running in the old cycles, our process may be "revolutionary" but not
transformative. (WCW, 7)
The transformation that Rich seeks begins with the creation of alternative models
against which specific women might measure and evaluate themselves. In her early work,
Grahn created a series of portraits of women, both lesbian and straight, which embody the
diversity of the "common woman." The result is a long series, The Common
Woman Poems, which has become a major document in the feminist movement. The series
mixes realistic depictions of oppressed women with a revolutionary call to action:
the common woman is as common as the best of bread
and will rise
and will become strong–I swear to you
I swear it to you on my common
Woman’s
head
(WCW, 73)
The origin of this series, as Grahn says, "was completely practical: I wanted, in
1969, to read something which described regular, everyday women. without making us look
either superhuman or pathetic" (WCW, 6). The women portrayed are tough and resilient,
hardened by years of work in low-paying, demeaning jobs and in equally demeaning sex
roles. Ella, for example, is
… a copperheaded waitress,
tired and sharp-worded, she hides
her bad brown tooth behind a wicked
smile, and flicks her ass
out of habit, to fend off the pass
that passes for affection.
She keeps her mind the way men
keep a knife …
(WCW, 63)
The language in these poems is as common as the women described, straightforward and
direct, with an occasional rhetorical flourish ("to fend off the pass / that passes
for affection"). But the more the women are described, the less "common"
they appear, each one possessing some volatile side of herself hidden beneath the surface:
she has taken a woman lover
whatever can we say
She walks around all day
quietly, but underneath it
she’s electric;
angry energy inside a passive form.
The common woman is as common
as a thunderstorm.
(WCW, 67)
The titles of these portraits indicate precisely where the portrait takes place:
"Helen, at 9 AM, at noon, at 5:15" or "Carol, in the park, chewing on
straws," as though they are photos in an album. The portraits are not idealized, and
the lives the women lead are hardly heroic. Madness, abortion, failed marriages, sexual
frustration, shrill invective become the unhappy legacy of the "common woman."
To Grahn these features signal a potential power that must be discovered in everyday
language:
I’m not a girl
I’m a hatchet
I’m not a hole
I’m a whole mountain
I’m not a fool
I’m a survivor
I’m not a pearl
I’m the Atlantic Ocean
I’m not a good lay
I’m a straight razor
look at me as if you had never seen a woman before
I have red, red hands and much bitterness
(WCW, 25)
In speaking of Joanne Kyger, I described her synthesis of autobiography and myth as an
attempt to gain a perspective on her life as a woman – that by identifying with Penelope,
she could speak for herself in the historical present. In the case of Judy Grahn, the
feminist implications of this synthesis are made explicit. "Look at me as if you had
never seen a woman before," she demands, and in much of her work she uses herself as
the focus for a larger social imperative. The common-woman portraits may be derived from
Grahn’s personal life, but they attain a kind of nobility precisely because of their bare,
hard-edged presentation. They gain mythical stature because they are so resolutely
ordinary. At the same time, Grahn’s use of historical figures like Marilyn Monroe (or
Susan Griffin’s use of Harriet Tubman or Adrienne Rich’s use of Emily Dickinson) represent
retrievals of exceptional women to serve as simulacra for every woman. The necessity of
retrieving women, common and uncommon, from their sequestration within a patriarchal world
has been the task of a feminist poetics from the outset. Judy Grahn is no different in
this respect than other feminists in the country, but her ability to speak as a lesbian
was certainly encouraged by the large gay community in San Francisco and the Spirit of
social action that had been there from its earliest days. Grahn became the inheritor of
this tradition but also one of its most articulate disseminators.
CONCLUSION: WHOSE RENAISSANCE?
Writing about women in and of the San Francisco Renaissance is difficult not because
there were so few of them but because the standard definition of the movement has no way
of including them. The boys’ club of San Francisco bohemia, however progressive in
defining new social roles for individuals, was often blind to its own exclusionary
posture. Where women are mentioned in the chronicles of the period, their contributions
are usually relegated to their "service" function. Carolyn Cassady may be valued
for her retrospective memoirs of life with Neal and Jack, but not for her own literary
attainments. The entries on Cassady and Eileen Kaufman in Arthur and Kit Knight’s
chronicle of the Beat generation, The Beat Vision, simply memorialize their former
husbands. Although Joanne Kyger’s major work, The Tapestry and the Web, is long out
of print, her journals of travel in India with her then-husband Gary Snyder are readily
available. Women are conspicuously absent from major critical accounts of the period,
although Kenneth Rexroth does acknowledge the pioneering work of Ruth Witt Diamant and
Madeline Gleason in establishing the San Francisco State Poetry Center. And although
Josephine Miles was included in the San Francisco issue of Evergreen, she is
almost invariably thought of as an academic fellow traveler rather than an active
participant in the movement. Such omissions, subordinations, and marginalizations may
reflect the roles that women played during this period, but they also suggest the
endurance of a privileged narrative – what I earlier called "enabling myths" of
origins – in which women are seldom the subjects.
By recognizing the contributions of women writers during the period from 1955 to 1965,
we may revise that narrative somewhat, but this is only half the job. It is also necessary
to discover the women who were already being invented between the lines, as it were, of
male verse. These women are as much projections of that romantic ideology that I mentioned
in my opening chapter as they are of the historical period with which we are
concerned. They emerge from romantic conceptions of feminized nature and from a theory of
creative imagination based on dualisms of form and content, action and inspiration, artist
and muse. The fact that Denise Levertov and Diane DiPrima recognized those hidden women
and responded to them in their own terms was crucial for the development of their
individual poetics. At the same time, their "appropriations" of male discourse
represent ways in which romantic narratives of natural rhythms, cyclic life, and
participation are revised in terms of gender.
One of the dominant themes of feminist scholarship has been the ways that women writers
have rewritten patriarchal discourse, subverting its authority while at the same time
providing women with alternative discursive forms. Helen Adam’s variations on stock
romantic figures and Joanne Kyger’s rewriting of male myth are obvious extensions of this
revisionist imperative. Their work was performed within – and, I contend, against -
male-centered circles in the San Francisco milieu. Judy Grahn developed her poetics in the
frame of a more self-consciously feminist poetry – one that she helped to create – and,
although not usually associated with the literary events described in the rest of this
book, she represents a logical outgrowth of them. Like the Beats, she emphasizes plain
speech and "common" subjects, but whereas Ginsberg and Kerouac often discover
transcendental principles in urban landscapes, Grahn seeks the historical awareness of
women’s – and specifically lesbians’ – condition in patriarchal America.
By concluding this chapter with figures not usually mentioned in the standard histories
of the San Francisco Renaissance, I am suggesting that in order to see the contributions
of women to modern literary history, we must often look outside the canonical narratives.
These counternarratives challenge more than our reading of literary history; they
introduce a new subject as reader. That subject, "she who" reads, must ask of
the period we are studying, Whose Renaissance? Renaissance of what? If those
questions are asked retrospectively, by a generation that reads through the spectacles of
gender, it is thanks to figures like Denise Levertov, Diane DiPrima, Helen Adam, Joanne
Kyger, and Judy Grahn. Impatient with the roles their male colleagues consigned to them,
they seized upon the social and aesthetic advantages of 1950s bohemian culture and began
to write "her" story in the margins of "his."
From The San Fransisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century.
Copyright ? 1989 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the
author.
Linda Garber
Grahn was a member of the Gay Women’s Liberation Group, the first lesbian feminist
collective on the west coast, founded around 1969. The collective established the first
women’s bookstore, A Woman’s Place, and the first all-woman press, The Women’s Press
Collective (Case 49), which "devoted itself exclusively to work by lesbians
disfranchised by race or class" (Harris, 1993, xxxi). Grahn’s poems, circulated in
periodicals, performances, chapbooks, and by word of mouth, were foundational documents of
lesbian feminism. Her work enjoyed a wide underground readership before 1975 (Larkin 92),
although it did not reach commercial audiences until the late 1970s. Collected as The
Work of a Common Woman in 1978, the poems were published by a series of successively
larger and more mainstream publishers in the late 1970s: first Diana Press (a small
lesbian-feminist press into which The Women’s Press Collective was incorporated in the
early 1970s), then Crossing Press (in paperback) and the New York publishing house St.
Martin’s Press (in hardcover). According to Carl Morse and Joan Larkin, "Crahn’s
work, both as legendary poet and independent publisher, fueled the explosion of lesbian
poetry that began in the 70s" (Morse and Larkin, 1988c, 140).
Carruthers cites Rich’s introduction to Grahn’s collection The Work of a Common
Woman as evidence of Rich’s influence on Grahn’s poetry, and Grahn herself has
acknowledged Rich, among others, as important to the development of her work. What
Carruthers fails to note, however, is that Rich was moved to write the introduction to The
Work of a Common Woman because of the impact of Grahn’s work on her own poetry years
earlier. In Rich’s introduction, "Power and Danger: Tile Work of a Common Woman by
Judy Grahn," Rich describes weeping when she first read Grahn’s "A Woman Is
Talking to Death" in 1974: "I knew in an exhausted kind of way that what had
happened to me was irreversible. All I could do with it at that point was lie down and
sleep, let . . . the knowledge that was accumulating in my life, the poem I had just read,
go on circulating in my bloodstream" (Rich, 1977, 9). The most clear evidence that
Grahn influenced Rich’s later work is Rich’s adoption of the term
"common" from Grahn’s The Common Woman (1969) in The Dream of a
Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 (1978) "where it was greatly broadened by new
phrases" (Grahn, 1985, 73).
Margot Gayle Backus interprets Grahn’s long elegiac poem, "A Woman Is Talking to
Death," as a calling "into being [of] a unified human communitas, a ‘we’
capable of containing and healing the divisions between subject positions that the
capitalist appropriation of human labor, emotions, time, and lives has represented as
natural and desirable. Grahn invokes a living, intersubjective community" (Backus
835). Grahn herself writes that poets build community by "making cross connections
and healing the torn places in the social fabric of myth we have all inherited, but that
the outcast especially inherits" (Grahn, 1985, 84). (As a committed activist in the
1970s, Grahn clearly also believed that poets build community by founding and contributing
to various grass roots institutions and political actions.) Grahn conceives of herself as
a poet in a community of lesbians and of other lesbian poets developing "a new voice
. . . a new women’s literature" (Aal, Part I, 76).
Before this community emerged, Grahn and her character Edward the Dyke appeared to
number among "the Nat Turners of the world," in Duberman’s phrase:
Resistance to oppression takes on the confident form of political organizing only after
a certain critical mass of collective awareness of oppression, and a determination to end
it, has been reached. There are always isolated individuals who prefigure that awareness,
who openly rebel before the oppressed community of which they are a part can offer them
significant support and sustenance. These individuals—the Nat Turners of the
world—are in some sense transhistorical: They have somehow never been fully
socialized into the dominant ideology, into its prescriptions and limitations; they exist
apart, a form of genius (Duberman 75).
Humorless Lesbians and Other Misrepresentations
By the early 1970s, a growing community of lesbian feminists, which included Judy
Grahn, was in dead earnest about fomenting revolution. Far from the stereotypical
"humorless" feminist or lesbian, however, Grahn is among the funniest of
contemporary American poets. Her broad use of humor—described in turns as
"raucous," "macabre" (Martinez 49), anarchic (Backus 816), "witty
and lighthearted" (Rich, 1977, 14)—itself redefines what is appropriate to
serious poetry. Inez Martinez writes that "the dominant tone and voice of [Grahn'sl
poems consists of deflating male supremacy through humor, and of taking her place among
the imperfect" (49). But despite the prevalence of wit in Grahn's poetry, critical
writing about her work tends to focus on her long, weighty poem "A Woman is Talking
to Death." (Martinez sees "grim and desperately puzzled" humor in the
poem's parodic elements [49]. In addition, the narrator not only talks to but in the end
defiantly laughs at death—"Hey you death / ho and ho poor
death"—but humor in the common sense is hardly the dominant tone of the elegiac
poem.) Critics Amitai F. Avi-Ram and Margot Gayle Backus have published articles focusing
solely on the poem; other critics invariably devote considerable space to it in more
general discussions of Grahn’s work.
[. . . .]
Again and again, appreciative critics and reviewers refer to the power of Grahn’s
poetry to "transform." Rich writes that the word "transformation" best
describes the goal of feminism and feminist poetry like hers and Grahn’s; unlike
"’revolution’ [which] has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the
dead-endedness of male politics," transformation is "a process which will leave
neither surfaces nor depths unchanged, which enters society at the most essential level of
the subjugation of women and nature by men. We begin to conceive a planet on which both
women and nature might coexist as the She Who we encounter in Judy Grahn’s poems"
(Ricil, 1977, 7-8), Lunde considers Grahn’s "feminist vision of personal and social
transformation" to be one of her basic themes, which are "inseparable" from
"her transformation of language" (238). Carruthers writes that the
"energy" of lesbian-feminist poetry "springs . . . from the perception that
women together and in themselves have a power which is transformative." She sees a
special role for lesbian-feminist poets in this transformation, because "in order to
recover their power women need to move psychically and through metaphor to a place beyond
the well-traveled routes of patriarchy and all its institutions, especially its linguistic