Megan Simpson

Introduction: Ecopoetics and the Eco-Narrative

Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 2009

A History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry, edited by Linda A. Kinnahan

Women's Studies, 2017

Poetic epistemologies: gender and knowing in women's language-oriented writing

Choice Reviews Online, 2000

POETIC EPISTEMOLOGIES GENDERAND KNOWING IN WOMEN LANGUAGE-ORIENTED WRITING MEGAN SIMPSON Page 2. ... more

Rolexical Glitter" and "Soul Kitch": Pun, Allusion, and Crosscultural Engagement in Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge

Reader, Apr 1, 2006

One day near the end of a recent semester, I noticed a student happily and absent-mindedly repeat... more One day near the end of a recent semester, I noticed a student happily and absent-mindedly repeating to himself a line of poetry from the day's reading assignment as he entered the classroom a few minutes early: "awrr reet peteet patootie, awrr reet peteet patootie." The course was on improvisation and identity in contemporary multicultural American literature, and the reading was Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge. When asked by another student what he was saying, the chanter sheepishly confessed that he had no idea what the words meant, but that he couldn't get this and other lines from Mullen's book out of his head. His explanation went something like this: "I just like her poetry-it's really funny and it makes me think-even though I don't understand it at all." This from a young white male criminal justice major with no experience prior to this class with multicultural American literatures, and none before Muse & Drudgewith radically experimental writing, let alone a text which qualifies as both. Yet here he was, clearly engaged with this poetry. I regularly include at least a taste of avant-garde or language-oriented writing in any course I teach, and these efforts are regularly met, at least initially, with resistance from students. Understandably, they often feel impatient and frustrated, even threatened (there are grades involved here, after all) by texts that don't lend themselves to any of the interpretive practices which usually serve them well enough. So I was surprised to see this student actually digging Harryette Mullen. And my curiosity was piqued when, once the discussion got underway that day, it became evident that other students were also apparently unthreatened, amused, and actually interested by Mullen's collection of 380 untitled quatrains, arranged four to a page and utterly lacking in narrative or statement as well as logical progression or development, in places relying almost entirely on sound for coherence: creole cocoa loca crayon gumbo boca crayfish crayola jumbo mocha-cola (64) What is it about this particular innovative poetry by an African American woman that earns it this response from even the most inexperienced of readers (and in this case, readers who were mostly white, mostly working class, mostly from rural central Pennsylvania)? And what is the nature of the engagement this poetry invites of its readers? It is helpful to consider Harryette Mullen's work in its cultural/literary contexts, for while her poetry is unusual in many ways, she is not working in an artistic or historical vacuum. Certainly, she is quite intentionally furthering some and resisting other trends in contemporary American poetry, especially when she's seen in relation to other experimental and African Ameri- can poets. Mullen is one of a growing number of writers engaged in "an ongoing revolution in black poetics," a revolution whose participants-including Nathaniel Mackey, Erica Hunt, and Will Alexander-are interested in formal and linguistic experimentation (Nielsen 410). Yet the innovative work of these poets has too often been overlooked by anthologies and critical/historical accounts of African American writing, in part due to the restrictive definitions of "black" writing that have developed and prevailed since the 1980s.1 As Nathaniel Mackey explains, "black writers tend to be read racially, primarily at the content level ... as responding to racism, representing 'the black experience'" (284). Juliana Spahr, one of a growing number of scholars who are paying due attention to innovative contemporary African American writers, reminds us that this formally innovative work is no less "culturally concerned" than more "identity-centered" black writing. Although Mullen has moved from the more conventionally representational voice in her first collection of poetry (Tree Tall Woman, 1981) to the radical formal experiment and linguistic play of her subsequent four collections, she has throughout her career explored issues of race, gender, and the social construction of identity categories. …

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's Four Year Old Girl and the Phenomenology of Mothering

Women's Studies, 2003

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge may not be the best-known name in contemporary American poetry, but she has... more

Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Writing Women's Lives

Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 1999

of the Permian Basin Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's third collection of theoretical essays offers consi... more of the Permian Basin Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's third collection of theoretical essays offers consistently fresh perspectives on a surprisingly wide range of topics, from biography writing to anorexia nervosa. The first of the book's two major parts, "The Practice of Psychobiography," is comprised of essays exploring the process, practice, and theory of biography writing, essays informed by Young-Bruehl's experiences writing her acclaimed biographies of Anna Freud and Hannah Arendt. In the second part, "Feminism and Psychoanalysis," Young-Bruehl explores the vexed relationship between the two schools of thought as she treats key issues of their mutual concern. What unifies these two otherwise quite dissimilar sets of writings are the revealing intersections among psychoanalysis, feminism, and biography that inform and define Young-Bruehl's project throughout the volume. Not only biographers, but also those who read biographies, and wish to do so from a theoretically informed perspective, will find the essays in Part 1 illuminating. Young-Bruehl is sensitive to the postmodernist perception that biography is a hopelessly untheorized and essentialist activity. And, although die-hard postmodernists will probably not find enough in Young-Bruehl's work to acquit biography and its practitioners of such charges, her first two chapters do go a long way toward offering a theoretical framework for biographical scholarship that both relieves it from the necessity of claiming scientific objectivity and informs it with original psychoanalytical insights. In "The Biographer's Empathy with Her Subject," Young-Bruehl considers the role of the biographer's subjecivity and her relationship to her subject, celebrating the cultivation of a kind of empathy she describes as "putting another in yourself, becoming another person's habitat" (22), a kind of cohabitation that, if undertaken with care, can lead to important selfdiscovery for the biographer herself (who is, as such, subject to biography). In "Psychoanalytic Reflections on Creativity," the only chapter that deals with literary authors (including Yeats, Wilde, Hopkins, and Stein), Young-Bruehl presents her theory of "the character-ideal" that creative people form for themselves in late

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Trickster Poetics: Multiculturalism and Collectivity in Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2003

Over the course of his twenty-five-year publishing career, Nathaniel Mackey has authored five poe... more

Will in the Wilderness: Language and Ecology in Will Alexander's "the Stratospheric Canticles

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2008

In August of 2003, I brought Will Alexander&#x27;s thirty-seven-page poem, The Stratospheric... more

Led by Language: The Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe (review)

Criticism, 2002

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Feminist Genealogies: On Experimental Women's Writing

Contemporary Literature, 2002

... But most striking is the array of contempo-rary voices: Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge... more

An Interview with Carla Harryman

Contemporary Literature, 1996

For a long time, I wanted to talk to Carla Harryman about her sentences, and, for about as long, ... more For a long time, I wanted to talk to Carla Harryman about her sentences, and, for about as long, I had no idea where to start. The questions I needed to ask were entangled in my own preoccupations with the sentence, and it seemed an insurmountable task to separate them out. But time passes; tangles become a recognizable shape, and suddenly there is a way in. The following exchange took place over email between December 2007 and August 2008. As will be apparent immediately, this conversation does not follow the typical interview format. Harryman's responses are wondrous, "thinking texts" that take their time, that take your time, but give you, in return, passage through the mind and practice of one of our most original writers.

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Un-gendering the Subject in US: Women's Experimental Novels

Revista canaria de estudios ingleses, 1999

... Un-gendering the Subject in US: Women&#x27;s Experimental Novels. Autores: Megan Simpson;... more

Poetic epistemologies: knowledge and gender in women's language-oriented writing

Deconstructing Haiku: A Dialogue

College Literature, 2006

Deciphering, normalizing, or tautologi cal, the ways of interpretation, intended in the West to p... more

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