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Verses of Feminism Versus the Patriarchy
Off Our Backs, Aug/Sep 1999 by Bruce, Minnie, Payne, Frances
VERSES OF FEMINISM VERSUS THE PATRIARCHY
Just when you were beginning to believe the "there-are-no-new-poets-worth mentioning-especially-no-females" stories spun by corporate America in order to stifle creativity, off our backs is here to dispel another myth created by the patriarchy. The truth is, the creative world of women and girls always has and always will be steeped in poetry. Whether it's the songs mothers make up to sing to their children, the clumsy verse you scrawled into your diary after your first heartbreak or the sonnets of a future Pulitzer Prize winner, women's words are worth remembering, reading and supporting. Here are three new women poets who create women only space with their words and hope that you create women only space in your mind.
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minnie bruce pratt, walking back up depot street
"This book tells my story in spirit but not in physical actuality. The journey from the rural to the urban is a story that rings true for many, whether its from Mississippi to New York or from another country to the United States, says Minnie Bruce Pratt of her new book of poetry Walking Back Up Depot Street. The book, which took Minnie thirteen years to write tells the story of a young girl, named Beatrice, who awakens to a political consciousness. The poems are truthful and endearing. There are points in the book where the reader may want to reach into the pages and hug Beatrice, giving her the strength to go on and to fight the battles that women are all too familiar with. But the imagery is searing and may make the reader shudder, as the images of the blood soaked nightmares creep from the page
In writing those nightmares into the book, I am bringing up something that we should all remember. The history of this country is soaked in the blood of others. The blood of the oppressed and the blood of the activists who worked to stop the oppression. We must always remember that. says Minnie Bruce Pratt. And it is blood that Minnie knows all too well. Growing up in segregated Alabama, she encountered brutal racism every day but because of complete indoctrination into white supremacy would not be unable to call it that or to work to fight it until years later. Minnie Bruce remembers other battle such as women's struggle in the sixties back when feminism was called woman's liberation and when the impressions of the 1930s labor movement was still fresh.
There are people who say that the sixties did nothing but tie dye and VW bugs but they can afford to say that because of the sixties and because they don't know what it was like before. Just like feminism now has become such a broad term. I personally am going back to the term of women's liberation because it reminds me of what were fighting for and not who we are, she says.
And with that statement, she does her part to remember. She educates and talks about the struggles, both past and present and brings us poetry such as this s that the struggle is also written down for activists for generations to come.
Walking... can be bought at your local women's bookstore or ordered through the University of Pittsburgh Press.
The Best of Margaret Mitchell to be Revealed
And she had wanted to bite. She was tired of polite
letters to the editor, two hundred fifty words, no more,
in columns like ornamental borders, like the women
who lined government square Saturday afternoons.
They rallied at empty buildings, they railed at men not there
about their rights. She was tired of petitions like prayers.
-copyright Minnie Bruce Pratt 1999
Central Prison
A sign passed on her way to work:
Central Prison Renovation. A lie.
Old work, not new. No creation. A repitition
of walls, a dry well, people at the bottom,
a narrowed sky, few stars. Women in mid-air
laid down brick over brick, over hidden
doorways, barred exits. The new death
chamber would be ready by spring.
-copyright Minnie Bruce Pratt 1999
daphne gottlieb, pelt
The last thing that Daphne Gottlieb wants is to be seen as a confessional writer. "I tell my stories not from a victim's viewpoint but as a survivor. When we talk about these things we normalize the shame and fear and that works to relieve it. When we tell people we're being oppressed that helps to stop it."
Through her poetry she comes to us as a survivor of a abusive father (an experience she describes painfully in the story of oh, no). She adamantly states that the world doesn't need another beaten girl. When she reads the poems in public, often because they are so truthful men often walk out and women often come to her afterwards and tell of their own experiences. She then turns the corner as a lesbian who experiences homophobia but can still find humor in the situation (reiterated in straight, no chaser), "I've spent way too many nights in a bar where men think there's glamour in a marginalized status. There's nothing kinky nor cool about endangering you or your lover as you walk down the street holding hands." She puts an interesting twist on receiving junk mail in making the difference).
Gottlieb's poetry is both fierce and subtle (from tales of fucking a swan to what being a prom queen gets you) with a sarcastic laugh rising from the pages. This book, whether to remind one of oneself or for a lazy read, should be read by any women who calls herself the "F" word
