figures" (136). In her 1993 study of the political uses and institutionalization of
lesbian poetry, Sagri Dhairyam elaborates on the poets’ participatory role in the creation
of communal lesbian identity: "[The lesbian] poet is not only the person who creates
a literary text, but overlaps with the person who reads, who participates in a ritual for
identity. . . . Poetry is an integral mode of willing communal identity in women’s
gatherings (Dhairyam, 1993, 47, 57).
Grahn herself has called poets the "map makers" of lesbian feminism,
"going out first and laying down the dimensions of the terrain and what the landscape
(and the future) could possibly look like" (Seajay, Part II, 61). Lorde makes a
similar point in her essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury": "[Poetry] lays the
foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been
before. . . . In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at
the possibility made real" (Lorde, 1977a, 38, 39). Grahn reports that "masses of
women" attended lesbian-feminist poetry readings in the early days of the movement,
and that "Fifteen years later . . . the movement still keeps one ear to the ground to
hear what else its poets may be telling." According to Grahn, "The leadership
exerted by Lesbian and feminist poets as the mass movement of women developed during the
1970s cannot be exaggerated" (Grahn, 1985, xviii, 71).
Grahn’s and Lorde’s assessments are more than mere self-aggrandizement.
Critics—from academic journals to feminist newspapers—attest to the importance
of lesbian-feminist poets in defining lesbian identity and lesbian community, that is, as
I have contended, in self-consciously constructing and politically deploying the identity
categories "lesbian" and "woman." Estella Casto, in her study of
Sexton, Rich, Lorde, and Broumas, concurs that feminist and lesbian poetry
"demonstrates how poetry can be a means of political agency" (17). In 1981, Jan
Clausen went so far as to call feminism—including, but not limited to, lesbian
feminism—"A Movement of Poets."
Contemporary Lesbian Identity Poetics:
A Brief Review of the (Scant) Literature
Like the work it sets out to describe, much criticism about lesbian literature—and
especially about poetry—has been centrally concerned with questions of definition,
identity, and community. This is poetics as a decidedly political pursuit, in which many
critics and poet-critics consider the stakes too high to speak of lesbian poetry or
fiction "dispassionately," solely in technical or aesthetic terms (Rich, 1983,
173). For some critics this takes the form of a preoccupation with defining the genre of
"lesbian poetry," much as lesbian poets concern themselves with reclaiming
lesbian identity and creating lesbian community. Nearly 200 studies of individual lesbian
poets that discuss the poet’s lesbian identity in some way were published in
nationally and internationally distributed periodicals between 1970 and 1990. However,
only a handful of writers have attempted to put forth a contemporary lesbian poetics that
transcends the study of a particular poet.
[. . .]
Rich’s statement, made at a Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, asserts
the importance of naming lesbian relationships between women in history, because
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored
in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made
difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an
inadequate or lying language—this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable
(Rich, 1976, 199, author’s italics).
Rich argues that it is the "lesbian" in every woman that is the creative
force, opposing this figurative creative "lesbian" to the "hack"
writer who is "the dutiful daughter of the fathers," the character whom all
women are socialized to become (Rich, 1976, 201). Inevitably, and perhaps purposely,
controversial, Rich’s deployment of the term "lesbian" provoked heated
debate about the source(s) of female creativity and the meaning of lesbian identity. Some
lesbians felt that using "lesbian" as a generic term robbed them of their
historical and political specificity (Rich, 1979, 202), that "lesbian writ large
essentialized and ahistoricized lesbian and female existence" (Farwell 67). Many
straight women felt left out by the equation of oppositional voice with "lesbian.
"Lesbian Imperative" (Ostriker, 1983, 121), an idea that Karen Alkaly-Gut took
(too) literally in Contemporary Review, where she asserted (with a straight face,
as it were), "Many women writing poetry today in America have come to the conclusion
that the only way they can write as women is to reject men and write as lesbians"
(209). . . .
Grahn is less concerned with the status of lesbian poets in the mainstream literary
world than she is with their importance to a lesbian audience and to each other. In an
interview with Kathryn Machan Aal published one year before The Highest Apple, Grahn
emphasized the value of poetry that "can be maximally used" (Aal, Part II, 61).
She described the way in which lesbian poetry readings "energize" poets and
audiences (Aal, Part II, 57), transforming the experience and relevance of poetry readings
as social institutions. Within this charged space, the unconventional content of
lesbian-feminist poetry challenges stereotypes of poetry, women, and sexuality.
In The Highest Apple, Grahn credits lesbian poetry with reclaiming "loaded,
stereotypic" language (Grahn, 1985, 70); providing "ethical guidelines"
(Grahn, 1985, 71); literally building a variety of communities to replace the "island
of centrality" that was Sappho’s Lesbos, "since we believe our work, and
act on it" (Grahn, 1985, 71); and saving lesbian lives, at least figuratively:
"More than once Lesbian has been kept from floundering on the rocks of alienation
from her own culture, her own center, by having access, at least, to Lesbian poetry. We
owe a great deal to poetry; two of our most important names, for instance: Lesbian and
Sapphic (Grahn, 1985, xxi). In Grahn’s schema, lesbian poets are accountable to and
benefit from the communities they help to create (Grahn, 1985, 56), including communities
of lesbian poets where "connections . . . are of vital importance to the growth of
our ideas" (Grahn, 1985, 57).
In The Highest Apple Grahn acknowledges her reliance on Mary Carruthers’ 1983
essay "The Re-Vision of the Muse," in which Carruthers draws a definition of
lesbian poetry from her readings of Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language, Lorde’s The
Black Unicorn, Grahn’s The Work of a Common Woman, and Olga Broumas’ Beginning
with O. Carruthers writes that "among them, these volumes articulate a
distinctive movement in American poetry. . . . I call this movement ‘Lesbian poetry,’
because the ‘naming and defining’ of this phrase is its central poetic preoccupation"
(Carruthers, 1983, 293). Carruthers views lesbian poets, of all the poetry movements of
the 1970s, as having "the moral passion of seer and prophet" (Carruthers, 1983,
299), which they bring to the task of establishing "a new civitas" (302)
through the reinvention of mythologies in the creation of a new lesbian epic (Carruthers,
1983, 300). (Similarly, Grahn considers "mythic realism" the operant mode of
most contemporary lesbian poetry [Grahn, 1985, 871]). Carruthers’ "new civitas"
is "predicated upon familiarity and likenesses, rather than oppositions"; it
is troubling "to the general public" in its "use of the lesbian bond to
signify that wholeness, health, and integrity which are minimized or negated by the
death-devoted sickness of male-inspired civilization" (Carruthers, 1983, 304). Both
in ‘The Re-Vision of the Muse" and her earlier essay "Imagining Women: Notes
Towards a Feminist Poetic" Carruthers opposes the anti-Romantic imagery and diction
of much lesbian love poetry to the physically "alienated,"
"confessional" style of earlier woman poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
from Garber, Linda. "Lesbian Identity Politics: Judy Grahn, Pat
Parker, and the Rise of Queer Theory." Diss. Stanford U, 1995. Copyright ? 1996 by
Linda Garber.