Excerpt from By Herself

From the Introduction by Molly McQuade:

When did you last read a review of poetry? Did the language of the critic tend to serve the language of the poet? Or were the critic and the poet speaking different languages, at times estranged or mutually opposed?

While editing reviews of poetry over recent years, I have noticed, too often for my liking, a silent resident ocean separating the critic from the poet, and challenging the authority of each: for the standard form and lingo of a review shares little with the lavish, unpredictable tongue of a poem, bringing to a peremptory end the conversation they might have shared. Poet and critic too soon part ways in many respects, bowing to that ocean between them. They observe fundamentally different habits of diction, syntax, rhythm, imagination, knowledge, sympathy, scope. Their habits, drastically distinct, often hinder any chance at union, quell the nascent give-and-take. Poets who write criticism can offer the advantages of poetry to their prose. Critics who aren't poets may or may not.

Briefly, these are some of this book's reasons for being. As an editor and a critic who is also a poet, I hoped to gather together essays written by contemporary poets who harbored a critical appetite, though of vastly varying style and bent, in order to explore possibilities in criticism—and, of course, possibilities in poetry. I also hoped to persuade myself that criticism could be as well and fully voiced as poetry sometimes is. Although critics, especially when meeting the requirements of certain kinds of review assignments, often end up sounding rather like one another, criticism is potentially nearly as artfully expressive as the poetry that provoked it. While critics don't need to be poets, and while poets don't have to be critics, each might well feel tempted by the beauties and powers of the other. All should mingle more.

Criticism can be any of many things, yet the critic is always the one who wrote it, leaving behind a footprint; the critic must always be a narrator of a sort, willingly or not, consciously or not. And to be an actively self-characterizing narrator seems the apt choice, since critics are then most audible—most fully heard because most fully and knowingly voiced. I wish more critics were naturally inclined (or unnaturally urged) to find a voice and a language unmistakably theirs. I wish more criticism were a transfiguring as poetry. And I wish this kind of criticism could be published safely and often, to the benefit of readers and writers alike. For if it could be, then criticism might offer, as this book seeks to, an education by and through poetry for readers old or new, occasional or long-term—something a bit different and a bit larger, perhaps, than what criticism typically offers.

Here we have a place to experiment. For critics—our teachers—in these pages are contemporary women poets, invited or inspired to reconsider and reclaim an aspect of poetry that matters to them, that somehow stirs or disquiets them. They were encouraged to choose any subject, any poet, for consideration, male or female, dead or living. Some of the contributors have given criticism an unusually generous definition, striving to create a new (if kindred) literary species in their prose—a species of the credo, the reverie, or the sharp-tongued amble, say. (For S. X. Rosenstock, who mocks criticism while frolicking in it, the proper setting for this ingenious act of deviant revelry is none other than the bath.) Others, such as Lyn Hejinian, reveal the full cache of their critical reflections indirectly or elliptically, laying claim to—while also playing with—imposing subtleties of the narrator's art. Still others, sharing consanguinity of mind or sympathy of temperament, call poignantly to each other from balconies of contrasting outlook, as when Eavan Boland wishfully envisions the future dynamics of literary influence and communion among women poets, and Sharon Olds, remembering Muriel Rukeyser's early influence upon herself, makes of Boland's vision a thing lovably known, sturdy, and exquisitely intact. Such inadvertent conversations are my ideal as an editor, because they establish unexpected contact. Other conversationalists, perched on other balconies, include Annie finch, musing in uncanny harmony with Eleanor Wilner about the bearing of the poetic past on present-day poets, who are changed by the past and who may also change or translate it; and Ann Lauterbach, making a case for experimentalism as a poetic tool. Lauterbach seems to cue (or hum with) Lucie Brock-Broido, whose choice of the fragment as a compelling compositional favorite is made in Lauterbach's spirit, if not exactly as directed. (The writers, I hope, will forgive my ambition to build patterns if these strike them as too deliberately wrought.)

Some readers may wonder why By Herself does not just serve up twenty-six examples of the classic literary essay only. That is because, as frequent outsiders to the genre, many women, I believe, enjoy, a special liberty to reappraise or eschew what is classic. There are those who assay the classic form here with distinction, such as Rita Dove and Mary Kinzie; others, though, do question the form vigorously. But in any case, our critics are and must be regarded as newcomers, professionally, and the status carries obligations with opportunities. Long excluded from the canon of poetry, women have for even longer been excluded from the canon of criticism. With few exceptions, they still are as I write. By Herself attempts to redress that exclusion and uncover a novel and lasting body of knowledge while telling a story of women unheard until now. The timing of the telling seems fortunate, since only in recent decades have women in growing numbers began revising what we believed American poetry was and could be. Surely their revisionary motive can work useful changes, too, on the way we think critically about poetry.

Copyright 2000 by Molly McQuade. All rights reserved.