Include everything: contemporary American poetry and the feminist everyday

This dissertation argues that women poets across post-1945 U.S. avant-garde movements shared an investment in creating new poetic forms that both valorized and critiqued the gendered conditions of everyday life. “The feminist everyday” designates a shared aesthetic tendency that consists of both the common impulse to “include everything” and the wide range of innovative forms that resulted from this inclusiveness. While previous narratives of U.S. feminist poetics have generally emphasized new content on the one hand or new forms on the other, the feminist everyday underscores how innovations in content and form can, and often must, go hand in hand, producing a poetics of personal experiment. The radical inclusion of women’s quotidian experiences produced poems that were everyday rather than lofty, improvisatory rather than carefully chiseled, or a series of modules rather than a continuous whole. Instead of excluding the ostensibly “unpoetic” (street slang, babies’ cries, nightmares, interruptions, complaints, chores, brand names), the poet invents new forms (sketch, pamphlet, transcription) that accommodate this new subject matter. While many later-20th-century women poets shared this aesthetic tendency, the feminist everyday appears most strikingly in the poems written from the 1950s to the 1980s by Diane di Prima, Sonia Sanchez, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley, poets whose brilliant experiments remain understudied even as their influence on subsequent generations of writers continues to grow. “The everyday” here indicates the conditions of daily life that produce gendered identities and especially the temporal rhythms that correspond to these conditions, including repetition, interruption, and real-time lived experience. Theories of the everyday, beginning with Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau and continuing through a growing body of contemporary thought, provide ways of conceptualizing the ambivalent, overdetermined relationship between femininity and everydayness. As the poets simultaneously reclaim so-called trivial aspects of women’s lives and expose the forces that have required women to serve as custodians of the banal, they create poems of double-edged feminist revaluation and critique that hold together these contradictions, making women’s lives and work visible and valuable even as they necessarily critique the tedium of the everyday.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Rebecca Klave