[T]he common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die … It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us. But such a common world can survive … only to the extent that it appears in public.
– Hannah Arendt1
The simple phrase, ‘there is only one world,’ is not an objective conclusion. It is performative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us. Faithful to this point, it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow from this simple declaration.
– Alain Badiou2
[T]he task was never one of retrenching from the radical analysis of the New Left; it was simply to go further.
– Robin Morgan3
More than one activist in the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) has observed the centrality of poetry in the feminist projects of the 1960s and 1970s. Historians Polly Joan and Andrea Chessman, having in 1978 assembled the most comprehensive guide to Women’s publishing in North America to date, proclaim: “poetry was the medium of the movement” (Guide to Women’s Publishing 3). Yet despite the aesthetic and political commitments linking Robin Morgan, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldúa, Irena Klepfisz, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Pat Parker, Judy Grahn, Honor Moore, June Jordan, Susan Griffin, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Audre Lorde, and many others, a feminist poetic community is more difficult to “locate” than it is with the other collectives addressed in this book. Black Mountain had an alternative college in North Carolina, CAM had the West Indian Student Centre in London, while the TRG’s combination of physical and discursive publics – the workshop and the Eternal Network – anchored their experiments in multi-authorship. It is too easily taken for granted that the existence of an accessible space is a precondition for collective experimentation. By contrast, women writers encountered the twin edifices of capital’s enclosure of the public sphere and an oppressive patriarchal system equally evident among left- and right-wing political and cultural factions. Audre Lorde aptly registers this acute sense of dislocation:
for the embattled
there is no place
that cannot be
home
nor is.
(“School Note” 25–9)
Many women found themselves excluded both from the official institutions of culture, as well as the counter-publics and alternative communities seeking to challenge the racist and classist policies of the nation state. Poetic groups like the Beats, BMC, the New York School, Black Arts, CAM, and countless others often echo the hypocrisy of the New Left’s disregard for female oppression.
Adrienne Rich makes the point adroitly: “[d]enied space in the universities, the scientific laboratories, the professions,” those affiliated with the Women’s Liberation Movement had to “devise [their] own networks” in which to theorize, practice, and enact their efforts (“Conditions” 214). Joan and Chessman record no fewer than seventy-three feminist periodicals and sixty-six presses operative from the late 1960s until the mid-1970s. Magazines like Rat, Speakout, The Second Wave, Moving Out, Aphra, Women: A Journal of Liberation, Sinister Wisdom, along with presses such as Daughters, Diana Press, Kelsey Street Press, Shameless Hussy, and the Women’s Press Collective disseminated a considerable body of work throughout the United States and Canada. By 1978 feminist small presses had collectively sold over one million books and pamphlets.4 Anthologies like No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women (1973), Rising Tides: Twentieth-Century American Women Poets (1973), and The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1550–1950 (1974) established a counter-tradition of writing that helped readers to redress literary history by challenging its legacies of gender exclusion. Nor was the poetry anthology separate from the WLM’s political work: Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), for instance, includes a large section devoted to “poetry as protest,” while two poets, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, edited the influential This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981). Moreover, a “how-to” compendium like Kirsten Ramstad and Susan Ronnie’s The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook (1975) indicates the degree to which poetic writing was linked to a broader cultural and political activism. An accessible and thoughtfully illustrated manual of resources for women looking to pursue various facets of the WLM, the book’s table of contents lists chapters such as “Work,” “Health,” “Education,” “Literature,” and “Law and Politics.” The sourcebook, its editors remark, “compile[s]” a working list of “women’s newspapers and magazines, printing presses and publishers, anti-rape centers, health clinics, art galleries, credit unions, childcare centers, research libraries, scholarly journals, schools, bookstores, karate studios, lobbying coalitions, divorce clinics, film cooperatives, theatre groups, bands, [and] therapy collectives” (vii). Health, politics, and culture converge within the discursive sphere the Sourcebook assembles. Turning to the chapter titled “Literature,” one encounters a conversation between Rich and Robin Morgan on the topic of poetry and community building, information about how to run an alternative press, along with brief critical studies of poets such as Susan Griffin, Judy Grahn, and Audre Lorde. The poetic, understood in this context, is carefully situated within communities of authors, editors, disseminators, and readers of books. Drawing from Grahn’s formative and influential work, Adrienne Rich describes her own poetry as the “making of connections,” the “drive / to connect” (“Power and Danger” 250; “Origins” 11–12).
Granted, the WLM was still very much a cosmopolitan movement, its main proponents and participants based in major cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Montreal. Yet compared to Black Mountain or CAM, groups whose work was anchored by a tangible site of collaboration, the WLM’s forms of solidarity echo the manifold structure of its publishing networks, magazines, and direct action protests. One should be cautious here, since there is a danger in setting up an inadvertently sexist and historically inaccurate binary opposition between supposedly male (centralized) and female (decentralized) tactics, conveniently concealed, as it were, within this ostensibly innocent discussion of place and space. In fact, countless authors and activists affiliated with the WLM echo Jo Freeman’s contention that “structurelessness” too can be “tyrann[ical].” The celebration of a leaderless, provisional, impermanent collective seemed only possible among those whose access to the public sphere went unquestioned. Instead, Women’s Liberation proliferates the ideal of unqualified, radical equality throughout very different feminist social structures and cultural locales. I will develop this line of critique momentarily, but for now let it suffice that WLM poetics unfolds within an expansive nexus of political formations.
A shortlist includes large, formal organizations like the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Women’s Political Action Caucus (WPAC), the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), and Women of All Red Nations (WARN) alongside comparatively flexible networks of “consciousness-raising” and direct-action groups such as WITCH, New York Radical Women (NYRW), the Redstockings, Bread and Roses, Cell 16, The Feminists, New York Radical Feminists (NYRF), and the Combahee River Collective (CRC). Of course, these various national, regional, and local activities reflect markedly different, often incompatible positions on a variety of questions. For instance, what forms of organization and tactics are needed? How do distinctions between private and public gender politics, work, and social experience? How should a feminist project address questions of race, class, sexual orientation, ageism, regionalism, and other forms of discrimination? And under what circumstances might Women’s Liberation forge alliances with other groups? One should always acknowledge from the outset that as a set of theories and practices the WLM comprises multiple discourses. While organizations like NOW sought constitutional equality for women in mainstream U.S. society through legislative reform, groups like NYRF and CRC insisted that the patriarchal foundation of society as such required radical structural change. Historians like Myra Marx Feree, Beth B. Hess, Alice Echols, and Barbara Ryan map largely persuasive distinctions between liberal, socialist, and radical feminist ideologies.5 Often, however, matters of practical organization made these conceptual boundaries unstable, while strict distinctions between socialist and radical feminists arguably conceal an important history of feminist-Marxist alliance.
The political orientation of WLM poets and the organizational model of the small press network undoubtedly reflect the less bureaucratic and more collectivist-minded groups associated with consciousness raising. Grahn was a member of Gay Women’s Liberation and helped to establish A Woman’s Place and the Women’s Press Collective, Morgan co-founded WITCH and NYRW, while Audre Lorde was a member of the CRC. Ambivalence was a constant, however. Musing on a reformist organization like NOW, Morgan observes: “an ecumenical view (which I hold on alternate Tuesdays and Fridays) would see that such an organization … reaches a certain constituency that is never going to be reached by, say, a group called WITCH … On certain Mondays and Thursdays,” however, Morgan “fear[s] for the women’s movement’s falling into precisely the same trap as did our foremothers, the suffragists: creating a bourgeois feminist movement that never quite dared enough, never questioned enough, never really reached out beyond its own class and race” (Sisterhood xxii). In her prefatory remarks to This Bridge Called My Back, Moraga reveals that “the deepest political tragedy I have experienced is how with such grace, such blind faith, this commitment to women in the feminist movement grew to be exclusive and reactionary” (Anzaldúa and Moraga xiv). “The lesbian separatist utopia? No thank you,” she remarks. “I want a movement that helps me make some sense of the trip from Watertown to Roxbury, from white to Black” (xiii–xiv). Jo Carrillo conveys similar frustration with attempts at inclusion by middle-class, white feminists registering symbolic gestures of solidarity only:
Our white sisters
radical friends
love to own pictures of us
sitting at a factory machine
wielding a machete
in our bright bandanas
holding brown yellow black red children
reading books from literacy campaigns
holding machine guns bayonets bombs knives
Our white sisters
radical friends
again.
…
We’re not as happy as we look
on
their
wall.
(“And When You Leave,” 1–13, 39–42)
Writing in Anzaldúa and Moraga’s anthology, Carrillo asserts that as “committed feminists[,] we are challenging white feminists to be accountable for their racism because at the base we still want to believe that they really want freedom for all of us” (“And When You Leave” 62). The challenge is a persistent one: namely, how to generate universal solidarity, on the one hand, and properly reflect and respect cultural difference, on the other. Rachel Blau DuPlessis puts the question bluntly: how do we choose between or possibly reconcile a feminism of “sameness/equality” and a “feminism of difference”?6
In bringing together the work of Rich, Lorde, Morgan, Grahn, Moraga, Anzaldúa, and others – indeed, poets drawn from socio-economically diverse Latina, African American, and white feminist traditions – one risks eliding key critical differences in regional and social location. Yet nor should one ignore the material-feminist approach informing their common practice. Rich, for instance, condemns a tendency in orthodox Marxism to promote a “sexless, raceless proletariat,” but she also insists that feminism “must be a socialist movement, must be an anti-racist, anti-imperialist movement” (“Notes” 219, 225). She refuses to accept the liberal solution that women need simply join the existing public sphere, nor would she espouse the classical individualist tradition from which liberalism arises. Likewise, Audre Lorde’s “Notes from a Trip to Russia” echoes the CRC’s socialist mandate, “that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy” (3). The poets of the Women’s Liberation Movement gradually adopted a material-feminist approach; if oppression is a manifold system irreducible to gender, race, or sexual orientation alone, then, in all of these instances of exclusion simultaneously, one must engage with the economic and social specificity of women’s different experiences.
Morgan remarks that the movement could “exist where three or four friends or neighbors decide to meet … It also exists in the cells of women’s jails, on the welfare lines, in the supermarket, the factory, the convent, the farm, the maternity ward, the street corner” (Sisterhood xxxvi). By this admittedly romanticized account, one might be tempted to describe the diverse networks of feminist activism as endorsing a nomadic, contingent, permanently impermanent collective, making it a poster child for the post-war era’s ostensible incredulity towards modernity’s master narratives. Yet the semi-provisional character of these networks is rather a condition of survival amid restricted resources and exclusion from existing institutions; one should resist a facile celebration of dispossession as if it were freedom. That which permits a heterogeneous movement such as Women’s Liberation to proliferate in such radically different social, cultural, and economic locales throughout the West was and is an emancipatory ideal implemented through reproducible democratizing structures. Publications could fold, resources disappear, and groups disband, but there was always the possibility of remobilization precisely because the WLM applied an unapologetically totalizing set of prescriptions designed to achieve radical emancipation for any subject whosoever.
This is, of course, a controversial claim, because it would seem to elide the philosophies of difference, alterity, otherness, and plurality that constitute the major challenges to the second-wave’s feminism of “equality/sameness.” Yet, in opposing universalist conceptions of womanhood, I worry that this line of critique vitiates one the movement’s most crucial contributions to political thought and activism. Consider, briefly, the following passage from Feminists member Pamela Kearon’s “Power as a Function of the Group”:
the group creates its own reality and its own truth. Knowing that reality is whatever is agreed upon by society, the group creates its own society and thereby its own power. Power is the organization of many wills with a common purpose and a common interpretation. The group through its many individuals working together creates an interpretation and then stands collectively behind it. (109)
Simply put, a movement worthy of the name must commit itself to a prescriptive political truth. One need not insist that this truth is found in human nature, but simply to state it, commit oneself to it, and encourage others to mobilize behind it. Yet the axiom of emancipation that Kearon and others advance is not the abstract universal of liberal humanism precisely because it makes no pretence at being an essential principle of human nature. Barbara Smith remarks similarly: “Feminism is the political theory and practice to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, physically challenged women, lesbians, old women, as well as white economically privileged heterosexual women. Anything less than this is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement” (qtd. in Anzaldúa and Moraga, This Bridge 61). One might think of such a politics as the formulation of truths from the ground up rather than from the top down. A proponent of such a political truth recognizes that it is socially produced, and must negotiate its implementation within radically different situations, under different external pressures, and so on. And while “wills with a common purpose” may appear to anticipate Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s definition of the multitude as “singularities” that “act in common,” absent is a celebratory rhetoric of the transitory, impermanent, and varied collectivity. The event of the group’s formation becomes the ground upon which a society, a culture, a writing is formulated, fought for, and maintained through militant stewardship and protection.
Whether it is radical feminism’s indictment of the New Left, or African American feminism’s race and class critique of radical feminist thought, the project is to pursue emancipation towards its fullest expression. Lorde remarks frequently that such a politics requires of human beings a radical openness. A writing cannot only concern the subject speaking; it must concern the “planet that we share” and the “interests of our common future” (“Above the Wind” 62; my italics). One hears this word with remarkable frequency: the preservation of a “common future,” the “building of a common world,” the “dream of a common language,” the “work of common women,” and the words of a poem distributed across the page, “dancing with each other in common.”7
I am a welder.
Not an alchemist.
I am interested in the blend
of common elements to make
a common thing.
(Moraga, “The Welder” 1–5)
Arguably no other concept is more important to the poets of the WLM (and more misunderstood) than the common. Many critics challenge a universalizing tendency in radical feminist art and politics, an issue I will return to throughout this chapter, but it suffices to say at this point that a poetics of the common, as writers like Rich, Lorde, Anzaldúa, and Grahn understood this principle of thought and action, had to do with the formation of a shared cultural and social space rather than a universal female identity.
To this end, three general theses guide this chapter: first, however paradoxical, it is a radically singular conception of equality that allowed feminist practices to spread in such different communities throughout North America. Choosing between a feminism of difference and a feminism of sameness obscures this crucial fact. Second, the WLM was more Marxist than New Left Marxism. I agree with scholars like Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, who argue that sexism and racism are irreducible to class struggle; one should, therefore, militantly guard against the subordination of race and gender to class. Yet feminist interventions into Marxist thought generate renewed tactics of opposition to patriarchy and capitalism that radical feminists, and especially its poets, identify as a system of manifold oppressions. At the present moment, roughly ten years into the third millennium, is it not surprising that a turn in theory to the “commons” – and to forms of distributed creativity tasked with defending it from state authority and private enclosure – ignores the formative contributions of feminist thought to these debates? A host of theorists formulating a discourse on the commons (a list that includes Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Paolo Virno, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou)8 choose to root such a project in the largely male-driven Autonomist and post-Workerist traditions with no mention at all of the WLM. The task at hand is not a matter of asking how feminist thought conforms to Marxism, but rather to ask how radical feminism reinvents Marxism as a gender-alert form of political practice and social existence. Faced with the total subsumption of capital saturating every aspect of contemporary life, radical feminism responds in kind: we must saturate contemporary life with the very principle of feminist liberation. Distilling the “communist hypothesis” to its skeletal core, subordination is not inevitable, and different forms of collectivity are possible, namely, organizations based on the “free association of producers.” The task, as expressed by one contemporary thinker, is to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in another mode, to help it emerge within new forms of political experience” (Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis” 35).9
Third, nowhere is this synthesis of Marxist-feminist practice more evident than in a poetics of the WLM focused on the concept of the “common.” Here, I have in mind Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language, Judy Grahn’s The Work of a Common Woman, Lorde’s Between Our Selves, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Robin Morgan’s Monster: Poems and her collaborative writing experiments with members of WITCH. But, more to the point, I mean these works understood within the small press networks, political formations, and resource centres to which a poetics of protest was intimately allied. Moreover, a theory of the common emerges in key essays, for instance, Rich’s “Conditions for Work” and “Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman,” Grahn’s Really Reading Gertrude Stein, Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” and Morgan’s Going Too Far.
Two interlocking conceptions of the common emerge from their poetry and poetics: the first is a radically materialist idea of the world (Arendt: “what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die”). The second meaning is the common as social regime, denoting those actions taken in defence of a radically accessible, shared world. Despite temptations to read a claim for the “common world of women” out of context as validation of female separatism, a poet such as Rich distrusts such exceptionalism. The purpose of naming a group of people (women, Arabs, immigrants) is not to make a case for their exceptional status, but rather to unwork their externally imposed state of exception by defending their access to the common. The claim here is not “we are all the same”; the claim is “we share the same world.” Thus, the common modifies, but it does not replace, philosophies of alterity, otherness, multiculturalism, and pluralism, whose proponents worked diligently to critique the white, male, and Western notion of subjectivity claiming universal status on behalf of everyone else. This logic need not carry out the erasure of racial, sexual, or cultural difference, but rather the common as a social practice works to create a world without material and ideological walls barring entry to the innumerably different subjects and groups that occupy the common world. To think the common, then, one must repudiate the binaric choice between sameness and difference. Finally, growing out of this synthesis of material-feminist politics and cultural work a demonstrable shift in lyric writing takes place. One might call this a poetic of the common. This tendency is most pronounced in the work of Rich, Grahn, Lorde, Anzaldúa, and Morgan, but one could also include the work of Irena Klepfisz, Cherríe Moraga, June Jordan, Anne Waldman, and several others. Much of the remaining sections of this chapter are devoted to elaborations of this concept as it materialized in various sites of WLM cultural production; let it suffice for now that the democratizing structures of feminist political action manifest themselves as the structuring principles of poetic form.
Jo Freeman first delivered her influential essay, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” as a speech to the Southern Female Rights Union at an event in Beulah, Mississippi, in May 1970. The text was later published in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Second Wave, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Agitprop, Ms., and Radical Feminism. Freeman’s claim is poignant: in opposition to rigid state institutions, the New Left had valorized “leaderless, structureless” group formations (285). I have argued that this binary opposition pitting the rigid structure of society (gessellschaft) against a romanticized notion of community (gemeinschaft) produces an untenable and reductionist oppositional logic. Community without structure, as this imperative materialized in the post-war era’s hippie culture for instance, was admittedly an understandable counterbalance to an age dominated by total war, totalitarian regimes, and the onset of the Cold War’s inflexible ideologies. Structurelessness, however, is an organizational impossibility, and when one perpetuates the myth that groups can operate according to no set of rules or regulating practices, it becomes a “way of masking power” (286). (Note that one could apply the very same logic to the structure of poems; from Olson and Levertov to Rich and Lorde, “open form” does not mean a structureless writing, but instead a practice that foregrounds the “relations between things,” between the elements that compose in and as a field of action.) A genuinely democratizing organization must instead work to make its own structure recognizable: “the rules of decision-making must be open and available, and this can happen only if they are formalized” (287).
Several WLM activists have sought to formulate strategies of consciousness raising – among them, Kathie Sarachild, Jo Freeman, Irene Peslikis, Pamela Allen, and members of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU).10 Sarachild’s “A Program for Feminist ‘Consciousness Raising’” was prepared for the First National Women’s Liberation Conference in late November 1968 in Chicago. Like Freeman, she outlines a program striking for its attention to basic axioms and tactics that enable open group participation. The following is a condensed version of the manifesto:
I. The “bitch session” cell group
A. Ongoing consciousness expansion
B. Class forms of resisting consciousness
C. Recognizing the survival reasons for resisting consciousness
D. “Starting to Stop”
E. Understanding and developing radical feminist theory
F. Consciousness-raiser (organizer) training
II. Consciousness-raising Actions
A. Zap Actions
B. Consciousness programs
C. Utilizing the mass media
III. Organizing
A. Helping new people start groups
B. Intra-group communication and actions
(79–80)
This organizing technique attracted ridicule from men within the New Left. Of course, when Chinese radicals used a comparable method, Speak Pains to Recall Pains, it was, as Morgan observes, “right-on revolutionary”; when women employed this tactic, “it was ‘group therapy’ or a ‘hen party’” (Sisterhood xxiii). Notably, personal testimony marks only the very beginning of the process, such that by 1 (A) of the expanded program, participants move from testimony to group interaction, and then to the naming of common oppression. “There is only collective action,” Carol Hanisch claims, “for a collective solution” (“The Personal Is Political” 76). The sessions are used to create resources (e.g., newspapers, posters, films, etc.), organize events and protest actions, and develop communication strategies for engaging (often hostile) mass media. Several activists rightly object that consciousness raising has its limits. Group discussion is only meaningful if it leads to concrete political action, institutional changes, and so forth; yet planning these types of actions composed an important part of this process. Consciousness-raising sessions involved creating the resources and conditions for interested parties to start new groups. In this regard, radical feminists build something akin to the TRG and Fluxus’s Eternal Network, creating a common conceptual model to be freely appropriated and adapted by other feminist groups.
Pamela Allen describes a similar procedure in “Free Space,” in which participants engage in a four-part process of “opening up,” “sharing,” “analysing,” and “abstracting.” The first phase is meant in two interrelated senses: opening up as personal testimony and as the social space needed for communal participation. The second phase, sharing, is akin to “building a collage of similar experiences” (275). The linked process of opening up and sharing has less to do with its cathartic value than with exposing a situation of common discrimination. By analysing these conditions, the group develops concepts meant “to define not only the why’s and how’s of our oppression,” but also “ways of fighting that oppression” (276). Activism synthesizes theory and practice: just as concrete experience must anchor all theory and analysis, understanding the systems of power that shape everyday experience requires abstract critique. Like Freeman, Allen explains that since “we are a group that believes that there is always a structure,” the abstraction of a group’s methods and forms of organization foregrounds the power dynamic that shapes its approach to collective action.
The consciousness-raising models advanced by Freeman, Sarachild, and Allen afford a sample of comparable strategies evident in groups as diverse as the Red Stockings and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, for whom consciousness raising constituted an integral intersubjective strategy for naming objective conditions of dispossession. Despite ideological differences among many of these consciousness-raising groups, an attempt is evident among them to formalize a process of open, egalitarian decision making. This commitment to structural and organizational scrutiny was less prevalent among the male-dominated New Left. Sarachild’s program (and numerous like it) provides an obvious practical solution: its flexible and adaptable structure can materialize and rematerialize anywhere the collective energies are present to put such action into practice. It bears repeating, feminist action proliferates rhizomatically (to use Deleuze’s term) only because it commits itself to a singular political precept. Indeed, what enables the WLM’s network logic – its emphasis on distributed creativity and group autonomy – is an unabashedly intransigent commitment to unqualified equality one should not shy from calling absolute.
One thing I know: There is no atom that is not political[.]
– Robin Morgan11
Robin Morgan’s “Goodbye To All That” appeared in the first issue of Rat in January 1970. Its publication, together with the first seizure of a male-run leftist newspaper, marked a crucial moment. Of course, Morgan was not the first feminist activist to proclaim a break with the New Left, but the concision and elegant delivery of her tract quickly popularized a position held by numerous proponents of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Morgan records the unsuccessful efforts by the leftist media to mute its far-reaching critical reference;12 soon after its publication, a feminist collective in San Diego adopted “Goodbye To All That” as the title of their newspaper, while numerous other women’s groups and gay organizations acknowledged its influence. Morgan’s indictment is particularly striking in that her denunciation moves much further than the familiar catalogue of outrageously sexist claims by New Left leaders. It was not simply that a few sexist men happened to occupy positions of power within an otherwise egalitarian movement; rather, the very form of leftist organization was structured on a model of exclusion: “[a] genuine Left doesn’t consider anyone’s suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom (and functioning as objectified prizes or ‘coin’ as well). Goodbye to all that” (123). It was likely the comparison of leftist organizations to the capitalist mode of production that earned Morgan more than one death threat.13 One should also take pause at her poetic sensibility, her knack for just the right word: “goodbye.” Although radical feminist groups often employed tactics of direct action and active confrontation, the value of withholding one’s participation in struggle was never more evidently powerful than when a significant portion of the Left up and left.
When “Goodbye To All That” appeared in print, below her byline, Morgan identified herself as a member of WITCH. The Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell first congregated in the autumn of 1968 in New York. Robin Morgan, Florika, Peggy Dobbins, Jo Freeman, and Naomi Jaffe (later a member of the Weather Underground) rank among its initial participants. WITCH “covens” staged public actions, or “hexes,” blending elements of guerilla theatre and poetry with political protest. Yet their goal was expansion. On Mother’s Day one WITCH collective became Women Infuriated at Taking Care of Hoodlums. Amid the tedium of corporate office work, provisional communities formed Women Indentured to Traveler’s Corporate Hell and Women Incensed at Telephone Company Harassment. There was also Women’s Independent Taxpayers, Consumers, and Homemakers; Women Interested in Toppling Consumption Holidays; and, in the case of Morgan’s byline for Rat, Women Inspired to Commit Herstory. Covens spread throughout the country, and, in so doing, sought to multiply their “insouciance, theatricality, humor, and activism” (“WITCH” 538). In fact, the modular structure of WITCH reflects a central characteristic of the WLM in general: it was neither a rigid organization, nor did it suffer from what Freeman would later dub “the tyranny of structurelessness.” The viral quality of WITCH – its capacity to modify and adapt as specific actions and political situations required it to – proved a valuable tactic for feminist authors and organizers. A simple name and a flexible organizational model facilitated the dispersal and reconstitution of like-minded groups committed to the movement. Akin to consciousness-raising techniques, a structured process paradoxically facilitates spontaneous action.
For audiences today, references to witchcraft are more likely to conjure images of Harry Potter, All Hallows’ Eve, and mainstream culture’s habitual satire of Wiccans than one of the hundreds of thousands of women tortured and executed in Europe and North America over a period of several hundred years. Of course, humour is a strategy used to cope with trauma and to undermine the authority of official cultures; one need not look far into Jewish and African American comedy to find racist symbols repurposed and deflated. Yet the ease with which this symbol is absorbed into popular culture with little satiric reference to an original context of exploitation is telling. For the general public in 1960s America, the term would have also resonated poignantly with McCarthyism, and the mass hysteria of 1950s communist “witchhunts.” Freeman, Morgan, and other members of WITCH sought to detourn both of these images. That is, as “agitators and as targets” (543), witches analogize the position women had to take up in radical politics, flanked on both sides by American conservatism and New Left hypocrisies. The ironic choice of leftist activists to appropriate the term “witch hunt” would not have been lost on WLM members. The reclamation of this cultural symbol comments on both the conservative traditions and institutions that vilify independent women, and the failure of the male Left to register the historical associations of the term with female oppression.
One WITCH collective in Washington, DC, targeted the United Fruit Company’s oppressive treatment of Third World employees abroad and secretaries at home. Groups in Chicago pelted the University of Chicago Sociology Department with hair and nail clippings for firing a radical feminist professor, while various covens routinely disrupted bridal fairs across the country.14 But perhaps the most infamous demonstration took place at the 1968 Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, where members crowned a live sheep. Recollecting years later, Morgan surmised that many of their strategies still “identified politically with the confrontational tactics of the male Left and stylistically with the clownish proto-anarchism of such groups as the Yippies” (Going Too Far 72). There were other missteps. At one bridal fair, for instance, a coven circulated stickers that read: “Confront the Whore-makers at the Bridal Fair.” Members of WITCH had used the slogan as a pun on the well-known anti-war message “Confront the Warmakers,” but many simply interpreted it as the “pillorying of women” (74). Morgan admits that the group erroneously assumed that the general public would recognize that their critique was directed at systemic forms of sexism.
Morgan’s own acknowledgment of the group’s mistakes has arguably led critics to over-exaggerate these shortcomings. For instance, in Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties, Lauri Umansky objects that WITCH “decr[ies] motherhood as a patriarchal ruse” (96). Yet the group had not meant to denigrate motherhood as such, but rather the patriarchal institutions that render maternal commitment and conventional gender roles as obligatory social norms. In fact, while WITCH might have been clearer on this point at bridal fairs and other demonstrations, the passage Umansky has in mind appears in “Mother’s Day Incantation”: “Become a liberated mother / a woman, not a ‘mom’” (550; my italics). A parody of Hallmark (“Hell-mark”) cards, the text was written by Women Interested in Toppling Consumption Holidays. Far from denouncing motherhood, a “liberated mother,” according to WITCH, rejects the commercial exploitation of the mother-child relationship. Likewise, in Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the Vietnam Era, Michael Bibby points to a WITCH poem targeting the incarceration of several female protesters at New Haven’s Niantic state prison in 1969: “women as represented in the poem appear classless and raceless even though the prisoners of Niantic were Black Panthers. What ultimately links the oppressed,” Bibby explains, “is biological gender; the victims of oppression are female, and by implication, oppressors are male” (96). It is no doubt true that many white feminists associated with the WLM subordinated race and class to a universalizing definition of “sisterhood,” yet here are the final lines of the poem’s opening verse paragraph:
All 6 are black.
All 6 are Panthers.
All 6 are sisters.
(“Pass the Word, Sister” 8–10)
Questions of race figure prominently in the poem from the very beginning. What is more, WITCH members point out that since activist Rose Smith had given birth in Niantic prison, the incarcerated also includes a newborn baby (a gesture fully recognizing motherhood):
Children oppressed:
on welfare, in orphanages,
in schools, in foster homes;
by poverty, by routine,
by racism, by male supremacy.
Therefore,
WITCH curses the State
And declares it unfit.
(52–9)
WITCH characterizes patriarchy as a multifaceted system of sexism, racism, and economic disenfranchisement. Certainly the concept of sisterhood that Morgan advocates runs the risk of privileging gender, but we should read these decisions in context, since this tendency is in large proportion a response to the New Left’s subordination of gender to class and race issues. White radical feminist groups indeed deserve criticism if they express a coalitional politics as a mere symbolic gesture; however, the implied distinction between cultural (symbolic) production and structural-economic critique deserves further consideration.
The term “cultural feminism” was first proposed by members of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union to name an emerging schism in the WLM: between those celebrating femaleness on the one hand, and those engaged in analysis of the economic factors oppressing women on the other. Alice Echols extends this analysis, arguing that by 1975, “with the rise of cultural feminism,” the creation of “a female counterculture” replaces the central goal of opposing “male supremacy” (Daring to Be Bad 5). Echols is correct – and her book is excellent – but the term “cultural feminism” is an unfortunate one, since it would seem to implicate all cultural production in the turn from a political project bent on ending economic dispossession to a supposedly genteel culture of “lifestyle” preferences. For poets like Rich, Grahn, Lorde, Anzaldúa, and Morgan, questions of culture and class are intimately connected. Rich proclaims: “if we care about the imagination, we will care about economic justice” (“Arts” 165). For Morgan’s part, she does not mince words indicting the underlying “classist” and “elitist” assumptions that denigrations of art invariably imply: “I think the notion that culture is irrelevant basically … assumes out of guilt, and I must say stupidity, that poor people don’t care about art, therefore it is counterrevolutionary to like art to be an artist – unless, of course, it’s socialist realist art” (“Poetry and Women’s Culture” 109). Instead, Morgan and her collaborators insist that a feminist intervention must take place simultaneously in economic and cultural spheres.
Attention to the work of the Guerilla Girls and the Chicano ASCO make clear WITCH’s considerable influence on feminist street theatre and performance art. And while recognition finds its way into histories of performance,15 the revisionist texts of WITCH play an important if rarely acknowledged role in advancing a highly politicized appropriative literature akin to Fluxus, conceptual, and situationist poetics. I mention at several stages in this book that such tactics emerged – often independently of one another – as central features of Cold War–era poetic and cultural movements throughout the West. The situationist practices of détournement, dérive, and psychogeography spring readily to mind.16 Given the present study, one should not overlook CAM’s signature repurposing of “Standard English,” a hallmark of Caribbean, Black British, and African Canadian and American verse. Looking ahead to the TRG, a litany of similar practices of creative misprision, parodic translation, and forms of appropriation colour their work, as well as that of Fluxus, pop art, conceptualism, and concrete and sound poetry. Many of these appropriative tactics evolve from avant-garde traditions, yet consider that similar approaches to language and art may be found in leftist poetry and culture in America dating to the slave song, The Little Red Songbook, and the work songs of Woody Guthrie, Langston Hughes, and the Harlem Renaissance.17 Similar tactics were also found in the militant activism of the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, post-Stonewall gay activism, and the Black Arts Movement.18 For Morgan and others, poetic discourse must insurrect, transform, and permeate everyday language.
The group’s work synthesizes the poem with the pamphlet, the chant, and the open letter. Circulated at rallies, consciousness-raising meetings, and through small-press networks, these collaboratively written “non-poem non-letters” (Morgan, “Letter” 32) were dispersed through the channels of the WLM. And while such a gesture evokes the conflation of art and everyday life, members of WITCH insist that “everyday” should never imply “neutral,” as the most prosaic and banal communications often express the subtly internalized ideologies of gender oppression. In a song lyric, for instance, playing on a jukebox –
To be sung to the tune of “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody”
A pretty girl is a commodity
With stock to buy and sell.
When the market is high,
Count up your shares
In what she wears
That pay you dividends.
A pretty girl in this society
Is judged by looks alone.
What you see on her face
Is often the waste
Of chemicals developed for the war.
(1–11)
This playful yet invective revision of Irving Berlin’s popular song is typical of many parodies sung at rallies.19 Resonating with the TRG’s playful homophonic translations of Catullus and other canonical texts, members of WITCH were more likely to target the artefacts of mass culture, given its increasingly expansive reach and particularly formative influence on young people. Moreover, the little magazines and anthologies of the WLM frequently challenged conventional approaches to canonicity and aesthetic criteria by integrating radically different writing communities. Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful, for instance, collects the work of established poets such as Sylvia Plath alongside this offering from an anonymous seven-year-old:
A hen
is useful to men.
She lays eggs
Between her legs.
(“Anonymous Poem” 504)
In The Art of Protest, T.V. Reed draws a distinction between “women’s movement poetry” and the “feminist poetry movement.” Whereas the former privileges the movement’s political concerns over aesthetics, with the latter “poetry comes first and the central concern is to establish a new kind of poetry” (95). Although Reed admits the distinction is “partly artificial,” such a categorical division would seem typical of the formalism that so many feminist poets sought to challenge by fusing art and politics.
Like their appropriations of popular ballads, WITCH frequently conflates the poem with the political tract. Cited earlier, “Pass the Word, Sister” documents the struggles of fourteen members of the Black Panthers detained at Niantic prison in 1969. Five of the members were women, of whom two were pregnant, one giving birth in prison:
How does New Haven’s Niantic State
Woman’s Farm treat women
in confinement?
They are:
isolated form other prisoners;
denied sleep by the continual noise
of walkie-talkies
and constant bright lights;
denied their constitutional right
to prepare their case;
denied their legal right
to choice of counsel …[.]
(18–29)
Anticipating the “drive to connect” in the work of Rich and Grahn, such conditions of incarceration frequently symbolize the separation and desired unification of white middle- and working-class women, minorities in the West, and women in the Global South:
We women are:
In jail at Niantic
In the mud of vietnam
In the slums of the cities
In the ghetto-sinks of suburbia
at the typewriters
of the corporations
at the mimeograph machines
of the Left[.]
(65–73)
To this end, the text combines the declarative axioms of the manifesto with the liberating versification of open form practice. And like their song parodies, the group’s techniques of appropriation expose the gender bias of seemingly neutral language:
of shutting within an enclosure;
the act of imprisoning.
2. The state of being restrained
or obliged to stay indoors.
3. A woman’s lying-in;
childbirth. – Standard College Dictionary[.]
(11–17)
Taken in isolation, the poem might be interpreted to mean that childbirth makes a prison of the female body. One should take note of the “speaker,” however; the portable dictionary, with its codification of meanings uncluttered by historical usage, still appears to its readers as the reliable narrator of a culture’s language (every recorded instance in the OED depicts the mother as the sentence’s object).20 Language as an environment can be a space of interaction and open exchange; it can also be a jail cell and a tool for repression. The gesture here is not to replace direct action with critique of culture as such, but rather to expose how a logic of containment and enclosure operates in the cultural as well as the socio-economic sphere, and usually in concert. Recalling the function of the consciousness-raising session, “Pass the Word” attempts to open up a space in language that can only be achieved through the occupation and dismantling of those discursive barriers that thwart community building.
It is within these networks of political struggle that WITCH’s challenge to the art object’s aesthetic autonomy should be understood. In publishing “Goodbye to All That” in the pages of Rat, members of WITCH had usurped the Left’s “mimeograph machines.” Yet the same was beginning to happen to poetic language as such. In “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision,” Adrienne Rich outlines one aspect of a feminist poetics as the “act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (11). In evoking the poet as (re-)visionary, the gesture is not a mythologizing one, but precisely the opposite: to confront and denaturalize the ostensible timelessness of a patriarchal past and present. Such a method is more than a “chapter” in feminist cultural history; it is a tactic of survival for navigating the immanent terrain of an inherited language: “until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves” (11). Rich’s metaphor is carefully chosen. Naming the world “afresh” is, indeed, the work of literature, but this act takes place within a system of patriarchy-capital whose total subsumption saturates language as such. WITCH constitutes an instance of counter-response, in which the role of art should be an equally totalizing project to proliferate and infuse culture, ideology, and language with the principles of common emancipation.
We need to begin changing the questions. To become less afraid to ask the still-unanswered questions posed by Marxism, socialism and communism. Not to interrogate old, corrupt hierarchical systems but to ask anew, for our own time: What constitutes ownership? What is work? … How can we move from a production system in which human labor is merely a disposable means to a process that depends on and expands connective relationships?
– Adrienne Rich21
Decades before the commons became a fashionable object of study for post-autonomist Marxists, Continental philosophers, and legal scholars, WLM poets anticipate what Slavoj Žižek calls the “new forms of apartheid” dividing the excluded from the included (First as Tragedy 91). WITCH names this logic of enclosure the material as well as the ideological-discursive “containments” that slowly erode the public spaces, cultural resources, and means of assembly that facilitate democratic action. A history of the commons cannot be written without the crucial intervention of feminist activism and its poetics.
Critics of Adrienne Rich’s critical and creative work during the 1970s and 1980s typically emphasize the following ideological shift: what begins as a tendency to essentialize womanhood in collections like Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 (1978) and non-fiction studies like Of Woman Born (1976) gradually gives way to collections exhibiting a conscious awareness of race, gender, and class diversity in Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988 (1989) and essays such as “Notes Toward a Politics of Location” (1984). Jan Montefiore, for instance, insists that Rich’s formative texts of the early 1970s seek to liberate a female literary tradition from patriarchal models by documenting a common tradition of women’s writing, but, in so doing, she invariably “subsume[s] all particular histories” into a single “representative fable” (Feminism and Poetry 58). By the outset of the 1980s, Montefiore continues, Rich’s work demonstrates a “much-needed corrective to the possible essentialism implied in the myth of a timeless female world” (89). We are told that difference replaces similitude; plurality replaces commonality.
Yet an important question arises: what does Rich mean by “common”? And what does the term mean for others, like Judy Grahn, Robin Morgan, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa? In Rich’s case, is the dream of a common language the tower of Babel re-erected? Does the idea of a “common woman” invoke a fixed, homogenous category of female identity? Although texts such as “Notes Toward a Politics of Location” (1984) and “Blood, Bread, and Poetry” (1984) have since become the touchstones framing critics’ assessments of Rich’s poetic practice over several decades of prodigious work, it is striking that other essays, composed during the mid-1970s, rarely receive mention. In particular, “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women” (1976) and “Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman” (1977) contextualize the poetry of this period, yet these essays also develop a very precise concept of the “common” – one that will persist as a consistent feature of Rich’s writing for the next three decades (in texts like “Defying the Space that Separates” [1996], “Arts of the Possible” [1997], and “Poetry and the Public Sphere” [1997]). The titles of her earliest papers alone are evocative: the “common,” for Rich, is carefully and inextricably linked to “work.” Indeed, when Rich evokes the term “common,” she has in mind a way of working together, such that work names the project of “building” the shared resources of “a common world” (“Conditions” 205).
The term “commons” in contemporary usage can refer to natural resources, public spaces, social institutions, information and research, and government and communicational infrastructure. A motley array of meanings converge within its signifying power, such that we feel compelled always to pluralize the word. The commons contains material assets (e.g., parks, forests, water), intangible resources (e.g., the public domain, government research), and virtual environments (e.g., public radio, the internet). Yet we also allude casually to the “commonplace” to denote the familiar, the ordinary, and the demotic. The commons is difficult to articulate because it is everywhere and nowhere; legal scholars have the peculiar habit of defining the commons by what it is not: i.e., that which is not owned.22 The terms “private” and “public” fail to register the meaning of commons, since in its purist sense the concept refers to a space unenclosed by market economies or the authority of the state. Beyond this range of meanings, the commons, from at least the fourteenth century onward, affords a synonym for community (L. communis).
Rich could not be more adamant that the creation of “community” consists not in formalizing a universal identity, but in “sharing” the task of building and defending a “common world.” For Rich and her collaborators, this activist undertaking must also lay the groundwork for a cultural poetics. In organizing a women’s clinic, a law collective, a writing workshop, in editing a magazine, or in running a centre for artistic work, a women’s prison project, or a crisis centre, “we come to understand at first hand not only our unmet needs but the resources we can draw on for meeting them” amid poverty and institutional hostility (“Conditions” 208). Rich calls this the “work of connection,” a phrase which appears in her 1997 lecture, “Arts of the Possible.” Yet what makes this claim so striking is its consistency with the focus of her politics-poetics more than twenty years earlier:
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.
(“Origins and History” 11–12)
The “making of connections” (“Power and Danger” 250), which Rich asserts is the defining feature of Judy Grahn’s poetry and activism, comes to constitute by the mid-1970s a central focus of very different poets associated with the WLM, including Rich, Anzaldúa, and Lorde.
Grahn’s The Common Woman Poems (1969) and She Who (1977) were read widely among activists in the WLM, mainly through readings and events – for instance, the Westbeth Artists’ Project, where Rich first heard Grahn read “A Woman Is Talking to Death.”23 In 1978 Diana Press collected her writing in the aptly titled The Work of a Common Woman. This was an idea Grahn had been developing since the Common Woman Poems, “using the idea of commonality means standing exactly where you and/or your group (of whatever current definition) are, and noticing what part of you overlaps with others who are standing exactly where they are” (289). Subjects are in a continual state of becoming; what anchors the alliance of subjects working in common are the shared conditions that either enable or necessitate their solidarity as groups. It cannot be said enough that what is “common” is not necessarily an identity, but shared social space, institutions, language, and the work undertaken collectively to bring about change. Like Grahn’s notion of commonality, conocimiento (“relatedness”) for Anzaldúa should not be mistaken for sameness. “When you relate to others,” she explains, “not as parts, problems, or useful commodities, but from a connectionist view,” one creates the conditions in which different individuals and groups generate an “unmapped common ground.” Conocimiento, a form of collective consciousness, “advocates mobilizing, organizing, sharing information, knowledge, insights, and resources with other groups” (“now let us shift” 199–201). Once again, we find among these different factions of the Women’s Liberation Movement a notion of the common that focuses not on identity but on the shared resources and tactics of collective labour. The common signifies both the shared world that any of us inhabits and the platform from which the “alliance” of “‘us’ and ‘others’” enacts the universal not as an identitarian category of being but as a political category of action.
Audre Lorde contends that the poem must form “future worlds”: poetry involves the “transformation of silence into language and action” (“Transformation” 43). In reading this, one of Lorde’s most frequently quoted maxims, one should also be mindful of her terminological precision. Action, she states, involves “collective responsibility – the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together.” Identification with others is not then predicated on an a priori essence anterior to race, gender, class, and so forth, but on the principles of cooperative work necessary to bring about equality.
Notably Lorde, along with Barbara Smith, was a member of the Combahee River Collective (CRC), a black feminist organization credited with popularizing the term “identity politics.” In light of legitimate criticisms that identity politics fetishizes difference and diverts attention from class conflict, it is instructive to read the CRC’s particular “concept of identity” in its original context:
We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work[;] … material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation … We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory … we know that his analysis must be extended further …
We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.” (“Statement” 275–6)
The CRC’s “identity politics” is not conceived as a “cultural feminism” (to use Echols’s term). In fact, the claim to be recognized as “human, levelly human” edges closer to a feminism of sameness than to an identity politics with which the group is usually aligned. Nor was “biological determinism” a valid “basis upon which to build a politic” (277); the group categorically opposed any form of sexual or racial separatism. The CRC instead insists that race and gender oppression are irreducible to class oppression, but this line of reasoning was meant to expand, not replace, the critique of the capitalist mode of production. Here we find once again that naming an oppressed group confers no essential or exceptional status on that community. The CRC’s axiom of collective emancipation bears something in common with the mantra of the French sans- papiers: “everyone who is here is from here.” For the Combahee, the question is not how do we simply respect difference, but how might one proceed from the prescriptive claim of an unqualified equality and build a world faithful to this political axiom. The Combahee Statement and Rich and Grahn’s concept of the common demonstrate important points of convergence. The presently fashionable alter-globality of plural, coexisting social worlds is not a viable end in itself. Decades ago Anzaldúa had already grown suspicious of a conciliatory and increasingly quietistic liberal pluralism taking hold both in feminism and among the New Left more broadly. “Can you assume,” she asserts, “that all of us, Ku Klux Klan and holistic alliances members, are in it together just because we’re all human? … It’s impossible to be open and respectful to all views and voices” (203).
There is instead one world within which an unlimited set of differences exists. The work of community is the bringing into being of new forms of relation, but ethical recognition of the other can only take place under the condition that the axiomatic truth of a common world accessible to all is first honoured. We hear frequently, of course, that contemporary capitalism facilitates a single global order, yet billions of people have only limited access to this world. Such a system depends on this exclusion. Insofar as commonality names a collective subject, it is one based on the cooperation of an ensemble of different individuals and groups labouring to defend our common existence in the shared world.
[I]n a paragraph … the word chair is alive the word the is alive the word is is alive and the word alive is alive and they are all dancing with each other in common.
– Judy Grahn24
The term “radical feminist lyric” describes a range of techniques that put into practice consciousness raising as poetic discourse. This form of writing is neither the mid-century anecdotal lyric, nor is it commensurate with the confessional mode to which a feminist poetics is no doubt partly indebted. In employing such a phrase I have in mind M.H. Abrams’s canonical statement on the “greater Romantic lyric,” a term he uses to denote a set of common features among the poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. This lyric mode (which critic Corey Marks also calls the “descriptive-meditative structure”)25 typically unfolds in three parts: (1) a speaker encounters a physical scene, which (2) functions as a trigger for interior contemplation (a thought, a memory, a feeling, and so on), followed by (3) a movement towards epiphanic disclosure, resolution, or consolation. Such poems involve a processual movement from the material-particular to the abstract-general. And though a silent auditor is often implied, this is strictly a rhetorical devise; the greater romantic lyric is a record of the mind in conversation with itself. In regards to what I will call the radical feminist lyric, there are ostensible similarities: in particular, a speaker is depicted within a particular locale, while such poems record a processual transformation of thought. Yet unlike the Romantic lyric Abrams formalizes, the lyric I am attempting to locate within a range of post-war feminist poetry typically features an alternative three-part structure: (1) a speaking subject (not always the author) is situated in a time and place in which power relationships are as palpable as a tangible locale; (2) the speaker forges connections with a community facing subjugation, typically women, but also other groups facing similar oppression; and, finally, (3) the naming of a common project of opposition. The lyric mode in question draws upon practices of consciousness raising and community building as the processual logic of its poetic method. In a word, the poem records not a mind talking to itself, but a transformation of I’s into we’s. Lorde could not be more precise: if the poem is a distillation of “our hopes and dreams toward survival and change,” if indeed the poem is a laboratory for a “future world,” then its movement involves a “transformation of silence into language” and from language into “action” (“Transformation” 43). The poem is still revelatory, in that it is consciousness raising, but it jettisons transcendent generalization; from a gender-alert, materialist poetic stance, the poem moves not towards universal knowledge but towards collectively forged actions.
As a preliminary example, consider Honor Moore’s “Polemic #1.” The opening lines announce a potential alliance between reader and writer: “[t]his is the poem to say ‘Write poems, women’ because I want to / read them” (1–2). The poem traces a movement from the speaker’s drive “to connect” to the manifesto-like axiom its title promises: “we can’t be stopped.” In effect, the text attempts to devise a network that circumvents the disciplinary institutions of cultural production that women are normally forced to navigate. The “Art Delivery Machine” is that diffuse apparatus of the state that
… instructs
by quiet magic women to sing proper pliant tunes for
father, lover, piper who says he has the secret, but
wants ours; it teaches us to wear cloaks labelled
Guinevere, become damsels, objects in men’s power joustings
like her: lets us shimmer, disappear, promise to rise like a
Lady of the Lake, but we drown – real, not phantom.
The Art Delivery Machine is ninety-nine and forty-
four hundredths percent pure male sensibility, part of
a money system ninety-nine and forty-
four hundredths percent pure white-male-power-structure controlled. So
you may wonder why I write this poem and say “Write your own poems,
women!” Won’t we be crushed trying? No. We have more
now, fifty-six hundredths percent of the Art Delivery
Machine. We can’t be stopped …[.]
(“Polemic #1” 35–49)
The speaker invents no illusory “outside” of the system; rather, like Allen’s claim, women must forcibly open up a space in which to occupy and to advance an emancipatory politics. Appropriately, this poem appears first among documents collected in the “Literature” chapter of The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook. Readers in 1975 who encountered Moore’s poem in the Sourcebook would have turned the page and found an interview with Robin Morgan and Adrienne Rich about the relationship between art and activism. Next, readers would have encountered an article entitled “An Alternative Network for Sharing Our Poetry,” replete with photographs of Madwoman: a Feminist Bookcenter and information about do-it-yourself publishing.
It will be argued perhaps that the procedural logic of the radical feminist lyric depends upon a highly selective reading of WLM poets, that in fact much of the poetic output of this moment generates as many examples of poetry indicative of the inward-looking anecdotal lyrics Ron Silliman calls the “school of quietude” or political poems that inadvertently essentialize identity. In Donna Kate Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem,” for instance,
The bridge I must be
Is the bridge to my own power
I must translate
My own fears
Mediate
My own weaknesses
I must be the bridge to nowhere
But my true self[.]
(Donna Kate Rushin, “The Bridge Poem” 45–52)
As I have argued earlier in this chapter, competing theories of subjectivity among members of the WLM were more prevalent than subsequent post-structuralist and third-wave feminists acknowledge. Recent efforts to collect Anzaldúa’s earlier writings from the 1970s, for instance, clearly reveal a preoccupation with social location and the transformative nature of identity:
“Reincarnation” (1974)
I
slithered shedding
my self
on the path
then
looked back and
contemplated
the husk
and wondered
which me
I had discarded
or the two thousand and
thirty-second
and how many me’s
would I slough off
before voiding
the core
if ever[.]
(1–19)
Most of the critical attention to Anzaldúa’s body of work specifically attends to her exceptional long poem, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), an ambitious multilingual text investigating the complex social and linguistic landscape of the United States/Mexico border region. The text deploys no fewer than eight identifiable languages and dialects in conjunction, weaving Mexican and tejana history and personal testimony in what constitutes a hybrid lineage of shifting mestizos geography, language, and identity.26 Like the description of subjectivization above, such an emphasis on nomadism and hybridity makes the critical space of the text safe for post-structuralists to enter – indeed, to declare Anzaldúa’s project in step with the radical critique of the subject undertaken in the post-war years by Continental thinkers. Two contextualizing observations about Anzaldúa’s poetics are key: first, her understanding of the subject is local to a site of cultural displacement, movement, and synthesis specific to the borderland. Second, and this is crucial, for Anzaldúa simply declaring the subject is without essence is not enough. Recalling conocimiento as a practice of consciousness raising, the question is always how does the perpetually “reincarnat[ing]” subject enter into communal formations with others? What are the possibilities of this political subject? Like Rich and Grahn in their respective social locations, the question always regards the “I” becoming “we” both in language and in action:
Some of us are still hung-
up on the art-for-art trip
and feel that the poet
is forever alone.
Separate.
More sensitive.
An outcast.
But what we want
– what we presume to want –
is to see our words engraved
on the people’s faces,
…
We don’t want to be
Stars but parts
of constellations.
(“The New Speakers,” 22–8, 36–9, 45–7 [c. 1975])
A poetic of consciousness raising develops from the collectivist spaces of activist networks, in which opening up, sharing, and organizing come to constitute the principles of a poetic mode developed and expanded by a community of poets associated with the WLM. The anxiety that “we’s” produce receives considerable attention in this study: Olson asks, “[i]nside totality, where are we, who are we?” For Duncan, “we must begin where we are … entering and belonging to a configuration being born of what ‘we’ means.” Rich is as insistent on this question: “who is we?” How do “we’s” form, and how might we form them otherwise?
A brief assessment of Rich’s work from the 1950s onward to the late 1970s aptly demonstrates how this question informs her poetics. As many critics note, she gradually abandons the well-wrought, formally chiselled verse of The Diamond Cutters (1955) for the open form techniques and historical themes particularly evident in A Will to Change (1971). The following two passages illustrate this transition:
“A Walk by the Charles”
Finality broods upon the things that pass:
Persuaded by this air, the trump of doom
Might hang unsounded while the autumn gloom
Darkens the leaf and smokes the river’s glass.
(1–4)
“November 1968”
Stripped
you’re beginning to float free
up through the smoke of brushfires
and incinerators
the unleafed branches won’t hold you
nor the radar aerials[.]
(1–6)
The technically proficient metres, rhythms, and rhymes, which had won Rich so much early praise, are subsequently “stripped.” The ground upon which so many of Rich’s contemporaries learned their practice had been sufficiently “cooked,” to use Robert Lowell’s phrase. Morgan is decidedly less cryptic: “I don’t write what I once called poems anymore – / the well-wrought kind that you and I / might once have critically discussed over a gentle lunch.” Instead, she asserts, the text ignites “a fuse,” “a small ticking insight / from the page” that can “flash into an action” (“Letter” 10–12, 18–22). Olson’s influence on feminist poetics is an ambivalent one. Scholars such as Duplessis, Libbie Rifkin, and Michael Davidson aptly observe that open form was conceived within the hyper-masculine milieu of 1950s culture, yet undoubtedly this appropriation afforded many women writers a set of poetic techniques enabling a synthesis of poetic form and cultural activism. Susan Howe maintains that despite Olson’s heterosexist attitudes, his “writing encouraged me to be a radical poet. When I was writing my first poems I recall he showed me what to do” (“Since a Dialogue We Are” 166). The practice variously called open form, projectivism, and field composition had sought to enact democratizing social structures at the level of poetic form; to borrow Morgan’s evocative phrase once more, Olson, Creeley, and others associated with BMC failed to “go far enough.” Almost immediately Levertov understood the value of Olson’s “relations between things” as an axiom of poetic activism, which she expresses through polyphony, appropriation, and intermedia in “To Stay Alive.” Likewise, Lorde will remark: “There are many kinds of open” (“Coal” 4 [1968/1976]).27
If Rich’s work indicates a shift from well-wrought to open form verse, then several critics also observe a gradual shift from the self-exploratory lyrics of “confessional” poetry in the early 1960s to a dialogic-epistolary form in feminist writing of the late 1960s.28 Accordingly, a conversant poetics emphasizing common struggle and social themes typified by poems like Morgan’s “Letter to a Sister Underground” and “Portrait of the Artist as Two Young Women,” Honor Moore’s “Polemic #1,” and Adrienne Rich’s “Coast to Coast” gradually replaces a preoccupation with loneliness and isolation in texts by Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, and certain of Sylvia Plath’s poems. Plath’s influence on Rich, Moore, and others deserves pause, however; though indeed some of her poetry reflects the lyric of private reference that Rich and others subsequently challenge, few poets in the English language comment on state oppression with such efficacy. Recall that a poem like “Daddy” (1962) unfolds as a series of private references to a father/husband figure that are filtered through the following cultural signs (god, Nazi, devil, vampire, teacher). In this regard, Plath, more capably than nearly anyone in post-war verse, demonstrates the meaning of the “personal is political,” not by opposing private to public spheres of life, but rather by exposing an identical patriarchal logic governing them both. The domestic sphere joins the school, the prison, the media, the church, and the court as one more state apparatus socializing Western subjects. Though “Daddy” was composed in 1962, the text would not appear in print until the posthumous publication of Ariel in 1966, amid rapid changes in feminist politics and aesthetics. Moore’s Art Delivery Machine applies Plath’s institutional critique to the publishing industry, while forging alternative cultural networks.
Yet this transition from a lyric of private reference to an epistolary form too seems an incomplete characterization of the poetry of the WLM. One might conclude, for instance, that poets involved in the WLM staged an intervention in lyric writing, whereby the mind speaking to itself now speaks to another. Kim Whitehead argues that, like the confessional group, the “banishment of persona … proved to be particularly important to women finding their voices as feminists” (4). Yet the convention of personae is readily evident in Morgan’s “Voices from Six Tapestries” and Rich’s “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff,” poems that construct imaginary encounters between female historical figures. A collection like Rich’s A Wild Patience employs appropriative methods akin to Salkey and Levertov’s expansive use of citation, while in Grahn’s The Common Woman Poems and She Who social location (rather than the person of the poet) replaces persona, whereby a multiplicity of race, class, and gender positions encounter one another on the page. Just as Denise Levertov’s participation in the New Left provoked a noticeable shift in her work from anecdotalism to dialogic collage, radical feminist activism contextualizes the contestatory formal politics of these works. Indeed, these poems are not private communiqués between individuals; they instead document the complex formation of collective subjects. But whereas Levertov’s work is still very much couched in a New Left project of alliances between the student movement, Vietnam protest, and Black Power, the work of Rich and Grahn formulates a critique of the patriarchal models informing conservative and New Left politics alike.
Rich’s “Culture and Anarchy” provides a useful illustration. The title is an obvious allusion to Matthew Arnold’s work of criticism. Although innumerable challenges to Arnold’s “touchstone” aesthetics by feminist, Marxist, post-structuralist, and post-colonial theorists are well documented, it is worth noting Terry Eagleton’s poignant observation that Arnold’s advocacy for a depoliticized national culture is “refreshingly unhypocritical” in its political motivations. According to Arnold, marshalling the energies of the middle class to pacify the poor is a necessary precondition for stabilizing class hierarchies: “[l]iterature was in several ways a suitable candidate for this ideological enterprise. As a liberal, ‘humanizing’ pursuit, it could provide a potent antidote to … ideological extremism.” Because literature trades in “universal human values rather than in such historical trivia as civil wars, the oppression of women or the dispossession of the English peasantry, it could serve to place in cosmic perspective the petty demands of working people for decent living conditions or greater control over their lives” (21–2). Rich counters Arnold’s own position as touchstone of high Victorian criticism with a multitude of early suffragist texts written at the end of the nineteenth century. Like the “Alabama woman still quilting in her nineties,” the text “stich[es] together” (13, 42) the diary and letters of Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull House, Elizabeth Barrett’s correspondence with Anna Brownell Jameson, Anthony and Ida Husted Harper’s The History of Woman Suffrage, and Elizabeth Cady Scanton’s speech “On Solitude of Self.” Notably, none of these texts are fictional; Rich is mindful to incorporate a litany of documents into the body of her poem, thus purposefully contaminating the literary with the non-literary, the aesthetic with the political. For Rich, all literature is collage in flux:
Rough drafts we share, each reading
her own page over the other’s shoulder
trying to see afresh[.]
(“Culture and Anarchy” 34–6)
The poem becomes increasingly populous, linking suffragist activism with abolitionists such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Maria Mitchell, native activist Matilda Joslyn Gage, journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and “all those without names” (116). Preceding this passage, Elizabeth Barrett’s letter to Anna Jameson appears italicized:
and is it possible you think
a woman has no business with questions
Then she had better use a pen no more[.]
(95–8)
The assemblage of appropriated texts in Rich’s poem analogizes a transformation in mid-century poetic writing I have been calling the radical feminist lyric: a diary becomes a letter, and a letter becomes a collectively authored political tract. In the most concrete terms, “Culture and Anarchy” follows this sequence: from Anthony’s diaries (a conversation with the self) to the correspondences between Anthony, Harper, and others (communication with another), to a work such as The History of Woman Suffrage (a political thesis). Rich documents the becoming-political of the speaker. Like Olson, she is grappling with the problem of the one and the many. Collectivity in the poem appears as neither the homogeneously singular culture of Arnold’s civilized citizenry nor a celebration of structurelessness as such. The textual collage brings together individuals, groups, and texts in a methodical distillation of the principles of female liberation, aimed at “complete emancipation” (150).
Rich’s preoccupation with community formation, in many ways, stems from her engagement with the work of Judy Grahn, arguably one of the most undervalued American poets of the second half of the twentieth century.29 The Common Woman Poems was produced and disseminated as a mimeograph edition in 1969. Passages from these poems were frequently circulated and recited at WLM events, such that the text became an “anonymous talisman for the women’s liberation movement as a whole” (“The Common” 55). For instance, the final passage of “Vera, from my childhood” appeared on various posters in slightly altered forms:
A common woman is
As common as a common loaf of bread –
AND WILL RISE.
“Well, the quote is sort of correct,” according to Grahn (55). Both accurate and slightly misleading versions of the passage circulated among members of the WLM. Here is the original version from The Common Woman Poems:
the common woman is as common
as good bread
as common as when you couldnt go on
For all the world we didnt know we held in common
all along
the common woman is as common as the best of bread
and will rise[.]
(20–7)
Of course, these forms of adaptation are not problematic as such; WITCH used the permutation of its acronym to expand the sphere of possible actions it undertook. But here, a precise meaning is lost. A “common woman” can indeed “be any woman, but the bread is not just any bread … The best of bread is the most carefully made” and it “feeds everyone” (Grahn, “The Common” 55). Both versions yoke the domestic image of the loaf with the “rising up” of a female underclass. Yet in the original poem considerable emphasis is placed on action. The “best,” for Grahn, is she who offers herself up to others – after all, bread provides sustenance and rises to be shared. “Common,” she carefully maintains, “steps outside of our factory driven lives to honor and treasure each of us, and in our commonality, to call for collectivity, alliance” (55). In brief, this seemingly minor additional meaning explains so much misinterpretation of Grahn’s poetic output. “Common,” as we have said, is not a category of identity; it describes the work of connection, of “collectivity” and “alliance,” between subjects that act, build, and create in common. Anticipating the potentiality implied in the Stein-inspired use of the phrase “She Who,” the common woman is “She Who increases / what can be done” (“She Who increases” 1–2).
The Common Woman Poems comprises seven interlocking texts. The title of each names a specific woman in a particular location – for instance, “Ella, in a square apron, along Highway 80” and “Nadine, resting on her neighbor’s stoop.” At first glance, the texts depict portraits of working-class, lesbian, and ethnic women within these respective communities:
Her grief expresses itself in fits of fury
over details, details take the place of meaning,
money takes the place of life.
She believes that people are lice
who eat her, so she bites first …[.]
(“I. Helen” 19–23)
She holds things together, collects bail,
makes the landlord patch the largest holes.
At the Sunday social she would spike
every drink, and offer you half of what she knows, …
… The neighborhood
would burn itself out without her …[.]
(“III. Nadine” 1–4, 14–15)
She has taken a woman lover
whatever shall we do
she has taken a woman lover
how lucky it wasnt you …
On weekends, she dreams of becoming a tree;
a tree that dreams it is ground up
and sent to the paper factory, where it
lies helpless in sheets, until it dreams
of becoming a paper airplane, and rises
on its own current …[.]
(“IV. Carol” 1–4, 13–18)
The meticulous documentation of commonplace life and the terse, gritty character of the poetic sequence mark its most emphatic characteristics. Grahn maintains that she sought to represent “regular, everyday women without making [them] look either superhuman or pathetic” (60). More so than other mid-century poets who sought to challenge Eliot’s objective correlative by capturing the minutiae of daily experience, Grahn manages to reveal the macropolitics of every micropolitical moment. Same-sex love and abortion were particularly controversial topics, but so were representations of underclass aspiration. The Common Woman Poems evokes at once Plath’s teeming dissension, Langston Hughes’s exploding dream, and Rich’s collective imperative. Note that the first-person pronoun appears only in the text’s final five lines of the sequence. Until this point, the third-person feminine “she” links speaker, character, and reader. Yet the relation between these agents is never specified in advance; or rather, the work of the common reader involves mapping the potential connections between these changing subject positions, positioning the reader as one more agent within the network of writers, small press editors, disseminators, and activists who make up a WLM poetic culture.
By the publication of She Who, the role of the reader as agent of an emancipatory politics is rendered all the more striking:
She Who continues.
She Who has a being
named She Who carries her own name.
She Who turns things over.
She Who marks her own way, gathering.
She Who makes her own difference.
She Who differs, gathering her own events.
She Who gathers, gaining
She Who carries her own ways,
gathering She Who waits,
bearing She Who cares for her
own name, carrying She Who
bears, gathering She Who cares[.]
(“She Who continues” 1–14)
Grahn’s previous strategy of naming individual women in The Common Woman Poems gives way to the repetitive use of the third-person feminine pronoun. “She Who” is a position in language that can be taken up by any woman, but there is an important precondition. The “She Who” of Grahn’s text is she who “turns things over,” who collects those who “wait,” and who “makes her own difference.” The operative term “continues” affords an evocative pun. While the prefix “con-” intimates its Latin origin, “together with, in combination or union” (OED), its suffix “-eus” mixes with its homonyms “you’s” and “use.” Continuity, collectivity, and purpose converge in the poem’s opening line only to proliferate. Hence, Grahn’s clever adaptation of Stein’s axiom: “the difference is spreading” (“A Carafe” 3).
One may choose to read The Common Woman Poems as a simple affirmation of difference. If so, the text will likely be read in support of the imperative of identity politics, its celebration of diverse subject positions. Depending on one’s definition of “common,” however, the reader may also conclude that the text evokes such attention to difference only to assimilate these socially located identities within a unifying notion of womanhood that, in the final analysis, subordinates class and race to gender. Yet Grahn ultimately advances an alternative to this familiar deadlock. Close attention to the aforementioned passage from “Vera” indicates that what we hold in common, in the most concrete possible sense, is “the world” understood in its radically material openness. In naming the subject’s race, gender, and socio-economic position, Grahn’s text is not merely celebrating difference; rather, her goal is to locate specific sites of dispossession – in this case the challenges of poor women – and to demand for these subjects the access to a common world enjoyed by anyone at all.
Morgan’s proclamation is the correct one: the task, whether in art or in politics, must not be to retrench from the Left, but rather to “go further” in demanding radical equality as the necessary precondition for any community that dares call itself one. It is not, of course, enough simply to declare one’s commitment to an idea, but to locate and install this idea in precisely those historical movements and moments in which real antagonisms give rise to actual change. The presence of racism in the community is enough evidence that it had serious shortcomings, but notice the response from Chicano and Black feminists: radical feminism did not go far enough in its bid for unqualified equality. They sought to take it even “further.” The WLM’s most controversial and difficult claim to accept – its declared commitment to the category of universality – is precisely that aspect of the movement we must revive today. Yet I reiterate that the universality proposed by the WLM is of a particular character incompatible with the abstract universality of liberal humanism, the latter’s rigid application of a rule imposed upon any and all situations. Instead, the WLM invite us to reimagine community in terms of the desires and hopes of those excluded from it. Let us call this the universality of the common world.30 To be sure, poetry alone is hardly a substitute for political action, but one challenges the autonomy of art by expressing this very fact, by situating the poetic text within a larger field of commitments. If capital has come to saturate every aspect of contemporary life – our affects, our desires, our knowledges – then, for the WLM, a material-feminist poetics demands that we challenge this development by saturating poetic language, indeed all language, with the demand for radical equality. This is a project that should not be relegated to the cultural sphere only, but it should happen there as well.
Turning now to the Toronto Research Group, and a host of activities undertaken with members of Fluxus, visual and sound poets, and conceptual artists, we undoubtedly encounter a very different scene of collective literary experimentation, yet the WLM’s preoccupation with a shared culture will likewise constitute an important concern among a group of poets rightly credited for their prescient anticipation of the digital age’s participatory cultures. If Black Mountain, CAM, and the WLM, in their respective locations both social and geographic, engaged questions of community largely in terms of places and publics, then the TRG’s work affords an important shift towards discursive and transnational communities. As a group preoccupied with ideas and practices of collaboration and appropriation, it also marks a moment in which the advanced West would drastically redefine its very notion of property, as market consortiums began to radically expand their efforts to control and enclose information, knowledge, and culture as such.