Heather Milne Publishes New Book Poetry Matters
Thu. Apr. 26, 2018
Professor Heather Milne has published the scholarly book Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics with University of Iowa Press. We asked her to tell us about this research and the process of writing the book.
Q: What is this book about? What gaps in scholarship does it fill?
My book explores poetry written by women from the U.S. and Canada that documents the social and political turmoil of the early twenty-first century and places this poetry in dialogue with recent currents of feminist theory, including new materialism, affect theory, the posthuman, and feminist engagements with neoliberalism and capitalism. The book focuseson poetry published after 2001 by writers who began publishing in the 1990s or 2000s and who were mostly too young to participate in the innovative feminist writing movements of the 1980s, but who have inherited and built upon their political and aesthetic legacies.
The poets discussed in this book bring a sense of political agency to poetry; they seek new vocabularies and dissenting critical and aesthetic frameworks for thinking across issues of gender, materiality, capitalism, the toxic convergences of nationalism and racism, and the decline of democratic institutions. The title of the project is meant to imply that poetry matters both in its political urgency and in its attentiveness to the world as “matter,” as a material entity under siege.
As the first monograph to focus specifically on feminist poetics of the early twenty-first century, this book provides new frameworks for thinking about feminist poetics in relation to contemporary politics and new strands of feminist critical thought. It also provides new critical frameworks for reading American and Canadian feminist poetics together.
Often people make an assumption that writing by women, and that poetry by women in particular, focuses on the private and the personal and is predominantly about self-exploration or self growth, or that it functions as a form of therapy. Indeed feminist poetry can do these things but this is not all that it does or all that it can do. My project shows that women poets are engaged with pressing public, social, political, and geopolitical issues and that they are bringing feminist analyses to bear on these issues in vital ways.
Q: Where did the idea come from?
In 2009, I co-edited a book of interviews that featured several Canadian women poets. I was struck by the fact that many of these poets were living, working and writing in the United States, yet there were no adequate critical frameworks at the time for thinking about American and Canadian poetry together. I was interested in finding a way to write about American and Canadian feminist poetry together without losing sight of national specificity, but at the same time, without over-determining the nation as a frame of reference.
I was also very interested in the political context of much of this writing. I was excited to encounter feminist poetry that was addressing urgent social and political issues and that was experimenting with language and form in order to address and foreground the crises brought about by unchecked capitalism, militarism, and environmental destruction. I wanted to think in depth about how these writers were using language in unconventional ways as they advanced political critiques and analyses through their poetry.
Q: Can you describe your research process?
I began to read as widely as I could in the field. I devoured small press poetry books, went on research trips to San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, and Toronto to gather a sense of some of the vibrant feminist poetry scenes happening across North America. I followed blogs and social media accounts dedicated to discussion of contemporary feminist poetry and poetics. I also read as much contemporary feminist theory as I could, paying particular attention to recent scholarship on affect, new materialisms, and the posthuman.
As I read, I realized that while the poetry and the theory was not usually in direct dialogue (theorists rarely write about contemporary experimental poetry; poets are more likely to engage with theory but often do so indirectly), there were many fascinating points of convergence between them and they illuminated each other in unexpected and exciting ways.
A lot of the poetry I write about is procedurally-driven and works with found language; I draw a lot on new materialisms in this book in order to think about how language functions as raw material that has its own agency or vibrancy and that can act in and on the world in tangible ways. We tend to think of theory as something that we can apply to literature but in my research process, I often found myself placing theory and poetry in a sort of reciprocal exchange, and sometimes even using poetry to understand theory. Contrary to popular assumptions that poetry is driven by emotion, it is often driven by conceptual frameworks and by philosophical, ethical, and political questions. This is especially true of process-oriented poetry but it can be true of other kinds of poetry as well.
I began researching the book about six years ago and began writing it about four years ago. The bulk of the manuscript was completed during my research leave in 2015-2016.
Q: Were there any surprises, challenges, or shifts in the project as you worked on it?
Because this book is focused on contemporary poetry that engages with recent and ongoing political, economic, and environmental events and crises, it felt sometimes like the book could expand indefinitely and I felt pressure to respond to an ever-expanding list of geopolitical crises.
I really had to struggle to draw boundaries around the project and to assign a kind of end date. When Trump was elected, I felt an urge to rewrite the entire book but I held myself back. The book represents a moment in time —roughly the span between 9/11 and the election of Donald Trump— a period characterized by the intensification of neoliberal modes of governance, shifting geopolitical relations that resulted from western military intervention in the middle east, and the intensification of the tendency to prioritize the economy and consumption over environmental sustainability.
I am mainly interested in how feminist poets responded and reacted to political events that unfolded during this time and in what we can learn from their writing in order to deepen our own political analyses and to think about how gender, sexuality, race and other facets of identity can inform and inflect these analyses in useful ways. I keep seeing new books of poetry that could expand and enrich the project in new and exciting ways. I had to draw a line and declare the book finished in spite of my desire to keep extending some of its discussions indefinitely.
Q: Any tips you'd share with other writers that you learned from the process of publishing this book?
This is a difficult question because I think people have very diverse writing practices and what works for me might not work for somebody else. I know that a lot of the advice out there tells people to set aside time every day to write. Personally, I find that this is impossible when I am teaching and sitting on university committees and doing all of the other things that professors do as part of their job. I needed to immerse myself in this project for longer periods of time so I worked on it during my research leave, in the summer, during reading break and in the break between fall and winter term.
I suppose my advice would be to figure out what a workable regular or semi-regular writing practice looks like for you – maybe it’s an hour every morning or maybe it’s one day a week or maybe it’s a solid month in the summer – and prioritize that time to work on your writing. Writing a book is an exercise in endurance, so set small goals for yourself and reward yourself for meeting those goals along the way. Make sure you are writing about something that really interests you since it is your own passion for the project that will sustain you over the course of writing the book.
Q: What will you be working on next?
I am editing a book of Rachel Zolf’s selected poetry for the Wilfrid Laurier University Press Canadian poetry series and finishing up a couple of scholarly articles. I’m planning to work on a handful of article-length research projects for the next year or two before thinking about another monograph. I’m also working on a side project with Dr. Angela Failler; together we co-direct a group called Museum Queeries that examines queer representation in museums. We might be co-editing a collection of essays on the topic soon.