Abstract
This essay will explore the idea that while innovation and formal experiment within poetry have been persistently figured as the fruits of male, predominantly bourgeois literary production, the material conditions and the pressured social contexts of working-class women's lives exert a peculiar power over the rhetorics and aesthetics of our poetry, driving a relentless innovation. Such innovation has the potential to reinvent poetic method, to renegotiate the terms of social as well as textual encounter, and to resist the tyranny of 'good' middle-class prosody.
Highlights
Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service
This essay will explore the idea that while innovation and formal experiment within poetry have been persistently figured as the fruits of male, predominantly bourgeois literary production, the material conditions and the pressured social contexts of working-class women’s lives exert a peculiar power over the rhetorics and aesthetics of our poetry, driving a relentless innovation
As Lyn Hejinian stated in her landmark essay ‘The Rejection of Closure’, Language poetry opposed the lyric’s ‘coercive epiphanic mode’, its ‘smug pretension to universality’, attending instead to the materiality of the text; Art. 4, page 7 of 25 to poem as substance, poem as sound.[11]
Summary
Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. This essay will explore the idea that while innovation and formal experiment within poetry have been persistently figured as the fruits of male, predominantly bourgeois literary production, the material conditions and the pressured social contexts of working-class women’s lives exert a peculiar power over the rhetorics and aesthetics of our poetry, driving a relentless innovation.
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