Transformations in Feminist Poetry

In the last ten years, 1968 to 1978, feminist poetry has altered the shape and substance of American poetry. The rise of the feminism of the late sixties and early seventies occasioned poetic as well as political action, and, more importantly, the understanding that these were not separate endeavors. Poetry by feminists has been a powerful and essential articulation of feminist consciousness and concerns. But even as consciousness is not an institution but a process, so there have been changes in poetry by feminists during this ten-year period, new themes, and the necessary forms for their expression. The poetry of the wave, the emergence of feminist poetry, can be characterized by directness and accessibility in form; a rhetoric of statement and honesty; a personal voice; language literal or symbolic rather than figurative. For subject matter, lives: the personal, private lives of women. Breaking down the barrier between private and public, as Adrienne Rich wrote,[1] the feminist poet sought to validate and to politicize women's experience by defining the self, rejecting cultural definitions, and revealing the substance of her life. While these generalizations continue to describe much of the poetry that feminists still write for this is a strong new form that has been remarkably successful in both expressing the needs of the writer and in drawing an audience to her work they are inexact with reference to some recent poetry, especially that by developing writers. Some of the best poets, for example, Adrienne Rich, Susan Griffin, Margaret Atwood, and Kathleen Fraser, have matured in new directions. The second reaches other spaces, both thematic and formal. Domestic interiors give way to inner places: those of imagination, of dream, of thought. The space of the mind. Outer places, too, are reached, as the poetry moves in widening circles from the world of one woman into myth and history. Formally, this means a variety of modes-the lyrical, sensual, even mystical; the dramatic and ironic; the meditative and philosophical-as the poetry reveals consciousness both widening and deepening. It means a texture that is consequently more complex than before, more subtle, more layered. Especially, it means language that is figurative, forming connections, interrelationships. Specifically, images that intertwine woman and nature, a traditional and archetypal body of associations are used in a new way to identify the source and setting for female wisdom and power. In these poems both personal and collective experience share as their place of origin the mental landscape, sacred and hidden; so that the two journeys of discovery-inward into the mind, outward into myth and history-turn out to be one. Such a process is both an achievement in its own right and also a preparation for another transformation: past description, past redefinition, re-interpretation, re-discovery, reevaluation, towards creation of a viable present and a possible future. The first wave was reaction as much as action: to male definitions of poetry as well as of women. In the late sixties Mary Mackay contrasted the new women's poetry to the male poetry establishment: 'Speak