Quo Anima

Description

Quo Anima studies the poetry of contemporary women poets in relation to spirituality and innovative form. In the past two decades, a lively conversation has taken shape as more and more poets have risked engagement with various forms of mysticism. However, much of the critical response to this work has focused on male writers: there is a critical gap where women poets and the subject of spirituality is concerned. Quo Anima addresses that gap by offering a wide array of responses to women writers who are engaging with questions of spirituality. This anthology is distinctive not only for its subject matter but also because it includes essays, interviews, personal statements, and poems. In addition, all of the contributing authors are poets. The collection considers the work of accomplished poets including (but not limited to) Brenda Hillman, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Alice Notley, Cole Swensen, and Cecilia Vicuna as well as a range of less widely-known, yet significant, poets.

Sujets

• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: University of Akron Press
• Date de parution: 18 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629220758
• Langue: English

Extrait

Quo Anima
Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics
Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics
Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher, Editors
Nick Sturm, Associate Editor
Mary Biddinger, John Gallaher, eds., The Monkey & the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics
Robert Archambeau, The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World
Rebecca Hazelton & Alan Michael Parker, eds., The Manifesto Project
Jennifer Phelps and Elizabeth Robinson, eds, Quo Anima: innovation and spirituality in contemporary women’s poetry
Quo Anima

innovation and spirituality in contemporary women’s poetry
Jennifer Phelps and Elizabeth Robinson, editors
New Material Copyright © 2019 by The University of Akron Press
All rights reserved • First Edition 2019 • Manufactured in the United States of America. • Inquiries and permission requests may be addressed to the publisher, the University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio 44325-1703 or [e-mail] .
ISBN : 978-1-629221-57-1 (paper)
ISBN : 978-1-629220-74-1 (ePDF)
ISBN : 978-1-629220-75-8 (ePub)
A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI NISO Z 39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). ∞
The views contained herein are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors, the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, or The University of Akron Press.
Cover: Painting, Untitled , Lourdes Sanchez. Courtesy Sears Peyton Gallery. Cover design by Amy Freels.
Quo Anima was designed and typeset by Amy Freels. The typeface, Mrs. Eaves, was designed by Zuzana Licko in 1996. The display type, Mr. Eaves, was designed by Zuzana Licko in 2009. Quo Anima was printed on sixty-pound natural and bound by Bookmasters of Ashland, Ohio.

Produced in conjunction with the University of Akron Affordable Learning Initiative. More information is available at www.uakron.edu/affordablelearning/
Dedicated to the memory of kari edwards, Barbara Guest, Joanne Kyger, Colleen Lookingbill, and Leslie Scalapino
Contents
Introduction
part i. the silent thing that has to be expressed
eye of the be/holder
giovanni singleton
The Apophatic Pilgrim: Simone Weil and Fanny Howe
Brian Teare
Thinking of Spirit and Spiritual: Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light
Hank Lazer
An In-Feeling in Jean Valentine: Absence, Gaps, and Empathic Readership
Sara Nolan
Refuge
Laura Moriarty
I Find Out Everything I Believe Through Writing: An Interview with Alice Notley
Claudia Keelan
Devotional Practice: Writing and Meditation
Laynie Browne
part ii. the memory of the journey unraveling
Becoming Animal in Leslie Scalapino’s The Tango
Faith Barrett
This Wondrous World We Feel: Pam Rehm’s Larger Nature
Peter O’Leary
Brenda Coultas: On the Transmigration of Things
Jaime Robles
Wholly Spirit Culture
Tracie Morris
from Penury
Myung Mi Kim
Living Backwards: Cecilia Vicuña’s Fleshly Language of Unsaying
Kythe Heller
part iii. continually dispersed along the web of the inter-relation
A Rangy Sense of Self: An Interview with Joanne Kyger
Andrew Schelling
The Exact Temperature of a Hand: Melissa Kwasny and the Mystical Imagination
Rusty Morrison
leap with nature)
Colleen Lookingbill
Third Eye Who Sees: On the Source of Spiritual Search in Sappho’s Gymnasium by T Begley and Olga Broumas
Kazim Ali
Can I Do this Spiritual Drag: on kari edwards
Michelle Auerbach
A [Prayerful] Ingenuity that is Erratic: Patricia Dienstfrey’s Theopoetics
Elizabeth Savage
Porous and Continuous with the World: Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s Four Year Old Girl
Sasha Steensen
part iv. all things leave themselves behind
Beginning with a Dark House
Beverly Dahlen
Empty Sleeve
Kimberly Lyons
Mysticpoetics: Writing the Alchemical Self in Brenda Hillman’s Poetry
Jennifer Phelps
Joining Spirits: An Interview with Hoa Nguyen (September 2011)
Dale Smith
Ghosting the Line: Susan Howe and the Ethics of Haunting
Dan Beachy-Quick
Ecstatic Émigré: Prologue
Claudia Keelan
It Didn’t Need Believing: Cole Swensen’s Gravesend
Elizabeth Robinson
Biographies
Introduction
“There is always something in poetry,” Barbara Guest observes, “that desires the invisible.” 1 Guest suggests that the poem and its various modes of agency make space for what she alternately calls metaphysics or spirituality. She writes:
Do you ever notice as you write that no matter what there is on the written page something appears back of everything that is said, a little ghost? I judge that this ghost is there to remind us there is always more, an elsewhere, a hiddenness, a secondary form of speech, an eye blink […] it is the obscure essence that lies within the poem that is not necessary to put into language, but that the poem must hint at, must say ‘this is not all I can tell you. There is something more I do not say.’ Leave this little echo to haunt the poem, do not give it form, but let it assume its own ghost-like shape . 2
Guest’s sensitivity to the unarticulated “essence” of the poem arrives as a useful counterpoint to the poetics that emerged with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in the 1970s and 1980s. As a reaction against, and critique of, conventional lyric poetry, and even the lyricism of the New American poetries, the poetics of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers raised a number of influential critiques. The potential spirituality within a poem was often seen as a problem to be avoided at all costs. The easy epiphanies of lyric-inflected poetry, the valorization of the speaker as possessing some kind of elevated priestly insight, the elitist transcendence of the religious or metaphysical, the lack of engagement with a world whose practical problems should no longer be separated from the making of art—all of these are fair criticisms of (some) poetries that have essayed (some forms) of the spiritual.
And yet. In Quo Anima , we have revisited the terrain of the spiritual as it has been explored, enacted, and exploited by a varied range of resourceful and intrepid women poets. There we’ve found poetries characterized not by dogmatic certainties, but irresolution and wonder, and by insights that make no triumphalist claims. In the work of women writers, we are impressed by the fluidity with which feminist commitments enter terrain in which subjectivity is ambiguous, malleable, and willing to upset gender conventions. Many of the poets we consider also use language as a vehicle to engage and reenact embodiment. This may occur via maternity or the erotic, but it may just as easily transpire through an attunement to the materiality and history of language. We’ve come to better appreciate the profound intersubjectivity and relationality that mediates—even as it gestures toward—transcendence in so much contemporary poetry by women.
Importantly, these women poets, adept scholars of contemporary poetry and poetics, defy not only conventions of feminine experience and spirituality but go on to defy the patriarchal authorities of experimentalism. In so doing, they remake poetry that speaks not just to women, but provides for poetic possibilities previously unexplored. Indeed, many of the poets whose work is addressed in this anthology were significantly influenced by the formal freedoms of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement, but departed in a variety of ways from the theoretical discourse of that cohort. Susan Howe not only opened the page as a visual field, she excavated marginalized, often feminine, histories. Leslie Scalapino introduced Buddhist thought and practice into her poetry. These are only two instances from a rich body of writings by women. A generation on, women writers are boldly making (for example) affect, maternity, and the nature of gender itself intrinsic to the poetry they write—all while continuing to apply pressure on the nature of sign and subject that began with their L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet antecedents. Following the legacy of innovation that embraces the ethos of the reader as co-creator of the poem, the poetries discussed in Quo Anima venture further into poetry as a site of inquiry for which there is no final conclusion. Fanny Howe’s foundational essay, “Bewilderment,” distills this approach, lifting up a poetics that “doesn’t want to answer questions so much as lengthen the resonance of those questions.” 3
Indeed, the extra-paradigmatic “swerves” that Joan Retallack describes in A Poethical Wager demonstrate the ways that making art can renew the meaning of “transformation” and, in so doing, transform the project of poetry itself. The risk entailed in such questioning and mutability results in writing that forges an embodied, politically engaged poetry that nonetheless approaches the question of the mystical and spiritual boldly. What therefore emerges are creative works (and, correspondingly, poetics) that unsay obstructions that have beset poetry—insofar as conventional definitions of poetics tend to constrain the speculative nature of the inquiry that arises in any poetry. In this way, innovation is a necessary element of this poetry, for poetry becomes inquiry rather than assertion, hypothesis rather than assumption. By their very fluidity and responsiveness (as evidenced also in their formal suppleness), the poetries considered in Quo Anima retain spirituality as an active endeavor and not a static category. The material in this anthology indicates that a wide variety of commitments shape what is most crucial to the act of making poems: intersubjectivity, justice, a relationship to ineffable and the incomprehensible, and even the possibility of saying or unsaying language itself.
This range of concern clearly makes any study of spirituality difficult to essay. We can no more give a comprehensive definition of spirituality than we can of feminism. “Spirituality” is itself a vexed word. Yet a general orientation to what we mean by the term is a complex and evolving network of metap