Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
career-boosting publications as Tish; the
editorial voice so dominates the text that it
effectively silences other voices. Godard's
brief analysis of each piece in her "Reprise"
is particularly offensive, as it leaves the
reader little room to think for herself. Her
too frequent mention of articles from
Tessera which do not appear in
Collaboration is even more suspect, as is the
fact that much pertinent information
respecting the periodical occurs not in the
introduction, but rather at the end of the
text. Equally disturbing is Gail Scott's mention
of the "suspicion" and "hostility" to
the Tessera project evinced in "certain
essays" in Language in Her Eye (18);
Collaboration, it seems, has a personal axe
to grind.
Intrusive editorial practices aside, the
text is in many ways a fascinating one.
Many of the essays deviate from the academic
model, blurring the lines between fiction
and theory, between the supposedly
(traditionally male) objective and the (traditionally
female) subjective. Marlene
Nourbese Philip's "Whose Idea Was It
Anyway?," for instance, juxtaposes speculation
and "fact" in a recreation of the mentality
of a slave owner, creating a powerful
immediacy lacking in much academic writing.
Phillip appeals to both intellect and
emotion; the piece is as much a story as an
essay, and yet it stands as an effective argument
about the way in which patriarchy
operates. Philip's article is one of many
which disprove the assumption that academic
discourse is necessarily dry: Ismail,
Marlatt, Scott, and Smyth all experiment
radically with the academic paradigm, creating
a space in which woman's voice is
freed (or would be were Godard et al less
insistently vocal) from the constraints of
prescriptive, male-determined forms.
Feminist Measures, while it adheres for
the most part much more strictly to the
academic model, has similar if not identical
aims; according to editors Lynn Keller and
Christanne Miller, the collection attempts
to rescue poetry from its relative critical
obscurity while allowing women to "experiment
with the soundings of their own
clear, personalized voices." Poetry, claim
several of the authors represented in the
collection, as the genre perhaps most resistant
to change, presents women writers
with a substantial dilemma: the novel, as
Virginia Woolf notes, may have been young
enough to have been shaped by female
hands; poetry, however (or "good" poetry,
at least), has long been almost exclusively
male territory. Thus, not only poetry itself,
but also the way in which poems are read
and evaluated, has remained in some ways
decidedly androcentric; "poetry," state
Keller and Miller, "is a gendered practise."
The strategies employed to generate new
readings of poetic texts are almost as varied
as the subject matter itself; the anthology
includes everything from dense text-based
analysis to feminist takes on Lacanian theory
to experimental work in which the criticism
is indistinguishable from the text.
Disparate as the focus of the articles may
seem, each piece, from Janel Mueller's reading
of the medieval "Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum" to Christanne Miller's examination
of the "space age" poetry of Alice
Fulton, attempts to engage with the issue of
"gender's role in poetic production." Some
essays, like Mueller's, offer a feminist reading
of the text using traditional scholarly
techniques; others subvert academic techniques
themselves by privileging so-called
subjective methods of discourse.
Akasha (Gloria) Hull's "Channeling the
Ancestral Muse: Lucille Clifton and Dolores
Kendrick," for example, opens with a series
of "Narratives": the essay begins as story. As
the piece progresses, Hull's startling thesis
emerges: she is exploring the "spiritual
connection of the two poets...to black
female ancestors," and her evidence
includes everything from Ouija boards to
visions. The high Romantic concept of
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