UC Berkeley

For nearly a century, the canon of war poetry has been studied for its dogged reliance on intersecting binaries: male/female, soldier/civilian, frontline/sideline, and wartime/peacetime. Literary canons act as organizations do, much like the military itself does, by including and excluding, setting conditions, hierarchizing, and providing for the circulation of particular poets and particular poems. They do so through complex, even if sometimes barely perceptible, cumulative processes of discrimination. In the canon of war poetry, these processes are called “glamorized acknowledgment of material facts.” Given that glamorized acknowledgment of material facts was (and is still) required, it is especially striking that three women whose work I take up in my dissertation, ‘Her’oics,’—Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, and Joy Harjo—call their poetry “war poetry.” The three poets do not adhere to any of the former canonical preferences: they do not define themselves as males, as soldiers fighting on a frontline, or as writing in a canon’s definition of wartime. In place of the canon, in ‘Her’oics,’ I approach and analyze Levertov, Lorde, and Harjo as part of an understudied, barely visible, and immensely vital lyric lineage of women war poets. A lyric lineage that has been running in tandem with the canon for almost the entire duration of the canon itself. Within the lyric lineage, these women sometimes called themselves “warriors” and their poetry “war poetry,” even as they wrote outside of canonic definitions of war. As the thesis explores the poetry of Levertov, Lorde, and Harjo, it presents not simply evidence of repression, prevention, exclusion, or elimination; rather, it finds what these poems positively do and how they inscribe new narratives and new understandings. These new narratives and new understandings immensely broaden what it means to be a war poet, what it means to write war poetry, and even what it means to be at war.