, Research Paper
from an Interview with Nisa Donnelly
Judy Grahn, the poet, activist, and self-described renegade scholar of gay life,
personifies contemporary lesbian writing. At 54, she has a massive body of work that
reflects the growth and development of the lesbian-feminist movement that she helped found
on the West Coast more than a quarter-century ago. Lines from her poems became the
rallying cry for a movement; her interpretation of history gave us a place in the world.
In the last ten years, I have had the privilege of working with Judy. Recently, we
discussed the roots of lesbian writing, where it is now, and where it might be going. Judy
Grahn is the winner of the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award and of a Lambda
Literary Award for Lesbian Non-Fiction. Her latest book is Blood, Bread and Roses: How
Menstruation Created the World.
Nisa Donnelly: It is virtually impossible to separate the lesbian-feminist
sensibility from the history of contemporary lesbian writing. But I think what we often
forget is how the lesbian-feminist movement or politic came about, and how it affected
lesbians in such a profound way, sometimes to the confusion of gay men.
Judy Grahn: Lesbian-feminist sensibility grew out of real life in the 60’s. It grew
out of all our experiences of growing up after World War II, with the whole sense of that
war resounding in our ears. I remember the end of the war and my parents’ tremendous shock
when the concentration camps were opened. When our generation came of age, as the Vietnam
War was beginning and I was a working-class girl-and girl was the word—we had no
money, no hope, no future; all expectations were that we were servants and nothing more.
The first time I suggested to a professor that a person such as myself might become a
college professor, he was so offended that he wouldn’t talk to me anymore.
So we had to gradually get together with each other and understand that you can do
something about life, and you do that by banding together with like-minded people. But
first you have to know what you want. We saw how adept African-Americans were at
organizing and had become very articulate about what they wanted. And then, through"
the antiwar movement, we realized you could express a mass opinion about the whole
government, and while you might not be listened to—and I don’t think we were—at
least you figured out what you believed in and wanted it never to happen again.
When it came time to think about feminism and ourselves as lesbians, we had a set of
articulations. We had some methods to apply to our own situation, And it more or less
spontaneously exploded. Seven or eight of us got together shortly after Stonewall and we
already knew from trying to work together with gay men that they had a different agenda.
We also knew that lesbians didn’t yet know their agenda. So we separated to see what it
was that we wanted, and immediately found that feminism was a really appropriate set of
understandings to get involved in. Of course, feminism at that time was mostly collections
of women talking to each other in private spaces. Lesbians brought action to that.
Getting lesbians to talk about their lives was a pain in the ass, they just wouldn’t do
it, but they would go found a store and a karate class and a rape crisis center and go
picket weddings and take action immediately. We added action and radical ideas to
feminism.
ND: I remember when there were no women’s bookstores, no feminist presses, no real
lesbian culture as we know it today, I think when I first discovered Rubyfruit Jungle I
must have inhaled it in one sitting, not so much because it was a great book, but because
it was the first book of its kind I’d ever seen. The lesbian didn’t die. She didn’t get
married. She was strong and funny and outraged und I was starving for that kind of
validation of my life and the lives of the women I knew. Shortly after that, I moved to
Chicago and I remember there was a tiny two-room women’s bookstore in the upper floor of a
commercial building in the Loop. There wasn’t much to pick from, but I
still thought I was in paradise. I went through a few years of reading only books written
by women, preferably lesbians. And by literary standards, some of the writing was,
frankly, not very good, but it was so remarkable that it existed between the pages of a
real book. I felt like I was finally hearing my own voice. And for the first time I
believed that it was possible for lesbians to write about lesbian life and actually be
published. That alone was . . .
JG: I wrote the "common woman" poems as an exercise to see if I could
write about the women’s movement. They were all portraits of ordinary women. The last one
was about my mother, "Vera From My Childhood," ending with the sentence about
the common women shall rise like good bread. That line traveled all over the country and
was memorized by people. In 1969, we didn’t even have a press at that time that published
women’s work. Now there are ten or twelve feminist presses. Pat Parker and I started one
of the first.
I didn’t want to run a press but there wasn’t a choice. Being a poet, there was no way
I could be published, so I could either stop writing and become completely an oral poet or
I could start a press. That’s true of anyone with radical content in any era, unless you
have a friend with money, and we didn’t have that.
The Women’s Press Collective started in San Francisco and moved to Oakland. For four or
five years after Pat Parker and I founded lesbian-feminism on the West Coast, we worked
together as a team. We had the press and were putting out work that we thought was
revolutionary that would arouse women. And it did. There was one other press: Alta had
Shameless Hussy press. I think she founded it a year before I started my press, and she
put out Susan Griffin and Pat’s first book. She’s a very important early publisher.
The result was a very strong feminist publishing movement because once there’s a press,
then there’s a readership; it doesn’t work the other way around. And as women began
wanting to read exclusively about themselves and with a brand of content about their real
lives, then there became what is now called a market. In the early days, we certainly
didn’t think about a market—we thought about a political constituency. But within
three or four years there was something called a market.
I think women have always been speaking to each other. At the turn of the century there
were lots of women poets; Amy Lowell crossed the Atlantic; there were international little
cliques that knew each other and were exchanging work; there were little magazines that
were publishing their work; there were lots of women on the lecture circuits; there was
lots of intellectual activity among women. It didn’t get remembered, because women don ‘t
have rituals to pass on to each other what we have learned. We’re always having to
re-invent the wheel to the point that when I started my press I believed that I was the
first woman in the world to ever have anything to do with a press.
ND: Your press was destroyed, as I recall, in the late 70’s. You were already well
known as a poet. Your books, especially The Work of a Common Woman and Edward
the Dyke, had made you a household name—at least in lesbian households. By then,
though, it was becoming easier for lesbian writers to find publishers. Is that why the
Women’s Press Collective was never re-established?
JG: Our press was vandalized by persons unknown in 1978. It was a very difficult
time; I was ill, probably very chemically poisoned—we knew nothing about safety
precautions—and I wasn’t taking very good care of myself. I had been trying to live
on coffee and cigarettes and kerosene, so I just about collapsed. And took a year or two
to recover myself. I changed my diet, got rid of some habits and so on, and to my great
relief I could concentrate on my own work.
My poetry just keeps me alive at times. It’s just been a lifeline at times that I throw
out for myself and hang on to. It’s the way that I’ve gotten through life. I’ve gotten to
fulfill lots and lots of ambitions. My poetry is like islands of earth in an otherwise
moving sea. I just walk from poem to poem or set of poems to set of poems to understand
all kinds of things about myself or other people. Or who women are in the world. They give
me a vision. That may sound trite but that’s what they do.
ND: I remember hearing you say that poets go out and "map the terrain"
and then we prose writers come along and fill in the terrain.
JG: Which doesn’t exactly hold true, but makes a nice sentence. I write prose in
order to gather information and I write poetry in order to put out information in a form
that has a really strong rhythm or tender rhythm that I think the world needs in order to
dance differently.
ND: And today, there is such a richness of poetry and prose, so many diverse voices
and new and exciting ways of looking at not only the work, but also at the world.
JG: I can’t say that I’ve kept up with the work that everybody’s doing, but one of
the things that’s happened is a lot more people are more expressive about more things in
the movement. There’s been more inclusion, which we originally wanted to see happen. I see
members of lots more communities who are writing; that’s happening in many segments of the
American population and it’s an extremely important development, a very important
democratizing of the media.
The means of print production gradually came into people’s hands, so it was possible
for our little group of lesbians to buy from Diane DiPrima a mimeograph machine for two or
three hundred dollars and be in business. As soon as we could learn how to use it, we
could be publishers and that’s what happened. The office equipment gave us accessibility
to the media. That’s one reason there is such a renaissance of women’s writing now: there
is that access to the means of reproduction of work. Desktop publishing has done nothing
but aid that. And I’m confident that now there are going to be lots and lots of
filmmakers, lots and lots of video makers all over the world.
A brand new way of speaking to each other has evolved and it is not elitist. Even
television is planning to put in more and more cables and channels, so it’s possible to
speak to each other as never before in these various art forms. It’s very exciting.
This is an opening up of media that enables us to talk to each other more quickly and
yet very thoroughly with ideas that are needed—and lots of thinking is needed right
now because lots of changes are going on. One of the things I hope can happen in this
movement is that we develop a capacity to speak to each other: that older women are able
to pass on knowledge and tradition, and also to learn from younger women. We need
to express ideas and to dialogue about those ideas and to help construct the world in new
ways.
from "The Sound of Two Rocks." Lambda Book Review 4:2 (Jan.-Feb.
1994).
Judy Grahn is the quintessential feminist writer. The content of her poetry and her
personal style were formed within the context of the women’s movement in the Bay area. In
the seventies she was published by several small presses and also became the publisher of
other women poets, and was a frequent participant in those poetry readings which
constituted public rituals for feminists, as they had for the beat writers of an earlier
decade. . . .
[Grahn responds to an interviewer's question]: "’Vera, from my
childhood’ is one of seven poems in my Common Woman series. I wrote them in 1969,
when I had just joined a women’s consciousness-raising group. Those groups came along at
the end of the sixties and I suddenly wanted something to read about women, but I couldn’t
find anything. The closest I came was a Leonard Cohen song sung by Nina Simone—very
wistful. I put it on the record player and played it over and over and wrote those seven
poems to ordinary women I had known. I picked the word ‘common’ poetically because it
means so many different things, and they all come back to feminist ideals in some way.
‘Common’ reminded me of ‘common whore,’ ‘common slut’ or something that’s sexual
property, and ‘common’ also reminded me of the commons of England and of Boston where
people could meet together and assert themselves. It reminded me of what we have in
common, which is a cross-connection between us all. And in one of the poems, I even
managed to use it as a nail, which, if you are a carpenter, you know is called a common
nail. The multiplicity of meanings gave the poems an extra emphasis which was both poetic
and real and political, all at the same time.
Felstiner noted that the word "’common’ has what so many words suggest which
political and ethnic groups have picked for themselves lately: a hard, angry, negative
thrust with a bad connotation that turns itself around and says this is something we have
to stand by and be proud of."
He turned to a question that must have been in the mind of everyone who knew Grahn’s
poetry: How is a man supposed to feel when he hears a poem addressed by a woman to another
woman, especially by an openly lesbian woman?
Grahn replied, "Well, women identify with men writing about men. There are men who
write about nothing but men, and I am able to identify with them as a sister and as a
daughter. I think that when men get into my poetry, which is woman-oriented, they do it in
a parental sense, in a brotherly sense, and I don’t think they have that much trouble."
She explained that the poem to Vera was inspired by her mother, "an older woman
in my, past, my present and my future."
"I was born in Chicago, but I grew up in a little town in New Mexico and I was an
eccentric child. I was a combination of a tomboy and a poet. I was always known as a poet.
I began writing long poems that my girl scout troop acted out when I was ten or eleven.
Since we were very much lacking in any extra money, I saved up my allowance to buy two
items that I desperately wanted. One of them was a softball glove, but since I had no
instruction, I accidentally bought a catcher’s mitt. I did not want to be a catcher. I
wanted to play first base, but forever after I had to be a catcher because I accidentally
spent my money on a catcher’s mitt. That’s a really tragic story, you know. But the second
item that I bought was instruction on how to write poetry. I don’t even remember who wrote
those books but I had all of them that I could get, and I went home and studied my craft
even as a child. I hid it from the other kids. They thought it was okay that I wanted to
play softball but that I wanted to be a poet was really bizarre."
When asked if she, like many male poets, had the experience of "bumming
around" in her early years that influenced her later poetry, Grahn replied,
"I think my position as a female and as a woman of no means whatsoever and little
secretarial skills, plus being a lesbian and being militant about it—wanting to have
a bill of rights that would guarantee us a place in the modern state—gave me more
than bumming around; I was kicked around, I was floated around from place to place,
hunting and searching, not for experience, but for a place to stop having so much
experience and be able to express something. I think that for many women this is true.
What took me a while was to know that my life had been a set of experiences that were
worth writing about and that actually had a richness to it and connection to other people.
So it wasn’t bumming around that I needed but the other, the opposite, the stable society
in which to say ‘everything I have experienced is true,’ to say it out loud so that it is
confirmed as something that really matters. I needed to express what it’s like to be a
secretary, to make sandwiches, to want to be a scientist, and have breasts as well. How do
you express all that? I think that’s what women writers have been dealing with.
"Once I grew up!, I wanted to go to school, but I couldn’t afford it,
so I became a sandwich maker and worked nights so that I could go to trade school in the
daytime and become a medical secretary. Then I was a medical secretary in the daytime and
I went to school at night, which is not atypical of the way that women go to school, and