Elizabeth Parsons

Poetry & Silence: a Sequence of Disappearances Elizabeth Parsons

If silence borders poetry then experimental women poets seek to perforate that margin in bids for alternative epistemologies. This book begins with a dialogic exchange between Jacques Derrida's accounts of language and Helen Keller's experience of silence as a blind, deaf and mute child able to remember the time before words were given to her at age seven. The outcomes of this philosophical interplay are then tracked through modern and postmodern experimental women's poetry from America, Britain and Australia as test cases for the possibility that new perceptions can be articulated by non-traditional modes of expression. Women poets have an intimate relationship with silence, not only as a function of their lived experience under patriarchy, but as subjects of phallocentric language. Their quotidian, linguistic and creative experiences of poetry are here deciphered according to feminist scholars including Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous, philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alphonso Lingis, and the postmodern theories of Jean-Francois Lyotard.