North America and the UK, edited by Maggie O’Sullivan for Reality Street
Editions (London, 1996), and Mary Margaret Sloan’s Moving Borders: Three
Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Jersey City, NJ: Talisman Publish-
ers, 1998)—have made the case that, in O’Sullivan’s words, “much of the most
challenging, formally progressive and signi¤cant work over recent years, par-
ticularly, in the U.S.... is being made by women” (Out of Everywhere 9), thus
leading directly to the title of the Barnard conference: “Innovation in Con-
temporary Poetry by Women.”
It was not always thus. The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us that
innovation was once synonymous with sedition and even treason. In 1561
Thomas Norton wrote in Calvin’s Institute, “It is the duty of private men to
obey, and not to make innovation of states after their own will.” Richard
Hooker in 1597 refers to a political pamphleteer as “an authour of suspi-
cious innovation.” The great Jacobean dramatist John Webster speaks of “the
hydra-headed multitude / That only gape for innovation” (1639), and in 1796
Edmund Burke refers to the French Revolution as “a revolt of innovation;
and thereby, the very elements of society have been confounded and dissi-
pated.”
Indeed, it was not until the late nineteenth century that innovation be-
came perceived as something both good and necessary, the equivalent, in
fact, of avant-garde, speci¤cally of the great avant-gardes of the early century
from Russian and Italian Futurism to Dada, Surrealism, and beyond. I can-
not here trace the vagaries of the term, but it is important to see that so far
as our own poetry is concerned, the call for Making It New was the watch-
word of the Beats as of Black Mountain, of Concrete poetry and Fluxus as
of the New York School. At times in recent years, one wonders how long the
drive to innovate can continue, especially when, as in the case of Sloan’s Mov-
ing Borders, ¤fty contemporary American women poets are placed under the
“innovative” umbrella. Given these numbers, one wonders, who isn’t innova-
tive? And how much longer can poets keep innovating without ¤nding them-
selves inadvertently Making It Old?
The problem is compounded when we turn to the relationship of innova-
tion to theory. When the various French post-structuralisms of the postwar
¤rst became prominent, they were known as la nouvelle critique. But as time
went on, la nouvelle critique became known as post-structuralism, just as the
“new American poetry” was called, in Donald Allen’s revised version of 1982,
The Postmoderns (New York: Grove Press). What, then, is the relation of
“new” to “post”? The issue is complicated, but it’s fair to say that in the case
of theory, “new” was an epithet applied from outside, for the theorists them-
selves were less concerned to Make It New than to establish certain truths—
156 Chapter 8