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 [...]
Last week we lost feminist foremother Adrienne Rich, to whom we owe boundless gratitude. Her poetry and prose guided many of us through the “anger and tenderness” of motherhood, helped us challenge countless “unexamined assumptions” and promised us that “we’re not simply trapped in the present…we can make…history with many others.” Nothing about Adrienne Rich [...]
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 [...]
Henrietta Lacks. The name meant nothing to me until I learned two years ago, at 29, that this Black woman had shaped and saved millions of lives–mine and yours included–without ever choosing to or knowing it. Furious that I had never encountered her story before, I was once again struck by the gaping absence, in [...]
Is there anything more appealing than a man at an ironing board? Hilma Wolitzer, in her delightful new novel An Available Man, takes it one step further, though: Edward Schuyler begins ironing after his wife Bee’s death, not to tend to his own life but to reconnect with her. “At first, he only pressed things [...]
“Doing what can’t be done is the glory of living.” When American missionary Minnie Vautrin cites this old Quaker saying to an admirer in Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem, she means to be humble, explaining her work helping Chinese refugees in wartime as merely her Christian duty. But the quote underscores that what Vautrin accomplished was heroic to [...]
By Susan McHenry Amy Alexander has amassed the credentials to be called, in the parlance of 21st century digital media, “an award-winning content producer,” as she’s described on the cover of this slim, somewhat elegiac and not quite triumphant book. But she is more invested in her roots in traditional media and in her role as [...]
