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Revisiting the Canon through the Ghazal in English 201For Webb, writing is not a retreat from reality, it is aprocess:“The pull, this way and that, ultimately into the pullof the pen across the page.Sniffing for poems, the forward memoryof hand beyond the grasp” (p 18).The easy blend of the line lengths facilitates Webb’s task intaking the line “across the page” or not, as she chooses, withoutresorting to male “yawp”. Writing is not the creation of a passiveobject or an artifact to be preserved for posterity, but rather it is acontinuum centered on the present moment,“the flow, flux, even the effluent stormyin high wind” (p.16).Writing is interrupted by the welcome intrusion of womenneighbours who teach the poet something about daily life; it is theability to “relate disconnectedly”. The real insight Webb offers ushere is that genuine writing is done, not by blocking out the world,but by allowing it to exist. And this is a revelation with profoundspiritual implications.Webb’s writing demonstrates the development of a feministpoet who rises from the ashes of her past, a past shaped bypatriarchal perceptions of the divine and of art (there are consciousreferences to characters in T.S. Eliot’s poems where the gendershave been reversed like Ms. Prufrock). Her repeated emphasis on“breaking” leads us to recognize the necessity of shattering outwornmyths.