Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- CONTEXTS
- POETRIES
- 4 Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Wendy Mulford: Lyric Transformations
- 5 Geraldine Monk: Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum
- 6 Denise Riley: Corporeal and Desiring Spaces
- 7 Maggie O'Sullivan: ‘Declensions of the non’
- 8 Harriet Tarlo, Elizabeth Bletsoe and Helen Macdonald: ‘Being Outside’
- 9 Caroline Bergvall, Elizabeth James/Frances Presley and Redell Olsen: Virtual Spaces
- 10 Younger Women Poets 1: Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson
- 11 Younger Women Poets 2: Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Geraldine Monk: Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum
from POETRIES
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- CONTEXTS
- POETRIES
- 4 Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Wendy Mulford: Lyric Transformations
- 5 Geraldine Monk: Supernatural Soundscapes and Interregnum
- 6 Denise Riley: Corporeal and Desiring Spaces
- 7 Maggie O'Sullivan: ‘Declensions of the non’
- 8 Harriet Tarlo, Elizabeth Bletsoe and Helen Macdonald: ‘Being Outside’
- 9 Caroline Bergvall, Elizabeth James/Frances Presley and Redell Olsen: Virtual Spaces
- 10 Younger Women Poets 1: Anna Mendelssohn, Emily Critchley and Sophie Robinson
- 11 Younger Women Poets 2: Marianne Morris, Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (1998), Keith Tuma opens his discussion of Geraldine Monk (b.1952) as follows:
Pity poor Geraldine Monk, extracted here from a whole host of British women experimentalists […] inevitably to be made to carry a discussion of the issues confronting feminist poetry in Britain. She might equally well be made to represent some of the possibilities of performance and performance writing … (Tuma, 1998, 229)
Tuma speaks to one of the difficulties involved in the criticism of women's poetry. The term ‘women's poetry’ suggests not only poetry that is by and for women but also poetry that is the articulation of women. Therefore, women's poetry is always being called on to be representative of something. Tuma also evokes another difficulty in writing about women's poetry: the assumption that experimental, feminist and radical can be comfortably elided. But identifying Monk's poetry as explicitly feminist has often been difficult. In his introduction to the ‘Some Younger Poets’ section of The New British Poetry (1988), Ken Edwards saw a convergence between Glenda George's championing of ‘womanism’ in order to avoid ‘the slur of “mere propaganda masquerading as literature”’ and the manifesto that Monk wrote with Maggie O'Sullivan which was published in City Limits in 1984. The two poets argued – in a passage that has since been endlessly quoted – that
the most effective chance any woman has of dismantling the fallacy of male creative supremacy is simply by writing poetry of a kind which is liberating by the breadth of its range, risk and innovation […] to exploit and realize the full potential and importance of language. (Sheppard, 2005, 163)
Women's poetry that is explicitly feminist seems to run the risk of being called something other than poetry and the choices this leaves are stark. Women can write a poetry that is based on what Alan Robinson terms ‘rhetorical estrangement from the masculine poetic tradition’ (Robinson 1987, 208); that self-identifies as ‘womanist’; or that is simply ‘liberating’ because it is very, very good.
Our reading of Interregnum will argue that, because Geraldine Monk's book-length sequence is concerned with a linguistic sociality outside the dominant order (the Pendle witches), it enables a different focus on terms such as experimental, feminist and radical.
- Type
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- Information
- Women's Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010Body, Time and Locale, pp. 68 - 82Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013