#MeToo: A Poetry Collective

Introduction

This is a moment new and not new, all at once. It’s too much and yet it’s always been there. Women have always been speaking up, even publishing poems out loud, decades ago, rooted in anguished or unsure responses to predatory behaviour that involved some kind of unwanted sexual component, coercion, or assault on a female body trying to flee. Or, as it was once known: the right of a man to simply grab at a woman without consequence.

– Erín Moure, 2018

Not speaking for others, especially for women, has always been critical to our critical thinking so we do not want here to attempt to “sum up” or to unify this varied selection of individual voices. (We are all too conscious of the dangers inherent in Derrida’s notion of the “totalizing assemblage,” as invoked in Sandeep Parmar’s contribution.) Those individual voices can, do, and should speak for themselves. They contain powerful cries of courage and hurt, criticism and hope; they also, we think, provide very valuable ways of perceiving these complicated, always-been-there problems anew, of witnessing them—which is of first order importance—and also thinking them through, with the attendant hope that thereby they might be countered in the future.

We kept the abstract very brief and very open: we asked as many women-identified poets as we could (in a short amount of time) if they had anything to contribute on any of the subjects raised by #MeToo. We did this because we already knew how many did, though we didn’t know the depths and lengths to which gendered violence of one form or another has touched the lives and writing of everyone who sent work (and many others who didn’t feel able to at this time). We stated that those contributions could take any form, shape, or direction the writers saw fit; nor did they need to be unpublished, because:

It’s not that women have not been speaking up. It’s that no one has had the ears to hear us, and we have been too scared or sad to realize the potential of a collective noise. And there was no social media, no “gone viral.” Now you hear us.

– Erín Moure, 2018

We approached poets, asking for poetry, but refused no genre that was sent, hence the “poethically driven heretical essays” (Joan Retallack), letters, collages, photos, plays, and other cross-genre contributions featured; whatever has “the agonistic power to swerve minds out of gender/genre-normative geometries of attention” (Retallack). Above all, we hoped to “realize the potential of a collective noise” (Moure) and to think about how, why, and where the present moment’s attention to gendered violence could lead us, since none of us wants it to lead nowhere.

Some may ask: Why poetry? Why respond in a kind of language where meaning is not always transparent, when the subject matter of sexual abuse might rather invite language that states categorically the terms of the experience, that does not allow for misinterpretation or ambiguity? Shouldn’t this be language that gets straight to the point rather than travelling slant, arriving wonky or misshapen? But, we ask, whose point would that language be arriving at? If it wasn’t women who shaped the vocabulary and syntax we widely recognize as legible, then following these forms could, for some, feel like another act of docility.

We do not disavow the value of clearly accessible writing on this issue and we support women everywhere speaking up, on whatever terms and in whatever forms that speaking takes. But we also argue for a space for work that is open to indeterminacy, that dismantles or destabilizes the designated markers of language and gender. We celebrate those for whom authenticity might mean an openness to swerve (Retallack); a willingness to be misunderstood, misinterpreted, looked over, or rejected by the less experimentally inclined, whether readers, writers, or gatekeepers of criticism or publication.

We receive the nonlinear, multi-angled, nonresolved narratives of those with experiences resonating with #MeToo, with gratitude and curiosity of spirit. We understand that, for many, such multiplicity, even contradictoriness, are what most precisely and honestly serve the unsureness of the self-dividing experiences delineated: the new and not new; the too much to say and the not enough: “words duped by this dialectic” (Rosemarie Waldrop), or “there is no self in any of this that I can bear, / and yet there are, everywhere” (Amy Cutler), or as in Verity Spott’s exceptionally moving deletion poem:

We go into rooms and we try
and we try We say

We listen;

– Verity Spott, 2018

We want to thank the writers who have made such personal contributions, in many cases having to remember and revise exceptionally painful moments in their lives, moments that should never have happened. We want to listen to and respect their pain and learn from the powerful examples of their work and lives. We want to offer our solidarity to them and to any of you.

Emily Critchley and Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, 2018

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we want to thank the poets that have produced this incredible work and contributed it to this gathering. We’re delighted and honored to be publishing it.

Thank you to Emily Critchley for approaching us back in November of 2017 to suggest this, and to Critchley and Elizabeth-Jane Burnett for their care and effort in putting this together.

Finally, thanks to all involved for being patient through publication delays.

– The Editors

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