This anthology also does some innovative work with form. Adams writes, Dear SandraBland, If only the cop. Nasty Women Poets is an affirmation that we are not alone, that there is power in numbers, in numbers of words and numbers of women. This anthology exists outside of the literary world, but also inside of it. This nod to the feminist anthologies of the s is a beautiful opportunity to reflect on the ways that feminism and our society at large has progressed alongside the ways we have stagnated and regressed. How do white women writers work in an anti-white-supremacist manner? Poets are called to continue to write about the politics of inclusivity.
How do cisgender women editors confront our gender essentialism? Not every woman has a vagina and breasts; embracing that reality contains promise and freedom for each of us. How do we center our differences in our journeys towards inclusivity and equity? As feminist poets may have wondered in , how do we create anthologies that include increasing breadths of experience across disability, gender, race, ethnicity, language, and more?
How do we continue to center and publish the narratives of women? Reading this anthology gave me hope that we can carry forth these conversations. I finished Nasty Women Poets with a passionate litany of questions. Carry these nasty poems in your backpack, your purse, your diaper bag, your back pocket, or your glove compartment as a warm-up for before the fight.
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How did this project come about? How did the results of the election and transition impact the anthology? The phrase had quickly become a hashtag, a meme, a t-shirt, etc. I knew there were plenty of them out there, and thought it might be interesting to see what a collection of them might look like. I contacted Julie, because we had worked together on a previous anthology Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: She was game as well, so we were off and running. We explain in the introduction how we planned to put out the call the day after the election, with inauguration day as the deadline.
We proceeded thinking election day would be a celebratory occasion, and when things turned out otherwise, I almost gave up. God help us all. So Julie and I rallied, revised the wording of the original call, and put it out a day or so later than planned. We asked friends and followers to re-post and re-tweet and include the call in their blogs, etc. As overwhelming as the response was we received over poems , we know many nasty women poets whose work might have fit perfectly into the anthology may have missed the call, but as it was, we still had to say no to many wonderful poems. To my mind, any refusal to allow others to define what it means to be a woman is a kind of resistance.
There has been a huge unofficial movement to reclaim the term and redefine it as a positive thing. We chose to situate the collection within several broader contexts, actually. Myth and legend can be just as important as a source of inspiration to resist limitations, especially on an unconscious level, and so we have a whole section devoted to those imaginary foremothers, as well. How did you go about organizing the material? Did you have the sections in mind during the selection process or did they arise while putting the anthology together?
How did the act of bringing so many voices together through arrangement enrich the spirit of the project?
Review: The Oxford Book of American Poetry ed. by David Lehman | Books | The Guardian
It was tempting to just put all of the poems in alphabetical order by last names, because doing the themed sections added so many more hours of work for us. Then we compared our lists, hashed out the ten major themes you see in the book, and started assigning poems to each themed section. Within each section, the organization is alphabetical, but that led to some amazingly serendipitous juxtapositions: Once the sections evolved, we played around with which poem fit best where many could, of course, fit into more than one section.
This added hours to our work, but in the end, I think it makes for a far richer collection. And yes, some of the serendipitous connections that occurred turned out better than anything we might have planned.
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The song titles, I think, add a fun dimension to the possible readings of the poems, but also show how women artists have been resisting and redefining for a long time. What editorial principles guided your decision making? How do you see these editorial practices resisting or reacting to the current social and political climate?
What is our responsibility as editors during these times? Grace and I each read every poem submitted and scored it a yes, no, or maybe. Then we would compare our lists. Then we hashed out the rest of the decisions in emails and phone calls. Our main criteria were 1 whether the submitted poem fit the parameters of the anthology and 2 whether the poem spoke to us on a significant level. We were choosing poems more than poets. What poems stood out immediately from the submissions?
What poems do heavy lifting in this collection? Every poem in the book stood out immediately to one or both of us when we were reading submissions. Yes, I agree that picking favorites is impossible. There are some poems in the anthology that made us laugh out loud and others that made us want to scream. However, writers such as Pope used their gift for satire to create scathing works responding to their detractors or to criticise what they saw as social atrocities perpetrated by the government.
Pope's "The Dunciad" is a satirical slaying of two of his literary adversaries Lewis Theobald, and Colley Cibber in a later version , expressing the view that British society was falling apart morally, culturally, and intellectually. The 18th century is sometimes called the Augustan age, and contemporary admiration for the classical world extended to the poetry of the time. Not only did the poets aim for a polished high style in emulation of the Roman ideal, they also translated and imitated Greek and Latin verse resulting in measured rationalised elegant verse.
Dryden translated all the known works of Virgil, and Pope produced versions of the two Homeric epics. Nevertheless, print publication by women poets was still relatively scarce when compared to that of men, though manuscript evidence indicates that many more women poets were practicing than was previously thought. Disapproval of feminine "forwardness", however, kept many out of print in the early part of the period, and even as the century progressed women authors still felt the need to justify their incursions into the public sphere by claiming economic necessity or the pressure of friends.
Women writers were increasingly active in all genres throughout the 18th century, and by the s women's poetry was flourishing. In the past decades there has been substantial scholarly and critical work done on women poets of the long 18th century: Towards the end of the 18th century, poetry began to move away from the strict Augustan ideals and a new emphasis on the sentiment and feelings of the poet was established. This trend can perhaps be most clearly seen in the handling of nature, with a move away from poems about formal gardens and landscapes by urban poets and towards poems about nature as lived in.
These poets can be seen as paving the way for the Romantic movement. Romantic literature in English ; English Romantic sonnets. The last quarter of the 18th century was a time of social and political turbulence, with revolutions in the United States , France , Ireland and elsewhere. In Great Britain, movement for social change and a more inclusive sharing of power was also growing. This was the backdrop against which the Romantic movement in English poetry emerged.
The birth of English Romanticism is often dated to the publication in of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. However, Blake had been publishing since the early s. Much of the focus on Blake only came about during the last century when Northrop Frye discussed his work in his book Anatomy of Criticism. Shelley is most famous for such classic anthology verse works as Ozymandias , and long visionary poems which include Prometheus Unbound.
Shelley's groundbreaking poem The Masque of Anarchy calls for nonviolence in protest and political action. It is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent protest. In poetry, the Romantic movement emphasised the creative expression of the individual and the need to find and formulate new forms of expression. The Romantics, with the partial exception of Byron, rejected the poetic ideals of the 18th century, and each of them returned to Milton for inspiration, though each drew something different from Milton.
They also put a good deal of stress on their own originality. To the Romantics, the moment of creation was the most important in poetic expression and could not be repeated once it passed. Because of this new emphasis, poems that were not complete were nonetheless included in a poet's body of work such as Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel". This argument has, however, been challenged in Zachary Leader 's study Revision and Romantic Authorship Additionally, the Romantic movement marked a shift in the use of language.
In Shelley's " Defense of Poetry ", he contends that poets are the "creators of language" and that the poet's job is to refresh language for their society. The Romantics were not the only poets of note at this time. In the work of John Clare the late Augustan voice is blended with a peasant's first-hand knowledge to produce arguably some of the finest nature poetry in the English language. Another contemporary poet who does not fit into the Romantic group was Walter Savage Landor. Landor was a classicist whose poetry forms a link between the Augustans and Robert Browning , who much admired it.
The Victorian era was a period of great political, social and economic change. The Empire recovered from the loss of the American colonies and entered a period of rapid expansion. This expansion, combined with increasing industrialisation and mechanisation, led to a prolonged period of economic growth. The Reform Act was the beginning of a process that would eventually lead to universal suffrage.
John Clare came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption. His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self". Tennyson was, to some degree, the Spenser of the new age and his Idylls of the Kings can be read as a Victorian version of The Faerie Queen , that is as a poem that sets out to provide a mythic foundation to the idea of empire. The Brownings spent much of their time out of England and explored European models and matter in much of their poetry.
English poetry
Robert Browning's great innovation was the dramatic monologue , which he used to its full extent in his long novel in verse, The Ring and the Book. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is perhaps best remembered for Sonnets from the Portuguese but her long poem Aurora Leigh is one of the classics of 19th century feminist literature.
Matthew Arnold was much influenced by Wordsworth, though his poem Dover Beach is often considered a precursor of the modernist revolution. Hopkins wrote in relative obscurity and his work was not published until after his death. His unusual style involving what he called "sprung rhythm" and heavy reliance on rhyme and alliteration had a considerable influence on many of the poets of the s.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a midth century arts movement dedicated to the reform of what they considered the sloppy Mannerist painting of the day.
Although primarily concerned with the visual arts, a member of the inner circle, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a poet of some ability, whilst his sister Christina Rossetti is generally considered a greater poet, whose contribution to Victorian Poetry is of a standard equal to that of Elizabeth Barret Browning. The Rossetti's poetry shares many of the concerns of the Pre-Raphaelite movement; an interest in Medieval models, an almost obsessive attention to visual detail and an occasional tendency to lapse into whimsy.
Dante Rossetti worked with, and had some influence on, the leading arts and crafts painter and poet William Morris. Morris shared the Pre-Raphaelite interest in the poetry of the European Middle Ages, to the point of producing some illuminated manuscript volumes of his work. Towards the end of the century, English poets began to take an interest in French symbolism and Victorian poetry entered a decadent fin-de-siecle phase.
Comic verse abounded in the Victorian era. Magazines such as Punch and Fun magazine teemed with humorous invention [14] and were aimed at a well-educated readership. The Victorian era continued into the early years of the 20th century and two figures emerged as the leading representative of the poetry of the old era to act as a bridge into the new. These were Yeats and Thomas Hardy. Yeats, although not a modernist, was to learn a lot from the new poetic movements that sprang up around him and adapted his writing to the new circumstances.
Hardy was, in terms of technique at least, a more traditional figure and was to be a reference point for various anti-modernist reactions, especially from the s onwards. Housman — was poet who was born in the Victorian era and who first published in the s, but who only really became known in the 20th century. Housman is best known for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad This collection was turned down by several publishers so that Housman published it himself, and the work only became popular when "the advent of war, first in the Boer War and then in World War I, gave the book widespread appeal due to its nostalgic depiction of brave English soldiers".
Housman published a further highly successful collection Last Poems in while a third volume, More Poems , was published posthumously in The Georgian poets were the first major grouping of the post-Victorian era. Their work appeared in a series of five anthologies called Georgian Poetry which were published by Harold Monro and edited by Edward Marsh. Lawrence , Walter de la Mare and Siegfried Sassoon.
Their poetry represented something of a reaction to the decadence of the s and tended towards the sentimental. Brooke and Sassoon were to go on to win reputations as war poets and Lawrence quickly distanced himself from the group and was associated with the modernist movement. Graves distanced himself from the group as well and wrote poetry in accordance with a belief in a prehistoric muse he described as The White Goddess. Kipling is the author of the famous inspirational poem If— , which is an evocation of Victorian stoicism , as a traditional British virtue.
Although many of these poets wrote socially-aware criticism of the war, most remained technically conservative and traditionalist. Among the foremost avant-garde writers were the American-born poets Gertrude Stein , T. Pound's involvement with the Imagists marked the beginning of a revolution in the way poetry was written. English poets involved with this group included D.
Lawrence , Richard Aldington , T. Eliot, particularly after the publication of The Waste Land , became a major figure and influence on other English poets. In addition to these poets, other English modernists began to emerge. The poets who began to emerge in the s had two things in common; they had all been born too late to have any real experience of the pre- World War I world and they grew up in a period of social, economic and political turmoil.
Perhaps as a consequence of these facts, themes of community, social in justice and war seem to dominate the poetry of the decade. The poetic space of the decade was dominated by four poets; W. These poets were all, in their early days at least, politically active on the Left. Although they admired Eliot, they also represented a move away from the technical innovations of their modernist predecessors.
A number of other, less enduring, poets also worked in the same vein. One of these was Michael Roberts , whose New Country anthology both introduced the group to a wider audience and gave them their name. These poets turned to French models rather than either the New Country poets or English-language modernism, and their work was to prove of importance to later English experimental poets as it broadened the scope of the English avant-garde tradition. John Betjeman and Stevie Smith , who were two other significant poets of this period, who stood outside all schools and groups.
Betjeman was a quietly ironic poet of Middle England , with a command of a wide range of verse techniques. Smith was an entirely unclassifiable one-off voice. The s opened with the United Kingdom at war and a new generation of war poets emerged in response. As with the poets of the First World War, the work of these writers can be seen as something of an interlude in the history of 20th century poetry. Technically, many of these war poets owed something to the s poets, but their work grew out of the particular circumstances in which they found themselves living and fighting.
These writers saw themselves as in revolt against the classicism of the New Country poets. Thomas, in particular, helped Anglo-Welsh poetry to emerge as a recognisable force. Thomas and Norman MacCaig.
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These last four poets represent a trend towards regionalism and poets writing about their native areas; Watkins and Thomas in Wales, Nicholson in Cumberland and MacCaig in Scotland. The s were dominated by three groups of poets, The Movement , The Group , and poets clarified by the term Extremist Art , which was first used by the poet A.
Alvarez to describe the work of the American poet Sylvia Plath. They were identified with a hostility to modernism and internationalism, and looked to Hardy as a model. However, both Davie and Gunn later moved away from this position. As befits their name, the Group were much more formally a group of poets, meeting for weekly discussions under the chairmanship of Philip Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith. Hobsbaum spent some time teaching in Belfast , where he was a formative influence on the emerging Northern Ireland poets including Seamus Heaney.
These poets are sometimes compared with the Expressionist German school. A number of young poets working in what might be termed a modernist vein also started publishing during this decade. These poets can now be seen as forerunners of some of the major developments during the following two decades. In the early part of the s, the centre of gravity of mainstream poetry moved to Northern Ireland , with the emergence of Seamus Heaney , Tom Paulin , Paul Muldoon and others.
In England, the most cohesive groupings can, in retrospect, be seen to cluster around what might loosely be called the modernist tradition and draw on American as well as indigenous models. The British Poetry Revival was a wide-reaching collection of groupings and subgroupings that embraces performance , sound and concrete poetry as well as the legacy of Pound, Jones, MacDiarmid, Loy and Bunting, the Objectivist poets , the Beats and the Black Mountain poets , among others. Leading poets associated with this movement include J.
At this moment in taste
Their work was a self-conscious attempt at creating an English equivalent to the Beats. Many of their poems were written in protest against the established social order and, particularly, the threat of nuclear war. Although not actually a Mersey Beat poet, Adrian Mitchell is often associated with the group in critical discussion.
Contemporary poet Steve Turner has also been compared with them. Some consider the late Geoffrey Hill to have been the finest English poet of recent years. There has also been a growth in interest in women's writing , and in poetry from England's minorities, especially the West Indian community.