Contemporary Women Poets Research Articles

How green was my valley: the critique of the picturesque by Irish and Galician women poets

The present paper explores how contemporary women poets in Ireland and Galicia have engaged, for the last thirty years, in a critique of the Picturesque representations of landscape. Irish poets like Eavan Boland, Anne Le Marquand Hartigan or Mary Dorcey, and Galician ones like Luz Pichel, Chus Pato and Lupe Gomez draw our attention to the strategies through which power relations, as well as political and economic interests, shape space. These female poets also expose the ways in which gender difference affects our experience of landscape. A materialist approach helps us see the conditions of labour that are inscribed in those landscapes that much of the pastoral canon has represented as idyllic spaces for leisure. Besides, current ecofeminist debates contribute to this critique of the picturesque with their conception of the relative difference of nature.

Dramatists and the Bomb: American and British Playwrights Confront the Nuclear Age, 1945-1964 by Charles A. Carpenter Mirrors of Our Playing: Paradigms and Presences in Modern Drama by Thomas R. Whitaker (review)

poems, includingthe recentlydiscoveredcomic poem, 'Balladof the SubwayTrain', writtenwhen shewas sixteen. Other essayson childhood areBarbaraPage's'Bishop as Poet of Childhood Recollected' (pp. 21-34), and Gail H. Dayton's critiqueof the autobiographicalmemoir in prose, 'The CountryMouse' (pp. 35-4I). Another section focuses upon 'Worcesterand Elsewhere',primarilyessaysabout Brazil, exile and migration, that fill in some interesting biographical detail on familiar topics. Carmen L. Oliveira's 'Luminous Lota' (pp. 83-91) and George Monteiro's 'Bishop'sBraziland ViceVersa' (pp. 93-98) have sympatheticperspectives on Lota de Macedo Soares with whom Bishop lived for thirteen years at Petropolis.Essaysin thissection also drawon the paradisetheme, includingHarriet Y. Cooper's 'ElizabethBishop:Longing forHome - And Paradise'(pp. I19-28). The section of five essays on translation has three essays on Bishop's own translations,and two on translatingherworkintoJapanese. The section on Bishop's relationshipto other writershas a diverse net ranging from the expected names of George Herbert and Wordsworth (the latter again in pursuit of the childhood theme), to Jorie Graham and other contemporary women poets in James McCorkle's essay 'Elizabeth Bishop's Embracing Gaze' (pp. 259-70). Students would be happy to light upon the section entitled 'Images and Insights: Close Readings' which includes Joelle Biele on 'The End of March' (pp. 129-38) and Lorrie Goldensohn's insightfulessay illustratedwith some of Bishop'swatercolors, 'ElizabethBishop'sWrittenPictures,PaintedPoems' (pp. I67-76). 'Imperialism,Politics,Racism'isashortsection,butconfirmsthatpostcolonialism is currently a productive, if problematic field in Bishop studies. Steven Gould Axelrod wastes no time in posing the question: 'Was Elizabeth Bishop a Racist?' (pp. 345-56), focusing, not on the Brazilianpoems, but upon racial identity in two early poems, 'Cootchie' and 'Songs for a Colored Singer'. He finds the former a 'naive discourse' guilty of 'peeking out' from a 'cocoon of whiteness'. Renee R. Curry's 'Elizabeth Bishop: At Home with Whiteness' (pp. 337-44) reads 'The Imaginary Iceberg' as a 'blatant display of white racial dominance'. Both critics acknowledgethe complexity of Bishop'spoetry, but seem surprisedthat she did not take pains to edit out racist stereotypes. These papers raise interesting issues, but seem so paralysedby theirown desireto exhibit correctracialattitudesthat they fail to trace the exploratorynature of her imagination:attitudesand shiftsof attitudes, after all, were her poetic material. The ground is laid here, however, for further workon this subject. The essays in this collection would provide studentswith a useful entry into the Bishop criticalcommunity, and it is good to thinkthat Worcester,for all its painful associationsfor Bishop personally, can also be a place of communal celebration of her life and work. UNIVERSITY OF READING PAT RIGHELATO Dramatistsand the Bomb:American and BritishPlaywrights Confront theNuclearAge, I945-i964. By CHARLESA. CARPENTER. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press. I999. xv + I83 pp. ?47.95. Alirrorsof OurPlaying.Paradigms and Presences in Modern Drama. By THOMAS R. WHITAKER.(Theater:Theory/Text/Performance) Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press. I999. viii + 309 PP. $49.50;?36. These two books, both of which springfrom intenselypersonal concerns, takevery different approaches to the nature of drama and its function within twentiethcentury culture. poems, includingthe recentlydiscoveredcomic poem, 'Balladof the SubwayTrain', writtenwhen shewas sixteen. Other essayson childhood areBarbaraPage's'Bishop as Poet of Childhood Recollected' (pp. 21-34), and Gail H. Dayton's critiqueof the autobiographicalmemoir in prose, 'The CountryMouse' (pp. 35-4I). Another section focuses upon 'Worcesterand Elsewhere',primarilyessaysabout Brazil, exile and migration, that fill in some interesting biographical detail on familiar topics. Carmen L. Oliveira's 'Luminous Lota' (pp. 83-91) and George Monteiro's 'Bishop'sBraziland ViceVersa' (pp. 93-98) have sympatheticperspectives on Lota de Macedo Soares with whom Bishop lived for thirteen years at Petropolis.Essaysin thissection also drawon the paradisetheme, includingHarriet Y. Cooper's 'ElizabethBishop:Longing forHome - And Paradise'(pp. I19-28). The section of five essays on translation has three essays on Bishop's own translations,and two on translatingherworkintoJapanese. The section on Bishop's relationshipto other writershas a diverse net ranging from the expected names of George Herbert and Wordsworth (the latter again in pursuit of the childhood theme), to Jorie Graham and other contemporary women poets in James McCorkle's essay 'Elizabeth Bishop's Embracing Gaze' (pp. 259-70). Students would be happy to light upon the section entitled 'Images...

Editorial: Contemporary Women Poets

Editorial: Contemporary Women Poets

‘Older Sisters Are Very Sobering Things’: Contemporary Women Poets and the Female Affiliation Complex

If, as history indicates, the directions of poetry are determined by its inheritance — that is, its perception of its past — in looking at literary records such as poems, reviews and other critical texts, it is possible to anticipate how twentieth-century women's poetry will come to be defined and the extent to which it will have value and authority. This in its turn will formulate the nature and status of women's poetry in the twenty-first century. In surveying twentieth-century poetry in Britain, the signs are that just as the label ‘poetess’ was a handicap to the self-perception of a woman at the beginning of this century, so the label ‘woman poet’ will shackle her in the next, largely because her end-of-the-twentieth-century predecessors will have become mythologized as a literary underclass, undermined and overlooked. One reason for the pattern of the last three hundred years, where women publish and then slip from literary histories, is that they do not receive proper attention from male-dominated literary criticism. Although women now seem to be sufficiently published to make segregation unnecessary, there is still a case for positive discrimination or their names will disappear from the records. Positive discrimination in the form of gendered segregation is, however, opposed by poets because of their uneasy relationship with one another. Women poets need an alternative line of development to the ‘masculinity complex’ whereby they unsuccessfully seek recognition within the male traditions, or the ‘female affiliation complex’ which prevents them from identifying themselves with one another. It will be argued that there is an emerging tendency in recent poets to plunder and appropriate the associations of the male tradition and that feminist critics need to theorize this aesthetic and make connections between poets so that they become positive role models for poets of the future.

Contemporary women poets

Contemporary women poets

Feminism, Ecology, Romanticism

lizabeth A. Fay's Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics is a strikingly original, conceptually fascinating, and reader-challenging excursion into largely uncharted realms of psycho-aesthetic-cultural-feminist-topographicalmythopoetic criticism. The book positions itself in relation to one of most prevalent-and undeniably productive-obsessions in current academic criticism, discrimination of Romanticisms on basis of gender. William Wordsworth is a central (dare one say seminal?) player in these scholarly debates. His masculinist project (4) is often cited by feminist and cultural critics as paradigmatic of male Romantic quest for poetic self-creation that silences, effaces, or in some way violates feminine. Exactly what constitutes the feminine is not always clear, but fact that Dorothy Wordsworth was William's life-long companion, amanuensis, interlocutor, and critic, as well as a (mainly unpublished) poet and journal writer who suffered mental and physical disorder in old age, has led to speculation concerning effects of brother's egotistical sublime on sister's putatively failed talent (4). Like other studies interested in contours and ramifications of a female English Romanticism, Becoming Wordsworthian cites considerable and, until recently, underappreciated influence on William Wordsworth of contemporary women poets such as Helen Maria Williams and Charlotte Smith. The book hypothesizes, for example, that William's imaginative reconstruction of Lake

Modern and contemporary Spanish women poets

Modern and contemporary Spanish women poets

"Thou maist have thy Will": The Sonnets of Shakespeare and His Stepsisters

dergraduates may quickly become overwhelmed by the array of unanswered and unanswerable questions that surround the 1609 Quarto. When they come to the sonnets with the expectation of hearing the unmediated voice of the Bard, they confront instead a group of shifting and mysterious figures-the fair young friend(s), the rival poet, and the dark lady. If they share Wordsworth's conviction that unlocked his heart in the sonnets,' they may follow in the wake of many earlier generations of readers who have searched in vain for a key. To lead students into more fruitful approaches to the sonnets, I prefer to teach the sequence in conjunction with lyrics by contemporary women poets, including Elizabeth I, Aemilia Lanyer, and Lady Mary Wroth. By using a paratactic method-juxtaposing sonnets on related subjects, such as absence, night, lust, betrayal, or constancy-it is possible to see how these poets differ in their treatment of conventional motifs.2 It is also valuable to explore how Shakespeare and the women authors radically transform their Petrarchan heritage, for most of these poets are writing after the extraordinary outpouring of English sonnet sequences in the 1590s. They confront the common problem of how to write in a genre in which the female beloved is generally silent, distant, and unattainable. One strategy to use in teaching the sonnets is to divide the class into teams, each responsible for researching and discussing a critical perspective on the poetry. Although the particular approaches listed below could easily be changed or expanded, the advantage of having students working together is the opportunity it gives them to discuss the poetry in small groups, to formulate their own interpretations, and then to share their results with the class; often the groups offer vastly different readings of the same poem, especially Sonnets 20, 93, or 1 16. In the first week of study on the sonnets, I generally meet with each of the teams outside of class to discuss the readings (and in some cases to provide additional reading materials, such as xeroxes of the 1609 Quarto or Wroth's manuscript poems). During the second and third weeks, the teams give their class presentations. The students working on physical features of the texts generally speak last because their topic is the least familiar and requires some extra time for preparation.

The Fertile Rhythms: Contemporary Women Poets of Mexico

The Fertile Rhythms: Contemporary Women Poets of Mexico

"She Want It All": The Sun Goddess in Contemporary Women's Poetry

It is expected of conventions that they be invisible-or visible only when broken. So it is with odd notion that sun is an emblem of masculinity, phallic power, yang force. Odd, that is, to Japanese, Ainu, Koreans, Siberians, Australians, Germans, Scandinavians, Lithuanians, Finns, Cherokee, Eskimo, Toba, Achomawi, and others to whom sun is female. To them, same physical object that in our literature so naturally, so unquestionably represents the solar principle, virile, intellectual, lucid' becomes to them Dearest Goddess, more important than God, who provides not only warmth and colors of rainbow, but good as well.2 To them, radiant power means not man but woman. So, too, to Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Ntozake Shange, and other contemporary women poets, who break literary convention of at least a thousand years by introducing a female sun into their works. Sometimes this goddess is celebratory:

Contemporary Women Poets

Contemporary Women Poets

An annotated bibliography of contemporary women poets of Australia

An annotated bibliography of contemporary women poets of Australia