Other Influences

Editors: Marcella Durand & Jennifer Firestone

Publisher: The MIT Press (2024)

Other Influences frames a new literary history in which feminist, avant-garde, and poetry practices intersect, foregrounding critically neglected but artistically powerful lineages in twentieth- and twenty-first-century North American poetry. In this collection, Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone assemble original essays by a range of leading contemporary feminist avant-garde poets asked to consider their lineages, inspirations, and influences. Their reflections contain many surprises, with writers citing scientists, artists, and little-known feminist writers from other eras and traditions; for example, Tracie Morris discusses the Gee's Bend quilters, Carla Harryman writes about her collaboration with Lyn Hejinian, and Cecilia Vicuña cites the Tao Te Ching.

Unlike other collections of “writers on writing,” Other Influences demonstrates a complex feminist ethos of paying homage to forebears while at the same time resisting the parts of a history, along with previous concepts of “influence,” that might be stale or limiting. Countering a masculinist model of “influence” à la Harold Bloom, Durand and Firestone illuminate the diverse, nonhierarchical ecosystems of feminist avant-garde poetry and re-envision “influence” through their own lens and on their own terms—aspiring to no less than the unmaking of a canon.