Elisabeth Frost

Poets and literary scholars Elisabeth Frost and Cynthia Hogue selected fourteen writers with particular attention to diversity in terms of ethnicity, philosophical concerns, and aesthetic movements, including the New York School, the Black Arts Movement, and Language writing. By bringing together poets not usually considered in the same critical context, the editors clarify the ways in which these innovative women have affected ideas of poetry and poetic practice. The engaging interviews, introductory texts, and selected poems allow readers to forge productive connections among the most important voices of late twentieth-century American poetry.

“An important step in charting a history of women's poetry in America.”

“As a lesson in openness, editing and exemplary publishing, I recommend Innovative Women Poets, a glorious gathering of poetry by and interviews with fourteen experimental poets. No ‘school,’ no manifesto, no self-righteousness, just great poetry and in-depth questions and answers. . . .This is a book I shall be spending a lot more time with.”
“Redrawing the conventional lines around voice, self, reader, and poet, the writers profiled in Innovative Women Poets offer exciting possibilities for the play of language. . . . We are doubly guided – by both interviewer and writer – through eddies of punctuation and the ebb and flow of letters on the page. Rather than spelling out ‘the answers’ to these poetic mysteries, the interviews invite us to reread the poems with newfound insights.”
“Focusing on aesthetic, ethnic, and philosophical diversity, editors Elisabeth Frost and Cynthia Hogue have compiled an authoritative collection of contemporary women writers that is as rich in its presentation as it is in its selection. Innovative Women Poets not only gathers together work from fourteen of America’s most astonishing poets of the last forty years but also introduces each writer with an evocative essay and engaging full-length interview. As Frost and Hogue write in their introduction, ‘Too often the poet’s voice – the conversational mode so different from that of writerly, formal statement – is eclipsed by critical or editorial voices.’ Allowed to speak in their context, the poems in this collection reveal the depth of intention involved in experimental poetics today – not only women’s poetry but also poetry in general.”

Introduction

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa
Introduction
An Interview with Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa by AnaLouise Keating
Selected Poems

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Introduction
Two Conversations with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge by Laura Hinton
Selected Poems

Jayne Cortez
Introduction
An Interview with Jayne Cortez by Sascha Feinstein
Selected Poems

Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Introduction
An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis by Jeanne Heuving
Selected Poems

Alice Fulton
Introduction
An Interview with Alice Fulton by Cristanne Miller
Selected Poems

Susan Howe
Introduction
An Interview with Susan Howe by Lynn Keller
Selected Poems

Harryette Mullen
Introduction
An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Elisabeth A. Frost
Selected Poems

Alice Notley
Introduction
An Interview with Alice Notley by Claudia Keelan
Selected Poems

Alicia Ostriker
Introduction
An Interview with Alicia Ostriker by Cynthia Hogue
Selected Poems

Sonia Sanchez
Introduction
An Interview with Sonia Sanchez by Sascha Feinstein
Selected Poems

Leslie Scalapino
Introduction
An Interview with Leslie Scalapino by Elisabeth A. Frost
Selected Poems

C. D. Wright
Introduction
An Interview with C. D. Wright by Sarah Vap and Charles Jensen
Selected Poems

Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser
Introduction
An Interview with Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser by Elisabeth A. Frost and Cynthia Hogue
Selected Poems