20th Century Poets From The United States

"In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal."

"We are among those who have been violated into violence."

"Efficiency, competence: Black students know the deadly, neutral definition of these words. There seldom has been a more efficient system for profiteering, through human debasement, than the plantations, of a while ago. Today, the whole world sits, as quietly scared as it can sit, afraid that, tomorrow, America may direct its efficiency and competence toward another forest for defoliation, or clean-cut laser-beam extermination."

"We, we know the individuality that isolates the man from other men, the either/or, the lonely-one that leads the flesh to clothing, jewelry, and land, the solitude of sight that separates the people from the people, flesh from flesh, that jams material between the spirit and the spirit. We have suffered witness to these pitiful, and murdering, masquerade extensions of the self.Instead, we choose a real, a living enlargement of our only life. We choose community."

"Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?"

"Most of the women of the world-Black and First World and white who work because we must-most of the women of the world persist far from the heart of the usual Women's Studies syllabus. Similarly, the typical Black History course will slide by the majority experience it pretends to represent. For example, Mary McLeod Bethune will scarcely receive as much attention as Nat Turner, even though Black women who bravely and efficiently provided for the education of Black people hugely outnumber those few Black men who led successful or doomed rebellions against slavery. In fact, Mary McLeod Bethune may not receive even honorable mention because Black History too often apes those ridiculous white history courses which produce such dangerous gibberish as The Sheraton British Colonial "history" of the Bahamas. Both Black and white history courses exclude from their central consideration those people who neither killed nor conquered anyone as the means to new identity, those people who took care of every one of the people who wanted to become "a person," those people who still take care of the life at issue: the ones who wash and who feed and who teach and who diligently decorate straw hats and bags with all of their historically unrequired gentle love: the women."

"1. “The People” shall not be defined as a group excluding or derogating anyone on the basis of race, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, class, or age. 2. “The People” shall consciously undertake to respect and to encourage each other to feel safe enough to attempt the building of a community of trust in which all may try to be truthful and deeply serious in the messages they craft for the world to contemplate. 3. Poetry for the People rests upon a belief that the art of telling the truth is a necessary and a healthy way to create powerful, and positive, connections among people who, otherwise, remain (unknown and unaware) strangers. The goal is not to kill connections but, rather, to create and to deepen them among truly different men and women."

"As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth — whatever the truth may be — that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life."

"Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?"

"If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable."

"I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience."

"Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations."

"If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic."

"I am working for the courage to admit the truth that Bertolt Brecht has written; he says, "It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak." I cherish the mercy and the grace of women’s work. But I know there is new work that we must undertake as well: that new work will make defeat detestable to us. That new women’s work will mean we will not die trying to stand up: we will live that way: standing up. I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks to all of the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never to be late again."

"I wanted to be strong. I never wanted to be weak again as long as I lived. I thought about my mother and her suicide and I thought about how my father could not tell whether she was dead or alive. I wanted to get well and what I wanted to do as soon as I was strong, actually, what I wanted to do was I wanted to live my life so that people would know unmistakably that I am alive, so that when I finally die people will know the difference for sure between my living and my death. And I thought about the idea of my mother as a good woman and I rejected that, because I don't see why it's a good thing when you give up, or when you cooperate with those who hate you or when you polish and iron and mend and endlessly mollify for the sake of the people who love the way that you kill yourself day by day silently. And I think all of this is really about women and work. Certainly this is all about me as a woman and my life work. I mean I am not sure my mother’s suicide was something extraordinary. Perhaps most women must deal with a similar inheritance, the legacy of a woman whose death you cannot possibly pinpoint because she died so many, many times and because, even before she became my mother, the life of that woman was taken; I say it was taken away."

"And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea we are the ones we have been waiting for"

"Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter. These poems speak to philosophy; they reveal the corners where we organize what we know."

"The migrants' plight has transformed border crossings into a key image in contemporary Latin American art and poetry. José Martí, who lived in exile in New York, said that shame of the indigenous mother culture is at the core of Latin America's dependency, fueling the sell-out of natural resources and the cycle of poverty. Gamaliel Churata concurs. It is no coincidence that the main theorization on this issue has come from the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, a mestiza born and raised on the border. She writes: "The U.S. Mexican border is an open wound where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. . . . We, indias y mestizas, police the Indian in us, brutalize and condemn her." In her work, the negative space that defines women by what they "are not" (nonwhite, non-male), is transformed into creative space, by a will "to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. " Her work indicates the difficult edge all mestizos navigate, the hidden rage and complex paradoxes that women poets often acknowledge."

"The works of Chicana lesbian writers Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, Emma Pérez, Ana Castillo, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Carla Trujillo, and many others bring out the pain and isolation, but, as important, their joys, self-respect, courage, and dignity."

"What W. E. B. Du Bois described as the "veil" that barred African Americans from the White American world can be productively understood in relation to Latinx subjectivities by drawing on Anzaldúa's theorization of exclusion in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). For Anzaldúa, borders are recursive structures that can be reproduced on a number of scales, such that the "color line" (in Du Bois' terms) is just one of many possible sites for the production of exclusion and double-consciousness. In her formulation of a New Mestiza Consciousness, the racial and economic exclusion caused by colonialism must always be understood in relation to the sexual and gender domination of patriarchy. Anzaldúa's Chicana feminism involves the experience of multiple forms of double-consciousness in response to the multiplicity of power. In some places, Anzaldúa characterizes her lesbian Chicana feminist consciousness as a "Shadow-Beast... that refuses to take orders from outside authorities... that hates constraints of any kind, even those self-imposed" (1987:38)...What Du Bois' navigates as transcendence around and above the exclusionary veil, allowing him to access both the Black and White worlds, Anzaldúa approaches with a hopeful ambivalence: she is without country as a Mestiza, yet possesses all countries through the potential for feminine kinship: she is without race as a lesbian, yet identifies with all races as part of a queer diaspora; and she is without culture as a staunch critic of patriarchal beliefs and practices, yet fully cultural as a creative participant in the production of an emergent reality (1987:102-103)."

"Gloria Anzaldúa, disentangling the heavy hanging strands fringing the cave of mestiza consciousness, finds speechlessness compounded by femaleness, and both by the fact of being alien, "queer," not a woman in her culture's eyes. Her sense of identity is more complicated than Baca's because she's forced to transform many layers of negativity surrounding femaleness itself-images of Malintzin, the Indian woman as betrayer, of la chingada, the Indian woman as the fucked-one, of la Llorona, eternally mourning, long-suffering mother-and to confront the despot duality of simplistic masculine/feminine: I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within.""

"What I like about Chicana writers like Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, and others is that they have very important things to say. They have a vision, a feminist vision."

"I saw Anzaldúa in action at a workshop on the creative process. "How's that for drama?" she asked us, having covered a portable blackboard with drawings. "I lecture with pictures," she explained, going on to trace the significance of these personal hieroglyphics. After she read us one of her poems in Spanish: "I know that was frustrating for many of you, but I wanted you to see what it feels like to be locked out of the language because you don't know it. I was punished for speaking Spanish in school.""

""To survive the borderlands/you must live sin fronteras/be a crossroads." Those words convey Gloria E. Anzaldúa's essence as she wrote so powerfully about the many kinds of borderlands we confront in life...Her death from diabetes marks the loss of a great feminist philosopher whose ideas live on."

"The most striking change during the past 20 years can be seen in attitudes toward homophobia. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, an almost total silence hung over gay and lesbian advocacy. No openly gay person could be a movement leader. Today homophobia persists; most progressive, straight Chicanos as well as Chicanas still fail to see gay and lesbian rights as another struggle of other oppressed people. Too many still fail to see homophobia as a sometimes murderous force of discrimination. But the situation has improved, especially in some major cities, in academia and among youth...The work of Chicana lesbian artists and intellectuals such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga has been crucial to this liberation, with benefits going beyond las lesbianas. Wherever one finds strong voices for women among Chicanas, they often come from Lesbians."

"In the '80s, when I -- I've written about this -- I was rooming with Gloria Anzaldúa, who was a Chicana lesbian writer from Texas. And we were teaching in a program in Santa Cruz -- a summer three-week -- I think it was a three-week program. It was called Women's Voices, and it was about -- it was a writing program,...We sort of introduced ourselves to each other, and -- she did ask me how come I never used Yiddish, and I thought that was sort of an interesting question, since it had never even occurred to me. I mean, I think I used two Yiddish words up until then."

"Shame is a knife that carves out a culture's heart. To name, describe and defy shame is thus a profoundly rebellious, strengthening act, and nobody writes about shame like Gloria Anzaldúa-the shame of the other, the minority, the one whose face, hair, eyes, skin, speech, sexuality is different, not right...Those familiar with Anzaldúa's writing from This Bridge Called My Back, the groundbreaking collection she co-edited with Cherrie Moraga, know her as one of the most important and original voices of Third World feminism. In the borderlands new creatures come into being, including the "new mestiza" Anzaldúa celebrates in some of the boldest experimental writing to come out of the women's movement. Monique Wittig comes to mind, experimenting with language as well as form, or June Arnold, or the innovative English/Yiddish poetry of Irena Klepfisz, cited several times by Anzaldúa...the dominant note in the book is neither scolding nor grim. Anzaldúa loves her culture, language, people. Many of the poems are wildly humorous or optimistic simply by dint of their inventiveness ("Interface" or "Holy Relics," for example). She invokes new human possibility in the name of the new mestiza charged with pulling the human race into a future free from destruction, exploitation or oppression."

"Gloria Anzaldúa has consistently modelled commitment to writing as a life-organizing principle; in addition, Gloria, an old friend, and Chrystos, a new one, gave me courage to write honestly about violence."

"This is the oppressor's languages yet I need it to talk to you." Adrienne Rich's words...I know that it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize. Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us of this pain in Borderlands/La Frontera when she asserts, "So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language."

"she was instrumental in revisioning feminism to embrace the concerns of lesbians and women of color."

"Gloria Anzaldúa declares: "I will not glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me and which have injured me in the name of protecting me. So don't give me your tenets and your laws. Don't give me your lukewarm gods. What I want is an accounting with all three cultures-white, Mexican, Indian." In her demand for "an accounting" with the many cultures and communities that define her identity, Anzaldúa articulates una cultura mestiza, an agonistic and innovative feminism whose democratic receptivity is characterized by its emphasis on contentious encounters that cut across multiple axes of difference."

"Her work is an exemplar of how to interpret from experience, and it also directs our attention to a process of connection between ourselves as women, and across the many boundaries of difference."

"The solution to your depression lies en esa cueva oscura [in this dark cave] and a deeper integration of your psyche."

"Though modern therapies exhort you to act against your passions (compulsions), claiming health and integration lies in that direction, you've learned that delving more fully into your pain, anger, despair, depression will move you through them to the other side, where you can use their energy to heal."

"May our voices proclaim the bonds of bridges."

"For positive social change to happen we need to envision a different reality, dream new blueprints for it, formulate new strategies for coping in it."

"Our images/feelings/thoughts have to be conflicted before we see the need for change."

"daring to make connections with people outside our "race" necessitates breaking down categories. Because our positions are nos/otras, both/and, inside/outside, and inner exiles we see through the illusion of separateness. We crack the shell of our usual assumptions by interrogating our notions and theories of race and other differences. When we replace the old story (of judging others by race, class, gender, and sexual groupings and using these judgments to create barriers), we threaten people who believe in clearly defined mutually exclusive categories. The same hands that split assumptions apart exchange of stories."

"Subtle forms of political correctness, self-censorship, and romanticizing home racial/ethnic/class communities imprison us in limiting spaces. These categories do not reflect the realities we live in, and are not true to our multicultural roots. Liminality, the in-between space of nepantla, is the space most of us occupy. We do not inhabit un mundo but and we need to allow these other worlds and peoples to join in the feminist-of-color dialogue. We must be wary of assimilation but not fear cultural mestizaje. Instead we must become nepantleras and build bridges between all these worlds as we traffic back and forth between them, detribalizing and retribalizing in different and various communities."

"And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space."

"The beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian heroes, lies in lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions."

"It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet It's twelve poems, I call it oranges."

"People I read a lot to my son were people like Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton, Frank O’Hara for some reason, Chinese poems, Japanese poems."

"I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages."

"Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey.It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again."

"Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations."

"Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact."

"I’m a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pat."

"The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the other’s bed, where the rival perfects the lover’s imperfections."

"We watched her come with subtle fire And learned feet, Stumbling among the lustful drunk Yet somehow sweet. We saw the crimson leave her cheeks Flame in her eyes; For when a woman lives in awful haste A woman dies. The jests that lit our hours by night And made them gay, Soiled a sweet and ignorant soul And fouled its play."