[In the following essay, Armantrout discusses Niedecker's relationship to other feminist poets and Niedecker's vision of female identity.]

In 1978 Charles Bernstein asked me to write an essay responding to the question, “Why don't more women do language-oriented writing?” The first answer that came to mind was that, as an oppressed group, women have a more urgent need to describe the conditions of their lives. This answer, however, seemed rather facile. It implied, for instance, that there was another (that is, a non-language-centered) poetic style in use that could fully and clearly represent the nature of women's oppression. I wasn't convinced of that. The question of how best to represent women's social position remained open, and the answer must depend on what one assumed to be the cause of that position. Moreover, I didn't believe that women had ever shown a marked preference for writing poetry of an easily readable, because conventional, kind. From Dickinson to Stein to Riding-Jackson to the women I discussed in that 1978 essay (Susan Howe, Carla Harryman, and Lyn Hejinian), American women have been radical innovators.

Since 1978 the debate around the role of women and minorities in experimental writing has developed and grown richer, partly because of the influence of French thinkers such as Lacan, Irigaray, and Cixous, and partly because of the recent, varied proliferation of poetry by women. Despite these influences, however, it is still a widely held opinion that formal experimentation is the province (privilege?) of a ruling elite. Ron Silliman summarized this position in Socialist Review when he wrote:

Progressive poets who identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history—many white male heterosexuals, for example—are apt to challenge all that is supposedly “natural” about the formation of their own subjectivity. That their writing today is apt to call into question, if not actually explode, such conventions as narrative, persona, and even reference can hardly be surprising. At the other end of this spectrum are poets who do not identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history, for they have instead been its objects. The narrative of history has led not to their self-actualization, but to their exclusion and domination. These writers and readers—women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the marginal—have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to whom is the subject of these conventions, illuminates the relation between form and audience.¹

I wonder, however, whether the nature of women's oppression can be best expressed in the poem that, as Silliman put it, “looks conventional.” The conventional or mainstream poem today is a univocal, more or less plain-spoken, short narrative often culminating in a sort of epiphany. Such a form must convey an impression of closure and wholeness no matter what it says. It is, however, I believe, the core of woman's condition that she is internally divided, divided against herself. This division begins at the level of the symbolic. She is taught that she is Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be awakened (which can be exciting), but she also knows that she is “always already” awake. Lacan says that woman as Subject does not exist because she does not have access to the symbolic order or Law of the Father. He sees the phallus as the symbol of the symbolic order; woman's exclusion from it is then morphologically based. How the phallus myth became such a symbol has, of course, been widely debated. I will only say that the boy who thus invests his sexual organ must already have a prodigious power of symbolic identification. How did he acquire it? It is clear that there are many social forces at work in our culture that encourage the male child to identify himself with some external image of potency. From Father to Sherlock Holmes to Superman—the man is aggrandized into being. As for the girl-child's experience, I always knew that Wonder Woman was an afterthought. But these images, as Simone Weil has said, “are garments. They were ashamed of their nakedness. Lauzun and the office of Captain of Musketeers. He preferred to be a prisoner and Captain of Musketeers rather than go free and not be Captain.”²

I don't think women's relatively difficult access to the “symbolic order” is inevitable, but, more important, I don't think it is necessarily all bad. Might there not be a moment of potential in that exclusion, a moment of freedom? Perhaps it is not, to quote Silliman again, “white male heterosexuals who are most apt to challenge all that is supposedly natural about the formation of subjectivity.” As outsiders, women might, in fact, be well positioned to appreciate the constructedness of the identity that is based on identification and, therefore, to challenge the contemporary poetic convention of the unified Voice.

American feminist critics such as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Alicia Ostriker, however, continue to valorize the poem dominated by a single image or trope and a trustworthy (authoritative) narrational voice. (In her book, Stealing the Language, for instance, Ostriker praises Elizabeth Bishop for her “usual tone of trustworthy casualness.”³) It is easy to see that such a style might be more immediately accessible than others. Is such a poem, then, best equipped to raise feminist issues? Let us use the following poem by Sharon Olds to examine the relation of style and tone to the experience of gender:

“THE ONE GIRL AT THE BOYS PARTY”

When I take my girl to the swimming party
I set her down among the boys. They tower and
bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek,
her math scores unfolding in the air around her.
They will strip to their suits, her body hard and
indivisible as a prime number,
they'll plunge in the deep end, she'll subtract
her height from ten feet, divide it into
hundreds of gallons of water, the numbers
bouncing in her mind like molecules of chlorine
in the bright blue pool. When they climb out,
her ponytail will hang its pencil lead
down her back, her narrow suit
with hamburgers and french fries printed on it
will glisten in the brilliant air, and they will
see her sweet face, solemn and
sealed, a factor of one, and she will
see their eyes, two each,
their legs, two each, and the curves of their sexes,
one each, and in her head she'll be doing her
wild multiplying as the drops
sprinkle and fall to the power of a thousand from her body.(4)

Here Olds presents us with a version of female identity using her daughter as an example. This is the kind of exemplary narrative often seen in mainstream verse. The apparent narrative impulse, however, and the plain-speaking style that goes with it are almost immediately overwhelmed by a hyperextended and contrived metaphor. In the narrative frame, the daughter is a girl who is good at math; in the metaphor she is sealed, indivisible, a factor of one. Are these adjectives merely a code for virginal? Are we to assume that she is good at math because she is a virgin? Given the fact that the pressure against female achievement increases with adolescence, perhaps so. I don't think the poem really deals with this issue, however. The striking thing about this poem is how oddly phallic the image of the girl becomes. Her ponytail is a lead pencil; her suit is narrow. She is like Dickinson's narrow fellow in the grass. She divides the water with her hard body. Thus Olds makes her entrance into Lacan's proscribed symbolic order, using her daughter as a phallus. Is that what Olds meant to do? If so, are we meant to be troubled by this act of appropriation? Although Olds is not reputed to be a difficult poet, I'm unable to answer these questions. What the poem seems to imply is that people and things are serviceable, interchangeable, ready to be pressed into the service of metaphor. When Olds claims to know what is in her daughter's mind, claims there are “numbers bouncing in her mind like molecules of chlorine,” I am repelled as by a presumptuous intrusion. This little girl is only a prop. There is no outside to this metaphoric system, no acknowledged division within it. It is imperialistic.

If women are outsiders in the symbolic order, if they experience psychic division, there is little sign of it in Olds's work. Such a totalizing metaphor as the one in this poem creates an impression of order and clarity by repressing any consciousness of dissent. Only information tailored to the controlling code is admissible; no second thoughts or outside voices are allowed. Whether such a poem is clear depends upon what one means by clarity. Certainly, it is quite readable.

There are, however, many women poets operating apart from this literally dominating methodology. I intend to discuss two of them: Lyn Hejinian and Lorine Niedecker. Though different in many respects, Hejinian and Niedecker both deal with a polyphonic inner experience and an unbounded outer world. Their poems may not be as easily readable as those of Olds, who has her imagistic ducks in a row, but clarity need not be equivalent to readability. How readable is the world? There is another kind of clarity that doesn't have to do with control but with attention, one in which the sensorium of the world can enter as it presents itself. Am I valorizing a long-enforced feminine passivity here? I think not. Writing is never passive. Hejinian's and Niedecker's poetry is subversive. Their poems are dynamic, contrapuntal systems in which conflicting forces and voices (inner and outer) are allowed to work.

In her essay “Strangeness,” Hejinian describes her compositional technique as metonymic. She writes:

Metonymy moves attention from thing to thing; its principle is combination rather than selection. Compared to metaphor, which depends on code, metonym preserves context, foregrounds interrelationship. And again in comparison with metaphor, which is based on similarity, and in which meanings are conserved and transferred from one thing to something said to be like it, the metonymic world is unstable. While metonymy maintains the intactness and discreteness of particulars, its paratactic perspective gives it multiple vanishing points.⁵

The restless attention and the preservation of context that Hejinian associates with metonymy are in sharp contrast to Olds's tenacious and all-absorbing metaphor.

I want to discuss the role of metonymy, otherness, and counterpoint in one of Hejinian's works. Her most recent book is Oxota: A Short Russian Novel. It is a huge (292-page) book of poems, each poem a numbered chapter, rendering the experience of her travels in the old Soviet Union. But in what sense is it a novel? It certainly does not involve a constructed plot; that would be anathema to Hejinian. It does, however, deal with character and incident. The Russians in this novel seem to act and speak for themselves, often in surprising ways. Hejinian and her characters hear and mis-hear each other across mighty linguistic and cultural gaps. This work is a paradigmatic encounter with otherness and estrangement (and therefore with what it means to be oneself). I will quote chapters 120 and 171 from Oxota, with the caution that no excerpt can do justice to Hejinian's work because she always relies on repetition and recontextualization to create a dense weave of meaning. Nonetheless, the following is chapter 120:

“ONE SPRING MORNING”

Divination by clouds must be renounced under a colorless sky
Ostap produced a small cardboard device for divining mood
A staircase
The proportions of temperaments and moods
Zina ran a rag over the table
I turned on the gas for tea
It's a blind day, Zina said
Such a sky produces vast absent-mindedness
Here
Arkadii and then I produced gloom
I too, she said
The device had turned a foreboding greenish black
Papa, it's just a human revelation, said Ostap—such colors
                    grow from temperatures and salt
You see?—heliotrope means passion.(6)

The poem poses the problem of knowledge in comic terms. A group of people wonder what moods they are in and what temperaments they have. A device for answering such questions—an emotion meter—is brought in by Ostap. It has replaced the older method of divination by clouds that was plagued by dependence on external conditions. The device proposes a universal standard. The reader can participate in the mixture of interest, light-heartedness, and skepticism produced by this party game. Does the fact that they all “produce gloom” mean that the device is working or that it isn't? The universal standard seems doomed from the start. The reader is allowed to realize that light-heartedness and doubt, gloom and passion, agreement and disagreement—these odd couples—are our permanent companions. Such a comic attempt to ascertain one's own and one's companions' mood is the opposite of Olds's single-minded occupation of her daughter's body and soul.

Like chapter 120, chapter 171, which is untitled, is structured around a counterpoint of oppositions:

The hunt must accomplish necessity
Then the hunt goes on
The hunt goes one
It widens on the frozen streets
We're made a mother, our influence sweeps, we can draft our
                    opinions of poverty
If one doesn't isolate the self, one doesn't experience
                    brevity
Brevity wasn't Gogol's fear
Nor Dostoevsky's, though his senses in event occurred from
                    many interruptions
Such hunger is more memory than disappointment
Such is our friendship with events
We have words, and their things must remain in abeyance
In current
The shoppers dive—and I follow Zina
Zina arrives with two chickens

(187)

I will go through the poem almost line by line, discussing its oppositions, metonymic connections, and the situation of its narrator. The rotating polarities of this chapter are forms of contraction and expansion: self and community, event and continuation. In the context of the book, the hunt is the search of Soviet women for life's necessities. What does it mean to “accomplish necessity”? It may mean that necessity itself becomes a goal, like motivation or the equanimity of habit. At any rate, accomplishment implies closure (contraction), but then the hunt goes on. The third line repeats the second, adding an “e” to “on,” making it “one.” The visual association of “on” and “one” is an example of metonymic adjacency and instability. Its meaning is complex. The addition of the letter becomes part of the trope of expansion while the meaning of the word one contracts this hunt to a single instance. Then the hunt, again, widens, part of a continuing cycle.

The middle section brings in the traditionally female activities of mothering and “sweeping up.” Those who do these things may be inspired (by the promises of democracy?) to “draft [their] opinions of poverty.” These lines seem ironic, momentarily bitter. “We have words, and their things must remain in abeyance.” The things in abeyance might include meat and bread as well as equality and power. Still, the women in this work are strong. They are the hunters.

The last four lines of this chapter exemplify the variety of metonymic connections Hejinian described in her essay. “In current” is connected to “in abeyance” by semantic as well as syntactic resemblance. Something in abeyance is not gone but in suspension—as if afloat or “in current.” Because Hejinian follows “current” with “the shoppers dive,” a standard metaphor appears to be developing. However, the fact that Zina, the first to dive, arrives with two chickens (not fish), stops us in our metaphoric tracks. The switch from metaphorical imagination to observational fact is surprising. It's worth noting that in this shopping hunt (or dive) the Russian woman leads. This poem is a place where the Other is granted autonomy. Here, as in all her works, Hejinian finds ways (forms) in which opposites and discordant life experiences can be encompassed without being distorted by resolution.

Lorine Niedecker, who died in 1970, was not a contemporary of Hejinian or Olds. She was loosely associated with the Objectivist poets, including George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky, who emphasized in their essays the importance of sincerity, precision, and (thus) clarity. Niedecker is relevant to my argument because her poems (often feminist in their concerns) achieve a brilliant clarity, not because of the predominance of a single image or a subordinating metaphor, but because they follow the labyrinthian twists of thought and circumstance with great agility. Hers are poems of ambivalence, inner division, and second thoughts. Niedecker's poems mix social fact (problem) with epistemological question. Here is an untitled example:

I married
in the world's black night
for warmth
                    if not repose.
                    At the close—
someone.
I hid with him
from the long range guns.
                    We lay leg
                    in the cupboard, head
in closet.
A slit of light
at no bird dawn—
                    Untaught
                    I thought
he drank
too much.
I say          I married
                                                            and lived unburied.
I thought—(7)

This poem, from The Granite Pail, is about a problem and a solution that turns into a problem. The original problem is the violence and danger (long-range guns) in America and the world. A kind of agoraphobia sets in and the poet wants to retreat, hide out, marry for security. Agoraphobia turns to claustrophobia soon enough. The lines “We lay leg / in the cupboard, head / in closet” are both grotesque and humorous. The question becomes, are marriage and domesticity really safe for women living in poverty and under patriarchy? “I married / and lived unburied. / I thought—” The reader will notice that “I thought” is repeated; it's an epistemological double take, a double step backward, a potentially infinite regression from solution to problem in which she discovers herself in the wrong more than once. Niedecker's visions seem open to revision. It's as if Olds (whom I imagine writing her poem in her car in a driveway, waiting for her daughter to emerge from the house where the party is being held) put down her pen, went in through the back gate, and caught her daughter in the act with one of those boys. How might that information be added to her poem?

It's interesting that the words that carry the charge of ambivalence and doubt in Niedecker's poem come in rhymed pairs: repose/close, untaught/thought, married/unburied. Rhyme usually conveys not only emphasis but a sense of closure and conviction. Here rhyme is used against the grain to point up paradox and doubt. It's funny, and risky, when weddings are performed by the mere coincidence of sound.

There is something asocial, misanthropic in Niedecker's work and life. She chooses, albeit ambivalently, to distance herself from the sources of unjust power and inequity. I will read her poem, “My Life By Water,” beginning with the fifth stanza:

to wild green
          arts and letters
                    Rabbits
raided
          my lettuce
                    One boat
two—
          pointed toward
                    my shore
thru birdstart
          wingdrip
                    weed-drift
of the soft
          and serious—
                    Water

(69)

Here (oddly green) arts and letters are attacked by animals, or animal-like people. Human contact is minimal: “One boat / two— / pointed toward / my shore.” Is this a source of grief or relief? At any rate, it is much mediated. Her “self” is difficult to locate or identify, placed, as it is, in an extremely dynamic natural landscape. To reach her, human beings must make their way through “birdstart / wingdrip / weed-drift.” Here her trochaic, sometimes hyphenated words remind me of the Pound of the early Cantos. But, unlike Pound, she does not pretend to speak for Culture. Niedecker (like Dickinson) has done what she could to place herself outside patriarchy, outside capitalism, outdoors. In this poem I imagine her as the voice of the lake itself. One almost feels she is teasing (teasing whom?) when she links soft with serious—a linkage almost oxymoronic in patriarchal culture. Niedecker's sibilance is soft and serious, subversive as water.

In the spirit of such subversion, I would like to raise some questions in the place of conclusion. What is the meaning of clarity? Is something clear when you understand it or when it looms up, startling you? Is readability equivalent to clarity? What is the relation of readability to convention? How might conventions of legibility enforce social codes? Does so-called experimental writing seek a new view of the self? Would such a view be liberating? Might experimental writing and feminism be natural allies? I think questions are most useful when left open. I will merely assert that there is more than one model of clarity. One might value a poem that could present the conditions of women's lives, but whose life is a single narrative or an extended metaphor? Metaphorically speaking, such poems are fenced yards. Is this the kind of control we should aspire to? What's on the other side of that fence?

Notes

1. Ron Silliman, “Poetry and the Politics of the Subject: A Bay Area Sampler,” Socialist Review 18.3 (1988): 63.

2. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Ark, 1987), 21.

3. Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 71.

4. Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living (New York: Knopf, 1983), 79.

5. Lyn Hejinian, “Strangeness,” originally published in Poetics Journal 8 (1989); reprinted as chapter 8 of this anthology.

6. Hejinian, Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 1991), 135.

7. Lorine Niedecker, The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker, ed. Cid Corman (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 93.