Leiden, Netherlands. Brill Publishers. 2022. 345 pages.
Is it possible to conceive of the “invention” of a canon? Where do canons come from? What inspires them? Who or what enables a canon’s appearance and subsequent visibility? I have come to believe a canon cannot be invented: it is impossible to imagine the growth of such solid branches without the support of strong, suspiciously underground roots. The modern canon depends, first and foremost, on the existence of a corpus, of “a room of one’s own”: there lie the exemplary works and the women who wrote them. It is a question not of inventing but of rediscovering them, reinterpreting them as solo works and as part of one grand chorus. These works exist, but are kept (or have been kept) hidden. The literary canon is neither hermetic nor immutable. While it has largely been considered a masculine territory, with the passage of time and the critical efforts of women poets and women researchers, new women writers can rightly be considered “modern classics.”
Perhaps the canon consists of delicate filaments that, coming together, form literary affinities: a mosaic we failed to see before (“webs of poetic bonding”). In such cases, the will of the contemporary critics who weave these bonds is fundamental, as is their resolve to contrast contexts and eras, voices and nuances. Also necessary is the revisionist exercise (“revision of the inheritance”) of broadening perspectives and calling into question, with balance and with methodological and reclamative instruments. Such is the resolve of Esther Sánchez-Pardo, a professor of English Literatures at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, who reaffirms the presence of a feminine poetic canon through the eleven studies brought together in Poéticas comparadas de mujeres: Las poetas y la transformación del discurso poético en los siglos 20 y 21 (2022).
This Spanish researcher meticulously curates and prefaces the volume at hand. She offers us a road map as exhaustive and thoroughly documented as the eleven chapters that make it up: almost forty pages of “Introduction,” which could just as well be published independently, and which are subdivided along relevant lines: the field of comparative poetics, the question of how to define comparative poetry and comparative poetics written by women, the dilemmas and violence of comparison, the methodology used in comparative women’s poetries and poetics, and the contributions of such studies of women’s poetry in a transnational or global context, as well as other elements of methodological interest.
Poéticas comparadas de mujeres was published by Dutch press Brill as part of their Foro Hispánico collection, “a peer-reviewed book series devoted to the study of Spanish and Spanish-American culture(s) in the global world.” This publication represents a notable and decisive boon to the critical study of the poetry of the past two centuries, comparative literature, feminist theory and criticism, and women’s studies, and it invites readers, educators, and researchers to gain first-hand knowledge of the aforementioned spheres of literary and critical history. Furthermore, as Sánchez-Pardo notes, it actively advocates for the study of comparative poetry and comparative poetics written by women: “With this volume we hope to correct the biased course that now afflicts Literary History and Criticism, even after the great expansion that feminist theory and criticism have undergone from the 1960s to the present.” There lies the pressing urgency of endeavors such as these: in the critical, systematic rereading of poets who, in their own time, had very few spaces in which to disseminate and promote their work (or, even worse, and as was common practice not so long ago, no such space at all).
This volume includes work by eleven professors and specialists from universities in London, Madrid, Barcelona, Toronto, and Florida, specifically: Niall Binns, Emilia Conejo, Olga Muñoz Carrasco, Ramón Muñiz Sarmiento, Renée M. Silverman, Leonor María Martínez Serrano, Javier Martín Párraga, Sara Torres, Isabel Alonso Breto, Maria Grau, Stephanie McKenzie, and the compiler herself, Esther Sánchez-Pardo. These researchers study how women writers have read both their ancestors and their contemporaries, which is to say, how the women poets here selected have read other women poets, and how this poetic legacy feeds into their own practices.
Critical lenses are updated; they change their spots so as not to lose relevance or continue committing unjust omissions.
This compilation boasts broad-ranging, pan-American appeal, comparing the bodies of work of both English- and Spanish-language poets from a wide swathe of our landmass, as well as the anglophone Caribbean, Spain, and India: Lorine Niedecker (USA), Emily Dickinson (USA), Sharon Olds (USA), Jan Zwicky (Canada), Margaret Atwood (Canada), Marlene Nourbese Philip (Trinidad and Tobago), Jean Arasanayagam (India), Loretta Collins Klobah (Puerto Rico), Jennifer Rahim (Trinidad and Tobago), Tanya Shirley (Jamaica), and Pamela Mordecai (Jamaica) are included alongside the following Hispano-American women writers, literary icons all: Olga Orozco (Argentina), Blanca Varela (Peru), María Mercedes Carranza (Colombia), Marosa di Giorgio (Uruguay), Malú Urriola (Chile), Gabriela Mistral (Chile), Concha Méndez (Spain), Clara Janés (Spain), Juana Castro (Spain), Ida Vitale (Uruguay), Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), and Laia López Manrique (Spain).
Poéticas comparadas de mujeres is a project of literary inclusion. It harbors a wide variety of women poets who converse along multiple comparative lines in every chapter; it creates and reinforces thematic and stylistic bonds between poetic oeuvres and theoretical tools. The book puts forth a novel, innovative methodology with which to gauge and debate the relationships between the women poets who developed—and continue to develop—their poetic practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The creative works cited, as well as the analytical tools employed in these literary studies, are constantly renewed. Every era has its own readers and critics who look back so as not to lose their sense of wonder, to bolster new genealogies. Critical lenses are updated; they change their spots so as not to lose relevance or continue committing unjust omissions.
I cannot stress enough the importance of this kind of publication for the poetry we read now, and for the place of women poets in all literary and editorial contexts: not only in universities and publishing catalogs, but also in public libraries, commercial and independent bookstores, book fairs, and poetry festivals. For this reason, I strongly agree with the words of one of the authors included, Isabel Alonso Breto, who tells us, “poetry passes down forms of memory excluded from the discourse of history.” And, when we talk about the discourses of the literary history of the twentieth century and the twenty-first thus far (successive generations, the “canon,” or whatever we call it), we are alluding to those who read little to nothing of many women poets in their respective historical moments.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
