In this unusual and insightful collection, fourteen full-length literary interviews with innovative female poets of the last forty years, enhanced with a selection of their poems and prefaced by short introductions, present a wide and accessible range of forms, schools, politics, and conversations. By giving us each poet’s own voice in a medium other than poetry, the interviews provide important cultural and historical contexts that help define notions of innovation and contribute to a fuller understanding of these experimental poems.
Poets and literary scholars Elisabeth Frost and Cynthia Hogue selected writers with particular attention to diversity in terms of ethnicity, philosophical concerns, and aesthetic movements, including the New York School, the Black Arts Movement, and language writing. By bringing together poets not usually considered in the same critical context, the editors clarify the ways in which these innovative women have affected ideas of poetry and poetic practice.
The engaging interviews (whose questions are often as interesting and informed as the responses), introductory texts, and selected poems allow readers to forge productive connections among the most important voices of late twentieth-century American poetry.
“Readers interested in women’s writing, innovative writing, and American poetry in general will find this collection useful and informative—perhaps indispensable. The poets gathered here are among the most important voices in late twentieth-century poetry in the U.S., and the anthology offers an excellent introduction to their work. But even readers already familiar with these poets will find new insights, new connections, new ways of thinking about their challenging and diverse poetics. Innovative Women Poets is likely to become a staple in personal and academic libraries as well as university course syllabi.”—Megan Simpson, author, Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women’s Language-Oriented Writing
“This critical anthology of poetry by and interviews with contemporary women poets represents an important step in charting a history of women’s poetry in America. Particularly in bringing together a collection of interviews with women poets who have made distinct, but often unrecognized, contributions to contemporary innovative poetry, this collection promises to fill a number of gaps.”—Linda A. Kinnahan, author, Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse
Contents
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa
Introduction
An Interview with Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa by AnaLouise Keating
Cihuatlyotl, Woman Alone
Del otro lado
Don’t Given In, Chicanita
Interface
Poets Have Strange Eating Habits
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Introduction
Two Conversations with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge by Laura Hinton
Chinese Space
Empathy
I Love Morning
Honey
Jayne Cortez
Introduction
An Interview with Jayne Cortez by Sascha Feinstein
So Many Feathers
If the Drum Is a Woman
Lynch Fragment
Rape
About Flyin’ Home
States of Motion
Bumblebee, You Saw Big Mama
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Introduction
An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis by Jeanne Heuving
from Crowbar
from Writing
Draft 27: Athwart
from Draft 52: Midrash
Alice Fulton
Introduction
An Interview with Alice Fulton by Cristanne Miller
= =
Fuzzy Feelings
from Give: A Sequence Reimagining Daphne & Apollo
The Permeable Past Tense of Feel
Susan Howe
Introduction
An Interview with Susan Howe by Lynn Keller
from The Nonconformist’s Memorial
Harryette Mullen
Introduction
An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Elisabeth A. Frost
from Trimmings
from S*PeRM**K*T
from Muse & Drudge
All She Wrote
Bilingual Instructions
Black Nikes
Zen Acorn
Alice Notley
Introduction
An Interview with Alice Notley by Claudia Keelan
from Désamère
Alicia Ostriker
Introduction
An Interview with Alicia Ostriker by Cynthia Hogue
The Eighth and Thirteenth
About Time
from The Volcano and the Covenant
Sonia Sanchez
Introduction
An Interview with Sonia Sanchez by Sascha Feinstein
a/coltrane/poem
Blues
Sister’s Voice (Read to “Round Midnight”)
A Poem for Ella Fitzgerald
Leslie Scalapino
Introduction
An Interview with Leslie Scalapino by Elisabeth A. Frost
as -- leg
Crowd and not evening or light
C. D. Wright
Introduction
An Interview with C. D. Wright by Sarah Vap and Charles Jensen
from Deepstep Come Shining
Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser
Introduction
An Interview with Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser by Elisabeth A. Frost and Cynthia Hogue
Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher
An Emphasis Falls on Reality
The Rose Marble Table
Spirit Tree
Turret
Petticoat
Noisetone
from “Türler Losses”
Norchia from Etruscan Pages
from “Wing”
Contributors
Works Cited
Index
