Foreword
Page 2: “ Thus ... the sense of having.’ ” Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 90–92.
Page 3: “ ‘Now the very idea of the serious. . . .’ ” Susan Sontag, “Thirty Years Later,” Threepenny Review (Summer 1996): 6.
Page 4: “ ‘I am not a marxist.’ ” See Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 105: “ ‘The world historic defeat of the female sex,’ which Engels grounds in a transition from matriarchy (or at least matrilineal descent) to patriarchy, is no expression of Marx’s. Marx rejected biologism whether in Morgan, Darwin or those Marxists from whom Marx felt it necessary to separate himself so sharply that he used the expression: If that is Marxism, ‘I am no Marxist.’” See also Maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale, Marx without Myth: A Chronological Study of His Life and Work (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), and Eugene Kamenka, ed., The Portable Karl Marx (New York: Viking, 1983), p. xlv.
Page 8: “ ‘Language is the presence....’ ” Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1993), p. 490: “Language as the product of an individual is an impossibility. But the same holds for property. Language itself is the product of a community, just as it is in another respect.. . the presence of the community.”
Page 8: “ ‘The community and its poetry are not two.’ ” Gary Snyder, The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964–1979 (New York: New Directions, 1980), p. 174.
“When We Dead Awaken”: Writing as Re-Vision
Page 10: “ ‘[Ibsen] shows us that no degradation. . ..’ ” G. B. Shaw, The Quintessence oflbsenism (New York: Hill & Wang, 1922), p. 139.
Page 12: “By the by, about ‘Women,’. . .’ ” J. G. Stewart, Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from Letters (London: Merlin, 1959), p. 140.
Page 13: “ ‘he once opened his eyes. . . .’ ” Henry James, “Notes on Novelists,” in Selected Literary Criticism of Henry James, ed. Morris Shapira (London: Heinemann, 1963), pp. 157–158.
Page 14: “Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience. . . .” In a letter to the composer Ethel Smyth dated June 8, 1933, Woolf speaks of having kept her own personality out of A Room of One’s Own lest she not be taken seriously: “How personal, so will they say, rubbing their hands with glee, women always are; I even hear them as I write.” Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Page 17: “What I chiefly learned from them was craft.” Yet I spent months, at sixteen, memorizing and writing imitations of Millay’s sonnets; and in notebooks of that period I find what are obviously attempts to imitate Dickinson’s metrics and verbal compression. I knew H.D. only through anthologized lyrics; her epic poetry was not then available to me.
Page 27: “Much of women’s poetry. . . .” Was I wholly unaware of the women’s blues tradition and its transformation of pain into female agency?
Page 28: “A new generation of women poets....” See Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973).
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet
Page 45: “. . . what the critic Edward Said has termed. . . .” Edward Said, “Literature as Values,” New York Times Book Review, September 4, 1983, 9.
Page 58: “ ‘Things move so much around you. . . .’ ” Nancy Morejón, “Elogia de la Dialética,” in Breaking the Silences: Twentieth Century Poetry by Cuban Women, ed. Margaret Randall (Vancouver: Pulp Press, 1982), p. 149.
Page 59: “ ‘There is the cab driver root and elevator. . . .’ ” Anita Valerio, “I Am Listening; A Lyric of Roots,” in A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women, ed. Beth Brant (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1988), p. 229.
Notes toward a Politics of Location
Page 62: “ ‘sexuality, politics,... work, . . . intimacy. . . .’ ” See Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976; 10th ann. ed., 1986), p. 286.
Page 64: “ ‘the first premise of all human history.’ ” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 42.
Page 65: “ ‘A female-led peasant rebellion’?” Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973). See also Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1978), pp. 29–37.
Page 68: “Much of what is narrowly termed ‘polities’....” See Rich, “Women and Honor,” above, p. 39.
Page 69: “The power men everywhere wield over women. ...” Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 68.
Page 70: “the 1977 Combahee River Collective statement.... ” Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), pp. 272–283. First published in Zillah R. Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp. 362–373.
Page 70: “To come to terms with the circumscribing nature....” Gloria I. Joseph, “The Incompatible Ménage à Trois: Marxism, Feminism and Racism,” in Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1981).
Page 71: “the woman-seeing eye. . . .” See Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1983), p. 171.
Page 72: “the ‘deadly sameness’ of abstraction.” Lillian Smith, “Autobiography as a Dialogue between King and Corpse,” in The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings by Lillian Smith, ed. Michelle Cliff (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 189.
Page 73: “the overall burying and distortion....” See Elly Bulkin, “Hard Ground: Jewish Identity, Racism, and Anti-Semitism,” in Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith, Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Long Haul, 1984; distributed by Firebrand Books, Ithaca, N.Y.).
Page 73: “The first American woman astronaut....” See Ms., January 1984, 86.
Page 75: “The difficulty of saying I.” Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T., trans. Christopher Middleton (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), p. 174. See also Bernice Reagon, “Turning the Century,” in Barbara Smith, pp. 356–368, and Bulkin, pp. 103, 190–193.
Page 76: “An approach which traces militarism. ...” Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?: The Militarisation of Women’s Lives (London: Pluto Press, 1983), ch. 8.
Page 77: “ ‘A movement helps you to overcome. . . .’ ” Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (Boston: Alyson, 1981), pp. 55—56.
Page 79: “When I learn that in 1913....” Women under Apartheid (London: International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa in co-operation with the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid, 1981), pp. 87–99; Leonard Thompson and Andrew Prior, South African Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982). An article in Sechaba (published by the African National Congress of South Africa) refers to “the rich tradition of organization and mobilization by women” in the black South African struggle (October 1984), 9.
Page 79: “When I read that a major strand. . . .” Helen Wheatley, “Palestinian Women in Lebanon: Targets of Repression,” TWANAS: Third World Student Newspaper, University of California, Santa Cruz (March 1984).
Page 80: “ ‘She was also subject to another great delusion.... ’ ” Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, trans. Georgina Kleege (Sausalito, Calif.: Post-Apollo Press, 1982), p. 101.
Page 81: “ ‘Women invest hours in cleaning....’ ” Blanca Figueroa and Jeanine Anderson, “Women in Peru,” International Reports: Women and Society (1981). See also Ximena Bunster and Elsa M. Chaney, Sellers and Servants: Working Women in Lima, Peru (New York: Praeger, 1985), and Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita, In Search of Answers: Indian Women’s Voices from Manushi (London: Zed, 1984), pp. 56–57.
Page 82: “This Bridge Called My Back. ...” Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, 1981; 2d ed., Albany, N.Y.: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1984).
Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marx
Page 83: “ ‘I come from Russia 1917. . . .’” Raya Dunayevskaya Archives, microfilm no. 5818, published in News and Letters, July 25, 1987, p. 11.
Page 84: “ ‘the creation of a new society.’ ” Raya Dunayevskaya, Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution (1985; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), p. 228.
Page 87: “ ‘but from within the left itself.’ ” Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1982), p. 99.
Page 90: “ ‘the official Moscow publication....’ ” Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom from 1776 until Today (1958; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1982), pp. 17, 22.
Page 90: “Where Marx had seen....” Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, pp. 150, 47.
Page 91: “ ‘a reluctant feminist... male chauvinism.” Ibid., pp. 85, 27.
Page 91: “ ‘the poisonous bitch. . . .’ ” Ibid., p. 27.
Page 91: “ ‘as independent Marxist revolutionaries,’ ” Ibid., p. 13.
Page 91: “ ‘Just imagine, I have become a feminist!’ ” Ibid., p. 95.
Page 93: “ ‘in each age, he becomes more alive. . . .’ ” Dunayevskaya, Women’s Liberation, p. 174.
Page 93: “ ‘without a philosophy of revolution. . . .’ ” Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 194.
Page 94: “ ‘the elements of oppression in general. . . .’ ” Ibid., pp. 180–181.
Page 94: “ ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex.’ ” Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1972), p. 50.
Page 94: “ ‘to see the possibility of new human relations. . . .’ ” Dunayevskaya, Women’s Liberation, p. 202.
Page 96: “ ‘joyfully [threw her] whole life....’ ” Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, p.v.
Page 96: “ ‘It is from there, in the depths of being....’ ” Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 277.
Page 96: “ ‘It isn’t because we are any “smarter”. . . .’ ” Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 195.
Page 96: “ “What does being a thinking subject. .. .’ ” Gloria Anzaldúa, “Haciendo caras, una entrada,” in Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1990), pp. xxv–xxvi.
Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts
Page 102: “ ‘poetry... an intolerable hunger.’ ” Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949; Williamsburg, Mass.: Paris Press, 1996), p. 159.
Page 102: “ ‘the desire ... a more profound and ensouled world.’ ” Clayton Eshleman, Antiphonal Swing: Selected Prose 1962–1987 (Kingston, N.Y.: McPherson, 1989), p. 136.
Page 103: “For a recent document on this. . . .” Phyllis Kornfeld, Cellblock Visions: Prison Art in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Page 104: “ ‘Due process asks ... of human nature and experience.’ ” New York Times, July 25, 1997, C19.
Page 115: “Recently, I read an essay by Charles Bernstein. . . .” Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 4–5.
Page 118: “ ‘cling to / what we’ve grasped too well.’ ” Ibid., p. 89.
Page 118: “to ‘intensify / our relationships.’ ” Ibid., p. 88.
Muriel Rukeysen Her Vision
Page 121: “The critic Louise Kertesz. .. .” Louise Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), pp. 78–84.
Page 121: “ ‘The city rises in its light. . . .” Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949; Williamsburg, Mass.: Paris Press, 1996), p. 192.
Page 121: “ ‘except in the servants’ rooms. . . .’ ” Ibid., p. 197.
Page 122: “ ‘I was expected to grow up. . . .’ ” Janet Sternburg, ed., The Writer on Her Work, I (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 221.
Page 122: “the Scottsboro case.” Nine African American youths were unjustly convicted of raping two white women, a conviction later overturned by the Supreme Court, and a landmark issue for radicals.
Page 124: “ ‘My themes and the use I have made of them....’ ” Muriel Rukeyser, “Poet... Woman ... American ... Jew,” Contemporary Jewish Record 5, no. 7 (February 1944); repr. Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends 1, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 23–29.
Page 127: “It’s to be hoped....” Paris Press in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, has reprinted The Life of Poetry, with a foreword by Jane Cooper (1996), and The Orgy (1965), her biomythographical novel, with a foreword by Sharon Olds (1997).
Arts of the Possible
Page 152: “the Combahee River Collective statement.” Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), pp. 272–283. See also Zillah R. Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978).
Page 153: “ ‘a visionary relation to reality.’ ” Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York and London: Verso, 1992), p. 154.
Page 154: “They have also been disparaged... .” Ibid., pp. 4–5, 129.
Page 155: “ ‘For a writer, as you live. . . .’ ” Garrett Hongo, ed., Under Western Eyes: Personal Essays from Asian America (New York: Anchor, 1995), pp. 23–24.
Page 156: “In place of all the physical and spiritual senses. ...” Karl Marx, as quoted by Raya Dunayevskaya, Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution (1985; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), p. 25. See also Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 92.
Page 158: “ ‘the barest illusion of rehabilitation. . . .’ ” Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995), pp. 89–90.
Page 159: “ ‘We are now not to describe. . . .’ ” Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 65, 52.
Page 160: “ ‘I’ve had moments when the life of my people. . . .’ ” Dionne Brand, Bread Out of Stone: Recollections, Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming, Politics (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1994), pp. 182–183.
Page 160: “I’ve gone back many times. . . .” Eduardo Galeano, Days and Nights of Love and War, trans. Judith Brister (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 191, 185, 192.
Page 163: “As Jonathan Kozol writes....”Jonathan Kozol, “Two Nations, Eternally Unequal,” in Tikkun 12, no. 1 (1996): 14.
Page 165: “ ‘who has seen the dove marry the hawk. . . .” Juan Gelman, Unthinkable Tenderness: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Joan Lindgren (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 12.