Temporalities and chronologies

We began this book by suggesting that it is difficult to write a history of women that produces either the contemporary woman or contemporary experimental woman poet. Denise Riley's designation ‘the temporalities of women’ – that is ‘that identities can only be held for a time’ – seems crucial in understanding how and why that task is difficult (Weed, 1989, 136 [emphasis in the original]). If Riley is right that ‘Woman is placed outside History’, but ‘at the same time thoroughly embedded in and also constitutive of the newer “social”’ sphere, then that embedment places her forever at the edge of something that is changing too quickly and may be simply too ephemeral to be codified as history (Weed, 1989, 138). The task of describing women's experimental poetry in Britain is complicated further by difficulties in saying what it once was and where it has come from. An argument that such poetry's own interest in provisionality militates against history not only converges with meta-critical approaches and using provisionality to excuse marginality, but risks homogenising a wide range of practices. With experimental poetry, it is more often the case that, as Caroline Bergvall notes of a moment in her own writing history, ‘contacts and friendships within the circuit evaporated’ (Bergvall, 2005, 113). ‘Circuit’ suggests that temporalities (in Riley's sense) involve the release and circulation of energies that may or may not continue to have power.

What can be described with some certainty are differences between ‘then’ and ‘now’. Poet and translator Glenda George (b.1951) recollects that, when she began writing and publishing at the end of the 1960s, it was doubtful whether

Just to be visible with an autonomous utterance was radical both in and of itself.