The sexual politics of syntax in Rosmarie Waldrop's poetry

The New Yorker:  From Dickinson to Stein to Susan Howe, American women’s disruptions of syntactical order have been a form of sexual power. Waldrop’s feminism, expressed in lacunae and “gaps,” implicitly mocks the need for accuracy and literal expression, here imagined as essentially male. We all know about men and their fixations with measurement: “I PUT A RULER in my handbag,” Waldrop writes, in “Lawn of Excluded Middle,” “having heard men talk about their sex.” The little “ruler” she totes along with her is the sort you find in a pencil case and the sort you find on a throne.

Waldrop’s poems are not for the nerdy-flirty name-tagged poststructuralists at the M.L.A. bar. Her poems decant nicely into theory, but their indeterminacies are an extension of her temperament, as well as the by-product of a remarkable marriage in which each party scrutinizes the other’s language, sometimes as a form of flirtation, often as a demonstration of power. In “Feverish Propositions,” the man has the thermometer, the woman has the fever: he takes her temperature, which, she says, she “had thought to save for a more difficult day.” These old lovers are still bickering over the meaning of words like “take”: the man accuses the woman of “stealing” his pencil, as though in revenge for his theft of her temperature, then holds his head in his hands, since, she informs us, “it could not be contained in itself,” and its contents are useless without that pencil to write them down. I don’t know a smarter or more moving glimpse into the sexual politics of a marriage between writers, the control of language—even the language of this poem—yanked back and forth between fearsome equals. The man’s tantrums and come-ons are all reported by the woman. He is given the last word. But, in this little parable of marital give-and-take, the last word is very much hers to give.  (read more)