Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich, and the Feminist Superhero

Voice, Vision, Politics, and Performance in U.S. Contemporary Women's Poetics

Laura Hinton

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498528740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

One a lyric "confessional" poet and essayist, the other a jazz "spoken-word" performance artist, Adrienne Rich and Jayne Cortez were American feminist superheroes who produced extensive bodies of poetic work that reveal strangely overlapping visions, but in radically different voices and poetic styles. This book reconsiders the poetry activism of Cortez and Rich side-by-side, engaging poetics theory, cultural studies, and popular media in its literary analyses. A collection of eight integrated chapters by multiple poetry critics, as well as an artist-statement narrative by Wonder Woman sculptor Linda Stein, the book focuses upon the voice of bravado, the various calls for global justice, and Third Wave feminist "intersectional" critiques all embodied within these two women's poetic texts. The book also examines the twentieth-century figure of the American superhero, particularly Wonder Woman, bringing popular-culture studies into conversation with literary criticism, as well as visual art through the inclusion of Stein's commentary and illustrations. This beautiful and compelling book experiments with the festschrift concept by inviting multiple and competing disciplinary views on U.S. feminist poetics, women's art and aesthetics, racial and sexual identities, as well as politics and performance—all in tribute to the power of poetry by Cortez and Rich.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Introduction
• Part I: Adrienne Rich: Becoming “The Roofwalker”
• Chapter 1: Adrienne Rich’s Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law
• Chapter 2: From Fragility to Heroic Strength
• Chapter 3: Diving Into SEEK
• Chapter 4: “Everyone. For a moment.”
• The Bridge
• Fierce Females and Icons of Protection
• Part II: Jayne Cortez and a “Blues Lady / with the beaded face”
• Chapter 5: Superheroic Subversion Through Music and Movement in Cortez’s “Samba Is Power”
• Chapter 6: Vision / Performance / Sound
• Chapter 7: “Drums Everywhere Drums”
• Chapter 8: Being New York City
• About the Contributors