Blue Studios

Feminist issues in avant garde poetry.

In her now-classic The Pink Guitar, Rachel Blau DuPlessis examined a number of modern and contemporary poets and artists to explore the possibility of finding a language that would question deeply held assumptions about gender. In the 12 essays and introduction that constitute Blue Studios, DuPlessis continues that task, examining the work of experimental poets and the innovative forms they have fashioned to challenge commonplace assumptions about gender and cultural authority.

The essays in “Attitudes and Practices” deal with two questions: what a feminist reading of cultural texts involves, and the nature of the essay itself as a mode of knowing: how poetry can be discursive and how the essay can be poetic. The goal of “Marble Paper,” with its studies of William Wordsworth, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson is to suggest terms for a “feminist history of poetry.”

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, critic, and Professor of English at Temple University. She is the author/editor of more than 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, including The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics and Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934.