Impure lines. Multilingualism, hybridity, and cosmopolitanism in contemporary women’s poetry

This text is an invited contribution to the inaugural roundtable of the first issue of the journal Contemporary Women's Writing. In it I suggest that a new journal devoted to criticism and to women's writing should decidedly move towards a cosmopolitan and multilingual critical perspective. Coherently, I address four major varieties of what I consider multilingual and cosmopolitan poetry, assigning to each of them a distinctive name to better pinpoint its dominating characteristic: nepantla or multicentric; exo or of the outsider; de l’irriducibilité or of the suffering visible body; and nomadic “otherhow.” I also argue that, although each variety entails its own complexity, there are at least two elements that cross over the varieties to form a common core. One is the poets’ resistance to systemic order and constrictions (social, cultural, national, linguistic). The second is their advocacy of plurality and complexity. For each variety, I have selected at least one representative poet. These are Gloria Anzaldua, Toni Maraini, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Anne Blonstein.