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Lesbian Poetry Retrospective Part 1

After eight nights of sleeping with you, one without you, and, O damn it, I miss you. I’d have to say how much and where I’d kiss you into your answering machine. It’s on; you’re out. I’d like to brag that I have done my donkey work, cleared my desk. In a daze, I walked four miles enumerating ways you make my laugh, take care of business, moan your name out loud and…There’s the telephone! Midnight, your good friend/roommate’s sick, maybe, gone Off without telling you. I saw Chip and Iva. You got in trouble in your sailor bar. I drank wine, talked France, and you, with Nadja. We wished we were together. Well, we are.
Kay Ryan (b. 1945)

Though Kay Ryan is not the first lesbian Poet Laureate – Elizabeth Bishop served from 1949 to 1950 – she is the first to be out and open about her sexuality. Ryan is the author of six collections of poetry, including her most recent, The Niagara River, which won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and Flamingo Watching, which was a finalist for the Lamont Book Award.

A teacher known for living a quiet life with her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair, Ryan’s work is filled with humor, insight and surprise. The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, called Ryan this generation’s Elizabeth Bishop.

The following poem is from her collection Elephant Rocks.

“If the Moon Happened Once”

If the moon happened once it wouldn’t matter much, would it?

One evening’s ticket punched with a round or a crescent.

You could like it or not like it, as you chose.

It couldn’t alter every time it rose;

it couldn’t do those things with scarves it does.
Let us know about your favorite queer poets in the comments!

“A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

First they said I was too light Then they said I was too dark Then they said I was too different Then they said I was too much the same Then they said I was too young Then they said I was too old Then they said I was too interracial Then they said I was too much a nationalist Then they said I was too silly Then they said I was too angry Then they said I was too idealistic Then they said I was too confusing altogether: Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind.
Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942)

One of the most respected formal poets, Marilyn Hacker has published several collections of poetry, including Winter Numbers and Presentation Piece, which won the National Book Award.

Her brilliant collection Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons is a book of sonnets that records an affair with a younger woman. The following poem comes from the middle of the narrative:

After eight nights of sleeping with you, one without you, and, O damn it, I miss you. I’d have to say how much and where I’d kiss you into your answering machine. It’s on; you’re out. I’d like to brag that I have done my donkey work, cleared my desk. In a daze, I walked four miles enumerating ways you make my laugh, take care of business, moan your name out loud and…There’s the telephone! Midnight, your good friend/roommate’s sick, maybe, gone Off without telling you. I saw Chip and Iva. You got in trouble in your sailor bar. I drank wine, talked France, and you, with Nadja. We wished we were together. Well, we are.
Kay Ryan (b. 1945)

Though Kay Ryan is not the first lesbian Poet Laureate – Elizabeth Bishop served from 1949 to 1950 – she is the first to be out and open about her sexuality. Ryan is the author of six collections of poetry, including her most recent, The Niagara River, which won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and Flamingo Watching, which was a finalist for the Lamont Book Award.

A teacher known for living a quiet life with her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair, Ryan’s work is filled with humor, insight and surprise. The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, called Ryan this generation’s Elizabeth Bishop.

The following poem is from her collection Elephant Rocks.

“If the Moon Happened Once”

If the moon happened once it wouldn’t matter much, would it?

One evening’s ticket punched with a round or a crescent.

You could like it or not like it, as you chose.

It couldn’t alter every time it rose;

it couldn’t do those things with scarves it does.
Let us know about your favorite queer poets in the comments!

“A Woman Speaks”

Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound.

I do not dwell within my birth nor my divinities who am ageless and half-grown and still seeking my sisters witches in Dahomey wear me inside their coiled cloths as our mother did mourning.

I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic and the noon’s new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white.
June Jordan (1936-2002)

Born in Harlem, June Jordan is one of the most published African-American writers, with 28 books, including essays, memoir, plays, novels, children’s books and poetry. The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Jordan was, Alice Walker said, “among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”

Jordan founded Poetry for the People out of UC—Berkeley, a program that defines itself as teaching “empowerment through the artistic expression of writing and reading poetry.”

Her own work consistently and passionately concerns itself with the idea of freedom, both in her art and her life, and she is famous for defining her bisexuality according to those standards: “Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?”

“A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

First they said I was too light Then they said I was too dark Then they said I was too different Then they said I was too much the same Then they said I was too young Then they said I was too old Then they said I was too interracial Then they said I was too much a nationalist Then they said I was too silly Then they said I was too angry Then they said I was too idealistic Then they said I was too confusing altogether: Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind.
Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942)

One of the most respected formal poets, Marilyn Hacker has published several collections of poetry, including Winter Numbers and Presentation Piece, which won the National Book Award.

Her brilliant collection Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons is a book of sonnets that records an affair with a younger woman. The following poem comes from the middle of the narrative:

After eight nights of sleeping with you, one without you, and, O damn it, I miss you. I’d have to say how much and where I’d kiss you into your answering machine. It’s on; you’re out. I’d like to brag that I have done my donkey work, cleared my desk. In a daze, I walked four miles enumerating ways you make my laugh, take care of business, moan your name out loud and…There’s the telephone! Midnight, your good friend/roommate’s sick, maybe, gone Off without telling you. I saw Chip and Iva. You got in trouble in your sailor bar. I drank wine, talked France, and you, with Nadja. We wished we were together. Well, we are.
Kay Ryan (b. 1945)

Though Kay Ryan is not the first lesbian Poet Laureate – Elizabeth Bishop served from 1949 to 1950 – she is the first to be out and open about her sexuality. Ryan is the author of six collections of poetry, including her most recent, The Niagara River, which won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and Flamingo Watching, which was a finalist for the Lamont Book Award.

A teacher known for living a quiet life with her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair, Ryan’s work is filled with humor, insight and surprise. The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, called Ryan this generation’s Elizabeth Bishop.

The following poem is from her collection Elephant Rocks.

“If the Moon Happened Once”

If the moon happened once it wouldn’t matter much, would it?

One evening’s ticket punched with a round or a crescent.

You could like it or not like it, as you chose.

It couldn’t alter every time it rose;

it couldn’t do those things with scarves it does.
Let us know about your favorite queer poets in the comments!

XIX

Can it be growing colder when I begin to touch myself again, adhesion pull away? when slowly the naked face turns from staring backward and looks into the present, the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living? Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream Or in this poem, There are no miracles? (I told you from the first I wanted daily life, this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.) If I could let you know – two women together is a work nothing in civilization has made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine – look at the faces of those who have chosen it.
Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

Audre Lorde’s work is deeply political both in its exploration of lesbian and African-American identity. A brilliant and prolific essayist, novelist and poet, Lorde wrote 10 volumes of poetry and was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993.

After divorcing her husband, with whom she had two children, Lorde’s latter relationships were with women. In her writing, Lorde combined her activism for women, African-Americans, and lesbian and bisexual women. In The Cancer Journals, she wrote about her struggle with the disease that eventually took her life.

One of the more interesting elements of Lorde’s work was her belief that poetry should be a “revelatory distillation of experience.” The following poem, “A Woman Speaks,” was published in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.

“A Woman Speaks”

Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound.

I do not dwell within my birth nor my divinities who am ageless and half-grown and still seeking my sisters witches in Dahomey wear me inside their coiled cloths as our mother did mourning.

I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic and the noon’s new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white.
June Jordan (1936-2002)

Born in Harlem, June Jordan is one of the most published African-American writers, with 28 books, including essays, memoir, plays, novels, children’s books and poetry. The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Jordan was, Alice Walker said, “among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”

Jordan founded Poetry for the People out of UC—Berkeley, a program that defines itself as teaching “empowerment through the artistic expression of writing and reading poetry.”

Her own work consistently and passionately concerns itself with the idea of freedom, both in her art and her life, and she is famous for defining her bisexuality according to those standards: “Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?”

“A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

First they said I was too light Then they said I was too dark Then they said I was too different Then they said I was too much the same Then they said I was too young Then they said I was too old Then they said I was too interracial Then they said I was too much a nationalist Then they said I was too silly Then they said I was too angry Then they said I was too idealistic Then they said I was too confusing altogether: Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind.
Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942)

One of the most respected formal poets, Marilyn Hacker has published several collections of poetry, including Winter Numbers and Presentation Piece, which won the National Book Award.

Her brilliant collection Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons is a book of sonnets that records an affair with a younger woman. The following poem comes from the middle of the narrative:

After eight nights of sleeping with you, one without you, and, O damn it, I miss you. I’d have to say how much and where I’d kiss you into your answering machine. It’s on; you’re out. I’d like to brag that I have done my donkey work, cleared my desk. In a daze, I walked four miles enumerating ways you make my laugh, take care of business, moan your name out loud and…There’s the telephone! Midnight, your good friend/roommate’s sick, maybe, gone Off without telling you. I saw Chip and Iva. You got in trouble in your sailor bar. I drank wine, talked France, and you, with Nadja. We wished we were together. Well, we are.
Kay Ryan (b. 1945)

Though Kay Ryan is not the first lesbian Poet Laureate – Elizabeth Bishop served from 1949 to 1950 – she is the first to be out and open about her sexuality. Ryan is the author of six collections of poetry, including her most recent, The Niagara River, which won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and Flamingo Watching, which was a finalist for the Lamont Book Award.

A teacher known for living a quiet life with her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair, Ryan’s work is filled with humor, insight and surprise. The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, called Ryan this generation’s Elizabeth Bishop.

The following poem is from her collection Elephant Rocks.

“If the Moon Happened Once”

If the moon happened once it wouldn’t matter much, would it?

One evening’s ticket punched with a round or a crescent.

You could like it or not like it, as you chose.

It couldn’t alter every time it rose;

it couldn’t do those things with scarves it does.
Let us know about your favorite queer poets in the comments!

“It is marvellous to wake up together”

It is marvellous to wake up together At the same minute; marvellous to hear The rain begin suddenly all over the roof, To feel the air suddenly clear As if electricity had passed through it From a black mesh of wires in the sky. All over the roof the rain hisses, And below, the light falling of kisses. An electrical storm is coming or moving away; It is the prickling air that wakes us up. If lightning struck the house now, it would run From the four blue china balls on top Down the roof and down the rods all around us, And we imagine dreamily How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning Would be quite delightful rather than frightening; And from the same simplified point of view Of night and lying flat on one’s back All things might change equally easily, Since always to warn us there must be these black Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise The world might change to something quite different, As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking, Change as the kisses are changing without our thinking.
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

While Elizabeth Bishop is known for her reluctance to address her sexuality, Adrienne Rich is the complete opposite. A well-known scholar and critic, Rich’s collection A Change of World won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952. A year later she married and had three children with Alfred Conrad, whom she later left for her partner, Michelle Cliff.

Rich’s work is intensely political and she believed in the power of poetry to influence and change lives. A teacher and an activist, she has published 20 volumes of poetry along with four collections of prose and is often referred to as America’s “most widely read lesbian poet.”

The following poem comes from “Twenty-One Love Poems” in Dream of a Common Language.

XIX

Can it be growing colder when I begin to touch myself again, adhesion pull away? when slowly the naked face turns from staring backward and looks into the present, the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living? Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream Or in this poem, There are no miracles? (I told you from the first I wanted daily life, this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.) If I could let you know – two women together is a work nothing in civilization has made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine – look at the faces of those who have chosen it.
Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

Audre Lorde’s work is deeply political both in its exploration of lesbian and African-American identity. A brilliant and prolific essayist, novelist and poet, Lorde wrote 10 volumes of poetry and was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993.

After divorcing her husband, with whom she had two children, Lorde’s latter relationships were with women. In her writing, Lorde combined her activism for women, African-Americans, and lesbian and bisexual women. In The Cancer Journals, she wrote about her struggle with the disease that eventually took her life.

One of the more interesting elements of Lorde’s work was her belief that poetry should be a “revelatory distillation of experience.” The following poem, “A Woman Speaks,” was published in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.

“A Woman Speaks”

Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound.

I do not dwell within my birth nor my divinities who am ageless and half-grown and still seeking my sisters witches in Dahomey wear me inside their coiled cloths as our mother did mourning.

I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic and the noon’s new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white.
June Jordan (1936-2002)

Born in Harlem, June Jordan is one of the most published African-American writers, with 28 books, including essays, memoir, plays, novels, children’s books and poetry. The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Jordan was, Alice Walker said, “among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”

Jordan founded Poetry for the People out of UC—Berkeley, a program that defines itself as teaching “empowerment through the artistic expression of writing and reading poetry.”

Her own work consistently and passionately concerns itself with the idea of freedom, both in her art and her life, and she is famous for defining her bisexuality according to those standards: “Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?”

“A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

First they said I was too light Then they said I was too dark Then they said I was too different Then they said I was too much the same Then they said I was too young Then they said I was too old Then they said I was too interracial Then they said I was too much a nationalist Then they said I was too silly Then they said I was too angry Then they said I was too idealistic Then they said I was too confusing altogether: Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind.
Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942)

One of the most respected formal poets, Marilyn Hacker has published several collections of poetry, including Winter Numbers and Presentation Piece, which won the National Book Award.

Her brilliant collection Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons is a book of sonnets that records an affair with a younger woman. The following poem comes from the middle of the narrative:

After eight nights of sleeping with you, one without you, and, O damn it, I miss you. I’d have to say how much and where I’d kiss you into your answering machine. It’s on; you’re out. I’d like to brag that I have done my donkey work, cleared my desk. In a daze, I walked four miles enumerating ways you make my laugh, take care of business, moan your name out loud and…There’s the telephone! Midnight, your good friend/roommate’s sick, maybe, gone Off without telling you. I saw Chip and Iva. You got in trouble in your sailor bar. I drank wine, talked France, and you, with Nadja. We wished we were together. Well, we are.
Kay Ryan (b. 1945)

Though Kay Ryan is not the first lesbian Poet Laureate – Elizabeth Bishop served from 1949 to 1950 – she is the first to be out and open about her sexuality. Ryan is the author of six collections of poetry, including her most recent, The Niagara River, which won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and Flamingo Watching, which was a finalist for the Lamont Book Award.

A teacher known for living a quiet life with her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair, Ryan’s work is filled with humor, insight and surprise. The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, called Ryan this generation’s Elizabeth Bishop.

The following poem is from her collection Elephant Rocks.

“If the Moon Happened Once”

If the moon happened once it wouldn’t matter much, would it?

One evening’s ticket punched with a round or a crescent.

You could like it or not like it, as you chose.

It couldn’t alter every time it rose;

it couldn’t do those things with scarves it does.
Let us know about your favorite queer poets in the comments!

“Pink Melon Joy”

My dear what is meat. I certainly regret visiting. My dear what does it matter. Leaning. Maintaining maintaining checkers. I left a leaf and I meant it. Splintering and hams. I caught a cold. Bessie They are dirty. Not polite. Not steel. Not fireless. Not bewildered. Not a present. Why do I give old boats. Theresa. Exchange in bicycles. It happened that in the aggregate and they did not hear then, it happened in the aggregate that they were alone. It is funny. When examples are borrowing and little pleasures are seeking after not exactly a box then comes the time for drilling. Left left or left. Not up. Really believe me it is sheltered oaks that matter. It is they who are sighing. It really is. Not when I hear it.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

She was certainly not the most prolific writer of her generation, but Elizabeth Bishop is widely considered to be an American master. Her mentors included Marianne Moore, whom she met at Vassar, and Robert Lowell.

Bishop’s life was difficult from the beginning. Her father died of Bright’s disease before her first birthday, and her mother was hospitalized for mental illness for much of Bishop’s life. Bishop also struggled with alcoholism, and her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, committed suicide while the two were living together in Brazil.

Bishop was as weary about proclaiming her sexuality as she was resistant to the title “woman poet.” Intensely private, she once told Robert Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”

“It is marvellous to wake up together”

It is marvellous to wake up together At the same minute; marvellous to hear The rain begin suddenly all over the roof, To feel the air suddenly clear As if electricity had passed through it From a black mesh of wires in the sky. All over the roof the rain hisses, And below, the light falling of kisses. An electrical storm is coming or moving away; It is the prickling air that wakes us up. If lightning struck the house now, it would run From the four blue china balls on top Down the roof and down the rods all around us, And we imagine dreamily How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning Would be quite delightful rather than frightening; And from the same simplified point of view Of night and lying flat on one’s back All things might change equally easily, Since always to warn us there must be these black Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise The world might change to something quite different, As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking, Change as the kisses are changing without our thinking.
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

While Elizabeth Bishop is known for her reluctance to address her sexuality, Adrienne Rich is the complete opposite. A well-known scholar and critic, Rich’s collection A Change of World won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952. A year later she married and had three children with Alfred Conrad, whom she later left for her partner, Michelle Cliff.

Rich’s work is intensely political and she believed in the power of poetry to influence and change lives. A teacher and an activist, she has published 20 volumes of poetry along with four collections of prose and is often referred to as America’s “most widely read lesbian poet.”

The following poem comes from “Twenty-One Love Poems” in Dream of a Common Language.

XIX

Can it be growing colder when I begin to touch myself again, adhesion pull away? when slowly the naked face turns from staring backward and looks into the present, the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living? Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream Or in this poem, There are no miracles? (I told you from the first I wanted daily life, this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.) If I could let you know – two women together is a work nothing in civilization has made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine – look at the faces of those who have chosen it.
Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

Audre Lorde’s work is deeply political both in its exploration of lesbian and African-American identity. A brilliant and prolific essayist, novelist and poet, Lorde wrote 10 volumes of poetry and was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993.

After divorcing her husband, with whom she had two children, Lorde’s latter relationships were with women. In her writing, Lorde combined her activism for women, African-Americans, and lesbian and bisexual women. In The Cancer Journals, she wrote about her struggle with the disease that eventually took her life.

One of the more interesting elements of Lorde’s work was her belief that poetry should be a “revelatory distillation of experience.” The following poem, “A Woman Speaks,” was published in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.

“A Woman Speaks”

Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound.

I do not dwell within my birth nor my divinities who am ageless and half-grown and still seeking my sisters witches in Dahomey wear me inside their coiled cloths as our mother did mourning.

I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic and the noon’s new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white.
June Jordan (1936-2002)

Born in Harlem, June Jordan is one of the most published African-American writers, with 28 books, including essays, memoir, plays, novels, children’s books and poetry. The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Jordan was, Alice Walker said, “among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”

Jordan founded Poetry for the People out of UC—Berkeley, a program that defines itself as teaching “empowerment through the artistic expression of writing and reading poetry.”

Her own work consistently and passionately concerns itself with the idea of freedom, both in her art and her life, and she is famous for defining her bisexuality according to those standards: “Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?”

“A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

First they said I was too light Then they said I was too dark Then they said I was too different Then they said I was too much the same Then they said I was too young Then they said I was too old Then they said I was too interracial Then they said I was too much a nationalist Then they said I was too silly Then they said I was too angry Then they said I was too idealistic Then they said I was too confusing altogether: Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind.
Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942)

One of the most respected formal poets, Marilyn Hacker has published several collections of poetry, including Winter Numbers and Presentation Piece, which won the National Book Award.

Her brilliant collection Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons is a book of sonnets that records an affair with a younger woman. The following poem comes from the middle of the narrative:

After eight nights of sleeping with you, one without you, and, O damn it, I miss you. I’d have to say how much and where I’d kiss you into your answering machine. It’s on; you’re out. I’d like to brag that I have done my donkey work, cleared my desk. In a daze, I walked four miles enumerating ways you make my laugh, take care of business, moan your name out loud and…There’s the telephone! Midnight, your good friend/roommate’s sick, maybe, gone Off without telling you. I saw Chip and Iva. You got in trouble in your sailor bar. I drank wine, talked France, and you, with Nadja. We wished we were together. Well, we are.
Kay Ryan (b. 1945)

Though Kay Ryan is not the first lesbian Poet Laureate – Elizabeth Bishop served from 1949 to 1950 – she is the first to be out and open about her sexuality. Ryan is the author of six collections of poetry, including her most recent, The Niagara River, which won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and Flamingo Watching, which was a finalist for the Lamont Book Award.

A teacher known for living a quiet life with her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair, Ryan’s work is filled with humor, insight and surprise. The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, called Ryan this generation’s Elizabeth Bishop.

The following poem is from her collection Elephant Rocks.

“If the Moon Happened Once”

If the moon happened once it wouldn’t matter much, would it?

One evening’s ticket punched with a round or a crescent.

You could like it or not like it, as you chose.

It couldn’t alter every time it rose;

it couldn’t do those things with scarves it does.
Let us know about your favorite queer poets in the comments!

“A Decade”

When you came, you were like red wine and honey, And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness. Now you are like morning bread, Smooth and pleasant. I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour, But I am completely nourished.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1925)

Known perhaps as much for her experimental prose style as she is for her relationship with Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein was born in Pennsylvania but spent most of her life in Paris helping to cultivate the modernist movement.

Stein was inspired by several distinct influences and experiences: her famous brother, Leo Stein; studying psychology with William James; a failed attempt to finish medical school; Picasso’s cubism (see Tender Buttons); the paintings of Cezanne and Matisse; and her frustrating attempt to gain recognition for her own work, including Three Lives, Things as They Areand The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,which told the story of their famous relationship.

The following poem, “Pink Melon Joy,” was published in Geography and Play.

“Pink Melon Joy”

My dear what is meat. I certainly regret visiting. My dear what does it matter. Leaning. Maintaining maintaining checkers. I left a leaf and I meant it. Splintering and hams. I caught a cold. Bessie They are dirty. Not polite. Not steel. Not fireless. Not bewildered. Not a present. Why do I give old boats. Theresa. Exchange in bicycles. It happened that in the aggregate and they did not hear then, it happened in the aggregate that they were alone. It is funny. When examples are borrowing and little pleasures are seeking after not exactly a box then comes the time for drilling. Left left or left. Not up. Really believe me it is sheltered oaks that matter. It is they who are sighing. It really is. Not when I hear it.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

She was certainly not the most prolific writer of her generation, but Elizabeth Bishop is widely considered to be an American master. Her mentors included Marianne Moore, whom she met at Vassar, and Robert Lowell.

Bishop’s life was difficult from the beginning. Her father died of Bright’s disease before her first birthday, and her mother was hospitalized for mental illness for much of Bishop’s life. Bishop also struggled with alcoholism, and her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, committed suicide while the two were living together in Brazil.

Bishop was as weary about proclaiming her sexuality as she was resistant to the title “woman poet.” Intensely private, she once told Robert Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”

“It is marvellous to wake up together”

It is marvellous to wake up together At the same minute; marvellous to hear The rain begin suddenly all over the roof, To feel the air suddenly clear As if electricity had passed through it From a black mesh of wires in the sky. All over the roof the rain hisses, And below, the light falling of kisses. An electrical storm is coming or moving away; It is the prickling air that wakes us up. If lightning struck the house now, it would run From the four blue china balls on top Down the roof and down the rods all around us, And we imagine dreamily How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning Would be quite delightful rather than frightening; And from the same simplified point of view Of night and lying flat on one’s back All things might change equally easily, Since always to warn us there must be these black Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise The world might change to something quite different, As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking, Change as the kisses are changing without our thinking.
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

While Elizabeth Bishop is known for her reluctance to address her sexuality, Adrienne Rich is the complete opposite. A well-known scholar and critic, Rich’s collection A Change of World won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952. A year later she married and had three children with Alfred Conrad, whom she later left for her partner, Michelle Cliff.

Rich’s work is intensely political and she believed in the power of poetry to influence and change lives. A teacher and an activist, she has published 20 volumes of poetry along with four collections of prose and is often referred to as America’s “most widely read lesbian poet.”

The following poem comes from “Twenty-One Love Poems” in Dream of a Common Language.

XIX

Can it be growing colder when I begin to touch myself again, adhesion pull away? when slowly the naked face turns from staring backward and looks into the present, the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living? Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream Or in this poem, There are no miracles? (I told you from the first I wanted daily life, this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.) If I could let you know – two women together is a work nothing in civilization has made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine – look at the faces of those who have chosen it.
Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

Audre Lorde’s work is deeply political both in its exploration of lesbian and African-American identity. A brilliant and prolific essayist, novelist and poet, Lorde wrote 10 volumes of poetry and was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993.

After divorcing her husband, with whom she had two children, Lorde’s latter relationships were with women. In her writing, Lorde combined her activism for women, African-Americans, and lesbian and bisexual women. In The Cancer Journals, she wrote about her struggle with the disease that eventually took her life.

One of the more interesting elements of Lorde’s work was her belief that poetry should be a “revelatory distillation of experience.” The following poem, “A Woman Speaks,” was published in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.

“A Woman Speaks”

Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound.

I do not dwell within my birth nor my divinities who am ageless and half-grown and still seeking my sisters witches in Dahomey wear me inside their coiled cloths as our mother did mourning.

I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic and the noon’s new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white.
June Jordan (1936-2002)

Born in Harlem, June Jordan is one of the most published African-American writers, with 28 books, including essays, memoir, plays, novels, children’s books and poetry. The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Jordan was, Alice Walker said, “among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”

Jordan founded Poetry for the People out of UC—Berkeley, a program that defines itself as teaching “empowerment through the artistic expression of writing and reading poetry.”

Her own work consistently and passionately concerns itself with the idea of freedom, both in her art and her life, and she is famous for defining her bisexuality according to those standards: “Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?”

“A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

First they said I was too light Then they said I was too dark Then they said I was too different Then they said I was too much the same Then they said I was too young Then they said I was too old Then they said I was too interracial Then they said I was too much a nationalist Then they said I was too silly Then they said I was too angry Then they said I was too idealistic Then they said I was too confusing altogether: Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind.
Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942)

One of the most respected formal poets, Marilyn Hacker has published several collections of poetry, including Winter Numbers and Presentation Piece, which won the National Book Award.

Her brilliant collection Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons is a book of sonnets that records an affair with a younger woman. The following poem comes from the middle of the narrative:

After eight nights of sleeping with you, one without you, and, O damn it, I miss you. I’d have to say how much and where I’d kiss you into your answering machine. It’s on; you’re out. I’d like to brag that I have done my donkey work, cleared my desk. In a daze, I walked four miles enumerating ways you make my laugh, take care of business, moan your name out loud and…There’s the telephone! Midnight, your good friend/roommate’s sick, maybe, gone Off without telling you. I saw Chip and Iva. You got in trouble in your sailor bar. I drank wine, talked France, and you, with Nadja. We wished we were together. Well, we are.
Kay Ryan (b. 1945)

Though Kay Ryan is not the first lesbian Poet Laureate – Elizabeth Bishop served from 1949 to 1950 – she is the first to be out and open about her sexuality. Ryan is the author of six collections of poetry, including her most recent, The Niagara River, which won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and Flamingo Watching, which was a finalist for the Lamont Book Award.

A teacher known for living a quiet life with her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair, Ryan’s work is filled with humor, insight and surprise. The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, called Ryan this generation’s Elizabeth Bishop.

The following poem is from her collection Elephant Rocks.

“If the Moon Happened Once”

If the moon happened once it wouldn’t matter much, would it?

One evening’s ticket punched with a round or a crescent.

You could like it or not like it, as you chose.

It couldn’t alter every time it rose;

it couldn’t do those things with scarves it does.
Let us know about your favorite queer poets in the comments!

What mystery pervades a well! That water lives so far – A neighbor from another world Residing in a jar

Whose limit none have ever seen, But just his lid of glass – Like looking every time you please In an abyss’s face!

The grass does not appear afraid, I often wonder he Can stand so close and look so bold At what is awe to me.

Related somehow they may be, The sedge stands next the sea – Where he is floorless And does no timidity betray

But nature is a stranger yet; The ones that cite her most Have never passed her haunted house, Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not Is helped by the regret That those who know her, know her less The nearer her they get.
Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Also a native New Englander, imagist poet Amy Lowell’s work was inspired by beauty from the very beginning. Though she was first stirred to write a poem after seeing the actress Eleonora Duse on stage, the real love of her life was another actress, Ada Russell. The two were together for 15 years.

Lowell helped bring the imagist movement to the U.S. after traveling to England and meeting H.D. (the bisexual poet and novelist, Hilda Doolittle). Though Lowell won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, her work was not without controversy. Ezra Pound, a leader in the imagist movement, resented and rejected Lowell’s involvement, and the lesbian content of her poetry offended many critics.

Nonetheless, Lowell, who was known for smoking cigars and wearing men’s clothing, continued to develop her unique and open voice. The following poem, “A Decade,” was written for Russell on their 10th anniversary.

“A Decade”

When you came, you were like red wine and honey, And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness. Now you are like morning bread, Smooth and pleasant. I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour, But I am completely nourished.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1925)

Known perhaps as much for her experimental prose style as she is for her relationship with Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein was born in Pennsylvania but spent most of her life in Paris helping to cultivate the modernist movement.

Stein was inspired by several distinct influences and experiences: her famous brother, Leo Stein; studying psychology with William James; a failed attempt to finish medical school; Picasso’s cubism (see Tender Buttons); the paintings of Cezanne and Matisse; and her frustrating attempt to gain recognition for her own work, including Three Lives, Things as They Areand The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,which told the story of their famous relationship.

The following poem, “Pink Melon Joy,” was published in Geography and Play.

“Pink Melon Joy”

My dear what is meat. I certainly regret visiting. My dear what does it matter. Leaning. Maintaining maintaining checkers. I left a leaf and I meant it. Splintering and hams. I caught a cold. Bessie They are dirty. Not polite. Not steel. Not fireless. Not bewildered. Not a present. Why do I give old boats. Theresa. Exchange in bicycles. It happened that in the aggregate and they did not hear then, it happened in the aggregate that they were alone. It is funny. When examples are borrowing and little pleasures are seeking after not exactly a box then comes the time for drilling. Left left or left. Not up. Really believe me it is sheltered oaks that matter. It is they who are sighing. It really is. Not when I hear it.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

She was certainly not the most prolific writer of her generation, but Elizabeth Bishop is widely considered to be an American master. Her mentors included Marianne Moore, whom she met at Vassar, and Robert Lowell.

Bishop’s life was difficult from the beginning. Her father died of Bright’s disease before her first birthday, and her mother was hospitalized for mental illness for much of Bishop’s life. Bishop also struggled with alcoholism, and her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, committed suicide while the two were living together in Brazil.

Bishop was as weary about proclaiming her sexuality as she was resistant to the title “woman poet.” Intensely private, she once told Robert Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”

“It is marvellous to wake up together”

It is marvellous to wake up together At the same minute; marvellous to hear The rain begin suddenly all over the roof, To feel the air suddenly clear As if electricity had passed through it From a black mesh of wires in the sky. All over the roof the rain hisses, And below, the light falling of kisses. An electrical storm is coming or moving away; It is the prickling air that wakes us up. If lightning struck the house now, it would run From the four blue china balls on top Down the roof and down the rods all around us, And we imagine dreamily How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning Would be quite delightful rather than frightening; And from the same simplified point of view Of night and lying flat on one’s back All things might change equally easily, Since always to warn us there must be these black Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise The world might change to something quite different, As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking, Change as the kisses are changing without our thinking.
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

While Elizabeth Bishop is known for her reluctance to address her sexuality, Adrienne Rich is the complete opposite. A well-known scholar and critic, Rich’s collection A Change of World won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952. A year later she married and had three children with Alfred Conrad, whom she later left for her partner, Michelle Cliff.

Rich’s work is intensely political and she believed in the power of poetry to influence and change lives. A teacher and an activist, she has published 20 volumes of poetry along with four collections of prose and is often referred to as America’s “most widely read lesbian poet.”

The following poem comes from “Twenty-One Love Poems” in Dream of a Common Language.

XIX

Can it be growing colder when I begin to touch myself again, adhesion pull away? when slowly the naked face turns from staring backward and looks into the present, the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living? Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream Or in this poem, There are no miracles? (I told you from the first I wanted daily life, this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.) If I could let you know – two women together is a work nothing in civilization has made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine – look at the faces of those who have chosen it.
Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

Audre Lorde’s work is deeply political both in its exploration of lesbian and African-American identity. A brilliant and prolific essayist, novelist and poet, Lorde wrote 10 volumes of poetry and was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993.

After divorcing her husband, with whom she had two children, Lorde’s latter relationships were with women. In her writing, Lorde combined her activism for women, African-Americans, and lesbian and bisexual women. In The Cancer Journals, she wrote about her struggle with the disease that eventually took her life.

One of the more interesting elements of Lorde’s work was her belief that poetry should be a “revelatory distillation of experience.” The following poem, “A Woman Speaks,” was published in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.

“A Woman Speaks”

Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound.

I do not dwell within my birth nor my divinities who am ageless and half-grown and still seeking my sisters witches in Dahomey wear me inside their coiled cloths as our mother did mourning.

I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic and the noon’s new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white.
June Jordan (1936-2002)

Born in Harlem, June Jordan is one of the most published African-American writers, with 28 books, including essays, memoir, plays, novels, children’s books and poetry. The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Jordan was, Alice Walker said, “among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”

Jordan founded Poetry for the People out of UC—Berkeley, a program that defines itself as teaching “empowerment through the artistic expression of writing and reading poetry.”

Her own work consistently and passionately concerns itself with the idea of freedom, both in her art and her life, and she is famous for defining her bisexuality according to those standards: “Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?”

“A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

First they said I was too light Then they said I was too dark Then they said I was too different Then they said I was too much the same Then they said I was too young Then they said I was too old Then they said I was too interracial Then they said I was too much a nationalist Then they said I was too silly Then they said I was too angry Then they said I was too idealistic Then they said I was too confusing altogether: Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind.
Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942)

One of the most respected formal poets, Marilyn Hacker has published several collections of poetry, including Winter Numbers and Presentation Piece, which won the National Book Award.

Her brilliant collection Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons is a book of sonnets that records an affair with a younger woman. The following poem comes from the middle of the narrative:

After eight nights of sleeping with you, one without you, and, O damn it, I miss you. I’d have to say how much and where I’d kiss you into your answering machine. It’s on; you’re out. I’d like to brag that I have done my donkey work, cleared my desk. In a daze, I walked four miles enumerating ways you make my laugh, take care of business, moan your name out loud and…There’s the telephone! Midnight, your good friend/roommate’s sick, maybe, gone Off without telling you. I saw Chip and Iva. You got in trouble in your sailor bar. I drank wine, talked France, and you, with Nadja. We wished we were together. Well, we are.
Kay Ryan (b. 1945)

Though Kay Ryan is not the first lesbian Poet Laureate – Elizabeth Bishop served from 1949 to 1950 – she is the first to be out and open about her sexuality. Ryan is the author of six collections of poetry, including her most recent, The Niagara River, which won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and Flamingo Watching, which was a finalist for the Lamont Book Award.

A teacher known for living a quiet life with her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair, Ryan’s work is filled with humor, insight and surprise. The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, called Ryan this generation’s Elizabeth Bishop.

The following poem is from her collection Elephant Rocks.

“If the Moon Happened Once”

If the moon happened once it wouldn’t matter much, would it?

One evening’s ticket punched with a round or a crescent.

You could like it or not like it, as you chose.

It couldn’t alter every time it rose;

it couldn’t do those things with scarves it does.
Let us know about your favorite queer poets in the comments!

“Return, Gongyla”

A deed your lovely face

if not, winter and no pain

I bid you, Abanthis, take up the lyre and sing of Gongyla as again desire floats around you

the beautiful. When you saw her dress it excited you. I’m happy. The Kypros-born once blamed me

for praying this word: I want
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

If Sappho is the woman poet of Ancient Greece, Emily Dickinson is perhaps the most famous American woman poet of New England. Unlike Sappho, however, Dickinson spent most of her days in quiet solitude.

Born in 1830, Dickinson only published eight poems during her lifetime – more than 1,700 were found and published posthumously. Her main connection with the outside world was through letters.

Among her more famous correspondents include Samuel Bowels, editor of a local paper, and Judge Otis Lorde. Some believe Dickinson was in love with one or both of these men, and that either could be the “Master” she addresses in three famous letters.

However, it is now recognized that Dickinson’s true love was her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. Their relationship was extremely passionate, and Dickinson wrote and sent Gilbert hundreds of poems, more than anyone else in her life. In several of the letters, Dickinson reveals her love and desire to be physically closer to Gilbert, who was, undoubtedly, the poet’s most trusted and beloved muse.

According to glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Culture, one draft of the following poem was found with the word “nature” replaced with “Susan.”

What mystery pervades a well! That water lives so far – A neighbor from another world Residing in a jar

Whose limit none have ever seen, But just his lid of glass – Like looking every time you please In an abyss’s face!

The grass does not appear afraid, I often wonder he Can stand so close and look so bold At what is awe to me.

Related somehow they may be, The sedge stands next the sea – Where he is floorless And does no timidity betray

But nature is a stranger yet; The ones that cite her most Have never passed her haunted house, Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not Is helped by the regret That those who know her, know her less The nearer her they get.
Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Also a native New Englander, imagist poet Amy Lowell’s work was inspired by beauty from the very beginning. Though she was first stirred to write a poem after seeing the actress Eleonora Duse on stage, the real love of her life was another actress, Ada Russell. The two were together for 15 years.

Lowell helped bring the imagist movement to the U.S. after traveling to England and meeting H.D. (the bisexual poet and novelist, Hilda Doolittle). Though Lowell won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, her work was not without controversy. Ezra Pound, a leader in the imagist movement, resented and rejected Lowell’s involvement, and the lesbian content of her poetry offended many critics.

Nonetheless, Lowell, who was known for smoking cigars and wearing men’s clothing, continued to develop her unique and open voice. The following poem, “A Decade,” was written for Russell on their 10th anniversary.

“A Decade”

When you came, you were like red wine and honey, And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness. Now you are like morning bread, Smooth and pleasant. I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour, But I am completely nourished.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1925)

Known perhaps as much for her experimental prose style as she is for her relationship with Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein was born in Pennsylvania but spent most of her life in Paris helping to cultivate the modernist movement.

Stein was inspired by several distinct influences and experiences: her famous brother, Leo Stein; studying psychology with William James; a failed attempt to finish medical school; Picasso’s cubism (see Tender Buttons); the paintings of Cezanne and Matisse; and her frustrating attempt to gain recognition for her own work, including Three Lives, Things as They Areand The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,which told the story of their famous relationship.

The following poem, “Pink Melon Joy,” was published in Geography and Play.

“Pink Melon Joy”

My dear what is meat. I certainly regret visiting. My dear what does it matter. Leaning. Maintaining maintaining checkers. I left a leaf and I meant it. Splintering and hams. I caught a cold. Bessie They are dirty. Not polite. Not steel. Not fireless. Not bewildered. Not a present. Why do I give old boats. Theresa. Exchange in bicycles. It happened that in the aggregate and they did not hear then, it happened in the aggregate that they were alone. It is funny. When examples are borrowing and little pleasures are seeking after not exactly a box then comes the time for drilling. Left left or left. Not up. Really believe me it is sheltered oaks that matter. It is they who are sighing. It really is. Not when I hear it.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

She was certainly not the most prolific writer of her generation, but Elizabeth Bishop is widely considered to be an American master. Her mentors included Marianne Moore, whom she met at Vassar, and Robert Lowell.

Bishop’s life was difficult from the beginning. Her father died of Bright’s disease before her first birthday, and her mother was hospitalized for mental illness for much of Bishop’s life. Bishop also struggled with alcoholism, and her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, committed suicide while the two were living together in Brazil.

Bishop was as weary about proclaiming her sexuality as she was resistant to the title “woman poet.” Intensely private, she once told Robert Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”

“It is marvellous to wake up together”

It is marvellous to wake up together At the same minute; marvellous to hear The rain begin suddenly all over the roof, To feel the air suddenly clear As if electricity had passed through it From a black mesh of wires in the sky. All over the roof the rain hisses, And below, the light falling of kisses. An electrical storm is coming or moving away; It is the prickling air that wakes us up. If lightning struck the house now, it would run From the four blue china balls on top Down the roof and down the rods all around us, And we imagine dreamily How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning Would be quite delightful rather than frightening; And from the same simplified point of view Of night and lying flat on one’s back All things might change equally easily, Since always to warn us there must be these black Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise The world might change to something quite different, As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking, Change as the kisses are changing without our thinking.
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

While Elizabeth Bishop is known for her reluctance to address her sexuality, Adrienne Rich is the complete opposite. A well-known scholar and critic, Rich’s collection A Change of World won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952. A year later she married and had three children with Alfred Conrad, whom she later left for her partner, Michelle Cliff.

Rich’s work is intensely political and she believed in the power of poetry to influence and change lives. A teacher and an activist, she has published 20 volumes of poetry along with four collections of prose and is often referred to as America’s “most widely read lesbian poet.”

The following poem comes from “Twenty-One Love Poems” in Dream of a Common Language.

XIX

Can it be growing colder when I begin to touch myself again, adhesion pull away? when slowly the naked face turns from staring backward and looks into the present, the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living? Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream Or in this poem, There are no miracles? (I told you from the first I wanted daily life, this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.) If I could let you know – two women together is a work nothing in civilization has made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine – look at the faces of those who have chosen it.
Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

Audre Lorde’s work is deeply political both in its exploration of lesbian and African-American identity. A brilliant and prolific essayist, novelist and poet, Lorde wrote 10 volumes of poetry and was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993.

After divorcing her husband, with whom she had two children, Lorde’s latter relationships were with women. In her writing, Lorde combined her activism for women, African-Americans, and lesbian and bisexual women. In The Cancer Journals, she wrote about her struggle with the disease that eventually took her life.

One of the more interesting elements of Lorde’s work was her belief that poetry should be a “revelatory distillation of experience.” The following poem, “A Woman Speaks,” was published in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.

“A Woman Speaks”

Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound.

I do not dwell within my birth nor my divinities who am ageless and half-grown and still seeking my sisters witches in Dahomey wear me inside their coiled cloths as our mother did mourning.

I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic and the noon’s new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white.
June Jordan (1936-2002)

Born in Harlem, June Jordan is one of the most published African-American writers, with 28 books, including essays, memoir, plays, novels, children’s books and poetry. The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Jordan was, Alice Walker said, “among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”

Jordan founded Poetry for the People out of UC—Berkeley, a program that defines itself as teaching “empowerment through the artistic expression of writing and reading poetry.”

Her own work consistently and passionately concerns itself with the idea of freedom, both in her art and her life, and she is famous for defining her bisexuality according to those standards: “Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?”

“A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

First they said I was too light Then they said I was too dark Then they said I was too different Then they said I was too much the same Then they said I was too young Then they said I was too old Then they said I was too interracial Then they said I was too much a nationalist Then they said I was too silly Then they said I was too angry Then they said I was too idealistic Then they said I was too confusing altogether: Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind.
Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942)

One of the most respected formal poets, Marilyn Hacker has published several collections of poetry, including Winter Numbers and Presentation Piece, which won the National Book Award.

Her brilliant collection Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons is a book of sonnets that records an affair with a younger woman. The following poem comes from the middle of the narrative:

After eight nights of sleeping with you, one without you, and, O damn it, I miss you. I’d have to say how much and where I’d kiss you into your answering machine. It’s on; you’re out. I’d like to brag that I have done my donkey work, cleared my desk. In a daze, I walked four miles enumerating ways you make my laugh, take care of business, moan your name out loud and…There’s the telephone! Midnight, your good friend/roommate’s sick, maybe, gone Off without telling you. I saw Chip and Iva. You got in trouble in your sailor bar. I drank wine, talked France, and you, with Nadja. We wished we were together. Well, we are.
Kay Ryan (b. 1945)

Though Kay Ryan is not the first lesbian Poet Laureate – Elizabeth Bishop served from 1949 to 1950 – she is the first to be out and open about her sexuality. Ryan is the author of six collections of poetry, including her most recent, The Niagara River, which won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and Flamingo Watching, which was a finalist for the Lamont Book Award.

A teacher known for living a quiet life with her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair, Ryan’s work is filled with humor, insight and surprise. The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, called Ryan this generation’s Elizabeth Bishop.

The following poem is from her collection Elephant Rocks.

“If the Moon Happened Once”

If the moon happened once it wouldn’t matter much, would it?

One evening’s ticket punched with a round or a crescent.

You could like it or not like it, as you chose.

It couldn’t alter every time it rose;

it couldn’t do those things with scarves it does.
Let us know about your favorite queer poets in the comments!

Sappho

You cannot talk about lesbian poetry without first bringing up Sappho, the “10th muse” and the only woman canonized as one of the nine lyric poets in antiquity. Though little is known about the life of the Ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos (where the term “lesbian” derives), Sappho is easily the most iconic lesbian poet in history.

What we do know about Sappho is that she was a poet, teacher, mother and, despite some disagreement, a lesbian. Her work was not particularly political, although she was exiled from Greece, presumably for her political leanings.

As the details of Sappho’s life are limited, so are the remains of her work. Aside from two complete poems, only fragments of Sappho’s original verses have survived. No one knows for sure, but there are different legends surrounding the destruction of her work, including book burnings by Christians offended with the poetry’s lesbian content.

What remains reveals a poet primarily concerned with passion, suffering, love, desire and the intimacy between women. Sappho addressed many of her poems to three women-Anaktoria, Atthis and Gongyla, who is featured in the poem below from Willis Barnstone’s Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho.

“Return, Gongyla”

A deed your lovely face

if not, winter and no pain

I bid you, Abanthis, take up the lyre and sing of Gongyla as again desire floats around you

the beautiful. When you saw her dress it excited you. I’m happy. The Kypros-born once blamed me

for praying this word: I want
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

If Sappho is the woman poet of Ancient Greece, Emily Dickinson is perhaps the most famous American woman poet of New England. Unlike Sappho, however, Dickinson spent most of her days in quiet solitude.

Born in 1830, Dickinson only published eight poems during her lifetime – more than 1,700 were found and published posthumously. Her main connection with the outside world was through letters.

Among her more famous correspondents include Samuel Bowels, editor of a local paper, and Judge Otis Lorde. Some believe Dickinson was in love with one or both of these men, and that either could be the “Master” she addresses in three famous letters.

However, it is now recognized that Dickinson’s true love was her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. Their relationship was extremely passionate, and Dickinson wrote and sent Gilbert hundreds of poems, more than anyone else in her life. In several of the letters, Dickinson reveals her love and desire to be physically closer to Gilbert, who was, undoubtedly, the poet’s most trusted and beloved muse.

According to glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Culture, one draft of the following poem was found with the word “nature” replaced with “Susan.”

What mystery pervades a well! That water lives so far – A neighbor from another world Residing in a jar

Whose limit none have ever seen, But just his lid of glass – Like looking every time you please In an abyss’s face!

The grass does not appear afraid, I often wonder he Can stand so close and look so bold At what is awe to me.

Related somehow they may be, The sedge stands next the sea – Where he is floorless And does no timidity betray

But nature is a stranger yet; The ones that cite her most Have never passed her haunted house, Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not Is helped by the regret That those who know her, know her less The nearer her they get.
Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Also a native New Englander, imagist poet Amy Lowell’s work was inspired by beauty from the very beginning. Though she was first stirred to write a poem after seeing the actress Eleonora Duse on stage, the real love of her life was another actress, Ada Russell. The two were together for 15 years.

Lowell helped bring the imagist movement to the U.S. after traveling to England and meeting H.D. (the bisexual poet and novelist, Hilda Doolittle). Though Lowell won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, her work was not without controversy. Ezra Pound, a leader in the imagist movement, resented and rejected Lowell’s involvement, and the lesbian content of her poetry offended many critics.

Nonetheless, Lowell, who was known for smoking cigars and wearing men’s clothing, continued to develop her unique and open voice. The following poem, “A Decade,” was written for Russell on their 10th anniversary.

“A Decade”

When you came, you were like red wine and honey, And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness. Now you are like morning bread, Smooth and pleasant. I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour, But I am completely nourished.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1925)

Known perhaps as much for her experimental prose style as she is for her relationship with Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein was born in Pennsylvania but spent most of her life in Paris helping to cultivate the modernist movement.

Stein was inspired by several distinct influences and experiences: her famous brother, Leo Stein; studying psychology with William James; a failed attempt to finish medical school; Picasso’s cubism (see Tender Buttons); the paintings of Cezanne and Matisse; and her frustrating attempt to gain recognition for her own work, including Three Lives, Things as They Areand The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,which told the story of their famous relationship.

The following poem, “Pink Melon Joy,” was published in Geography and Play.

“Pink Melon Joy”

My dear what is meat. I certainly regret visiting. My dear what does it matter. Leaning. Maintaining maintaining checkers. I left a leaf and I meant it. Splintering and hams. I caught a cold. Bessie They are dirty. Not polite. Not steel. Not fireless. Not bewildered. Not a present. Why do I give old boats. Theresa. Exchange in bicycles. It happened that in the aggregate and they did not hear then, it happened in the aggregate that they were alone. It is funny. When examples are borrowing and little pleasures are seeking after not exactly a box then comes the time for drilling. Left left or left. Not up. Really believe me it is sheltered oaks that matter. It is they who are sighing. It really is. Not when I hear it.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

She was certainly not the most prolific writer of her generation, but Elizabeth Bishop is widely considered to be an American master. Her mentors included Marianne Moore, whom she met at Vassar, and Robert Lowell.

Bishop’s life was difficult from the beginning. Her father died of Bright’s disease before her first birthday, and her mother was hospitalized for mental illness for much of Bishop’s life. Bishop also struggled with alcoholism, and her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, committed suicide while the two were living together in Brazil.

Bishop was as weary about proclaiming her sexuality as she was resistant to the title “woman poet.” Intensely private, she once told Robert Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”

“It is marvellous to wake up together”

It is marvellous to wake up together At the same minute; marvellous to hear The rain begin suddenly all over the roof, To feel the air suddenly clear As if electricity had passed through it From a black mesh of wires in the sky. All over the roof the rain hisses, And below, the light falling of kisses. An electrical storm is coming or moving away; It is the prickling air that wakes us up. If lightning struck the house now, it would run From the four blue china balls on top Down the roof and down the rods all around us, And we imagine dreamily How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning Would be quite delightful rather than frightening; And from the same simplified point of view Of night and lying flat on one’s back All things might change equally easily, Since always to warn us there must be these black Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise The world might change to something quite different, As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking, Change as the kisses are changing without our thinking.
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

While Elizabeth Bishop is known for her reluctance to address her sexuality, Adrienne Rich is the complete opposite. A well-known scholar and critic, Rich’s collection A Change of World won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952. A year later she married and had three children with Alfred Conrad, whom she later left for her partner, Michelle Cliff.

Rich’s work is intensely political and she believed in the power of poetry to influence and change lives. A teacher and an activist, she has published 20 volumes of poetry along with four collections of prose and is often referred to as America’s “most widely read lesbian poet.”

The following poem comes from “Twenty-One Love Poems” in Dream of a Common Language.

XIX

Can it be growing colder when I begin to touch myself again, adhesion pull away? when slowly the naked face turns from staring backward and looks into the present, the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living? Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream Or in this poem, There are no miracles? (I told you from the first I wanted daily life, this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.) If I could let you know – two women together is a work nothing in civilization has made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine – look at the faces of those who have chosen it.
Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

Audre Lorde’s work is deeply political both in its exploration of lesbian and African-American identity. A brilliant and prolific essayist, novelist and poet, Lorde wrote 10 volumes of poetry and was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993.

After divorcing her husband, with whom she had two children, Lorde’s latter relationships were with women. In her writing, Lorde combined her activism for women, African-Americans, and lesbian and bisexual women. In The Cancer Journals, she wrote about her struggle with the disease that eventually took her life.

One of the more interesting elements of Lorde’s work was her belief that poetry should be a “revelatory distillation of experience.” The following poem, “A Woman Speaks,” was published in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.

“A Woman Speaks”

Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound.

I do not dwell within my birth nor my divinities who am ageless and half-grown and still seeking my sisters witches in Dahomey wear me inside their coiled cloths as our mother did mourning.

I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic and the noon’s new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white.
June Jordan (1936-2002)

Born in Harlem, June Jordan is one of the most published African-American writers, with 28 books, including essays, memoir, plays, novels, children’s books and poetry. The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Jordan was, Alice Walker said, “among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”

Jordan founded Poetry for the People out of UC—Berkeley, a program that defines itself as teaching “empowerment through the artistic expression of writing and reading poetry.”

Her own work consistently and passionately concerns itself with the idea of freedom, both in her art and her life, and she is famous for defining her bisexuality according to those standards: “Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?”

“A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

First they said I was too light Then they said I was too dark Then they said I was too different Then they said I was too much the same Then they said I was too young Then they said I was too old Then they said I was too interracial Then they said I was too much a nationalist Then they said I was too silly Then they said I was too angry Then they said I was too idealistic Then they said I was too confusing altogether: Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind.
Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942)

One of the most respected formal poets, Marilyn Hacker has published several collections of poetry, including Winter Numbers and Presentation Piece, which won the National Book Award.

Her brilliant collection Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons is a book of sonnets that records an affair with a younger woman. The following poem comes from the middle of the narrative:

After eight nights of sleeping with you, one without you, and, O damn it, I miss you. I’d have to say how much and where I’d kiss you into your answering machine. It’s on; you’re out. I’d like to brag that I have done my donkey work, cleared my desk. In a daze, I walked four miles enumerating ways you make my laugh, take care of business, moan your name out loud and…There’s the telephone! Midnight, your good friend/roommate’s sick, maybe, gone Off without telling you. I saw Chip and Iva. You got in trouble in your sailor bar. I drank wine, talked France, and you, with Nadja. We wished we were together. Well, we are.
Kay Ryan (b. 1945)

Though Kay Ryan is not the first lesbian Poet Laureate – Elizabeth Bishop served from 1949 to 1950 – she is the first to be out and open about her sexuality. Ryan is the author of six collections of poetry, including her most recent, The Niagara River, which won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and Flamingo Watching, which was a finalist for the Lamont Book Award.

A teacher known for living a quiet life with her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair, Ryan’s work is filled with humor, insight and surprise. The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, called Ryan this generation’s Elizabeth Bishop.

The following poem is from her collection Elephant Rocks.

“If the Moon Happened Once”

If the moon happened once it wouldn’t matter much, would it?

One evening’s ticket punched with a round or a crescent.

You could like it or not like it, as you chose.

It couldn’t alter every time it rose;

it couldn’t do those things with scarves it does.
Let us know about your favorite queer poets in the comments!

Lesbian Poetry – 10 Poets We Love

As with any attempt to categorize or label, there is plenty of controversy surrounding the broad term “lesbian poetry.” What qualifies as “lesbian poetry”? Is the term restrictive? Where do poems for and about lesbians, but written by male poets (see Charles Baudelaire’s “Lesbos”), fit into the definition?

The 10 poets featured below represent a wide range of aesthetics and backgrounds. Each poet has contributed to and expanded the definition of lesbian poetry in a distinct and important way, showing that the genre is as multifaceted and difficult to characterize as lesbians themselves.

Sappho

You cannot talk about lesbian poetry without first bringing up Sappho, the “10th muse” and the only woman canonized as one of the nine lyric poets in antiquity. Though little is known about the life of the Ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos (where the term “lesbian” derives), Sappho is easily the most iconic lesbian poet in history.

What we do know about Sappho is that she was a poet, teacher, mother and, despite some disagreement, a lesbian. Her work was not particularly political, although she was exiled from Greece, presumably for her political leanings.

As the details of Sappho’s life are limited, so are the remains of her work. Aside from two complete poems, only fragments of Sappho’s original verses have survived. No one knows for sure, but there are different legends surrounding the destruction of her work, including book burnings by Christians offended with the poetry’s lesbian content.

What remains reveals a poet primarily concerned with passion, suffering, love, desire and the intimacy between women. Sappho addressed many of her poems to three women-Anaktoria, Atthis and Gongyla, who is featured in the poem below from Willis Barnstone’s Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho.

“Return, Gongyla”

A deed your lovely face

if not, winter and no pain

I bid you, Abanthis, take up the lyre and sing of Gongyla as again desire floats around you

the beautiful. When you saw her dress it excited you. I’m happy. The Kypros-born once blamed me

for praying this word: I want
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

If Sappho is the woman poet of Ancient Greece, Emily Dickinson is perhaps the most famous American woman poet of New England. Unlike Sappho, however, Dickinson spent most of her days in quiet solitude.

Born in 1830, Dickinson only published eight poems during her lifetime – more than 1,700 were found and published posthumously. Her main connection with the outside world was through letters.

Among her more famous correspondents include Samuel Bowels, editor of a local paper, and Judge Otis Lorde. Some believe Dickinson was in love with one or both of these men, and that either could be the “Master” she addresses in three famous letters.

However, it is now recognized that Dickinson’s true love was her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. Their relationship was extremely passionate, and Dickinson wrote and sent Gilbert hundreds of poems, more than anyone else in her life. In several of the letters, Dickinson reveals her love and desire to be physically closer to Gilbert, who was, undoubtedly, the poet’s most trusted and beloved muse.

According to glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Culture, one draft of the following poem was found with the word “nature” replaced with “Susan.”

What mystery pervades a well! That water lives so far – A neighbor from another world Residing in a jar

Whose limit none have ever seen, But just his lid of glass – Like looking every time you please In an abyss’s face!

The grass does not appear afraid, I often wonder he Can stand so close and look so bold At what is awe to me.

Related somehow they may be, The sedge stands next the sea – Where he is floorless And does no timidity betray

But nature is a stranger yet; The ones that cite her most Have never passed her haunted house, Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not Is helped by the regret That those who know her, know her less The nearer her they get.
Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Also a native New Englander, imagist poet Amy Lowell’s work was inspired by beauty from the very beginning. Though she was first stirred to write a poem after seeing the actress Eleonora Duse on stage, the real love of her life was another actress, Ada Russell. The two were together for 15 years.

Lowell helped bring the imagist movement to the U.S. after traveling to England and meeting H.D. (the bisexual poet and novelist, Hilda Doolittle). Though Lowell won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, her work was not without controversy. Ezra Pound, a leader in the imagist movement, resented and rejected Lowell’s involvement, and the lesbian content of her poetry offended many critics.

Nonetheless, Lowell, who was known for smoking cigars and wearing men’s clothing, continued to develop her unique and open voice. The following poem, “A Decade,” was written for Russell on their 10th anniversary.

“A Decade”

When you came, you were like red wine and honey, And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness. Now you are like morning bread, Smooth and pleasant. I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour, But I am completely nourished.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1925)

Known perhaps as much for her experimental prose style as she is for her relationship with Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein was born in Pennsylvania but spent most of her life in Paris helping to cultivate the modernist movement.

Stein was inspired by several distinct influences and experiences: her famous brother, Leo Stein; studying psychology with William James; a failed attempt to finish medical school; Picasso’s cubism (see Tender Buttons); the paintings of Cezanne and Matisse; and her frustrating attempt to gain recognition for her own work, including Three Lives, Things as They Areand The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,which told the story of their famous relationship.

The following poem, “Pink Melon Joy,” was published in Geography and Play.

“Pink Melon Joy”

My dear what is meat. I certainly regret visiting. My dear what does it matter. Leaning. Maintaining maintaining checkers. I left a leaf and I meant it. Splintering and hams. I caught a cold. Bessie They are dirty. Not polite. Not steel. Not fireless. Not bewildered. Not a present. Why do I give old boats. Theresa. Exchange in bicycles. It happened that in the aggregate and they did not hear then, it happened in the aggregate that they were alone. It is funny. When examples are borrowing and little pleasures are seeking after not exactly a box then comes the time for drilling. Left left or left. Not up. Really believe me it is sheltered oaks that matter. It is they who are sighing. It really is. Not when I hear it.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

She was certainly not the most prolific writer of her generation, but Elizabeth Bishop is widely considered to be an American master. Her mentors included Marianne Moore, whom she met at Vassar, and Robert Lowell.

Bishop’s life was difficult from the beginning. Her father died of Bright’s disease before her first birthday, and her mother was hospitalized for mental illness for much of Bishop’s life. Bishop also struggled with alcoholism, and her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, committed suicide while the two were living together in Brazil.

Bishop was as weary about proclaiming her sexuality as she was resistant to the title “woman poet.” Intensely private, she once told Robert Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”

“It is marvellous to wake up together”

It is marvellous to wake up together At the same minute; marvellous to hear The rain begin suddenly all over the roof, To feel the air suddenly clear As if electricity had passed through it From a black mesh of wires in the sky. All over the roof the rain hisses, And below, the light falling of kisses. An electrical storm is coming or moving away; It is the prickling air that wakes us up. If lightning struck the house now, it would run From the four blue china balls on top Down the roof and down the rods all around us, And we imagine dreamily How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning Would be quite delightful rather than frightening; And from the same simplified point of view Of night and lying flat on one’s back All things might change equally easily, Since always to warn us there must be these black Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise The world might change to something quite different, As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking, Change as the kisses are changing without our thinking.
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

While Elizabeth Bishop is known for her reluctance to address her sexuality, Adrienne Rich is the complete opposite. A well-known scholar and critic, Rich’s collection A Change of World won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952. A year later she married and had three children with Alfred Conrad, whom she later left for her partner, Michelle Cliff.

Rich’s work is intensely political and she believed in the power of poetry to influence and change lives. A teacher and an activist, she has published 20 volumes of poetry along with four collections of prose and is often referred to as America’s “most widely read lesbian poet.”

The following poem comes from “Twenty-One Love Poems” in Dream of a Common Language.

XIX

Can it be growing colder when I begin to touch myself again, adhesion pull away? when slowly the naked face turns from staring backward and looks into the present, the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living? Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream Or in this poem, There are no miracles? (I told you from the first I wanted daily life, this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.) If I could let you know – two women together is a work nothing in civilization has made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine – look at the faces of those who have chosen it.
Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

Audre Lorde’s work is deeply political both in its exploration of lesbian and African-American identity. A brilliant and prolific essayist, novelist and poet, Lorde wrote 10 volumes of poetry and was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993.

After divorcing her husband, with whom she had two children, Lorde’s latter relationships were with women. In her writing, Lorde combined her activism for women, African-Americans, and lesbian and bisexual women. In The Cancer Journals, she wrote about her struggle with the disease that eventually took her life.

One of the more interesting elements of Lorde’s work was her belief that poetry should be a “revelatory distillation of experience.” The following poem, “A Woman Speaks,” was published in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.

“A Woman Speaks”

Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound.

I do not dwell within my birth nor my divinities who am ageless and half-grown and still seeking my sisters witches in Dahomey wear me inside their coiled cloths as our mother did mourning.

I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic and the noon’s new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white.
June Jordan (1936-2002)

Born in Harlem, June Jordan is one of the most published African-American writers, with 28 books, including essays, memoir, plays, novels, children’s books and poetry. The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Jordan was, Alice Walker said, “among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”

Jordan founded Poetry for the People out of UC—Berkeley, a program that defines itself as teaching “empowerment through the artistic expression of writing and reading poetry.”

Her own work consistently and passionately concerns itself with the idea of freedom, both in her art and her life, and she is famous for defining her bisexuality according to those standards: “Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?”

“A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

First they said I was too light Then they said I was too dark Then they said I was too different Then they said I was too much the same Then they said I was too young Then they said I was too old Then they said I was too interracial Then they said I was too much a nationalist Then they said I was too silly Then they said I was too angry Then they said I was too idealistic Then they said I was too confusing altogether: Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind.
Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942)

One of the most respected formal poets, Marilyn Hacker has published several collections of poetry, including Winter Numbers and Presentation Piece, which won the National Book Award.

Her brilliant collection Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons is a book of sonnets that records an affair with a younger woman. The following poem comes from the middle of the narrative:

After eight nights of sleeping with you, one without you, and, O damn it, I miss you. I’d have to say how much and where I’d kiss you into your answering machine. It’s on; you’re out. I’d like to brag that I have done my donkey work, cleared my desk. In a daze, I walked four miles enumerating ways you make my laugh, take care of business, moan your name out loud and…There’s the telephone! Midnight, your good friend/roommate’s sick, maybe, gone Off without telling you. I saw Chip and Iva. You got in trouble in your sailor bar. I drank wine, talked France, and you, with Nadja. We wished we were together. Well, we are.
Kay Ryan (b. 1945)

Though Kay Ryan is not the first lesbian Poet Laureate – Elizabeth Bishop served from 1949 to 1950 – she is the first to be out and open about her sexuality. Ryan is the author of six collections of poetry, including her most recent, The Niagara River, which won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and Flamingo Watching, which was a finalist for the Lamont Book Award.

A teacher known for living a quiet life with her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair, Ryan’s work is filled with humor, insight and surprise. The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, called Ryan this generation’s Elizabeth Bishop.

The following poem is from her collection Elephant Rocks.

“If the Moon Happened Once”

If the moon happened once it wouldn’t matter much, would it?

One evening’s ticket punched with a round or a crescent.

You could like it or not like it, as you chose.

It couldn’t alter every time it rose;

it couldn’t do those things with scarves it does.
Let us know about your favorite queer poets in the comments!

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