& one hundred and thirty-seven wow and thanks.
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From "Three Conversations with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge"
LH: Let me now ask you a slightly different set of questions. In Rae Armantrout’s essay, “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity,” she argues against the idea that women writers are less experimental and more traditional by nature, that they supposedly need more plot and narration in order to describe the conditions of their social oppression. Rae argues against that point, which had been suggested by other writers — all of them men, I think — saying that women are actually very attracted to an experimental kind of writing that rebukes this set of conventions. She questions the “meaning of clarity.” This has to do with the poetic discourses of the academy, the institution of “Creative Writing,” people studying Contemporary Literature, the mainstream forms of modern writing. She suggests that women are instinctive “outsiders” to these conventions.
MB: Yes, I would even say that women have an essentially more fragmented approach to writing. Just being the outsider gives you more freedom to see the fragments.
I remember years ago Kathleen Fraser saying that women with children have to do this and that — it’s more natural for them to pay attention in fragments. I’ve heard people say that to portray fragments is actually more naturalistic. If we sit here, for example, and people walk by talking, and you record what we say and they say in patches, that’s actually more representational than a single narrative line.
LH: So going back to this issue of “clarity.” Take the writing of Leslie Silko, for example. Her writing is following those traditional representational structures that are considered part of a “clear” reader-writer contract, right?
MB: I wonder if that, for her, is really part of her social commitment. She has a deep commitment to people without power. Also, I question the word “traditional” as applied to Leslie. The clarity of her narrative line may not be of a tradition we are familiar with.
LH: Well, that’s the argument that Rae Armantrout is countering. She’s actually responding to her friend Ron Silliman’s argument, that women, like other oppressed groups of people, need the conventions of narrative to speak at all. She says that we, as women, have a connection to alternative rather than conventional terms of discourse, which may be patriarchally-ideologically infused and inescapably so. That women have a different relation to the symbolic. What is your own position on this? In your writing, where do you see yourself? Because I believe that you, too, are a socially aware writer, on many different levels.
What you are doing with perspective is very political for me, because perspective is situational, and that shifting situation is the nature of politics, whether you’re in a room of people in some kind of institution, or any group, or the family — maybe I’m answering my own question —
MB: I like what you’re saying.
LH: Where do you position yourself with regard to “the group,” politically? And what kind of relation do you wish to build with your reader?
MB: I have deep feeling for the group, deep longing, and I have inner-drive for my work. Generally, I’ve let my inner-drive dictate what the next moment will be. I trust that inner drive’s assessment of the reader. At the same time, I want to be open to and express the situation of my culture. I feel that audience extends out like a web. A reader can carry the influence of my poem to another person without that person necessarily knowing the poem itself. I also feel karma works in the proliferation of one’s influence or expression.But I don’t think understanding is that important. I think there are mysteries. Things can set other things in motion that can set yet other things in motion. Without understanding.
(read the whole here)
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