1 Negotiations of Political Value in Feminist Poetics: Past Experiments, Present Quandaries Elena Basile, York University * In 2004, I met with three of my university colleagues 1 to discuss the possibility of organizing a conference on contemporary feminist poetics in Canada. Bringing us together was a nagging preoccupation with the foundering fate of feminism’s symbolic currency, particularly in the aftermath of the culture wars of the 1990s, and of the accompanying – although rarely correlated – neoliberal shifts in the dynamics, composition and articulation of the public sphere. Symptomatically, the first title we came up with was “Beyond Stasis: Feminist Poetics in Canada.” Both a statement of fact and a plea for change, this title incorporated our own dissatisfaction with what we perceived to be the current state of feminist poetics in Canada, and gestured towards a shared need to revisit past debates and experimentations. We envisaged the conference as an opportunity to explore the recent past of feminist experimentalism and draw it into a conversation with issues and practices being pursued by a younger generation of innovative writers. A few insistent questions kept haunting our meetings, which today I am tempted to read as symptomatic both of a deep-seated anxiety for cultural/political recognition, and of an ambivalent desire to engage with the legacy of second wave innovative poetics in ways capable of addressing present issues and concerns without falling prey to generational nostalgia or generational ressentiment. Caught between the apparent obsolescence of feminism in public discourse and a relative marginalization of new feminist poetics within innovative writing circles, we struggled to articulate our * Paper published in Open Letter, 13, 9 (Summer 2009)