Kornelia Freitag studied Russian and English in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) where she also wrote her PHD thesis on Stephen Crane. Since then she has been teaching as an assistant professor at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Her current research focusses on women's poetry and feminist theory. She is working on a booklength project on women's experimental writing in the U.S.
Forum response
The question regarding the category of (working) class in the context of innovative poetry redirects the view from a single focus on gender, which as Anna Yeatman poignantly formulated, "is always going to be most compelling for those women who do not experience ethnicity, race, and class as additional bases of oppression." (Feminism and the Politics of Difference, Sydney, 1993. p.228) Nevertheless, I felt extremely reluctant to respond to your question–not so much because I think "class" could not prove valuable in the analysis of particular texts by–say Charles Bernstein or Erica Hunt–but because I fear the metamorphosis of this analytical category (as much as race or gender) into a political yardstick sentencing the poetries or poetics apparently "lacking" the awareness of the one or the other (the judgement "lack of class consciousness" smacked definitely of failure in the brand of literary criticism I was originally trained in).
A careful (re)reading of texts within and without the "field" of wo/men's experimental writing might indeed bring some surprises concerning the ways in which the texts will render class intelligible. But many of the innovative texts which do not thematically and/or formally engage with some of the critical categories mentioned above might inspire us to think as much about reading expectations, linguistic categorizing, and their links with social stereotyping. This would depend primarily on how the available texts will be read and contextualized.
It is in this sense, I think, in which Erica Hunt can claim in her "Oppositional Poetics:" "contiguity, as a textual and social practice, provides the occasion to look beyond the customary categories of domestic and international, politics, history, aesthetics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and so on....As a reading and writing practice, it suggests new syntheses that move out of the sphere of a monoculture of denial; syntheses that would begin to consider the variance between clusters of oppositional writing strategies with respect for what has been achieved by each and a sense of the ground that holds it in place." (Moving Borders. ed. Mary Margaret Sloan, Jersey City, 1998, p. 687.)