Writing the Body with Kimiko Hahn

What does text look like if a writer is “writing the body”? Poet Kimiko Hahn considers this, using as a starting place écriture féminine—the French feminist movement of the 1970s that defined writing as, in the words of scholar Elaine Showalter, “inscription of the feminine body and female difference in language and text.” Hahn explores the concept of a “full throated” poetry of physicality in the work of writers like Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Lucille Clifton, Joy Harjo, and Claudia Rankine.

Presented as part of Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & The Body, the second annual initiative of the Poetry Coalition, a national poetry coalition working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds.