Kirsten Kaschock

Kirsten Kaschock is the author of Unfathoms (Slope Editions) and a beautiful name/for a girl (upcoming from Ahsahta Press). She holds a Ph.D. from University of Georgia in English and is currently a doctoral fellow in dance at Temple University. She lives and writes inPhiladelphia.

1

I don’t like them. Ever confessing boredom, vampires have no inner resources. They deign to still be interested in sex only marginally—or else, in extremis. In my memory, only in The Hunger did I watch vampires who had become musicians. Who spent some of their time on pursuits that put their stolen blood to use. Time is borrowed from death for most of us—for vampires it is stolen from the living, yet they are not grateful. Vampires, despite their European or Egyptian pedigrees, are quintessentially American. Ever youthful, ever beautiful, ever vicious—ever living in the privilege. Where is the vampire scholar? The vampiric philanthropist or scientist? Vampires are the pale idea that we do not learn, that we do not grow, that to live forever is only to go around again and again and again. I am a feminist because I am the anti-vampire.

2

My first conscious act as a feminist was a refusal: I would not take my husband’s name, would not be possessed. This was the third grade, and the husband and children were givens, but somehow the name was ridiculous. If, as I knew, men and women were exactly equal, if different—then to change my call-sign for a boy was simply an outdated idea, and wrong. This was also how my ex-Catholic parents taught me to think about religion. It helped that I didn’t much like other people’s families, that I didn’t want to leave mine to cleave to anyone else’s. Truly, my logic on this issue was deeply conservative: relinquishing my surname offended my very warped concept of fairness—also, I didn’t feel like embracing change. I could be both married and Kaschock. Why not?

I cut my hair pixie-short soon after this decision. This, I did with my father one summer afternoon and it earned me a year and a half of derision from an insane ballet teacher—until it grew back to bun-length. I didn’t quit ballet, but I was from this point on deeply ambivalent about it. I love it now, still take classes, also ambivalently. I snapped my Achilles two years ago in a dance class while trying to fly. At thirty-seven, the recovery has been slower than I would like, but ballet classes help. Two of my three sons are enrolled in dance, doing their first pliés and tendus—in the same traditional black tights, white shoes and t-shirts my brothers wore from ages five to twenty-five in their classes. If my boys stay enrolled, their best friends may very well be young women. A gift I would like to give them. Ballet, that most feminine and self-image-damaging of endeavors, is both much more than that and not quite that at all, engaged in deeply.

3

Vampires are unused potential. They are the manifestation of the extra-hour-in-the-day that is lacking for the weary. Why are none of them artists? Community activists? I know that small time is not an obstacle to accomplishment. This is a myth that harms those who must, in their non-extended lives, perform many roles. Or simply want to. The lack of time does not prevent art, but believing that it does invites artistic paralysis. The belief that there is a single recipe for beauty, for art-making, for governance, for social organization, for what a family is, for what it means to read a book or be a woman—this is the blood-drainer. Total immersion and time given to one area of interest: this is the anorexic myth of greatness. I refuse it based on my knowledge of vampires. If time devoted to singular passion were the measure—to be a person of note would be to be a long-lived if not deathless hermit with a cache of stingy materials. In actuality, this is only one path.

4

I didn’t have a theory of feminism when I was a teenager. And I don’t. I love theory—I read it for fun and profit. Well, I read it. I claimed my feminisms despite ignorance: I was a feminist in college when Rush Limbaugh convinced my father to refer to me as a femi-nazi (rough period for Dad… now he says he was listening to Rush “ironically”). But Yale was deeply conservative and my education there (I was not really a self-director) consisted of reading great books by great men (I say now, ironical as my father), the occasional Elizabeth Bishop poem, and then, senior year—Virginia Woolf—who wasn’t (it was clear—wasn’t it?) as smart as Joyce. I liked Woolf better and felt less smart. I liked how her arguments looped around each other. I liked how they tripped me up with digressions and tangents that were actually central, if you took the time to follow her circuitry. She didn’t edit her electric excess, she hooked it back in. And so, for me, there was more power to her.

5

Vampires produce each other on purpose—acts of animal magnetism, ownership, and punishment. Since they view their life as a privileged sort of hell, those whom they elect to join them are both being elevated and tortured. They choose their own chosen. They are both gods and servants, the made and makers. In a strange way, there is no mystery since there is no recombination—only a sort-of blood purchase. There is little accident to increase in the vampire community, and there is much homogeneity. Humanity is the clay they fashion themselves and each other from, but it is the physical form and attraction to it in vampire literature that serves as the primary evaluative criteria. To recreate oneself so calculatedly, with swap of blood but no crossing of minds—no allowance for the bloom of the wholly new from out of the detritus—is to deny meaningful growth. In extending themselves and their image, vampires do not go deep, do not surrender themselves to the fullness of their creations, they make instead copies.

6

I kept going to school. I moved to New York after my undergraduate BA in English and temped while I took dance classes. But I wanted to choreograph—not to audition where bodies were targets of evaluation as often as the dancing—so I ended up in Iowa City, working on an MFA in choreography. That’s where I met Danny, budding future geneticist and his huge Midwestern Italian-American family. I was at the time purposefully bald. We moved quickly back East. In pursuit of my sanity and his doctorate. I got accidently pregnant and, thinking dance (so body-bound) was over, started writing poetry again—the terror of failing the great-books by great-men test having worn off a bit. I had Simon, started an MFA in poetry, wrote a book, had a second child, Bishop. We applied to Danny’s post-doc and my doctorate in English together. Emory took him, UGA took me. Another superb accident: we named him Koen. After the deep south, we moved to Philadelphia for a job—Danny’s. I did the adjunct thing around town before beginning a doctorate in dance on a fellowship that pays far better than adjuncting. Far better.

I view all my institutions as having offered patronage to a dilettante. I can’t refuse that label. I can’t refuse any label thrust at me so violently. I look at the facts as given above and know some would say (some have said) I have chosen to capitulate, to hand my head over as I procreated. But I kept my head, and chose to spend the years with my young children feeding it. During these years, I have written four manuscripts (3 poetic, 1 fiction), and I have read those female writers and studied the work of those female choreographers I was not exposed to earlier in my education. I choreographed and began dancing again. But I have also begun to understand what my early feminisms did for me. They made me able to keep going, to refuse the necessity of choosing any one thing over another, to keep gathering labels and identities as they came without discarding any. I am scholar, poet, choreographer, mother, dancer, daughter, lover, friend. I did not give up my humanity, once bitten, twice bitten, thrice.

My feminisms allowed me to go into my several inseparable interests deeply over time, rather than pick one for total immersion. I can’t devote twelve hours a day to writing, or to dance, or to my children, or to eating or sex, or to hunting for blood. But I never could. Even if only one of those interested me, twelve hours is too long—as would be eternity—I admit it. My feminisms have slowly allowed me to become okay with my sprawling finitude.

7

I want to raise feminists. My boys are, I hope, on their way. They are themselves, and I am encouraging them to accrue identities rather than eschew any. They are also learning who I am—which is key to my project for them since I have failed (more accurately, genetically, their father’s sperm has failed) to produce for them a sister to love and to witness in the fullness of her multiplicities. I would like to be a cognitive neuroscientist, a cellist, a linguist, an architect. I would like to adopt more children, or to foster them—this I may still do. The interesting thing about the label mother is that, like writer, it encompasses several others: cook, confidante, nurse, coach, lullabyist, protector, mentor, and disciplinarian among them. I didn’t know when I first became pregnant that the one role I was wary of accepting because I thought it might limit my feminisms would actually be the one role that would most expand them. That has been a surprise. I look like a feminist because I now look for opportunities to be surprised and to surprise myself and others. To engage in the expected so deeply, so broadly, that it is both much more and not quite at all what I once thought it to be.

I seek to embrace other feminisms as I encounter them, to be moved and changed by how other choices and other refusals and other engagements have created humans invested in the expansion of human possibility rather than in its narrowing, or in the dismissal of such engagement as cliché. I am not a vampire—life does not bore me. I am a feminist because I know I will die, and I want to get somewhere, and I want the world to get somewhere else, before I do.

Michele Battiste

Michele Battiste is the author of Ink for an Odd Cartography (Black Lawrence Press) and three chapbooks, the most recent of which is Slow the Appetite Down (Spire Press). She recently made the move from Astoria, NY to Boulder, CO, where she studies, teaches and misses the old neighborhood, especially Rose & Joe's Italian Bakery and La Guli Pastry Shop, not to mention the 27 Greek restaurants. Her current project is a collection of linked, narrative poems set in post-WWII Budapest, and she thinks everyone should eat more vegetables.

This is What a Feminist Poet Looks Like.

My body is trouble. Big trouble. A troublemaker. My body is a sand trap, a pitfall, quicksand. These were the messages I heard growing up, messages I think many of us – men and women – hear growing up. These bodies of ours, they have urges, urges that can get us into trouble, can get us pregnant or sick, so sick we can die. AIDS was a big part of the 80s. As a teenager, I feared it more than pregnancy. But the trouble started before AIDS. The trouble started with my body, my child’s body, which needed to be cautioned, which needed to be trained to show restraint. Bodies are provocative, and I was a girl, and girls’ bodies are particularly provocative to boys. I didn’t buy it. I thought, well, can’t boys show restraint in their response to girls' bodies? No. That is not their role. It is a girl’s responsibility to restrain her body. It is a girl’s fault when her lack of restraint provokes a boy. These were the messages I heard growing up. I still hear them.

Inversion isn’t subversive. It mollifies. It enables an oppressed person to believe she isn’t oppressed. It enables her to believe that her subordinated position is actually a position of power. I grew older. I grew provocative. I thought, well, here is the power, in my ability to sexually provoke boys. I have sexual power and I’m going to use it. I think maybe this is the same inversion that can lay claim to powerful strippers, powerful prostitutes. Women in charge of their sexuality. But I’m uncomfortable with this argument. It keeps a woman’s body in the subordinate position – that of a source of pleasure for others, particularly male others.

I went to graduate school. That is when I learned about feminism. Amidst what was for me the mass confusion of Derrida and Lacan and Foucault and Freud, of différance and jouissance and power-knowledge and the mother’s missing penis, I found Cixous. Kristeva. Irigaray. I learned that a woman’s body is powerful because it is generative, productive, multiple, sensual, and, yes, sexual. It’s not that I’m an intellectual, a theory hound. It’s just that the model of the sexually provocative female body was so ingrained in my consciousness that I needed to be pulled into an alternative universe to understand that alternatives existed in my universe. In my body. Same thing.

Women’s bodies are a source for women. My body is the source of my power. Not a hierarchical power that implies power over something or someone, but rather a generative power. A power to create, to endure, to feel pleasure, to express, to remember, to know music, to know language. My body is the source of my writing, and what I write is of the body. Body as metaphor, body as repository of vast stores of knowledge, body as history, body as intuitive knowing, body loaded with all its connotative baggage.

I believe passionately that my poetry is feminist except when I wonder if it isn’t. All these bodies, all these anatomical references, all these explorations of sexuality, all these sensual images clearly alluding to physicality. Am I just using the body? Practicing an alternative form of objectification? Hiding the sexually provocative female body behind a scrim of liberal hoo-ha? And when I perform? When I use my body to give the words shape and form? When I interact with the listeners and touch them? Am I just being provocative? Would I be better off practicing restraint?

No. My body, all bodies, are prone to decay and degeneration. Let these be our restraints. They are effective enough. In the meantime, my body – my excessive, kinetic, chaotic body – will continue to be my source, and I will give it the lead.

Like a Sine Curve
(first published in Willow Springs)

So you know how the skin of whales
not all whales but some whales
maybe all whales
the skin of whales, the exoderm, if
that’s a word, but you see my emphasis
contains an intricate pattern of tiny muscles
tiny like an eyelid muscle
the muscle that may cause a tic
and tic is the small movement I want you
to envision
an intricate pattern of tiny muscles that move independently
so maybe think of grass in wind
each blade bending one nanosecond
before the other
each whale skin muscle contracting before the other as the whale propels itself through water
so you may be thinking ripple
but not as a fan unfolds, more
like a sine curve, which you would think of,
which naval researchers would think
of when they think about improving
the aerodynamic – or would it be aquadynamic
– structure of their submarines, working
the water like a whale works the water
without thinking, its skin a series of muscular shudders driving water along its flank, quickening

So you know how whale skin can do that?
I do that
I do that sometimes but not swimming
I know what you’re thinking: the misappropriation of sine curves, but

focus
I am not whale skin
I am the water that moves with the muscle
You are the whale

Juliet Cook

Juliet Cook’s poetry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Action Yes, Columbia Poetry Review, Diagram, Diode, Everyday Genius, Robot Melon and many other online and print sources. She is the editor/publisher of Blood Pudding Press. She is author of numerous poetry chapbooks, most recently including PINK LEOTARD & SHOCK COLLAR (Spooky Girlfriend Press), Tongue Like a Stinger (Wheelhouse), and FONDANT PIG ANGST (Slash Pine Press). Her first full-length poetry collection, Horrific Confection was published by BlazeVOX in 2008. For more information, please feel free to visit her website at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

Juliet’s latest book, FONDANT PIG ANGST, was chosen for publication from Slash Pine Press’s first open reading period, along with only one other manuscript. This collection includes cockroach infested doll heads, malfunctioning ballerinas, shemales living inside whales, meat hooks, expired cellulite cream, and plenty of perverse pigging out and can be acquired from Slash Pine Press or from Blood Pudding Press.

Juliet’s next book will be an up-cycled, convoluted and overly personal passageway through intersections of love, death, hot water, and mutant sea creatures, to be published as part of the Dusie Kollektiv 4 and tentatively entitled Soft Foam.

DESIGNER VAGINA DENTATA by Juliet Cook

disclaimer:

I have a predilection for taking content out of context and inserting it into MY context.

I am very interested in fluidity when it comes to gender and identity, but my poetry may be too solipsistic and maybe even too tied to its own breed of dysfunction to truly transcend boundaries. It creates its own obsessive boundaries, in a way. Still, I find it somewhat freeing to release those boundaries out of my head and place them elsewhere—and hopefully to do so in a way that provokes.

I have feminist sensibilities, but I do not necessarily think of myself as part of a feminist movement and nor do I feel especially aligned with academic feminism.

conflict:

I like poems rife with uneasiness, mixed feelings, mood swings, and conflict. Those people (including some feminists) who do not allow space for mixed feelings and conflict are probably just talking academic rhetoric. Rhetoric-based consciousness raising reminds me of team building which reminds me of corporate culture with its rote hegemony and rhythms of conformity. Rhythms of conformity are stultifying whether in the office or in the university. I object to passionless rhetoric, to a false sense of propriety (i.e. political correctness for the sake of political correctness), and to a non-inclusive insularity, BUT just because I object to something, that doesn’t mean I’ve developed a successful solution or satisfying alternative.

I like reading feminist texts. However, reading texts does not bestow the same kind of expertise as lived experience. I have mixed feelings about our cultural tendency to think we can swoop in and fix the ills for women in different cultures. I’m not suggesting we should ignore other cultures or not try to empathize with others, but there’s a difference between having a sense of empathy and enacting a misguided sense of authority, as if we are experts on some reality just because we’ve read about it.

In my early 20s, I took an Ethnicity & Creative Writing class, in which I was one of only a few women and the only white person. I felt awkwardly self-conscious, but just acted as if I fit in. At some point, I turned in a piece of creative writing that was like some sort of persona poem written from the perspective of a third world woman; I’m not sure what I was thinking; maybe since the focus of the class was ethnicity, I felt like I couldn’t just write from my own (angsty white middle class) voice. The instructor wrote on my piece, ‘Eat, drink, and be Mary with or without the lamb’ and I felt embarrassed and realized I shouldn’t try to write from anybody’s head other than my own, if I was aiming for authenticity. I like reading about the experiences of others, but as far as my writing, I feel that I should stick to my own idiosyncratic vision, no matter how lacking in accessibility, palatability, or widespread appeal this may be. I risk coming across as frivolous, self-indulgent, narcissistic, and otherwise self-absorbed, but I would rather come across that way than be fake.

My poetic schematics involve conflicted perceptions of femaleness—societal perceptions versus personal perceptions, outer landscapes versus inner landscapes, trying to reconcile the fictive with the real when it comes to self-constructs and larger constructs. I’m not trying to present women as victims in my poetry, but I am more than willing to present them as flawed, warped, and conflicted. Based on my own experience with femininity and feminism, I think I am offering an accurate representation of women’s complexity and of the contradictions they are continually exposed to and expected to channel.

I’m interested in the conflict inherent in my desire to be perceived as consumable, even though I don’t really want to be consumed. I’m interested in how my feminism can co-exist with my low self-esteem and how my creativity can co-exist with my self-destructive impulses. I’d like to think that an ongoing pursuit of creativity, even in the midst of contradictions and certain kinds of negativity, will eventually lead to a circuitous yet significant sort of accretion that will take precedence over self-effacement.

misfits & mutants:

I am anti-assembly line, despite feeling pervasively encouraged to go with the assembly line flow. In relation to my poetic concerns, I sometimes think of the assembly line as a doll injection mold of sorts. I sometimes think of my poems as being resistant little mutants working from within this doll injection mold, but maybe I should be working from outside it.

I often feel in-between, like I don’t really fit in anywhere, like I am some kind of misfit. I feel this way with my poetry, I feel this way with my feminism, I feel this way with life in general. Maybe this is just a self-indulgent breed of existential angst.

I am a woman, not a child, and yet my poetic persona sometimes expresses itself in girlish (or even doll-like) terms. Although this may seem indicative of a strange stiltedness, there is more to it than that. I don’t buy into mainstream media’s narrow parameters regarding what constitutes a desirable woman, yet even as I choose to reject such parameters, I still feel ingrained by them. Sometimes I don’t feel like a real woman. On a more reasonable level, I realize that there is not any one blueprint for womanhood. Yet imprinted somewhere inside my head is a cookie cutter that I am both trying to fit into and trying to creep out of. Much of my poetry is situated in the realm of that conflicted resistance. If I could grow some new appendages like glittery tentacles or a misshapen tail, then I wouldn’t fit into the mold. Sometimes I think of my poems as being appendages on a larger body that is trying to evolve into a powerful new breed of misfit. Then again, if I did grow a tail, I’d probably spend too much time chasing it.

It bothers me that I am concerned with my own desirability as a female physical specimen. Despite being an intelligent and free-thinking individual, I have not been able to transcend that concern. In some of my poems, I am trying to figure out WHY. I am aiming to replace my feelings of commoditization with those of creation. I am interested in developing a body of work that offers a different kind of edibility that is less about commodity and mainstream palatability. I don’t like vanilla snack pack pudding poetry; I like blood pudding poetry. I like poetry that borders the unappetizing, poetry that borders the grotesque, poetry that borders the pornographic and horrific. I am attuned to a sense of revolting, bodily-based horror associated with femaleness and I have a desire to birth this horror or abort it or deconstruct, reconstruct, or vivisect it.

I also like poetry that is funny and disturbing at the same time; that could possibly elicit a paroxysm of nervous laughter.

horrific confections:

Why should art be easy to swallow? That’s not the way life is. Thus, the consumables in my poetry are spiked, tainted, and mixed with unruly baggage, jagged detritus and sharp artifacts. I want to wield provocative juxtapositions related to the intersections of personhood and consumption, especially personhood as it is situated, perceived, and interpreted in the realm of the female body.

I like to bake horrific confections. I like to play with various meanings and implications of consumption, especially as related to my own experience of femaleness. I think about consumption as purchasing power, consumption as devouring, consumption as disease, consumption as death. Delectable consumables, corrupted consumables, women consuming, women choking on what they’re supposed to consume, women being consumed. Women as dessert products, because they are both delighted in and deemed sinful; they are both adored and dismissed as fluff. But if they’re not as pretty as a sweet slice, then they may be demonized. If they’re not easy on the eyes/easy on the mind, then they may be castigated. Our society wants its women to be easy, yet whoreifies them for being easy.

I am also interested in cosmetic surgery; lately, I’m especially interested in designer vaginas.

meat curtains:

I am not easily offended when it comes to words, but I am sometimes bothered by contexts. For example, the word “fat” doesn’t strike me as offensive; it just seems like a factual word—but why do we so often hear it combined with the word “bitch”? The words “pussy” and “cunt” don’t bother me, but why do we so often hear them used as a kind of insult implying weakness?

Carrying this over into the realm of pornography, I am open minded about two consenting adults engaging in any sexual activity they want to, yet I find myself feeling rubbed the wrong way by the preponderance of porn that seems to revolve around degradingwomen. I realize that porn is fantasy, not reality, but I feel bothered by the prevalence of certain kinds of fantasies.

Sometimes when I feel bothered by certain words, scenarios, fantasies or realities, I like to approach those things from different angles or confront myself with those things in different contexts, including contexts that I can insert my own control over i.e. my poems. Recently, I’ve enjoyed plucking words out of a porno context and placing them in a poem context. Stuff like bukkake and bestiality don’t seem so troublesome to me anymore now that I’ve had my way with them by inserting them into MY contexts.

I also feel much better about “meat curtains” due to my own poetic ministrations. That term used to sound gross to me, but now that I’ve incorporated it into poetry, it seems amusing and even legitimately poetic. I used it in one of my designer vaginas, which is a newish series of poems-in-progress that combine pornographic language with more intellectual references with cultural detritus in a sort of pastiche that hopefully comes across like some kind of excessive hybrid of surgical precision and questionable aesthetic appeal.

Some months back, I found myself online scrolling through page after page of vagina photos, pre and post laser vaginal rejuvenation surgery. I began to feel grossed out, not so much by the vaginas as by the surgeons’ captions. “What am I DOING?” I thought to myself at some point—and then I realized that I was conducting poetry research.

I am discomfited by terrains in which women’s bodies on display are harshly evaluated. I think a lot of my mixed feelings about porn are associated with the aspect of harsh judgment of female flesh. I’m not bothered that people enjoy looking at images of nude bodies or sex acts; however, I am bothered by the tendency to cruelly judge these bodies on display as if to cut them down in size or diminish the power of the pussy by degrading it. Sometimes, it seems as if people are so conflicted about their own sexual desire that they feel compelled to try to subjugate whatever is provoking that desire—and I think this leads to a lot of twisted gender dynamics, including the Madonna/whore dichotomy, which is awfully limiting.

It bugs me how some people seem to think that any woman who chooses to put herself on display in a sexually provocative way deserves to be lashed out at, as though if you choose to display yourself, then you deserve to be judged, as though that just comes with the territory. Maybe it does come with the territory (after all, anyone who puts themselves out there, whether it’s their body or their poetry, is opening themselves up to the risk of receiving a negative critique), but it still seems really problematic to me that lusting and lashing out too often go hand in hand. In lieu of what I’m saying here, it seems apt and interesting to me to insert pornographic language and activities into a different context, like a poem and put that out there, as if inviting people to critique these little bodies. Reconfigure these babies or it’s meat curtains for you!

I’m also interested in how different kinds of fetish porn both adhere to and diverge from the more typical porn models. One fetish porn niche I think I’ll be conducting some poetry research on soon is feeding porn.

more:

I am particularly interested in working to enact a personal (conflicted) feminism within microcosmic realms, including the realm of my real life (which is not situated within the realm of academe) and the realm of my poetics. I am certainly interested in connecting with others—in corresponding, dialoguing, and cultivating a sense of creative and/or feminist community, but much of this for me takes place online because I am somewhat immobile and financially limited.

It is important to me to contribute to the poetic community beyond just writing my own poems, so I do direct some of my creative energies towards writing book reviews and publishing other’s poems, too. I have limited resources as far as what I can do with my publishing endeavors, but that’s okay, because I’ve long been a fan of zine culture and DIY spirit, so that translates well to the realm of small press publishing and my little indie press, Blood Pudding Press (and its online incarnation, Thirteen Myna Birds).

Still, I sometimes think that since I’m not politically correct and not aligned with academe in such a way that I’m able to promote my press at academic conferences and the like (for example, I’ve never attended AWP; I don’t have the resources), I will not be seen as a writer with feminist sensibilities and my press will remain obscure (or just downright unpopular). I can’t control how others interpret me or my creative work, though.. I’m well aware of what my creative work means to me; others are more than welcome to form their own interpretations.

My interpretation is that the Blood Pudding Press aesthetic is pussy-centric and oozilicious, but not raw. Visceral in a semi-oblique kind of way. Creepy yummy. Alien witchy. Sexy/queasy. Girlie/womanly/queer. Angry/sweet/volatile/contradictory/conflicted. Interested in longing, lust, burlesque, grotesque, flirtation and impropriety. Mostly I like things to be provocative as opposed to complacent, but that provocation can define itself in many different ways.

I know this has already been said by many other editors, but I receive significantly more submissions from males than I do from females. I’m willing to publish males, especially if they’re pussy-friendly, but my guidelines aren’t skewed towards them. My own poetic sensibilities are more aligned with female-centric content. I’m bothered by the male/female ratio discrepancy in the submissions I receive, yet part of me is resistant to specifically solicit work from women, because I think my guidelines are equally available to all and I don’t have oodles of free time. I wish women would just submit to me of their own accord.

After writing this message, Juliet suffered a stroke and is now having trouble reading and writing, but hopes to regain those strengths.

Below are a few other notes and resources for interested parties.

*

Some of my remarks here were adapted from my artist statement and from some previous poetry-related interviews I’ve participated in recently, including an interview with Cynthia Reeser for Prick of the Spindle, an interview with Kane X. Faucher for ditch, and a response to a question by Nathan Moore for his ‘Just One Chapbook Thing’ column on Read Write Poem. Feel free to visit the Blood Pudding Press blog at http://bloodyooze.blogspot.com for links to these (and other) interviews in their entirety. Feel free to visit my website at http://www.JulietCook.weebly.com for more information about my poetry, publishing, and other creative projects.

Kate Schapira

Kate Schapira is the author of TOWN (Factory School, Heretical Texts, 2010) and several chapbooks with Flying Guillotine Press, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Cy Gist Press, Rope-A-Dope Press and horse less press, as well as her own kitchen-table imprint, In Hand Books. She lives in Providence, RI, where she teaches at Brown, the University of Rhode Island, and the Smith Hill Community Library, and runs the Publicly Complex reading series.

I think many people associate being easily swayed or open to convincing with women, with femininity, and also believe it to be bad, although I’m not sure which came first. I feel like those are the places where learning can happen. I think sometimes when you are too sure, too pure, you keep thinking exactly what you thought and doing exactly what you did, and I don’t think there is any set of thoughts or actions so perfect that it should never change. I’ve called myself a feminist since I learned (from my mom) what the word meant, but what I think I need to do about that—what I want my actions to be because of that—has changed and continues to change.

Right now I’m thinking I have had a lot of turns to speak and it’s probably my turn to listen. In being a feminist I put myself in the position of not wanting this world, but when we start to describe what we do want, the world we want, it may not turn out to be all the same world.

Taking turns, making room: I feel like there always needs to be more of this. Look how much I’m saying, “I think,” and “I feel.” In some ways this making room is tricky in poetry because it’s words, it’s about speaking! How do I make room in my own voice for other voices? (“Other” in this case meaning “people besides me.”) I just finished a semi-collaborative book, TOWN (Factory School, Heretical Texts, 2010! Yeah!) in which I asked about 100 people to tell me about a town and wrote poems in which everything they told me was true. I’m currently working on a project that includes words from soldiers’ blogs as part of talking about the way humans try to make each other into heroes and monsters. In some ways this is sort of cake-eating and cake-having: I am listening, but I also get to speak (through presenting and commenting). I simultaneously feel like it’s moving closer to what I dream of, and wonder what else I will have to, choose to, be able to give up.

Feminist web presences—including, most recently, the great blog FWD (feminists with disabilities) For a Way Forward that someone referenced in the comments to Jennifer Bartlett’s post—as well as poems and writings by (among others) Joan Retallack, Harryette Mullen, Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Iijima, Ann Lauterbach, my associated Kates Greenstreet, Colby and Pringle—so many others and really, mainly women—have informed my use of words, including my own poems, the metaphors I use, how I talk to my friends, what I assume. I teach writing too, and I try to bring up with my students the reverberations into action of the language they use. It’s not about policing but about believing people—that people know what they want and mean what they say. I don’t want to be the permanent boss of anyone.

If you try to define being a woman in a positive way—not positive as opposed to sad but positive as opposed to “not a man”—you run into all these essentializing or exclusionary things, like bumper stickers or parking passes. Many of the things that as a feminist I want for women I want for people of all genders—many or all of us (humans, living creatures) lack them. Maybe instead of saying “I think” or “I feel” so much I, or we, could start saying “I want”?

Poetry helps me pay more attention to the words I use inside and outside of it and what they mean for whom.

My characters Freak Millways and Tango Wax are young gender-free lovers and performers, who are beautiful to me because of their narrowness, which is also their immediacy. They’re very local, very caught up in what’s happening around them. This is something that I think of in both feminism and poetry, the range of words and actions: if I try to get a student to examine the assumptions in something xe said, how far does that action reach? If I yell at a guy who catcalls another woman in the street? If I write a series of poems that asks questions about seeing women’s bodies as pathological? If I donate to Planned Parenthood, or use their email form to write to my senator about the Stupak-Pitts Amendment? I feel like feminism is about remembering that women are real, that all people are equally real, and the more local you are, the easier it is to keep realness in mind.

I’m uncomfortable with, but also drawn to, abjection, grossness and childishness. Joyelle McSweeney, Lara Glenum, Nada Gordon and many others ask me through their work to delve into this discomfort and why I’m squeamish about it—fears of helplessness and weakness—and made me consider that these modes could be feminist. Not every woman wants to talk about her pussy, just like not every woman wants to be a lawyer and not every woman wants to be a poet and not every woman wants to be a woman, and all the women who do want these things, and other things, and the women who want to set things on fire and rage, and the women who want to speak quietly—

Who decides whose turn it is to speak? Is it the person who was just speaking or the person who was just listening?

In the form of feminism I would like to practice in writing and life, people—women—would take turns saying what they want and listening, would take turns committing to meeting the wants and needs of the people speaking. This would require speakers and listeners to be honest—if you have been a turn-taker, then be a turn-giver for a while and vice versa. Acknowledging how much or how little you have already said, how much or how little you’ve already listened, and evaluating it in the context of everyone who is not you, and then deciding whether to speak or to listen—then to commit to action—can be kind of awful either way, embarrassing and risky. I don’t think this is a dreamy-happy-fake-utopian version of things. I think it could give us change without coercion. I think it would require us to listen to ourselves and each other (by “us” I mean “people of varying degrees of privilege”). When poetry’s working best for me that’s what it does. I try to require it of myself. The poems I value require it of me.

Many people are doing this already—but I would like now to ask people to respond in the comments with what they want to say, what they want to have heard, what they want. If you’ve said it elsewhere, you could just say where to find it. If you feel like you too have been a turn-taker, maybe listen a while.

Ching-In Chen

Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press). Daughter of Chinese immigrants, Ching-In has worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston and is a Kundiman, Lambda and Macondo Fellow. In May, she will curate a Kundiman feature here on Delirious Hem. You can find her at www.chinginchen.com.

Feminism is a Zuihitsu

Is a noun. Yuri Kochiyama.

Is a doctrine. I first saw her speak when I was a student,

Is a firecracker. and thought -- Wow, this isn’t anything

Is a grandfather. like the grandmothers I know.

Then, I would bump into Yuri time and again on the streets in the protest marches against the war or at community events, in wheelchair yet not bound or limited, eyes always afresh and eager to connect with everyone around her. Is a phallic bullet, says the decolonial conversation. She leans forward eagerly in response to the other woman's question. You can use masculinist structures with feminist results. She asked me my name and wrote it down in her tiny notebook, repeating it to make sure she had it right. Is a bridge that has been lit on fire. The other woman says, yes, but I'm talking about Barbara Smith. I'm talking about a non-hierarchical sense of power. She was fierce when it came to naming the things that we really needed to be organizing around and against, from police brutality and the prison industrial complex to racism to the war. Is a boat which has sunk. Yet she was kind and gentle to the individuals who crowded around her, always remembered me even if I hadn't seen her in months. During the Tule Lake Pilgrimage, I bought the last T-shirt of a watchtower at Tule Lake, menacing even surrounded in yellow sun. I willingly gave it up so that she could have it. Later in the week, I got a package from her in the mail. A letter of thanks and another shirt, as promised.

Is a mister sister. I always begin with a girl, even if I end somewhere else.

Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Bartlett was a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. She is the author of Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM Press 2007) and (a) lullaby without any music. Individual poems have appeared in New American Writing, Ratapallax, The Brooklyn Rail, and others. In 2009, she was featured in Michele Beck and Jorge Calvo's documentary film series. Bartlett teaches poetry to people with cognitive and/or physical disabilities at United Cerebral Palsy (NYC). She is also a half-time First-Year Writing Instructor at Montclair State University. Bartlett lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn with the writer, Jim Stewart and their son, Jeffrey. (Photo by Emma Bee Bernstein.)


This is not my beautiful house; this is not my beautiful wife



I see myself as employing feminist ideals practically in my daily life. The most important aspect I take from feminism is the idea of choice. I have chosen my life. My feminist belief -- that girls can do anything derives from both sides of my family. My feeling of oppression comes from being a person with disability - cerebral palsy. People very often react strongly negative to my slightly slurred speech (or "cp accent ") and awkward gait -- which is actually very minor in the disability world. The frustration I feel, both real and imagined, is not gender specific - it comes from the able-bodied community. It is both women and men who have, at times, made me feel less than.

As Denise Levertov points out, "Not to deny the history of women. But women who see exclusively the oppression of women tend to forget other kinds of oppression." In day-to-day life, if you have a "double minority" one inadvertently trumps the other. This is why I have had an easier time relating to the Civil Rights and gay Movements than the Feminism Movement. Like some African-Americans, what has happened to me a disabled person has been so profoundly worse than what has happened to me as a woman. I am sure there is gender disadvantage in my life, but I can't even begin to see it because I'm so busy dealing with the other.

It is embarrassing, yet liberating, to disclose the things that have happened to me as a person with cerebral palsy. There's the time that the teenagers rode their bikes around me yelling "retard, retard." There's the time that a man asked me to dance at a club and, after discovering my voice, told his friend, "She's some kind of retard" and walked off. There's the time that someone in NYC Teaching Fellows, whom I trusted, told me she would never want her young child to have a teacher 'like me.' (By the way, I was 'kicked out' of the elementary school teaching program due to my disability). There are the many, many other jobs I have been passed over. There's the time that some folks with a racist, homophobic, ableist website got a hold of my blog writings and wrote about me: relentlessly, ruthlessly, mocking me. There's the time the woman asked me in the park in disbelief - "Is that your baby!?" People have mistaken me for drunk (that was the police!), Deaf, on drugs, unable to feel physical pain, mentally handicapped, incapable of giving childbirth, and asexual. (Not that any of these are bad, they just aren't me. Well, I have been drunk from time to time, but that's another story).

As I write this, I see more and more the equation - woman and disability. Would there have been the same response if I had been a man? Perhaps, but probably not as aggressively. Perhaps not the same events, in any same order. However, there still exists the paradigm that the things people believe able-bodied women should do (or feel obligated to do) are the same things that people believe women with disabilities shouldn't do. There are still complexities between the disabled and feminist communities: Feminists fight not to be forced into mothering; women with disabilities fight to HAVE children. Feminists want to be looked at as more than sexual objects: women with disabilities are rarely considered sexual.

Sometimes, I feel like the community has forgotten us! Despite wonderful strides toward inclusion in many areas of feminism, disability is often the overlooked element. The issues of women with disabilities are among the most extreme cases of female abuse in the United States. So, it is shocking to that the pages of MS. Magazine are not full of issues such as forced sterilization or the fact that some women with disabilities have their children forcefully taken away at birth. Many people do still do not know about abusive institutions, such as Willowbrook, which were the norm as late as the 1980's. The unemployment rate for women with disabilities remains at a steady 70% or more. While Affirmative Action has become a given for African-Americans and women, for people with disabilities it is still a theory at best; the exceptions being higher education and the government. Many employers fail to note disability in their EOE ads.

On a more mundane note, women with disabilities are consistently absent from women-only poetry conferences, journals, and anthologies that champion diversity. When popular feminist journals do write about people with disabilities, they often use outdated, offensive language; confined to a wheelchair, wheelchair bound, and, my personal favorite, 'the disabled.'

What is the answer? It would be ideal if feminist writers and activists examined the exclusion and could write in an honest way about why this exclusion takes place. Is it a benign oversight? It is because women have as much difficulty dealing with the 'othered' bodies as men? Is it because of the primal fear that the able-bodied have of becoming disabled? Does it have to do with the complexities of the physicality of a woman's body? Fear of aging? What makes the able-bodied community still unwilling to see people with disabilities as merely 'different' rather than 'less than?' I worry that feminists might be hesitant to align with women with disabilities out of fear of the society's concept of bodily weakness. Women do not want to be considered as physically incapable, which is often the stereotype bestowed on women with disabilities. In my experience, the problems of physical disability are largely, if not exclusively, a social construct. For example, there is nothing wrong with using a wheelchair; the problem lies, rather, in non-accessibility. What I would like to convince people is that being disabled can mean a stronger body, not a weaker one. Sure, I can't run as fast as some, but I do everything else people do with more than average bodily limitations--and all the prejudice to go along with it. I am not sure how that could be construed as anything other than strength.

To readers, I would like to pose these questions:
1. Where have you seen mainstream Feminism and disability intersect in positive ways?
2. If you do believe disability has been glossed over in feminist culture? If so, why do you thing this has happened?
3. What can both disabled and non-disabled feminists do to make disability more prominent, resulting in better understanding, job opportunities, and birthing/abortion rights?

I think the problem is not maniacal. I think that people tend to focus what is on their radar. I think people with disabilities (and their problems) are still utterly marginalized in our society -- so that even the most sensitive thinkers aren't aware. I think feminism is the ideal place to begin. For me, at its core, feminism is about becoming enlightened -- and moving forward accordingly.

from Autobiography (Dion Chapter)

takes the ticket out
of the purse

looks at the ticket

puts the song on
takes the song off

returns the ticket to the purse

yells at the social worker

don't you people care about
patients with AIDS

looks toward the cold field
where the geese

startle and lift

like their return,
this will all be over soon

takes the ticket out
of the purse

looks at the ticket

puts the song on
takes the song off

returns the ticket to the purse

looks out on the field, amongst
the geese, this will all be over soon

phones the nurse, phones the friend
phones the clinic, yells at the nurse

people look, look at her,
look at the field,

the geese lifting

yells at the nurse
yells at the field

blames the geese

takes the ticket out
of the purse

looks at the ticket

puts the song on
takes the song off

returns the ticket to the purse

looks out to the field
amongst the geese

this will all be over soon

Delirious adventskalender 2009

Each evening through the 24th, a new audio poem will be added. Click on that day's numbered box in the kalendar to listen. More info on the poets appear in posts below.

(Best viewed in any browser other than Firefox. If you do not see the image below, please click here to go to Dusie.org.)