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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY
ii
THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY
Edited by
Craig Svonkin and Steven Gould Axelrod
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2023
Copyright © Craig Svonkin, Steven Gould Axelrod, and contributors, 2023
The editors and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as Authors of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page.
Cover image: Paintings in Browns and Rusts and Reds, Laura Eve Borenstein. Photograph by Karla Castañeda.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this
book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any
inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist,
but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Svonkin, Craig, editor. | Axelrod, Steven Gould, 1944– editor.
Title: The Bloomsbury handbook of contemporary American poetry /
edited by Craig Svonkin and Steven Gould Axelrod.
Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | Series: Bloomsbury handbooks |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Summary: “With chapters written by leading scholars such as Steven Gould Axelrod, Cary Nelson, Aldon Lynn Nielsen
and Marjorie Perloff, this comprehensive Handbook explores the full range and diversity of poetry and criticism in
21st-century America. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry covers such topics as: ·
Major histories and genealogies of post-war poetry - from the language poets and the Black Arts Movement to New
York school and the Beats · Poetry, identity and community - from African American, Chicana/o and Native American
poetry to Queer verse and the poetics of disability · Key genres and forms - including digital, visual, documentary
and children’s poetry · Central critical themes - economics, publishing, popular culture, ecopoetics, translation and
biography The book also includes an interview section in which major contemporary poets such as Rae Armantrout,
Charles Bernstein and Claudia Rankine reflect on the craft and value of poetry today”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022027033 | ISBN 9781350062504 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781350351929 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350062511 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781350062528 (epub) | ISBN 9781350062535
Subjects: LCSH: American poetry–20th century–History and criticism. |
American poetry–21st century–History and criticism. |
Poets, American–20th century–Interviews. | Poets, American–21st century–Interviews.
Classification: LCC PS613 B583 2023 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027033
ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6250-4
ePDF: 978-1-3500-6252-8
eBook: 978-1-3500-6251-1
Series: Bloomsbury Handbooks
Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters.
The editors dedicate their part of this book to the blessed memory of their parents,
Paula and Stanley Svonkin and Martha and Bernard Axelrod
vi
CONTENTS
A cknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part One Roots and Branches of the Contemporary
1. A Conversation with Marjorie Perloff 7

Susan McCabe, Brian Reed, and Steven Gould Axelrod
2. The Feminist Poetry Movement in America 19

Bethany Hicok
3. American Poetry and War 33

Cary Nelson
4. Experimental Asian American Poetry 49

Josephine Nock-Hee Park
5. Undisciplined Writing: Postwar Prose Poetry 61

Michel Delville
6. Lowell’s Turtles 73
Stephanie Burt
7. Subjectivity and Identity in New York School Poetry 85

Terence Diggory
8. Jewish American Poetry and the Late Twentieth-Century Literary Canon 101
Hilene Flanzbaum
9. The Autobiographical Prose of Poets 113

Grzegorz Kosc
10. Queer Poetry after 1945 125

Laura Westengard
11. From Shingled Hippo to Gay Unicorn: Self-Othering in Bob Kaufman and Other Beats 139
Craig Svonkin
viii Contents
12. The National Anthology Wars and West Coast Anthologies 153
Bill Mohr
13. The Black Art of Confession 163

Steven Gould Axelrod
14. Binding Nation-States: Poetry Anthologies of Hawai‘i, 1966–2018 177

Stanley Orr
15. The Poetics of Chicana Daughterhood: Cherríe Moraga and Lorna Dee Cervantes 195
Lisette Ordovica Lasater
Part Two Interviews with Poets
16. Mitsuye Yamada 215

Steven Gould Axelrod, Craig Svonkin, and Traise Yamamoto
17. Marilyn Nelson 221

Craig Svonkin
18. Rae Armantrout 225

Steven Gould Axelrod and Craig Svonkin
19. Lorna Dee Cervantes 233

20. Marilyn Chin 245

21. Geof Huth 255

Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.
22. Juan Delgado 269

Craig Svonkin
23. Claudia Rankine 279

Andrew Lyndon Knighton
24. Crisosto Apache 287

25. Joshua Jennifer Espinoza 293

Part Three The Contemporary Moment
26. A Conversation with Stephanie Burt 299

Contents ix
27. Ecopoetics: In and against the American Grain 305

James McCorkle
28. Economies of Scale: Contemporary Poetry and the Marketplace 323

Ann Keniston
29. Contemporary Children’s Poetry: A Colloquy 339

Craig Svonkin, Mike Cadden, Richard Flynn, Michael Heyman, Krystal Howard,
Michael Joseph, JonArno Lawson, Lissa Paul, and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.
30. Multilingual American Poetry and Poetics 361

Maria Lauret
31. Claiming Their Place: Contemporary Arab American Poetry and Poetics 379
Richard Hishmeh
32. The Rise of Award-Winning Black Poets 391

Howard Rambsy II
33. The Fourth Wave in Native American Poetics 405

Erika T. Wurth
34. Recent Trends in Jewish American Poetry 419

Norman Finkelstein
35. What Is the Queer Confessional? 429

Jan Maramot Rodil
36. Poetry Translation and Poet-Translators 437

Brian Reed
37. Prosthetic Poetics: Contemporary Poetry of Disability 449

Jessica Lewis Luck
38. Data Dump: Poetry and Information in the Twenty-First Century 465
Jeffrey Gray
L ist of C ontributors 489

I ndex 497
x
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors wish to thank everyone at Bloomsbury who was so supportive of our project, including
David Avital, Ben Doyle, Laura Cope, Amy Brownbridge, and Saranya Manohar.
Thanks go out to all of our very patient contributors who gracefully withstood our pandemic-
caused production slowdowns. Particular thanks to Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Burt, Lorna Dee
Cervantes, Marilyn Chin, Juan Delgado, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Jeffrey Gray, Geof Huth,
Andrew Lyndon Knighton, Susan McCabe, Marilyn Nelson, Stanley Orr, Marjorie Perloff, Claudia
Rankine, Brian Reed, Joseph T. Thomas, Jr., Mitsuye Yamada, and her daughter Hedi Mouchard.
We wish to thank our research assistants: Zander Allport, Raymond Hong Jig Rim, Sonia
Christensen, Maggie Svonkin, and Natasha McCone.
Craig wishes to thank David John Boyd, Russell McDermott, Kathryn Stevenson, Paula Svonkin,
and Jeanine Svonkin, for their advice and support.
Steve wishes to thank Rise Axelrod for her invaluable advice and support.
We wish to thank Laura Eve Borenstein for permission to use her “Painting in Browns and Rusts
and Reds” as the cover image of our book. We also thank Karla Castañeda for her photograph of
the painting.
xii
Introduction
CRAIG SVONKIN AND STEVEN GOULD AXELROD
Attempting to design a Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry raises quite a few
questions. First, how to organize the collection: what to include and what to exclude; which poets,
poems, and perspectives to highlight; and how to decide those questions. Should the book attempt
to trace a master narrative, a totalizing account of the progress of poetry in this era? Or should
it settle for a metanarrative, a survey of preexistent accounts? We found ourselves convinced that
neither of those approaches would produce the generative and interesting book we were hoping
for. In a culturally and intellectually diverse society like the United States, influenced so deeply by
the past and by other regions and world systems, we are doubtful that any single narrative of what
has happened and is happening makes sense. This book, therefore, offers a series of partial views
that don’t necessarily harmonize or add up. Each view reflects a particular gaze from a particular
vantage point. Each essay takes its place amid the varied viewpoints of the other highly informed
essays, each one causing what Elizabeth Bishop called “an active / displacement in perspective” (36).
Perhaps our essays do keep mentioning certain key poems and highly recognized poets. If this
were the Academy Awards, perhaps we would be handing out Oscars to certain stellar recipients.
But of course, like any Academy Awards or Pulitzer Prize ceremony, we’d then be slighting many
amazing poems and poets, leaving us with an acrid taste in the mouth. And nobody wants that. We
have likewise chosen to reject a Handbook that aspires to tell an authoritative or complete story.
As Henry James observed in his Notebooks, “the whole of anything is never told” (18). Instead
this book highlights a multitude of contradictory poems and oeuvres, which find their way to the
spotlight not quite randomly, but with a sense of contingency. We give you only parts of a story the
whole of which can never be told. Our contributors would probably admit the wisdom of Anthony
Bourdain’s remark, “I do my best; I look, I listen, but in the end I know it’s my story.” We hope we
are providing useful ways into the vast, pleasurable, provoking, and consoling ocean of recent and
contemporary American poetry. We wanted this Handbook to be a whale of a book, and moreover
to be what Melville called a “Loose-Fish”—not one with clear labels but one that reflects the
slippery nature of poetry, reading, and reality itself.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari define a minor literature as “that which a minority constructs
within a major language” (Kafka 16). They regard Franz Kafka as exemplary because of his inability
to fit into the dominant German linguistic culture of his time, and they celebrate Kafka’s contested,
contesting, and always liminal and impossible kind of writing. Minor literature in this sense is about
flight and escape, about the way some texts can elude “judgment, flee and become destratified,
decoded, deterritorialized” (Thousand 40). These are practices that Deleuze and Guattari’s editor,
Robert Brinkley, calls “particularly crucial for minorities who want to remain minorities and affirm
2 The Bloomsbury HANDBOOK of Contemporary American Poetry
perspectives that are not those of the culture they inhabit” (13). Deleuze and Guattari go on to
argue, “There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor” (Kafka 26). So, to adapt
their concept of a minor literature to our purpose, we wanted a Handbook that was broad enough
to welcome many “minor” or outsider poets, poems, and perspectives. We wanted a Handbook
that was more rhizomatic than genealogical. The rhizome, as Deleuze and Guattari explain, is
heterogeneous, multiple, and resists the unidirectional: “Any point of a rhizome can be connected
to anything other, and must be” (Thousand 7). And Deleuze and Guattari view American literature
as particularly rhizomatic rather than linear or branching: “Everything important that has happened
or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome” (Thousand 19).
Yes, we wanted a rhizome, not a family tree of a Handbook; a Handbook that would go a bit
crazy and include offshoots and side paths, knowing that one person’s major poetry is another’s
minor, and vice versa. And so the binding idea of a Handbook that certified the “best” or the “most
significant” texts in contemporary American poetry had to go. As Emory Elliott pointed out in
his introduction to Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age: “The critic in judgment who assumes that
there are universal standards of beauty—that ‘we all recognize a beautiful face or a great poem
when we see one’—will be likely to erase or subordinate an array of human differences and forms
of creative expression as being inferior to a select few” (3). Harryette Mullen put the idea more
bluntly: “When I think colored someone bleeds” (52). If the essays here explore what is valuable
in contemporary American poetics, they do so in a pluralistic, multicultural, multi-perspectival
context. And while we are interested in a more pluralistic aesthetics, we do not want to privilege
aesthetics over history and culture, for doing so ignores the mutual entanglement of all three. As
Jane Tompkins has written, “When classic texts are seen not as the ineffable products of genius but
as the bearers of a set of national, social, economic, institutional, and professional interests, then
their domination of the critical scene seems less the result of their indisputable excellence than the
product of historical contingencies” (xii). So we worked to design a Handbook that engaged with
questions of historical contingencies. And while we would like to consider how an attention to a
pluralistic, diverse aesthetics might bring out new facets of a multitude of poems from a variety of
poets, we agree that one cannot disengage aesthetic judgment from historical and cultural power
dynamics. Therefore, we cannot find much use in Matthew Arnold’s aging dictum that the study
of literature and culture should be the study of “the best which has been thought and said” (viii).
Instead, we accept Wei Chee Dimock’s more contemporary invitation “to rethink the shape of
literature against the history and habitat of the human species” (6).
Part One of this Handbook addresses the new beginnings made in the latter half of the twentieth
century and the opening decades of the twenty-first—and the new beginnings made by individual
poets and movements. Part One assumes that poetic history, like a single poem, is a “labyrinth of
linkages” (Victor Shklovsky, quoted in Perloff 13). Here you find a range of approaches to that
history, each orthogonal to the others. We begin with a wide-scale conversation with Marjorie
Perloff. We then present essays that look at poetry from ethnic perspectives and that examine
innovative poetic movements. We also present essays that examine queer poetry, war poetry,
feminist poetry, multilingual poetry, and issues of genre and collection. And finally, narrowing the
focus, one essay provides what Perloff might call “a super close reading” (xii) or a “micropoetics”
of a single image by a single poet (Robert Lowell).
Part Two of this Handbook is devoted to interviews with poets. Many of the poets are well
known and much honored, while others may be emerging. All provide insights into their poetic
Introduction 3
process and pursuit. Although a divergence of cultural contexts is on display, each poet illuminates
and elucidates the interior life of poetry.
Part Three includes essays that focus on twenty-first-century poems and aesthetic developments.
Stephanie Burt starts us off this time with another wide-ranging conversation. Then essayists turn
to some of the most significant topics of our time, including economics, ecology, globalism, and
data and information. Other essays focus on the poetry that is flowering within ethnic, queer, and
disabled communities—communities that are “minor” in the Deleuze and Guattarian sense of being
revolutionary.
We have aimed above all to produce a Handbook that wouldn’t, as Cole Porter said, “fence us
in” (180). We sought a collection that welcomes us into “the light of lost words” (Ashbery 19) and
into the language that “shakes the silence of memory” (Abinader 471). We hope you find this book
to be a welcoming invitation to read, to ponder, and to be astonished by poetry.
WORKS CITED
Abinader, Elmaz. “In the Country of My Dreams” (1999). The New Anthology of American Poetry, Volume 3, ed.
Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano, Rutgers University Press, 2012, pp. 469–71.
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Oxford University Press, [1869] 2011.
Ashbery, John. “The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers.” The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five
Books of Poetry, Ecco Press, 1997, pp. 18–19.
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems: 1927–1979. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.
Bourdain, Anthony. Parts Unknown. CNN Season 12, Episode 1: “Kenya.”
Brinkley, Robert. “Editor’s Note” to “What Is a Minor Literature” by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Mississippi
Review, vol. 11, no. 3 (Winter/Spring 1983), pp. 13–33.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan. University of Minnesota
Press, 1986.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizopohrenia, 2nd ed., trans. Brian
Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton University
Press, 2006.
Elliott, Emory. Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Oxford University Press, 2002.
James, Henry. Notebooks, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdock. George Braziller, 1955.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick, chapter 89. Norton, [1851] 2017.
Mullen, Harryette. Sleeping with the Dictionary. University of California Press, 2002.
Perloff, Marjorie. Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Porter, Cole. “Don’t Fence Me In” (1944). The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, ed. Robert Kimball, Knopf, 1983,
p. 180.
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. Oxford University
Press, 1986.
4
PART ONE
Roots and Branches of the

Contemporary
6
CHAPTER ONE
A Conversation with Marjorie

Perloff
SUSAN MCCABE, BRIAN REED, AND STEVEN GOULD AXELROD
Marjorie Perloff is one of the most distinguished and prolific scholars of modern and contemporary
American poetry in the world. She is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at
Stanford University and Florence Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern
California. Among her books on contemporary American poetry are The Poetic Art of Robert
Lowell (1973), Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (1977), The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981),
Poetic License (1990), Radical Artifice (1991), The Dance of the Intellect (1996), Poetry On and
Off the Page (1998), Differentials (2004), Unoriginal Genius (2010), Poetics in a New Key (2013),
and Infrathin (2021). The edited conversation presented below originally took place at the 2014
Riverside, California conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA).
This is its first appearance in print.
Axelrod: The person that we are all here to hear talk is Marjorie Perloff, who I think is the greatest
scholar of American poetry. I think most people would say that, Marjorie, except your rivals.
Marjorie has changed the discourse about poetry over the last forty years, introducing the
avant-garde as central to the field; championing the new; employing subtle and illuminating
close reading at a time when many others were not doing close reading; and bringing poetry
into conversation with the visual arts, philosophy, culture, history, and European, Canadian,
and Brazilian literature. I think her work seeks to provoke and inspire, bravely taking stands
and being individual when many scholars exemplify somewhat herd-like behavior. Marjorie
does not.
McCabe: In 2013 Marjorie wrote “Take Five” in Poetry magazine. Some of you may have seen
it. And it’s really a take on Pound’s “Don’ts” that was always sent as part of a rejection
letter, as far as I recall, to poets who were not accepted. He would send that to suggest that
incorporating a little foreign language here and there might help you, and that you don’t need
to necessarily have meaning tied to the word. The word itself is more important. So in any case,
“Take Five” is your kind of revision of Pound, wouldn’t you say, Marjorie?
Perloff: For Poetry Don Share, the editor, organized a whole series of these “A Few Don’ts.” It
was designed for the anniversary not of The ABC of Reading but for 1914, the year Pound
wrote “A Few Don’ts.” Vanessa Place had a piece before I did, and there were four or five
others. They asked me, would you like to do “A Few Don’ts,” so I said yes in honor of Pound.
I really sort of did a riff on Pound.
McCabe: Right, right. So Brian and I thought we wanted to address a few of the don’ts, and see
how we might sort of expand or discuss or see whether Marjorie still agrees with herself or is
wanting to be different from herself.
Reed: The reason we thought this was an interesting place to start is this is one of the closest things
that Marjorie has done to a manifesto. A distillation of a set of points or frustrations, advice,
and it is a valuable place to spin off from. So if we don’t get through all five, that doesn’t
matter. It just is an interesting start.
McCabe: Brian, I think you wanted to start with two, right? I want to do three and five, but we
can share them, of course. Two and four, you were interested in that.
Reed: I’ll start with two because it’s “don’t take yourself so seriously,” which I think is good
advice. You write:
Don’t take yourself so seriously. In the age of social networks, of endless information
and misinformation, “sensitivity” and the “true voice of feeling” have become the most
available of commodities. Remember that, as Wallace Stevens put it, “Life is a bitter aspic.
We are not / at the center of a diamond.”1
McCabe: Yeah, and one of my big questions for Marjorie is just how do we address this? Where is
the place for feeling and emotion within this manifesto? Or is there a place for it?
Perloff: I think so. I have a whole essay in press on conceptual poetry and emotion in response
to Cal Bedient’s writing, in the Boston Review, that there’s no emotion in, say, the poetry of
Christian Bök. I tried to answer that, and certainly I think emotion is very important.
I’ve written a great deal about Rimbaud, and nobody is more emotional than he is. But
he arouses emotion in the reader; he does not write confessionally at all. And the corollary,
as I said, is don’t take yourself so seriously, have a sense of humor. I talk about this in my
new book [Edge of Irony] because the Austrians were so ironic. I mean a really deep irony. I
have a very hard time with victim poetry, the sort of poetry that claims “I am the only one
who understands! Nobody else understands, but I know.” Denise Levertov had her fight with
Robert Duncan about precisely this topic, the Vietnam War. And the things Robert Duncan
said to her, I think, were so very true: that she was always presenting herself as the innocent
person who has the right attitude toward war, whereas everybody else has the wrong attitude.
McCabe: I see, I see.
Perloff: And Levertov’s view was that you have to “teach” them, and I find that very annoying
because, as I say, we’re all in part implicated in the dominant culture. Nobody is not part of
this capitalist culture, so I deplore the current endless attacks where whole essays are written
just using that word. Capitalism. I don’t let people use that word without modifiers in my
class. It’s really much too vague. The whole world is capitalist. So what do you mean by
capitalists? You mean Russian capitalism? That’s very different from American capitalism. Or
do you mean Chinese capitalism? You know, where in the world today isn’t there capitalism?
If you pick up American Poetry Review, pick up anything, you will find these endless sorts of
poems implying “I’m so sensitive,” and “I hate capitalism.” But those people are on Facebook.
1
Perloff Marjorie. “Take Five.” Poetry. Vol. 202, no.1 (April 2013), pp. 41–3. This quotation is from page 43.
A Conversation with Marjorie Perloff 9
That’s pretty capitalist. You know you can’t have it both ways. You do use the internet and use
Facebook, and those things would never have been invented had it not been for capitalism.
Then they imply, “I am on the outside looking in.” One of the things I’ve always loved about
Sylvia Plath—“Viciousness in the kitchen! / The potatoes hiss,” or “What a thrill— / My
thumb instead of an onion”—is that she could look at herself and realize she was just part
of so many of the things that she was criticizing. That was true of a poet like Robert Lowell,
too. You know it wasn’t always the case that poets claimed to be the “good people,” whereas
everyone else was wrong and needed to be corrected. But today it’s ubiquitous: everyone is
so sensitive! It’s terribly hard to write good war poetry, because one should not evade the
complexity of taking more than one side. There isn’t one easy answer. Look at that great
war poem, Yeats’s “Easter, 1916.” In the midst of celebrating the heroes of the revolutionary
Easter Rising—“MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse”—a catalogue that
can make me cry when I recite it— suddenly the poet pauses and asks, “Was it needless death
after all? / For England may keep faith …” That’s a great poem.
McCabe: I see.
Perloff: But as far as emotion goes, John Cage was always asked that question, and he said: What
makes you think I’m not interested in emotion? But it might be the emotion of the reader.
So if you think of the old notions of ethos and pathos. The ethical argument, Aristotle would
say, is presenting yourself in a certain light, as, for example, Philip Sidney does in “Astrophel
and Stella.” And the pathetic argument is the appeal to the reader and the appeal to an
audience, as in John Donne’s sonnets and sermons. And it’s amazing what people can do with
the ethical and pathetic arguments. Think of Baudelaire, who is to me the greatest modernist
poet if I had to name one, and he is writing in the 1850s. Baudelaire was certainly a very lyric
poet, and he was certainly very emotional. But he was just as hard on himself as he was on
anybody else. And that I think is the key.
McCabe: Not taking yourself seriously.
Perloff: I’m not only saying not to take yourself seriously but also to realize that there is complicity.
Complicity, you know, and how one is oneself just as much to blame as are those others.
McCabe: I think part of the controversy sometimes revolves around—you hear many people
citing in graduate schools all over the world, oh we’ve done away with the quote “lyric I”
unquote. So I just wanted to give you a chance to say that is really not what you mean.
Perloff: No, I don’t at all. Obviously, most countries have lyric poetry, and I love lyric poetry.
And I come out of a German tradition, greater than Baudelaire, the great lyric poetry
of Goethe and Heine, there, but, corny as it sounds, the poet has to find an objective
correlative, the set of words or images that immediately evoke that emotion without direct
statement. Like the “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells” in “Prufrock.” In other words,
instead of saying, I’m so sad since my Uncle Harry died or whatever, you show the feeling.
It’s the old show versus tell dichotomy, which I know is considered very old hat now. But
I still believe in it.
Reed: It’s one of the things that Eliot talks about, that you used to be able to feel a thought.
McCabe: And the dissociation of sensibility.
Reed: But it seems that in so much of your own work you’re interested in logopoeia, the play of
the intellect as Pound defines it. But as an experience or the excitement I make, there’s all sorts
of ethics and emotions that accompany the wit or the intelligence.
Perloff: I think that’s absolutely true, but you put it better than I could. I think it’s true that certainly
thinking is very exciting too, and it is emotional in a way. I’ve never felt that I would make any
argument against emotion. Obviously emotion is there, although it’s very hard to define affect.
But of course it’s very important that you have that in all kinds of work. I think of [Christian]
Bök’s essays, for instance. [Roland] Barthes was one of my favorite critics, who now is not as
much read even though he really should be. And the essays themselves were quite emotional,
and you could certainly always see character, and I would argue that, for instance, when people
accuse, oh any of the conceptual writers, let’s say Kenneth Goldsmith, of not having emotion, I
think that is unfair. It’s just that the emotion is not stated in his own words. It’s stated in other
people’s words, but I read out loud to somebody, the piece Kenneth wrote about 9/11. That
piece I really recommend in his book Seven Disasters, the piece about the radio broadcasters and
television broadcasters living through the event. You live through 9/11 in that piece, and you
can just see that terror, and I think the appropriated text, carefully tweaked, does contain a great
deal of feeling. It’s just not specified in certain ways. And that’s what lyric does, if you think of
earlier lyric, if you think of the metaphysical lyric, let’s say Herbert, Donne, and so forth, but
when I think of Greek lyric with nature, there was never anything directly personal.
McCabe: Right, right.
Perloff: That started with Donne, and then with the Confessionals, and it was an interesting
experiment, and I still, you know, love that poetry. But in the wake of Confessionalism, in the
’60s you got a lot of—that’s not my idea, particularly—the terrible side of confessionalism.
But it’s interesting how many people have imitated Frank O’Hara too. After all, his poetry is
certainly lyric, and it’s very personal.
McCabe: Yeah, yeah. Very personal poems.
Perloff: Yeah, in a certain way. It is, and it isn’t. You know, one of the O’Hara poems I worked
on for an essay on Lunch Poems is “Naphtha.” It begins, “Ah Jean Dubuffet / when you think
of him.” And it’s the poem that ends with the line, “I am ashamed of my century / … / but I
have to smile.” Or something like that. And it’s the poem that has the passage, “how are you
feeling in ancient September / … / you were made in the image of god.” No, “I was not / I
was made in the image of a sissy truck-driver.” It is so funny, but O’Hara does not belabor the
point. He’s very down-to-earth. He doesn’t write, “you are made in the image of God,” but
“you were made in the image of god,” which of course means something else. It isn’t really
that much of a compliment. It’s just stating a fact in a way, you see. That’s why I think you
have to watch every word. “You were made in the image of god” is very different from “you
are made in the image of a god,” or “of God,” right? You see. And so he plays with that. No, “I
was not / I was made in the image of a sissy truck driver.” And at that time you still couldn’t be
overt about gay things. He usually is, but in a certain funny and self-deprecating way, and the
picture of his century is just hilarious because, in fact, he has all these awful things happening
in that century.
You know, I’m ashamed of my century, but I have to smile, yeah? You know, I mean, I love
that mood. I just like this, but anyway.
McCabe: Yes, yes, yes. In an earlier session, someone cited Vendler’s comment or definition of
the lyric as being able to go into the innermost chamber of another person’s life. I think what
that quote leaves out is this whole notion that it’s not just a person living in a vacuum having
emotions. There’s a context.
Perloff: Yeah.
McCabe: And so it fits in with your historical approach as well. Well, I just wanted to disabuse us
of this notion that you were sort of anti-lyric or anti-emotion.
Perloff: Or, for example, George Oppen is a poet who I think is very emotional and in a really
heartbreaking way. For example, you have [in “Of Being Numerous”]:
There can be a brick
In a brick wall
…
Here is the brick, it was waiting
Here when you were born

Mary-Anne.
There are so many bricks, Mary-Anne. Look at the line breaks! You can just see how isolated
he is and how lonely. And it’s as if something really bad has happened, and he’s very isolated.
And I find that very heartbreaking. Very moving. Lorine Niedecker is another poet who is
very moving in that way but without saying too much.
Reed: Susan and I were talking about a figure like George Herbert. His poetry depends a great deal
on feelings associated with faith and belief, and you can be completely an atheist and sit down
and read those poems and be profoundly moved.
Perloff: I love it. I think they’re just beautiful. How does that one poem go, the one with
the windows. How does it begin? I’m trying to remember the first line of that poem, “The
Windows.” I always use that as an example:
Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
He is a brittle crazy glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
…
To be a window, through thy grace.
McCabe: Beautiful.
Perloff: It’s such a beautiful poem. “Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?” That’s the
first line. And the language and rhythm makes it comes across as—I hate to use the word—
wholly sincere. No words are wasted, and the intimate address to the Lord is so convincing.
McCabe: It has to have a sense of urgency.
Perloff: It has to have urgency.
Reed: You know there’s a statement that is not in your list of five don’ts, but it’s a positive
assertion: “The slightest loss of attention leads to death.”
Perloff: Yes, from Frank O’Hara. And I think he got it from Rilke.
McCabe: Really?
Perloff: Yeah, I think that is in one of Rilke’s early poems. Attention is everything. And Henry
James’s “Try to be one of those on whom nothing is ever lost,” right?
McCabe: Yeah. I love that quote. I want to put that on my office door.
Perloff: It’s a great sentence. Try to be someone on whom nothing is ever lost. So there’s the idea
of real attentiveness. A wonderful example is Yeats’s “Wild Swans at Coole,” where in the first
draft I think it was, the poem begins, “Now I am here walking among these swans.” And he kept
that line in draft after draft, with the “I,” at the center, and finally Yeats crosses out the whole
line and replaces it with “The trees are in their autumn beauty / The woodland paths are dry,”
and realizes he must get away from the extreme subjectivity of the first draft. And then of course
the “I” does come in a little later. But he tried to distance it, and that is a wonderful thing to do.
Axelrod: How do you reconcile that kind of writing, using really concentrated emotions, with
Frank O’Hara, where it feels like …
Perloff: I think it’s the language and rhythm—it looks casual, but it isn’t.
Axelrod: Do you? Whatever is happening on the street as he’s walking by?
Perloff: Well yeah, but look at the things he’s putting in. Take a poem like “A Step Away from
Them.” O’Hara will write “I look / at bargains in wristwatches.” The whole poem, “A Step
Away from Them,” is about time. It’s all about the passage of time: all the various deaths like
Jackson Pollock’s. Do you think it’s a coincidence, after the meditation about time and death,
that it’s wristwatches and not some other product he sees in shop windows?
McCabe: Ties.
Axelrod: Shoes.
Perloff: Yeah, ties or shoes or whatever. So I think he’s very purposeful—though not always.
You know he wrote some less good things, but I think “Lana Turner has collapsed!”—that is
a great poem. And people think, well anybody can write that. But no. I actually looked that
up. This is where scholarship comes in, as Susan said. But I actually looked it up, and it’s very
interesting, Lana Turner, when he wrote that poem, was already a has-been. She was not the
Lana Turner of The Postman Always Rings Twice.
McCabe: Oh.
Perloff: She was the Lana Turner whose daughter had tried to kill her lover Johnny Stompanato.
Her daughter was fourteen years old. Cheryl. And she did kill him. I shouldn’t say tried, she
killed Johnny Stompanato. So the “collapse” is not just silly.
McCabe: At the Formosa Cafe.
Perloff: So Lana Turner had had a lot of trouble. This is after that, and she was still very well
known. But she was no longer the icon she had been. When the poet says “I was trotting along,”
he doesn’t say I was running along or I was walking along. “I was trotting along” sounds so silly.
You know. There I am trotting along, and it’s snowing and hailing, but hail hits you on the head
so it wasn’t really hailing. And then you get that wonderful part. There is no snow in California.
There is no hail in Hollywood. “I have been to lots of parties / and acted perfectly disgraceful /
but I never actually collapsed / oh Lana Turner we love you get up.” I say that to people all the
time because it has that wonderfully absurd mood. The headline is so absurd: “Lana Turner has
collapsed!” But in a way it just fits on all grounds, you know. But it is Lana Turner, so I think he
chose this particular movie star very carefully. It’s a very funny poem but sad too.
McCabe: And it does seem inevitable. It does have that inevitability feel to it.
Reed: And it’s a poem where the title is repeated twice. The first part is rampant enjambment that
is also very controlled.
Perloff: Very controlled.
Reed: And he controls the bouncing around the conjunctions in the left- and right-hand margins.
Then you have the repetition of the title and all of a sudden, it’s end-stopped. Single sentence
per line down to the last statement.
Perloff: That’s great. I didn’t realize that.

Reed: The itinerary of everything in the poem is incredibly carefully controlled.
Perloff: It’s very carefully constructed.
Reed: Is that the poem he read at the reading with Robert Lowell? Where he says, I wrote it on
the way on Staten Island.
Perloff: Yeah, of course he says just that.
Reed: Want to tell the Staten Island story?
Perloff: That Staten Island story, yes!
Reed: I don’t remember the details.
Perloff: The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that Frank was invited to read with Lowell at Staten
Island, and they went over on the Staten Island Ferry together. And O’Hara didn’t like Lowell.
He really didn’t like Lowell. He famously commented on “Skunk Hour” where he said I
think it’s perfectly disgusting to write about skunks, and I don’t want to read about skunks
marching up Main Street. Why does anybody talk about skunks?
Axelrod: And Lowell didn’t give him the time of day, either.
Perloff: And Lowell didn’t give him the time of day. Frank played the role of bad boy and said
to the audience, “well on the way over here I wrote this poem, and it was “Lana Turner has
collapsed.” And Lowell responded, “Well, I’m not going to read a poem that I wrote on the
ferry coming over here!” And he read, I forget which poem he read. But that became a sort of
famous story of the difference between their poetics. But of course people have now shown,
as Steve shows, that in fact Lowell and O’Hara have a lot in common. Yeah, they certainly do.
And then there is a whole period mood.
McCabe: And I think when O’Hara says he’s going by his nerve when he’s writing, he’s meaning
more of an aesthetic rather than the process.
Perloff: It has to look spontaneous. It has to look natural.
McCabe: It has to look nervy.
Perloff: It has to look spontaneous, but that’s like Wordsworth, you know in some ways.
Axelrod: It’s also like Yeats. When someone asked him what did you do today, he said I spent the
day trying to make a line more spontaneous.
Perloff: Yes, exactly. This is it. And so he would revise and revise and revise. “Leda and the Swan”
is another poem where the revisions are so fascinating. Because I think in Yeats’s first version it
went something like now that God has found that girl, something like “Now shall the winged
wonder have his will.” Then he finally changed it to “A sudden blow: the great wings beating
still / Above the staggering girl.” Wonderful. Not that things always improve. Sometimes you
feel the first version might be better—Lowell has many interesting revisions, too.
Axelrod: Yeah. But many of his revisions were unfortunate.
Perloff: There’s that Lowell line that first brought me to Robert Lowell, which was “Tamed by
Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed” [in “Man and Wife”]. And why do I like that line so much?
Miltown. It had a kind of exactitude. It was very … Miltown was the first tranquilizer, and it
was really, what was the chemical?
McCabe: Nembutal?
Reed: Barbiturates?
Perloff: I’m thinking of something more specific. Miltown was THE famous antidepressant.
But also “Tamed by Miltown,” the whole idea of a milltown. And then we lie, we’re lying on
mother’s bed. What could be worse than lying on my mother’s bed? So you know from that
line that everything is askew. So short. “Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed.” So it’s
a matter of exactitude. And I came across a poem the other day that I really didn’t like by
a young poet getting a lot of attention, and it began like this, “At the public college where I
teach.” And I thought, why are you saying at the public college? Let’s hear what it is.
McCabe: Naming. Name it.
Perloff: City College or the other day at Brooklyn College? You know it’s in New York somewhere,
but at the public colleges, this is what I mean by being evasive, and sort of wanting to create
an impression that I’m teaching at a public college. I mean let’s hear what it is. And “at the
public college” is condescending.
McCabe: I see what you’re saying.
Perloff: And so “Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed.” That’s it, isn’t it?
Axelrod: Yeah, you’re right about that, and that Miltown is no longer used. It just brings back that
whole era, yeah?
McCabe: It does.
Perloff: Yeah. That was a good name. Of course you can also say that later those will all have to
be annotated, and I came across an Italian edition of Lowell that I’m sure you know. What’s
his name? [Rolando] Anzilotti? And they annotate brownies. Brownies. Piccoli biscotti con
cioccolato or whatever it is. You know, brownies and sarsaparilla, root beer. Brownies and
root beer.
McCabe: In his grandfather’s elegy [Lowell’s poem “Dunbarton”].
Perloff: Yeah, root beer has to be annotated for foreigners or whatever, brownies.
McCabe: Yeah, right. [Laughs.]
Perloff: But I do have one question which I don’t know how to answer. In Frank O’Hara, the
names, the proper names that are the names of his own friends that don’t have resonances
cause they’re just his friends. So why? Why do we like those? Or I like them anyway. Yeah,
what do you think about that?
Reed: That they’re always woven in. At their best moment they feel woven in, like “Grace to be
born …” [from “In Memory of My Feelings”].
Perloff: And adieu to Norman, bonjour to Joan and Jean-Paul.
McCabe: I think it’s a sort of defiance of the precursor not daring to say just an ordinary person’s
name, a friendship or kinship. That sort of sense of what can’t be in a poem. I think that was
one of O’Hara’s breakthroughs. I think he was one of the first to do that, right?
Perloff: Yeah, names of that sort.
McCabe: A casual acquaintance, brought in as sort of a significance for their sound as well as
their designation.
Perloff: But it could be pretty bad if the names weren’t contextualized as well. You could say why
do I want to hear all those names?
Reed: It could turn into a catalog, and we must be careful of the catalog.
McCabe: It’s like “The Day Lady Died” where he’s buying something.
Reed: Miss Stillwagon. Or “Joe’s Jacket” where you have just that moment of intimacy in the title.
You don’t need to know it is Joe’s.
Perloff: That’s right. That’s right.
McCabe: Who is he bringing the Strega to in “The Day Lady Died?” I forget, there’s some friend.
Perloff: Patsy?
Audience member: It’s Mike and Patsy. He’s having dinner with Patsy Southgate and shopping for
drawings.
Perloff: Every item works in with Lady Day [Billie Holiday]. Every item leads up to Lady Day.
We have Gauloises, we have exotic cigarettes.
McCabe: Without naming her name in the title, just her nickname.
Axelrod: It’s also misdirecting. You get into the ordinariness of the everyday and the quandary-ness.
McCabe: And then he recreates the shock.
Axelrod: Absolutely, yeah.
McCabe: So he can’t be writing off the top.
Reed: One thing about being always attentive, and it was the modernist problem, is how do you
then write a long form list?
Perloff: Yeah.
Reed: You know, when someone like [Arnold] Schoenberg declares something like no repetition,
everything must be important. How in the world do you build back up from miniatures to a
full-length work? Like Beethoven had to write an awful lot of notes to make us remember “dun
dun dun dun.” [Hums Beethoven’s Fifth] He wrote an awful lot of notes. And most of them are
pretty forgettable. How does one manipulate ….
Perloff: I don’t think there are that many good long poems.
McCabe: Where do you stand with the long poems?
Perloff: With The Cantos you have clusters of ideograms. And of course the poem doesn’t all
have the same level of intensity, but on the other hand, if you take any given passage, the
reader is amazed by the intensity of the conjunctions. In Paterson, which I’ve always liked less
than I like Williams’s short poems, there are long slack passages that aren’t as good. You know
that sort of go along, but in Pound I don’t think there are very many. I know the long poem
became very fashionable. I’m not quite sure why. Actually, I don’t know why. There were all
those courses on the long poem, and books on the long poem, but I can’t think of that many
successful ones.
McCabe: I taught one of those.
Perloff: I mean Hart Crane, but that’s not that long.
McCabe: The Bridge.
Reed: John Ashbery’s books were so long. That is, if you read a John Ashbery book, you have the
lyrics in it, but there was also a new long poem, and there was something about kicking up the
level of seriousness.
Perloff: True. But you know he’d be the first to say that people today don’t read a thing from
beginning to end. They read a few lines. They go out to the movies. They come back. They
might read some more. He said he never reads anything continuously. And I mean I don’t
think one can read “A Wave” and “Flow Chart,” right?, beginning to end.
McCabe: Right.
Perloff: There are parts you don’t need. And on the other hand, if you open it, you’ll come
across wonderful things, so I don’t know. When I. A. Richards would present these poems,
and you have to figure out is that by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who is it, or just some student?
Whatever it is, I don’t really believe in poems, framed poems, that way. I mean, I really believe
in the oeuvre, so whether they’re short poems or long poems, I think you have to read it all.
McCabe: A poem is part of a corpus.

Perloff: So I’m always shocked when students have sometimes said may I put my reading
list together? And they’ll put on Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” and maybe “Sextus
Propertius” and nothing else. And I said, well, you can’t really do that.
McCabe: Yeah.
Perloff: I do think you have to read the whole in that sense. Even if you’re not going to like all of
it, even if it isn’t that good. But I’m not sure from the poet’s point of view, whether wanting
to write a long poem, I guess, is to have a much more ambitious work. But in Ashbery’s case
they could also be shorter. I mean, he’s always writing another book. Sometimes they have
short poems in them, and sometimes it’s one long poem. And I’m not sure there’s that much
difference, is there?
Reed: It depends on the phase of the book. I mean he had “Fantasia on ‘The Nut-Brown Maid,’ ”
and I don’t know how many people have read that book [Houseboat Days].
Perloff: I can’t get through that.
Reed: I love that book. I love all of Ashbery, but there are different ways in which these poems
have been received. “Litany” is probably awfully long.
Perloff: Tedious. Yeah, it’s awfully long.
McCabe: One of the things I’m thinking about is that there’s so much nostalgia in modernism, or
this notion that we all want to go back.
Perloff: But the reason that Walter Benjamin, whom I started with in Unoriginal Genius, why
his Arcades Project is so moving is that’s his life. That’s his world in the quotes, the things
he’s quoting. That is what his life consists of, and I think, by the way, that Charles Bernstein’s
libretto for the opera Shadowtime is one of his best things. In order to write about Walter
Benjamin, instead of making up a play or an opera about Benjamin he uses the language that
he actually gets from Benjamin, and so that’s very moving. There’s a work that’s actually
very emotive because Benjamin makes so many mistakes, including that he was convinced he
wouldn’t get over the border, so he committed suicide, and then everybody else got over the
border. That was the ultimate “mistake.” So he lost his life, but he didn’t often miss the point
on something, and that comes through when you can use his own language.
McCabe: Right.
Perloff: I think documentaries are among the great art forms of our time. I mean the things you
can do now with documentaries on TV and in movies, and some of the ones that have been
made, you know, political documentaries, they’re just wonderful. And so if you can have a
very good documentary, why do you want to see, I don’t know, a play or a long poem about
the past? A dramatic monologue, let’s say, like Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England,” you
see, when I even see a title like that, I just run the other way. I don’t want to read it.
Reed: We don’t have a lot of poetry nowadays with documentary style.
Perloff: I think that it’s a very good thing to do, but then you have to know a lot. Then you
really have to know a lot, and you have to know what quotes you’re using, and why you’re
juxtaposing them, and it’s very hard to do a good conceptual work. People think all you have
to do is just copy it out of somewhere because Kenneth Goldsmith goes around saying that.
Which is just like Frank O’Hara saying you just go on your nerve. But Goldsmith works very
hard in creating these “natural” effects. It’s not easy to do it well, and other people have not
done it as well. There have been people who have a feel for some earlier author, and let’s go
back to Ashbery, and not that I like those authors in Other Traditions, such as Thomas Lovell
Beddoes. Who else did he do in his little book?
McCabe: Clare.
Perloff: John Clare. Now those are poets who mean something to Ashbery. John Clare doesn’t
mean that much to me at all.
McCabe: I like him.
Perloff: Those poets mean something to Ashbery, and so he can then do things with them, or
quote from them. But it has to be something that really means something to you.
Audience member: What do you think about Harryette Mullen’s works then?
Perloff: I have always admired her work very much.
McCabe: Well there’s that one that plays off of …
Perloff: But I love the Gertrude Stein one [Tree Tall Woman]. I’m sorry I haven’t read the newest
ones yet.
Audience member: Mullen in “Dim Lady” takes, it’s kind of a variation of an Oulipian S + 7
exercise, where she cuts out words and substitutes other words, makes it kind of like a …
Axelrod: “My mistress’s eyes are …”
McCabe: “… nothing like the sun.”
Axelrod: That’s the one.
Perloff: For some reason, I haven’t read that one yet. But the ones on Gertrude Stein, on “Tender
Buttons,” are excellent because she has a real relationship to Gertrude Stein.
Audience member: To me Mullen’s play on Shakespeare’s sonnet, “Dim Lady,” is clever and funny
and weird because it changes the voice so much.
Perloff: Yeah, that could be a good idea!
McCabe: I think it’s good. There’s a variation where he stopped laughing, kind of.
Axelrod: It brings race and class and language in, which Mullen cares about a great deal.
Perloff: It does bring in things that she cares about.
McCabe: Do you think there’s a paucity or lack of ideas on the part of the poet? What do you
think motivates poets to do that, to write about what they don’t really feel or care about?
Perloff: Because you’re getting somewhere. Being successful. I mean obviously these days you
have to have one book to get tenure in the creative writing program, and two probably to get
promoted. I mean, let’s be realistic, people write whatever is the fashion. I’m not saying that’s
bad. You sort of have to. And you think, well, this might be a good idea. It might be fun, you
know, and I can’t really know people’s motives.
McCabe: Yeah, but I’m just curious as to what you would speculate.
Perloff: When Donald Allen edited The New American Poetry back in 1960, he could say that
here is these poets’ first book publication, which is incredible. His chosen poets had never
published a book. Only little chapbooks. [Charles] Olson, [Robert] Duncan, [Robert] Creeley.
None of the people in there had yet published a book when he edited that collection, so
this was their first real book publication. Today there are so many chapbooks, and so many
little handbooks that people do in their own basement. And then, you know when poets are
introduced, we regularly hear that so-and-so is the author of fifteen books. In the NAP, each
poet has forty pages. But today there’s no serious peer review. It’s become too easy, and there
are just too many people writing and publishing. Craig Dworkin did this survey of how many
poetry books get published every year.
Yeats said somewhere, “I had already met all the poets of my generation.” Imagine saying
that today. But he had. He had met all the poets of his generation, in England and Ireland,
anyway. Maybe not in other countries. Today I come across people who haven’t met the poets
in the next town, whatever it is, who are well-known, who other people think are very well-
known. That is, in California, if we take some very well-known New York names right now.
Tim Donnelly. Adam Fitzgerald. Dorothea Lasky. If I mentioned them in L.A. to most people,
they’re going to say who? And it works the other way around too.
That’s why I wanted to go back to Pound. As wrong-headed as he was, he didn’t like
anybody. He dismissed all of French literature from Francois Villon down to Rimbaud. He
didn’t like Balzac, so it’s ridiculous. But insane as those things are, you get people to think
about it. So I would actually love a situation where I would hear poets say I can’t stand
so-and-so, and take on most of the establishment, but nobody dares saying anything now.
Everybody likes everybody. They don’t really. [Laughs]
McCabe: Interesting. You shut down so it’s not bad manners.
Perloff: You’re not allowed to say anything is plain awful or just plain bad. And it hasn’t done
poetry any good. Because you can’t criticize anybody. People like D. H. Lawrence and the
Modernists would do that. Virginia Woolf did it. She said she hated Ulysses. I think she’s dead
wrong, but I respect her saying it. You know, it shows certain things about her, and she was
willing to say it. Eliot said he hated Milton.
Axelrod: But he took it back.
Perloff: Yes, he took it back, but by then he wasn’t such a great poet anymore, after he took it
back. It’s very salutary. I think if every now and then everybody came along and said, you
know what, I don’t think Whitman is really that good. Let’s look at it. Is he really that great?
If they did that, then you are forced to reread Whitman.
McCabe: Not Whitman. Not Whitman.
Perloff: Well, why not? Anyone. Who is above that? And then you can see how good it is. You
see what I’m saying?
CHAPTER TWO
The Feminist Poetry Movement

in America
BETHANY HICOK
The close alliance between second-wave feminism (the Women’s Liberation Movement) and
feminist poetry reshaped the landscape of American poetry in the postwar period.1 As Nancy
Berke has argued, “In the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, poets, and the poetry
they wrote, were integral to the movement’s organizing and theorizing” (162). Poetry was not
only an individual means of expression for the poet, but also a “ ‘tool’ for movement building
and resistance” (162). The alliance is documented in some seventy-three feminist periodicals and
sixty-six presses operating between the late 1960s and mid-1970s.2 Feminist poetry anthologies,
such as the iconic 1973 No More Masks! (expanded and reprinted in 1993), and magazines such
as Sinister Wisdom (still being published), created a significant forum and shared space for women
to articulate the politics and poetics of change. This chapter tracks the crucial alliance between
feminist politics and poetics in order to help define what has now become the canon of American
feminist poetry. As Lisa Moore, adapting Percy Bysshe Shelley, has recently argued in the Los
Angeles Review of Books, it is time we acknowledged poets as the “legislators of the women’s
movement” (n.p.).
There are of course many American women poets writing in the twentieth century whose work
explores female identity and women’s experience in interesting and complex ways. Elizabeth
Bishop’s tour de force poem about the “strange” formation of gender identity, “In the Waiting
Room,” is but one example. But what I am calling feminist poetry is part of “an identifiable poetry
movement,” as Kim Whitehead has argued, that grows out of “women’s political struggles” and is
concerned with “the place of literary expression in women’s lives” (Whitehead xiii). These poets
saw their work as a driving force for change. Their poetry emerged from the heady days in the
1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s as women found each other in poetry readings and in print, as well
as during protest marches on Washington.
1
For a good introduction to second-wave feminism, see Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s
Movement Changed America. Particularly useful is Rosen’s chronology, which provides a detailed timeline, starting with
the First Women’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls in 1848 (also the year that married women were allowed to own
property). The timeline runs to 2006. Rosen also usefully includes the backlash against feminist gains, which picks up steam
in the 1980s, as one might expect. Much of this backlash has been focused on women’s reproductive rights, which continue
to erode, and LGBTQ+ rights.
2
These figures are reported in Polly Joan and Andrea Chessman’s 1978 Guide to Women’s Publishing (see Voyce 162).
Feminist poetry throughout its evolution takes many poetic forms, but in all its variations, it
shares key characteristics and concerns—a sense of the shared experience of oppression within
patriarchy; a utopian impulse toward equality; anger as a driving force for change; a belief that the
“personal is political,” a key slogan of second-wave feminism (“there is no private life, which is not
determined by a wider public life,” Adrienne Rich, quoting George Eliot, tells us);3 reinvention;
a desire to reclaim women of the past through myth and history (as Carolyn Kizer does with
Hera and Sappho); the subject of rape and other forms of violence against women (e.g., June
Jordan’s “Poem about My Rights” and Pat Parker’s “Womanslaughter”); attention to the body;
solidarity; the reclaiming of spaces that have been off-limits for women (e.g., the park after dark
in Marilyn Hacker’s “Regent’s Park” sonnet sequence); relations between mothers and daughters;
the intersections of race, gender, and history; female sexuality and its expression; the intersections
of feminism with other identities (lesbian, Jewish, African American, and Native American, such
as Joy Harjo’s attention to feminist issues, as well as uniquely Native American ones). These poets
speak to each other across time and space and build a community of shared concerns.
We can locate a moment that signals the close alliance between feminist politics and feminist
poetry in Adrienne Rich’s 1958 poem “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.” Written on the eve of a
full-scale movement, “Snapshots” is Rich’s “first overtly feminist poem,” as Marilyn Hacker notes,
for here, “Rich not only considered the question of women’s aspirations and achievement directly,
she placed it within defining social and cultural contexts which would be equally characteristic of
her ongoing poetic/political project” (n.p.). After the often mannered poems of Rich’s earlier work,
suddenly Wham! the daughter-in-law of the title is “Banging the coffee-pot into the sink” (Rich,
Collected 117).4 The poem is a tour de force of energy and cathartic anger that does not shy away
from how women hurt each other—“the argument ad feminam,” Rich calls it (118). And, facing
the mother-in-law, she delivers her death sentence: “all the old knives / that have rusted in my back,
I drive in yours, / ma sembable, ma soeur!” (118). Witty simile reveals the lengths women must go
to be attractive to men: “she shaves her legs until they gleam / like petrified mammoth-tusk” (119).
The force of Rich’s energy leads to the amazing lift at the end of the poem, the emergence of a new
kind of woman. Contained in this figure is Rich’s strong desire to challenge gender binaries, which
continues throughout her career. Drawing on a key feminist text, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second
Sex (first published in France in 1949 and then in 1953 in English translation), Rich locates the
origins of a new woman and a new kind of poet in de Beauvoir’s image of the helicopter: “Well, /
she’s long about her coming, who must be more merciless to herself than history. / Her mind full to
the wind, I see her plunge / breasted and glancing through the currents, taking the light upon her /
at least as beautiful as any boy / or helicopter” (Collected 121).
This poem, as well as the poems of Sylvia Plath’s 1966 Ariel (composed in 1961–3), mark
the beginning, the first cries, as it were, of what would later become a codified feminist poetry
movement. Plath’s Ariel, like Rich’s poetic sequence “Snapshots,” makes clear the relationship
between a woman’s personal life and the patriarchal social system that traps her in prescribed
and oppressive roles. In “The Applicant,” for instance, Plath stages a chilling interview with a
3
Rich quotes George Eliot in her epigraph for her volume Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971-1972.
4
This posthumous edition of Rich’s Collected Poems, edited by Pablo Conrad, and with an introduction by Claudia Rankine,
makes available in one volume the full range of Rich’s extraordinary and long poetic career. It is a joy to read and is a
powerful testament to the range and enduring relevance of one of the twentieth century’s most important poets.
The Feminist Poetry Movement in America 21
prospective bachelor looking for a bride. The poem deploys an arsenal of Cold War–exclusionary
rhetoric (“First, are you our sort of person?”), mechanistic repetition (“Will you marry it, marry
it, marry it”), and gender stereotypes (his prospective Stepford Wife5 emerges from the closet
“naked”—“a living doll,” her status as solely an object for his pleasure evident in her conversion to
an “it”: “It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk”) (Plath 4–5). Plath’s “Daddy,” too, remains
one of the most powerful statements of a totalitarian patriarchy of violence and oppression. In
Plath’s poem, the “daddy” of the title becomes father, husband, and finally Nazi. But the brilliance
of Plath’s metonymic “Daddy” is also the recognition that women internalize and project this
violence into their own lives: “Every woman adores a Fascist,” Plath tells us. “The boot in the face,
the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you” (49–51).
“THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL”

Context is important to the emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement and to understanding
the poetry that developed alongside it. It grew out of other protest movements of the period, such
as the Civil Rights and the Black Power movements, and in concert with others, such as the mass
organized protests against the Vietnam War and later the fight for gay rights. Grace Paley’s 1973
poem “The Women in Vietnam,” for instance, entwines an anti-imperialist message while extending
the hand of global sisterhood. “Sisterhood is Powerful,” used for the first time in 1968, was a key
slogan of the movement. Paley’s poem stages a conversation between the poem’s speaker and “the
women of that country” who now do their planting “in straight rows / so the imperialist pilot can
see how steady our / hands are” (136). The poem reports their words, beginning each refrain with
“They said,” but by the time evening comes, the women speak to each other: “I said is it true? we
are sisters? / They said, Yes, we are of one family.”
Many of the major gains of the Women’s Liberation Movement were achieved during these
years. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 to fight for a broad
range of women’s rights issues, including reproductive rights, pay equality, LGBTQ+ issues, and
family and marriage law. Title IX, prohibiting sex discrimination in education, was passed in 1972;
and Roe v. Wade, giving women the right to an abortion, in 1973. Before Roe, women resorted
in many states to a network of illegal, backstreet abortion providers. Anne Sexton’s 1961 poem
“The Abortion” speaks to this terrifying choice. The speaker of the poem drives south through
Pennsylvania where “I met a little man, / not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all … / he took the fullness
that love began” (189). Sexton’s terza rima and exact rhymes (man/began, mouth/south, where/
hair) create a fairy-tale effect in this poem that speaks of the nursery; the tragic refrain that follows
the speaker throughout her journey to the abortionist and back with its slant rhyme (born/gone)
undermines the fairy tale: “Somebody who should have been born / is gone.” This is no fairy-tale
journey but a terrifying reality for women who sought abortions before they became legal. Lucille
Clifton’s powerful elegy “the lost baby poem” from 1972 also deals with an abortion, but here, the
speaker directly addresses the lost child in order to describe the conditions of her life at the moment
of her painful choice (“you would have been born into winter / in the year of the disconnected gas”
(60)) and the ethical responsibility that she has to her other children (“your definite brothers and
5
Ira Levin’s dystopian novel The Stepford Wives was published in 1972 and made into a horror film twice, in 1975 and 2004.
sisters”). Clifton then offers an invocation, enlisting the rivers and seas to rise up against her if she
is “ever less than a mountain” to her living children (60). Clifton’s poem moves beyond the world
of backstreet abortions to one of ethics. There is no judgment here against the woman who has had
the abortion; only a recognition of the duty she has to be strong for her “definite” children. In this
invocation, the poem looks to the future and offers hope.
Violence against women, a major agenda item of second-wave feminism, became the subject of
legal cases, activism, and poetry. The first battered women’s shelters opened in the United States in
1973. Rape law reform was on the political agenda for this era’s feminists, and feminist poets began
writing about rape (and other forms of violence against women), and they spoke out in public
(New York radical feminists held their first “Speak-Out” on rape in 1971, giving women a platform
to share their personal experiences). The speaker of June Jordan’s “Case in Point” finally breaks
her silence on the subject in order to describe two terrifying rape scenes. She was raped first by a
“whiteman,” then by “a blackman actually / head of the local NAACP” (122). As Stephen Voyce has
argued, these poets “challenge the gender oppression implicit in conservative America,” as well as
“among proponents of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements” (11).
Before 1978, a woman’s reputation could be used to discredit her in a courtroom in cases of
rape or attempted rape. So, in 1972, in her powerful poem “Rape,” Adrienne Rich thus wrote of
the terrible humiliation and guilt that women faced when reporting rape to the police: “There is a
cop who is both prowler and father,” the poem begins, and “when the time comes …. / You have to
confess / to him, you are guilty of the crime / of having been forced” (Collected 391–2). Congress
passed a bill, which was signed into law, to prevent this defense in 1978, but, as my women college
students know all too well, they can still be tried in the court of public opinion. That same year
(1978), Congress also passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which made it illegal for employers
to discriminate against pregnant women. These are only a few of the key legal cases that transformed
women’s lives during this period. The shift in the legal landscape was the crucial gain of second-
wave feminism. First-wave feminism culminated in women gaining suffrage in 1920, but it wasn’t
until this second wave that women made substantial gains in the legal protections that would lead
to greater educational and employment opportunities.
“THE WORLD SPLIT OPEN”: FEMINIST ANTHOLOGIES AND

THEIR ROLE IN THE MOVEMENT
One could do worse than begin one’s exploration of the feminist poetry movement with the
anthologies that reflect the vitality of the movement: from Florence Howe’s No More Masks!
([1973] 1993), to Laura Chester and Sharon Barba’s Rising Tides (1973), to Louise Bernikow’s
The World Split Open (1974), to Lucille Iverson and Kathryn Ruby’s We Become New (1975), to
Honor Moore’s recent Poems from the Women’s Movement (2009)—the latter’s Library of America
imprint testifying to the canonization of the movement and its poems. Moore writes of the heady
days of poetry readings and gatherings of women that changed the face of American poetry, when
the concerns of women became collective concerns rather than simply those of individuals writing
alone. Moore writes, “I wrote without the company of other women until December 11, 1971,
when I volunteered to take part in a women’s poetry reading I’d seen advertised” (Poems xxi). The
reading took place in the Loeb Student Center at NYU. Most of the twenty-one women who read
that night were not yet published, Moore writes. But over the next two years, six more readings
followed, bringing in widely published poets, such as June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, and Carolyn
Kizer (Honor Moore xxi).6 This particular set of readings, organized by Kathryn Ruby and Lucille
Iverson, resulted in its own anthology, We Become New. In her preface to this anthology, Iverson
writes of this event that “some 250 women came—a large number for a New York poetry reading—
and filled to capacity the South Lobby of New York University’s Loeb Student Center. Laughing,
screaming, and applauding, the crowd stayed for an intense three hours of readings by 21 women
until they were finally asked to leave, long past closing” (Iverson and Ruby xviii). Both Ruby and
Iverson note in their prefaces that they selected poems they felt were specifically feminist. But, as
Ruby points out, these poems are not just about oppression, but about “liberation,” as well,
a casting off of the old roles and a desire for new alternatives: for self-identification and self
expression in art, vocation and life; for social, political, and economic change in America; for
new ways of relating to men—open marriage/monogamy, eroticism based on mutual respect;
for new ways of relating to women—sisterhood, supportive behavior, lesbianism; and for
alternatives to the traditional family—radical motherhood, changing roles, and experimental
lifestyles. (Iverson and Ruby xiii)
We Become New offers a range of poems that strongly represent the movement and its variations.
Iverson writes that they chose to organize the poems like “voices in a musical arrangement,
juxtaposed to counterpoint one another” (Iverson and Ruby xx–xxi). The effect is to offer varying
moods, tempos, and tones throughout. Marge Piercy’s opening poems use the blues as a metaphor
for women’s oppression: In the first poem, “The Morning Half-Life Blues,” the “girls” rushing
down the street to work are hounded by the furies of capitalism and public opinion: “The shop
windows snicker / flashing them … dresses they cannot afford: / you are not pretty enough, not
pretty enough” (Iverson and Ruby 1). The deeply disturbing “Burying Blues for Janis” examines the
“great-hearted suffering bitch fantasy” that Janis Joplin’s blues represent for Piercy—the seductive
danger of the woman as victim: “You embodied the pain hugged to the breasts like a baby. / You
embodied the beautiful blowzy gum of passivity, / woman on her back to the world endlessly
hopelessly / raggedly / offering a brave front to be fucked” (4). But these poems are quickly followed
by Sonia Sanchez’s experimental and self-defining “Three X Three”: “a blk / woman / speaks …
and u can hear the /sound of my walken / as i bring forth green songs / from a seasoned breast / as
i burn on our evening bed / of revolution” (9).
There is also a great deal of wit in this volume, such as the revenge fantasy at the heart of Cynthia
Macdonald’s “Objet d’Art.” The poem relates an incident when the speaker was seventeen and
accidentally entered a Men’s Room at Dakar Station, whereupon a man says to her: “You’re a real
ball cutter” (Iverson and Ruby 215). The speaker, intrigued, decides to live up to the role assigned
to her: “Preservation,” she tells us, “was at first a problem: pickling worked / But was a lot of
trouble. Freezing / Proved to be the answer. I had to buy / A second freezer just last year” (215)
We also have here one of the great wits of the feminist poetry movement, Carolyn Kizer, with
several poems, including the first three sections of her much-anthologized Pro Femina, a feminist
anthem of sorts. Kizer grounds this work in an astonishing range of literary references from the
ancient Greek Sappho, to the Roman poet Juvenal to Charles Dickens’s Madam Defarge from A
6
Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar Farr note in their introduction to This Book Is an Action that “performance was a key
to the aesthetic of feminist communities, [including] poetry readings and an emerging theater scene” (7–8).
Tale of Two Cities in order to investigate the “fate of women.” Part one opens: “From Sappho
to myself, consider the fate of women. / How unwomanly to discuss it!” (Iverson and Ruby 50).
Kizer pinpoints the problem for women if they speak of their oppression, their “fate”: they risk
being thought “unwomanly,” or worse. The roles we must play and the masks we must wear (“Our
masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, / In need of continuous check in the mirror or
silver-ware”), Kizer tells us, “Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces” (Iverson
and Ruby 52). Kizer’s sense of humor exposes deeper truths about the lot of women and the
paucity of literary foremothers: “I will speak about women of letters, for I’m in the racket. / Our
biggest successes to date? Old maids to a woman. / … Think of that crew of self-pitiers, not-very-
distant, / … / Or the sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen” (53). Is there hope?
Kizer writes in the last stanza of part three that “we’re emerging from all that, more or less” (54),
and yet that emergence means the pressure seems to be once again on women themselves to do the
right thing, which Kizer relates brilliantly in a series of subordinate clauses: “If we submerge our
self-pity in disciplined industry; / If we stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep with editors;
/ If we regard ourselves formally” (54). These contingencies do not make us free, as the last line
suggests, since it means we have to depend on “the luck of our husbands and lovers, who keep free
women” (55, my emphasis).
Judy Grahn’s “A Woman Is Talking to Death,” another urtext of the movement, presents in its
title a paradox of being a woman in the 1950s: she is accused of talking too much, as in talking a
subject to death, while simultaneously being taught to “hold her tongue” when it comes to speaking
out against injustice.7 But this woman is literally talking to death itself. Each section of the poem
is a testimonial to the senseless violence and injustice that the powerless experience every day: the
nurses’ aide who is abused by nurses and doctors; the lesbian who is the subject of the mock
interrogation of part four; the Asian woman who is raped by the cab driver and thrown out onto
the street. Each section bears witness and finds a way to testify against injustice, creating a space for
justice that is beyond the reach of many of the poem’s protagonists.
Part one of Grahn’s sequence describes a scene of terrible violence on the San Francisco Bay
Bridge witnessed by the speaker. The scene: a White man on his motorcycle in the middle of
the bridge, head flung back; a Black man plows into him, killing him. This opening movement
describes the speaker’s struggle against the social forces that have taught her to be silent. The Black
man pleads with her to be his witness. She walks away, reassuring him she’ll be his witness later. She
convinces herself and later the man’s wife that everything will be OK:
“He’ll be all right” I said, “we could
have hit the guy as easy as anybody, it
wasn’t anybody’s fault, they’ll know that,”
women so often say dumb things like that,
they teach us to be sweet and reassuring,
and say ignorant things, because we dont invent
the crime, the punishment, the bridges (Honor Moore 80; Grahn 24)
Parts four, six, and seven appear in Iverson and Ruby’s We Become New and Moore’s Poems from the Women’s Movement.
7
Grahn’s The Judy Grahn Reader (pp. 22–33) reprints the entire sequence.
Anyone could have hit this man in the middle of the road. But because it was a black man, the police
beat him up, create a trumped-up charge of drunk driving, and his second-rate lawyer gets him to
“cop a plea,” so he’s put in prison for twenty years instead of life. Grahn pushes back against this
mandate by giving “testimony in trials that never got heard,” as the opening lines tell us (Honor
Moore 76).
Grahn’s sequence exemplifies the basic tenet of one of the key texts of the feminist movement,
Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” which Lorde originally
gave as an MLA talk on the “Lesbian and Literature Panel” in Chicago on December 28, 1977.
Lorde told her audience that the difference between women is not the problem, silence is: “The
transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems
fraught with danger.”8 Lorde urged her audience not to “hide behind the mockeries of separations
that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.” These separations
include the excuses that both Black and White women have given for not teaching a particular
writer. White women say they can’t teach “black women’s writing” because “their experience is so
different from mine.” Black women say, “She’s a white woman and what could she possibly have
to say to me?” (Lorde, Sister 43). But Lorde points out the illogic of these arguments by asking
her audience, “Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust?”
(43). These excuses are some of the “endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each
other. … There are so many silences to be broken” (44).
In her cover blurb for the second edition of No More Masks! (1993), which is now out of
print, June Jordan calls the anthology a “pioneering” work. While the purpose of such blurbs
is to tout the “fabulous” qualities of the book in hand, as Jordan does, there is no reason to
doubt her final clause: this is a “beautiful anthology,” she writes, “which we really needed in
our lives back then, and which we really, really need in our lives right now!” That was 1993.
Sadly, in 2021, her statement still holds true. Let’s look at those two moments: 1973 and
1993. The 1973 volume, as Florence Howe notes in her foreword, very much grew out of the
women’s movement, since she and Ellen Bass, her coeditor at the time, began their project by
“reading back issues of women’s movement magazines and newspapers” (Howe xxviii). And the
volume’s dedication (not included in the 1993 edition) emphasizes this point: “to our sisters
/ in jail / underground / at war / whose lives are their poems.” Since women poets had largely
been left out of the canon, part of the goal of the anthology was to establish a tradition with
a selection of early twentieth-century writers, such as Angelina Weld Grimké, Amy Lowell,
Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore, but “nearly half (95)” of the volume’s 220 poems “were
published in the 1960s” (Howe 4). Other anthologies of the period, such as Bernikow’s The
World Split Open, which begins with poems by Queen Elizabeth I and ends with those of
Gwendolyn Brooks and Muriel Rukeyser, reach much farther back in their attempts to establish
a women’s poetry tradition. The second iteration of No More Masks! reflects the difference
that the feminist movement has made for women poets. It is possible to read No More Masks!
and begin to understand the full arc of the feminist poetry movement. Howe explains that part
three of the 1993 edition is the most changed and reflects how the women’s movement led to
a group of women poets whose “poems and lives are freer than the generations that preceded
8
This talk was reprinted in Lorde’s collection of essays, Sister Outsider, p. 41.
them: in style, with language, about women’s bodies, about sexuality, and about difference.
More of these poets are openly lesbian” (Howe, 2nd ed. xliv). Moreover, half of the women
included in this section of the anthology are now women of color. This move toward greater
inclusiveness reflects the successful efforts of women of color to build a coalition of women of
color writers, feminist periodicals, and feminist presses (such as Kitchen Table: Women of Color
Press) throughout the 1970s and 1980s that could represent the diversity of women’s voices in
the movement. They also published their own anthologies.9
One of the most important of these anthologies, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This
Bridge Called My Back, originally published in 1981 and now in its fourth printing, continues
to be important in articulating, as Moraga writes in her introduction, “the complex confluence
of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and
liberation” (xix). Many of these women felt excluded by the White middle-class feminists who
came to dominate the feminist movement.
In her preface to the first edition, Moraga writes, “The deepest political tragedy I have experienced
is how with such grace, such blind faith, this commitment to women in the feminist movement
grew to be exclusive and reactionary. I call my white sisters on this” (xxvii). The anthology explores
these issues in a range of genres, including essays, testimonials, art work, and poetry. Nellie Wong’s
“When I was Growing Up,” for instance, explores the complex issues of gender and national
identity, the pain of being “a child / born of Chinese parents” and feeling “un-American” (Moraga
5–6). In “And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures with You,” Jo Carrillo confronts “our white
sisters / radical friends” who “love to own pictures of us / sitting at a factory machine / wielding a
machete / in our bright bandanas / holding brown yellow black red children,” but who don’t really
see women of color when confronted with them “in the flesh” (10).
“A THINKING WOMAN SLEEPS WITH MONSTERS”:

ADRIENNE RICH AND AUDRE LORDE
These anthologies present a rich and varied body of work that helps define the feminist poetry
movement. But it is the poets themselves who make the movement, and it would be difficult to
find two more important and central figures than Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde as poets and
theorists of feminism. Both Lorde and Rich had long careers as writers, teachers, editors, and
activists, including teaching in the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) writing
program in the late 1960s. This program was directed by Mina Shaughnessy at City College, City
University of New York, and was an open admissions, “pre-baccalaureate program of compensatory
education,” serving mainly poor and working-class students of color.10 Both poets came of age at
a time when heterosexuality was “compulsory,” as Rich was to write in one of her most important
9
Although I do not have the space here to discuss them, feminist magazines also played a significant role in shaping the
movement and articulating the relationship between politics and poetics. In addition to poetry that ran in mainstream
feminist publications like Ms. Magazine, one of the key magazines of the period for defining a lesbian feminist literary
tradition was Sinister Wisdom. For an excellent discussion of how the first twenty-four issues of Sinister Wisdom helped
shape the lesbian feminist movement, see Joy Parks, “Sinister Wisdom: A Chronicle.” Back issues of Sinister Wisdom are
available online and free of charge, making them a wonderful teaching tool for students in women’s gender and sexuality
studies classes.
10
Lorde and Rich (724 n.7). Lorde and Rich discuss their experiences in the program more generally on pp. 723–5.
essays (“Compulsory” 23–75). And both married, had children, and then came out as lesbians and
left their husbands. Rich believed strongly in lesbian love as a source of political and revolutionary
power. Her stunning long poem from The Dream of a Common Language, “Twenty-One Love
Poems,” explores the dimensions of this erotic power. She speaks of “the desire to show you to
everyone I love, / to move openly together / in the pull of gravity, which is not simple” (Rich,
Collected 466). In a later section, she observes, “The rules break like a thermometer, / quicksilver
spills across the charted systems, / we’re out in a country that has no language” (471). And in one
of the most beautiful erotic scenes, she reflects, “Whatever happens with us, your body / will haunt
mine—tender, delicate” (473). This section ends: “I had been waiting years for you / in my rose-wet
cave—whatever happens, this is” (473).
Lorde, too, believed in the power of the erotic to challenge oppression: “In order to perpetuate
itself,” she writes, “every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power
within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has
meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our
lives” (Sister 53). In a conversation between the two women published in the journal Signs, they
explore this territory in their discussion of Lorde’s lesbian “Love Poem,” which was both an open
expression of lesbian sexuality and political. When the poem was published in Ms. Magazine
in 1974, Lorde ripped out the page from the magazine and defiantly tacked it up on the wall
of the English Department at John Jay College (Lorde and Rich 727, Bowen 112). It contains
these lines:
And I knew when I entered her I was
high wind in her forests hollow
fingers whispering sound
honey flowed
from the split cup (Lorde, Collected 127)
Lorde had been working for two years with other faculty of color at John Jay “to create and
implement a Black Studies Department,” and Lorde uses the incident to provide a telling example
of the separatism and damaging divisions between the feminist and Black liberation movements.
Members of the department tried to use Lorde’s lesbianism to discredit her, and, as Angela Bowen
has noted in her excellent discussion of the poem, Lorde “was subsequently shunned … because of
her feminism and lesbianism” (112). Lorde’s act of defiance demonstrates a fusing of activism and
poetry that is fundamental to the powerful poetry that she created.
Lorde and Rich understood poetry as a vehicle for change and as a way to explore the power
issues that lie at the heart of questions of gender, race, and class. As Lorde argued in her influential
volume of essays Sister Outsider, “for women, poetry is not a luxury” but a “vital necessity” (Lorde,
Sister 37). One of the key poems in Lorde’s oeuvre that speaks directly to this “vital necessity” is
the poem “Power,” which opens her 1976 collection Between Ourselves. “Power” explores the rage
Lorde felt at the acquittal of a White police officer after he gunned down a ten-year-old Black boy,
Clifford Glover, who was walking with his father in Queens.11 Lorde describes the gruesome scene
after the shooting, when the policeman
See Bowen for excellent context on this poem.

11
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and
there are tapes to prove it. (Lorde, Collected 215)
The 37-year-old White policeman also said that he didn’t notice the boy’s size but only his color.
He was set free by a jury consisting of eleven White men and one Black woman who said, “They
convinced me” (215).
The poem is a serious meditation on this miscarriage of justice and on a coercive system that
does not allow a Black woman to speak up for a child. The speaker translates the meaning of the
Black woman’s words (“They convinced me”) by succinctly describing the arc of systemic racism
and sexism that “convinced” this woman to side with the men:
they had dragged her 4’10” Black Woman’s frame

over the hot coals
of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go
the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children. (Lorde, Collected 216)
Lorde describes to Rich the incident that led to the poem. She was driving when she heard the
news of the policeman’s acquittal on the radio. She was “so sick and so enraged” that she pulled
over to jot down ideas in a notebook (Lorde and Rich 734). She imagined herself being the only
Black woman on the jury: “What kind of strength did she, would I, have at the point of deciding
to take a position—,” she tells Rich, and Rich finishes her sentence “against eleven white men.”
Lorde recognizes “that archaic fear of the total reality of a power that is not on your terms.” The
conversation develops further after Rich asks Lorde what she “really” means when she describes
the “difference between poetry and rhetoric” in the opening lines of “Power” as “being ready to
kill / yourself / instead of your children” (Lorde, Collected 215).
In Lorde’s extraordinary, soul-searching answer to Rich, she outlines the “vital necessity” of
poetry, how one has to confront “that archaic fear” (735). It becomes, finally, for Lorde, the Black
Woman and her decision to be “convinced” on which the question of power revolves. At the time
that she heard about the verdict on the radio, Lorde felt strongly that she “was that woman.” As
Lorde tells Rich,
There is the jury, white male power, white male structures, how do you take a position against
them? How do you reach down into threatening difference without being killed or killing? …
To put myself on the line to do what had to be done at any place and time was difficult, yet
absolutely crucial, and not to do so was the most awful death. And putting yourself on the
line is like killing a piece of yourself, in the sense that you have to kill, end, destroy something
familiar and dependable, so that something new can come, in ourselves, in our world. And that
sense of writing at the edge, out of urgency, not because you choose it but because you have
to, that sense of survival—that’s what the poem is out of, as well as the pain of my son’s death
over and over. Once you live any piece of your vision it opens you to a constant onslaught. Of
necessities, of horrors, but of wonders too, of possibilities. (Lorde and Rich 734–5)
Lorde’s power (and that of her sister poets) depends first on recognizing ourselves in the other: “I
was that woman,” and then reaching down into that threatening difference—that is the difference
between poetry and mere rhetoric.
At the same time (between 1974 and 1977), Rich was writing the most powerful feminist
poetry of her career, collected in The Dream of a Common Language, which also begins with a
poem called “Power.” This poem, like a number of others in this volume, focuses on historical
women—in this case, Marie Curie, and the power (and dangers) that meaningful work affords.
The poem ends: “She died a famous woman denying / her wounds / denying / her wounds came
from the same source as her power” (Rich, Collected 443). She tells us in “Hunger,” a poem
dedicated to Lorde, “Until we find each other, we are alone” (454). In an essay written at this
time called “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women,” Rich argues that community
is “the essential condition for all fully realized work,” which is something that women have not
found in “the common world of men,” or in the male-dominated work force (On Lies 207). As
she says in “Poetry and Women’s Culture,” published in The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook,
“It is not as interesting to explore the condition of alienation … as it is to explore the condition
of connectedness” (quoted in Voyce 108). The promise of the women’s liberation movement for
Rich was that “more and more … women are creating community, sharing work, and discovering
that in the sharing of work, our relationships with each other become larger and more serious”
(On Lies 208).
One of the most powerful aspects of The Dream of a Common Language is the poems focused
on women’s relationships within the context of their work. These poems build on the promise in
Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own that it was possible for “Cloe” to not only love “Olivia”
but also share a laboratory with her. Rich conveys this idea of community in several powerful
poems. In “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” Rich again focuses on a historical figure: Elvira
Shatayev, who, as the headnote tells us, was the “leader of a women’s climbing team, all of whom
died in a storm on Lenin Peak, August 1974” (Rich, Collected 443). Yet this is not a poem about
the dangers of their profession, but the strength they find together in the end, written in the
voice of Shatayev: “choosing ourselves each other and this life / whose every breath and grasp
and further foothold / is somewhere still enacted and continuing” (445). The danger lies rather
“down in our separateness,” as Shatayev realizes at the end; “till now / we had not touched our
strength” (445).
In another poem, “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff,” Rich mines the letters of these two early
twentieth century artists who, as the headnote says, “became friends at Worpswede, an artists’
colony near Bremen, Germany, summer 1899” (Collected 481). They traveled to Paris together in
1900 for half a year where Becker painted and Westhoff studied sculpture with Rodin, and they
returned to Worpswede that same year in August and spent the winter together in Berlin. Westhoff
married the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in 1901. Becker married the painter Otto Modersohn and
later died in childbirth. The poem begins with a letter from Becker to Westhoff about the child
she is carrying: “I didn’t want this child. / You’re the only one I’ve told,” and states that “marriage
is lonelier than solitude” (481–2). But Becker goes on to write about her work: “I’m looking
everywhere in nature / for new forms, old forms in new places” (483). She remembers
How we used to work
side by side! And how I’ve worked since then
trying to create according to our plan

that we’d bring, against all odds, our full power
to every subject ….
Clara, our strength still lies
in the things we used to talk about ….
Clara, I feel so full
of work, the life I see ahead, the love
for you, who of all people
however badly I say this
will hear all I say and cannot say. (483)
Rich’s ability to write these women back into our history through powerful poetry is a testament
to poetry’s continuing power to be meaningful, relevant, vital, and alive into the twenty-first century.
So, too, is Lorde’s urgent need to explore her deepest fears, to reach down into “threatening
difference.” When Rich wrote in her 1969 poem “Tear Gas,” “(I am afraid.) / It’s not the worst
way to live,” she took seriously Lorde’s charge and her own to confront her fears. “Poetry,” Lorde
wrote, “is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. … It lays a bridge across
our fears of what has never been before” (Lorde, Sister 37–8). When I return to these poets now at
this moment in America’s history, I find that we need these voices more than ever; poetry is a good
tool for thinking with; in that way it is close to theory and philosophy. Unlike narrative, poetry
provides the house of possibility in which to dwell, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson. We move
through Adrienne Rich’s thoughts, and they become not so much ours as shared: “the true nature of
poetry,” she writes, is “the drive / to connect. The dream of a common language” (Rich, Collected
446). This is the fundamental drive that speaks most accurately to the feminist poetry movement
and its continuing legacy.
WORKS CITED
Berke, Nancy. “The World Split Open: Feminism, Poetry, and Social Critique.” A History of Twentieth-Century
American Women’s Poetry, ed. Linda A. Kinnahan. Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 155–69.
Bernikow, Louise, ed. The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–
1950. Vintage, 1974.
Bowen, Angela. “Diving into Audre Lorde’s ‘Blackstudies.’ ” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol.
4, no. 1 (2003), pp. 109–29.
Chester, Laura, and Sharon Barba, eds. Rising Tides: 20th Century American Women Poets. Washington Square
Press, Pocket Books, 1973.
Clifton, Lucille. Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980. BOA Editions, 1987.
Grahn, Judy. The Judy Grahn Reader, ed. Lisa Maria Hogeland. Aunt Lute Books, 2009.
Hacker, Marilyn. “The Young Insurgent’s Commonplace Book,” Poetry Daily, poems.com/special_features/prose/
essay_hacker3.php. Accessed November 3, 2017. Reprinted from Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics #77
(Fall 2007), Oberlin College, as part of a symposium on Rich.
Harjo, Joy. She Had Some Horses. W. W. Norton, 2008.
Harker, Jaime, and Cecilia Konchar Farr, eds. This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist
Aesthetics. University of Illinois Press, 2016.
Howe, Florence, and Ellen Bass, eds. No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women. Anchor Books, 1973.
Newly revised and expanded edition as No More Masks!: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American
Women Poets. Harper Perennial, 1993.
Iverson, Lucille, and Kathryn Ruby, eds. We Become New: Poems by Contemporary American Women.
Bantam, 1975.
Jordan, June. “Case in Point.” Poems from the Women’s Movement, ed. Honor Moore. Library of America, 2009,
pp. 121–2.
Kinnahan, Linda A, ed. A History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry. Cambridge University
Press, 2016.
Kizer, Carolyn. Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women. Copper Canyon Press, 1984.
Lorde, Audre. Collected Poems. W. W. Norton, 1997.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, revised ed. Crossing Press, 2007.
Lorde, Audre, and Adrienne Rich. “An Interview with Audre Lorde.” Signs, vol. 6, no. 4 (Summer 1981), pp.
713–36.
Moore, Honor, ed. Poems from the Women’s Movement. Library of America, 2009.
Moore, Lisa. “Sister Arts: On Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Others.” Los Angeles Review of Books, February
8, 2013. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/sister-arts-on-adrienne-rich-audre-lorde-and-others/.
Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th
ed. SUNY Press, 2015. Originally published by Persephone Press in 1981.
Paley, Grace. “The Women of Vietnam.” No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women, ed. Florence Howe
and Ellen Bass, Anchor Books, 1973, pp. 136–7.
Parks, Joy. “Sinister Wisdom: A Chronicle.” Women’s Review of Books, vol. 1, no. 5 (February 1984), pp. 14–15.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. Harper Perennial, 1966.
Rich, Adrienne. Collected Poems: 1950–2012, ed. Pablo Conrad, with an introduction by Claudia Rankine. W.
W. Norton, 2016.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980). Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected
Prose, 1979–1985, Norton, 1986, pp. 23–75.
Rich, Adrienne. Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972. W. W. Norton, 1973.
Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978. W. W. Norton, 1979.
Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. Penguin, 2006.
Sexton, Anne. “The Abortion.” No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women, ed. Florence Howe and
Ellen Bass. Anchor Books, 1973, p. 189.
Voyce, Stephen. Poetic Community: Avant-Garde Activism and Cold War Culture. University of Toronto
Press, 2013.
Whitehead, Kim. The Feminist Poetry Movement. University Press of Mississippi, 1997.
32
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Fig. 16.—Plan of the south-western palace at Nimroud; from Layard.
As to the buildings on the other sides of the court and the total
extent of the palace, we know very little; towards the west the walls
of several saloons have been recognized, but they have been left
half cleared. On the east, landslips have carried away part of the
buildings.[46]
Between the palace of Assurnazirpal and that of Esarhaddon
Layard found what seemed to him the remains of the second story of
some building, or at least of a new building erected over one of
earlier date (Fig. 17). Impelled, no doubt, by the rarity of the
circumstance, he gives a plan of these remains, and goes so far as
to express his belief that the arrangements shown in the plan were
repeated on the three other faces of a tower of which he
encountered the summit, still partly preserved.[47]
Although Calah was never abandoned, it fell, after the accession
of the Sargonids, from the first place among Assyrian cities; on the
other hand Sargon’s attempt to fix the seat of government in his own
town of Dour-Saryoukin does not seem to have met with permanent
success. From the eighth century to the end of the seventh the
Assyrian kings appear to have made Nineveh their favourite place of
residence.
The site of this famous city has been much discussed,[48] but at
last the question appears to be settled. Nineveh was built on the left
bank of the Tigris, opposite to the site occupied by modern Mossoul.
Two great mounds rising some five-and-thirty feet above the level of
the plain, represent the substructures upon which the royal homes of
the last Assyrian dynasty were raised; they are now famous as
Kouyundjik and Nebbi-Younas. Like the mound of Khorsabad these
two artificial hills were in juxtaposition with the city walls, which may
still be traced in almost their whole extent by the ridge of earth
formed of their materials (Fig. 18).
Fig. 17.—Upper chambers excavated at

Nimroud; from Layard.
The mound of Nebbi-Younas has so far remained almost
unexplored. It is fortified against the curiosity of Europeans by the
little building on its summit and the cemetery covering most of its
surface. The inhabitants of the country, Mussulman as well as
Christian, believe that Jonah lies under the chapel dome, and they
themselves hope to rest as near his body as possible. Some slight
excavations, little more than a few strokes of the pick-axe, have
been made in the scanty spots where no graves occur, but enough
evidence has been found to justify us in assuming that Nebbi-
Younas also hides its palaces. They too will have their turn. Thanks
to the prestige of the prophet they are reserved for excavations to be
conducted perhaps in a more systematic fashion than those hitherto
undertaken on the site of Nineveh.
Fig. 18.—Map of the site of Nineveh; from Oppert.

Fig. 19.—Plan of the mound of Kouyundjik; from Rassam’s Transactions.
At Kouyundjik, on the other hand, no serious obstacle was
encountered. The village transported itself to the plain; it was not
necessary to persuade the inhabitants to quit it, as it had been at
Khorsabad. When Botta, who had begun certain inquisitions at this
spot, abandoned his attempts, the English explorers were left free to
sound the flanks of the artificial hill at their leisure, and to choose
their point of attack. If they had gone to work in the same fashion as
Botta and Place, they might have laid bare palaces excelling that of
Sargon in the scale and variety of their arrangements. Of this we
may judge from Mr. Rassam’s plan (Fig. 19). But after the departure
of Mr. Layard the excavations, frequently interrupted and then
recommenced after long intervals, aimed only at discovering such
objects as might figure in a museum. A trench was opened here and
another there, on the inspiration of the moment. The explorers often
neglected to measure the buildings in which they were at work, so
that we have only partial plans of the two principal buildings of
Nineveh, those palaces of Sennacherib and Assurbanipal from which
so many beautiful monuments have been taken to enrich the British
Museum.
Fig. 20.—Part plan of the palace of Sennacherib; from Layard.

The mound of Kouyundjik in its present state is an irregular
pentagon. Its circumference is rather more than a mile and a half.
The palace of Sennacherib occupies the south-western corner, and
forms a rectangle about 600 feet long by 330 wide. The two chief
entrances were turned one towards the river, or south-west, the
other towards the town, or north-east. The latter entrance was
flanked by ten winged bulls. The four central ones stood out beyond
the line of the façade, and were separated from each other by
colossal genii.[49] About sixteen halls and chambers have been
counted round the three courtyards. As at Khorsabad, some of these
are long galleries, others rooms almost square. The fragmentary
plan shown in our Fig. 20 brings out the resemblance very strongly. It
represents a part of the building explored in Layard’s first campaign.
In the rooms marked 2, 3, and 4, small niches cut in the thickness of
the walls may be noticed. They are not unlike the spaces left for
cupboards in the modern Turkish houses of Asia Minor. The hall
marked 1 in the plan is about 124 feet long and 30 wide. In another
part of the palace a saloon larger than any of those at Khorsabad
has been cleared. It measures 176 feet long by 40 wide. The
average size of the rooms here is about one-third more than in the
palace of Sargon, suggesting that the art of building vaults and
timber ceilings made sensible progress during the reign of that king.
As in the case of the Khorsabad palace, the explorers believed they
could distinguish between the seraglio and the harem; but the plan
given by Layard has too many blanks and leaves too many points
uncertain for the various quarters to be distinguished with such ease
and certainty as at Khorsabad.[50] The walls were everywhere
covered with rich series of reliefs, from which we have already taken
some of our illustrations (Vol. I., Figs. 151 and 152), and shall have
to take more. The military promenade figured upon page 49 will give
a good idea of their general character (Fig. 21).
Assurbanipal, the grandson of Sennacherib, built his palace
towards the north of the mound. The excavations of Mr. Rassam
have been the means of recovering many precious bas-reliefs from
it, but we may see from the plan (Fig. 19) that a very small part of the
building has been cleared. Much more must remain of a palace so
richly decorated and with rooms so large as some of those explored
in the quarter we have called the sélamlik. One of these saloons is
145 feet long and 29 wide. The plan of its walls suggests a very
large building, with spacious courts and a great number of rooms.[51]
Fig. 21.—Sennacherib at the head of his army. Height 38 inches. British Museum.
Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
In many other mounds of Assyria, such as those of Arvil,[52] of

Balawat,[53] of Kaleh-Shergat,[54] of Karamles,[55] and in the valley
of the Khabour,[56] the explorers have encountered the remains of
buildings and of ornamental figures that must have formed parts of
royal palaces, or at least of the dwellings of great nobles. We shall
not stop to notice all these discoveries. None of the mounds in
question have been explored with sufficient care and completeness
to add anything of importance to what we have learnt by our study of
Khorsabad. The chief thing to be gathered from these widely
scattered excavations is that during the great years of Assyria there
was no town of any importance in which the king did not possess a
habitation, arranged and decorated in the same spirit as the great
palaces at Calah and Nineveh, and differing from these chiefly in the
size of their courts and chambers.
No doubt the pavilions sprinkled about the park, or paradise, as
the Greek writers called it, in which the king sought amusement by
exercising his skill as an archer upon the beasts that roamed among
its trees, were ornamented in the same fashion, although in all
probability, wood and metal played a more important part in their
construction. As for the dwellings of the great officers of the crown
and of vassal princes, they must have reproduced on a smaller scale
the plan and ornamentation of the royal palace.
Of the house properly speaking, the dwelling of the artizan or
peasant, whether in Assyria or Chaldæa, we know very little. We are
unable to turn for its restoration to paintings such as those in the
Egyptian tombs, which portray the life of the poor with the same
detail as that of the rich or even of the monarch himself. The
Assyrian bas-reliefs, in which the sieges of towns are often
represented, always show them from the outside (Fig. 22), nothing is
to be seen but the ramparts and the towers that flank them. The only
bas-relief in which we can venture to recognize one of the ordinary
houses of the country belongs to the series of pictures in which
Sennacherib has caused the transport of the materials and colossal
bulls for his own palace to be figured. We there see two very
different types of edifice, one covered with hemispherical or elliptical
domes, the other with flat roofs supporting a kind of belvedere[57]
(Vol. I., Fig. 43).
This latter type may be found several times repeated in a relief
representing a city of Susiana (Vol. I., Fig. 157). Here nearly every
house has a tower at one end of its flat roof. Was this a defence, like
the towers in the old Italian towns and in the Greek villages of Crete
and Magnesia? We do not think so. The social conditions were very
different from those of the turbulent republics of Italy, where the
populace was divided into hostile factions, or of those mountainous
districts whose Greek inhabitants live in constant fear of attack from
the Turks who dwell in the plains. The all-powerful despots of Assyria
would allow no intestine quarrels, and for the repulse of a foreign
enemy, the cities relied upon their high and solid lines of
circumvallation. We think that the towers upon the roofs were true
belvederes, contrivances to get more air and a wider view; also,
perhaps, to allow the inhabitants to escape the mosquitoes by rising
well above the highest level reached by the flight of those tiny pests.
It was, then, between these two types, as Strabo tells us, that the
civil buildings of Mesopotamia were divided. They all had thick
terraced roofs but some were domical and others flat.[58] At Mugheir
Mr. Taylor cleared the remains of a small house planned on the lines
of an irregular cross; it was built of burnt brick and paved with the
same material. In the interior the faces of the bricks were covered
with a thin and not very adhesive glaze. Two of the doors were
round-headed; the arches being composed of bricks specially
moulded in the shape of voussoirs; but the numerous fragments of
carbonized palm-wood beams which were found upon the floors of
each room, showed that the building had been covered with a flat
timber roof and a thick bed of earth. Strabo justly observes that the
earth was necessary to protect the inmates of the house against the
heats of summer. As a rule houses must have been very low. It was
only in large towns such as Babylon, that they had three or four
stories.[59]
We need say no more. We have studied the palace in detail, and

the palace was only an enlarged, a more richly illustrated edition of
the house. It supplied the same wants, but on a wider scale than was
necessary in the dwelling of a private individual. To complete our
study of civil architecture it is only necessary to give some idea of
the fashion in which palaces and houses were grouped into cities,
and of the means chosen for securing those cities against hostile
assault.
§ 4. Towns and their Defences.
Of all barbarian cities, as the Greeks would say, Babylon has

been the most famous, both in the ancient and the modern world;
her name has stirred the imaginations of mankind more strongly than
any other city of Asia. For the Greeks she was the Asiatic city par
excellence, the eternal capital of those great oriental empires that
were admired and feared by the Hellenic population even after their
political weakness had been proved more than once. In the centuries
that have passed since the fall of the Greek civilization the name and
fame of Babylon have been kept alive by the passionate words of
those Hebrew prophets who filled some of the most eloquent and
poetic books of the Old Testament with their hatred of the
Mesopotamian city, an ardent hate that has found an echo across
the ages in the religion which is the heir of Judaism.
Fig. 22.—Town besieged by Sennacherib. Height 86 inches. British
Museum.
Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
There is, then, no city of the ancient world in which both our
Christian instincts and our classic education would lead us to take a
deeper interest, or to make more patient endeavours towards the
recovery of some knowledge of its passed magnificence by the
interrogation of its site and ruins, than this town of Babylon. At the
same time it happens, by a strange series of chances, that of all the
great cities of the past Babylon is the least known and the most
closely wrapped in mystery. The descriptive passages of ancient
writers are full of gaps and exaggerations, while as for the
monuments themselves, although the size of their remains and the
vast extent of ground they cover allow us to guess at the power and
energy of the people to whom they owed their existence, there are
no ruins in the world from which so little of the real thoughts and
ideas of their constructors is to be learnt. Not only has the
ornamentation of palace and temple disappeared, the ruling lines
and arrangements of their plans are no longer to be traced. It is this
no doubt that has discouraged the explorers. While the sites of
Calah, Nineveh, and Dour-Saryoukin have been freed of millions of
cubic yards of earth, and their concealed buildings explored and laid
bare in every direction, no serious excavations have ever been made
at Babylon. At long intervals of time a few shafts have been sunk in
the flanks of the Kasr, of Babil and the Birs-Nimroud, but they have
never been pushed to any great depth; a few trenches have been
run from them, but on no connected system, and only to be soon
abandoned. The plain is broken by many virgin mounds into which
no pick-axe has been driven, and yet they each represent a structure
dating from some period of Babylonian greatness. It would be a
noble undertaking to thoroughly explore the three or four great ruins
that rise on the site itself, and to examine carefully all the region
about them. Such an exploration would require no slight expenditure
of time and money, but it could not fail to add considerably to our
present knowledge of ancient Chaldæa; it would do honour to any
government that should support it, and still more to the archæologist
who should conduct the inquiry to completion, laying down on his
plan the smallest vestige remaining of any ancient detail, and
allowing himself to be discouraged by none of the numerous
disappointments and deceptions that he would be sure to encounter.
Meanwhile it would be profitless to carry our readers into any
discussion upon the topography of Babylon. In the absence of
ascertained facts nothing could be more arbitrary and conjectural
than the various theories that have been put forward as to the
direction of the city walls and their extent. According to George
Smith the only line of wall that can now be followed would give a
town about eight English miles round. Now Diodorus says that what
he calls the Royal City was sixty stades, or within a few yards of
seven miles, in circumference.[60] The difference between the two
figures is very slight. “In shape the city appears to have been a
square with one corner cut off, and the corners of the walls of the city
may be said roughly to front the cardinal points. At the north of the
city stood the temple of Belus, now represented by the mound of
Babil; about the middle of the temple stood the royal palace and
hanging-gardens.”[61]
The Royal City was the city properly speaking, the old city whose
buildings were set closely about the great temple and the palace, the
latter forming, like the Old Seraglio at Constantinople, a fortified town
in itself with a wall some twenty stades (4043 yards) in
circumference. A second wall, measuring forty stades in total length,
turned the palace and the part of the city in its immediate
neighbourhood into a sort of acropolis. Perhaps the nobles and
priests may have inhabited this part of the town, the common people
being relegated to the third circle. In the towns of Asia Minor at the
present day the Turks alone live in the fortified inclosures, which are
called kaleh, or citadels, the rest of the town being occupied by the
rayahs of every kind, whether Greek or Armenian.
There is, then, nothing in the description of Diodorus at which we
need feel surprise. Our difficulty begins when we have to form a
judgment upon the assertion of Herodotus, who speaks of an
inclosure 120 stades (13 miles 1385 yards) square.[62] According to
this the circumference of Babylon must have been nearly 55¼
English miles, which would make it considerably larger than what is
called Greater London, and more than three times the size of Paris.
Here, strangely enough, Ctesias gives a more moderate figure than
Herodotus, as we find Diodorus estimating the circumference of the
great enceinte at 360 stades (41 miles 600 yards).[63]
We can hardly read of such measurements without some
astonishment. It seems difficult, however, to doubt the formal
statement of such a careful eye-witness as Herodotus. Although the
Greek historian was quite ready to repeat the fantastic tales he
heard in the distant countries to which his travels led him—a habit
we are far from wishing to blame—modern criticism has never
succeeded in convicting him of falsehood or exasperation in matters
of which he could judge with his own eyes. Our surprise at his
figures is diminished when we remember with what prodigious
rapidity buildings of sun-dried bricks could be erected. The material
was at hand in any possible quantity; the erection of such a length of
wall was only a question of hands. Now if we suppose, with M.
Oppert, that the work was undertaken by Nebuchadnezzar after the
fall of Nineveh, that prince may very well have employed whole
nations upon it, driving them into the workshops as the captive Jews
were driven. In such a fashion the great wall that united into one city
towns which had been previously separated—such as the original
Babylon, Cutha, and Borsippa—might have been raised without any
great difficulty. It is certain that the population of such a vast extent
of country cannot have been equally dense at all points. A large part
must have been occupied by royal parks, by gardens, vineyards, and
even cultivated fields. Babylon must, in fact, have been rather a vast
intrenched camp than a city in the true sense of the word.
At the time when Herodotus and Ctesias visited Babylon, this wall
—which was dismantled by the Persians in order to render revolt
more difficult—must have been almost everywhere in a state of ruin,
but enough of it remained to attract curious travellers, just as the
picturesque fortifications of the Greek emperors are one of the sights
of modern Constantinople. The more intelligent among them, such
as Herodotus, took note of the measurements given to them as
representing the original state of the great work whose ruins lay
before their eyes and confirmed the statements of their guides.[64]
The quarter then still inhabited was the Royal City, the true Babylon,
whose great public works have left such formidable traces even to
the present day. Naturally no vestige of the tunnel under the
Euphrates has been found; we may even be tempted to doubt that it
ever existed.[65] But we cannot doubt that the two sections of the
town were put in communication one with another by a stone bridge;
the evidence on that point is too clear to admit of question.[66] The
descriptions of the structure give us a high idea of the engineering
skill of the Chaldæans. To build such a bridge and insure its stability
was no small undertaking. The river at this point is about 600 feet
wide, and from twelve to sixteen deep at its deepest part.[67] We
need hardly say that for many centuries there has been no bridge
over the Euphrates either in the neighbourhood of Babylon or at any
other point in Mesopotamia. As for the quays, Fresnel found some
parts in very good preservation in 1853.[68] At the point where this
discovery was made the quay was built of very hard and very red
bricks, completely covered with bitumen so as to resist the action of
the water for as long as possible. The bricks bore the name of
Nabounid, who must have continued the work begun by
Nebuchadnezzar.
The description given by Herodotus of the way in which Babylon
was built and the circulation of its inhabitants provided for must also
be taken as applying to the Royal City. “The houses are mostly three
and four stories high; the streets all run in straight lines, not only
those parallel to the river, but also the cross-streets which lead to the
waterside. At the river end of these cross-streets are low gates in the
fence that skirts the stream, which are, like the great gates in the
outer wall, of brass and open on the water.”[69]
We may perhaps form some idea of Babylon from the
appearance of certain parts of Cairo. Herodotus seems to have been
struck by the regularity of the plan, the length of the streets, and the
height of the houses. In these particulars it was very different from
the low and irregularly built Greek cities of the fifth century b.c. The
height of the houses is to be explained partly by the necessity for
accommodating a very dense population, partly by the desire for as
much shade as possible.[70]
The decadence of Babylon had begun when Herodotus visited it
towards the middle of the fifth century before our era;[71] but the
town was still standing, and some of the colossal works of its later
kings were still intact. The last dynasty had come to an end less than
a century before. We are ready, therefore, to believe the simple and
straightforward description he has left us, even in those particulars
which are so well calculated to cause surprise. The evidence of
Ctesias, who saw Babylon some half century later, seems here and
there to be tainted with exaggeration, but on the whole it agrees with
that of Herodotus. Supposing that he does expand his figures a little,
Ctesias is yet describing buildings whose ruins, at least, he saw with
his own eyes, and sometimes his statements are borne out by those
of Alexander’s historians.[72]
The case of Nineveh is very different. Of that city Herodotus
hardly knew more than the name; he contents himself with mere
passing allusions to it.[73] Ctesias is trammelled by fewer scruples.
When he wrote his history Nineveh had ceased to exist for more
than two centuries; the statements of Xenophon[74] prove that at the
time of the famous retreat its site was practically deserted and its
name almost forgotten in the very district in which its ruins stood. But
the undaunted Ctesias gives us a description of the Assyrian capital
as circumstantial as if he had lived there in the days of Sennacherib
or Assurbanipal. According to his account it formed an elongated
rectangle, the long sides being 150 stades (17 miles 380 yards), and
the shorter 90 stades (10 miles 595 yards), in length, so that the total
circumference was 480 stades (55 miles 240 yards).[75] The whole of
this space was inclosed by a wall 100 Greek feet (103 feet English)
high, and with towers of twice that height.
It is hardly necessary to show that all this is pure invention. To
find room for such a Nineveh we should have to take all the space
between the ruins opposite Mossoul and those of Nimroud. But all
the Assyrian texts that refer to Nineveh and Calah speak of them as
two distinct cities, each with an independent life and period of
supremacy of its own, while between the two sites there are no
traces of a great urban population. The 1,500 towers on the walls
were the offspring of the same brain that imagined the tower of
Ninus nine stades (5458 feet) high. We can scent an arbitrary
assertion in the proportion of two to one given to the heights of the
towers over that of the wall. In the fortified walls of the bas-reliefs the
curtain is never greatly excelled in height by its flanking towers (see
Vol. I. Figs. 51, 60, 76, and 158, and above, Fig. 23).
Fig. 23.—Siege of a city; from Layard.

Ctesias has simply provided in his Nineveh a good pendant to
Babylon. Being quite free to exercise his imagination, he has laid
down even a greater circumference than that of the city on the
Euphrates. The superiority thus ascribed to the northern city is
enough by itself to arouse our suspicions. We cannot point to any
particular text, but contemporary history as a whole suggests that
Babylon was more populous than Nineveh, just as Bagdad is now
more populous than Mossoul. Nineveh, and Calah before it, were the
capitals of a soldier nation, they were cities born, like Dour-
Saryoukin, of the will of man. Political events called them into life,
and other political events caused them to vanish off the face of the
earth. Babylon, on the other hand, was born of natural conditions;
she was one of the eternal cities of the world. The Turks do their best
to make Hither Asia a desert, but so long as they do not entirely
succeed, so long as some light of culture and commerce still flickers
in the country, it will burn in that part of Mesopotamia which is now
called El-Jezireh (the island), where the two streams are close
together, and canals cut from one to the other can bring all the
intermediate tract into cultivation.
Sennacherib speaks thus of his capital: “Nineveh, the supreme
city, the city beloved of Istar, in which the temples of the gods and
goddesses are to be found.”[76] With its kings and their military
guards and courts, with the priests that served the sanctuaries of the
gods, with the countless workmen who built the great buildings,
Nineveh must have been a fine and flourishing city in the days of the
Sargonids; but even then its population cannot have equalled that of
Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. The latter was something more
than a seat of royalty and a military post; it was the great entrepôt for
all the commerce of Western Asia.[77]
All the travellers who have visited the neighbourhood of Mossoul
are agreed that, on the left bank of the Tigris, there is no trace of any
wall but that which forms a rather irregular parallelogram and
embraces the two mounds of Nebbi-Yonnas and Kouyundjik (Fig.
18).[78] According to M. Oppert this wall was about ten thousand
metres (nearly 6¼ miles) in circumference, which would make it
cover about one-eleventh of the ground covered by modern Paris.
There is nothing here that is not in accord with our ideas as to the
character and importance of Nineveh. If we add to the town inclosed
within such a wall suburbs stretching along the right bank of the river
on the site of modern Mossoul, we shall have a city capable of
holding perhaps two or three hundred thousand people.
In the northern part of the inclosure, not far from the north-
western angle, Sir Henry Layard made some excavations that
brought one of the principal gates of ancient Nineveh to light.[79] The
passage was probably vaulted, but its upper part had disappeared.
The gateway, which was built by Sennacherib, had a pair of winged
bulls looking towards the city and another pair looking towards the
country outside. The limestone pavement in the entrance still bears
the mark of wheels. Two great chambers are hollowed out of the
thickness of the walls and open into the entrance passage. The walls
must be here about 116 feet thick, judging from the proportion, in
Layard’s plan,[80] between them and one of the two chambers, which
has a diameter, as we are told by its finder, of 23 feet. We need say
no more of this doorway. The town attached to the palace of
Khorsabad will give us a better opportunity for the study of a city
gate.
The “town of Sargon,” Dour-Saryoukin or Hisr-Sargon, according
as we follow one or the other method of transcribing the Assyrian
name, was far smaller than Babylon, was smaller even than
Nineveh. It formed a parallelogram two sides of which were about
1,950 yards, the other two about 1,870 yards long, which would give
a surface of considerably more than a square mile. This city is
interesting not for the part it played in history, for of that we know
nothing, and it is quite possible that after the death of Sargon it may
have been practically abandoned, but because, of all the cities of
Assyria, it is that whose line of circumvallation has been best
preserved and most carefully studied (Vol. I. Fig. 144).
Like all inhabited places of any importance Dour-Saryoukin was
carefully fortified. Over the whole of Mesopotamia the words town
and fortress seem to have been almost convertible terms. The
nature of the soil does not lend itself to any such distinctions as
those of upper and lower city, as it does in Italy and Greece; there
was no acropolis, to which the inhabitants could fly when the outer
defences were broken down. In case of great need the royal palace
with its massive gates and cincture of commanding towers might be
looked upon as a citadel; while in Babylon and some other towns
several concentric lines of fortification made an attack more arduous
and prolonged the defence. But, nevertheless, the chief care of the
Mesopotamian engineers was given to the strengthening of the
external wall, the enceinte, properly speaking.
At Khorsabad this stood on a plinth three feet eight inches high,
above which began the sun-dried brick. The whole is even now
nowhere less than forty-five feet high, while in parts it reaches a
height of sixty feet. If we remember how greatly walls built of the
materials here used must have suffered from the weather, we shall
no longer be astonished at the height ascribed by Herodotus to the
walls of Babylon: “These were, he says, 200 royal cubits (348 feet)
high.”[81] This height was measured, no doubt, from the summit of
the tallest towers into the deepest part of the ditch, which he adds,
“was wide and deep.” It is possible that the interpreters who did the
honours of Babylon to the Greek historian exaggerated the figures a
little, just as those of Memphis added something to the height of the
pyramids. That the exaggeration was not very great is suggested by
what he says as to the thickness of the wall; he puts it at fifty royal
cubits, or eighty-six feet six inches. Now those of Khorsabad are only
between six and seven feet thinner than this, and it is certain that the
walls of Babylon, admired by all antiquity as the masterpieces of the
Chaldæan engineers, must have surpassed those of the city
improvised by Sargon both in height and thickness.
Far from abusing our credulity, Herodotus is within the mark
when he says that on the summit of the wall “enough room was left
between the towers to turn a four-horse chariot.”[82] As for Ctesias,
he speaks of a width “greater than what is necessary to allow two
chariots to pass each other.”[83] Such thicknesses were so far
beyond the ideas of Greek builders that their historians seem to have
been afraid that if they told the truth they would not be believed, so
they attenuated rather than exaggerated the real dimensions. If we
give a chariot a clear space of ten feet, which is liberal indeed, it will
be seen that not two, but six or seven, could proceed abreast on
such walls.
The nature of the materials did not allow walls to be thin, and in
making them very thick there were several great advantages. The
Assyrians understood the use of the battering-ram. We see it
employed in several of the bas-reliefs for opening a breach in the
ramparts of a beleaguered town (Vol. I. Fig. 60 and above, Fig. 23).
They also dug mines, as soon as they had pierced the revetment of
stone or burnt brick.[84] To prevent or to neutralize the employment
of such methods of attack they found no contrivance more effectual
than giving enormous solidity to their walls. Against such masses the
battering-ram would be almost powerless, and mines would take so
much time that they would not be very much better. Finally, the
platform at the summit of a wall built on such principles would afford
room for a number of defenders that would amount to a large army.
Throughout the circumference of the enceinte the curtain was
strengthened by rectangular flanking towers having a front of forty-

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Part One Roots and Branches of the Contemporary

1. A Conversation with Marjorie Perloff  7

2. The Feminist Poetry Movement in America  19

3. American Poetry and War  33

4. Experimental Asian American Poetry  49

5. Undisciplined Writing: Postwar Prose Poetry  61

7. Subjectivity and Identity in New York School Poetry  85

9. The Autobiographical Prose of Poets  113

10. Queer Poetry after 1945  125

13. The Black Art of Confession  163

14. Binding Nation-States: Poetry Anthologies of Hawai‘i, 1966–2018  177

Part Two Interviews with Poets

16. Mitsuye Yamada  215

17. Marilyn Nelson  221

18. Rae Armantrout  225

19. Lorna Dee Cervantes  233

20. Marilyn Chin  245

21. Geof Huth  255

22. Juan Delgado  269

23. Claudia Rankine  279

24. Crisosto Apache  287

25. Joshua Jennifer Espinoza  293

Part Three The Contemporary Moment

26. A Conversation with Stephanie Burt  299

27. Ecopoetics: In and against the American Grain  305

28. Economies of Scale: Contemporary Poetry and the Marketplace  323

29. Contemporary Children’s Poetry: A Colloquy  339

30. Multilingual American Poetry and Poetics  361

32. The Rise of Award-Winning Black Poets  391

33. The Fourth Wave in Native American Poetics  405

34. Recent Trends in Jewish American Poetry  419

35. What Is the Queer Confessional?  429

36. Poetry Translation and Poet-Translators  437

37. Prosthetic Poetics: Contemporary Poetry of Disability  449

L ist of C ontributors  489

Roots and Branches of the

A Conversation with Marjorie

Perloff: That’s great. I didn’t realize that.

McCabe: A poem is part of a corpus.

The Feminist Poetry Movement

“THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL”

“THE WORLD SPLIT OPEN”: FEMINIST ANTHOLOGIES AND

“A THINKING WOMAN SLEEPS WITH MONSTERS”:

See Bowen for excellent context on this poem.

they had dragged her 4’10” Black Woman’s frame

trying to create according to our plan

Fig. 17.—Upper chambers excavated at

Fig. 18.—Map of the site of Nineveh; from Oppert.

1. A Conversation with Marjorie Perloff 7

2. The Feminist Poetry Movement in America 19

3. American Poetry and War 33

4. Experimental Asian American Poetry 49

5. Undisciplined Writing: Postwar Prose Poetry 61

7. Subjectivity and Identity in New York School Poetry 85

9. The Autobiographical Prose of Poets 113

10. Queer Poetry after 1945 125

13. The Black Art of Confession 163

14. Binding Nation-States: Poetry Anthologies of Hawai‘i, 1966–2018 177

16. Mitsuye Yamada 215

17. Marilyn Nelson 221

18. Rae Armantrout 225

19. Lorna Dee Cervantes 233

20. Marilyn Chin 245

21. Geof Huth 255

22. Juan Delgado 269

23. Claudia Rankine 279

24. Crisosto Apache 287

25. Joshua Jennifer Espinoza 293

26. A Conversation with Stephanie Burt 299

27. Ecopoetics: In and against the American Grain 305

28. Economies of Scale: Contemporary Poetry and the Marketplace 323

29. Contemporary Children’s Poetry: A Colloquy 339

30. Multilingual American Poetry and Poetics 361

32. The Rise of Award-Winning Black Poets 391

33. The Fourth Wave in Native American Poetics 405

34. Recent Trends in Jewish American Poetry 419

35. What Is the Queer Confessional? 429

36. Poetry Translation and Poet-Translators 437

37. Prosthetic Poetics: Contemporary Poetry of Disability 449

L ist of C ontributors 489