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The Formation of a Feminist Counterpublic in the Poetics of Lola Lemire Tostevin and Daphne Marlatt
University of Southampton, UK S.C.Morton@soton.ac.uk
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In Ogress Oblige (2002), the Vancouver-based writer Dorothy Lusk articulates the incapacity of avant-garde poetics to account for what she calls "Mummy's archaic corporeality" (Lusk 32):
An ahistorical avant-garde verges on apoplexy at the approach of an active mother—RRRRRR—. One's "condition of being" as recipient of another's motive, rendering one mute or mum (Lusk 32).
In this passage, the speaker attempts to demystify the aesthetic ideology of the "ahistorical avant-garde" by comparing its exclusionary response to the "approach" of "an active mother" to a form of "apoplexy" (32). In doing so, the speaker refuses to be either silenced (rendered "mute") or defined by her maternal body (rendered "mum"). The dilemma that Lusk articulates in this quoted passage points to a broader problem facing contemporary avant-garde women writers: How to address a public that will engage with women's writing as the articulation of a historically situated and embodied knowledge rather than
| Translation and/as Articulation: The Poetics of Lola Lemire Tostevin |
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| Rearticulating the Reproductive Maternal Body in Daphne Marlatt's Poetics |
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| Breathing a Different Bodily Life-line: Corporeal and Conceptual Contexts for Marlatt's Poetics |
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