Poetry as a Feminist Practice

By Erin Heuring

A poet, essayist, and one of the most prominent voices in modern feminism, Adrienne Rich explored the rich experiences of women through the written word. Hailed as “one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the twentieth century,” it seems fitting to honor her in the aftermath of April’s National Poetry Month. Adrienne Rich passed away March 27, 2012, but her poetry will endure for generations to come.

Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland on May 16, 1929. She attended Harvard and studied poetry, and later married an economics professor she had met there. After the birth of her third child, Rich produced a book of poetry which mark a dramatic shift in the themes she explored in her writing. Entitled “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” the volume included more personal poetry and an exploration of what it was to be a wife and mother in the 1950s. Rich was also involved in politics and the New Left and began teaching at Columbia University. Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” split the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry with Allen Ginsberg. After divorcing her husband, Rich began a long-term relationship with her life partner, Michelle Cliff, and acknowledged lesbianism as a political and personal issue. Rich also wrote socio-political essays, including “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” which was one of the first to bring to light the theme of lesbian existence. During this period of Rich’s life, she seem to “cross a threshold into a new relationship with the universe.” Rich died last year at her Santa Cruz, California home at the age of 82.

The poet W.S. Merwin said of Rich’s writings:

“All her life she has been in love with the hope of telling utter truth, and her command of language from the first has been startlingly powerful.”

Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent than
fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Carolyn Kizer: Feminist Poet

Contemporary poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, Carolyn Kizer, is a Pacific Northwest native, born in Spokane, Washington in 1925. After graduating from Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Carolyn Kizer went on to study at Sarah Lawrence College and graduated in 1945. She then pursued graduate studies at Columbia University and the University of Washington. Due to strong encouragement from both her mother and father to study poetry during her childhood, Kizer elected to study poetry at the University of Washington under the direction of Theodore Roethke. In an interview, Kizer spoke of the years she spent studying poetry:

“I was then in my late twenties, living in Seattle. I had never taken myself seriously as a poet, and at that point the poetry didn’t deserve it. But then, most women poets of my generation didn’t dare take themselves seriously, because the men didn’t take us seriously—-I was almost middle-aged before the idea penetrated.”

Kizer moved to Pakistan in 1964 and served as a U.S. Department specialist teaching at the Kinnaird College for Women, as well as at several other institutions, eventually serving as the first Director of Programs for the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966. Through this position, Kizer promoted programs that distributed aid to struggling writers, as well as promoting poetry to be read aloud in schools. Kizer was an up-and-coming poet in a male-dominated world during the 1950s and 60s, and feminist ideology had a strong influence on her work. Kizer’s poems were consistent in speaking out against the inequality between men and women, both at work and at home, and offered a window into the historical changes that were taking place throughout her career. Carolyn Kizer went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for her poem Yin, and has been recognized as one of the most influential feminist writers of the century.

Excerpt from Carolyn Kizer’s poem Pro Femina

I take as my theme “The Independent Woman,”
Independent but maimed: observe the exigent neckties
Choking violet writers; the sad slacks of stipple-faced matrons;
Indigo intellectuals, crop-haired and callus-toed,
Cute spectacles, chewed cuticles, aced out by full-time beauties
In the race for a male. Retreating to drabness, bad manners,
And sleeping with manuscripts. Forgive our transgressions
Of old gallantries as we hitch in chairs, light our own cigarettes,
Not expecting your care, having forfeited it by trying to get even.

But we need dependency, cosseting, and well-treatment.
So do men sometimes. Why don’t they admit it?
We will be cows for a while, because babies howl for us,
Be kittens or bitches, who want to eat grass now and then
For the sake of our health. But the role of pastoral heroine
Is not permanent, Jack. We want to get back to the meeting.

Knitting booties and brows, tartars or termagants, ancient
Fertility symbols, chained to our cycle, released
Only in part by devices of hygiene and personal daintiness,
Strapped into our girdles, held down, yet uplifted by man’s
Ingenious constructions, holding coiffures in a breeze,
Hobbled and swathed in whimsy, tripping on feminine
Shoes with fool heels, losing our lipsticks, you, me,
In ephemeral stockings, clutching our handbags and packages.
Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking,
In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,
Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.
Look at man’s uniform drabness, his impersonal envelope!
Over chicken wrists or meek shoulders, a formal, hard-fibered assurance.
The drape of the male is designed to achieve self-forgetfulness.

So, Sister, forget yourself a few times and see where it gets you:
Up the creek, alone with your talent, sans everything else.
You can wait for the menopause, and catch up on your reading.
So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh,
All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility!
Meanwhile, have you used your mind today?
What pomegranate raised you from the dead,
Springing, full-grown, from your own head, Athena?

For more information about Caorlyn Kizer, please visit http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/carolyn-kizer and http://flavorwire.com/290406/10-feminist-poets-you-should-know/9.

To Write Or Not To Write

As we close out April as National Poetry Month (a month set aside to praise and acknowledging poetry’s niche in our society), we’d like to take a moment to recognize a wonderful poet who is part of the UI community.

Alexandra Teague is an assistant professor of poetry at UI.  She was born in Fort Worth, Texas and has since lived, wrote, and taught in several other states.  Her poems have been published in several journals as well as Best New Poets 2008 and Best American Poetry 2009.

Alexandra’s first book of poetry, Mortal Geography, won the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and 2010 California Book Award.  Some examples of her work can be found on her website and many of her books can be bought at Book People or through Amazon.

Alexandra is a talented artist and has directed her talents into teaching others. It’s amazing to think about the opportunities the University of Idaho presents to its students. We are surrounded by inspiring people throughout this entire institution.

National Poetry Month can be celebrated in many different ways, but I encourage you to read some of Alexandra Teague’s work because it is truly great. Another good way to celebrate the beautiful art of poetry is to write your own work. You may ignite a hidden passion.

 

Adjectives of Order

By Alexandra Teague

That summer, she had a student who was obsessed
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when

Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order
could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook
with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering

streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard,
she wrote: The mothertook warm homemade bread
from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade

is essential to bread. He copied this down, but
he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before
older, if he worked security at a twenty-story modern

downtown bank or downtown twenty-story modern.
When he first arrived, he did not know enough English
to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part

of Lovelybig rectangular old red English Catholic
leather Bible. Evaluation before size. Age before color.
Nationality before religion. Time before length. Adding

and, one could determine if two adjectives were equal.
After Saigon fell, he had survived nine long years
of torture. Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.

A Major Coming Out

Recent months have seen a swelling amount of news related to LGBTQA issues in nearly every area of our society. The 2012 election cycle ended with the first ever adoptions of same sex marriages by popular vote in Maine, Maryland, and Washington and the election of a president who would go on to speak of the 1969 Stonewall Riots on par with other watershed civil rights moments in his inaugural address. Three additional nations, Uruguay, New Zealand, and France have legalized same-sex marriage, adding to a growing list of diverse nations.

In late March, the nation’s attention was fixated on the Supreme Court as it heard two cases concerning California’s Proposition 8 and the federal governments Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Hearings on both cases are anticipated by many as they stand to make great strides the attainment of equal rights.  The nation seems to have made a pivotal shift, with the Pew Research Center reporting that “recent polling clearly shows that Americans are much more accepting of same-sex marriage than they were a decade ago” with “all of the major national polls now find more supporters than opponents of same-sex marriage.”

Even more conservative organizations like the Boy Scouts of America seem poised to move towards equality with as scout executives last week unveiled a new policy that “no youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone,” even with the support of the Mormon Church, the organizations largest sponsor of scout troops.

But while progress is being made, many unfriendly environments remain. Particularly visible has been major league sports which has had a curious absence of LGBT identified individuals and has had hostile moments including Kobe Bryant’s shout of a homophobic slur and cornerback Chris Culliver saying he’s not okay with gay players in the NFL or on his team. But someone has stepped forward to break this absence and become the first male U.S. athlete in a major professional sport to come out as gay. Jason Collins has done so in a Sports Illustrated story to appear May 6^th, but accessible online currently. In this article, Collins describes his struggle in accepting his sexuality and the challenge of being different in major league sports.

Taking the helm of a delicate issue, Collins says, “I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I’m happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn’t the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, ‘I’m different.’ If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I’m raising my hand.”

While Collins was remarked he had “no idea” about the reaction of fellow players and officials, it has been a largely warm reception. The Huffington Post reports, “NBA commissioner David Stern applauded Collins in a statement cited by ESPN, noting, ‘Jason has been a widely respected player and teammate throughout his career and we are proud he has assumed the leadership mantle on this very important issue.’” Washington Wizards President Ernie Grunfeld felt similarly, calling Collins “a leader on and off the court and an outstanding teammate throughout his NBA career.”

Collins joins a list of leaders who are navigating an important time in the struggle for equal rights in our nation and world. As it becomes more of a national issue, these brave voices help personalize the struggle and provide hope for coming generations. Through this sort of action and the concerted efforts of activists the world over, 2013 may prove to be one of the most important years in LGBT rights.

Gender Politics in Pakistan

The first (ever) woman to run for parliament in a highly conservative region in Pakistan, Bajur, is making a statement in an attempt to force Pakistani governmental officials to place a higher focus on women’s inequality in the country. Her name is Badam Zari, a 40-year-old Pakistani housewife, and she is running for parliament in a tribal region located near the Afghanistan border known for its highly conservative values. The semi-autonomous tribal region of Bajur is located in northwest, severely poor and dominated by strong enforcement of conservative ideas derived from Islam enforced by Pashtun tribal leaders. Pakistan currently ranks second in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, depicting the large disparities between gender regarding political representation, education, health, and other issues.

Zari’s statement of bringing attention to women’s equality in such a conservatively dominated region is an attempt to demote patriarchal systems already in place. Her actions may endanger her (and her husband’s) wellbeing as she braves the potential for attacks from Islamist military. Women in the region of Bajur are often discourged by men to participate in elections and are usually undereducated, rarely working outside the home. Zari herself does not have an education beyond high school, but is using running for parliament as a means to represent her agency against suppression of women in Pakistan.

In an interview, Zari said, “My decision to contest the election will not only give courage to women in general and attract attention to their problems, but also helps negate the wrong impression about our society. This will reflect a true picture of our society, where women get respect.” Zari is running as an independent candidate, and hopes to secure votes from women in Pakistan, who currently constitute about 67,000 of the 186,000 registered voters in her constituency.

Gay Marriage Legal — Outside US

New Zealand is the 13^th country to legalize gay marriage in the world, and the first out the Asia-Pacific countries. New Zealand has allowed civil unions between gay couples since 2005, but the new proposal allows couples to adopt and allows for their marriages to be recognized in other countries. The new proposal will take effect in August.

New Zealand passed the legislation 77-44 on April 17.  Although over two-thirds of the New Zealand population supports gay marriage, there is still opposition to the bill.  A lobbying group called Family First presented a proposition to lawmakers, which was signed by 50,000 people in opposition to the legislation.

There is talk about Australia following suit to their neighboring state. Julia Gillard, Australia’s prime minister, is has voiced her opinion and is opposed to same-sex marriage, but some states are considering a new legislation allowing for gay marriage.

The new legislation was brought up after President Obama announced his support for gay marriage last May. Prime Minister Key then announced his support by saying he was not personally opposed to it.

New Zealand now joins Spain, Canada, Belgium, and several other countries by allowing gay marriage. Most recently (as of yesterday), France has legalized gay marriage. Nine U.S. states and the District of Columbia allow gay marriage, but it is still not recognized by the federal government.

Many U.S. senators and other prominent public figures have changed their expressed views on same-sex marriage. The United States may not be far behind New Zealand in the fight for equality (or so we can hope).

Lavender Graduation 2013

Erin Heuring

The LGBTQA Office would like to celebrate the accomplishment of the graduation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and ally students at the Lavender Graduation. The University of Idaho recognizes the contributions which these individuals have made to the school and community over the years of their attendance. The date of the Lavender Graduation is Tuesday, April 23 2013 (tonight!) at 7:00 pm in the Commons Clearwater/Whitewater rooms.

The history of the Lavender Graduation begins in 1995, when the director of the University of Michigan LGBT Resource Center, Ronni Sanlo, made the decision that it was time for LGBT students to have a graduation of their own similar to other racial or ethnic minorities on campus. Since that time, many universities have adopted the tradition of celebrating the fact that LGBTQA students have made it through the college experience successfully.

The keynote speaker will be Harvey Katz, a spoken word artist who addresses the mainstream understanding of gender and sexuality through spoken word poetry and rap parody. Katz is a solo member of Athens Boys Choir. Katz/Athens Boys Choir and has been performing since 2003.

Please join us in celebrating the unique accomplishments and contributions of our LGBTQA students today!