to reconfigure relationships between place and language, addressing both essentialist constructions of nationhood and the homogeniz-ing effects of English as a global language by focusing on locality, heterogeneity and diachronic variation. Of a different generation, Ágnes Lehóczky, though Hungarian-born, has established a reputa-tion as a poet in English through two collections with a strong emphasis on urban space. Although her work’s bicultural negotia-tions leave her outside obvious groupings of poets in the UK, its focus on language and layered memory in the city relates interestingly to Monk’s. By comparing the layering of language with the layering of different urban spaces, I discuss, in Chapter 5, the ways in which Lehóczky’s work presents the lyric self and the city as palimpsestic.

Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Canadian writers Erín Moure and Lisa Robertson respectively, both of whom engage explicitly with the notion of polis. For Moure, living bilingually in Montréal, this involves a citizenship that inhabits and crosses borders, so that the idea of the city becomes a critique of both essentialist nationalism and the borderless spaces of global capitalism. Beyond her own poetry and its translingual strategies, her practice as a translator of poets including Nicole Brossard and Chus Pato extends her vision of local and global community. For Robertson, the city is a social space

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18 Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space

in which rhetorical and architectural surfaces are equally important. Whether charting the vanishing spaces of Vancouver, exploring the rhetoric of weather in Cambridge or recording Parisian soundscapes, her work is alert to the social rhythms that cross language and space. With reference to her use of ‘prosody’ as an encompassing concept of rhythm influenced by Henri Meschonnic, I explore the relationship in her work between the linguistic spaces of the polis and the mate-rial structures and surfaces of cities.

Chapters 8 and 9 discuss approaches to response, collaboration and performance on both sides of the Atlantic. An underlying con-cern here is the relationship between embodied and textual practice. If situationist practice challenged the political validity of art within the context of the city, claiming everyday life itself as art, what does this mean for poetry? London-based Redell Olsen’s reworking of Charles Olson questions the masculine embodiment of the polis, while the US poet Jena Osman, by exploring sightlines of statues, reveals the means by which masculine and often militarized power structures pervade the material spaces of the present. I discuss Frances Presley’s transatlantic response to Osman’s work as well as her own approach to the framing of attention in urban space. In the final chapter I consider performance within the city in terms of Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia, with reference to a diverse group of writ-ers: Fiona Templeton and Hazel Smith from the UK, and two younger poets from the United States, Laura Elrick and Kaia Sand. Crossing the boundaries of genre, these writers present poetry in contexts that intersect with theatre, digital media, performance art and activism.

The poets I have discussed address many aspects of cities and what it means to live in them, including changing understandings of the body and embodied space in increasingly technologized urban envi-ronments, the ecopoetics of the urban, the role of cohabiting lan-guages in defining public space, and the city’s centrality in questions of global citizenship. They do so from a range of oppositional per-spectives, through an interrogation of language that becomes a proc-ess of critiquing the structures that shape city space. While their work often engages with a knot of concerns that can be traced back to mod-ernist and earlier visions of the city, it explores contemporary urban spaces as complex, often contested, and open to re-imagination.

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Adorno, Theodor, 178Althusser, Louis, 28Apollinaire, Guillaume, 10, 12

Calligrammes, 12Augé, Marc, 177, 204Austin, J. L., 160

Babel, Tower of, 97, 98, 106, 113Bakhtin, Mikhail, 104Barnes, Djuna, 8 Barry, Peter, 21–2, 25, 29Baudelaire, Charles, 3, 8Beauvoir, Simone de, 31Benjamin, Walter, 8, 27, 63, 89, 96,

97, 134, 148, 155, 160–1, 178, 185

The Arcades Project, 15, 134Benveniste, Émile, 155, 156Bergvall, Caroline, 112, 124Bernstein, Charles, 180bilingualism, 111–15, 129, 133,

136, 151Blau DuPlessis, Rachel, 6–7, 14

Blue Studios, 6body and city as ‘interface’ 4–5, 33,

36, 39, 40, 51–2, 61, 81Bolter, Jay David, and Richard

Grusin, 205Bonney, Sean, 89Borden, Iain, 70–1Bordo, Susan, 48Boykoff, Jules, 205Boykoff, Jules, and Kaia Sand, 198,

210Brady, Andrea, 31Brossard, Nicole, 17, 74, 134, 146–7

Museum of Bone and Water, 146–7Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 15Butler, Judith, 27, 131, 133, 154, 165,

166, 187, 189, 203Buuck, David, 205

Cage, John, 170, 179Calvino, Italo, 123CCTV and surveillance, 38–9, 89,

183, 187Cebreiro, María do, 148Certeau, Michel de, 4, 9, 50, 51, 54,

55, 63, 64, 70–1, 76, 110, 154, 157–8

chora, 56Chow, Rey, 155Chtcheglov, Ivan, 159, 165, 207Cixous, Hélène, 6cosmopolitanism, 64, 68, 79, 138,

141, 145Critchley, Emily, 16, 26–7,

34–5‘Some Curious Thing II’, 26

Dante Alighieri, 44, 52, 54, 57Davidson, Ian, 4, 155, 180Dean, Roger, 203–4Debord, Guy-Ernest, 3, 120, 134,

164Dehaene, Michiel and Lieven de

Cauter, 197, 205Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari,

92, 94, 96, 103, 105, 138dérive, 3, 12, 32, 121, 134, 157,

164Derrida, Jacques, 97, 98, 114–15,

117, 119, 124–5, 150Dickinson, Emily, 8, 78dislocution, 93, 95Donne, John, 65DuBois, Page, 44, 45–6Duncan, Robert

The H.D. Book, 13–14

Eagleton, Terry, 34écriture feminine, 6–7Eliot, T. S., 13, 44

Index

231

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232 Index

Elizabeth I, 99, 100Elrick, Laura, 7, 18, 195, 197,

205–8Engels, Friedrich, 90experimental feminine, 5, 74–5, 81

Falconer, Rachel, 44, 46feminism 3, 5, 6, 16, 28, 43, 45,

66, 67, 129, 134, 166, 177, 179, 213

Fisher, Allen, 179flâneur, 8–9, 10, 12, 39, 43, 54, 59,

134, 158, 206flâneuse, 8–9Foucault, Michel, 18, 50, 195,

196, 200Freud, Sigmund, 13, 15, 189Friedlander, Ben, 154Friedman, Susan Stanford, 13, 14

Glenum, Lara, 44Godard, Barbara, 134Griffiths, Bill, 96Grosz, Elizabeth, 89

body and city as ‘interface’ 4–5, 33, 36, 39, 40, 51–52, 61, 81

Gubar, Susan, 14

H.D., 8, 13–16Trilogy, 13–16

Haraway, Donna, 5, 61, 204

Harrison, Jane, 11Harvey, David, 2heterotopia, 195–7, 200–12How2, 3Howard, Luke, 168–69

Irigaray, Luce, 81Iveson, Kurt, 68

Jacobs, Jane, 206Jakobson, Roman, 106Jameson, Fredric, 165Jarrell, Randall, 13

Joris, Pierre, 111Joyce, James, 103

Kamboureli, Smaro, 130katabasis, 46, 57Kinnahan, Linda 7, 100Koolhaas, Rem, 160Kristeva, Julia, 5, 35, 56, 68,

133, 144

Lalonde, Michèle, 100Lawrence, D. H, 13Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 100, 106, 107Lefebvre, Henri, 4, 32–3, 36, 48, 63,

70, 71, 72, 154, 161, 164, 172, 182, 196

The Production of Space, 4, 161, 182

Rhythmanalysis, 32–3, 71, 72Lehóczky, Ágnes, 17, 109–25

Budapest to Babel, 109, 113, 116, 119–10

Rememberer, 109–10, 121–25Lévinas, Emmanuel, 131Locke, John, 64–5

McCabe, Susan, 44, 45, 47, 49McCaffrey, Steve, 158, 165McGann, Jerome, 78Majzels, Robert, 145, 146Mallarmé, Stéphane, 10, 12Marinetti, F. T, 10, 12–13Mary Queen of Scots, 99–105Massey, Doreen, 5, 35, 46, 52, 82,

90, 150, 192, 196Mayer, Bernadette

Midwinter Day, 45Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 28Meschonnic, Henri, 18, 33, 156,

158, 168, 171, 173Mezei, Kathy, 99–100Mirrlees, Hope, 8, 110

Paris: a Poem, 10–13modernism 7, 39, 44, 45Moi, Toril, 31monad, 16, 89, 155

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Index 233

Monk, Geraldine, 16, 21, 87–108, 110, 123, 146, 179

‘Hidden Cities’, 88Escafeld Hangings, 92–108

Morris, Marianne, 8, 16, 33Tutu Muse: Prophylactic Poetry for

the Last Generation, 33–6Morris, Meaghan, 50, 76Morton, Timothy, 178–9, 189Moure, Erín, 17, 116, 129–51, 171

O Cidadán, 130, 138–44, 148Search Procedures, 130–7

Moyes, Lianne, 130, 138, 142Mulvey, Laura, 185

naming, 21–6, 94, 97–100, 113, 129Nelson, Maggie, 55–6Nemes-Nagy, Ágnes, 109, 116–19,

125Niedecker, Lorine, 8noise, 11–12, 77–8, 136, 140, 170–2,

183Notley, Alice, 16, 43–61, 67, 75, 163

The Descent of Alette, 43–52, 58, 60, 61, 75, 163

Disobedience, 43, 46, 52–61

O’Hara, Frank, 31, 33, 60Occupy, 205Oliver, Kelly, 56Olsen, Redell, 18, 177–84, 198

Secure Portable Space, 179–84Olson, Charles, 18, 23, 26, 44,

The Maximus Poems, 179–84Osman, Jena, 18, 23–4, 177, 184–90

An Essay in Asterisks, 187The Network, 23–4Public Figures, 184–90

palimpsest, 88, 109, 111–12, 115, 125

Parmar, Sandeep, 11Parsons, Deborah, 8–9, 11, 59Pato, Chus, 17, 147–50

Charenton, 149Hordes of Writing, 148, 149–50

Peacock, Laurel, 167personism, 31Pike, David L., 45, 54Pizan, Christine de, 44–5Plato, 2, 56, 142,

Republic, The, 2, 142Pnyx, 1polis, 3, 17, 18, 28, 29, 31, 32, 129,

148, 153, 155, 173, 213Pollock, Griselda, 8Portante, Jean, 112Pound, Ezra, 13, 37, 179Presley, Frances, 18, 177, 190–4

Lines of Sight, 190–1Paravane, 192–4

Prevallet, Kristin, 6–7, 205–6Production of Space, The, 4, 161, 182

Quartermain, Meredith, 22–3, 157Walking Vancouver, 22–3

Rendell, Jane, 66Retallack, Joan, 77, 81–3, 170, 177,

179, 185experimental feminine, 5, 74–5,

81rhythm, 18, 31, 32–40, 72–3, 156,

159, 160, 168, 172Rich, Adrienne, 57Riding, Laura, 8 Riley, Denise, 16, 21, 22, 27–32, 110,

112, 139‘Knowing in the real world’, 21‘A shortened set’, 29–31‘A drift’, 32

Rimbaud, Arthur, 124Robertson, Lisa, 1, 17, 67,

153–73Nilling, 1, 153, 170–3Occasional Work and Seven Walks

from the Office of Soft Architecture 153, 159–65

The Weather, 159, 166–70Roque, Ligia, 102Rose, Gillian (geographer), 5, 91,

133, 141, 183

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234 Index

Rose, Gillian (philosopher), 97Russo, Mary, 170–1

Samuels, Lisa, 17, 63–83Gender City, 64, 73–83 Tomorrowland, 63–73

Sand, Kaia, 18, 195, 205Remember to Wave, 208–12

Schafer, R. Murray, 38, 171–2Scott, Clive, 104Scott, Gail, 134Semtex, 193Senn, Fritz, 93, 103

dislocution, 93, 95Simon, Sherry, 145Simonsen, Kirsten, 29, 30Singh, Indra, 168situationism, 3, 32, 121, 134,

135, 153, 154, 157, 158, 159, 164, 178, 179, 197, 207–10

Skibsrud, Johanna, 138Smith, Hazel, 18, 195, 202–5Solnit, Rebecca, 121Spahr, Juliana, 6, 24

The Transformation, 24–5Spivak, Gayatri, 112Stein, Gertrude, 8Szirtes, George, 109–10

Tarlo, Harriet, 179Templeton, Fiona, 18, 195, 198–202

London, 201–2

YOU – The City, 198–201Thomas, Helen, 67Tonkiss, Fran, 196translation, 87, 92, 93, 96, 97,

98, 104, 106, 108, 110, 130, 142, 145–8, 150, 183, 206

Trotsky, Léon 7, 9Truth, Sojourner, 28–9

Venturi, Robert, 165Venuti, Lawrence, 94, 103Vickery, Ann, 8Vicuña, Cecilia, 24Voltaire, 97

Wah, Fred, 23Walsh, Catherine

City West, 25–6Warner, Daniel, 170Watts, Carol, 16, 36–9, 77

Occasionals, 36–8this is red, 38–9

Westling, Louise H., 67Williams, Raymond, 170Williams, William Carlos, 23, 44Wolach, David, 206Wolff, Janet, 8–9Woolf, Virginia, 9, 10World Trade Center, 4, 24, 50,

192–3, 205, 207, 215

Young, Stephanie, 6

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