Saturday, November 15, 2008

Toward Feminist Aesthetics

[...] one of the major aesthetics of the contemporary moment is the feminist. Not feminist in the political sense, by which I mean the Adrienne Rich sense, but feminist in the sense that the poem wants to create its own conditions for analysis, wants to construct its own world that is simultaneously shared and shareable.

This is in distinction to the rather muscular and masculine trend of, let's say, Ginsberg, where the object is to shoulder your way through sense and sensibility, dragging your reader along through an oppositional world so that there is a binary dynamic of seer-acolyte; instead here, and in a lot of contemporary work that I value, the poet voluntarily -- and, importantly, without anxiety -- becomes the recipient of meaning which is then passed through to the reader.

--Simon DeDeo in an old post but a good one on G.C. Waldrep, whom Steven D. Schroeder compares to Caroline Noble Whitbeck

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