We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics by Laura Hinton , Cynthia Hogue (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.1, 2004 185 nothing about the poetry after The WasteLand, does she give enough sense of Eliot's impact in the twentieth century. Instead, she attempts to abbreviate an argument about modernism, seeing it in terms of a new attention to language and of the power of words within modernity to generate new significances as the initiative is ceded to them. The absence of so many others who might have been discussed, the attempts to draw the lines of discussion so that there is very little attention to the culture(s) of modernism, and none to what modernism was contesting, make the book, though in? teresting in detail, a little inconsequential too. It is hardly a 'manifesto'?for although Perloff has a considerate reputation in discussing modernism, and in extending its sway into what others have seen as the postmodern, and though she refuses to say anything about e-poetries, she also seems to be saying here too little. The result is writing that is interesting and not pompous, but it is not altogether new. University of Hong Kong Jeremy Tambling We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Po? etics. Ed. by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2002. xii +376 pp. $60.00 (pbk $24.95). ISBN 0-8173-1094-0 (pbko-8173-1095-9). Described as the 'firstcritical volume devoted to the full range ofwomen's postmodern works', these eighteen previously unpublished essays work well together in providing a useful overview of contemporary avant-garde women's writing. The book's firsttwo sections explore relations between the avant-garde and various traditions, the third examines texts as performances, and the fourth concentrates on the relation between body and text. The essays are intelligently arranged, ensuring that each generates insights that are developed subsequently. The essays are especially connected by the ways in which the contributors confrontwhat appear to be conventional and inevitable binary oppositions. This gesture is anticipated in the introduction, where the editors challenge the assumption that postmodern art's emphasis on the materiality of language nullifies its potential for political engagement. In this light, the task that this book sets for itself can be seen as not only political, the restoration of potential praxis to the avant-garde, but hu? manist, the restitution of emotion and subjectivity to an art sometimes seen as a denial of them. This challenge to binary thinking is taken up in differentways. Eileen Gregory, citing Linda Kinnahan, points out that Kathleen Fraser's poetry is both a criticism of the marginalizing effect of patriarchal power structures and simultaneously an affirmation of marginality as a necessary position for creativity. Writing on Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Charles Altieri sees her work as countering the 'imaginatively crippling binary opposition that honors experiment almost exclusively as a radical attitude toward the poem's language while relegating values like intimacy to the reactionary egocentricity of an enervated romanticism' (p. 57). Several contribu? tors affirmand explore aspects of radical continuity between contemporary women's writing and various humanist traditions and, rather than softening the radical edge of experimental writing, this approach has the overall effectof conceptual stabilization in which experimental writing is more securely connected to earlier conventions and traditions rather than being disconnected from or opposed to them. These affirmative gestures do not necessarily make experimental writing seem more mainstream, but they do make it harder to dismiss experimentation as eccentric, superficial, or purely self-referential. This approach works well in Charles Borkhuis's comments on Ann Lauterbach and the sublime, and in two essays that consider women's transformative renegotiations of epic: Susan McCabe's on Alice Notley, and Heather Thomas's 186 Reviews on Anne Waldman. This form of renegotiation is also a sustained feature of Nicole Cooley's excellent (and moving) essay on Kathy Acker's last texts, while Ron Silliman 's close readings of poems by Rae Armantrout function to locate them within conventional idioms. Some of the essays are informative in the straightforward sense of making much more available than before a body of writing that often seems forbiddingly inaccessible, even when (and this is not always the case) it is...