Lesbian Poetry Retrospective Part II

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.