Quote: Michelle Cliff + RIP

-- Copyright © Michelle Cliff, from "If I Could Write This in Fire I Would Write This in Fire," from Homegirls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983. All rights reserved.

(In memoriam to Michelle Cliff, who passed away on June 12, 2016. Born on November 2, 1946, in Kingston, Jamaica Cliff would go on to a long and important career as one of the major queer Jamaican-American and Caribbean-American novelists, short story writers, and essayists of her generation.

Michelle Cliff (1946-2016

Cliff's articulations of feminist and queer intersectionalities in relation to history and society played important roles in the development of Black Diasporic feminist thought and writing, and her ongoing experimental approach to her fiction, like her political engagement and ethical example offered models for all who have followed her. Her partner, the great poet Adrienne Rich, predeceased her in 2012.

Among my favorite of her works of fiction are her first book, Abeng, published in 1985 and which I first came across when I was in college--though not in a college class, but on a bookstore shelf--and the very playful and inventive The Store of a Million Items, from 1998. Her last book, the novel Into the Interior, appeared in 2010.)

Quote: Sarah Schulman

Sarah Schulman
(photo by
Monica Simoes)

"At first we [she and Jim Hubbard, at the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, which they co-founded in 1987, the same year as ACT UP started] showed artists who were experimental. That is to say, they experimented. "Experimental" meant that each artist singularly tried out their own eccentric idea, their own imaginative way, and then they looked at each others' discoveries. They learned how to be artists by making art, talking about art, looking at art, being with artists. Whether or not one went to graduate school was irrelevant (and still is) to whether or ont one was really an artist. But at some point around the height of AIDS/gentrification this shifted. Those true experimenters who needed to earn a living in the rapidly shifting gentrification economy were channeled by inflation into teaching jobs. The increasing number of MFA programs became the only way that artists could earn a living beyond waitressing or copyediting at night at law firms. MFA programs became workfare for writers, as rents skyrocketed, as arts funding--already so elite as to be culturally damaging--was practically eliminated. It was like the role of the artist in society had devolved from WPA to NEA to MFA. Their students started producing inside a now established genre called "experimental". It wasn't actually any longer experimental, but it was a fixed set of derivative paradigms, invented by their teachers--many of whom did not have MFAs." (p. 102)

***

"Of course now that the noose has tightened even further, civilian artists are systematically excluded from teaching, as having an MFA [or Ph.D., for poets] has become mandatory for hiring. Being a product of MFA acculturation is now more important in determining who will influence students than what that person has achieved artistically. So, the frame of information and impulse becomes even more narrow and irrelevant and its product even more banal." (p. 103)

***

"Despite the fact that these programs are homogenizing and corrupting and bad for the culture, I feel that when I am advising working-class or poor students with talent, I have to insist that they go to them. There is simply no other way of getting into the system. As damaging as these programs are when they codify or elevate ruling-class perspectives and middlebrow practitioners, they become the only hope for outsiders to have a chance to be let in. It's a conundrum. Hopefully a talented person can emerge from these programs without a highly distorted sense of their own importance, and if they come originally from the margins this is more likely. But as far as I can see, MFA programs have done nothing to break down the barrier that full-character plays with authorial universes (not performance art, vaudeville, or stand-up) and authentic lesbian protagonists face in the theatrical marketplace. So although they do help certain minority voices who have had the support and sophistication to access and survive the system, overall they reinforce the dominant cultural voice, the clubbiness and repetition and most importantly, the group mentality that is, itself, counterindicated for art making." (p. 108)

-- Copyright © Sarah Schulman, from The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012, pp. 102-3. All rights reserved.

Poem: Amy Lowell

I've asked the same question on this blog about her distant relative Robert Lowell (1917-1977), but does anyone read Amy Lowell (1874-1925) any more? In school or elsewhere? I recall having to, and neither liking or disliking her work. Returning to it long after childhood has not increased my enthusiasm, though it has helped me to appreciate her overall efforts more. She was from the same prominent Boston family that produced James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), the sometime-abolitionist, scholar and poet, and her brother, A. Lawrence Lowell (1856-1943), one of Harvard's major presidents, as well as a notorious anti-Semite and anti-gay bigot, yet unlike these male figures, she was not allowed any education beyond what she provided herself, which included copious reading and book collecting. With her wealth she was able to travel, live quite independently for most of her life, and challenge many conventions, including indulging her love of smoking cigars.

Amy Lowell was an early and consistent advocate for free verse, which few poets today think twice about, as well as of stylistic innovation in terms of form, particularly through her theorization of "polyphonic verse," which advocates for the use of prose lines and a range of styles within a single poem (do many poets today even know where this comes from?), but in the late 19th and early 20th century, she stood among the Modernist avant-garde. Her work also articulates an erotics of female desire, especially same-sexual desire, quite transparently in certain ways, yet veiled in others, as is clear in the poem below, the "Moon-white" body leaning beside the poem's speaker the unnamed actress Ada Dwyer Russell, with whom Lowell is thought to have had an extended relationship. (A Boston marriage, you could say, but I am unsure whether they lived together.) She also got under Ezra Pound's skin, to his mind hijacking the Imagist movement from him, although the school was big enough for both and whereas Pound approached his poems with a scalpel, Lowell employed a large house-painting brush with hers. "July Midnight" makes a good argument for why we should keep reading her work. Whether there'll be an Amy Lowell vogue is another matter altogether.

JULY MIDNIGHT

Fireflies flicker in the tops of trees,
Flicker in the lower branches,
Skim along the ground.
Over the moon-white lilies
Is a flashing and ceasing of small, lemon-green stars.
As you lean against me,
Moon-white,
The air all about you
Is slit, and pricked, and pointed with sparkles of lemon-green flame
Starting out of a background of vague, blue trees.

Copyright © Amy Lowell, from The Complete Poetics Works of Amy Lowell, with an introduction by Louis Untermeyer, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955. All rights reserved.

Remembering Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich at Northwestern, 2006 (Photos by Marion Hanlon)

Last night I started to see posts, first via email, then on Twitter, that poet, essayist and activist Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) had passed away, and Googling quickly confirmed this sad news. I immediately felt a sense of loss, as so many others did and expressed in multiple ways, the most common, at least on Twitter, through quotations of Rich's poetry and essays, which will be with us for time to come.

Adrienne Rich inspired generations of people; first as a young, incredibly talented female poet who in her senior year (1951) at Radcliffe College won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, meriting offhandedly sexist praise from the judge, W. H. Auden; then, by the early 1960s, as a woman writer who had moved away from the formal strictures of her early verse, while also increasingly expanding upon what was evident in her earliest published poems, a critique of the political, social and economic strictures on American women; then, by the late 1960s, through her active involvement in the anti-Vietnam War, Civil Rights, Women's Rights, and anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist movements; and then, in the early 1970s, through her increasingly powerful articulation of feminism and her coming out publicly as a lesbian, which produced her landmark books Diving into the Wreck (1973), for which she was co-awarded the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry (with Allen Ginsberg), an award she accepted not for herself but, with the other nominees, two queer women of color, Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, present on stage beside her, on behalf of all women, followed by her "Twenty-one Love Poems" (Effie's Press, 1976), which appeared first as a stand-alone text and quickly became a major work of lesbian and queer literature, and then in Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 (1978); then through her essays, such as "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," her published notebooks and other theoretical essays, her ongoing poetic oeuvre, and her public activism, particular on behalf of equality, her advocacy for women writers, writers of color, working-class and poor people, people battling American imperialism and neocolonialism; and always, because of her courage, her willingness to be herself, a woman, a Jewish woman, a lesbian, to criticize herself, lay bare her privileges, to risk calumny and condemnation because of her political stances, to be dismissed as a serious poet because of the same, to ally herself with those who had no privileges to offer, to speak truth to power, including in 1997 to a Democratic president who wanted to honor her with one of the country's highest honors but whose actions flew in the face of so much that she believed in.

I met Adrienne Rich several times over the years, including being introduced by another poet I admire so very deeply, Marilyn Hacker, but perhaps most special to me in this regard was having had the opportunity to offer my thoughts on her work with her present, at Northwestern, in 2006.  I later posted them on this blog: you can read them here. I also had the pleasure just this past quarter to teach Adrienne Rich's poetry and "Compulsory Heterosexuality" again, and look forward to doing so in the future. We have lost a major figure in our literature and culture, a guérillière, to use Monique Wittig's term, of the likes we might not see anytime soon.

And, in honor of her passing, here is one of her poems, Number XIII from "Twenty One Love Poems":



Copyright © Adrienne Rich, from Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977, W. W. Norton, 1978. All rights reserved.

Happy Women's History Month

March 1, 2012 marks the beginning of Women's History Month, and just as I believe on a daily basis if we are talking about and exploring and writing history, thinking about our society and how it functions and might improve, we cannot but focus on the history and contributions of women, without whom none of us would be here, and without whom this world would fall apart immediately.  In my LGBTQ class, one of the first documents we looked at was "The Woman Identified Woman," by RADICALESBIANS, formerly the Gay Lavender Menace, one of several groups that splintered off from the Gay Liberation Front.

Released on May Day (May 1), 1970 (and eschewing the parodic tone of Valerie Solanas's 1967 S.C.U.M. Manifesto while sacrificing none of that or similar documents' political acuity) and distributed to attendees of the National Organization for Women-sponsored Second Annual Conference to Unite Women, and then published in Come Out!'s 4th issue, it is very much an artifact of its time and moment, down to its rhetoric, but like similar documents it set the stage for countless theoretical, biopolitical and political, cultural and aesthetic interventions to follow. As it did for me when I first came across it, the text resounded for many of my students, across genders, and become of the documents that they circled back to in our in-class discussions and in their response papers. Its insights are ones, however, that I think still don't pervade the public consciousness, despite the many decades of LGBT and later queer (and queered, and as E. Patrick Johnson and others coined, "quare") studies.

Here, in tribute, are two quotes, the opening paragraph, and the closing.

What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society – perhaps then, but certainly later – cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with her self. She may not be fully conscious of the political implications of what for her began as personal necessity, but on some level she has not been able to accept the limitations and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society–the female role. The turmoil she experiences tends to induce guilt proportional to the degree to which she feels she is not meeting social expectations, and/or eventually drives her to question and analyze what the rest of her society more or less accepts. She is forced to evolve her own life pattern, often living much of her life alone, learning usually much earlier than her “straight” (heterosexual) sisters about the essential aloneness of life (which the myth of marriage obscures) and about the reality of illusions. To the extent that she cannot expel the heavy socialization that goes with being female, she can never truly find peace with herself. For she is caught somewhere between accepting society’s view of her – in which case she cannot accept herself – and coming to understand what this sexist society has done to her and why it is functional and necessary for it to do so. Those of us who work that through find ourselves on the other side of a tortuous journey through a night that may have been decades long. The perspective gained from that journey, the liberation of self, the inner peace, the real love of self and of all women, is something to be shared with all women – because we are all women.

And:

It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution. Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves. As we do this, we confirm in each other that through struggling, an incipient sense of pride and strength, the divisive barriers begin to melt, we feel this growing solidarity with our sisters. We see ourselves as prime, find our centers inside of ourselves. We find receding the sense of alienation, of being cut off, of being behind a locked window, of being unable to get out what we know is inside. We feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves. With that real self, with that consciousness, we begin a revolution to end the imposition of all coercive identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in human expression.

Copyright © RADICALESBIANS, 1970, 2011, from the Queer Rhetoric Project. All rights reserved.