THE POETICS OF GENEROSITY:

STRANGE FEMALE BEASTS / CHIMERAS FROM OUTER SPACE

(a womanifesto and rant)

In 1963 I defined my poetics as a feminist poetics (therefore both emotional and ideological) and as a poetics of simultaneity, of synchronicity, of mozaic (therefore both technical and mathematical). In 1973 I defined my poetics primarily as the poetics of a political visionary, a performer and a technician, using voice, form, and technique, whether traditional or experimental, as modes of discovery. Since 1988, without abandoning those positions, I've moved inward from primarily technical descriptions of what I do, to a reformulation, to the poetics of generosity. This means a total commitment to possibility, for which techniques or methods are simply different forms of lens, to bend the available light to whatever degrees of concentration will work for my particular distance at a given moment. This redefinition is not a change in direction from my earlier work. I think, instead, that it is a refocusing or a renaming of what I was always implicitly doing.

The Poetics of Generosity as I now see it, has three main components: simultaneity, interactivity/community, commitment. My 1963 poetics, which arose out of work on my first book, URANIUM POEMS, was most usefully based on simultaneity or synchronicity, ie. juxtaposition, collage, mozaic, portmanteau, pun, counterpoint, multiplicity, the mixed metaphor rather than the single image, the chimera or the sphinx rather than the believable natural animal with only one nature at a time. This grew out of the New Critics' favorite beast of the times, Irony, but went beyond it. The approved writers of my time used irony as a way of avoiding feeling and commitment rather than enlarging feeling and risking commitment. In terms of specific works and methods, that meant putting together the way fashion dictated to women the rise and fall of hemlines, and the Dow-Jones industrial average, or looking at our history in a way that showed the Vikings, the Oklahoma Land-rush, the Atomic Bomb, the murder of Patrice Lumumba, and the Vietnam war as simultaneous and interwoven events. These phenomena are not isolated factors in our madness, nor is putting them together a kind of female illogic born of hysteria, although men close to me called it that at the time. It was, instead, the accurate view of history those pushed outside history are sometimes forced to achieve.

My 1973 poetics, which grew out of work on my WASTE trilogy, was based on community, relationship, interactivity, and performance, ie. the poem as act, transferring energy (as Olson & Rukeyser describe) to the audience, and also transferring authority and creativity to them even while drawing its authority and creativity from them. Don Byrd's description of my poetics of that time as "a public open-ended process of interaction..." is accurate. I recognize, at all times, that the poem or tale never begins in my mind, my will, or my needs, and never ends with whatever usefulness it had to my mind and will. It begins with my community, with their energy, their lives, their needs. It continues with them, a collective creation, serving their purposes as well as mine, useful to all of us. That meant, in terms of specific works, ignoring boundaries between public and private, changing the forms of creativity so that my work would hold more room for what others think, or would write or perform what others felt, making room, for example, in "No-Name's Tale," for what the audience tells me happens next. It meant listening, as attentively as I could, to what the poem meant to do rather than what I thought I might want it to do. It meant, also, seeing the relationship between what was said and what was not said, whether by heeding my own subconscious or by rescuing the work of artists like Ethel Schwabacher and bringing them back into the public area, into the community, so that they would not be isolated or forgotten. The community is all of us, not just the brotherhood of male abstract expressionist artists, the Black Mountain brotherhood, or their successors.

What I've added, first, in the process of re-examining my work in my fifties, and then, reconsidering that now in my sixties, is the third factor, maybe implied but not fully stated in those earlier formulations. That factor is commitment. Not that I was not as much committed to each poem or fiction as any other writer; not that commitment to carrying the language as far as I could, and being carried by it as far as it could take me, was not always implicitly present, assumed to be the ground of the work. But one's general commitment to one's work is an entirely different question from commitment as an articulated program and engine in the act of the work itself. Some reviewers have defined this quality negatively, in me as in other women, as excess. There's a long history of male reviewers or reviewers who have adopted patriarchal definitions of the norm, considering female energy to be excess or hysteria. So, in defining for myself what I want to keep of my life and what let go, I hold onto the force of commitment, but I redefine it, defiantly, not as excess but as generosity, a total giving of my attention and energy to what's there. Not to a little piece of what's there, not to what's supposed to be there, not to what they tell me is there, what I should see, should feel, should value, should say, but what's really there, all of it. Muriel Rukeyser said in a great poem, "Double Ode," "Pay attention to what they tell you to forget." That means Ethel Schwabacher. That means Alice Dunbar Nelson. That means the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago poets, Juliana Berners. That means you and me. Simultaneity, community, interactivity, as I understand them, necessitate that: paying attention to all of what's there, a full commitment to the energy of that interaction, ie., giving oneself completely to the fullness of possibilities inherent in the creative and interactive moment.

This is why I chose the term generosity (a complete giving, as if poem, reader, and poet are born of the same act, one kind). This is also why Marjorie Perloff's term for multiplicity of meaning and purpose, "indeterminacy" (which I otherwise find useful for its integration of mathematical and literary concepts), and the New Critics' terms, "ambiguity," "irony," and the deconstructive aporia, "abyss," don't fit what I now understand either by a twenty-first century or a feminist poetics. "Indeterminacy" is what resists commitment or location, what is not definably there; "ambiguity" is a form of withholding one's full endorsement of one meaning because of the existence of other meanings, a form, therefore, of resisting commitment and location. Aporia looks at what is not there, the space where meaning is lacking. An "abyss" is a terrified perception of no meaning or of too great a wealth of meaning, or maybe (possibly the boys from the continent have got it wrong? do you think that could be possible?) THE WRONG MEANING, MY MEANING AND NOT THEIRS! and maybe that IS terrifying.

Oh help, female excess, the Sphinx, at it again! But I'm not going to be restrained by those terrified canonical voices, heavy with a continent even more messed up than ours, because they've been exploiting it even longer than we have through the single vision of anthropocentric greed. Plato said that the fertility of the Greek soil had already been destroyed, eroded, denuded with the stripping of the forests to build ships for empire, long before his lifetime. Nor will I be contained by this continent’s patriarchs, scared that their authority over whatever they define as other---women, nature, inferior sexes, sexualities, and races---is dwindling away like a limp implement of inscription, one with such self-consuming artifacts as Dali's melting clocks.

Multiplicity of meanings and energies is not excess except to those who may not be up to much. Emily Dickinson called it possibility, another definition of generosity, location of meaning in more than one place at a time. Zeno, of course, insisted that the arrow couldn't be in two locations at once, and therefore found that motion was impossible. That great analytic and satiric act has been misread, and has trapped all energy in a finicky witholding of passion. Motion is, not only possible, but the universal condition. Zeno's readers must have had it wrong. Here I am, excessively there, constantly in motion, in more than two places at once, occupying the whole continuum between being and not being in a fiery instant, every possible position. Dickinson, my friends, got there long before Kristeva, Cixous, or Irrigaray---as did Whitman, in his self-contradictions. Whitman, however, unlike Dickinson, located his sense of possibility less in the language itself, and cared more for the democratic vista than for the syntax in which it spoke. So I prefer, not chauvinistically but in the sense of empowerment proper to this hemisphere, to begin with an American poet rather than a French theoretician to define, to measure, to summon forth into named reality, the shifting, moving, and forceful generosity I find in my fellow women's modes of consciousness. For other purposes, it is indeed useful to locate that poetics globally, as it has been articulated in this century and outside this continent. With whatever vocabulary I chose to theorize it, I must praise and use our unbounded (re/fusing boundaries) ability to locate ourselves in more than one mental, emotional, or logical place at a time.

This is not an argument, actually, that women have an innate genius for productive fuzzy-mindedness that men lack; instead, it's an argument that because patriarchal logic defined that cognitive multiplicity which produces generosity of spirit as both fuzzy-minded and female, women had license to develop such abilities as "fuzzy logic" -in its full, cybernetic vigor,- which men were taught to suppress.

The poetics of generosity, then, is complete commitment to and location in the full range of possibility, commitment to the eternal ( what is present in all moments at once) and the infinite (present in all locations at once) as manifested through the specific, the local, and the dynamic---through the moment itself. Not that we might, through this commitment, impose some form of universal truth on ourselves, but that, in collapsing all time and space to a single moment that we inhabit fully, we set possibility free to be itself. In quantum terms, generosity manifests itself in the unhedging definition of light both as waves and as discrete particles---commitment, here, to the equal and simultaneous validity of the contradictory, the mutually exclusive, and the cognitively dissonant, as useful discourse, which has brought contemporary physics into weird imaginative territories charged with difficult light. In these wild realms, clearly, as on more solid ground, the commitment inherent in the poetics of generosity is a commitment to contradictions, to chimeras, medusas, and sphinxes, as simultaneously and usefully accurate, because their result is not lack of location but multiple, full, complex location. Think of this less as playfulness, although that enters into it (without joy and irresponsible mind-experiment, what are we?), and more as complete attention, accuracy, fidelity to the actual. In another realm, commitment helps to ground the difference between applied research and pure research: not that applied reseach is more usefull than pure research or vice versa, but that they're differently useful. Applied research finds how to do what you already know you want to do; pure research, in the wild play of possibility, interogates what it is you want to do.

Do you really want to do this? With all these things here for us to do, do you really want to roll all your living up into one ball, and then toss out all the adjacent im/possibilities as no good, unreal, not there, irrelevant, untrue, too much? Hadn't we better pay attention to what they told us to forget? What about Alice Dunbar Nelson? What about the ecosystem? What about the sphinx and Medusa? What about getting the names of things right? If that requires me to have two heads, and one of them an animal's so that I never forget my connection with the rest of the planet, so be it. Inside my hands of smooth human skin I'll wear my animal hands, my mineral hands, my hands of crystal, moss, claws, and hair.

Or, fly out with me here into the space between galaxies: Mankind, terrified by a certain lack of security once the multiplicity of interconnected meanings came barreling in on Him, called it a blooming buzzing confusion. Pascal and Frost were "terrified by the silence of those infinite spaces"(Pascal) "between stars, on stars where no human race is"(Frost). They've called space a lack, and imagined that language and the symbolic order arise phallically out of this lack. But whose lack and whose symbolic order: certainly not mine. They feared that they might lack the ability to conceive fruitfully. Out of their apparent lack they have constructed and invented an imaginary wound for me, and have made of my great fervent space an empty void. They've called it an abyss, and used authoritative, scientific-sounding vocabularies to neutralize it yet again. They see that singing space, and describe it as an excess of meaning: "overdetermined," they say. Hysterical. Illogical. A woman's head and a lion's body? A woman's head with all those snakes, each one with its own brain, all those brains lifting their heads, darting their eyes, flicking their tongues at you? That's irrational, logically and mathematically: you can't get to the root of it or of me, can't reduce my plethora of energies to one undivisible factor, not find a square, not calculate a root, not measure a curve, not limit a trajectory. Well, maybe you can't. Maybe you have to consent to it unreduced, in its full amplitude and awe (Dickinson's words, again): the chimera triumphant, rampant, all there.

The great multiplicity of events they tell me to forget is neither an abyss, nor overdetermined. It is my rightful space, my totality; and my totality need not exclude yours. Two bodies, ten bodies, a hundred bodies, a thousand thoughts, untold millions of possibilities can inhabit the same space at the same time. This is not excess and it is not an abyss, it is empyrrean freedom, it is the elyssian fields, it is splendor, gladness, and radiance, it is, in fact, the norm, which we were all born to inhabit and own. All that terrified, small gabbling, that frightened withdrawal, is not the norm from which I deviate in my grand excess, my chimerical energy ---("a woman in the shape of a monster, a monster in the shape of a woman / the skies are full of them[us--jj]…"--- Rich). It is the patriarchal terror before plenitude, it is the false-masculine, pettily gendered deviation that history took, forcing both men and women into a narrow groove, for which we have paid a terrible price, and which we are now correcting.

What does this mean for our discourse here? It means that I am not Alterity: I will not play that role in your mind or in my own. I am not Shakespeare's sister Judith, whose existence Virginia Woolf divined in her prophetic sanity. I am Judith, and Shakespeare is this Judith's brother. He is defined contingently, by his relationship to me, not I contingently by my relationship to him, by my absence from the center of discourse. No, in generosity, in commitment, in determination to take it all the way, I define my age. Marie de France and Marguerite de Navarre define the medieval French narrative; if that definition does not hold Chretien de Troyes, he is the deviation who must be explained, and they the norm we must understand and imitate. Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and George Eliot define the 19th Century English novel; if that definition does not hold Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith, they are the deviation from the norm, and their Alterity makes them contingent. Ethel Schwabacher defines Abstract Expressionism; Jackson Pollack is the deviation. Muriel Rukeyser defines the poetics of energy- transfer; Charles Olson is the deviation. Carolyn Kizer, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, June Jorden, Marilyn Hacker, Ann Waldman, Joy Harjo, I, and a host of others, define contemporary American poetry; you, our illustrious male colleagues and brothers, are the deviation. It will be healthy for you to see yourselves in the full brilliance of your own Alterity for a while, to study our practice as the human norm, and to wonder when and why you strayed from us.

I've constructed my excess, my generosity, my norm, large enough to include whoever is tired of that shrinking deviation from expansiveness. You're welcome to rejoin me in the world's great plenitude, which is ourselves. Although we need the oppositional tactics so many of my feminist colleagues have adopted in the face of hostility and rejection, we also need to go beyond them, to include them fearlessly in our vocabularies when needed, but never to permit them either to limit our strength or to entrap us in arrogance. Opposing error is basically a position of no power. It is reactive, dependent, contingent.

If what I have proposed here is generosity rather than excess, what we have had thus far is a poetics of stinginess, as we have certainly, in the public sphere, had an economics of stinginess, except to the wealthy. Generosity includes difference, accepts deviations, enjoys oppositions, as part of itself, even the small, squalling terror and self-protective deviation of those of our fellow humans who are afraid of chimeras and sphinxes, which they think are Other, which they think are Excess, which they think are not themselves. (Yes, sometimes I get scared of my own immensity too, and want to curl up in a cozy ball and be loved, but I get over it quickly.) Muriel Rukeyser said, "I will make this relation with the It./ I am the It." We need to construct our excess, our generosity, our norm, large enough to include the It, the world's great plenitude, which we collectively define, here and always, along with our brother the rain, our sister the earth, and the multiple sentient and nonsentient natures we contain, and which release us out of them as brilliant nebulae.

Judith E. Johnson---1999

You may quote from this essay, but not reproduce it without my permission.