By the late 1970s Fraser found herself
increasingly reluctant to submit her work to
male editors and no longer found it possible to
accept their well-meaning but patronizing ‘‘cor-
rections’’ of her work. Some of her difficulties
and a great deal of her passion as a writer came
in her eyes to have an increasingly gendered
origin, a theme she would explore with remark-
able and indeed devastating effectiveness inEach
Next: Narratives(1980). This book marks the
great turning point in Fraser’s career.
Since the title declines the labelfiction, for
example, there is no means to tell whether these
largely prose works are fictions or not; they bear
the stamp of direct and immediate autobiogra-
phy. A passionate defense of nontraditional
writing by women, the narratives were written
exactly at the time when Fraser felt isolated as a
writer in San Francisco, unable to ‘‘submit’’ her
work to male editors and finding precious few if
any feminist journals prepared to publish stylis-
tically innovative heterosexual work. The book
was also published exactly at the time when
Fraser, Beverly Dahlen, and Frances Jaffer
were embarking on a series of conversations
and investigations that would result in the
founding two years later of Fraser’s important
journalHOW(ever). Adapting Olson’s famous
dictum that ‘‘one perception must immediately
and directly lead to a further perception’’—
already a feature of some of the poems inNew
Shoes and before—Fraser finds, especially in
‘‘Talking to Myself Talking to You,’’ a fierce
narrative drive to push the writing headlong
from discovery to discovery; multiple and com-
plex feelings and responses suggest the fragment-
ing of daily life and self so alien to the discourse
of male power, at times fragmenting syntax, con-
tinuity, and image. At the same time, these prose
poems erase conventional narrative concepts
such as point of view in an ironic melange of
fragments, and they dissolve generic boundaries.
All the poems inEach Nextare ‘‘about’’ writing
(and necessarily then about reading) as a
woman, and the reader, forced by the linguistic
play into the active construction rather than the
passive reception of meaning, finds procedural
and even methodological clues. The narratives of
Each Nextpave the way to discovery by partic-
ipating in it and moving the reader into such
participation:[....]
Such writing is marked by overt risk-taking,
by an acutely painful honesty of revelation and
detail of dialogue and response, of thought and
desire, of anger and delight. These are powerful
poems of desire, interrogating the beloved, inter-
rogating the very nature of ‘‘other,’’ and—by
means of the comments others reportedly make
in these stories—interrogating the self, or
selves:[....] The poems also interrogate, then,
their own writing and invite the reader into
the act.
The formal and especially thematic achieve-
ment ofEach Nextis to dissolve generic contrasts
between ‘‘prose’’ and ‘‘verse’’ and the boundaries
between ‘‘fact’’ and ‘‘fiction,’’ rendering such dis-
tinctions not only irrelevant but intrusive. Fras-
er’s next books,Something (even human voices)
in the foreground, a lake(1984) andBoundayr,
written some three years later but not published
until 1988, are a devastating assault on the pos-
session of meaning, on the social and intellectual
certainties implicated in hegemonic and institu-
tionalized powers. They do so by destabilizing the
text and by flattening out the voice. Some of the
poems in Something abandon referentiality
almost completely; those inBoundayrcultivate
error as compositional principle. These writings
are intimately connected with Fraser’s founding
ofHOW(ever), which she edited from 1983 to
1991, with guest editors in 1990.
As editor ofHOW(ever), Fraser created a
place where women could ‘‘focus attention on
language and ... discover what [could] be written
in other than traditional syntactical or prosodic
structures.’’ The magazine gave women an
immensely important opportunity to publish
experimental work that would call into question
conventional models of language usage and the
social institutions that enforce those conven-
tions. A groundbreaking enterprise, the project
shared many of the goals of the language writers,
who deliberately foreground language as mate-
rial object and seek to criticize habits of meaning
by defamiliarizing customary language patterns.
Its most important features were its openness to
new writers of whatever persuasion and its
refusal to adopt a partisan feminist position:[....]
At the same time the magazine undertook the
important work of retrieving work by forgotten
women modernists such as Mary Butts, Mina
Loy, Lorine Niedecker, and others, and it
became the model forf(lip)magazine in Van-
couver and6ixmagazine in Philadelphia.
The great work of editingHOW(ever),so
closely linked as it was with Fraser’s own writing,Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted