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Jed Rasula's review of ten books by or about the women writers of the modernist generation seems to be generally well-informed (though he perhaps doesn't know--at least he doesn't mention--that H.D.'s The Gift, as issued by New Directions, is drastically cut) and is a useful contribution. The review begins with a fantasy that the work of the major male writers of that period is out-of-print and inaccessible by way of illustrating what has been, in fact, the case with the women writers. His statement that "feminists have ignored the modernist women writers as blissfully as the men have" is, however, simply not true. The only evidence that Rasula offers for this judgment is the comment of an English professor's "female colleague on the appearance of the two recent books on H.D. She seemed uninterested, and pressed for a response, dismissingly said 'H.D., oh, she's a man's poet.' " This woman's lack of interest in H.D. is fortunately not typical of literary feminists generally. If there is a renaissance of women writers, feminist scholars, poets, novelists and serious readers have helped to create it. A glance at the publishing record of feminist scholars will confirm this.

As for the unnamed "female colleague" Rasula cites, I would propose this: on a certain page in Love's Body, Norman O. Brown asks, "Who is my real mother? It is a political question." It is a man's question, and perhaps now also a woman's.

--Beverly Dahlen

°

This is only a sampling. Some other magazines featuring work on women modernists by women scholars include: Signs, Massachusetts Review, Truck and Sagetrieb. Over the last decade of Modern Language Association meetings, one has had the privilege of hearing an increasing variety of papers on the modernist women by women scholars--many feminist-identified, some not. Long in-the-works is Barbara Guest's forthcoming biography, Herself Defined: H.D., the Poet and her Work, due from Doubleday, spring 1984. Carolyn Burke has been working for several years on a critical biography of Mina Loy. Poetics Journal 4, winter 1984, will focus on "Women and Modernism," with articles on individual authors as well as related esthetic questions, by Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Carla Harryman, Leslie Scalapino, Abigail Childs, Susan Laufer, Francoise Larocque, Johanna Drucker, Sally Silver, Ellen Zweig, Beverly Dahlen, Kathleen Fraser and Carolyn Burke.

All in all, this adds up to a rather solid indication of scholarly interest and labor. The question remains: will the works cited above be incorporated into traditional institutional reading lists, where new readers and writers are initiated into what is important? We know that some of this new scholarship is being taught in Women's Studies programs throughout the country, as an alternative to the status quo. At best, that leaves the situation a segregated one.

Rasula has pointed out that these "great modernist women writers" were prominent in their own day, publishing "on the order of 150 books"--making it remarkable and suspect that until the last few years these works have been unavailable to be taken seriously. If he is truly interested in encouraging further critical study of women modernists, it seems a rather shop-worn and ultimately diversionary tack for him to trot out the traditional "j'accuse," chiding feminists for ignoring their own--especially given his limited research. From whom does he think the sudden demand for reprints and critical studies of modernist women has come? Isn't it more to the point to examine the power structures underpinning the making of a canon? Would Pound's The Cantos or Eliot's Four Quartets still be read, if they hadn't been seriously and thoroughly taught? Or, turning it around, could they have been taught, if the editors of American literature textbooks and poetry anthologies--predominately male, during the '30s, '40s and '50s--hadn't chosen their work as "major"? Would younger scholars have been adding to the growing body of criticism without these texts to alert their attention? It seems easy to forget that particular individuals with concrete esthetic criteria decide what work is significant enough to sustain in print. These far-reaching judgments include personal responses of recognition and pleasure, as well as ideas of relevance and excellence. Between 1925 and 1965, who were the individual editors, publishers and critics exercising these literary choices? How many women were there, among the ranks of the powerful?

-- Kathleen Fraser

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I was moved from Niedecker's poetry to her life, a life I learned was devoted to poetry for no more important reason than survival. The principle of "enough" governed LN's vision and underlies her "condensery". . . . For Niedecker, such economy was clearly more than poetic technique; it was a physical, psychological and moral necessity. . . for the woman who had grown up on Blackhawk Island, a place intimately connected to "the soft / and serious-- / Water", writing poetry was the means to "float" or "fly", and she employed images of both to characterize the act itself. She learned to condense, to: "be alone / Throw it over--/ all fashion / feud" . . . because the poetry was enough, "enough to carry [her] thru". . . .

To many it seems as though Niedecker sacrificed much to achieve such a precious balance. Ironically, she remained isolated from the established centers of literary activity in order to write the poetry of the American idiom and modern experience. She was, nonetheless, always alert to the "fashion and feud" of the literary world; she tells Cid Corman in a letter of 12 December 1964 that when she was eighteen and still reading Wordsworth, she "was vaguely aware that the poetry current (1921) was beginning to change." She was, in fact, a contributor to such avant-garde journals as New Democracy, and contributed along with Pound and William Carlos Williams, to the first annual edition of New Directions . . . . Zukofsky first published LN in A Test of Poetry, in which he placed "There's a better shine" in the section called Recurrence. According to LN, she did not introduce herself to LZ until six months after February Poetry, (1931), when she finally worked up enough courage to write him. By this time Zukofsky was back in New York, so contrary to many people's claim, LN did not work with Bunting and Zukofsky in Madison, Wisconsin. In the letters to Cid Corman, Niedecker describes her meeting with Bunting in 1967. She saw herself "on the periphery" of the Objectivist movement, and while she maintained a warm and affectionate correspondence with Zukofsky, she developed her art on the delicate line where individual imagination and culture meet . . . .

At bottom, it is LN's ability to make me engage the words, experience syncretism and the associative power of language that I find thrilling. Her poetry makes me know, without discourse, what it is like to be alive, to feel alive:

The eye
of the leaf
into leaf
and all parts
spine
into spine
neverending
head
to see

Lisa Pater Faranda has edited the complete annotated edition of The Letters of Lorine Niedecker, a selection of which appears in the Fall, 1983, issue of Conjunctions. Her introduction to that collection will appear in a future issue of Origin. Her lengthy biographical sketch of LN, containing much important information for scholars, will appear in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, (Modern American Poets volume), Fall, 1984.