"Am I Not a Poetess?"

"Am I Not a Poetess?" Tricia Lootens (bio) Who needs Poetess studies? "No one!" I might have cried some forty years ago, brandishing my newly pirated photocopy of Aurora Leigh: "Enough of 'poetesses'! Time for feminist warrior poets! Find their forgotten forerunners!"1 Judging from the previous pages, the moment for such searching has yet to end.2 Still, in the intervening years, as the capacious, conflicted projects of nineteenth-century feminist criticism have changed, so have the subjects of Poetess studies. Indeed, if the preceding essays are any indication, such studies may even now be emerging as particularly revelatory, albeit risky—and, frankly, irritating—convergence points for powerful interdisciplinary debates. It seems fitting, then, that editor Marjorie Stone should have chosen to close this forum on a note of provocation. I'm grateful both for the invitation to strike that note and for the chance to do so in response to essays from which I've learned so much. "Woman/not Woman"; "Poetess/not a Poetess": here as elsewhere, it is on these edges that the shifting, potentially explosive instabilities of Poetess performance—including Poetess criticism—often play out. For here, if anywhere, students of poetics confront what Susan Brown rightly terms "the contradiction at the heart of feminist category work": the imperative need, that is, to "trouble and interrogate" the very "category, woman" that such work itself "necessarily invokes" (194).3 "Poetess": the very word invokes histories of category crisis.4 Here, my first task will be to insist that by now, such histories are always—always—potentially or actually racialized, in ways that matter to us all.5 [End Page 200] "Who made the Poetess white? No one; not ever"; thus echoing my own Political Poetess, let me begin. From history to mythology—from poetry's Phillis Wheatley to Germaine de Staël's fictional Senegalese anti-slavery poet Mirza, and from Pauline Johnson, Toru Dutt, and Frances E. W. Harper to Harper's own fictional poet-heroine Annette and beyond—Poetess histories have always exceeded and defied the "impossible purities" of feminine poetics written white (Lootens, Poetess 5–6, 9–11, 42–45; Harper).6 Still, even now, fuelled by late-Victorian histories of denial, the mythic Poetess lives on. Within popular Victoriana's evolving dream-poetics of nineteenth-century Woman,7 she retains her power as literary agent for the "racialized national and imperial functions of a poetics of separate spheres" (Lootens, Poetess 11).8 Indeed, thanks to her clichéd, imaginary avatars, "purely conventional poetesses," she stakes her untenable claims even within the margins of otherwise historically precise scholarship, where convenient, otherwise archaic foils re-emerge as long-honed weapons of epistemic violence.9 If, then, the Poetess is a "trope 'available for occupancy' yet also advertising its vacancy" (Prins 180; see Lootens, Poetess 3–5), hers is a space of highly charged, ongoing histories: histories that still prove to be as contested, and as explosively intersectional, as they are highly charged. "Am I not a poetess?": provoking in its very echoes, this question strikes straight to the heart of an epicentre of feminist category crises and adventures.10 Want to challenge sentimental imperialist fantasies of the "private feminine sphere"—whether within or beyond literary studies? As this forum makes clear, the strange, richly specific histories of actual Poetess performance offer one place to begin. With this in mind, turning from my own "political Poetess" perspectives—with thanks to colleagues who have highlighted their limits11—let me gesture toward a few striking patterns seen through the essays at hand. Constellation, not conflation is the aim; questioning, the mode; incitement to collaboration (and, with this, contestation), the dreamed-of result. sensory poetesses: fleshliness , collectivity, performance, platforms Caolan Madden's invocation of a "theatrical" Poetess whose "supposed 'emptiness' paradoxically teems with countless, variously embodied figures" (187); invitations to move through and across the personal/impersonal virtual spaces of the Orlando Project, Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry, and Christina Rossetti in Music, tracking graphs, charts, and lists; everyday experiences of the distances and intimacies of shared electronic archives: taken together, what conversations might these open up, and how? How might such conversations affect longstanding strains of...

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