Day 22 * ALICE NOTLEY * KRYSTAL LANGUELL *

LANGUELL reads part 2 of  As Good as Rocks. Notley is the author of over twenty five books of poetry, including 165 Meeting House Lane (1971), Phoebe Light (1973), Incidentals in the Day World (1973), For Frank O’Hara’s Birthday (1976), Alice Ordered Me to Be Made: Poems 1975 (1976),Dr. Williams’ Heiresses (1980), How Spring Comes (1981), which received the San Francisco Poetry Award, Waltzing Matilda (1981), Margaret & Dusty (1985), From a Work in Progress (1988), Homer’s Art (1990), To Say You (1993), Selected Poems of Alice Notley (1993), The Descent of Alette (1996), among many others. Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and her collectionDisobedience (2001) was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Notley’s recent work includes From the Beginning (2004), Alma, or the Dead Women (2006),  Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, In the Pines (2007), Culture of One (2011), and Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011).

KRYSTAL LANGUELL reads her own poem, Tonight This Is Our Last Song. Languell is founder of the feminist literary magazine Bone Bouquet, she serves as a collaborative board member for Belladonna* Series as well as editor-in-chief at Noemi Press. She teaches composition at York College in Queens and the Borough of Manhattan Community College. She lives in Brooklyn, where she also co-curates the HOT TEXTS Reading Series.

"Get Our War Paint on and Go to Work: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" by Krystal Languell

This semester, the department-wide freshman composition final exam at one of the schools I teach for is about gender performance and expectations in America. We’re all required to teach the same two essays, which, when juxtaposed against one another, seem to do little more than argue whether it’s harder to be a man or a woman: another false dilemma from higher education. In my class, I’ve supplemented the essays with a paragraph out of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, a discussion of the Bechdeltest and an episode of Father Knows Best, assigning new vocabulary words: “performativity,” “representation,” and “patriarchy.”