Jacque Vaught Brogan

Jacque Vaught Brogan is an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame, currently on leave with an NEH to write a book on the intersection of aesthetics and politics during World War II, Poets Against Their Climate: Williams, Stevens and Bishop. Her other critical work includes Stevens and Simile: A Theory of Language (Princeton University Press) and Part of the Climate: American Cubist Poetry (forthcoming from University of California Press). She has recently completed a manuscript of poetry, Changing Places.

Working Notes, Jacque Vaught Brogan:

The poems published here are part of a series of poems I've written this fall that explicitly explore the question of whether a feminist prosody is possible. Aesthetically as well as politically we are compelled to move (or open the spaces) between tradition and anarchy. Given these constraints, these poems take as their reference the iambic pentameter--but here pentameters turned to varying kinds of tripled feet, along with a specific numerical play of position [from 2 to 5 to 4 to 1 to 3]. Anyone familiar with medieval (theological) numerology will understand why, in terms of feminism, it might be necessary to begin with two (rather than to privilege one). The spacing is intended to evoke the change in perspective (literally, the dismantling of aesthetic/political "lines") necessary for attaining something on the order of a true cosmospolis.

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