“Not How to Write Poetry, but Wherefore”
1Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1986), pp. 60–61. “You have to change your life” is my American rendering of the line.
2W. H. Auden, Foreword, in Adrienne Rich, A Change of World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 8.
3W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in his Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1945), p. 50.
4Ibid., p. 51.
5Adrienne Rich, Collected Early Poems 1950–1970 (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 15. Muriel Rukeyser, in an essay on her Jewish identity, wrote of her childhood experience of temple services: “I think that many people brought up in reformed Judaism must go starving for two phases of religion: poetry and politics” (see “Poet . . . Woman . . . American . . . Jew,” Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends 1, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 23–29.
6Reginald Gibbons and Terrence DesPres, eds., Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), pp. 120–21.
“ ‘Rotted Names’ ”
1Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1955), pp. 128–30.
2Ibid., p. 266.
3Ibid., p. 27.
4Ibid., pp. 33–34.
5Ibid., pp. 239–40. Stevens’s program for modern poetry implies a tradition of poetry that has failed to do these very things.
6Ibid., p. 183.
7Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 9. Marjorie Perloff notes, in Stevens’s letters written during World War II, his dismissive labeling of various literary intellectuals, even those he admired, as “a Jew and a Communist,” a “Jew and an anti-Fascist,” “a Catholic,” and his attempt, in the long poem “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” (1941–1942), to construct “an elaborate and daunting rhetoric . . . designed to convince both poet and reader that, despite the daily headlines and radio bulletins, the real action takes place in the country of metaphor” (Albert J. Gelpi, ed., Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism [London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985], pp. 41–52).
8Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 321.
9“I am using the term ‘Africanism’ for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these peoples. . . . As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability” (Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992], pp. 6–7).
“A Poet’s Education”
1Diane Glancy, Claiming Breath (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 85.
2Ibid., p. 23.
3Ibid., p. 22.
4Jimmy Santiago Baca, Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio (Santa Fe, N.M.: Red Crane Books, 1992), pp. 4–6.
5Ibid., p. 65.
6Ibid., p. 66.
7Ibid., p. 4.
8Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Books, 1987), p. 54.
9Ibid., p. 19.
10Ibid., pp. 59–61.
11Glancy, pp. 86–87.
[2003: See also Linda McCarriston: “Weed,” in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 28, pp. 189–229.]
“Tourism and Promised Lands”
1June Jordan, “Solidarity,” in her Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989), p. 171.
2Thomas Larsen, “Uneasy Confessions,” review of Truth and Lies That Press for Life: Sixty Los Angeles Poets, ed. Connie Hersheym (Concord, Mass.: Artifact Press, 1992), in Poetry Flash, no. 232 (July 1992): 1.
3Marxist-Humanism: A Half Century of Its World Development, XII: Guide to the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, ed. Raya Dunayevskaya (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Library, 1986), p. 59. Available on microfilm from Wayne State University Library.
“Six Meditations in Place of a Lecture”
1Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), pp. 388–92.
2Federico García Lorca, In Search of Duende (New York: New Directions, 1998), pp. 22, 48.
3Robert Duncan, “Towards an Open Universe” (1964), in A Selected Prose (New York: New Directions, 1995), pp. 10–11.
4Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 175.
5Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
6Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
7Rainer Maria Rilke, “Autumn Day,” in The Essential Rilke, trans. Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann (New York: Ecco, 2000), p. 5.
8David Budbill, “An End to the Age of Impunity,” Sunday Rutland Herald/Times Argus (September 30, 2001).
9Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949; Ashfield, Mass.: Paris Press, 1966), p. 61.
10James Baldwin, Another Country (New York: Dial, 1962), p. 4.
11Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871), in Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 938, 949, 960.
12Michael Harper, Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 372.
13Robert Duncan, Selected Poems, ed. Robert J. Bertholf (New York: New Directions, 1993), pp. 64–72.
14See Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (San Francisco: Freeman, 1983).
Arts of the Possible (2001)
“Muriel Rukeyser: Her Vision” (1993)
1Louise Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), pp. 78–84.
2Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949; Williamsburg, Mass.: Paris Press, 1996), p. 192.
3Ibid., p. 197.
4Janet Sternburg, ed., The Writer on Her Work, I (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 221.
5Nine 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.
6Muriel 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.
7Paris 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).
“Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts” (1997)
1Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949; Williamsburg, Mass.: Paris Press, 1996), p. 159.
2Clayton Eshleman, Antiphonal Swing: Selected Prose 1962–1987 (Kingston, N.Y.: McPherson, 1989), p. 136.
3Phyllis Kornfeld, Cellblock Visions: Prison Art in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
4New York Times, July 25, 1997, C19.
“Arts of the Possible” (1997)
1Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), pp. 272–83. See also Zilla R. Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978).
2Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York and London: Verso, 1992), p. 154.
3Ibid., pp. 4–5, 129.
4Garrett Hongo, ed., Under Western Eyes: Personal Essays from Asian A
merica (New York: Anchor, 1995), pp. 23–24.
5Karl 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.
6Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995), pp. 89–90.
7Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 65, 52.
8Dionne Brand, Bread Out of Stone: Recollections, Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming, Politics (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1994), pp. 182–83.
9Eduardo Galeano, Days and Nights of Love and War, trans. Judith Brister (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 191, 185, 192.
10Jonathan Kozol, “Two Nations, Eternally Unequal,” in Tikkun 12, no. 1 (1996): 14.
11Juan Gelman, Unthinkable Tenderness: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Joan Lindgren (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 12.
A Human Eye (2009)
“Permeable Membrane” (2005)
1Vladimir Mayakovsky, How Are Verses Made?, trans. G. M. Hyde (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 18.
2Vice President Dick Cheney, on NBC’s Meet the Press (September 16, 2001).
3Nadine Gordimer, “The Congo River,” in her The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics, and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 15.
4Selected Poems of René Char, ed. Mary Ann Caws and Tina Jolas (New York: New Directions, 1992), p. 125: “La poète fait éclater les liens de ce qu’il touche. II n’enseigne pas la fin des liens.”
“Poetry and the Forgotten Future” (2006)
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Credits
GLORIA ANZALDÚA: From Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. © 1987 by Gloria Anzaldua. Reprinted with permission from Aunt Lute Books.
MARGARET ATWOOD: From Surfacing by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1972, 1973 by Margaret Atwood. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright © 1972 by O.W. Toad Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Emblem/McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. From Margaret Atwood, Surfacing. Copyright © 1973 by Andre Deutsch. Reprinted by permission of Carlton Books Ltd.
W. H. AUDEN: From W.H. Auden: Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA: Selection from “Coming into Language” in Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio (1992; Museum of New Mexico Press, 2008).
KATHLEEN BARRY: Female Sexual Slavery (New York University Press, 1984). Copyright © 1979 by Kathleen Barry. Used by permission of New York University Press.
CHARLES BERNSTEIN: From A Poetics (Harvard University Press, 1992). Copyright © 1979 by Charles Bernstein. Reprinted by permission of the author.
LORRAINE BETHEL: From “This Infinity of Conscious Pain: Zora Neale Hurston & the Black Literary Female Tradition” in But Some of Us Are Brave (Feminist Press/CUNY, 1993). Copyright © by Lorraine Bethel.
ELIZABETH BISHOP: Excerpts from “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” “The Burglar of Babylon,” “Chemin de Fer,” “Faustina, or Rock Roses,” “Four Poems,” “Insomnia,” “O Breath,” “Pink Dog,” Questions of Travel,” “The Shampoo,” “Songs for a Colored Singer,” “Sonnet,” “A Word with You” from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All poems were previously published in The Complete Poems 1927–1979 volume. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. From Poems by Elizabeth Bishop published by Chatto & Windus Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. © 2011.
JUSTICE WILLIAM J. BRENNAN: From “Reason, Passion, and the Process of Law,” Cardozo Law Review 10, no. 3 (1988). Used by permission of the Estate of Justice William J. Brennan.
DENNIS BRUTUS: “An Old Black Woman” by Dennis Brutus. Copyright © by Dennis Brutus, from Poetry & Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader, edited by Lee Sustar and Aisha Karim. Copyright © 2006 by Dennis Brutus. Used by permission of Haymarket Books.
GRACIA CLARK: From “The Beguines: A Medieval Women’s Community,” copyright © by Gracia Clark. From Building Feminist Theory: Essays from Quest (Longman, 1981). Used by permission of the author.
MAHMOUD DARWISH: Reprinted with permission of University of California from Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (University of California Press, 1995); permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
EMILY DICKINSON: Copyright 1914, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright 1929 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright 1957 by Mary L. Hampson. Copyright 1935 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright 1963 by Mary L. Hampson. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
ROBERT DUNCAN: From The Opening of the Field by Robert Duncan, copyright © 1960 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
EDUARDO GALEANO: Reprinted from Eduardo Galeano, Days and Nights of Love and War, translated by Judith Brister (Monthly Review Press, 198
3). Used by permission of the Monthly Review Press.
JUAN GELMAN: Republished with permission of University of California from Juan Gelman, Unthinkable Tenderness: Selected Poems (University of California Press, 1997); permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
DIANE GLANCY: Reprinted from Claiming Breath by Diane Glancy, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © 1992 by the University of Nebraska Press.
KATHLEEN GOUGH: Reprinted from Kathleen Gough, “The Origin of the Family,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna [Rapp] Reiter (Monthly Review Press, 1975). Used by permission of the Monthly Review Press.
SUSAN GRIFFIN: From Rape: The Power of Consciousness (Harper & Row, 1979). Copyright © Susan Griffin. Reprinted by permission of the author.
TED HUGHES: From A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse, selected and with an introduction by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1963). Reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber.
JUNE JORDAN: From Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005, 2018 by June M. Jordan Literary Trust. Reprinted with permission. www.junejordan.com.
JONATHAN KOZOL: From Jonathan Kozol, “Two Nations, Eternally Unequal,” in Tikkun 12, no. 1 (1996). Reprinted by permission of the author.
THOMAS LARSEN: From Thomas Larsen, “Uneasy Confessions,” in Poetry Flash, no. 232 (July 1992). Used by permission of the author.
ROBERT LOWELL: Excerpt from “Dolphin” from Collected Poems by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
HUGH MACDIARMID: Excerpt from “The Kind of Poetry I Want” by Hugh MacDiarmid, from Selected Poetry. Copyright © by Michael Grieve. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Copyright © 1992, 2004 the Estate of Michael Grieve. Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press.
CATHARINE A. MACKINNON: From The Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (Yale University Press, 1979). Copyright © by Catharine A. MacKinnon. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.
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