SOURCE: Armantrout, Rae. “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity.” In Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics, edited by Christopher Beach, pp. 287-96. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Armantrout discusses Niedecker's relationship to other feminist poets and Niedecker's vision of female identity.

In 1978 Charles Bernstein asked me to write an essay responding to the question, “Why don't more women do language-oriented writing?” The first answer that came to mind was that, as an oppressed group, women have a more urgent need to describe the conditions of their lives. This answer, however, seemed rather facile. It implied, for instance, that there was another (that is, a non-language-centered) poetic style in use that could fully and clearly represent the nature of women's oppression. I wasn't convinced of that. The question of how best to represent women's social position remained open, and the answer must...