, 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 s
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
after a long time of doing that, I suddenly became very ill and got brain fever and went
into a coma, and when I came out of my coma, I couldn’t remember anything, but I was very
happy, extremely happy. I remember waking up singing a little ditty from Archibald
MacLeish’s play, J.B., that was about survivors of nuclear warfare. It had
this little childish song in it: ‘I love Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, da da da . . . ‘ I
sang the song for a year; that was the only thing I could do, it was my only skill. And
during that time I realized that if I was going to do what I had set out to do in my life,
I would have to go all the way with it and take every single risk you could take. I was
then twenty-five years old and I saw that I could have died a very nice ordinary woman who
had produced absolutely nothing. So I bought a notebook and I got a very strange hat and I
went to a local bar and told everyone I was a poet. I began taking notes and began again,
and this time I decided I would not do anything I didn’t want to do that would keep me
from my art. And I haven’t since that time. I just turned forty.
"I should probably add that I was very fortunate to have had a lover who wanted me
to be a poet, and she took care of me for that year when I was in such terrible condition.
She was a teacher and so we just got by. It was a very hard year. And then I did not go
and become a poet until I had also gotten a part-time job as a laboratory technician.
"Edward The Dyke was written at that time. It was considered unpublishable, a
little satire about a woman and a psychiatrist. I wrote Edward The Dyke in
Washington, D.C. That’s the white collar center of the universe. You would think that no
one would ever write a lesbian feminist satire in 1965 in Washington, D.C., but I did.
Since it was unpublishable, I had to wait and become a publisher myself before I could
really get rolling.
"In 1969 I founded a press with Wendy Cadden, an artist, with a simple mimeograph
machine. I had a little trouble learning to use it at first—it’s such a classical
office machine that I had avoided it for many years, not wanting to end up doing only
that, but when we realized that no one was going to do our work for us, we began to design
beautiful books on that mimeograph machine. We treated it as an artistic instrument, and
it produced for us as an artistic instrument. We produced books of graphics and poems,
deciding to find a new basis for the criticism of art and poetry.
"Thiswas the same time I began writing The Common Woman poems. I took them
to my neighbors and asked them what they thought of them. I did not say that I had written
them. Sometimes I just said ‘Someone gave me these poems. What do you think of them?’
to get female feedback. I was very courageous in those days because real people tell you
real things about your work. It established a new basis for women’s art—things which
had formerly been unspeakable suddenly became vital and desirable things to say, and The
Common Woman poems spread all by themselves without any help from any New York
publication of any kind.
"People took them along because they wanted other people to read them. We had
women who sold them on the buses, sold them at work. Women sneaked them into foreign
countries because they wanted others to have them. That’s what building a network of
people is about—people who are just as interested in what you’re doing as you are,
and you help them and they help you. So much depends on making sure your work is relevant,
making sure that it is useful to other people.
"The Common Woman poems spread: the last time I counted them was about eight
years ago, and they had been reprinted half a million times from Canada to Australia and
to Germany. I get letters from women in jail, women in Harvard Law School, and men in
jail, men in Harvard Law School, about them and about other things. So we shifted the
basis of poetry, coming out of what the beatniks had been trying to do, but they had
stayed a little exclusive, and I think the women’s movement and the black arts movement
also shifted the basis for art and infused it with a new set of ideas and a new
lifefulness. Our publishing simply magnified that. We published work of women that we
thought no one else would do and we put out about sixty thousand volumes of verse on our
own—isn’t that amazing! Sixty thousand volumes by about 200 different women! And then
we merged with another press and we kept that up for awhile. Now we’ve pulled away from
publishing and we’re concentrating on our own work."
Grahn was asked if she might still publish her own poems or have them published by
another feminist press, now that she has a New York publisher, St. Martin’s Press.
"It keeps me very independent, which I like. It keeps me knowing that if there is an
idea I really feel close to, one that is essential to what I’m doing, that I can
compromise the corners of it, but I’m never going to have to compromise the center core,
because I can damn well do it myself. You know, that kind of independence is pretty
unbeatable. I would never have gotten anywhere if I had had to depend on New York
publishers; they’re very conservative to most of our ideas."
In response to a question about the West Coast publishing scene—whether it was a
good climate for women and lesbian writers—Grahn was of two minds. "Not only
women and lesbian writers but many independent publishers drift out here where there has
been a flourishing small press trade for many years, and flourishing poetry and
flourishing political, spiritual and economic ideas. Women writing and publishing, as well
as male writers and publishers, come to the West Coast and make the climate; we all hear
about it and so we drift in this direction. But I think most people create their own
environments. There’s an environment here for publishing, but for writing? Writing takes
so much determination—you would do it on a rock in the middle of the ocean, if you
had to."
Remembering her first years on the West Coast, little more than a decade ago, Grahn
spoke of the role she had played in the creation of feminist separatism. "I helped to
found the institution of separatism for women, but it has been founded multitudes of times
through the centuries. For me, it began in 1969 when we formed women-only groups and held
women-only dances. We were quite daring to do that at the time. I began writing
specifically about women’s issues and lives, feeling that I couldn’t learn to do that from
men. I could only learn to do it by concentrating on women. We perceived separatism as a
tool, as a home base in this very nomadic society—everyone needs one—and for
women, separatism has been a home base from which to launch our various legions of issues
out into society.
"I found that sometimes at women-only readings, men would dress up like women and
come to my readings to hear me, which really astonished me. They would creep in in
dresses. I believe this happened in antiquity and someone’s mother ripped him to pieces
for doing that very thing, but of course we’re different now. We don’t go to those
extremes. "The first time I read anything on the subject of rape where there were men
in the audience, they laughed because they didn’t know how else to respond. So, it was
impossible to bring the subject up with men in the audience until men had learned a
different set of responses and perceptions. They had to identify with rape as a problem
and not want it to happen. Many people took it for granted before the women’s movement
that rape was okay, it was even funny; so that was one of the reasons for us to use
separatism at that particular time. Now I would read a rape poem to a mixed audience on
purpose because I know there would be plenty of men in the audience who identify with it,
some of them who have been raped themselves, or who go out on Take-Back-The-Night marches
and who are organizers on the issue.
Grahn was asked if being a lesbian poet created additional problems of communication.
Does she feel that she speaks for other lesbians or women in general or even some larger
community?
I don’t think I speak for anyone but myself. I don’t think anyone ever basically does.
I mean, you have to ask someone else whether I speak for them or not, but I certainly have
tried to speak about and to a large number of people, different kinds of people, whose
spirits crowd into my room in their most critical aspects while I’m writing.
"Being a lesbian, which I knew I was by the time I was sixteen, and being a poet,
which I knew I was when I was nine, forced me to put those two things together, and there
are a number of ways to do it. I had some traumatic things happen to me as a lesbian. For
example, I was thrown out of the Air Force for being honest about my lesbianism. So I felt
it was very important for me to be able to find a way to speak as a lesbian and then go on
from there to be everybody’s poet, which is what I want to be. I had to take care of that
little piece of business first. For fifteen years I’ve been juggling both sides of myself,
trying to create a climate whereby people could see around the fact that I’m a lesbian.
When this stereotype would be broken, they would understand, ‘Yes, there is such a thing,
and it has thus and such dimensions, and that’s her or that’s me, but the rest of her work
is about something else which pertains to many, many other issues.’ I don’t know if I’m
describing it, but my intention is to write poetry for everyone, and, given that, I have
to do it as me. So first I have to establish that everyone can see me as who I am and take
that for granted, and then we can go on to what comes next.
Commenting on the universality of Grahn’s work, Felstiner read from Adrienne Rich, in
her introduction to The Work of a Common Woman: "When I finished the
poem ("A Woman Is Talking to Death") I realized I had been
weeping; and I knew in an exhausted kind of way that what had happened to me was
irreversible."
Her poem on Marilyn Monroe caused readers to wonder how Grahn could reconcile anger and
humor. She explained: "If you have two emotions, then you know that I’m really
talking about something more than just what I said I was talking about. What I’m really
talking about is all of us who have seen a symbol of Hollywood success commit suicide at
the height of her career, after having married an athlete and after having married an
intellectual and obviously wanting to become an intellectual herself, and wanting to be
someone whose body would be taken more for itself and less as the pretty horseflesh that
it was taken for. When I think of her, I get a terrible chill because I know that she came
from a poor background and worked her way all the way up to being a suicide, and I don’t
want that to happen to any of us ever again.
"I knew women similar to her, for example, a very statuesque blonde woman who was
the mistress of a doctor and when he jilted her at age 40, she drank mercury and took a
week to die. It was the same year as Monroe’s death and that was not unusual. We should
not have those kinds of images in our minds to look forward to. This poem was written to
break through that poster image to another side and say, ‘let’s go for what’s real, let’s
take this and make something else out of it,’ and I think that for the last decade
we’ve been doing just that." Grahn made it clear that the anger was not directed at
Marilyn Monroe but at the potential suicide "who lives in each of us."
"I’m doing a lot of research into women’s history and also gay history and
beginning to write about that. I’m also working on a novel. It actually has many
characters that are plants and animals, which I find intriguing. I seem to be really
expanding the notion of how poetry can be useful to the other arts and lead us further
into understanding the nature of our world: where we come from and what the basis of
women’s power is, what it looks like, where it developed and where it might go. At some
point in the past, poets were scientists in society, and I want us to reclaim that part of
poetry, the notion of being very exact in description, like druids and sorcerers and other
ancient poets. They were using language in its most potent form. So I am straining, in
every direction, in order to do research and combine etymology with imagery. I am trying
to understand analogy, which is a way of comparing one thing to another, so that we can
make connections again."
Grahn had written an article on the word "bulldyke," in conjunction with her
historical research. "I don’t know of an uglier word I’ve ever been called in my life
than ‘bulldyke.’ I was so haunted by this for many years that I finally decided to
take the[ word by the horns and find out why this strange word is in the vernacular. I’ve
traced it to a Celtic queen who fought against the Romans in A.D. 61 during the
reign of Nero and nearly won. The Celts had institutional gay practices, which the Roman
authors were horrified by. This queen led a nation which still had gay traditions going
on. She had flaming red hair and was a very large woman. The Celtic women warriors were
older women who often taught the men arms. It was a totally different sense of fighting
than we have any conception of. And when she rebelled against the Roman colonists and
nearly won, they suppressed her name. Her name was Boadicea, a word which has come down to
us meaning a very militaristic or strong, warrior-like, lesbian-type large female. That’s
a part of what I’m working on, combining poetry and etymology and my own experiences.
There are many other examples besides that one. That’s the one that really thrilled me to
death when it finally came together."
Judy Grahn leaves her readers realizing, consciously or not, what people from antiquity
down through the Renaissance have realized: that at her best, the poet feels no
distinction between her own experience, her art, and her political life. All three feed
and flow into each other.
from Felstiner, John. "Judy Grahn." Women Writers of the West-Coast:
Speaking of Their Lives and Careers. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1983.
35c