Booksmart

Thinking Poetry: Readings in Contemporary Women’s Exploratory Poetics (University of Iowa Press, 2010)

Lynn Keller, Martha Meier Renk Bascom Professor of English

The compressed form of poetry resonates with multiple meanings and connotations. But how do you talk about poems written with deliberate graphic marks, words on angles, upside down?

“It’s a great challenge for me, too,” says Lynn Keller. “How do you talk about it in a way that doesn’t shut them down or limit them? You can’t say ‘it means just this’ when that would be counter to the open quality of the text.”

The seven women examined in Keller’s new book use poetry to “stretch the boundaries of the sayable,” as poet Cole Swenson puts it. With experimental approaches diverging from the more confessional poetry of past decades, these works emphasize their words, not their speakers, to probe issues of gender, language and politics.

“Women have traditionally had a different relationship with structures of authority and power,” says Keller. “There can be links between a woman’s desire to refashion social structures in ways that are not oppressive to women, and the desire to explore alternative resources within language as well.”

Keller’s subjects call attention to how language works, particularly as a political vehicle that manipulates, and is manipulated by, its users.

“There’s a kind of torqueing of usual language that freshens our attention,” she says. “A lot of these poets take pleasure in treating the reader as a kind of collaborator. It’s not the kind of reading you can just set by your bedside, but it’s a pleasure. That’s so valuable in today’s world: to really pay attention to something, whether it’s in language or out in the natural world.”

A veteran of 1970s feminism, Keller’s activism these days emphasizes critical thinking over politics. This is especially vital in her large introductory lectures, often among the first classes that students take at the university level.

Through exploration of issues like environmentalism and violence in American history, she links burgeoning fields of literary studies with places and events in her students’ own lives.

“Good literary texts have lots of views; it’s not a reductive or simple presentation,” says Keller. “I’m not trying to shove a set of issues down my students’ throats, but give them a version of history that will grab them.”

For the past three years, Keller supported more than 200 students as chair of graduate studies in English. Now, she has time to make new connections. She has affiliated with the Center for Culture, History and the Environment (CHE) and works on developing courses with others in environmental studies. Despite her 29 years at UW–Madison, she — like her students — is still exploring her surroundings.

“We’re all studying the world we live in,” says Keller. “As faculty members, we approach it on different scales and through different media, but we’re all trying to learn about that world as we also try to give our students the tools to do the same.”