Taking Place: Deixis, Collaboration and the Gender Politics of the Aesthetic.

This chapter considers how and why deixis, the semantic activity of pointing or positioning, can be complicated in the textual and contextual compass of collaborative poetic practice. The question of cultural positioning is central to Frances Presley's 'Somerset letters' (1999) and Zoe Skoulding's From Here (2008), co-produced with New York artist Simonetta Moro. The reflexive spatialities of each work contest culturally freighted notions about "place" and literary history which intersect in the late twentieth-century female poet. Freed, for generic reasons, of the temporal sequentiality of speech, the poetic construct is more than capable of escaping the constraining "topography of the ideal textual space" (Nöth 1996: 603). Both women gender the aesthetic possibilities of this freedom in the more-or-less site-specific epistolary poem, problematizing the ways in which their texts might be said to "take place" to resist the over-determining of their own cultural-political position. What Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls the "sociality" of the deictic proves crucial to their common project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]