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Denise Riley's poetry always has a quiet, astringent quality. Even when dealing with what seems by now conventionally feminist material in her early poems, she is more likely to be dryly humorous than emotional. Her famous holiday poem
Not What You Think
wonderful light
viridian summers
deft boys
no thanks
seemed to say it all about Greek island hedonism: she'd rather stay at home with her books. Her neat fable 'A note on sex and the reclaiming of language' was a marvellous classroom standby for those seeking an explanatory myth to help their students into some of the issues surrounding feminism and language. Riley's poem is both myth and counter-myth. Woman is presented as 'The Savage... flying back home from the New Country', her predicament identical with that of colonised black people, but she questions the empty prospects offered by being denned as Other' in either case. Instead, she suggests:
The work is
e.g. to write 'she' and for that to be a statement
of fact only and not a strong image
of everything which is not-you, which sees you
In a sense she has it both ways in her poetry - she is both 'the other' and a centrally defining female consciousness occupying the site of what is usually the male gaze, both object and subject; but this poem had all the right resonances for those who would go on to read Julia Kristeva in institutions where you needed all the oppression points you could credibly muster. Is consciousness gendered? For Riley, it appears, although she is on the same ground, those notions are all bollocks, or all ovaries.
A Cambridge poet who started writing in the late 1960s under the sign of the New York School (in concert with her contemporaries, the underrated John James and her close collaborator Wendy Mulford), she also owes much to American feminist voices such as that of Diane Wakoski, both for the light-footed, speech-based rhythmic flexibility of her New American Poetics and for a tough feminine irony.
But her greatest debt is perhaps to Frank O'Hara. Every idea in 'Personism: A Manifesto' is teased out and applied in new and surprising contexts to make a poetry that's acutely interested in a multiplicity of...