speaker has great fun leading us on, encouraging
us to imagine her roles in such sensuous detail
that we’re at least momentarily taken in by them.
...If you did, you were mistaken, the poem
implies—as you were if you thought the speaker
could be identified with the roles, based on
expressionist paintings, vividly depicted in the
second stanza. The third and final stanza reads:
You can tear up your lecture notes now,
erase every phone number
under my name and go shopping in someone
else’s suitcase.
I’ve changed my address again. And don’t
waste your money
on bilingual road maps. After a six-day
ocean voyage,
a train ride and three Metro transfers you’d
only find nights
where the breath churns to snow after dark
and a bench with a man making blankets of
his arms, his wife
in her black wool nightgown and a three-
legged cat
in her lap. And then would you know me?
As the figure of the quick-change artist sug-
gests, Fraser’s work of the mid- and late-sixties
offers a good deal of variety: celebratory excla-
mations within everyday routine recall O’Hara’s
poetry; visually exotic and often comically
inventive metaphors recall Guest or Wallace Ste-
vens; sometimes raw emotion with an edge of
desperation recalls Plath; elsewhere carefully
pared lines and plain diction echo Creeley, and
so on. Yet, from today’s perspective, there are
clear limits to the work’s daring or range on the
levels of both form and content. While the
female speakers struggle against conventional
roles without really breaking free of them, the
poet pushes against the conventional lyric enve-
lope only to a limited degree. Venturing toward
the extreme, they nonetheless find resolution
within the normal.
Take, for instance, ‘‘Poem in Which My
Legs are Accepted.’’ The speaker of this poem
proclaims her acceptance of what has been her
‘‘most obvious imperfection,’’ her embarrass-
ingly unglamorous, plump legs that have always
fallen so far short of conventional standards of
female beauty. Stepping free of that hegemonic
perspective, she now celebrates her legs for their
wondrous functionality: they have performed
gymnastic feats, they have enabled her to swim
to the top of blue waves, etc. Yet, reading on to
the poem’s close, we find she values her legs most
for the support they give her in performing
socially approved gender roles.
...In lovemaking, her fleshy white legs may
dance, but they also become mere background,
setting off the dark elegance of the man’s limbs. It
is through their sexual enhancement of the man
and their ability to bring forth his progeny that
her appendages attain their greatest worth. To a
post-sixties reader, the limits of such sexual lib-
eration are obvious. Formally, too, one perceives
the limits of the poem’s challenge to the norm: the
appearance of the page suggests Charles Olson’s
composition by field, with its shifting margins
and uneven line lengths, but most of the line
breaks respect syntactic units, and the poem is
composed entirely in unambiguous, logically
contiguous sentences, all addressed to the legs.
Fraser’s poem looks more daring than it is.
Like ‘‘Poem in Which My Legs Are
Accepted,’’ many poems in Fraser’s sixties col-
lections celebrate the speakers’ sexuality and
sensuality; this was an important personal free-
dom women seized in the 1960s, and we must be
wary of taking that achievement for granted
now. Yet the poems reveal how Fraser’s invest-
ment in heterosexual eroticism becomes a point
of retreat from new kinds of self-creation. While
Fraser’s poetic personas have freed themselves
from the traditional position of passive object
defined by the male gaze, they are rarely able to
deviate from the decade’s ‘‘normal’’ gender
roles—any more than Fraser herself is able to
push the lyric beyond the free-verse possibilities
opened by the generation of Rich and Creeley.
How might we account for this correlation
between what happens on the level of feminist
content and what happens on the level of form?
An answer is suggested by a phrase Fraser has
recently used to characterize lyric: ‘‘the lyric
vise’’ (‘‘An Interview’’ 16). It is as if her speakers
have been locked into particular conventional
gender roles partly by the inherited conventions
of lyric itself. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in her essay
‘‘‘Corpses of Poesie,’’’ has usefully clarified that
‘‘a cluster of foundational materials with a gen-
der cast are built into the heart of the lyric’’ (71).
Those foundational materials tend to silence the
woman, identify her with nature, frame her in
terms of the male gaze, and position her within
masculine narratives of romance or of poetic
inspiration. The beauties of poetry are bound
up with the beauties of women, which are thePoem in Which My Legs Are Accepted