Emily Dickinson’s highly compressed, powerful poems inspire legions of readers, and Dickinson is one of the most widely revered and critically engaged women writers. Dickinson matters, not only to readers but also to scholars. For feminists, however, our understanding of Dickinson as a preeminent poet of the 19th century is only partial. In 1975, poet [...]
Over the past few weeks, we’ve celebrated National Poetry Month on the Ms. Blog with landmark poems from Joan Larkin, Pat Parker, Fran Winant and the anonymous authors of Because Mourning Sickness is a Staple in My Country. Now, we conclude the series with the poem “Sappho’s Reply,” from the number-one-selling book of lesbian poetry [...]
In 1973, Ain’t I a Woman, a feminist newspaper in Iowa City, published and distributed the anthology Because Mourning Sickness is a Staple in My Country, an anonymous collection of “poems by working-class dykes who have been going through changes and writing poems, among other things.” Printed on newsprint, the small book is “designed to [...]
In her 1975 poem “Yesterday,” New York-based poet Fran Winant assumes the voice of Gertrude Stein addressing her lover, Alice B. Toklas. The poem animated what lesbians of 1970s knew but history often denied: the intimate and erotic connections between women. Winant—a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front in 1969 and its sister group, Radicalesbians, in 1970—started Violet [...]
The iconic feminist poet Pat Parker was known not only for her printed work but also for her powerful performances. Parker’s activism with the Black Panther Party and the Black Women’s Revolutionary Council in the 1960s shaped her poetic voice. Her poetry, rooted in the African American oral tradition of call and response, grapples with [...]
In her introduction to Poems from the Women’s Movement, Honor Moore recollects a friend saying, “The women’s movement was poetry.” The women’s movement was–and is–many things, and poetry was–and is–a necessary part of it. During the 1970s, poetry provided a way for women to find their voices and validate their experiences. Poetry enabled feminists to [...]
The murders of black women in Boston in the late 1970s incited feminist activists; they also prompted poets to address racist violence in their work. Stephania Byrd, a member of the National Black Feminist Organization, wrote these lines in the poem, “On Black Women Dying,” … In the spring of 1979 13 black women were [...]
