Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry by Jennifer Putzi (review)

Reviewed by: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry by Jennifer Putzi Erin Kappeler Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry. By Jennifer Putzi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. xii + 272 pp. $69.95 cloth/from $52.49 e-book. Can we read nineteenth-century American women’s poetry on its own terms? This question has animated recovery projects for decades, but as Jennifer Putzi shows in Fair Copy, it remains hugely generative. Building on scholarship in book history, feminist studies, and historical poetics, Putzi argues that we have yet to grapple with what it would mean to read (and not just to acknowledge) the outpouring of unexceptional poetry written by women in the nineteenth century—that is, poetry that seems unexceptional when we apply contemporary critical standards to it. How do our literary-historical narratives change when we turn our attention from a handful of towering figures to networks of anonymous and pseudonymous authors? How can we read in ways that value imitation and convention? Over the course of five chapters and a conclusion, Putzi develops compelling answers to these questions as she demonstrates what she calls the “theory and methodology of relational poetics” (1). Putzi’s concept of relational poetics helps to show how women poets navigated what Meredith McGill has named the culture of reprinting in the antebellum [End Page 134] United States. As Putzi notes, a relational poetics, which involved copying, reciting, and memorizing poems, as well as imitating other poems and responding to reader requests for poems on specific topics, “provided access to print that might have otherwise been denied the majority of women poets” (10). While such imitation and collaboration were not necessarily unique to women’s poetry, Putzi convincingly argues that “antebellum print culture combined with cultural perceptions of women’s nature to render women poets perfectly suited to certain kinds of publication and circulation” that made up a relational poetics (11). That is, writing conventional poems that imitated other poems, and writing collaboratively with and for specific communities, helped to cement a perceived connection between “the ‘fairness’ of copying itself in the antebellum United States” and “the ‘fairer sex’” (10). One test of any scholarly intervention is what it allows us to see and read anew, and by this measure, Fair Copy is a rousing success. Putzi demonstrates, through careful close readings of poems and through an impressive marshaling of archival evidence, that our sense of literary history is fruitfully expanded when we attend to the vast body of generic poetry women published in the nineteenth century. Putzi is attentive to the imbrications of class, race, and authorial status throughout the book, but the chapters on the Lowell Offering and on the abolitionist poetry of the well-to-do Sarah Louisa Forten (chapters 2 and 3) make particularly clear Putzi’s argument that these lesser-known poems illuminate the distance between nineteenth-century practices of authorship and reading and our own. In the case of poetry by working-class women, contemporary critics often struggle with poems that do not show signs of class consciousness or a radical politics. Putzi shows us how to read these poems not for the politics we may want them to have but as evidence of working-class women finding creative ways to engage in print culture. In the case of the Lowell textile factory operatives, Putzi demonstrates that imitating poems published by middle-class women did not necessarily entail political quietism. Instead, the poems published in the Offering show these factory workers “claim[ing] both the reading and the writing of poetry as a classless activity” and “mak[ing] their lives, texts, and talents legible to a wider, primarily middle-class, audience” (62). Indeed, in some ways the Lowell factory workers literalized relational poetics, making the factory into a kind of shared text as they hung poems on the walls of their workspaces, “creating a scrapbook of sorts out of the environment in which they worked” (72). In turning the factory floor into part of the literary world, these women made poetry a vital part of their working lives. Putzi’s discussion of Sarah Louisa Forten’s Liberator poems, along...

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