Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity (Feminist Criticism Theory)

Scheming Women charts a trajectory of American female poetic speakers from within a heterosexual lyric framework to bisexual lyric and lesbian subjects outside that pervasive frame. In close readings of Dickinson, Moore, H.D., and Rich, the author makes a new argument about the division that permeates their poetic speaking subjects. Postulating a revolutionary female subject, she extends Julia Kristeva's theory of poetic language through an intertextual approach, and shows that these relatively advantaged female poets destructure the very poetic power they are able to assert. Hogue concludes that in not reproducing positions of dominance and privilege indicative of larger cultural trends, these key poets exemplify important alternatives to class, race, and gender hierarchies - persuasively demonstrating the promise of what she terms an ethical feminist poetic practice.

Literature & Fiction

Hogue, Cynthia

History & Criticism

State University of New York Press

Scheming Women charts a trajectory of American female poetic speakers from within a heterosexual lyric framework to bisexual and lesbian subjects outside that pervasive frame. In close readings of Dickinson, Moore, H.D. and Rich, the author makes a new argument about the division that permeates their poetic speaking subjects. Postulating a revolutionary female subject, she extends Julia Kristeva's theory of poetic language through an intertextual approach, and shows that these relatively advantaged female poets destructure the very poetic power they are able to assert. Hogue concludes that in not reproducing positions of dominance and privilege indicative of larger cultural trends, these key poets exemplify important alternatives to class, race, and gender hierarchies--persuasively demonstrating the promise of what she terms an ethical feminist poetic practice.

Poetry. "I drive into an August tropic rain./ The road's behind a waterfall and I'm/ hunched squinting like a crone/ for signs. Ghosts mark time ..." (Moving to New Orleans, 1991). "I am moved by Ms. Hogue's apparent knowledge of people, and by her ability to present them convincingly in her poems. This is a quality all too rare in contemporary poetry, characterized as it is by a nearly universal self-absorption. There is wisdom here, and acute observation of the human situation"--John Haines.

THE NEVER WIFE

Poetry

Mammoth Books

We feature poems, short fiction and nonfiction by Cornelius Eady, Joy Harjo, TR Hummer, Karen Brennan, Cynthia Hogue, Patricia Spears Jones, Isaac Black, Julia Bouwsma, Melissa Tuckey, Sarah Browning, Teresa Mei Chuc, Aliki Barnstone, Demetria Martinez, Peggy Shumaker, Brenda Peterson, Nayantara Roy, Heather Cahoon &amp; more. Edited by Pamela Uschuk

Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts, Issue 23

Harjo, Joy

Eady, Cornelius

Essays & Correspondence

Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts

Physical and emotional pain, internal scarring, and explorations of social illness color the poems of this collection with hauntingly honest accounts, simultaneously filling readers with both a sense of hope and of surrender.

Incognito Body

Red Hen Press

In her stunning ninth collection of poetry, In June the Labyrinth, Cynthia Hogue tells a deeply personal lyric of love and loss through a mythic story. This book-length serial poem follows Elle, a dying woman, as she travels a trans-historical, trans-geographical terrain on a quest to investigate the labyrinth not only as myth and symbol, but something akin to the “labyrinth of the broken heart.” At the heart of Elle’s individual story is the earnest female pilgrim’s journey, full of disappointment but also hard-won wisdom and courage―inspired by Hogue’s own composited experience with loss, in particular the death of her mother. Rooted in the idea of the labyrinth as a symbol for life, as in the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe that Hogue would visit the summer of her mother’s death, these poems above all distill, fracture, recompose, and tell only partially―literally in parts but also in loving detail―the story of a life.

In June the Labyrinth

By turns elegiac, ecopoetic, and impolitic, Cynthia Hogue’s eighth collection, Revenance, is a condensery of empathic encounters with others and otherness. Hogue coins a word—from revenant, French for ‘ghost’—to consider questions of life and afterlife, and to characterize the ways in which the people and places we love return to us, and return us to ourselves, holding us to account. The poems of Revenance contain telling touchstone figures, like a guide named Blake who, noting signs of global warming, will speak of spirits but not angels; a man who dies and is brought back to life by the imaginative power of love; and a woman who can speak the language of endangered trees. While writing these poems, Hogue journeyed often across country to her familial roots in upstate New York in order to help care for her dying father. At last she began to record some of the many stories she heard of mysterious encounters and visitations, such as she herself was soon to witness, over several intensive years. Although grief silvers the threads of these poems, Hogue pares away the personal in order to be present to others in a fiercely engaged and innovative poetry.

Revenance

Following her husband's massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to discover if there were more such memories in her extended family in France. When asked, family members told her never-before-shared tales of parents who were POWs, collaborators, Resistance fighters, and one most vulnerable--of a hidden child. Hogue spent years researching the lives of civilians during war, work crystallized in her tenth collection of poetry, instead, it is dark. The personal is alchemized as Hogue weaves history and present day in poems that explore how there, here, an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry, speaks a complex truth and casts a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and--the heart of this collection--love.

instead, it is dark

Fusing lyric meditation and narrative perceptions, the poems in Cynthia Hogue’s new collection track the natural world and the self in it—from the Sonoran Desert of the Southwest to the far north of Iceland. In the tradition of the distilled and lyrically abstract poetry of Dickinson and H.D., Flux opens out into visionary language and the never-ending search for transcendence.

Flux (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

New Issues Poetry and Prose

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hogue, Cynthia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hogue, Cynthia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hogue, Cynthia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity (Feminist Criticism Theory)

Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity (Feminist Criticism Theory)

THE NEVER WIFE

Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts, Issue 23

Incognito Body

In June the Labyrinth

Revenance

instead, it is dark

Flux (New Issues Poetry & Prose)