To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
communitarianism, finding communitarian
values friendly to feminism only when
they are focussed on friendship and communities
of choice. Cheshire Calhoun looks
for a moral theory that includes "emotional
work"—work we do not as agents on ourselves
but as mediators on others. Sarah
Lucia Hoagland locates in a lesbian context
the revaluing of choice, where choosing to
help a friend, for example, is an act of creation
rather than self-sacrifice. Charlotte
Bunch calls for a new consideration of difference
within feminism, not constrained
by a tradition in which difference is known
only as inequality.
It is probably worth noting that (with a
single exception) every one of the contributions
in Explorations participates in that
masculine genre, the academic essay, and is,
accordingly, rather proprietary and somewhat
bellicose. Perhaps as they explore ethical
theory, some of these authors might
explore as well different genres for writing
about it. The interview, perhaps?
Life, Work & Free Verse
Naomi Guttman
Reasons for Winter. Brick Books $9.95
Sandy Shreve
The Speed of the Wheel Is Up to the Potter. Quarry
Press $10.95
Reviewed By Cynthia Messenger
Contemporary lyric poets have inherited
(through the modernists) many things
from the English Romantics, not the least
of which is the high seriousness with which
the Romantics regarded the mundane. In
both books under review, the everyday, the
quotidian, figures prominently in poetry
that continually reiterates its commitment
to writing as a moral act.
I would argue, contra Perloff, that there is
nothing in the "lyric frame," to use her
words, that prevents the poet from adopting
a socially committed position. The a
priori assumption shared by Perloff and the
Language Poets that disjunction—as
expressed through found poetry, montage,
collage, and fragmentation—expresses
"inclusiveness" is unconvincing. The
rhetoric used in the promotion of language
poetry (and simultaneously in the undermining
of lyric) attempts to conceal the
aesthetic judgment that underlies the privileging
of one form over the other.
To pass off found poetry as untainted, as
untouched by the authorial "I," involves
subterfuge. And to posit that collage's juxtaposition
of disparate materials is (to
quote Perloff from Poetic License) "without
commitment to explicit syntactical relations"
only weakly disguises what is actually
an aesthetic argument. Perloff's
implicit assumption that, in language
poetry, the apparent violation of syntax
equals a broadening of the moral and social
scope of the poem reflects only her interpretation
of this "structure"—it could mean
something else entirely.
Naomi Guttman is not a language poet;
nor is Sandy Shreve. But neither are they
formalist poets. Both Guttman and Shreve
relie on the confessional tone, the imagism,
the shortish lines, and the verse paragraph
that are intrinsic to modernist free verse.
And even if one craves the rigours of the
formalists, or the aesthetics of the language
poets, one cannot deny the integrity and
purpose of writers like Guttman and
Shreve, who write, not out of engagement
with trends in literary criticism, but out of
their experience as women.
In Sandy Shreve's The Speed of the Wheel
Is Up to the Potter, commuting is the central
metaphor for the alienation of the modern
worker from her job. Often in this volume,
the speaker narrates the sadness/emptiness
of daily life from inside her automobile:
The whole way home, I was stuck
under the wet, black half
of a sun-shower sky.
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