Female Desire in Prose Poetry: Susan Holbrook's "as thirsty as" and Hilary Clark's "Tomato"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kathleen Fraser, in her examination of line in poetry by contemporary women, argues that poetic line is often location for experimentation with and departure from received poetic norms. As a result, she contends, line provides women poets with the difficult pleasure of reinventing givens of poetry, imagining in visual, structural terms core states of female social and psychological experience not yet adequately tracked: hesitancy, silencing or speechlessness, continuous disruption of time, illogical resistance, simultaneous perception, social marginality (153). She then proceeds to support her position with a detailed examination of works by eleven women poets, including reference to her own poetry. With each poet, she demonstrates how that woman alters poetic line to enact certain female experiences. Although Fraser occasionally mentions female desire, she never fully explores in this essay how these women writers might visualize female sexual desire. She begins her essay by stating, The line, for a poet, locates gesture of longing brought into language, but does not elaborate in terms of sexual longing, sexual desire (152). In this essay, I examine what Fraser does not. I begin by investigating both Susan Winnett's contention that female sexual desire manifests itself in female specific narrative patterns and Luce Irigaray's assertion that woman registers her multiple sources of pleasure in language. I, then, adapt Winnett's and Irigaray's theories to a tracing of female sexual desire in prose poetry of two Western Canadian female poets, Susan Holbrook and Hilary Clark. I argue that Holbrook and Clark use language to enact a female sexual desire that contradicts linearity of male desire. Both poets challenge grammatical conventions, problematise referentiality, and deploy an associational erotic that weaves in and out, between and around passages and words to speak a female sexuality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".