Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets
ed. Carrie Etter
Shearsman, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-84861-099-6. £12.95

Infinite Difference is a collection of ‘other’ poetries by 25 female poets born or based in the UK, the first such anthology since Out of Everywhere: linguistically innovative poetries by women in north America and the UK, published in 1996. It is also, suggests editor Carrie Etter in her introduction, an argument. An argument against the tendency to divide poetry into two opposing camps – ‘mainstream’ and ‘experimental’. An argument for a spectrum on which poetries hold ‘infinite points of difference’ depending on a range of extremes against which they can be measured: for instance, Etter suggests, their ‘degree of engagement with the natural environment’.

Each poet introduces her work with a page-long artistic statement, discussing what influences her poetry and what she is hoping to achieve with it. These are lively and interesting, providing for the most part not explanations to decode the work, but vantage points to see into it. What struck me was a kind of synaesthesia running through many of the poets’ discussion of their poetry. Visual arts, music and dance are not just influences on poetic practice, but an inextricable part of it: letters have colour (Presley); white space is as important as sound (Mulford); the visual provides a constraint to work against where poetry is more traditionally filled by rhyme and meter (Morris); language has ‘music, or pitch’ (Watts). Many of these relate back to the body. Poetry is a means of ‘finding the cadences of thought in the body’, or ‘singing, the body used as vocal instrument, imprinted with the body’s effort’ (Armstrong); a kind of ‘music. The shape of the mouth making the words’ (Lehrman); or a dance ‘where I discover my poetics: in movement and embodiment, in unfolding and foot-stamping, in connection and ecstasy’ (Mayer). Many poets (for instance Kruk) also directly highlight the importance of embodiment in their work.

This is where I begin to get a real sense of what Etter means by a different range of extremes against which poems can be measured. Engagement with the natural environment could simply seem like a ‘theme’ a poem might tackle or not; a spectrum of ‘infinite difference’ in this sense is not particularly interesting. But reading through Infinite Difference, I get the sense of something more radical and exciting than that: extremes that determine not just how a poem is understood, but the possibility of it and its creation being understood.

There are certain persistent concerns that flow through the anthology: for instance the relationships between body, language, landscape, boundaries, and in particular how these relate to violence and war. This is present both in the artist’s statements, such as in the equation of conventional forms and violence (Hales) or the devastating reason in technological language (Watts), and also flitting between the poems themselves.

In Bergvall’s ‘Cropper’, a bilingual poem in Norwegian and English, body and violence intertwine. It begins with long, prose-like segments occasionally interrupted by three- or four-word Norwegian phrases:

could I make sure that what I called my body would remain in the transit from other languages, that it would hold its progression into English

These statements build to the rhythmic core of the poem, short statements where language and body seem interchangeable:

Some were never free to speak their body before it was taken up and taken away –

These phrases are echoed (although not always entirely faithfully) in Bergvall’s native Norwegian.

Some are laughed at some are spat out some are dragged into the crowd –

                        som blir ledd av som spyttet ut som blir trukket inn i mengden

            [...]

Some bodies like languages simply disappear –

Violence also insinuates itself into Olson’s ‘A Newe Booke of Copies’:

shirt survivor smock
damage at pinning
gape neck gusset
bows now missing

Similarly, landscape, body and violence are related in Reedy’s ‘Survivre’:

the tree’s lace is lost cloth
for their clothing was taken.
Sun’s glint is the gold from teeth
torn from mouths…

and in Watt’s ‘Hare’. This poem, one of my favourites in the anthology, is particularly interesting in how it cuts between rural Wales and the inner-city. Watts alternates between the stories of a 7th-century woman who saves hares from the hunt and a murdered teenager who thought of himself as a supernatural protector of his friends, giving a sense of disorientation and startled embodiment:

Wire in the blood, nicks some inner
heart, tears it slightly. Does he lope, now, out of earshot,
wordless

greeting, sssup! from a doorway, slaps his palm. Towards
the squawk of traffic

Movement – especially fast, tense movement – and sound are key throughout to connecting disparate elements and places.

small malachi from a thin country            darting through
rivulets, or as large as scree clouds looming at night
the speed telling,

only. Called up by December green, unseasonal, in long lines.
Fitting the lines the length of a span, the leap from
there under the yews,

to this place. Sudden shift, when legs are collected under,
a coil where not being is this instant of generation, pushing
out

This is not to claim that all, or even most, of these poems engage with issues of embodiment or violence. There’s a wide variety of work and concerns here, from the bi- and multi-lingualism in Bergvall and Presley’s poetry (also hinted at by Skoulding’s statement that place is ‘multiplied by the languages that speak it into existence’) to work drawing on a variety of forms – Bletsoe’s versions of Japanese haibun, ‘Birds from the Sherborne Missal’, being a particular highlight.

One concern is that, given the large number of poets and the relatively small number of pages (just over two hundred) there are often few poems by each individual poet; Crowther’s and Etter’s sections end rather abruptly. This is not necessarily at odds with what the anthology is trying to do, however. Etter presents it as a snapshot, rather than a definitive collection, a sampler that encourages readers to seek out unfamiliar work.

Another concern is Etter’s discussion, in the introduction, of the role of the anthology in opening readers up to the broad range of other poetries. In one sense the anthology certainly succeeds in presenting a diverse set of voices; however, when Etter discusses the importance of expanded poetics, such as ‘performance’ or ‘off-page writing’, and ‘changing writing, publishing and dissemination modes through which we’re encountering text in social culture’, it is unclear what role the anthology plays in this, being very much a traditional book and not particularly innovative in the sense of presenting anything beyond black and white text. This is not to say that it needs to be or should be anything else  – but that, if it wants to explore new ways of encountering text, a more explicit discussion of how the anthology fits into this would be useful.

In short, Infinite Difference is successful in presenting a broad spectrum of poetries which, while not necessarily undermining the divide between ‘mainstream’ and ‘experimental’ poetry, suggests other reference points against which poetries can be measured. It is also successful simply in showcasing poetry that is alive with a fierce, taut energy.