Review:
By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry, ed. Molly McQuade
It is hard to imagine a more welcome book, and odd that no one conceived of such a project sooner. In By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry, editor Molly McQuade has produced a bountiful essay anthology collecting twenty-six contemporary women poet-critics, a sprawling, scrappy, fascinating testimonial to the explosion of women's poetry—and concomitant critical activity—in the latter half of the twentieth century. The book is arranged in four broad sections: "Writing Their Lives" collects biographical criticism; "A Poet's Tools" focuses on poetic craft; "Critical Panoramas" provides more sweeping perspectives on poetics and culture; and "Reading Her Mind" supplies vivid "creeds and memoirs."
The essayists are mainly living Americans, including many renowned names (Adrienne Rich, Alicia Ostriker, Sharon Olds, June Jordan), plus a number of less-acclaimed figures, such as the editor herself, whose quirky, sharp-eyed essays are better known than her poems. The range of subjects represented is refreshingly wide, from Rita Dove's scrupulous, helpful overview of Derek Walcott's career to Brenda Hillman's excursus on punctuation in contemporary poetry, and Eavan Boland's autobiographical "Letter to a Young Woman Poet." Roughly half the essays appear for the first time here; the other half includes some that have stirred considerable comment, including Adrienne Rich's essential re-evaluation of Dickinson from 1975, "Vesuvius at Home," or Mary Karr's astringent "Against Decoration," first published in Parnassus in 1991. Contributors range from textbook favorites such as Rich, Dove, and Olds, to voices from the more experimental wings of the current scene, such as Lyn Hejinian, C. D. Wright, and Ann Lauterbach.
Many essays, such as Annie Finch's delightfully provocative "Confessions of a Postmodern Poetess," Elizabeth Macklin's "'It's a Woman's Prerogative to Change Her Mind,'" and April Bernard's knottily robust "My Plath Problem," are highly explicit in their feminist stances; and various personal/political convergences are explored in pieces like Sharon Olds's "A Student's Memoir of Muriel Rukeyser" and June Jordan's "The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something Like a Sonnet For Phillis Wheatley." Other essays, however, simply (and complexly) tackle various craft issues, e.g. Alicia Ostriker's "A Meditation Upon Metaphor" or Heather McHugh's high-voltage study of grammatical articles.
The book's title is most fully justified in essays of reassessment and reclamation of earlier women poets. Particularly noteworthy in this vein are the previously mentioned pieces on Wheatley, Dickinson, and Plath by Jordan, Rich, and Bernard, respectively. Perhaps the most overdue essay is Elizabeth Alexander's astute "Meditations on 'Mecca': Gwendolyn Brooks and the Responsibilities of the Black Poet," which firmly places Brooks where she deserves to be, among our most important voices, and pays due attention to her greatest book.
But in the larger sense, as McQuade's spunky introduction makes clear, the reclamation here has less to do with attending to respected foremother poets than with celebrating the fact that women poet-critics have recently appeared in such abundance and variety. Ultimately this is a celebration of the critical act itself, in all its variegation and with a natural feminist edge; it's not a thesis anthology, blessedly, except in the central point it makes powerfully and inescapably: here are some of our best contemporary critics of poetry.
Every anthology involves agonies of exclusion, and it would be unfair to harp on them when the book in question is as capacious as this one. Still, if there were ever to be a By Herself, Volume Two, I would hope to see essayists such as Ellen Bryant Voigt, Marianne Boruch, Alice Fulton, Carolyn Kizer, and the late Denise Levertov. At the same time, Molly McQuade is more fond than I am of essays which exploit and explore fragmentation of form; Lucie Brock-Broido's "Myself a Kangaroo Among the Beauties" seems so dedicated to avoiding ponderous explication that it barely registers any single notion before flitting onward. Likewise, the title of C. D. Wright's "69 Hidebound Opinions, Propositions, and Several Asides from a Manila Folder Concerning the Stuff of Poetry" seems all too accurate, leaving me yearning for more developed views. Still, the essays included are, as McQuade notes in her introduction, "fully voiced," and all are worth arguing with, even as some differ with each other. Taken as a whole, they justify McQuade's claim that criticism can be as artful as poetry itself.
For the book's greatest strength, finally, may be its gallery of styles. McQuade's own essays, previously collected in Stealing Glimpses, are highly accessible and written in a vigorously lucid personal voice—far from the gray vapors of most academic prose. That stylistic proclivity plainly informs McQuade's selections: though the voices vary considerably, and some essays hew closer to standard academic format, for the most part this is a volume of considerable charm, wit, and glitter. Front to back, it's not only a collection of intelligent, provocative thinking about poetics, but also one of the most readable books of criticism to appear lately.
Work Cited
By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry, ed. Molly McQuade. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2000.
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Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 31.1 (January/February 2002): 107-9.
