Introduction

Summary

From the moment I began thinking about the shape of this book, I found I could never easily designate its center, and that as I wrote, the center kept altering, slipping, transforming. Just as simultaneity characterizes the modernist endeavor to reconsider reality, and a nonlinear layering of thought compels much postmodern poetics, this study takes shape as shifting, overlapping planes moving through a flattened space so that at any one moment we see numerous perspectives configured in changing relationship to each other. Is it a book about Williams, or modernism, or poetic daughters in a male tradition, or language innovation, or feminist poetics? William Carlos Williams is certainly the “big daddy” of the four poets examined here, a modernist giant looming with other male poets over Denise Levertov and Kathleen Fraser, and a modernist privileged in a literary history that has erased his radical contemporary, Mina Loy. Obviously, Williams remains the binding presence throughout the book, but I would encourage thinking about this presence as a translucent gauze that changes in tone, texture, shape, and even substance as various lights shine through it. To a significant degree, this shifting quality emerges when we recognize the impact of different gender-inflected strains of modernism upon Williams's writings. Operating at an intersection of a modernism practiced by men and a counterstrain practiced by women, Williams's work and his poetic theories traverse questions of subjectivity, tradition, and language, illuminating the gender dimensions of such questions and the process of poetic production.