Oh, what a tiny compressed history of love and struggle.

February 11, 2013 8:22 AM

Sister Arts: On Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Others Starting off examining the friendship between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, Lisa L. Moore examines how poetry acted as the lingua franca of second-wave feminism.

from the article:

"The idea (inspired by the Speak Bitterness groups that produced revolutionary critiques of Chinese imperialism) was that you shared personal experience in order to understand how problems you had thought were private and personal — especially problems with sex, marriage, body image, work, parenting, domesticity — were not unique but rather widely shared, the result of systems of inequality rather than your failures as a woman. "

posted by eustacescrubb (2 comments total)

Hacker is one of my favourite poets, but like Moore, I thot of her as beside and above--maybe because of her time in paris, maybe because of her formalism, the "movement poets", i hadn't noticed the footnote, but to have it pointed out, was a gift.

thanks!
posted by PinkMoose at 9:13 AM on February 11, 2013

Thank you for the post. I've just read Rich's "Of Woman Born," and her insights were amazing.

This: "In the United States, where we hold artists cheap, this association has been turned inside out so that the widespread assumption is that poets belong only on the margins of society. No poet-presidents or poet-ambassadors for us, and if you don’t like it move to Russia — or Peru or Mexico or Poland." is so obvious, yet it had never dawned on me before in these terms. Going to forward this to all my lefty feminist poet friends.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 12:05 PM on February 11, 2013 [1 favorite]