cover image Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition

Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition

. W. W. Norton & Company, $25 (200pp) ISBN 978-0-393-03570-4

This excellent idea for a book is well served by Bryan's 21 contributors, each of whom tells us what poetic tradition means to her and how she fits into or departs from it. Arguments build from independent stances. Joy Harjo, for example, a Muscogee writer, finds poetry to be communal and shared by nature, but had to craft ``my own language out of the language of exclusion'' imposed by male Anglo culture. Not radical but critical is Deborah Tall, who believes ``that if we owe literary tradition anything, it's our conscious revision of it.'' In an especially spirited essay, Anne Stevenson notes that ``for a writer it is generally an advantage to be free of power,'' and suggests that women exercise that freedom, rather than too quickly abandon it. For her part, Pattiann Rogers questions the very position that men have had it easier as writers. Originally published as an issue of the literary journal River City , which Bryan edits, the essays show how relative is the term ``tradition,'' and how widely it can be interpreted. The book also points to the vitality of pluralism in contemporary American poetry, here female and many-minded. (Nov.)