William Carlos Williams Review

After twenty years of admonishing the modernist canon for its masculist premises, we must all be relieved to learn that the battle is finally won. The publication of Bonnie Kime Scott's two volume critical anthology Gender and Modernism in the spring of 2008, for instance, makes clear that critical consensus has moved from argument to precept that the prevailing modernism privileges the masculist consciousness. As a result, after so many years of a formulaic and pietistic critical pursuit of "transgression," driven by "interrogation" to "clear a space for" a marginalized presence, we find ourselves nearly shed of that once fruitful and now decayed line of reasoning.

Suzanne Churchill's recent book on Others shows how far we have come, from a posturing vexation to a renewed exploratory sense of issues in gender construction. Her book is valuable as both a fresh study of form in American modernist poetry and an introduction to a key period of development in the work of William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Mina Loy. Churchill describes a time, a milieu, and a rich set of personalities, and she dishes up lavish close readings of poems appearing in Others. This little magazine, published from 1915 to 1919, was a venue—a "space"—for experiments in free verse and re-constructions [End Page 202] of identity. The magazine's motto—"The old expressions are always with us, and there are always Others" —deftly pushes the notion not of demolition or revolution but of a separate realm where the new formal opportunities afforded by free verse could be explored. Expressive surprise in line breaks, lower-case lettering, deliberate use of white space, numbered verse paragraphs suggesting Cubist perspectives that dislodged the fixed reading eye, and other similar innovations allowed these poets to explore different constructions of mind, gender, and sexual/social relationships. Countering earlier views of modernist verse as expressive of enclosed and solipsistic minds, Churchill argues that the poems are essentially social, self-examining negotiations with others. For Churchill, the prevailing conceit is architectural: spaces tend to be either open or enclosed, expressing degrees of intimacy, invasiveness, and privacy. The term "Renovation" in the subtitle is therefore especially adroit: her treatment of spatial situation describes new expressions of relative autonomy and therefore reconstructions of gender in an atmosphere of renewal. Her method, particularly with her chapters on Williams, Moore, and Loy, is strongly formalist, a set of detailed studies of the workings of poems published in Others.

The first chapter provides the conceptual framing of social/architectural spaces, and the second elaborates on this framing, placing it in the context of Others—its evolution, editorial personalities, and situation in a period of what Churchill nicely calls "gender unrest" (23). The third chapter, looking inside Others's publishing history, explores ways the architectural language of space and identity dismantles the sense of gender as a cultural assignment, reimagining it as derived from the interior. The fourth chapter characterizes Williams's Others's experimentation not as use and abuse of female-as-ground, but as exploratory, self-mocking, and hapless collisions of his male creative inquiries with the elusive, unmasterable female ground. She concludes, rightly, I think, that though Williams clings to gender essentialism, he is an exhibitionist, not sharing or directing our gaze so much as making himself the occasionally ridiculous object of it. The fifth chapter, on Marianne Moore's contributions to Others, likewise sidesteps certain critical orthodoxies. Churchill finds in Moore's apparently detached voice an engagement with her readers in an ongoing "conversation" of multiple perspectives. The interplay of these perspectives resists both closure and the determinacy of gender identification. The final chapter, on Mina Loy, after a certain restless ambivalence, rightly concludes that her "poetry of dislodging" the self from fixed social and gender patterns marks a resistance to the "critical paradigms" of modernism itself (222).

But there are necessary quibbles with even such a valuable book as this one. First, Churchill...