> In that case, though, the adoption of a particular formal register
> would be a feminist gesture chiefly because of a historical antagonism
> between prior workings of that form (presumably by un-"female"
> writers) and feminist concerns: the game would be to co-opt and
> subvert a manner of speaking by means of which one had formerly been
> patronised and ignored.
Actually, my own personal feeling that formalism is a feminist gesture
is based more than this in the opposite movement--on the roots that
formalism has in centuries of women's poetry, much of it overlooked
--and in the embodiments characteristic of goddess and pagan theology.
>
> But I have some trouble with what looks to me like the
> mischaracterisation of free verse as either clandestinely
> fixed-metrical or simply un-metrical - of metre as a tennis-net that
> must be either up or down. Celine's prose, a canonical example for
> Kristeva of poetic language, is not written in fixed metre...
Personally I posit numerous traditional meters (many more than are
usually acknowledged), and numerous ways of engaging with those
traditional meters (from unconscious quoting to unskilled or abandoned
attempts at use to conscious irony to calculated subversion to
co-optation to amused play to sheer revelling to rhapsodic engagement
to dogged following to reactionary glee)--and which of these is in
force is not always apparent except by looking carefully at the context
of the poet's other work and literary milieu or lack thereof (i have no
"cohort" that I know of, Dominic!!) and where meter is concerned, I
hear not only these traditional meters but also numerous other ways of
being rhythmical that may or may not evoke particular traditional
meters with their historical associations. That the traditional meter
of iambic pentameter was meaningful for Whitman, evoking nonverbally a
certain kind of "poetic authority," and that some contemporary poets
play off these same connotations presumably says nothing relevant to
Celine's rhythmic practices, or to those of any other poet who may be
working without meters or with idiosyncratic meters or personal rhythms
or with traditional meters that are there but don't have particularly
meaningful connotations. Why should it?
Annie
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