More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Ms. Muse is a discovery place for riotous, righteous and resonant feminist poetry that nourishes and gives voice to a rising tide of female resistance—brought to you by Ms. digital columnist Chivas Sandage.
Ms. Muse is a discovery place for riotous, righteous and resonant feminist poetry that nourishes and gives voice to a rising tide of female resistance.
How do you redeem a woman’s worst nightmare lived—or at least one of them? How do you give a mute, silenced or dead woman a voice? These are a few of the questions answered by Melissa Studdard’s poems.
“after I died / I put my clothes back on. / Like women do. / When everything has been taken.”
The following poems of resistance are written by five poets who identify as women or once did. These poems are about our lives, our mothers and grandmothers, our younger selves and changing selves. The myths, lies and abuse we were raised on. Our beauty and our truths, our lovers and marriages, children and childlessness. The particular deals we make with our lives and “the true honey of freedom.”
Our poetry and stories—our songs—bring us together, remind and ignite us, and make us strong.
Before she became the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation and the first woman to be chief of a major tribe, Wilma Mankiller published a poem about “the edges of / something called freedom.” But until now, the world has not known that this great chief, community developer, activist and author also wrote poetry throughout her life. With the support of Charlie Soap, Mankiller’s husband for over 30 years, editors Frances McCue and Greg Shaw found the magazine and nine other poems tucked randomly into boxes of paperwork stored in Mankiller’s old barn in August 2021. They wanted to publish her lost poems to show “how an activist reflected on her life through art and that art itself is activism.”
“For the first time in my life, I felt allergic to poetry. A radical, rogue Supreme Court decided Americans with uteruses no longer have the human right to control our own bodies but are subject to the whims of our state. I couldn’t bear to read a poem. … Then came Independence Day. The painful irony of a July 4 on the heels of such profound loss of liberty left me suddenly hungry for words. I needed poems the way some need scripture.”
Welcome back to Ms. Muse, a discovery place for riotous, righteous and resonant feminist poetry that nourishes and gives voice to a rising tide of female resistance.
Poet Laureate of Fresno, Calif., since 2019, Marisol Baca is the first woman, the first woman of color, and the first Chicano/Latinx poet to hold this appointment.
Descended from lifetimes of being forced to forget, Chicana/Latinx poet Marisol Baca works to remember what was lost long ago, writing stories that she grew up hearing from the women in her family.
As a systems change consultant, Shah has asked tough questions about domestic violence against women—and the relationships between structural, state, community and interpersonal violence—and then provided transformative research and strategies. Shah’s poetry asks hard questions, too.
Please spread the word to feminist poets: If you’re writing about what you’re witnessing, what you’re living and what haunts you, we invite you to send your work to Ms. Muse for consideration.
In this edition of Ms. Muse, four feminist poets write and talk about queerness, happiness, genderless sex and imagining change—personally and politically.
“I don’t think I can isolate what I need as a writer from what I need as a Black woman, mother, wife—which is to live… And to know that my children have a future. And to know that my husband will not be hunted down.”
