Saving the Earth: Wendy Mulford's Salthouse

Abstract

Wendy Mulford is a significant figure within contemporary British avant-garde poetry. Having been associated with the influential Cambridge group of poets—which grew up in the late 1960s and which has variously included writers such as J. H. Prynne, Andrew Crozier, and Douglas Oliver—Mulford has published with a variety of predominantly small presses since the late 1970s, producing work that has ranged from early feminist-Marxist material such as Bravo to Girls & Heroes (1977) to the more spiritually directed writing of female saints' lives in Virtuous Magic: Women Saints And Their Meanings (1998; co-written with Sara Maitland). According to critic Ken Edwards, Mulford's work emerges from two specific areas of poetic and political practice. The first is her involvement in the so-called British Poetry Revival, an avant-garde movement in British poetry which Edwards describes as “the establishing of a ‘tradition of the new’ by some British poets in the late 1960's and early 1970's” as a “modernist reaction against the poets associated with The Movement and other groups.” Alongside this, Edwards identifies the second formative strand to Mulford's work as “the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970's, and the political and specifically feminist theory of such writers as Cixous and Irigray [sic]” (686). Mulford's relationship with much British poetry is consequently problematic, for reasons Edwards outlines: “In Britain, most ‘feminist’ poetry remains formally conservative, while the avant-garde remains male dominated. Meanwhile the literary climate since the 1970's has turned against experiment, with the result that poetry such as Mulford's is less ‘understood’ than ever” (686). This assessment was published in 1991, and it is fair to say that the conditions of British poetry outlined here have not changed substantially. By contrast, Edwards suggests that Mulford's work finds rich “affinities” with “the poetry and theory” of North American writers such as “Alice Notley, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Rosmarie Waldrop, Beverly Dahlen, and Susan Howe” (686). As with much British avant-garde poetry, in other words, it is arguably the case that many of Mulford's most significant contexts are trans-Atlantic rather than indigenous.