Woman; 404; Contemporary Women Poets

[music] Woman, a program by, for, and about women today. With Sandra Elkin. Good evening and welcome to Woman. Tonight you're going to meet two outstanding women

poets. They're going to read and discuss their works. With me is Audre Lorde. Audre is an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. Audre's third book of poetry, From a Land Where Other People Live, was nominated for a National Book Award in poetry in 1974. Her most recent volume of poetry is titled Coal. Also joining us is poet novelist Marge Piercy. Marge is the author of four novels, the latest titled Woman on the Edge of Time. Her fourth and latest book of poems, Living in the Open, is the closest she's come to an autobiography. Marge travels regularly, giving readings and workshops. Welcome to both of you. Audre, do you read other people's poems. I read other people's poems when I can find poems that move me, yes. Unfortunately some of it's very upsetting all too often. But I still come back to it because it gives me a great deal. Poetry after all, I think, is one of the few

ways in which we're allowed to touch emotion, to be reached by other people. In a sense, some of the clearest sharing of experiences that we have. And so I keep coming back to it over and over again. Is it especially true for women? Yes, I must say, women and Black poets who are writing are, as far as I'm concerned, much more satisfying in terms of sharing—sharing experience and evocative language. Marge do you read other people's poems. I do. What do you mean by upsetting. I want to know. Well, upsetting only because so much of what is called poetry or is labelled poetry today, I find the most charitable word that I can use is obstructionist. I think that so much of what is called poetry becomes constructs that are erected in the same way so much of, so many of our buildings and other artifacts are, to separate us rather than

to make bridges or to pull us together. Buildings that nobody lives in. Buildings that nobody lives in. Buildings that no one enjoys looking at. Buildings that serve no other function except separation. Or display of power and money. And to have poetry used, to have those things that function in that way called poetry always upsets me. You read other people's poetry? Yes. Have you always? I write poetry in part because I like it, because I need it. I mean a lot of poetry is offensive to me, but I think that there's more poetry that is not oppressive than most other parts, you know, of the culture. More than other kinds of books, more than film certainly, more than records certainly. There's more poetry that comes out of parts of the culture that feed me: that's written by women, that's written by people coming to consciousness, that's written by Blacks, that's written by people who are becoming

aware themselves, who are interested in changing, whose consciousness is not a—not oppressive to me, that feeds me, enlightens me, educates me. I would like it if we didn't talk very much. I would really like to hear you read. We made a tape earlier and I think it would be very nice if we hear that now. I think it's more important to hear poetry than to talk about it. This is a poem written to my daughter the day after she was born with the title Now That I Am Forever with Child. How the days went / while you were blooming within me / I remember each upon each — / the swelling changed planes of my body and how you first fluttered, then jumped / and I thought it was my heart. How the days wound down / and the turning of winter / I recall, with you growing heavy / against the wind. I thought / now her hands are formed, now her hair / has started to curl / now her

teeth are done / now she sneezes. / Then the seed opened / I bore you one morning just before spring / My head rang like a fiery piston / my legs were towers between which / A new world was passing. / Since then / I can only distinguish / one thread within running hours / You, flowing through selves / toward You. The Love Poem Speak earth and bless me with what is richest / make sky flow honey out of my hips / rigid as mountains / spread over a valley / carved out by

the mouths of rain. / And I knew when I entered her I was / high wind in her forests hollows / fingers whispering sound / honey flowed / from the split cup / impaled on a lance of tongues / on the tips of her breasts on her navel / and my breath / howling into her entrances / through lungs of pain. Greedy as herring-gulls / or a child / I swing out over the earth / over and over / again. The next poem is entitled Chain. It's in two parts, and it was written on the occasion of my reading

an article which haunts me still, and which I hope will continue to haunt each one of you. The story is of three girls, three teenaged girls, who were taken from their natural parents' home and placed into custody, into placement, because they bore, had borne, children by their natural father. And the girls asked to be returned to their homes, and the court returned all three of them. Chain. Part One. Faces surround me that have no smell no color no time / only strange laughing testaments / vomiting promise like love / but look at the skeleton children / advancing against us / beneath their faces there is no sunlight / no darkness / no heart remains / no legends / to bring them back as women / into their bodies at dawn. / Look at the skeleton children / advancing

against us / we will find our womanhood / in their eyes / as they cry / which you bore me / will love me / will claim my blindness as yours / which you marches to battle / from between our legs? Sisters, I have seen you spit on my image behind your own mirror. But you're screamed for me. When the knife cut out your young. We stand convicted in the same court of asking each other's name and age before we give blood. Part Two. On the porch outside my door / young girls are lying / like felled maples in the path of my feet / I cannot step past them nor over them / their slim bodies roll like smooth tree trunks / repeating themselves over and

over / until my porch is covered with the bodies / of young girls. / Some have a child in their arms. / To what death shall I look for wisdom? / Which mirror to break or mourn? / Two girls repeat themselves in my doorway / their eyes are not stone. / Their flesh is not wood nor steel / but I cannot touch them. / Shall I warn them of night / or offer them bread / or a song? / They are sisters. Their father has known / them over and over. The twins they carry / are his. Whose death shall we mourn / in this forest? / Winter has come and our children are dying. / One begs me to hold her between my breasts / Oh write me a poem mother / here, over my flesh / get your

words upon me / as he got this child upon me / our father lover / thief in the night / do not be angry with us. We told him / your bed was wider / but he said if we did it then / we would be his / good children. He said if we did it / then we would be his / good children if we did it / then he would love us / oh make us a poem mother / that will tell us his name / in your language / is he lover father / we will leave your words / engraved on a whip or a pair of golden scissors / for our children / to tell them the lies / of their birth. And another says mother / I am holding your place. Do you know me better than we knew him / or myself? Am I his daughter or girlfriend / am I your child

or your rival / you wish to be gone from your bed? / Here is your granddaughter mother / give us a blessing before I sleep / what other secrets / do you have to tell me / how do I learn to love her / as you have loved me? The last poem is Solstice, which is a call to power. We forgot to water the plantain shoots / when our houses were full of borrowed meat / and our stomachs with the gifts of strangers / who laughed now as they pass us / because our land is barren / the farms are choked with stunted rows of

straw / and with our nightmares / of juicy brown yams that cannot fill us. The roofs of our houses rot from last winter's water / but our drinking pots are broken / we have used them to mourn the deaths of old lovers / the next rain will wash our footprints away / and our children have married beneath them. / Our skins are empty / They have been vacated by the spirits / who are angered by our reluctance / to feed them. / In baskets of straw made from sleep grass / and the droppings of civets / they have been hidden away by our mothers / who are waiting for us by the river. / My skin is tightening / soon I shall shed it / like a monitor

lizard / like remembered comfort / at the new moons rising / I will eat the last signs of my weakness / remove the scars of old childhood wars / and dare to enter the forest whistling / like a snake that has fed the chameleon / for changes / I shall be forever. / May I never remember reasons / for my spirit's safety / may I never forget / the warning of my woman's flesh / weeping at the new moon / may I never lose / that terror / that keeps me brave / May I owe nothing / I cannot repay.

Audre, you do a lot of readings around the country. You do too, Marge. What do you think you get, and what do you think the audience gets? I think that when I get the most, the audience gets the most, too. And it's a mutual—it's almost a ritual of shared emotional experience. There is a touching, a strengthening of what I'm trying to do with my poetry, and a connection between people which I believe is what poetry is all about. Are there mostly women in the audiences? My very best readings, yes, but not always. Not always. I would have to say because it comes into "who do I write for?": that I write for and to any human being who can be touched, reached by my work, by my words. Including men. Including men, yes. Marge, what about you? Well, I give a lot of readings. I do a fixed proportion of paid readings to

benefits. I read often times for audiences of predominantly women and often times for audiences that are mixed. I get feedback, I think, that the kind of audiences that you have now, since there's a lot more that sense of women's culture and women coming out to readings and really writing poetry, even the audiences that are mixed are different. The audiences are perhaps more like older church audiences than—not, not high church, not fancy churches, but revival, or, people churches, right. In other words people are coming asking for affirmation, for images of wholeness, for I think a putting in touch with their anger, their joy. People expect to be moved. Women in particular expect to be moved, expect to be touched, expect to respond. And you expect reading to them to get feedback, the kind of feedback that previously musicians got and preachers got. My best feedback isn't critical reviews. Critical reviews are important because that's how people hear about

you, and that's how colleges decide you're worth spending money on. But the real feedback is the feedback that you get face to face with people. The strengthening that encourages our strength, which in turn we write from and feed back, so it's a continuous process. It's back and forth, there's... It's not a one-way poet, which is what the old modern poetry was about. I read and you listen. But poetry is really a sharing. And so there must be feedback between audience and poet because it's what we... it's what we live on, it's what we strengthen ourselves by and continue writing or at least I do. Yes, and I feel that when people respond to the poetry, they're not responding to self-expression or an ego trip on my part. They're responding to the poetry because they feel it's true. Because they feel it's for them and of their experience as well as my own, and they're giving me back the sense of that experience. That a poem touches the listener's strength reinforces it for the person who is listening, and they in

turn return to us some of that strength, which we write from and share. Marge, let's hear you read now. We made a tape earlier, let's hear it. Rape Poem. It doesn't have a fancier title. There is no difference between being raped and being pushed down a flight of cement steps except that the wounds also bleed inside. There is no difference between being raped and being run over by a truck. Except that afterwards men asked if you enjoyed it. There is no difference between being raped and being bit on the ankle by a rattlesnake. Except that people ask if your skirt was short and why were you out alone anyhow. There is no difference between being raped and going headfirst through a windshield. Except that afterward you are afraid not of cars but half the human race. The rapist is your boyfriend's brother. He sits beside you in the

movies eating popcorn. Rape fattens on the fantasies of the normal male. Like a maggot in garbage. Fear of rape is a cold wind blowing all of the time on a woman's hunch back, never to stroll alone on a sand road through pine wood, never to climb a trail across a bald without that aluminum in the mouth when I see a man climbing toward me. Never to open the door to a knock without that razor just grazing the throat the fear of the dark side of hedges, the backseat of a car, the empty house rattling keys like a snake's warning. The fear of the smiling man in whose pocket is knife. The fear of the serious man, in whose fist is locked hatred. All it takes to cast a rapist is to see your body as jackhammer

as blow torch as adding machine gun. All it takes is hating that body your own your self your muscle that softens the flab. All it takes is to push what you hate, what you fear on to the soft alien flesh, to back it out invincible as a tank armored with treads without senses, to rip up pleasure, to murder those who dare live in the leafy flesh open to love. This is a poem in praise of an unpopular subject, work. It's the title poem from To Be of Use. The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black, sleek heads of seals, bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo with massive patience. Who strain in the mud and muck to move things forward. Who do what has to be done, again and again. I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along. Who are not parlor generals and field deserters, but move in a common rhythm. When the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies clean and evident. Greek camphoras for wine and oil. Hopi vases that

held corn are put in museums. But you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real. But. This is a poem called Unclench Yourself. It's sort of a personal magic type poem. Unclench Yourself. Open, love, open. I tell you we are able. I tell you we are able now and then gently with hands and then feet, cold even as fish to curl into a tangle and grow a single hide slowly to unknit all other skin, and rest

in flesh and rests in flesh entire. Come all the way in, love. It is a river with a strong current but its bwon waters will not drown you. Let go. Do not hold out your head. The current knows the bottom better than your feet. You will find that in this river we can breathe, we can breathe and underwater find small gardens and bright fish, too tender, too tender for the air. This is a sort of up-and-at-it poem for discouraged times. To un-discourage you. Called Phyllis Wounded To fight history as it carries us, to swim upstream

across the currents. No. To move the river, to create new currents with the force of our arms and backs, to shape this torrent as it shapes us flowing, churning, dragging us under, into the green moil where the breath is pummeled from the lungs and the eyes burst backwards among rocks, the teeth of the white water grinning like hungry bears. Ah, Phyllis, you complain too much. We all carry in the gold lockets of the good birthday child, sentimental landscapes in pale mauve where we have everything we desire carried in on trays serene as jade Buddhas, respectable as Jane Austen, secure as an obituary in The Times. We were not born for a heaven of Sundays. Most people are given hunger, that dim pain of being used, twisting through the bowels, close walls and a low sky. Troubles visited from above like tornadoes that level the house. Pain,

early, pain late, and a death not chosen. My friend, the Amazons were hideous with the white scars of knife wounds, welts of sword slashes. Flesh that would remind nobody of a ripe peach. Yet age sucks us all dry. All campaigners waken to the resonant singing of angels, of pillars of fire and pillars of ash, that only trouble the sleep of women who climb on a platform or crouch at a barricade. Your smile is rich with risk and subtle with enemies contested. Your memories whistle and clang and moan in the dark like boys that summon and give warning of danger

and the channel through. I was not born a serf bound to a rye field. I was not born to bend over a pressing machine, while the sun rose and set. I was not born to starve in the first year with big belly and spindly legs. I was not born to be gang raped by soldiers at fourteen. I was not born to die in childbirth. To be burned at the stake by the church. But of all these we are the daughters born of luck, round as an apple and fat as a goose to charge into battle, swinging our great grandmothers' bones. Millions of dead women keen in our hair for food and freedom. The electricity drives me humming, what privilege to be the heiresses of so much

wanting. How can we ever give up? Our laughter has been honed by adversity till it gleams by an ax, and we will not die by our own hand. I think that sums things up very nicely. Thank you both for being here. Thank you for watching, and good night. [music] Woman is produced by WNEDTV which is solely responsible for its content and was funded by public television stations, the Ford Foundation,

and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.