Imprints and Casualities: Poets on Women and Language, Reinventing Memory

Shannon Hengen is a professor of English at Laurentian University. She
is the author of Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors, Reflections and
Images in Select Fiction and Poetry.

The contents of this book include essays, letters, poems, and drawings
by female poets on the subjects of gender, writing, and remembering.
Unique in structure, the book is part of a Living Archives series begun
in 1991, arising from annual feminist caucus panels held at meetings of
the League of Canadian Poets. This volume brings together excerpts from
those meetings and from correspondence leading up to the meetings, from
1985 to 1993. Critical years for feminist writing in Canada, the period
is chronicled with intelligence and care in these selected pieces,
providing a sense of the struggles, triumphs, and disappointments of a
vibrant part of recent history.

The 16 contributors create a nice diversity of voices, and since
celebrations of diversity were a starting point of much feminist
activity then, the volume is an accurate record. The optimism of early
feminist writing becomes tempered with very real differences of opinion,
particularly in the exchange of letters between Bronwen Wallace and Erin
Mouré that makes up the long opening section of the book. Theories of
gender and language much debated in those years, theories imported
largely from continental Europe, are explicated, analyzed, practised,
condemned, and redeemed in the epistolary section in a way that really
distinguishes this book. In fact, the volume may find use in women’s
studies classrooms as well as those in Canadian literature or
contemporary poetry, for it not only anatomizes the debate surrounding
language and gender theories, but it also locates the theories in
practice, in the lives of recognizable women—friends—who work in
words.

Can women get outside of the dominant discourse to find a language of
their own? Is literary theory useful to the feminist cause or simply
another, subtler form of domination, with its obscure terms and
difficult concepts? Do women already have a unique form of discourse?
Questions such as these, on which the academic feminist movement was
often divided, are articulated here in lucid, deeply felt prose.

The fact that the books in this series have appeared regularly, and
that they contain such compelling work, is a triumph. Showcasing the
writing of such Canadian female poets as Lola Lemire Tostevin, Penn
Kemp, and Sarah Klassen, the series itself speaks eloquently for the
presence of a women’s voice in Canadian literature. At times moving or
funny, always thoughtful, often startlingly insightful, and never
self-pitying, the pieces entertain. Such excellent material deserves
more scrupulous proofreading, the text at times being rendered foolish
by repeated typographical errors and misspellings (one surname spelled
three different ways, for example, in the course of several pages).
Otherwise, the book repays not just reading but studying.