Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics
Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne, eds.
Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009, ISBN 978-1-55245-221-9, 407 pp., $29.95 paper.

Prismatic Publics is an excellently conceived and executed collection of interviews and poetry, but it is also seriously flawed.

The book contains interviews with fifteen of the best women's experimental poets Canada has to offer, among them Nicole Brossard, Erin Moure, Lisa Robertson, Margaret Christakos, and Daphne Marlatt. Each interview is accompanied by excerpts from the poets' books.

For example, Brossard's interview is followed by well-chosen excerpts from Lovhers, After Words, Downstage Vertigo and Notebook of Roses and Civilization such as the following (from Lovhers):

(bec.) the only reality
in body the (fiction) or this time
the mental space of the word women in ink
calls forth the unrecorded from myths and torment
turning point of the imaginary of forms of comfort (30)

Barbara Godard translated this work for Guernica Editions, while further selections were translated by Robert Majzels and Erin Moure. The interview includes a discussion between Eichhorn and Brossard regarding the difference Brossard sees between writing a poem and a book or essay--genres in which Brossard is equally adept.

Moure's interview begins tongue-in-cheek with Eichhorn asking Moure about "another writer," one by whom she is "lately . . . being eclipsed," namely Elisa Sampedr’n." (214). Sampedr’n emerged in Moure's Little Theatres, from which no selection is included. In order to understand Sampedr’n's role, you need to be familiar with the nature of the Galician poet Pessoa, whose O Guardador de Rabanhos Moure translated as Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person. Pessoa tends to operate through alter egos. Unfortunately, no excerpts from this work are included and the book is out of print. The excerpts that appear are from some of Moure's most radical writings--Search Procedures, A Frame of the Book, and O Cidadán. From the last, we read, in "FANFARE'S FANS 'A'":

Who are the knights? Temples.
Visions over greed.

Oracular vesicular auricular.

Small bird pecking the rib.
Torpor ('s return) (235)

Concluding the book is an interview with Lisa Robertson, in which she discusses her experiences at the Kootenay School of Writing, literary collaborations, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and writing as a performative act. Abstracted from her longer works are excellent selections from XEclogue, Debbie: An Epic, The Weather and Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip. Consider this example from "Liberty," in Robertson's second book, XEclogue, based on Virgil's Eclogue:

Enormous grief as if outside 'our culture' a sense of peace floated or languished with no historical precedent. As if we could invent liberty, as if peace and liberty had no place in that slow starvation. As if, subject only to 'the laws of nature,' a gendered life were worth three years or nothing. (383)

This is as good a time as any to segue into a discussion of the downfall of this otherwise excellent book--gender. Or, more precisely, gender discrimination. This charge will not come as a surprise to Milne and Eichhorn. Milne writes in her introduction: "But if, as we claim, our concern is with innovative poetry and poetics, why edit an anthology that remains bound by the constraints of gender and nation at all?" A good question, at least as it relates to gender--but the response to which leaves much to be desired. Milne continues: "Although this question dogged us from the outset, we had no way of anticipating that we would find ourselves editing this book in the midst of the most significant debate on feminist poetics in the past decade. What would come to be known as the 'numbers trouble' started with the presentation and eventual publication of Jennifer Ashton's article 'Our Bodies, Our Poems' and Jennifer Scappettone's response." What led to this debate was the publication of two books by Wesleyan University Press, American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002), edited by Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr, and American Poets in the 21st Century (2007), edited by Rankine and Lisa Sewell. We don't know why Spahr was not involved in the latter project. Presumably, though, it came about in part due to the storm of dissension that greeted the first volume. Significantly, it does not bear the title "American Men Poets in the 21st Century," probably because of the possibility of a charge of gender discrimination against Wesleyan University. Why, then, would Kate Eichhorn, Heather Milne, and Coach House Press believe that the same charge should not be levelled against them?

As to the 'numbers trouble,' Milne is a professor in the English Department at the University of Winnipeg. Walk down the hallway containing that department and notice the names on the doors, the majority of which are female. The same situation can be expected at English Departments in most other Canadian universities. Yes, women in years past had a significant struggle to have their names on those doors and to gain full professorship status--a fight that still goes on in certain backwards locations today.

But that fact is no longer enough to support the publication of a 'women-only' anthology, and for that reason, this book cannot be recommended.

John Herbert Cunningham is a Winnipeg writer. He reviews poetry in Canada for Malahat Review, Arc, Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead and The Danforth Review, in the U.S. for Quarterly Conversations, Rain Taxi, Rattle, Big Bridge and Galatea Revisits, and in Australia for Jacket.

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