The MFA hegemonic poetry style
August 27th, 2008Rachel Blau DuPlessis to CAConrad:
All I can say is that I am fascinated by Loy and her manifesto; in fact have analyzed it and some of her poems in one of my books, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry. It is a very generative document, and also one so bravely, brashly critical and suspicious of culture as usual that it calls for the surgical destruction of the hymen at puberty so that girls can no longer trade their virginity for a marriage and a good establishment. To be against parasitism (i.e. marriage the old way) and prostitution (perhaps also marriage!), as she was, is to still hold a very radical, a VERY radical position on gender. However, in her life, she was also “for” really manly men and womanly women–she is interested in the extremes there, too. PLUS, and I love this, she is for “mongrel” language and diction. All cultural figures who take the risk of writing at all have to be seen as complex.
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Writerly alertness to gender materials in culture could not possibly be focused by one only kind of feminist urgency. What did develop after the feminist movement, beginning around 1967 and 1968 was an extreme cultural self-consciousness about gender. This is the result of the bifurcation between a vision of cultural critique and a religious orientation that I spoke of above. There were issues regarding accessibility of language and the presentation of easy to understand findings; there seemed to be a desire for a very consumable art product. Actually, this was not just feminism; it was (for me) a somewhat astonishing mix of MFA hegemonic poetry style with this touch of or dollop of feminist practitioners that created a somewhat robotic poetic culture. It was as if the worst impulses of the MFA sensibility–highly colored imagery, stolid rhythms, limited sense of the line, obvious epiphanies, I-based narrative explorations, a valorizing of personal experience as if there were no mediation from language when one wrote, and finally an ultimate innocence about all this AS a convention–crossed with the worst impulses of feminist thought–lurid claims, easily limned imagery, stark binaries, melodramatic narratives, expression of motifs with fixed outlines, a new and quite interesting frankness that also had certain conventionalized outcomes or closures, a loss of analytic suspicion. I am giving a very tight-lipped picture, I suppose. I think this is similar to what you have cited from Alexandra about gays and lesbians, in your question. But this was not only—or hardly!–the “fault” of the liberation movements; it was really their uses of mainstream period style. Hence between an MFA mode that is persistent to this day, and a broad-brush pro-woman line, I felt painted into a corner.
By feminism I mean gender analysis, and a passionate motivation to work for the change of some abuses and oppressions in the sex-gender system. By gender analysis I mean asking what roles gender (including constructions of masculinity and sexuality issues in general) play in any cultural product or political institution or social practice. Gender analysis is a secular tool of critical understanding, not a religious or quasi-religious structure of feeling. As I have said, now, a couple of ways, early feminism seemed to split between people who wanted the mode of the essay or on-going investigation, and people who wanted the sermon, or the church. What feminism did was open the investigative, critical project of cultural analysis for me; I was less interested in positive affirmative thought. The thing is—people who experience a fervent upsurge of political feeling often DO feel this as a belief system—they are not insincere! and probably wonder at the cooler sometimes skeptical tone of the non-converts. Anyway, sometimes this split occurred in the same person, and sometimes was the same person at different stages.