Looking back at Feminism and Poetry : An interview with Jan Montefiore

Professor, Feminism and Poetry is a landmark for any feminist literary critic and scholar interested in women and literature. The first edition, published in 1987, situated your work as one of the pioneering studies on women’s poetry in English. Can you tell us about the genesis of the book?

What prompted it was twofold. One was simply the women’s movement, and the intellectual form it took at the University of Kent, which was the interdisciplinary MA in Women’s Studies. It was founded in 1980 by Mary Evans and Clare Ungerson and it was the very first Master’s post-graduate degree in gender studies in the UK, and I was part of it from very early on. Even before that, the University’s atmosphere was friendly towards experiment. Our first year students in the summer term used to take a course known as a ‘Topic’ that was interdisciplinary, with two weekly lectures and one seminar, taught by members of at least two different disciplines and preferably more. There was a list of about eight ‘Topics’ to choose from – popular ones were ‘Sex, Literature and Morality’, or ‘The Absurd’ (about existentialism). When we ran ‘Psychoanalysis, Art and Language’, I gave my first lectures on Luce Irigaray and that started me seriously thinking about her. There was a great intellectual excitement at the University of Kent then, it was founded as an interdisciplinary university in 1964 and when I arrived in 1978 it was still in that mode. The other thing was that I used to publish poems in the national UK Arts Council’s magazine South East Arts, and I was asked if I would do a survey article on contemporary women poets. So I wrote about basically what was on my shelves, which was Anne Stevenson’s Correspondences (1974), which I’d been alerted to by Mary Jacobus who had been my tutor at Oxford, the feminist poetry anthology One Foot on the Mountain (1979) and Eavan Boland’s In Her Own Image (1980), which was her most angry feminist collection, and of course Adrienne Rich, whose Dream of a Common Language (1978) I had picked up in the London radical bookshop Collet’s (but that’s closed long ago). ¹ South East Arts were really pleased with it, but when I wrote it I thought there was more to say. So I went back to it and I wrote a second version of it, which I sent to Feminist Review and they liked it too. This is when I thought, ‘Actually, there’s a book in this …’ I hadn’t ever really thought systematically about women’s poetry before. I got in touch with Philippa Brewster who was then Editor at Routledge, we had a meeting, and then she commissioned what became Feminism and Poetry. I got the contract not long after 1982, and it actually appeared just before our second son was born in 1987. I remember Mary Jacobus saying to me ‘It’ll take you five years to write it. Everyone takes at least five years to write a real book’ (laughs) and she was right. Five years was what it took.

Your book represented a surfacing of academic focus on women’s poetry around the late 1970s and the 1980s. How was the dialogue between your book and the corpus of feminist literary criticism at the time?

There was a bit of feminist criticism of poetry then but not an awful lot. There was Suzanne Juhasz’s Naked and Fiery Forms (1976), which had some good things to say, but it was all very American and very essentialist, as we said then. There were a lot of interesting articles and that collection by Gilbert and Gubar, Shakespeare’s Sisters (1979), I used that quite a lot when I was writing Feminism and Poetry. ² Margaret Homans’s Women Writers and Poetic Identity (1980), which I liked much more than her second book. I much admire what it’s got to say about Brontë and Dickinson, I think she overplays her hand a bit on Dorothy Wordsworth perhaps. So, you know, … there didn’t seem to be a “book”. Oh, Cora Kaplan of course, she was hugely important for me. Her article ‘Language and gender’ (1986) I read again and again. ³ And in a sense, the nearest thing to the book that asked the sort of questions I wanted to ask was her anthology Salt and Bitter and Good (1975), which I retain a huge respect for. That really is a landmark, but you can’t do the theoretical work I was searching for in an anthology. So that’s what got me started.

In the article ‘In Their Own Images: An Afterword’, you suggest that Feminism and Poetry was intended to be the ‘first systematic attempt to theorize the traditions of women’s poetry’ (2002: 24). Could you contextualize your work within the specific cultural context of the women’s movement and the boom on women’s poetry highlighting its unique contributions within the scene?

Well, I can try. The cultural context is difficult to define as the women’s movement was never a single party. There was a National Women’s Association (if I have the name right), but there were lots of feminist workshops and local women’s groups. And there were the ‘Greenham women’ – feminist pacifists who camped for years at Greenham Common US airbase to protest against nuclear missiles. But what I mainly had in mind in relation to poetry were the 1980s consciousness-raising groups, which were small groups of women meeting, usually weekly, in a member’s house, putting questions which they would answer from their own experiences, and the group would then work out a collective conclusion from these personal testimonies. It sounds like what we would now call a support group, except that it was much more political – since they were working out a critique of their oppression. Poetry was important because in a consciousness-raising group people would use poems – often feminist poems – to define their feelings, or poetry came out of the discussions. It was a two-way process. Lilian Mohin in her manifesto-introduction to the anthology One Foot on the Mountain (1979) said ‘we must continuously see and say that what the world/men has declared invisible or invalid is real and important … We intend to tell each other everything we can, every secret, because we know this intimate, difficult exchange makes a difference, and it is the process of change.’ This comment pretty well equates poetry with consciousness-raising, since Mohin is saying that the poems in her anthology and women in consciousness-raising groups are doing the same thing.

And, as you say, at the time I was working on Feminism and Poetry there had been particularly a boom in feminist poetry, it didn’t last, but it was there. These two anthologies, One Foot on the Mountain (1979) and Lesbian Poetry (1981), stayed in print for years, presumably subsidized by more lucrative things than only women’s poetry. There were also the American anthologies The World Split Open (1974) and later No More Masks (1993). But One Foot on the Mountain was contemporary. This one was up to the minute. I found it very useful for what people were thinking. And although I kind of disagreed with them (laughs), I found they were very creative and useful for people to disagree with. I mean, I more or less set out that stall in Feminism and Poetry, don’t I? But, I have a great deal of respect for radical feminism. I’ve learnt a lot from them. Most of these anthologies were on American women poets.

In relation to my contribution within this scene, as I said before, Cora Kaplan had also sketched an attempt to theorize women’s poetry because her book has a kind of temporal trajectory, she writes about Victorian women, about Dora Greenwell and Christina Rossetti and so on. ⁴ And Margaret Homans’s book was sort of doing that but she didn’t go further than the nineteenth century. She does one great leap towards Adrienne Rich, who she accuses of essentialism, but that’s about it. And Naked and Fiery Forms only dealt with the contemporary. Also I think I had had a very thorough and good training in the great European literary traditions. I was a Classicist at school and I did my degree in English, although at Oxford where I did my studies, the latest we went was early Yeats and Hopkins. But still, you thought you were being taught all of English literature, from Old English through to the nineteenth century. But of course, what you were being taught was something very selective. And you weren’t doing any women poets for a start. I didn’t even know about Emily Dickinson until my first job at Liverpool University. ⁵ I was educated in what I thought of as the Great Tradition. What I was kind of alert to in women’s poems was how they were relating to this Tradition. Gilbert and Gubar followed the line of Harold Bloom’s thesis considering that literary tradition filled women writers with angst, and that they were writing against this, but I never really bought that because I think that the way great literature works is more complicated than that. ⁶ I know that a lot of women writers felt these dead white men spoke to them as well as speaking about them, and that they were in dialogue with them. So I suppose I felt that that needed thinking through.

It is 21 years since the publication, in 1994, of the second edition of Feminism and Poetry that included a last and new chapter on postcolonial women’s poetry. This edition is probably the one that readers of a younger generation like me look at as the ‘actual’ Feminism and Poetry.

I kind of felt more comfortable with it. The only thing about the first edition is I like the cover much better (laughs). They produced a really beautiful cover for the first one.

Yes, and it obtained much more critical attention. Could you tell us, though, about the evolution towards this more complete second edition?

I had some friends at Kent who were in Postcolonial Literature, and of course what prompted it also was reading Adrienne Rich’s second essay collection Blood, Bread and Poetry (1986) where she’s finding out about racism. Rich’s poems helped to push me in that direction, as well as her third essay collection, What Is Found There (1994). I wrote the chapter on postcolonial poetry in America. My husband is a journalist and for much of his career he has been a war reporter, specialized in the Middle East. He was working for the Financial Times and they offered him Moscow. He asked me what I thought about coming to Moscow with our son and taking leave from my job. I actually finished Feminism and Poetry in Moscow where I was away from all of the libraries that I could’ve used at the time. I think that was actually good for the book because it meant I was totally concentrated on getting it clear instead of looking up yet another reference. I came back to Canterbury to have our second son. Then my husband started reporting the first Gulf War (1991) for The Independent, which made him their Washington correspondent and he said, ‘What about doing this again but in Washington rather than Moscow?’ And again we were out for a total of two years with the boys, from 1992 to 1994. That time I went to Washington as a Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University, and that’s where I wrote Chapter 6 ‘ “Long memoried women”: Feminism and post-colonial poetry’. ⁷ And of course, being in touch with people at the Georgetown University Faculty you could not be unaware of the politics of race. Relating to this, I do mention in the second edition of the book that the Feminist Review ran an issue about black women feminists who bitterly resented white feminists like me. I wanted to put one of the poems from that issue in my book, but the poet I asked said ‘No way. I’m not having a white sister taking over my voice’. I thought it was pretty damn silly but there you are, if that’s what she thought. Also, you couldn’t live in Washington, which was, and is, basically an apartheid city, and not be aware of race. And I have to say that it was my American colleagues that recommended Gloria Anzaldúa to me, whose work I had not known before. ⁸

The progression of the chapters in Feminism and Poetry moved towards the analysis of the elements at work in the emergent poetry by women. In Chapter 4, ‘Two-way mirrors: Psychoanalysis and the love-sonnet’, and Chapter 5, ‘ “The lips that never lie”: Female language and imaginary identity’, you draw extensively on French psychoanalytic theory to analyse women’s literature. Do you still consider psychoanalytic insights useful analytical tools for approaching women’s poetic work?

I have a feeling that probably the most important questions nowadays on literature and women are philosophical rather than psychoanalytic ones. Alertness to historical context is also important. Psychoanalysis came out of the 1980s Zeitgeist and it was very, very exciting. All that material in the chapters you mention was written out of intellectual excitement with that. In fact, that’s the part of the book that I wrote first. The progression of the chapters in the final book is not the same as the order of composition; it was massively transformed. The introduction was written last, and that’s when the category of experience in women’s writing comes in. I shouldn’t think that people will be looking to those intellectual models in the same way now that they did then. Margaret Whitford’s (1991) book about Irigaray treats her principally as a philosopher. Though maybe that’s a false dichotomy [between philosophy and psychoanalysis] – after all in Feminism and Poetry I was focusing on the constructs of Lacan and Irigaray more as interpretive models. And so does Deryn Rees-Jones (2005) in her book on women’s poetry Consorting with Angels – focusing on Irigaray and Cixous.

Throughout the book there is a well-grounded critique on the main tenets of American feminist literary criticism. For example, in Chapter 3, ‘Towards a woman’s tradition’, you discuss in detail Gilbert and Gubar’s and Adrienne Rich’s critical models that accounted for the separation and specificity of women’s literature in English on the basis of women’s experience. These perspectives were anchored in a traditional approach to literature (and women) that contrasted with a poststructuralist, linguistic and discursive approach to literature and identity by French feminist theory. In retrospect, how do you view now these divisions between Anglo-American and French feminist literary criticism?

That of course is the subject of Toril Moi’s book Sexual/Textual Politics (1985). I think that the great division was a product of cultural differences. French feminists like the generalization; they do like the grand theory. After all they get trained in logic and philosophy in a way that we don’t at school and they tend towards abstraction. The Anglo-Americans, on the other hand, were trained to be empirical. And so that’s what they were. Moi pretty much set them up against each other, I think rather regrettably. Although there’s a lot of Toril Moi’s book I really like, and her biography of Simone de Beauvoir is absolutely terrific. What I always thought about the American side of it was that they were much too oblivious to class. And of course race. They didn’t allow for divisions between women. But neither of course did the French, since they were talking about a level of identity where it didn’t really matter.

Although there is not such a clear-cut argument in favour of one or another, as in Moi’s thesis, the innovative critique you make in Feminism and Poetry of the category of women’s experience as defining the poetry or literature written by women was a groundbreaking thesis in your work. As you reveal in the introductory chapter of the book, ‘Poetry and women’s experience’, the assumptions that poetry could directly articulate personal experience and that the feminist poet could reflect in her writing women’s consciousness hid a masculinist Romantic understanding of subjectivity and transcendence (a vision of universality and idealization in poetic discourse) that could be dangerously essentialist for women and captious for feminist literary analysis. Bringing to light the problems found in the ‘unrecognized Romantic inheritance’ (1994: 11) in feminist discourse at the time was at the core of your critique of the category of women’s experience and constituted a brave challenge to the basis of American feminist literary criticism.

This is true. I think, in a way, my view of that hasn’t changed. The American radical feminist argument didn’t add up, because their central term ‘experience’ was so un-thought out. Nonetheless there was a kind of political energy from things such as this collection, Lesbian Poetry, that you couldn’t do without. However right theoretically people like Kristeva and Irigaray might be, they did seem to be much further from the grassroots than the best of the American critics. The energy and commitment that the best of the American poets and writers represent has always seemed to me absolutely indispensable.

In relation to the concept of ‘women’s experience’, it was central to a certain kind of feminist aesthetic, which Lilian Mohin articulated in that introduction to her feminist poetry anthology which I quoted earlier. It was a poetry of cultural critique, very much committed to accessible language and form, and an ideology of shared experience. The problem with ‘experience’ is that it’s a deceptively universal category because women divided by race, class, ethnicity have very different experiences. That discovery of differences between gender, race, sexual orientation divided the ‘women’s movement’ and made it impossible to sustain, thus identity politics was born. The other problem is that an ‘experiential’ aesthetic assumes that words straightforwardly express meaning; it ignores the fact that there is rhetoric, there are traditions, and the fact that the rhetoric you use affects what you say and how you think. The notion of poetry as self-expression goes back to Romantic poets defining poetry as the overflow of powerful feelings – and buying uncritically into that tradition risks bringing back the false Romantic universals that feminism is critiquing. I said in the book that radical feminists were trying to re-invent Wordsworth’s humanist idea that the poet was a man speaking to men as a poetry of ‘women speaking to each other’ – but then the question arises, ‘Which women?’

In 2003, the last edition of Feminism and Poetry came out with an introduction by Claire Buck, an enlightening essay that contextualizes the book within the history of feminist poetry criticism. Why did you feel the need to re-edit the book 10 years after its 1994 publication?

Well, I was asked to by the publishers. The first edition was originally commissioned by Pandora, which I chose because it was a feminist press. What they wanted for the third edition was a complete revision, and I said that I couldn’t do it. If I had known how much women’s poetry there was when I began Feminism and Poetry I would never have had the courage to write it, you know. But I did know by the third edition; it had all got global and I thought there was no way I could cover that. In an ideal world I would have brought it up to date with a proper appreciation of what new poets were doing and what developments there’d been in thinking about women’s poetry since then.

In Feminism and Poetry you already suggest that ‘there is a variety of women poets, often divided by major differences of class, race and circumstances, and writing in multiplicity of discourses’ (1994: 59). Do you think feminist literary critics should drop the specific classification of women’s poetry?

I have already addressed the issue of differences among women in my answer about the challenge to the concept of women’s experience in poetry. But regarding your question I have to say that regrettably, experience over our lifetimes, over the centuries shows us that if you say, ‘The battle is won, we don’t have to think of women separately’, then women writers get forgotten. If you want to go on thinking about women’s poetry then you have to draw that line and say, ‘Yes, I am thinking about women’s poetry’, because if nobody does that it’ll all get forgotten again. You mark my words!

‘Part of a feminist critic’s job’, you say in Arguments of Heart and Mind, ‘is to construct a “map” of her subject, knowing how fallible and incomplete such maps are’ (2002: x). You also suggest that bringing to light unknown women poets is one of the more useful tasks they can do. Can you tell us about the critical research on forgotten women’s writing you undertake in your book Men and Women Writers of the 1930s?

Yes, part of the impulse of writing that book was bringing to light undeservedly forgotten poets (the title of one of the chapters in the book), and my long-standing interest in politics and poetry. Jane Dowson had also made it her area. I remember I wrote a piece about women poets of the 1930s for the PN Review (‘Poetry Nation’, one of the most prestigious poetry magazines in the UK) slightly before Dowson’s anthology (1996), but we were working independently in the same field. Most of these women poets and writers of the 1930s were middle class or upper class women that had not been given the deserved attention in the canon by male literary criticism, such as Sylvia Townsend Warner and Naomi Mitchison. ⁹ And Storm Jameson and Rebecca West, though they aren’t poets. ¹⁰ The book was worth doing but it has huge gaps, the one I regret the most being Nancy Cunard. ¹¹ It actually grew out of Feminism and Poetry. There was a section on the 1930s, ‘Women’s exclusion: A cautionary tale’, and I thought there was a book on this. Sometime in the early 1980s I was asked to give a talk at a girls’ school on the Penguin anthology Poetry of the Thirties, which was their A-level text. I was really cross about this, because it was a non-teaching day and I had childcare set up, and what I wanted to do was to get on with Feminism and Poetry, so I went reluctantly. But after my talk a girl put up her hand and said: ‘Please, were there any women writing then?’ I was a bit thrown aback but I managed to come up with Vera Britain and Steve Smith – ‘And of course there’s Virginia Woolf’. So I saw this was a real question, which I not only hadn’t thought important but hadn’t even considered. I was already thinking about Sylvia Townsend Warner, and I had worked on her poem ‘Drawing you, heavy with sleep’, for what became Chapter 5 of Feminism and Poetry. But I simply hadn’t thought of Warner as a thirties figure. And that’s really what started that book. I wrote it trying to think about the implications of that question. Women predominate in the book, but I thought the men had to be part of the story too, partly because I am interested in sedition and politics and Auden’s poetry is a long-standing love of mine, I didn’t want to leave him out. ¹² But I think that probably didn’t do me any good in promoting the book. The attacks came not from feminist reviewers, who welcomed the book, but from male critics who were expecting a book about women writers only, and clearly felt I was trespassing on their territory by writing about men too.

Some of the central concerns in contemporary feminist criticism of poetry still focus on an assumed struggle between aesthetics and politics, between an avant-garde feminist poetics and an experiential, formally conservative women’s poetry. In fact, if you have a look at the few last publications on the field they are mostly on modernist or experimental women poets. What do you think of this long-standing feminist argument on poetics?

That sounds exactly like a re-run of the American versus French feminism argument. It’s very limited to think that writing about experience means being formally conservative. It doesn’t have to be this way. I think the problem with the avant-garde is that it has such a very small audience; people have to be trained to appreciate it. ¹³ It basically means you are speaking to a university audience. And that is regrettable because poetry becomes a specialist subject. I would hope that the debates would move on. The thing is of course, that now, as then, there is an intellectual excitement in the avant-garde which isn’t there when you are talking about the more traditional poets. But I do actually think that feminists and critics ought to be attending to the voices of the outsiders and the marginalized in terms of ethnicity, migration, or sexuality, paying attention to what happens when they put that specific situation into words. And some avant-garde poetry also does that. But why just look at those two kinds of poetry? It’s not as if that’s the only poetry that’s being written. There are lots of other people and poetry you could be thinking about.

I do actually think that the experiential and experimental very often come together, and that feminist poetry and criticism must not only attend to the mainstream, and there is an avant-garde mainstream, as well as a traditional mainstream. Such a lot of the energy of the poetry of the eighties came from little pamphlets published by impoverished presses of people who were then unknown. And some of them stayed unknown, but they nevertheless wrote very well. I suppose I’m thinking of Sheila Shulman, who has given up writing poetry and become a lesbian rabbi, but I think her poetry was worth attending to.

As a renowned scholar on women’s literature, what would be your advice for a young researcher specializing on contemporary women’s poetry?

One thing I say in the introductory chapter of Feminism and Poetry, and I think that I was right about this, was that a lot of the most interesting thinking about what poems can do has been done in the poems themselves. If you’re writing on a poet, you should know their work really well. And you should know their context. That’s something that seems to me is in danger of being lost as poetry becomes an academic subject – people sometimes know more about commentators on a poet than they do about a poet’s actual works. About feminist critics of poetry, to my knowledge, there has not been an awful lot since Vicki Bertram’s book Gendering Poetry (2004), Deryn Rees-Jones’s Consorting with Angels (2005) and Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle’s History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry (2009). In a sense, Gendering Poetry attempts to go on where Feminism and Poetry left off. Vicki Bertram did a lot of interviews with women poets in PN Review and she did that collection Kicking Daffodils (1997), which has been quite influential. Unfortunately, I don’t think her Gendering Poetry got much notice, but then books about women’s poetry often don’t. Feminism and Poetry never made it into the TLS. ¹⁴

Apart from being a literary critic and scholar you are also a published poet. Can you tell us about the interrelation, if any, between your creative and intellectual work?

My intellectual work certainly feeds into my poetry; it always has. That is why I did see fit to include one of my poems in Feminism and Poetry, ‘The mistress to her lover’, which is how I imagined one of John Donne’s women might have answered back to him. ¹⁵ But it also came out of reading Lacan, The Language of the Self. I think Auden got it right quoting Matthew Arnold when he said that, if a critic’s going to be any good, he’s got to be prepared to say ‘Mr X’s work is more important than anything I can say about it’, though I would alter the gender in the sentence … But, I would like to write more poetry than I have. I published a very slim volume a long time ago in the late 1970s, and I hope that in my retirement I am going to be able to write more poetry. That’s what I’m really keen on doing. I am now trying to get published a memoir of my childhood and school days in 50 sonnets. I spent a lot of time and trouble not polishing them, but trying to get them rougher (laughs). I can do form easily, but being good at form is a great trap, you can easily think of the word that fits the metre, which is not necessarily the right word. I called the sonnet sequence Shaping Spirits, which is a phrase from Coleridge’s (1802) ode ‘Dejection’. It’s the greatest poem anyone has ever written about depression. It has this line about ‘what nature gave me at my birth / my shaping spirit of imagination’, I thought it was a good phrase for a poem about childhood because it’s also the spirits that shaped you. ¹⁶

What are you working on right now and what are your projects for the future?

I’m writing a piece about post-1945 feminist poets for a Cambridge Companion. That’s my project for the autumn. And otherwise, I want to get on with writing poetry and wood engraving, which is something I had always hoped to do when I retired. And then I’ve got the Kipling Journal. I don’t have another big book in mind now, but I kind of feel that I’ve paid my dues when it comes to big books (laughs). I’m sorry, you are probably disappointed, you would probably like me to be writing another big book on women poets …

Of course, a review of contemporary women poets for an up-to-date edition of Feminism and Poetry would be wonderful … Meanwhile, I hope this interview, which will be of interest for any researcher on gender and literature, helps to raise academic debate on the current situation of women’s poetry in English and critical attention to your pioneering contribution to the field of feminist literary criticism. Thank you, Professor Montefiore, for talking with me about your valuable work.