News

Lesbian Poetry Retrospective Part II

As our first poetry retrospective revealed, it is challenging to compile a comprehensive list of great lesbian and bisexual poets – and the reason is a good one: There are a wealth of choices from all around the world, and from different moments in history.

Certainly there are plenty more that deserve to be featured here, but these next 10 poets continue to show the diversity and brilliance that exists within the category of “lesbian and bisexual poetry.”

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) (1886—1961) Bisexual poet Hilda Doolittle, known as H.D., is celebrated for her avant-garde style, which distinguished her from the more sentimental nature of the late Victorian era, and for her contributions to the imagist movement.

Leaving her Pennsylvania roots, H.D. traveled to Europe to develop her voice and to start her literary career. She was engaged to fellow poet Ezra Pound at one point, though the relationship was complicated when she became involved with a woman named Frances Josepha Gregg.

Throughout her life, H.D. continued to have affairs with both men and women, though her long-term partner was Annie Winifred Ellerman. The consequences of her relationship with Ellerman were significant, and the women referred to each other as “cousins” to prevent suspicion.

H.D. explored her relationships with women more in her novels (published posthumously) than in her poetry. Nonetheless, her sexuality was a significant source of inspiration for all of her work. The following poem was published in Hymen in 1921.

“At Baia”

I should have thought

in a dream you would have brought some lovely, perilous thing, orchids piled in a great sheath, as who would say (in a dream), “I send you this, who left the blue veins of your throat unkissed.”

Why was it that your hands (that never took mine), your hands that I could see drift over the orchid-heads so carefully, your hands, so fragile, sure to lift so gently, the fragile flower-stuff– ah, ah, how was it

You never sent (in a dream) the very form, the very scent, not heavy, not sensuous, but perilous-perilous- of orchids, piled in a great sheath, and folded underneath on a bright scroll, some word:

“Flower sent to flower; for white hands, the lesser white, less lovely of flower-leaf,”

or

“Lover to lover, no kiss, no touch, but forever and ever this.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892—1950) Referred to as the poetry “It Girl” of her generation, Edna St. Vincent Millay was a prolific playwright and poet known for her sonnets on love and all of its thorny complications.

One of Millay’s first celebrated collections of poetry, A Few Figs from Thistles, included several controversial poems about female sexuality and monogamy – themes that she would continue to explore throughout her career. She later won a Pulitzer Prize for her collection The Harp Weaver.

Though Millay married a man, Eugen Boissevain, she was intimate with women and openly acknowledged her bisexuality in her work and personal life. Still, Millay struggled with her role and identity within both heterosexual and lesbian relationships, a challenge she often tried to work out in her poetry.

The following sonnet is from her collection Fatal Interview, which was published in 1931:

Night is my sister, and how deep in love, How drowned in love and weedily washed ashore, There to be fretted by the drag and shove At the tide’s edge, I lie-these things and more: Whose arm alone between me and the sand, Whose voice alone, whose pitiful breath brought near, Could thaw these nostrils and unlock this hand, She could advise you, should you care to hear. Small chance, however, in a storm so black, A man will leave his friendly fire and snug For a drowned woman’s sake, and bring her back To drip and scatter shells upon the rug. No one but Night, with tears on her dark face, Watches beside me in this windy place.
May Sarton (1912—1993) Born in Belgium, May Sarton moved to the U.S. when she was a toddler and published her first poems when she was just a teenager. From there she went on to become an incredibly prolific essayist, novelist, journalist and poet who produced 54 volumes of work in her lifetime.

Though Sarton kept details of her personal life veiled, she did write about her long-term relationship with Judith Matlock in her journals and later explored homophobia and lesbianism in her poetry and fiction.

Sarton’s journals have been celebrated for their honest, funny and complex depictions of relationships – from friends to family to Matlock – and for her analysis of the creative process.

The following poem, “The Waves,” was originally published in A Grain of Mustard Seed:

“The Waves”

Even in the middle of the silent firs, The secret world of mushroom and of moss, Where all is delicate and nothing stirs, We get the rumor of those distant wars And the harsh sound of loss.

This is an island open to the churning, The boom, the constant cannonade, The turning back of tides and their returning, And ocean broken like some restless mourning That cannot find a bed.

Oh love, let us be true then to this will- Not to each other, human and defeated, But to great power, our Heaven and our Hell, That thunders out its triumph unabated, And is never still.

For we are married to this rocky coast, To the charge of huge waves upon it, The ceaseless war, the tide gained and then lost, And ledges worn down smooth but not downcast- Wild rose and granite.

Here in the darkness of the stillest wood, Absence, the ocean, tires us with its roar; We bear love’s thundering rumor in the blood Beyond our understanding, ill or good- Listen, once more!

May Swenson (1919—1989) Poet and journalist May Swenson published 10 collections of poetry and served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In her work, she often used nature to capture and depict the human body, sexuality, love and even science.

Swenson’s mentors varied in style and aesthetic, from E.E. Cummings and Gertrude Stein to the more traditional Elizabeth Bishop. Many of her “lesbian love poems” are found in the collection The Love Poems of May Swenson.

The following poem was published in 1991.

“Dark Wild Honey”

Dark wild honey, the lion’s eye color, you brought home from a country store. Tastes of the work of shaggy bees on strong weeds, their midsummer bloom. My brain’s electric circuit glows, like the lion’s iris that, concentrated, vibrates while seeming not to move. Thick transparent amber you brought home, the sweet that burns.

Mary Oliver (1935-) As a teenager, Mary Oliver spent time at Millay’s old house, helping the famous poet’s family organize her papers after her death. Unlike Millay, Oliver is known more for her work on nature than on love.

Oliver only came out in the early ’90s, after she had lived with her partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook, for several decades. The two met when Oliver was working as a secretary for Millay’s sister.

Oliver’s first collection, No Voyage, and Other Poems was published in 1963, and 20 years later, her book American Primitive won the Pulitzer Prize. In her work, Oliver brilliantly grounds her questions about spirituality, psychology and humanity in the world of nature.

The following poem, one of her most beautiful, was first published in New Poems (1991-1992):

“The Sun”

Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful

than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone – and how it slides again

out of the blackness, every morning, on the other side of the world, like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils, say, on a morning in early summer, at its perfect imperial distance-

and have you ever felt for anything such wild love- do you think there is anywhere, in any language, a word billowing enough for the pleasure

that fills you, as the sun reaches out, as it warms you

as you stand there, empty-handed- or have you too turned from this world-

or have you too gone crazy for power, for things?

Paula Gunn Allen (1939—2008) Paula Gunn Allen was a well-respected poet, scholar and fiction writer. Born on a land grant in New Mexico to a mother with Laguna-Sioux and Scottish heritage and a Lebanese-American father, Gunn used poetry to explore her unique background.

In her work, Paula reinterpreted the stories and myths of her Native American heritage from a contemporary lesbian perspective. She published six collections of poetry and her collection of critical essays, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, is considered a classic and vital contribution to Native American cultural and gender studies.

Allen’s last book before her death, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2004. The following is from the poem “Some Like Indians Endure”:

dykes remind me of indians like indians dykes are supposed to die out or forget or drink all the time or shatter go away to nowhere to remember what will happen if they dont

they dont anyway even though it happens and they remember they dont

because the moon remembers because so does the sun because so do the stars remember and the persistent stubborn grass of the earth

Joan Larkin (1939-) A co-founder of Out & Out Books, a feminist independent press from the ’70s, Joan Larkin’s contributions to lesbian poetry cannot be underestimated.

As a poet, Larkin has published several books, including Housework, A Long Sound and Cold River, which won a Lambda Award. She has also edited many groundbreaking anthologies featuring lesbian and bisexual writing, such as Lesbian Poetry.

Larkin’s most recent collection, My Body: New and Selected Poems, won the Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award. The following poem, “Want,” was first published in Cold River:

“Want”

She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts of last century’s lesbians; I want a spotless apartment, a fast computer. She wants a woodstove, three cords of ash, an axe; I want a clean gas flame. She wants a row of jars: oats, coriander, thick green oil; I want nothing to store. She wants pomianders, linens, baby quilts, scrapbooks. She wants Wellesley reunions. I want gleaming floorboards, the river’s reflection. She wants shrimp and sweat and salt; she wants chocolate. I want a raku bowl, steam rising from rice. She wants goats, chickens, children. Feeding and weeping. I want wind from the river freshening cleared rooms. She wants birthdays, theaters, flags, peonies. I want words like lasers. She wants a mother’s tenderness. Touch ancient as the river. I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox. She’s in her city, meeting her deadline; I’m in my mill village out late with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells thinking of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together. We’ve kissed all weekend; we want to drive the hundred miles and try it again.

Cherríe Moraga (1952-) Cherríe Moraga is a Chicana lesbian playwright, poet and essayist whose revolutionary work focuses on her culture. Moraga has contributed to the diversity of lesbian literature in several ways, from her own writing to co-editing the anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color in the early ’80s.

Moraga’s first collection of poetry, Loving in the War Years: (lo que nunca paso por sus labios), marked the first publication of poetry from an out lesbian Chicana. The book, which also features two essays, explores her sexuality as it relates to her culture. The following is the title poem from this groundbreaking collection:

“Loving in the War Years”

Loving you is like living in the war years. I do think of Bogart & Bergman not clear who’s who but still singin a long smoky mood into the piano bar drinks straight up the last bottle in the house while bombs split outside, a broken world.

A world war going on but you and I still insisting in each our own heads still thinkin how if I could only make some contact with that woman across the keyboard we size each other up yes…

Loving you has this kind of desperation to it, like do or die, I having eyed you from the first time you made the decision to move from your stool to live dangerously.

All on the hunch that in our exchange of photos of old girlfriends, names of cities and memories back in the states the fronts we’ve manned out here on the continent all this on the hunch that this time there’ll be no need for resistance.

Loving in the war years calls for this kind of risking without a home to call our own I’ve got to take you as you come to me, each time like a stranger all over again. Not knowing what deaths you saw today I’ve got to take you as you come, battle bruised Refusing our enemy, fear.

We’re all we’ve got. You and I

maintaining this war time morality where being queer and female is as rude as we can get.

Carol Anne Duffy (1955-) Carol Anne Duffy is a poet and playwright born in Scotland but raised in Staffordshire, England who identifies as a lesbian. Though she was almost appointed as the British Poet Laureate in 1999, Andrew Motion was granted the position amid speculation that Prime Minister Tony Blair was concerned about Duffy’s sexuality.

Duffy’s poetry is also no stranger to controversy. Known for infusing her work with the personal and for her sharp social critique, her poem “Education for Leisure” was removed from the AQA exam because of its depiction of violence.

Duffy once said that when it comes to the language of her poetry, she is not interested in using “words like ‘plash’ – Seamus Heaney words, interesting words. I like to use simple words but in a complicated way.”

A prolific writer, her collections include Standing Female Nude, Selling Manhattan, The World’s Wife, Feminine Gospels and Rapture, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. The following poem was published in one of her earlier collections, Selling Manhattan.

“Warming Her Pearls” for Judith Radstone

Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress bids me wear them, warm them, until evening when I’ll brush her hair. At six, I place them round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,

resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.

She?s beautiful. I dream about her in my attic bed; picture her dancing with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.

I dust her shoulders with a rabbit?s foot, watch the soft blush seep through her skin like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass my red lips part as though I want to speak.

Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see her every movement in my head … Undressing, taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way

she always does … And I lie here awake, knowing the pearls are cooling even now in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night I feel their absence and I burn.

Staceyann Chin (1973-) Chinese-Jamaican poet and activist Staceyann Chin has performed her work around the world, from the Nuyorican Poets’ Café to the Tony-nominated Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway to her one-woman show “Hands Afire.”

Chin’s work is edgy and provocative. Among her many achievements, she’s won a Lambda Poetry Slam, a Chicago People of Color Slam and the American Amazon Slam title in Denmark. She has been featured in numerous publications and television programs, such as the New York Times and the documentary “Between the Lines,” about her experience as an Asian woman and writer. She was even a guest on Oprah last year.

Chin’s publications include her first chapbook, Wildcat Woman, and if there is any doubt that she is a modern poet, check out her comprehensive website, which features audio clips of Chin reading her work and a rolodex of her poetry.

Here’s an excerpt from her poem, “Lesbian Chasing Straight.”

told her I liked the way she made that pink push up bra look intellectual- and she laughed at me beautiful confident deadly she turned her color-treated blow-dried bone-straight just curled arrogance the other way and roared

I almost told her-If you didn’t have that perm you’d be perfect -only a scorned woman’s opinion it hangs on the uncertain balance of her laughter still I wanted to go after her -beg her to sit with me awhile lip-stick that smile to the tip of my pen maybe then she would allow for my fingers constructing the perfect poem on the hollows her elbows the line of her neck made me want to paint her brush tattooing words up the inside of her ankle tongue caressing metered shadows under her knees how I wanted to please that woman with the things I have learned to do to a body

But straight girls require more than the catchy lesbian line they need more than the average stitch in these times of weak-kneed freedoms the bi-curious require a puss’ whole nine lives as they move in for the kill it is a skill they perfect in the practice of rejection it is the only protection they know in a world where ladies are encouraged to toe the only line allowed

Let us know your favorite queer poems and poets in the comments!

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button