We recently published
a review of an important anthology of poetry called
Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gendered Violence.
In addition to that review, co-editor Stacia M. Fleegal recently caught up with the editor of the anthology, Dr. Laura Madeline Wiseman. Here is part one of their conversation:
SMF: You mention the work of Judy Grahn and Chrystos (among others) as catalysts to your interest in poetry as an agent of change in the realm of domestic and gender-specific violence. I adore and revere both of these fierce writers, but they aren't as widely known as they should be. Would you agree with that statement? If so, do you believe their "invisibility" (from the canon and/or popular literary consciousness) to be part of, or symptomatic of, the silencing you speak of in your introduction? What titles by these women would you recommend to those who aren't familiar with them?
LMW: It’s interesting that you ask me about these two writers and the literary canon, because to have a Ph.D. in English and a B.S. in English Literature suggests that I
should be well versed in the “literary canon,” have studied it,
mastered it, but what a fickle, fashionable beast the canon is, no? It
made me wonder how I came to read Judy Grahn and Chrystos, for though I
may have read them in some anthology before I started Ph.D. school, as
some necessary poem in a women’s literature class, as some required
activist profiled in a women’s studies seminar, I don’t recall them,
meeting inscription from one woman to another, a note of love, but given
that I now had the book, I did wonder if the couple had broken up,
parted ways, found new loves to recite poetry to at night. I was drawn
to Chrystos’ work and by that point, I had already begun researching the
poets and poems I was considering for their poems, if you will, in some
well lit library corner. In my first year of the doctoral course work, I
took a class in lesbian literature. In that class the professor, Dr.
Barbara DiBernard, asked us to read to
In Her I Am by Chrystos, a book of love poems, a book that I ordered used and in mine included an
Women Write Resistance. Some of the poems in Chrystos’
Not Vanishing astonished me. I felt while reading her work the visceral impact of her words, the way I’d read one of her poems while I studied on the couch on the mornings I did not teach, and feel myself pinned to the cushions, all of my breath gone, the room zeroed in on a line, a phrase, an image.
Judy Grahn also came to me that first year of Ph.D. school.
