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