What is erased?

Listening to the NPR story on Whitman reminded me of this little story:

I recently heard a colleague read Walt Whitman as a Language poet. The presentation confused me because much of it went against what I knew about the topic, and after considering his convincing argument, I started to question my understanding of the parameters of and players within the Language Poetry movement. I left the conversation remembering that I had been under the previous impression that feminist poets had been using Language poetry as a way to disrupt the history of patriarchal poetry, to underscore the difficulty of using language to critique itself, and to find new ways for women to speak without adopting male syntax and grammar rules. But after this Whitman presentation, I was unsure of myself; and I wondered if I had mis-remembered or if I had misunderstood all along.

So, I went home and went straight to my bookshelf. From it, I picked out my newly purchased copy of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics where I fully expected to find my answer. I was correct and pleasantly surprised to find that the entry for “Language Poetry,” written by Michael Davis, was over two columns long. There in the 8 point, New Times Roman font, was a concise definition of the troubling subject at hand: it (language poetry) “emerged in the mid 1970s [yes, that sounds right, I said to myself] as both a reaction to and an outgrowth of the ‘New Am. Poetry’ as embodied by Black Mountain, New York School, and Beat (q.v.) aesthetics” (Davis 675). Okay, I told myself, but I didn’t think of it as an outgrowth.

As I continued to read, I found that Language Poetry was never a feminist movement at all, and that, according to Davis, it has been a movement headed by men such as Bernstein, Watten, and Perelman. In fact, the name my memory had most clearly identified with the movement, Susan Howe, didn’t appear in his encyclopedic entry. The entry does say that language poetry uses “a relatively neutral voice (or multiple voices)” and so it must be that I’ve spent too much time reading feminist criticism, and I didn’t know that multiple voices would be considered parenthetical. When I closed the 1400 page book to return it to my shelf, I chastised myself: You don’t know half as much as you think you know. I forgot about it. I moved on.

This was not much more than a month ago, and as I began reading for this research project, reading more feminist theory on poetry and poetics, I ran across Australian writer Ann Vickery who points her finger at this Encyclopedia on my shelf to point out the very thing that happened to me: women, and more poignantly feminists, are still erased from the history of, and definitions of, poetry. Because Vickery’s study deals with Language poetry, she actually discusses the very entry that I had been “educated” by. In her book, Leaving Lines of Gender, she reminds us that Lyn Hejinian is the only woman poet mentioned in Davis’s Language Poetry entry. Suddenly the serendipitous nature of my experience could not be denied. No wonder I question myself, no wonder women find themselves outside “the system” over and over again, wondering who we are and how we fit it.

We are still coming in through the back door.