Women and poetry have long been confused with each other. From early warnings to women to beware of poetry’s seductions, to later addresses to women as if they were poems, to even later complaints that women read and write poetry too easily, to still later suggestions that women are historically instantiated poetic fictions, this intimate association has blurred the difference between poems and persons. But being mistaken for poetry has never made writing it easier.

Perhaps that is because, as Lauren Berlant liked to say, “femininity is a genre with deep affinities to the genres associated with femininity.” That witty turn of phrase (technically, a chiasmus) makes the two parts of this apparently propositional statement seem more balanced than they tend to be in practice. If femininity is a genre, then it is something easily recognized. If we define genre as a spontaneous mode of recognition instantiated in discourse, then we know a woman when we see one because we have agreed (or the discourse we share makes it seem as if we agree) on what constitutes that genre. It might go without saying that poetry is also a genre with deep affinities to the genres associated with poetry, but this needs to be said. If poetry is made out of other genres, does the same discourse govern all of them? What Judith Butler economically calls “the phantasm of gender” is so deeply embedded in the phantasm of genre that by now they seem impossible to tell apart.

Here’s the big question: Can women poets change the discourses in which we are recognized? Or are we doomed to reiterate the genres—the poetry—of which we are made?

Jos Charles begins her third volume of poetry, a Year & other poems, with a poem entitled “LIKE YOU.” The point is to make the two genres—that is, the genre of the poem and the genre of the person—contingent on their affinities with one another:

I looked for arbors to bend beneath carried circuits

 

countless in the blood myself from room

 

to room to see a city

 

square pin calendars to walls

 

& hear, I have heard, of inventories of

 

names dead unspoken

 

as if the first

Charles is a virtuoso enjamber, and here she uses that skill to draw you in and keep you reading for the sentence’s end that never comes. The “you” of the title seamlessly becomes the “I” of the first line; consequently, the usual dynamic of lyric identification (I the reader imagine myself as I the “speaker”) is reversed (the poem’s “I” imagines themself as “you,” the reader). Themself? It seems important that as this book begins, the gender of this first person is in question: The gender fantasy is suspended while the genre fantasy is in full force. These seven entitled, widely spaced lines look like poetry. And they are. But the “names dead unspoken” aren’t so easy to see, and that turns out to be the point.

Charles is not the only lyric poet to accomplish a reversal between first and second persons, but she is uniquely skillful among high lyricists in both framing and suspending the gender of those persons. Her second book, feeld (2018), combined Middle English and textspeak to articulate her transition, her process of becoming a woman poet. If women are mistaken for their poems, Charles has developed her own laureate’s idiom of how that mistake takes place, since her entry into it has been intentional. For example, in feeld, the line “the cis boyes waring jim shortes & tragick shaydes” demonstrates the ways, as Charles puts it, “that poem in particular, at least for me, is invested in rearranging identity into another terminology.” The rearrangement is often funny, but Charles also wants it to foreground the cis logic of identity, or, as she likes to say, the space of identity, which can only be pure in the way that “the expulsion of a trans woman from the bathroom makes it pure again, makes the woman pure as a woman again.” Such purity requires violence. And indeed, feeld is full of delightful evasions of such violence, as when the shorts and sunglasses and even the noun for the bros whose insignia they are turn on them, becoming effeminate and animate and ancient and pastoral, casting intimate shade on those self-appointed shaydes.

But now, in a Year & other poems, that waywardness is seldom comic and has turned toward seriously tragic shades. Charles says that the newer book looks back on the deaths of friends in 2016 amid California wildfires and a shocking national election.

Most of the volume, like a medieval book of days, is taken up by the title poem, which literally expands over each of the twelve months of that one year: “Months / I move in you.” This long poem amounts to a series of temporal enjambments that parallel or, better, frame the poems’ linear enjambments. Each line draws out the lived consequences of mistaking gender for genre, women for poems, time for progress:

Rosemary

Dead   Naomi at the clinic

Leah in hospice in bed

& debt   Throwing a book

to the thresher a poet read

Charles likes random rhymes, and here “bed” / “read” only sounds like it closes a sequence that can’t be closed:

So much less than our

nakedness    a chorus

                         a garland

                         of changing names

a Year & other poems is indeed a book the poet has thrown to the thresher, scrupulously separating words from persons, persons from lines, lines from space and time. Charles brings into relief the affinities that mutually define persons and poems. Her poems refine both within an inch of their lives, trailing “a garland / of changing names” as they come and go.

Jos Charles delicately condenses the delicate generic composition of both women and poems in order to expose the ties that bind them. Meanwhile, Maggie Millner’s Couplets: A Love Story exaggerates the affinity between the gender fantasy and the genre fantasy. The reviewer for the New York Times (February 7, 2023) sums up the strategy by beginning her review in couplets, then ending it in one, declaring that “this books is straight

-up as formal poetry can be,

While, simultaneously, queering all binaries.”

Is “formal poetry” really so “straight-up”? Perhaps what the reviewer means is that what Millner accomplishes by writing most of her book in couplets is the equivalent of cis recognition for poetry. Couplets are pure Poetry with a capital P, especially rhyming ones, as Millner’s most often are, especially at the beginning:

All my life I’ve shown up late.

But when I do, I compensate

 

for my delay—I laugh and preen and carry on

as if I had been present all along.

Such recognition can be misleading, since “formal poetry” is rarely plain dealing, especially when one genre is embedded in another—as happens here, since these couplets are framed by the genre of the subtitle, A Love Story. We all know the way that narrative is supposed to go: Girl meets boy, girl gets boy, boy gets girl, both genders get what that genre wants. But in this story, girl meets girl, girl leaves boy, girl gets girl, girl leaves girl, no one gets what they want. Most of this entertaining narrative poem in couplets (punctuated by prose) is about the search for a genre that suits that story.

And it’s not just the story that needs adjustment: As Charles suspends the current lyric fiction of the representative speaker by reversing it, so Millner skews the genre of this fictional “I” by novelizing her lyric, thus making the poet a character in a story rather than rendering a referentially suspended “I” into a persona stranded between wide blank margins. Yet the real genre twist here happens not in the frame narrative but instead in those apparently generic couplets, which turn out to be queerer than the tale they tell.

Can women poets change the discourses in which we are recognized? Or are we doomed to reiterate the genres—the poetry—of which we are made?

The rhymed couplet is still understood as a conservative and defunct, often didactic verse genre, a relic of an Enlightenment ethic of balance and reason that the Romantics displaced for good. Such a false history glosses over the wit that is so apparent in Millner’s couplets. It also ignores the couplet’s basic technology, which as J. Paul Hunter describes it, doesn’t just create symmetry between two rhymed lines but in skilled hands actually “blurs and reconfigures binaries and develops a rhetoric of complex redefinition.”

Consider the following sequence, as the poet is leaving “the boyfriend at the center [she] revered / but felt [she] had been failing many years.” At the same time, the poet is falling hard for a woman who shares her passion for Middlemarch and for being tied up:

When I was with her, the physical

    experience of my pleasure—the little

 

death—seemed to make the nauseous question

    of whether I was in possession

 

of a clear and unified self

    mostly irrelevant.  Those days, I was something else:

 

a soft vacuity.  A sort of net.

    No guilt. No age. No epithet.

These lines use the principle of varied sameness that makes rhymes rhyme to articulate the tantalizing illusion of sameness in homoeroticism: What is physical (and therefore prepossessing) becomes little, what’s in question becomes a possession, what one thought was oneself becomes something else, and the net of perception closes in an epithet, a name that sticks even when thrice negated.

The rhetoric of complex redefinition these couplets enact surely mimes an erotic logic of self-displacement. But it also enacts a logic of generic displacement enhanced by the enjambments, which means that while the rhymes seem to close the sequence, the sentence does not close—until it does, over and over: No … No … No …

Couplets is Millner’s first book, and it’s unlikely that she will repeat its appealing combination of genres in her next. Simone White, in contrast, is the author of five books of poetry, all dedicated to what she calls the hybrid genre of “poetic thinking” about and through Black feminist life. While Charles’s poetics contracts genres and Millner’s expands them, White’s cuts straight through them with a knife. But that’s not quite right: While both Charles’s and Millner’s poetics require a certain ironic distance, White is a devotee of immersion, so her poetic thinking becomes her poetic lived experience and vice versa. One can’t cut through the other because, for White, one is the other: “I believe poetic thinking must seek a horizon of possible language and become writing that is always in a relation of negation with the demand for legibility,” she has said. Why negate “the demand for legibility”?

White wants the genre of her thought to be hard to read, and it can be—but in the way that Emerson is hard to read, the way that a writer who demands that you be all in is hard to read until you are. (White wrote a dissertation on Emerson.) While as an older straight white cis woman, I cannot claim to be seamlessly all in here (that feels unethical), this poet’s persistent—often astonishing—vision of “a horizon of possible language” compels me to think more and to hit my limits more often. And limits are what White likes to hit: Finding “the horizon of possible language” means we are not there yet. For example, when she writes

the declarative sentence of the last generation of women poets

now nearly overtaken by doubt about the singularity of the action female

very young women I teach struggle with the genre of words that constitute the

    feminine penumbra’s

thought afterlife

I think I know exactly what she means; still, following one overflowing line to the next, one realizes that critical apprehension is the last thing this poet wants. What she wants instead is for you to think through this problem with her: If the identity of “the woman poet” depends on a fantasy of gender that no longer sticks, then what do we do with “the feminine penumbra’s” afterlife, with the shadow of gender, in which we continue to live? In White’s poetic thinking, “the singularity of the action female” can be “overtaken by doubt” and fully inhabited at the same time.

And I would say the same thing about the genre of White’s work. The elegantly long lines, the periodic collapse of lineation into prose, the frequent dispersal of prose back into lines all place the genre in doubt and also insist on the work’s generic status as poetry, and on Simone White’s vocation as a poet. You could attach “avant-garde” or “experimental” to that status, but that would be a mistake, since, as White writes, “to loop in genre identification and emotion can dictate what is next, what causes what,” and the point of this work is not to let what is next be determined.

The rhetoric of generic determination is, of course, especially dictatorial in the discourse of race, so for White, “explanations of blackness’ overdetermination appear to come apart at the seam along which everyone agrees the logic of blackness, which cannot be said to be any one thing … shall cohere. For me, it has come apart along the seam of the Music.” Music, for a long tradition of thinkers about Black expressive culture, has remained an idealized form of aesthetic invention. Yet in or, on being the other woman, White takes that tradition one step further and simultaneously breaks with it by thinking through Trap music, a Black genre that so insistently objectifies her as a Black woman that it brings her to life in her signature combination of resistance and absorption:

An Excursive feature of my own being in speech

Of the nature of the poem

Is to admit the manner in which Trap has required me to pretend to believe in

    sexual

difference in order to become intelligible but the machines

ever obliterate a sui generis feminine they corrupt …

These lines do what White’s work does best: they embrace a fiction and its contradiction as the phenomenological basis of women’s experience, and they embrace women’s experience as someone else’s fantasy that we keep living, despite ourselves.

In Trap, White finds generically exaggerated, explicit versions of a gender fantasy that openly scorns her, and so “ever obliterate a sui generis feminine they corrupt.” On this view, to be obliterated is to be a woman:

I am an ignorant fucker wherein the comedic shock of the thing resides in the manner in which I do not resemble and yet am the thing, impossibly

misperceived

And that is the thing, isn’t it? If the “sui generis feminine” is all too easy to perceive, then the phenomenology of living as that genre means that what and how we live is always “impossibly misperceived.” White, like Charles and Millner, articulates what life as that generic misperception feels like. That comedic shock.