by Anne Boyer

I could say I am a feminist poet

I could say I am a feminist poet because I write for one reason: the landlords insisted we had heat when the tenants knew we were freezing. It was sixteen degrees, and we tried everything to get warm like burning the signs the landlords had written for us: “the heat is on.”

I am only writing this now for one reason – the power grab of infantilism. Kathy Acker wrote as a character Erica Jong and she said “I would rather be a baby than have sex.”

I remember the clip art of roses from the “cycle of abuse” but the rest of us could die trying. Peril is our essentialism. You could sit in the office and the things they would do to you if they noticed you. There were so many things done in offices. Men and a few affluent women were there and didn’t mind anything: the thing about class is that it is natural. In the offices if they are not the bosses even the old women are girls.

I wanted to know everything about men. I wanted someone to prove to me that when I was writing I was not a man. I made some experiments: to live in thrall to them, to live in fear of them, to live best friends with them, to read their books, to love them, to cash the checks to which they signed their names.

From these I learned human aspects: to be a big mouth like an appetite. Somehow a hunger which seemed to have everything to do with holes was also misunderstood for the kind of active reaching toward what it wants like an antenna or phallus. There was nothing about being a woman that could be proved though starting lists.

My generation was matter of fact that all would be appearance. There was a flaunting that had everything to do with comfort, the expectation of comfort, the way of asserting her right, privilege, and consumer choice to appear more free than everyone else. Could gender also be shopping? On the radio she said, “I have my SUV and I have my Prius and this is what freedom means to me.” The rest of us could die if we tried that.

If all sex was sex work and all work was sex work what was this? Courtney Love had the bug-eyed stare of an encephalitic infant. Those days I didn’t care about her. I was Rimbaud. There was no denying my figure.

My figure was exactly the opposite of intelligence. It was a dumb figure, a series of rotating circles, like some robot built to avoid being mistaken for a boy. No one seemed to understand how it was I had come to look so stupid.

I thought I would like to be a woman because I really do enjoy the clothes, but there were other women who had long lists of everything they would not say aloud. They would check you off against these. This was uncomfortable like having your own mother hate you.

I felt a romantic insistence that I would fuck shit up. I would be ordinary as possible and a mother. I would live among the types of men who gathered around their cars each night and stopped conversation in solemnity and awe for a woman as she walked by them. I would be ugly in a way that the women didn’t understand and the men sometimes enjoyed. I would be biological.

As I said before I had read many of the books by men and moreso spent most of my time with men. Also when I wrote I felt like them, full of tradition and invention and speaking up about things. There was only something else that happened when I stopped writing and left the house in which the world often reminded me I was a woman.

I would like to have educated myself out of this but do not have much of an education.

I supposed I was not a woman or a man precisely. One time I was mistaken for a table-cloth and the other time I was mistaken for a force of nature. But I was a woman because my numbers trouble was in my bank account, also because I had so many of the ordinary problems of women, those things about which we were encouraged not to speak. Men and women were alike in that to add the insensible was to attempt negative calculation: who could chart the invisible and on just what kind of graph?

It is perhaps another symptom of my preternatural coherence that I soon knew the places at which the public provides services and these services are always for whole women or wounded men and thus when people say or try to pretend there are no women and are no men the rest of us could die trying –

hunger, hungry children, poverty, abortion, prostitution, all that ordinary violence of love, illness, labor, birth, rape. There are many things more ordinary among ordinary women. Peril was our essentialism. I suppose I was not, despite having read some books, a man.

I am so sorry this is not even really an essay, certainly not an essay that says “and then I spread upon my furrowed brow the balm of science” or “a twentieth century philosophy of liberation remedied nature and saved my life” or “ “now I am beautiful and have health insurance and many friends. “ A man I know insists on a positive criticism, so how do I do that? I asked him “Is it useful to abide by the rule of positive criticism when the world is full of so many things that are unjust and in their injustice, wrong?”

At the same time that I feel totally failed by liberalism I am dreaming up a moral philosophy of radical care. I am trying to make an ethics and metaphysics and poetics of the most passionate attachments like that of a mother for her child. I am stuck on natality and natality is stuck on me. I want an avant-garde of light forearm touching. I want a high art of forehead stroking. I would ritualize biology and always include with it a decanting of delicate and heavy perfumes. I would include all the animals and make my own currency of handholding.

It is not enough that you understand me. I would rather be believed. Imagine a kind of love that has no Greek word for it and then imagine that we could make a system in which all connections are made of this. Imagine a human system like culture that could make the public private and the private okay. I do not know what to do with the powerful except try to offer them some things to look at that they were trained not to see. Bernadette Mayer wrote “I hate power, except the power I have to show you something.” On this and many other things I require your attention, also your advice.

Brandifesto by Brandi Homan

Brandi Homan is the author of Hard Reds (Shearsman, 2008) and Bobcat Country (Shearsman, forthcoming 2010). Her chapbook, Two Kinds of Arson, is available from dancing girl press. She is editor-in-chief of Switchback Books.







I sat down to write about how my identification as a feminist does not affect my own personal poetics, except for a project explicitly designed to give a platform to narratives from specific women. As soon as I put pen to paper, however, I realized that this assertion was unarguably false. This could be because, up until now, exactly as I’m writing this sentence, I’ve only identified as a feminist publicly, have never internalized it or embraced it as part of my true identity—the part of yourself that you keep just for yourself, the part others can’t touch. Writing this essay has changed that.

A bit of background—I came to feminism relatively late compared with a lot of my peers. Although within my circles of fairly conservative early adulthood friends I was labeled a “Feminazi,” I was (and still am, actually) far from thoroughly educated on feminist issues, theory, and frankly, terminology from both the second and third waves. I never read Bitch or Bust or knew any riot grrls or had even heard of Bikini Kill or Kathleen Hanna until around three years ago. I didn’t know what a zine was or understand the fuss around Lilith Fair. In many ways, I was raised in a 1950s-style environment except my mother also worked in addition to raising the kids and running the household. Where I come from, and, I imagine, in similar places, the “problem that has no name” (American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities—and yes, I did have to look that up on Google) is, by and large, still a real issue.

The actual nuts and bolts issues of what I associate with second-wave feminism—gender equality in the workplace (and for my purposes here, also in the arts) and economic parity—are directly tied to what I see/have seen with my own eyes, what I have lived/am living. It is these life experiences that have directed me toward feminism—hell, toward poetry—and, by default, to feminism in my poetry. It feels like some feminists are so ready to push past second-wave (and third-wave?) feminism into other ideals that the messages associated with the second wave are being overlooked or taken for granted by women and men alike as already established or “solved.” It feels like the rhetoric surrounding these issues has changed but the problems haven’t, although yes, significant progress has been made.

This disparity between rhetoric and reality seems almost characteristic of Generation X and those that follow—mainly, I was (we were?) raised to think that, as a woman, I could “do anything,” which is obviously much more progressive than my mother’s generation. And yet, at 32, I still struggle with thinking that there is something wrong with me because I am not married and have no children. The responses I get from mainstream society feel like, yes, I can “do anything,” as long as that anything still includes a husband and family.

Another example would be the workplace/arts communities. I still work in a Corporate America largely run by white males. I still exist in a city where five of six full-length poetry presses are run by white males. I still see the majority of my female poet friends reluctant to submit their work or promote themselves. And I definitely exist among male peers who see no difference in my decision to exercise my voice or publish other female voices versus their decisions to use/support theirs. We’re equal now, don’t you know?

I want to use the small ways of my life to address these outstanding issues. I can’t write like a Rachel DuPlessis, an Erica Kaufman, or a Lara Glenum, but I can speak and write like my mother, my sister, my female friends and relatives who are still trying to fit into a fairly homogenous, oppressed space. I have seen and heard things, and this hearing and seeing comprises the space from which I now write. From this space, I am writing myself into an identity different than the one prescribed me, while gleefully respecting the varying notions of gender associated with the third wave (in addition to other third-wave ideals) and gratefully acknowledging the work of the second-wavers who have made it much, much easier for me to do so.

New: Poetics Forums at Delirious Hem

Delirious Hem's monthly poetics forums are designed to give women poets a platform from which to address topics we all grapple with, obsess over, cram down the craws of our cohabitant lovelies. DH's poetics forums invite creato-critico-bio-cultural-multi-dimensional responses. Political personal public private. Theory-rich, yammer-strung, high-octane, molecular-fringe. DH's poetics forums invite contributors to drop in briefly or never shut up. We hope you'll do the same (see fig. 1, the comments box).

On May 4th, we'll launch our first forum:




Featuring:
Monday May 4: Mary Biddinger, Anne Boyer, & Brandi Homan
Tuesday May 5: Megan Kaminski, Becca Klaver, & Majena Mafe
Wednesday May 6: Gina Myers, Martha Silano, & Leah Souffrant
Thursday May 7: K. Lorraine Graham, Mytili Jagannathan,   Elizabeth Treadwell, & Sarah Vap
Friday May 8: Teresa Carmody & co.

There are likely as many strains and modes of feminist poetics as there are of feminism, but in reviews, discussions, and even our own manifestos, we often fall into shorthand that fails to explore this valuable friction, our own variations. I've lately longed for unpacking, and so issued this open-ended call:

This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like: what branch of feminism, model of feminist poetics, feminist icon, or etc. informs your poetry? Or, from which of these does your poetry diverge? Are there particular feminist tactics you employ? Do you consider yourself a feminist in many ways, but don't particularly involve it in the poetry? Feel free to take liberties with the questions! Short, long, essay, manifesto, whatever appeals to you!

Curated by Danielle Pafunda

Delirious Advent 2008

amy king





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MEN BY THE LIPS OF WOMEN


I'm in love with a man who doesn't love me
with the pages of the book he sees from.
He makes love through his syllabic ink, a salted thunder,
leaves me to my own delirium tremors.
I gouge out his eyes, break the yolk across his shoulders,
disembowel the nectar from his liver.
His toxins become a cherry blossom wine.
He sounds in the brain's eagled hollows
of a soft guitar from a Spanish café
among the mountain peaks in nightshade.
He cannot hide, no matter how many goats he scares
or biscuits he throws at the hunger.
The mother of everyone calls him.
His fright is an orb of Hold me, I'm yours,
crisp and curled with age's yellow
and the godless sunburn you love across your nose.
I am that love you light yourself with
and my gender is powerless in this.
We are metered only by our own machines,
while the book is a clock that forgets her mechanics.
Her hands can count but would rather wipe warm dew,
the pall from your lips and kiss the lids
of your eyes from sleep. Here am I, is he,
with yoke and shadow removed, she is, her in me,
apart from you, man reading men by the lips of women.

................this poem first appeared in Turntable + Blue Light

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Amy King is the author of I'm the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, both from Blazevox Books. For information on the reading series Amy co-curates, please visit The Stain of Poetry: A Reading Series blog, and visit her own website for more.

Recent work
Amy's Alias

ta noonan

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Difference Engine: It is early; I am small. Everything is built to tolerance. The priest detours water to my scalp & face. His accent shortens my vowel. He is naming—and renaming—me. Mother corrects him, but I have to do it again. ( I will wait nineteen years for the opportunity. ) Brass gears crank and waver. Engine reads: Gödel, Lovelace, Derrida. Engine prints: psychopomp, mockingbird, chuck-wills-widow. This is assignment, a baptism in variables that spellcheck catches. Input/output housed in separate units. I change my name not to fool God, but to fool myself. It is a trigger. It is past my time. Speak slowly, now. Speak slowly.

first published in, "La Grande Dame est morte! Vive la Grande Dame!"

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T.A. Noonan's The Bone Folders won the 2007 Heartland Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Cracked Slab Books. She edits Flaming Giblet Press and the online journal grain short/grain long. In May 2009, she will receive her PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers

Linda Russo

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Sensing

& sensing this had something to do with levity,
for sure, for we agreed we believed we were kinda shared territory.
However, if you, in these negotiations, specifically, if you knew
it wasn’t sky sky sky in fact
nor missives, nor misgivings, nor. Daunting brilliant entirely accepting smiles
To be near, anyhow, to a lovely yesterday, & another day besides.
Many its lovely falls across the sky, a history, discontinued, of
pouring our hearts out. A landmark & a blemish.
The roof over our heads, laughter, let me lead you.
Try shouting or whatnot. With levity
& surprisingly not sunk. Grown, finally. We were
on course & for generations to come & not men, only
& not women, either. Then I lay down and tried.
Did you ever, ironically? Then I lay down and tried.




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Linda Russo recently relocated in the Inland Northwest, and teaches creative writing at Washington State University. "Sensing" is the first poem of her recently-completed manuscript Simplicity Blend. Other poems appear or are forthcoming in Damn The Caesars, Fence and Bird Dog. She is the author MIRTH (Chax Press) and o going out (Potes
& Poets).