Rachel Blau DuPlessis's The Pink Guitar: Writing As Feminist Practice (1990) offers a creative alternative to traditional scholarship about women's poetry. Specifically, DuPlessis wrestles with the work of H. D., Beverly Dahlen, Susan Howe, and others, both by analyzing their writing and by participating in the politicized play she values in their poetry. This politics—and DuPlessis's tendency to wander between poetic and academic discourses—is connected to Lyn Hejinian's formulation of the "open text," Susan Howe's notion of "stuttering," and DuPlessis's commitment to a "both/and vision." That is, DuPlessis's politicized writing is characterized by a lack of closure, marginalized utterings, and multiplicity. Such elements are not obviously associated with activism and change, yet The Pink Guitar insists on turning to the socio-material realm even as it refuses reductive or programmatic approaches or answers.
In order to continue the politically engaged response to women's writing that DuPlessis models, I offer here a nontraditional presentation—a conversation in many voices that explores ideas of politics, poetry, performance, and play in DuPlessis's poetic criticism and in the poetry on which she comments. Three members of the audience will thus be asked to help me perform a dramatic reading featuring four characters: Politics, Poetry, Performance, and Play. The rest of the audience will be asked to act as the chorus. The production as a whole will offer a variety of perspectives on the relation between politics and criticism, politics and poetry, not only by analyzing ideas but by participating in DuPlessis's project.
I've written about Rachel Blau DuPlessis's book The Pink Guitar: Writing As Feminist Practice (1990) in very traditional, academic ways. Today I decided to say something differently—and I imagine that what I'm saying is thus also different.
I have also presented papers that involve audience interaction, but today I'm going further than that. I've written a paper in a dramatic form, so it will involve both participation from you and the help of a few colleagues.
I was inspired to experiment with my approach by DuPlessis's writing, of course, both in The Pink Guitar and elsewhere. As a matter of fact, after arriving at this conference I looked at the journal Contemporary Women's Writing that was on display in the registration area, and I discovered that DuPlessis had included an essay there that uses a dramatic form with symbolic characters, so seeing that was pretty neat. But I also need to give credit to another scholar whose name I don't know. When I went to MLA for the first time, the first panel I attended was a feminist one, and it was fantastic. One of the speakers gave a dramatic presentation that included Virginia Woolf interacting with various characters. I loved it. The MLA was way better than anyone had ever described it.
Because this is such a new venture for me, I feel more unable than usual to judge my own work. I'd be genuinely interested in hearing from you at some point about what seems to be working and what could work better.
Just a few more things, and we can get started.
First, you must learn your part. When I point at you, you all need to say together, "What is The Pink Guitar?" Let's practice”. Very good! You'll only need to do it twice, once at the start and once near the end, but don't forget! Write it down if you have to!
Now let me introduce the players:
Politics
Poetry
Performance
Play
And I will say a quick word about the point, just in case it's not at all apparent. I'm exploring the poetics of The Pink Guitar in a way that implicitly argues it's a cool role model for politicized writing. More specifically, I'm really playing with criticism and looking at what it does, what it can do, and maybe what it usually fails to do, especially in the way it uses categories to discuss texts.
One last note. A huge part of this dramatic reading consists of direct quotes from The Pink Guitar, taken out of the original text and moved around to help my narrative progress. I have a handout that I'll distribute at the end to give appropriate credit to DuPlessis [and which is at the end of the text in the written version], but the actual script won't be interrupted to show when direct quotes are used.
Okay. Are we ready?
AUDIENCE: What is The Pink Guitar?
POLITICS, POETRY, PERFORMANCE, AND PLAY [together]: I am The
PLAY: Pink
PERFORMANCE: Guitar
POETRY: Writing as
POLITICS: Feminist Practice.
[Pause. They all look at each other.]
POLITICS: I don't mean to be rude, but let's not mislead anyone. What matters about The Pink Guitar is its feminist practice—its politics. That's me.
POETRY, PERFORMANCE, AND PLAY [together]: What?!
POETRY: I beg your pardon, but this conference here is about poetry. It's about women's poetry. And The Pink Guitar is about poetry—about H.D. and Pound and Williams and Dahlen and Howe. And really, it's about DuPlessis. Poetry. Poetry is what's important in The Pink Guitar. Writing poetically about poetry.
PERFORMANCE: But the point of The Pink Guitar is neither you, Politics, nor you, Poetry. Please. What matters is the volume's "practice of interference, of trying to stop normal, normative, coherent, flowing and consumable practice" (172). "Not incidentally, I [an "I" who is not actually in this text] am tired of 'poetry'—that bike wheel mounted upside down thinking it is a real bike, forgetting it was undone by Duchamp" (147).
PLAY: I hate to interrupt, but you three are awfully amusing. I think you might be going "over the edge!" I love it. "Satisfying one's sense of the excessive, indecorous, intense, crazed and desirous. She's over the edge!" (154). You're over the edge! We're all over the edge!
POLITICS: It's no laughing matter. "I am deadly serious" (158). Don't you know what's at stake?
PLAY: I have a funny feeling that you're going to tell us.
POLITICS: Back in the day, they'd say "'Remember our brothers at Kent State!' I remember going to them, the grieving mourners and saying 'but women were killed too.' If it took two women two days to drop out of history—of experienced history, events burnt into us—what equation can we extrapolate here?" (42).
Things haven't changed as much as we'd like. The sign at my local drug store says, "Support freedom! Donate toiletries to our men in Iraq." Do you know how many things are wrong with that sign? But, for starters, the women have once again been disappeared. Or the women that are getting all the attention are named Sarah. Politics is most important!
POETRY: I answer your contention with action. Specifically, I answer with the verb "To write: to be caught in hopeless joy between black and white, said and unsaid, between the overwritten and underwritten, between desire and obliteration" (127).
PERFORMANCE: I'm with you on this one, Poetry. "Divided in language, but speaking the language" (127).
POLITICS: What is all this fiddle? I know what you're thinking. "I am saying it grossly, baldly, without subtlety," but I do so "in order to underline the problem in poetics (not outside of it) for a woman writing" (111). I'm on your side, Poetry, and sometimes you might be political. But, at the end of the day, "Literature doesn't change things, people do" [Sara Lennox, qtd. in DuPlessis 19]. Like I said at the start, I am what matters. The rest of you are simply the frosting.
POETRY: "The struggle on the page is not decorative" (173).
PERFORMANCE: "Nothing changes by changing the content only" (141).
POLITICS: What are you saying?
PLAY: We ain't just frosting.
POLITICS: Fine. You're not frosting. You matter.
POETRY: Our resistance to one another”
PLAY: is pretty damn funny.
POETRY: Funny, and ludicrous.
PLAY: Yes! Ludicrous!
POETRY: Perhaps we need to let go of resistance. Perhaps we need to embrace. Politics, you are important. You are important to me, for "The page is never blank" (42). "The ground can never be cleared of the prior. It saturates us—political powers, social places, duties, infusions of norms, irruptions of protest" (128). And I am important to you because "All texts have. . .strong bonds with power which means also with powerlessness" (129). You and I need one another. "I am hungry. I am very very hungry. Have I always been this empty?" (12).
POLITICS: I know that need, that hunger, that desire. I am committed to "the struggle" women poets face so as "not to be reduced, to be neither muse nor poetess" (29). What you're saying to me—you're saying that it is the same struggle, isn't it? And I insist on showing the way the problem for the woman poet is attached to other problems. "Girl babies may be found nowadays in light blue, but boy babies are scarcely found in light pink" (45). "She has her babies bravely between semesters. She fears being ghettoized. Being patronized. But it happen[s] anyway" (12). The goddamn "Little Miss Philadelphia Glamour Girl Pageant" (171). And the lives at stake. There are lives at stake.
PERFORMANCE: I hate to break up this lovefest, but I need to. Who is this 'I' you use, I use, we use? who is here and speaking? "I struggle to break into the sentences that of course I am capable of writing smoothly. I want to distance. To rupture. Why? In part because of the gender contexts in which these words have lived, of which they taste" (144). Pay attention, Politics! And you, too, Poetry! You know the danger. "I went to the movies and—look—there 'I' was! All stories interpret experience, construct what we call experience" (146). Let's not create new prisons that only seem to lead out of current ones. Let's break out! "Who we? Who? How? Who howe (who is any of us) to attempt this?" (137)
PLAY: And whooo-wee—the cheer, the whoop, the enormous, outrageous pleasure, the pride, of making this attempt" (137).
POLITICS: Poetry and Performance, I see you more clearly now. You are not frosting. But I wonder about you, Play. You know what people are likely to think, don't you? "Who cares about this? or about someone or other's guitar?" (53) I have answers to those questions. Do you?
PLAY: I don't have answers; I have a question. Tell me about a dream.
POLITICS: Dream? Isn't that beside the point?
PERFORMANCE: I'll play along. "I dreamt my mother was 'working on”"
PLAY: "The Sinus!" (60).
PERFORMANCE: Okay, the sinus. "I am making this up" (88). "My mother had built, inside her apartment, a person-sized model sinus. A series of doors. When she went in, you could never predict which door she would come out of" (60).
PLAY: And you, Politics?
POLITICS: Fine. I dreamt "I found an animal at home" (47)
PLAY: The animal was a girl.
POLITICS: It was "An animal 'tired of being cute'" (47). That's it. Your turn, Poetry.
POETRY: "Dream: edible twigs. Slight flowers. Is this an adequate dream?" (47).
PLAY: No. Try again.
POETRY: "I dreamed I was an artist. . . " (4)
PLAY: Your "medium was cottage cheese" (4).
POLITICS: And your dream, Play? Tell us.
PLAY: I dream about "How to remain connected within, immersed to the buzzing honey, the chaunt, the wordless pleasure, how to notate the space in which one has being, how to tell the globes of spell, spell without spilling, spoiling, splaying" (93).
POETRY: "Spilling, spoiling, splaying" (93).
POLITCS: I don't understand.
PLAY: "My only interest: in making objects that give me pleasures; they may also be interesting enough to sustain and renew whatever regard, look, or reflection is by chance cast upon them. That is it" (144).
POLITICS: I am angry.
PLAY: I am full of desire, full of joy.
POETRY: I love words.
PLAY: I change words, I change worlds.
PERFORMANCE: I help us "translate ourselves from our disguises" (2).
PLAY: And I play dress-up. I explore the possibilities.
POLITICS: I am still confused.
PLAY: Yes! Isn't it great?
POETRY: I like you, Play.
PERFORMANCE: Yes. We actually have a lot in common.
POLITICS: You're not always serious enough or direct enough for my taste, but maybe that's what I need. Maybe complexities are underrated. Anyhow, you know where this leaves us, don't you?
PLAY: Um, no.
POLITICS: They need to ask us their question again.
AUDIENCE: What is The Pink Guitar?
POLITICS, POETRY, PERFORMANCE, & PLAY: We are the
[the following sounds like stuttering]
POLITICS: P-
POETRY: P-
PERFORMANCE: P-
PLAY: P-
POLITICS, POETRY, PERFORMANCE, & PLAY: Pink Guitar: Writing As Feminist Practice
Quotations are from Rachel Blau DuPlessis's The Pink Guitar: Writing As Feminist Practice, New York: Routledge, 1990.
"To translate ourselves from our disguises" (2).
"I dreamed I was an artist, my medium was cottage cheese" (4).
"She has her babies bravely between semesters. She fears being ghettoized. Being patronized. But it happened anyway" (12).
"I am hungry. I am very very hungry. Have I always been this empty?" (12)
"literature doesn't change things, people do" (Sara Lennox, qtd. in DuPlessis 19)
"It was the struggle not to be reduced, to be neither muse nor poetess" (29).
"I remember 'Remember our brothers at Kent State'! I remember going to them, the grieving mourners and saying 'but women were killed too.' If it took two women two days to drop out of history—of experienced history, events burnt into us—what equation can we extrapolate here?" (42).
"The page is never blank" (42).
"And that—in the same way that girl babies may be found nowadays in light blue, but boy babies are scarcely found in light pink—they did not want to appear wearing the 'colors' of women" (45).
"Dream: edible twigs. Slight flowers. Is this an adequate dream?" (47).
"Dream: I found an animal at home. An animal 'tired of being cute'" (47).
"Who cares about this? or about someone or other's guitar?" (53)
"I dreamt my mother was 'working on the sinus'—which was also the topic of another woman who was writing a book on—Heady Coincidence!—'The Sinus.' 'The sinus,' she had said at a meeting, 'is a very primitive form. Did you know that all of its chambers are connected?' My mother had built, inside her apartment, a person-sized model sinus. A series of doors. When she went in, you could never predict which door she would come out of" (60).
"I am making this up" (88).
"How to remain connected within, immersed to the buzzing honey, the chaunt, the wordless pleasure, how to notate, the space in which one has being, how to tell the globes of spell, spell without spilling, spoiling, splaying" (93)
"I am saying it grossly, baldly, without subtlety, in order to underline the problem in poetics (not outside of it) for a woman writing" (111).
"To write: to be caught in hopeless joy between black and white, said and unsaid, between the overwritten and underwritten, between desire and obliteration. Divided in language, but speaking the language" (127).
"The ground can never be cleared of the prior. It saturates us—political powers, social places, duties, infusions of norms, irruptions of protest" (128).
"And all texts have had strong bonds with power which means also with powerlessness" (129).
"Who we? Who? How? Who howe (who is any of us) to attempt this? And whooo-wee—the cheer, the whoop, the enormous, outrageous pleasure, the pride, of making this attempt" (137).
"Nothing changes by changing the content only" (141).
"My only interest: in making objects that give me pleasures; they may also be interesting enough to sustain and renew whatever regard, look, or reflection is by chance cast upon them. That is it. Period" (144).
"I struggle to break into the sentences that of course I am capable of writing smoothly. I want to distance. To rupture. Why? In part because of the gender contexts in which these words have lived, of which they taste" (144).
"I went to the movies and—look—there 'I' was! All stories interpret experience, construct what we call experience" (146).
"Not incidentally, I am tired of 'poetry'—that bike wheel mounted upside down thinking it is a real bike, forgetting it was undone by Duchamp" (149).
"A writing over the edge! That's it. Satisfying one's sense of the excessive, indecorous, intense, crazed and desirous. She's over the edge! And the writing drives off the page, a variegated channel between me and you" (154).
"I am deadly serious" (158).
"Dear Parent: Your daughter's name was referred to us as possibly being an excellent candidate for the 1989 LITTLE MISS PHILADELPHIA GLAMOUR GIRL PAGEANT. . . . Because of her beauty, poise and appearance I am VERY interested in learning more about her" (171).
"A practice of interference, or trying to stop a normal, normative, coherent, flowing and consumable practice" (173).
"The struggle on the page is not decorative" (173).