proper possession of men. It is not surprising,
then, that expectations associated with lyric—
involving, for instance, closure, coherence, the
potential range of tone and voice, lyric cadence,
and lyric beauty—even in the less rule-bound
forms common in the sixties, would still work
against impulses to radically reposition women
and female subjectivities within the genre. I do
not claim that the traditions behind lyric pro-
hibit all women from exploring alternative
notions of subjectivity within the genre, but
Kathleen Fraser seems to have been among
those who found herself unworkably constrained
within that form.
Fraser did gradually free herself from this
vise. And part of what made the beautiful seam-
less lyric less and less available, pushing her
toward the more fragmented experiments of the
decades to follow, was the experience of mother-
hood, in her case single motherhood—that life of
interruption and others’ constant demands that
Rich would describe in her landmark essay
‘‘When We Dead Awaken.’’ (Looking ahead, it
is worth noting that Fanny Howe—who had
three children within four years—has also observed
that the domestic duties that constrained her to
write ‘‘only in fits and starts’’ profoundly affected
her style and contributed to her work becoming
more eccentric, disjunctive, and generically hybrid.)
The final Fraser poem I will consider is one that
confronts the frustrations of a mother’s broken-up
time and the strain of existing between the roles of
mother and poet. Not coincidentally, I believe, in its
structure, syntax, and language, this poem is one of
the most unconventional of her works of the sixties.
As Peter Quartermain and others have
noted, the title ‘‘In Defiance (of the Rains)’’ delib-
erately puns: kingly reigns and the reins that
control horses are as pertinent here as soggy
rains. The poem concerns a woman’s struggle to
maintain a sense of herself and to be a writer in
the face of patriarchal demands epitomized by a
‘‘he’’ who seems to be her young son but who
could easily represent male demands more gen-
erally. It is built of paratactically arranged, dis-
junct stanzas ranging in length from one to a
dozen lines. The first stanza, suggesting the influ-
ences of Creeley and Plath at once, begins with a
terse description of the self she projects: strong
and capable, the rock of domesticity. But as early
as the fourth line, a sense of passionate needs
unmet, of entrapment, and conflict around
domestic love begins to emerge.
...The short second stanza presents one
source of her frustration, the imperative desires
of the child: ‘‘he brings me a dandelion gone to
seed / and wants me to blow it and wants his
way.’’ As I read it, the next stanza presents the
decorum of sincerity as insufficient to this situa-
tion, invoking as alternatives more defiant
rhetorical strategies that tear at the fabric
of literary—perhaps lyric—tradition. Then we
have a report, at once whimsical and sobering,
of how the public perceives a woman in terms of
the men who desire and thereby validate her:
‘‘They said when the diamond merchant loved
me / my skin sparkled authentically.’’ Semantic
and syntactic uncertainties abound here, but as I
read the penultimate stanza, the speaker
explores similarities between herself and her
son, who is creating a painting.
...Just as he watches his hand place the
paint (defying societal convention or parental
authority in not following the approved method
of application), anticipating the dramatic effect
of added color, she attends to the cluster of
words that lie under her awareness, hoping that
they will ‘‘explode. / All the new flash.’’ In the
poem’s last line, ‘‘He wanted her pen to write
poems in the grass,’’ the boy attempts to claim
the privileges traditionally allotted to the male
artist: he would take away her writing implement
so that he can produce his own poems. ‘‘In Defi-
ance (of the Rains)’’ ends without revealing
whether the mother/poet will hand over the
pen, enabling the boy’s creativity, or insist that
the pen is hers to control. With its keen non-
formulaic exploration of a woman’s conflicted
situation, its inventive metaphors, wit, multiple
perspectives, and syntactic variety, the poem
points toward Fraser’s wonderfully ranging
explorations of an experimental feminist poetics
that would follow in the seventies and
eighties...
Source:Lynn Keller, ‘‘‘Just one of / the girls:—/ normal in
the extreme’: Experimentalists-To-Be Starting Out in the
1960s,’’ indifferences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2001, pp. 47–69.Peter Quartermain
In the following excerpt, Quartermain gives a
critical analysis of Fraser’s work.
As director of the Poetry Center at San
Francisco State University from 1973 through
1975, founder of the American Poetry Archives
(possibly the largest collection of audio- andPoem in Which My Legs Are Accepted