(Kristeva 1986, pp. 89–136), suggests that linguistic experimentation is a
way that writing recaptures what she terms as the semiotic, the pre-lin-
guistic realm, in which the child completely identifies with the mother.
This precedes the symbolic order, ‘the law of the father’, which brings with
it not only societal regulation and patriarchal domination but also the
conventions of language. Although Kristeva is not completely successful in
applying these ideas (the main example she gives of such writing is by
James Joyce, a man!) she suggests important ways that we can theorise the
idea of linguistically experimental feminist writing.
Finally, although linguistic innovation is particularly the province of
poetry, much linguistically innovative work occurs in prose, or in genres
which are a hybrid of poetry and prose, demonstrating how fragile the
boundaries between different genres are. The later work of James Joyce, to
take a classic example, is extremely linguistically innovative. Linguistic
experimentation is also a relative concept, and there is no absolute divid-
ing line between poets who are linguistically innovative, and those who are
not. Rather there is a continuum of approaches from the mainstream to
the experimental, with most poets situated somewhere between the polar
extremes, and possibly even at different points on the continuum for
different poems.
There are now many anthologies which include experimental poetry, or
even make it their primary focus. These include In the American Tree
(Silliman 1986b), The New British Poetry: 1968–88 (Allnutt, D’Aguiar et al.
1988), Postmodern American Poetry (Hoover 1994), From the Other Side of
the Century (Messerli 1994), Out of Everywhere (O’Sullivan 1996b), Calyx
(Brennan and Minter 2000) and Poems For The Millennium (Rothenberg
and Joris 1998). There are also a number of well-written critical books
which illuminate this practice, including A Poetics (Bernstein 1992a), My
Way (Bernstein 1999b), The New Sentence (Silliman 1987), The Marginal-
ization of Poetry (Perelman 1996), New British Poetries (Hampson and
Barry 1993) and Leaving Lines of Gender (Vickery 2000). You will also find
Marjorie Perloff ’s books, for example Radical Artifice (1991) and Poetry
On & Off the Page (1998), extremely helpful.
LINGUISTIC EXPERIMENTATION
We have already looked, in the first two chapters of this book, at various
ways of experimenting with language: the following strategies will help
you to respond to Exercise 2. They will widen your range and deepen your
appreciation of the possibilities. The first strategy we will look at concerns
the extension of metaphor.
170 The Writing Experiment