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BRITISH-IRISH-POETS  2006

BRITISH-IRISH-POETS 2006

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Subject:

Re: Oxford Conference

From:

Jane Holland' <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Jane Holland' <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 14:51:31 +0100

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (50 lines)

On Sat, 30 Sep 2006 22:53:34 +1000, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Surely it's a a pretty
>reductive way of reading, looking for gender markers; surely
>imagination plays in a writerly self? After all, we're talking about
>the writing, aren't we?
>

Absolutely, it is reductive, and was never a suggestion that I would have made. But then I have 
been talking about woman's poetry in general, rather than in specifics. Still, I think this could be 
an interesting exercise, if only because it would highlight the confusion on this topic between 
CONTENT and VOICE. 

To return to the 'desiring I/eye' in women's lyrical poetry which seems to have caused this 
confusion, here is the last stanza of my own poem 'Pulse', condemned by Sheenagh Pugh, as I 
recall, for its lack of lyricism, a judgement which plays into this notion that women find an active 
'desiring I' hard to express in lyrical terms:

I am not a woman poet.
I am a woman and a poet.
The difference is in the eyes.

Along the same lines, if we look at Bloom's theory of the poetic predecessor (i.e. an 
inspirational role model/deadly rival) then the problems for women become immediately apparent. 
The vast majority of 'great' poets have been male, for largely social reasons. So does a woman 
choose to take on a male predecessor and write in the male tradition of poetry (i.e. the canonical 
version of poetry's history) or does she take on a female predecessor, whose work 
would almost certainly have been marginalised to some extent during her lifetime and would 
probably have taken its line from the male tradition anyway in terms of style, due to a lack of 
strong female role models? 

Neither option seems particularly attractive to me, nor, I suspect, to a large proportion of new 
women poets in search of a strong role model. Which is more or less, as I understood it, what Zoe 
was saying initially about a current struggle against the passive voice in women's lyric poetry. 

Basically, to deny the existence of a difference between men and women is to force women writers 
into line with the canonical (i.e. largely male) tradition of poetry, as there has never been a strong 
female or gender-neutral tradition for us to work in, only a passive female poetry which does not 
threaten male supremacy and is therefore sanctioned by male poets and critics. Women's writing 
per se is effectively eradicated by such a denial, of course, being subsumed into the male 
tradition. The only way to avoid that trap is to focus on the individual woman and her 'difference' 
as a writer from men and other women, not the ways in which she is similar. In other words, to 
focus on the personal rather than the collective. But to deny gender is to instantly deny the 
personal, for what what could be more personal than our gender?  

Jane


www.janeholland.co.uk

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