(Quenched, photo by Jill Posener)
In her introductory essay to the anthology True to Life Adventure Stories, Judy Grahn wrote the often-quoted:
"I have given a good deal of thought to the origins of folk English, to women and English, to the King's English, and to the phrase, 'murdering the King's English'. Murdering the King's English can be a crime only if you identify with the King."
Grahn's emphasis on reclaiming, valuing, publishing, and emulating the speech of common women, poor women, working women, women who use other than white "standard" English, permanently altered the landscape of American writing, not only feminist writing. Riding the same wave are/were Nora Zeale Hurston, Agnes Smedley, Alice Walker, Tillie Olson, Sharon Isabell, Irene Klepfisz, Dorothy Allison, Cherrie Moraga, Meridel LeSueur, Alta, Pat Parker, and other women who understood that "refusing to identify with the King" was an essential step in broadcasting the thoughts and lives of women in a patriarchy.
The first book published by Grahn was Edward the Dyke and Other Poems, a title which is itself ironic and rebellious. The main work within in, "The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke" is not actually a poem. Written in 1964, it is a staggeringly early and taunting rejection of what, fourteen years later, Adrienne Rich would name as "compulsory heterosexuality".
In 1985, Grahn published Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition. According to Martha Nell Smith in her article on Lesbian Poetry:
'Dedicating her study "To All Lovers" (not exclusively lesbian lovers), Grahn clearly states her objective: "The story I am telling is of the re-emergence of the public Lesbian voice."
'Claiming that poetry is especially important to women, Grahn makes the even more controversial claim that it is a vital "tool for survival" for lesbians and says that "more than one Lesbian has been kept from floundering on the rocks of alienation from her own culture, her own center, by having access, at least, to Lesbian poetry."
'Immediately she remarks the indisputable fact that "We owe a great deal to poetry; two of our most important names, for instance: Lesbian and Sapphic," effectively arguing the case for a study focused on lesbian poetry.'
....
'Of Grahn's "A Woman Is Talking To Death," [Elly] Bulkin wrote:
"That's a fact," Grahn keeps observing as she builds image after image of women ignored, derided, abused. The central 'fact' of the poem is finally the poet's own lesbianism. In a society that perceives lesbians as committing 'indecent acts' and that leers at women who kiss each other, who call each other 'lovers,' who admit to "wanting" another woman, Grahn forces a rethinking of both language and the assumptions behind it.
'Remarking that the "rhetorical drive" of Grahn's poetry draws on biblical and protesting oral traditions, Bulkin concludes that "this oral quality" underscores the "sense that the poem should be heard with others, not read by oneself." This is not a poetry for private pleasure only but a poetry of motivation meant to act as a force to change the world.'
Bulkin goes on to state in her 1978 essay ''Kissing/Against the Light': A Look at Lesbian Poetry":
'Uncovering a poetic tradition representative of lesbians of color and poor and working-class lesbians of all races involves, as Barbara Noda has written, reexamining "the words 'lesbian,' 'historical,' and even 'poet.'" A beginning problem is definitional, as Paula Gunn Allen makes clear in her exploration of her own American Indian culture:
It is not known if those
who warred and hunted on the plains
chanted and hexed in the hills
divined and healed in the mountains
gazed and walked beneath the seas
were Lesbians
It is never known
if any woman was a lesbian'
(It is worth noting here that Paula Gunn Allen and Judy Grahn were partners for many years.)
From my own experience, I recall having a copy of Edward the Dyke by 1975. That summer, there was no lesbian and gay pride event within several hours' drive of the small North Texas city where I lived with my lover and our five-year-old daughter. However, we heard that on Saturday, gay men and perhaps some lesbians would be gathering at Queen's Point, a beach on nearby Lake Dallas notorious as a locale for cruising and clandestine same-sex partying.
It was still very dangerous to go to known gay places in public, especially in daylight. You could be arrested simply for being there. My lover was a schoolteacher already under custody fears from her fundamentalist parents. Nevertheless, we resolved to go. We were that hungry for community.
We decided to take things one step further: We would contribute to the day's festivities. We memorized "The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke", assigning the characters to my lover (narrator), Dr. Knox (our gay friend Billie Bledsoe), and Edward the Dyke (me). We performed this on the beach, before a crowd of drag queens, college fags, and cruisers from Dallas looking for pick-ups. We were the only women there.
I can recall clearly my voice waxing lyrical on the lines "Oh Bach, oh Brahms, oh Buxtehude", and Billie shouting at me "Admit you have a smegmatic personality". I can also recall that we got not a single laugh. It went completely over their heads, a crushing failure to connect.
Yet when we later reprised it for an entirely straight, mostly married crowd of women from NOW, we killed. After that, I put all my energy in women's and lesbian community efforts, not gay or queer. I wanted to begin with a common language.
After the fold is the text of "The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke". Below is a bibliography of Judy Grahn's work. Also immediately below is the first paragraph of an extraordinary essay by Judy Grahn (now Ph.D.) at her website Metaformia, entitled Are Wars Metaformic?. This is intended to whet your appetite and send you to the link so you can keep reading the ongoing work of this major leader/thinker/writer.
"Mass warfare is not sustainable, is not noble, and is not between warriors. Civilian deaths far outnumber those of soldiers; terrified and furious soldiers go mad in war and murder civilians, and many ex-soldiers never recover from the traumas—physical, psychological, and social—of modern warfare. War is addictive and attractive because it appears to be about meaning, but it is actually about sensation and loyalty, grotesquely out of balance emotions of the people who endure it, and grotesquely out of balance power urges of the men who decree it to happen. Yet, the bloodshed of war is glorified above all other bloodshed."
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JUDY GRAHN
—Edward The Dyke and Other Poems. Oakland, CA: The Women’s Press Collective, 1971.
—A Woman is Talking to Death. Oakland, CA: The Women’s Press Collective, 1974.
—She Who: a graphic book of poems with 54 images of women. Oakland, CA: Diana Press, 1977.
—The Works of a Common Woman. Oakland, CA: The Women’s Press Collective, 1978.
—The Queen of Wands. Ithaca, NY: The Crossing Press, 1982.
—Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
—Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition. Spinsters Ink, 1985.
—The Queen of Swords. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.
—Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology with Essays by Judy Grahn. Ithaca, NY: Crossing Press, 1990.
-Mundane's World, A Novel, Ithaca, NY: The Crossing Press, 1988
—Blood, Bread and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
FEMINISM UNADULTERATED: THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF EDWARD THE DYKE
STOCKPILING BLACK DNA: "THE USUAL SUSPECTS"
When a culture has as bedrock a belief system which renders whites more valuable than non-whites, men more valuable than non-men (women, gays, lesbians, trans), and upper class people more valuable than those of the lower classes, every single institution in that culture is going to refect these values and, if that institution has been empowered with enforcement, such enforcement will inevitably be racist, sexist and classist. This is the case in America.
Until this reality is altered, one truth which will follow is that any advance in technology employed by our institutions in this country will add to the burden of unequal enforcement against our less valued citizens. Technology is not going to be the means by which we alter oppression. It will, instead, be used to exacerbate oppression. Giving up the myth, the faith that we can "science" our way to equality, is an important milestone when joining the reality-based community.
We need to keep this in mind when reading a recent article in the Washington Post about the nonconcensual use of DNA of innocent family members to locate criminals, From DNA of Family, a Tool to Make Arrests. This article leads with sensational details from the BTK Killer case, patently intended to dissuade our recognition of injustice when we learn that the killer was tracked down via a DNA database which contained the DNA of his daughter obtained, without her knowledge or consent, from a routine Pap smear given five years earlier at a university medical clinic in Kansas. This blatant theft of her most private and unique information as an individual -- her DNA -- is portrayed as justified because of the result.
Friday, May 2, 2008
THE POWER OF NAMING OUR TERMS
(Cartoon by XKCD)
I'm going to reprint here in its entirety a great comment and introduction to another essay posted currently at Utne Reader online. The comment, by Steve Thorngate, is titled "The Perils of Gender Guy". The essay is referenced in his comment but I cannot send you directly to it because it's by subscription only. Hence, I'll let you read someone else's take on it.
"If you spend much time in office meetings or college classrooms, you’ve likely run into Gender Guy. He’s an alpha male and a liberal, and he likes to talk about gender issues—in the workplace, in society, in the book you’re reading, wherever. He pontificates and patronizes; he interrupts and shouts down. He makes the rest of the room endure his pissing matches with men less enlightened, or with those who share his general opinions but oblige his desire to quibble over details, loudly and at length.
"Gender Guy’s assumed expertise might come from overly simplified connections he makes between gender and race, or class, or sexual identity, or religion. It might be based on the fact that, as an intelligent and well-spoken man, he’s by definition an expert on everything. Or perhaps he thinks he understands gender because the word—unlike, say, “women”—suggests a subject that deals not with one gender’s concrete realities so much as, more abstractly, with the relationship between two.
"This last point in particular interests historian Alice Kessler-Harris. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kessler-Harris considers the consequences for her own discipline when, starting in the early 1990s, gender history began to take over the ground previously held by women’s history (subscription required). She allows that “gender is a tempting and powerful framework”:
"Far more inclusive than the category of women, [gender] raises questions not so much about what women did or did not do, but about how the organization or relationships between men and women established priorities and motivates social and political action. While the history of women can be accused of lacking objectivity—of having a feminist purpose—that of gender suggests a more distanced stance… The idea of “gender” frees young scholars (male and female) to seek out the ways that historical change is related to the shape and deployment of male/female relations.
"And yet, something is lost:
"Gender obscures as much as it reveals… [I suspect] that in seeing the experiences of men and women as relational, we overlook the particular ways in which women—immigrants, African-Americans, Asians, Chicanas—engaged their worlds… We lose the power of the individual to shed a different light—sometimes a liminal light—on historical processes.
"In short, Kessler-Harris worries that abstracting “women” into “gender” can have the effect of silencing the voices of actual women—a danger not limited to the rarefied world of historians. The tension between analyzing gender relations and highlighting female voices is an old one, and it’s as broadly relevant as ever. While Gender Guy’s opinions may be impeccably feminist, how helpful is this if the abstraction “gender” gives him cover to go on and on, preventing the women in the room from getting a word in?"
(more after the fold)
Thursday, May 1, 2008
GINNY BATES: MOUNTAINS GO TO M*HAMMED
All right, fans, here's another segment of my novel-in-progress, Ginny Bates. This occurs after my last post two days ago. If you are already a familiar reader, begin below. If you need background, check the links in the sidebar on the right, fifth item down, to get caught up. P.S. If you've read Ginny Bates since the beginning, there's a fun little riddle hidden in this section.
August to October 2010
A couple of nights later at dinner with Edwina and Allie, Myra said "We just received the final payout from my lottery winnings. Which means we need to discuss your trust fund, Allie. We can keep putting the same amount in, or up it, if you need -- "
"No way Jose. I mean, I'm blessed for what you did, way back when. Set me up for life. But I've been earning good for a while now, I got that insurance settlement from Mama's death, and if they really do buy the animation rights to Ashante Alabama, it'll be a buttload more. I've got a pension paid for, so does Edwina, and even with buying the apartment building where we live and renovating the ground floor so we can be old ladies there, I still got tons in the bank. I could be giving you money." The pride on her face made Myra's eyes well.
"I wonder how many of us could do what you and I did, with a single hand up" said Myra softly. They looked at each other for a minute.
IT'S ALL IN THE REWRITE
FIRST DRAFTS OF THE PARABLES OF JESUS.
by A.J. Packman, found at McSweeney's (more at their website)
At that time a man said unto Jesus, "Jesus! I do not understand the nature of the kingdom of heaven."
Jesus said, "The Father's kingdom is like a shepherd who had a hundred sheep. One of them went astray. He left the 99 and looked for the one until he found it. When it was found, he said to the sheep, 'That you went astray is a clear sign that you misunderstand my instructions. You are nothing to me.' And then the shepherd turned the lost sheep into a pillar of salt, because the shepherd is God in this parable, and that's the sort of thing He does when people fail to understand His Word."
"Wait, what?" said the man,
And the man became a pillar of salt.
A MOVEMENT OF POETS, REPRISE
Jan Clausen called lesbian-feminism of my era "a movement of poets", and she was assuredly right. Here's a partial list of who I and my friends were reading, talking about, quoting, going to see perform, and being shaped by:
Paula Gunn Allen
Dorothy Allison
Alta
Ellen Marie Bissert
Karen Brodine
Olga Broumas
Rita Mae Brown
Chrystos
Cheryl Clarke
Jan Clausen
Martha Courtot
Judy Grahn
Susan Griffin
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
Irena Klepfisz
Audre Lorde
Barbara Noda
Pat Parker
Marge Piercy
Adrienne Rich
Canyon Sam
Martha Shelley
Kitty Tsui
Alice Walker
Chocolate Waters
Fran Winant
Nellie Wong
Merle Woo
Of this list of twenty-eight women poets, I've been lucky enough to hear fourteen read their work, as often as I could. Most are lesbian; few were academics in a traditional sense, eleven are women of color, all were breaking barriers and creating new voice. When our movement is accused of being white and middle class, they are ignoring the poets and the street activists, the heart of who we were.
I have printed here some of the hard-to-find work of several of these sisters already. I intend to keep doing so. I have shelves and shelves of poetry in my cave here. Tonight I'm sharing one poem each from five of them (after the fold), lines that cover the breadth of America and link us to people of the world. When you go to used bookstores, carry a list of these names and buy their volumes if you can find them.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
HOW TO REALLY STOP BIG OIL RUNNING OUR GOVERNMENT
In light of the offensive "magic wand" speech today by Dubya (stands for Wastrel), here's an online tool for you to track precisely how Big Oil buys our politicians. Oil Change International has a stated purpose of separating oil and state, and they/we are making progress. They note that "in the 2006 election:
• ALL of the incumbents who took no oil money won. Each and every one of the Congressional incumbents of either party that refrained from accepting campaign contributions from Big Oil in 2006 was successfully re-elected to office.
• Big Oil’s biggest friends lost. Four of the top five Congressional recipients of campaign contributions from Big Oil during the 2006 election cycle lost to cleaner candidates in close Senate races.
• The 110th Congress is the least beholden to the oil industry in a generation. Roughly one quarter of Congress is completely free of oil industry campaign donations, and the majority takes less than $5,000 in each election cycle."
In addition to education and calls for action, they have a marvelous tool for tracking oil money contributions, Follow the Oil Money. You can search by zip code, U.S. Congress, and Presidential Race, and you can see the results in a Relationship View (similar to a cloud format), Politician View, or Company View.
My search for the U.S. Presidential Race today, rendered in Politician View, turned up the following:
GIULIANI, RUDOLPH W. $659,158
ROMNEY, MITT $442,063
MCCAIN, JOHN S $291,685
CLINTON, HILLARY RODHAM $289,950
RICHARDSON, BILL $206,125
OBAMA, BARACK $163,840
THOMPSON, FRED DALTON $161,654
PAUL, RON $92,742
HUCKABEE, MIKE $76,739
BROWNBACK, SAMUEL DALE $43,665
EDWARDS, JOHN $36,350
DODD, CHRISTOPHER J $33,350
THOMPSON, TOMMY G $18,400
BIDEN, JOSEPH R JR $6,600
VILSACK, THOMAS J $2,300
Please note: The genuinely progressive Democrats received far less oil money than the current front-runners.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
TAKIN' BACK THE STREETS WITH ART AND FREE SPEECH
(Street art from University City, Missouri -- click on image to enlarge)
RETURN OF THE FREEWAY BLOGGER
LOLCATS WEEKLY ROUND-UP 29 APRIL 2008
Here's the weekly best of what I've gleaned from I Can Has Cheezburger efforts. There are some really creative folks out there. As usual, those from little gator lead the pack.
GINNY BATES: FLEDGING
(Coastal Burger with chickpea fries and coriander aioli, Coastal Kitchen, Capitol Hill, Seattle)
All right, fans, here's another segment of my novel-in-progress, Ginny Bates. This occurs after my last post two days ago. If you are already a familiar reader, begin below. If you need background, check the links in the sidebar on the right, fifth item down, to get caught up.
July and August 2010
Gillam stuck around in the Netherlands for a few days after Margie and Frances left. He and Myra took a train to Delft and toured the factory. Myra let Gillam pick out dishes as gifts for everyone they knew, plus a set for their own home, to be shipped back. They made a second trip to the FOAM photography museum in Amsterdam, and imitated Margie and Frances' trek by bike to a tulip farm, where again boxes of bulbs were addressed for home.
They kept the bikes and made their way through the redeveloped Docklands so Gillam could photograph all the new architecture. Myra wrote three poems that day, and they talked of creating a book with his photos, her poetry, perhaps a limited edition for friends.
The night Ginny finished her first canvas, Myra wanted to stay in and order room service. Gillam opted to go out, a little evasive in his answers about what he might do. After he left, Myra realized he probably wanted to have a look at the Red Light District. It didn't bother her at all. She was closer to him than she had felt since he was a toddler. She kept the connecting door to his room open until he got back, which was only an hour and a half later: Long enough to grab a bite from a foodstall and stroll down a block or two, but nothing else. Which is what she expected of him.
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