Re: The Name & the Paradox of its Contents

I am a footnote. I was in a campus bookstore yesterday and glanced through the new issue of the Chicago Review. In it I quickly read Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young’s essay on gender and publication, “Numbers Trouble.” I was curious about it but short on time and did what I often do—I flipped through the pages rapidly trying to get a sense of the key coordinates. And then, lo and behold, I saw my name footnoted deep in the bowels of the thing. It referenced posts to the Buffalo Poetics list from 1997 in which I responded to critiques of gender and publishing.

I would like to respond to this “footnote” by way of a brief personal reflection. Recently on her blog, The Well Nourished Moon, Young writes that she and Spahr are interested in expanding the conversation they begin in their Chicago Review essay beyond the limited perspectives of U. S. feminism. She writes:

One of the things our paper does is end up being a catalogue of what’s missing; a catalogue of some of the limits of a mostly white, mainstream US feminism in experimental poetry scenes. We see a myopic lack of attention to women’s issues outside of the US and a lack of collective action. We need more feminisms.

We end this paper asking people to write to us with suggestions about how to overcome this. Our intention is to try and compile a bunch of these suggestions for publication in order to start a conversation.

Would you be interested in being a part of this conversation?

Since, in part, their article references me, and in order to respond, in my way, to this call for an extended conversation, I present here a self-evaluation as a form of response, since I am implicated in this problem to a minor degree.

II

Ten years ago I began posting notes to the Buffalo Poetics List. Much of what I said then was influenced by many factors. Primarily, a novice as far as poetry was concerned, I perceived the list as being hostile to poets I found compelling. In the winter months of that year, many on the list made derisive comments about Edward Dorn, who had been recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Some referred to him as a “bigot.” Others publicly expressed their desire to provide Dorn with a “[p]unch in the mouth.” And still others compared him with Hitler, and “waited expectantly for some coke-induced froth from his evil lips—did he ever post” a response to this online community of poets. In anger at the blithe list commentary regarding his work—commentary to which he could not respond due to his illness and indifference to online technology—I sympathetically appropriated his energy to begin entering conversations on the list from a position of anger. This, though acknowledged ten years too late, is not the best point from which to enter a conversation.

In one particular thread, written in September 1997, it was pointed out to me by Dodie Bellamy that one issue of my small magazine, Mike & Dale's Younger Poets, only published poems by four women out of the 24 writers our journal contained. I won't rehash what took place: the curious can troll the Buffalo archives if they wish. At stake in this particular thread, though, is the question of representation and equity on literary markets. Should editors publish an equal number of female voices as men?

III

I remember reading Judith Butler in a class taught by Lyn Hejinian called “The Language of Paradise,” at the New College of California in San Francisco. This was in the 1990s. I recall that Butler’s theory of performativity influenced my thinking about gender tremendously. It appealed to my understanding of dynamic action—dramatism in Kenneth Burke's terms—as a way to engage the construction of identity in a way that focused on the act rather than on the metaphysical assumptions ontology. Looking back over Gender Trouble today, the key work in the subtitle that still stands out for me is subversion. Butler’s focus too on "the subversive and parodic redeployments of power rather than on the impossible fantasy of its full-scale transcendence" also appealed to me as a way to engage social bodies. Moreover, of great importance is the work she did to complicate any easy notions of gender as ontology, for, she argues, it is not biologically determined. Sex comes into being after the law. Representation of gender is performative, wrapped up in the complex weave of subjective identification with the disciplines of power that institute our cultural coordinates. And then from here our chances of representation come down to that "parodic redeployment of power." We can't assume the category: we must read the dynamic intrusion of subjectivity into other contexts.

Looking back at my posts of September 1997, I see a young man ill equipped to participate in the environment of the Buffalo Poetics List. I trust that person (my old self), and his instinctive gestures and claims: but I cringe at his "parodic redeployments" (though I embrace his lack of theoretical sophistication). Still, if his vocabulary had been better constructed, perhaps his entrance on the List would have been eased. And, thinking of Derrida's On Hospitality, it is true that we do not get to choose who enters our domains. This creates opportunities for discussion and reflection through confrontation with the other—in whatever context you want to define other. Theorized through this notion of hospitality, Derrida suggests that “tolerance” draws boundaries that prevent engagements with the other. Such “tolerance” is unproductive in terms of communication. By testing one’s identity in a context in which the other arrives to challenge us, we can develop strong arguments that further conversation without retreating into the safe categories of being we claim to protect us from the dynamic arguments of others.

IV

In 1997 I wore the mask and armature of the underdog. At the time, I was entangled in my emotional devotion to the systems of other writers while trying to find my position within these new social coordinates. Unfortunately, I worked out much of this social confusion publicly on the List. I think there was benefit in doing so, even if it alienated certain people—and continues to sustain a divide between others and me in our community. Mainly, I was torn between taking a position and resisting one, and to this day, I would prefer a poetics that remains open and dynamic to one that is closed under the category of a particular heading. Still, to communicate effectively, the lure of the category tempts me, though I often regret such things and turn back on myself in contradiction.

At stake though was this problem of representation. Recently it has become necessary for some to count the prize winnings offered by the various institutions "supporting" "poetry" in America. Also, as in the recent Chicago Review, a kind of body count goes on, comparing the number of women to men published in magazines over the last fifty years or so. Spahr and Young perform a kind of cultural critique, following Steve Evans' own brilliant analysis of prize data in The Poker, in order to respond to the inequities in North American publishing. But here's the problem:

Such critiques look at poetry as if it were just another business. A poetics based on spreadsheets rather than affinity and affection—or reflection and speculation—gives the game over to other disciplines. Read as another social discipline, the inner life of poetry—its formal and rhetorical components—are passed over in order to disclose its productive value on capitalist markets. The urge to count, however, is strong in us Americans, duped as we are by polls, elections, and faith in empirical orders of social measures. But this has never been my project: to count.

My wonderful co-editor through 10 issues of Skanky Possum, Hoa Nguyen, has argued with me about this. Her position is on the side of equity. Provide equal space for women writers in small journals. On the surface, of course, I agree: it is weird to see a magazine or a press publishing works that are written predominantly by men. Why would anyone even take a stance that favored some kind of skewed gender representation? Of course, in the economically and temporally “squeezed” moment of small press production, positions mutate, and much is forgotten or obliterated in the long hours of typographic layout, correspondence, and production. Much of my oversight as an editor was and is a tremendous reliance on velocity to help me accomplish some critical task. In the wake of that speed, crucial issues get pushed aside. And when questioned, the defenses mount, because the unconscious results conflict with the conscious goals of production.

Women find places today more than ever to publish their work. Many editors are committed to including women in their journals. It would be foolish to purposely exclude them on any grounds. The problem, however, becomes one of editorial intent: editors must make commitments to women writers or face some stern questions. And so we come to the counting game again: numbers. These numbers are based on ontological assumptions of gender. A genealogical approach to issues of gender, by contrast, looks at the dynamic actions—the performative capacity—of gender disclosure. The second wave feminist concerns for equity are important—but this is not my project. I remain instead committed to Butler’s argument on the subversion of identity as a basis for provoking a “redeployment of power.”

V

At stake too is this: bodily pleasure. I support almost every combined notion of sexuality that can be imagined. Gender should be explored and pushed out in every possible way to liberate those desires that are so often repressed and condemned by the Law. Poetry is one key way to achieve this. As an epideictic genre, its main function is to produce reflection and speculation within the minds of its audience. All are welcome to participate, but some “subversive and parodic redeployments of power” work better than others in terms of producing reflection and speculation in the minds of an audience. This is where editorial decisions can be made. How will these words affect an audience? How might a journal be shaped to persuade an audience to speculate on other formulations of power?

Power? Poetry really pushes beyond power too. Foucault’s arguments about power regimes are so compelling that reconciling them with notions of desire, affinity, and affection often challenge our perceptions of subjectivity within certain social relations. But by accepting the essentialist ontology of gender as somehow being determined prior to the intrusion of the law, and by asserting a platform of equity that does not value the impact of dynamic acts in relation to an audience, editors fail to accomplish political acts with their publications. Poetry becomes another product of disciplinary regimes rather than a genre of speculative feedback and reflection on those disciplinary forces. It is used to condone crippling ontological categories rather than to subvert power with its affective claims on desire. On the surface, my project is not radically different from the equity-centered feminists: but under it there lies another set of assumptions about power, affection, reflection, and persuasion in terms of an audience.

VI

In my confused and over-complex manner of reducing these issues of desire and power to terms I could understand ten years ago, I fucked up. I’m still not confident that I grasp the issues here as well as others do. But I have always devoted my work in its many arrays to an open and vigorous critique of power and desire, and I’ve put my words out there to push thought into action. The success or failure of this can only be determined from our diverse perspectives and investments in the debates so widely straddled here. To my own “defense,” let me add to this apologia a question offered a decade ago to me by Maria Damon, and then let me respond. Better late than never.

“Dale,” she said, “I wonder if it'd be fair to say that your aesthetic sense may itself be the product of conditioning in an unjust society?”

This question, you might say, has pushed me the last decade when reflecting upon my role in the making of art and in publishing. Since that initial public “outburst” I have gone on to write about the work of many “women.” And I have published others and worked with women to achieve the redeployment of power argued by Butler. Moreover, my work over the last decade, with some few exceptions, has focused upon the construction of masculine identity. By confronting masculine identity within the context of the hearth—marriage, childcare, and other domestic concerns traditionally related to women—I have worked to examine how performativity of gender is not just a queer concern. Butler’s work pushed feminism toward an inquiry into the nature of subjectivity and it complicated gender as ontology. As a basis for queer theory it is great, but it also opens space to investigate gender across the board. I see no reason why such theoretical uses of gender study should not apply to straights as well as gays, women as well as men. The main thing is that such gender-specific constructions and desire-driven identifications are not categorically glossed but explored in a dynamic context of ongoing changes that are open to self-critique and interpretation.

If the world is “to change” gender relations must be explored and reinterpreted by those also who usually are lumped in with the oppressor class: white males. My work explores how white male relations to the hearth can be performed in new ways. My words may be perceived as confrontational in certain contexts, but more than any other poet of my generation, I have pushed these concerns into the open for debate and reflection, with often uncomfortable consequences for me. It is through my own reflection upon events from a decade ago that I have worked to more radically appreciate and explore what’s at stake not just for women, but for us all who are challenged to respond to our environments through complex identifications and judgments that ultimately contribute to our survival. This has been my project and it will remain so, for I find it more valuable than taking count and keeping score, which seems to be a goal of equity-based feminists—and that’s not insignificant work. It’s just not the whole picture, either.

Looking back after a decade upon the traces of one’s self left in electronic media is kind of freaky. I realize too how unprepared then I was for electronic environments, for I had only begun to acquaint myself with the web in the summer of 1996. By writing this I wanted to point out that the context always shifts, expands, and morphs in ways few of us can anticipate. Our words, motivated within specific frames of reference, reach others and persuade them somehow to listen to us, or spur them into action, or reaction, to accomplish something, even if it’s a reorientation to the issues at stake, or the generation of a reflective moment that can inspire other ethical acts. The point is we are dealing with complex dynamic surfaces. These are constructs of the imagination and the real. This is where my poetics begins, though I don’t think this is a terribly subtle position. It is merely a beginning ten years in the making.