Twenty years after the landmark conference held at Barnard College in April 1999, “Where Lyric Tradition Meets Language Poetry: Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry by Women,” scholars of American poetry have agreed that the so-called “poetry wars” that sparked the conference have subsided. The strict divide between experimentation and expression in American poetry has “fractured” into what Vernon Shetley describes as “microclimates,” “niches structured by different, often radically discordant, ideas about poetry.”[i] This panel hopes to extend the conversation about the important role contemporary women poets have played in designing those varied and resistant “microclimates.” Interrogating the troubling compulsion towards rubrics, schools, movements and factions—confessional poetry, Language poetry, conceptual poetry, new narrative poetry, documentary poetry, lyric poetry—that seek to contain and define writing styles and proclivities, this panel presents essays on three contemporary women poets, Claudia Rankine, Leslie Scalapino and Cecilia Vicuña whose work troubles categorical divisions and in the process, have changed the face of contemporary poetry. The concerns of this panel also dovetail serendipitously with the Presidential Theme of 2020 convention. All three writers bear witness to the limits and the possibilities of the human in their work.

The panel is composed of three essays, “The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject,” by Kamran Javadizadeh; “Leslie Scalapino’s Anarchic Moment,” by Michael Cross, and “Reading as Ritual Response: The Artist’s Books of Cecilia Vicuña” by Julie Brown. Together, the three papers demonstrate the innovative forms found in the work of these important women poets. Each speaker will limit their presentation to twenty minutes, leaving time for a conversation among the panelists and with the audience.

In his presentation on Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Javadizadeh focuses on Rankine’s invention of new forms of lyric subjectivity. Rankine reroutes the expressive lyric’s investment in the singular self, discovered in well-established lines of American genealogy, into a sustained and historicizing attention to dispersed networks of black kinship. She does so in part through a revisionary allusion to Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and thereby lays bare the fact that his landmark book, which she treats as a paradigm of the expressive lyric tradition, relies on the (usually unspoken) whiteness of its lyric subject for the force of its autobiographical disclosures. Rankine’s Citizen not only helps us see the expressive lyric tradition in a radically new way but also develops an introspective lyric mode that refuses lyric conventions while remaining alert, dispersed, and open to the political, social, and racialized formations that govern the lived experience of contemporary American life.

In her extreme fragmentation, de-centering of the lyric “I,” and commitment to theory and seriality, Leslie Scalapino’s work has often been aligned with the politics and methods of an experimental, Language-oriented aesthetic. But with her emphasis on interiority, her poetics cannot be be fully accounted for by the parameters of Language-based experimentation. Scalapino wrote across genres, including poetry, essays, the novel and detective fiction but was consistent in her creation of unsmooth surfaces and attention to the radical particularity of language. In “Leslie Scalapino’s Anarchic Moment,” Cross draws on early works like Considering how exaggerated music is and That they were at the beach to delineate the ways Scalapino’s poetry resists categorization of any kind, testing the limits of space, time and the text in order to test collectively and concomitantly occupied social environments through writing. Cross explores her work as a conceptual practice that tracks the limits of space and time in order to, finally, test the limits of consciousness: a scrutiny and praxis that occur simultaneously, pitting the two-dimensional tensile strain of the word against a mind making experience fictional—a writing in which the nexus reader-writer-word is the burden of the testing ground itself. The telos of Scalapino’s writing is the recovery of what recoils amidst and against the habitual—it’s goal is to make the space of the page the unconcealment of the “anarchist moment,” which we might understand as the human experience of time itself.

Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña has been working across genre and rubrics since the 1970s, developing a truly intersectional body of works that draw on poetry, painting, sculpture, installation, dance, song, and film. Brown’s “Reading as Ritual Response” considers Saborami, a bilingual artist’s book first published after the 1973 coup in Chile. In Saborami Vicuña harnesses the visual, material, and tactile capacities of the book to preserve histories and reimage presents and futures. Pinochet’s coup inflicted a national trauma of massive proportions, from the torture and disappearance of individuals to the systematic dismantling of Chile’s economic systems and cultural memories. If the nature of trauma is to resist narrative comprehension and to persist through melancholic repetition, then its subject suffers doubly from the initial event and from its unbidden, uncanny returns. Brown argues that Vicuña’s repeated efforts to revise and republish Saborami demonstrate not merely the poet’s melancholic return to an original trauma, but also her investment in ancient Andean models of time and her belief in the poïetic powers of reading as a ritual response to collective trauma. The Aymara tradition of facing the past (while turning one’s back on the future) places history immediately before us, directly at hand and readily reworked. With each return to Saborami, Vicuña works to reform the past from the present, and to turn the violence of Chile’s collective trauma toward a larger, cosmic reversal.

The panel celebrates the important role women poets have played in devising resistant and unruly modes of poetic inquiry. Rather than ranging somewhere on the spectrum between lyric expressiveness and language-based self-reflexivity, Rankine, Vicuna and Scalapino have each carved out a poetic mode that cannot be fully accounted for by that continuum, writing both at the vanguard of the field and within the indefinable interstices of form and genre.

[i] Vernon Shelton “The Poetry of Engagement and the Politics of Reading” in The News from Poems: Essays on the 21^st Century American Poetry of Engagement (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 2016).