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On Sun, 7 May 2000, Joseph Duemer wrote: > Both Dom & Alison have used the word "argument" to characterize this thread--am > I missing something? This series of posts has neither sense of the word, either > "disagreement" nor "structured presentation of an idea." > > jd > Come come, Joseph: perhaps I can be allowed the other colloquial meaning of ragbag to and fro conversation, especially with email. When I first encoutered Rukeyser - thanks to those Paris Press editions - I was amazed I had not met her work before. Poems like The Dead surely deserve to stand with the absolute best American poetry has produced this century, and I rate her higher than Adrienne Rich, who is hard to miss. Eclipse rather than erasure is a better metaphor, but there's no doubt the eclipse existed; and if even feminists say (as in the introduction to her Selected Poems) that her eclipse was due to the birth of her son, which inevitably meant her decline as a poet, and that Rukeyser's denial of that was just typical of the way mothers erase the truth about child rearing, what is there to say? (That introduction, btw, made me very angry). Of course her gender played a part. Best Alison %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%