Poetic Epistemologies

Megan Simpson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

"Drawing upon her own interviews with several of the poets as well as on the work of prior critics, Simpson evinces an enviable ease dealing with extremely difficult materials. Free of jargon, this book is a model of lucid interpretation. Written with enthusiasm and scholarly acumen, Poetic Epistemologies offers a powerful introduction to the feminist language-poets and to some of the most compelling questions having to do with poetry in our time." — Joanne Feit Diehl, author of Women, Poets, and the American Sublime"We can't foretell the map of literary history in the decades ahead, but it strikes me that Simpson's book will become an important touchstone for the study of language-oriented feminist poetry in the twenty-first century. The odds are good that this book will preserve and transmit important primary information about how major figures of the late twentieth century wrote poetry." — Timothy Morris, author of Becoming Canonical in American Poetry"Poetic Epistemologies is beautifully written, rigorously documented, and carefully argued. Most impressively, the book seamlessly blends two functions: it offers an accessible introduction to a number of emerging contemporary poets, yet it also provides a meticulous and nuanced theoretical discussion of some very complex philosophical and epistemological issues." — Helen Sword, author of Engendering Inspiration: Visionary Strategies in Rilke, Lawrence, and H. D.

• Preface Acknowledgments 1. Language-Oriented Feminist Epistemology, and the Case of Lyn Hejinian "A space that has opened": Gender and LanguageLanguage-Oriented Feminist Epistemology"Night Knowledge": Lyn Hejinian's Faustienne Poetics 2. "Come, words, away": Modernist Women's Invitations to Innovation Laura Riding's Lifelong Project with LanguageInside Language as Language with Gertude Stein"From stepping-stone to stone of creative explorations": Mina Loy's Deconstruction of FemininitySlipping the Knot of Language: Realism and Indeterminacy for H.D. 3. Subjects of Knowledge: Processing Gender and Sexuality Beverly DahlenLori LubeskiLaura Moriarty 4. Feminist Phenomenologies: Language as the Horizon of Encounter Leslie ScalapinoMei-mei BerssenbruggeCarla Harryman 5. "Cries open to the words inside them": Textual Truth and Historical Materialism in the Poetry of Susan Howe Interventions in History: Recovering the FeminineIntertextuality and the Material WordThe "Visible surface of Discourse"A Poetics of Encounter Notes Works Cited Index