Feminists From The United States

"(Sylvia to blindfolded cat) Just put your paw on the map, and that's where we'll go for our vacation. It's a big country, and yet you picked Cleveland."

"(Sylvia) You almost never see a real lady popping out of a cake."

"(Sylvia at typewriter) On Getting Old in America. By Sylvia. Page One. 1. Best to do it somewhere else."

"(Dr. Paul Johns, animal linguist, on cats) It seems their entire language consists of two phrases, uttered with varying degrees of intensity: "Hurry that dinner, willya" and "Everything here is mine." (p. 35)"

"(Cat in bed) The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago recently identified a new species of fish...virtually extinct in the wild, and they haven't even named it yet. I dreamt I ate it."

"(question about democracy) It is more than troubled. I mean, it may be sliding out of our grasp. It goes without saying that this has never been a full democracy. It has always been a selective democracy, offering a few people the full enjoyment of a democratic society, but it has always been repressive toward certain groups, and I don't think that it is less so now. I think we're seeing a failure of the democratic dream and a cynicism toward that dream, so that the dream becomes mere rhetoric in the mouths of politicians and corporations."

"my sense of her, the thing that I most loved, was her integrity. She lived exactly what she said. And this was so rare and so beautiful...I think her legacy for all of us is to continue to believe in the power of art, especially in the power of poetry, and to keep moving and not to be dissuaded, not to be discouraged, but to take heart from a woman who lived for 82 years giving her very best, growing out of every shell that society attempted to force her into to become this really amazing figure of inspiration and hope and love."

"At her best Rich is inimitable"

"It is my conviction that currently in the United States, more women than men are writing good and vital poetry, although there are fine male poets. This is our renaissance, our Elizabethan plenty. We have giants like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Diane di Prima and Maxine Kumin, we have rising powers like Joy Harjo and Celia Gilbert and Sharon Olds, and we have dozens and dozens of individual voices sharply flavored and yet of our time, our flesh, our troubles."

"Anger has always played a role in poetry...What is relatively new for poetry is women expressing anger, which horrifies many readers because it is such an unfeminine thing for women to do. Women are supposed to be nice and courteous, and leave the violence to men. The anger in twentieth-century women’s poetry, beginning with Plath and continuing with Adrienne Rich and many others, especially Black women, has been thrillingly salutary, cleansing the air."

"For nearly half a century the voice of Adrienne Rich has charted America's changing mental, emotional, and moral landscape in poetry and essays fueled by the twin motives of a thirst for justice and a quest to stretch the imagination."

"Adrienne Rich was an exquisitely political poet—and a politically exquisite poet...Committed to trade unionism, she served on the board of the National Writers Union, as arguably the most honored of its author members...A huge fan of "Democracy Now," and a frequent contributor to The Nation and other journals of the left, she made political media more lyrical. But she also made literary journals more political."

"I admire her work, and I now understand historically the important part that she played in the feminist movement."

"I think of Adrienne Rich's words from a generation ago: adapting John Donne, she wrote, "Any woman's death diminishes me.” Twenty years later, I would amend Rich's statement and assert with equal lesbian feminist passion, "Every barrio boy's death diminishes me.""

"As a poet, Adrienne Rich had a great impact on me. I studied her work a great deal."

"Why weren't other women of Color found to participate in this conference? Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black panelist's paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don't love each other? In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, "We did not know who to ask." But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women's art out of women's exhibitions, Black women's work out of most feminist publications except for the occasional "Special Third World Women's Issue," and Black women's texts off your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven't also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us-white and Black-when it is key to our survival as a movement?"

"I feel I was very lucky, though, because when I came out, which was in 1973, New York was just hopping. It was exploding. It was after Stonewall. Lesbians started getting organized. I belonged to a group of lesbian writers. There were four of us who decided to start Conditions magazine, for example, and before that we had a group called Di Vilde Chayas [the wild animals], which was a group that had Adrienne Rich, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Gloria Greenfield, and Evelyn Torton Beck, who did Nice Jewish Girls."

"Adrienne Rich's Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying, for example, filled a need and has been taken instantly into the culture. How many lesbians have given a new lover a copy, either to start things off right. or after the first big fight?"

"Despite flaws and contradictions in her analysis, Adrienne Rich's essay "Disloyal to Civilization': Feminism, Racism, and Gynephobia" was groundbreaking in that it ruptured that wall of denial, addressing the issue of race and accountability. White women were more willing to "hear" another white woman talk about racism, yet it is their inability to listen to black women that impedes feminist progress."

"Writing about Adrienne Rich's work, connecting it to the work of men who thought critically about the body, in her introduction to Thinking Through the Body, Jane Gallop comments: “Men who do find themselves in some way thinking through the body are more likely to be recognized as serious thinkers and heard. Women have first to prove that we are thinkers, which is easier when we conform to the protocol that deems serious thought separate from an embodied subject in history. Rich is asking women to enter the realms of critical thought and knowledge without becoming disembodied spirit, universal man.”"

"I admire her sheer audacity. In the face of everything she learned from the fathers, given the time when she grew up and her own father's admonitions, still she became herself."

"In her vision of warning and her celebration of life, Adrienne Rich is the Blake of American letters."

"Rich was one of the most celebrated poets of the last half-century and a lifelong advocate for women, gay and lesbian rights, peace and racial justice. Rich drew widespread acclaim for her many volumes of poetry and prose, which brought the oppression of women and lesbians into the public spotlight. She was a key figure in the women’s movement and an uncompromising critic of the powerful."

"Adrienne Rich believes “the poem must serve” the people. Somehow, I don’t want my poems to be relevant to only a few readers in academia."

"I echo Adrienne Rich’s idea that the personal is political. My poetics is rooted in my personal history, and from there I examine the world around me. I see myself not just as a Chinese-American, but as a global citizen. I care about America but also about what happens in the world."

"I cannot say I am a citizen of the world as Virginia Woolf, speaking as an Anglo woman born to economic means, declared herself; nor can I make the same claim to U.S. citizenship as Adrienne Rich does despite her universal feeling for humanity. As a mestiza born to the lower strata, I am treated at best, as a second class citizen, at worst, as a non-entity. I am commonly perceived as a foreigner everywhere I go, including in the United States and in Mexico. This international perception is based on my color and features. I am neither black nor white. I am not light skinned and cannot be mistaken for "white"; because my hair is so straight I cannot be mistaken for "black." And by U.S..standards and according to some North American Native Americans, I cannot make official claims to being india."

"I am indebted to Adrienne Rich whose thinking on so many issues influenced my own, and who read this manuscript in full, offering detailed notes. Her support, and incisive criticisms and suggestions were of great importance to me emotionally and intellectually."

"As Di Vilde Chayes began its meetings in February, Adrienne Rich outlined her goals for the group: "Dear Schvesters: Thinking about what a Jewish Lesbian group/cell/collective/study group/action group/network or combination of these, might be.... I want to be part ... of a Jewish/lesbian/feminist group which can develop an analysis of anti-Semitism and Jewish identity for ourselves and for the feminist movement and which will also relentlessly keep this in with what we already understand of racism, class injustice woman-hating, homophobia. Rich felt that she had a lot of work to do "simply to feel and understand" both her "existence and oppression as a Jew." When Evelyn Torton Beck invited her to contribute to Nice Jewish Girls, she at first declined, but after thinking over the issues for a year, Rich wrote "Split at the Root" for the anthology. The essay spoke of the profound difficulties of focusing on different oppressions at the same time. "Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles," Rich wrote memorably in the now-classic essay, "white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate Southerner, split at the root; that I will never bring them whole."... Although Judaism was "yet another strand of patriarchy," she always added mentally, "if Jews had to wear yellow stars again, I too would wear one"...Di Vilde Chayes' formation offered "another beginning," analogous to the founding moments of radical feminism. "In some ways this feels to me like the early 1970s when we were rushing about searching for the lost, out-of-print, hard-to-come-by information we needed," she wrote to her Di Vilde Chayes sisters, "the books gathering dust in libraries, the history we didn't know. We exchange bibliographies, follow off leads in other bibliographies. We start trying to name what is happening, We make lists... of Jewish women fiction writers in America and are shocked at how few we find. We start... reversing stereotypes, claiming our strengths. At the same time, within the very movement where this is happening, we have to confront unexamined bigotry, old Leftist attitudes, etc." Given the historical exigencies of the times and the coming together of Di Vilde Chayes, along with work done by other Nice Jewish Girls contributors, Rich felt that her own perspectives were "changing, opening out.” “I am glad that each of you exists," she told the Schwesters."

"Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn."

"Adrienne Rich has also had a real influence on me and more recently Audre Lorde."

"A long-lived relationship is about so many things. It is such a dense and complex process — always a process — and it's not to be summed up. It's not to be turned into some kind of vignette. If we are serious, we also have to recognize that even the longest and richest and densest relationship must end, and we see it around us. We see it in that inevitability of time's power, if you will."

"I'm one of the lesbians who came out through the women's movement. And I don't mean I wouldn't have come out without a women's movement, but it's very hard to imagine the world without the women's liberation movement at this point. However, in my own history, that was the point. It was a time of tremendous intensity among women — women of all kinds. Women who had known they were lesbians all their lives, women who were then coming out, women who were then and have remained heterosexual. There was a kind of intensity around the politics that was very profound and passionate. It was very moving and very exciting to see women taking their strength and taking hold of each other's strength and bringing out the power in each other. ... The passion was political, and the politics was passionate. Yes, it was very sexual, and it was also a milieu and a time that was very political."

"Essentially poetry, if it is poetry, does not lend itself to simple readings, to oversimplifications — though people may try to read it that way. It seems to me that the essential nature of a poem is that there is ambivalence and ambiguity quivering underneath."

"We tried in the early years of the feminist movement to look under and behind the myths, the legends that always depicted the stepmother as cruel, the bad mother, the myths in popular psychology of the evil mother, the evil mother-daughter bond. We tried to correct those, and in so doing, I think we unearthed a great deal that was real and important and useful. To idealize, to sentimentalize, to mythologize that — those powers, those strengths, those teachers — takes us into yet another place where I think we are disempowered."

"("What are the obligations of poetry? Have they changed in your lifetime?") I don’t know that poetry itself has any universal or unique obligations. It’s a great ongoing human activity of making, over different times, under different circumstances. For a poet, in this time we call “ours,” in this whirlpool of disinformation and manufactured distraction? Not to fake it, not to practice a false innocence, not pull the shades down on what’s happening next door or across town. Not to settle for shallow formulas or lazy nihilism or stifling self-reference. Nothing “obliges” us to behave as honorable human beings except each others’ possible examples of honesty and generosity and courage and lucidity, suggesting a greater social compact."

"to be “against war” has come to seem too easy a stance. War exists in a texture of possession and deprivation, economic and religious dogmas, racism, colonialist exploitation, nationalism, unequal power. Who decides to make war? Who is destroyed in it? Who creates the rhetoric of “terror” and “democracy”?"

"The split in our language between “political” and “personal” has, I think, been a trap."

"There’s a poem from the mid-1950s in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, “From Morning Glory to Petersburg”—titles from an encyclopedia volume—that suggests the effort to ask, as a conscious strategy, how do you make livable meaning out of separate bits of classified information? How to live with “facts” you can’t integrate? Well, one way was to integrate them is through poetry."

"Relations of power, as I began to decipher them, have infused a great deal of my work over time—both poetry and prose. But poetry was where I could confront, perhaps transform, what I was experiencing and learning about the world."

"Our ears, like it or not, take in so much in a day. Maybe some North American ears have trouble with poetry because of the noise from an aggressively voiced ruling ethos—its terminology of war, success, national security, winning and losing, ownership, merchandising, canned information, canned laughter. Poetry can be direct, it can be colloquial, it can be abrupt or angry, but it’s not that vacuous noise; it wants to unseat that kind of language, play other kinds of sound tracks."

"The music, the sound of words working together, has always mattered to me."

"For myself it is an ever-present challenge to draw lines of connection between personal feelings and their social dimensions, “the body’s pain and the pain on the streets” to recognize that an economic system can impact on human sensibility—Marx’s idea that exploitative relations of production end by affecting all human relations, the most private and intimate included. These are finally not just ideas, they become our feelings. And it’s in feelings that poetry is rooted."

"Dark Fields of the Republic and Midnight Salvage were written during the final decade of the twentieth century and against the grain of their society. The economic and technological expansion, with the terrible human and environmental prices paid, were (and are) accelerating, while at the same time language itself, the medium of my art, was deteriorating."

"I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise? The philosopher Hannah Arendt writes about the concept of “public happiness”—the sense of being a participant, a citizen, of sharing the power to create collectively. She says that’s what the framers of the U.S. constitution really intended in saying that “men” are endowed with the inalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness.” The idea becomes more tantalizing in a society where most citizens feel individually and collectively disempowered—as just now in the U.S. But the issue of happiness turns up also in the poetry of Charles Olson, and in my poem, “Camino Real,” I have a dialogue with both Olson and Oppen, in which I say, “Why measure? It’s itself the measure.” It occurs to me now that Whitman was not simply inventing an ideal United States; he was trying to show what public happiness would feel like, along with public grief and mourning as in his Civil War poems."

"women cannot become liberated one by one. But individual revolt is not simply futile."

"One of the insidious rhetorical devices of the U.S. Right has been to claim (for example) that empathy with others is merely “liberal guilt” or “political correctness,” that compassion is merely sentimental or even hypocritical. I see it as an entirely cynical view that underscores the profit motive as the only real basis for human relationships."

"I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class. What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing."

"I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university."

"Over many years (I am almost 72) so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me—it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry. Some poets—like Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Jean Valentine, Audre Lorde, Hayden Carruth, Jane Cooper, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Clayton Eshelman—have been my friends, we’ve been comrades in exchanging work and encouraging each other… But I’ve also been powerfully affected by Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Muriel Rukeyser, Aimé Césaire, Robert Duncan—poets I met briefly if at all. Baudelaire, Sachs, Celan, Ghalib, Mandelstam…all in translation. This kind of influence isn’t textual, exactly—it’s like having windows open on “what is possible.” And this kind of intensive reading of many poets, and dialogues with a few, seems to me more fertilizing to a poet’s life than immersion in workshops."

"I began as a formalist because that was the poetic tradition—Anglo-European—that I first knew. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were there of course, but Dickinson’s work was edited into a prim textual conformity until 1960 when the poems in their original form exploded my ideas of poetry. Also, my own life pushed me beyond the conventions of formalism—along with reading my direct contemporaries who were exploring open forms, like Denise Levertov, W.S. Merwin, and Galway Kinnell. All this was in the Sixties when the most intense life was lived around politics—the Black Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, very large moral questions were in the air, along with a great deal of hope, and the revolutions in Africa and Central America were part of that consciousness. That period has been trashed by the Right as mere posturing, violence and drug abuse. But it was in many ways both a practical and a visionary time."