Female Desire in Prose Poetry: Susan Holbrook's "as thirsty as" and Hilary Clark's "Tomato"

Abstract

Kathleen Fraser, in her examination of the line in poetry by contemporary women, argues that the poetic line is often the location for experimentation with and departure from received poetic norms. As a result, she contends, the line provides women poets with "the difficult pleasure of reinventing the givens of poetry, imagining in visual, structural terms core states of female social and psychological experience not yet adequately tracked: hesitancy, silencing or speechlessness, continuous disruption of time, "illogical" resistance, simultaneous perception, social marginality" (153). She then proceeds to support her position with a detailed examination of works by eleven women poets, including reference to her own poetry. With each poet, she demonstrates how that woman alters the poetic line to enact certain female experiences. Although Fraser occasionally mentions female desire, she never fully explores in this essay how these women writers might visualize female sexual desire. She begins her essay by stating, "The line, for a poet, locates the gesture of longing brought into language," but does not elaborate in terms of sexual longing, sexual desire (152). In this essay, I examine what Fraser does not. I begin by investigating both Susan Winnett's contention that female sexual desire manifests itself in female specific narrative patterns and Luce Irigaray's assertion that woman registers her multiple sources of pleasure in language. I, then, adapt Winnett's and Irigaray's theories to a tracing of female sexual desire in the prose poetry of two Western Canadian female poets, Susan Holbrook and Hilary Clark. I argue that Holbrook and Clark use language to enact a female sexual desire that contradicts the linearity of male desire. Both poets challenge grammatical conventions, problematise referentiality, and deploy an associational erotic that weaves in and out, between and around passages and words to speak a female sexuality.