Rebranding Women’s Poetry

Women's Poetry and Culture by Marsha Bryant Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 235 pages Branding is, of course, about marketing. It is about packaging and advertising, about sales and consumption. It is, ultimately, about differentiation and classification, about drawing borders around a product and policing margins of those boundary lines. its most fundamental level, one marketing expert insists, is driven by human need distinguish one thing from another (Holland 5). Advertisers know that brands follow rules governing representation--rules that, if broken, threaten product's visibility and viability. Successful branding requires unwavering consistency and well-disciplined conformity. Women's of twentieth century, according Marsha Bryant's Women Poetry and Culture, has long suffered within confines of narrow borders, and is time we stopped patrolling them. It has been conceptually bound what she terms the WP label, which entails such notions as oppositional aesthetic (10) and counter-discourse (2). Essentially, has been reduced a discourse of resistance produced only to challenge institutional practices that systematically excluded women. Its writers have been seen invariably as canonical outsiders. As Bryant explains, some expect be strictly about women or for them, limiting its scope stereotypical subjects (motherhood and romance) and its social domain gender issues (women's identities under patriarchy) (4), (5). Women's that does not overtly challenge patriarchy--women's that dares be about anything other than women--remains largely un-anthologized, and thus largely unread. Positioned as canonical outsiders, women have found their verse ignored as well by discipline of cultural studies, Bryant argues further. A man's poem might appear in a popular magazine, she notes pithily, a woman's poem disappeared into it (179). To be fair, cultural studies has not attended much as a genre or high modernism as a movement, but Bryant argues that approach, when applied, has failed twentieth-century poetry. Due ideological commitments of cultural studies, critics align themselves, interestingly, with editors of anthologies and scholars of verse, expecting--demanding in fact--a rhetoric of resistance mainstream, commercialized mass culture. But Bryant finds in a more nuanced response: Popular culture does not necessarily place women poets in a position from which they must answer back--even when engages conventionally feminine subjects such as romance and domesticity (1). Bryant's book ultimately 'calls for a significant widening of canon--broader acceptance of a range of themes by women poets and a more sophisticated set of reading practices that take into account this writing as not simply oppositional, parodic, or critical. Perhaps problem lies not in poetry, she asserts, in our ways of talking about it (16). At once a monograph and a manifesto, Women's Poetry and Culture is irreverent, immensely readable and, frankly, a lot of am. It is clearly born out of frustrations and revelations that must arise when teaching poetry. Students invariably stumble over contradictions, they are uncomfortable with ideologically driven readings, they ask wrong questions. Students don't carry our baggage. What happens women's poetry as a brand when we encounter so much that does not fit, Bryant contemplates, noting her students' complex, often perplexed, responses verse outside of anthologies? More point, I would ask, how do we teach third-wave feminism with textbooks so squarely grounded in second-wave commitments? Anthologists are wedded not just academic audiences but popular ones. …