The Lesbian Poet

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Notes

¹ ‘The Lesbian Poet’ is a talk I read at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in May of 1994 as part of the Revolutionary Poetry Symposium. [‘The Lesbian Poet’ first appeared in published form in School of Fish, Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa, Calif., 1997, pp. 123-131.]Ed Friedman, Director of St. Mark’s [from 1987 to 2003].

² I guess I could name a few. Danine Ricereto, Alice Notley, Deborah Weinstein, Camille Roy, Rae Armantrout, Tracie Morris, Kellie Cogswell, Joan Larkin, Michelle Tea, Lee Ann Brown, Leslie Scalapino, Karin Cook, Sapphire, Kristin Stuart, Carla Harryman, Shannon Ebner, Bernadette Mayer, Susan Wheeler, Jan Heller Levi, Ann Rower, Cecilia Dougherty, Brenda Coultas, Lyn Hejinian, Stephanie Grant, Susan Howe, Maggie Nelson, Cynthia Nelson, Dodie Bellamy, Jennifer Blowdryer, Mary Beth Caschetta, Elaine Equi, Tom Carey, Diane DiPrima, Eliza Galaher, Jennie Portnow, Tory Dent, Barbara Barg, Honor Moore, Ann D’Adesky, Lucia Berlin, Harryette Mullen, Kathe Izzo, Jane King, Barbara Guest, Heather Lewis, Jill Johnston, Linda Smukler, Lynn Tillman, Madeleine Olnek, Rose Lesniak, Bea Gates, Ann Lauterbach, Amy Gerstler, Holly Hughes, Gerry Pearlberg, Myra Mniewski, Laurie Weeks, Robyn Selman, Kathy Acker, Anne Waldman, Sarah Messer, Josie McKee, Elinor Nauen, Susie Timmons, Adrienne Rich … (actually you can pick up a copy of The New Fuck You / adventures in lesbian reading [Semiotext(e), 1995] edited by Liz Kotz and myself) … Marilyn Hacker, Maggie Estep, Erica Hunt, Lori Lubeski, Gail Scott …

³ Rather than fool with the talk I gave at St. Mark’s, I’ve decided to footnote some of my meanings. When I talk of “unwriting” myself, I’m thinking of it as the act of shedding. You can put on your mother’s clothes, or you can take them off, bur you’re still her daughter. It’s a performance of being that I’m after. Being female of course means something different to women than it does to men. It’s a given that I’m alive, so I don’t have to be “conceived” again. To stand in that place more firmly, though, I find myself consciously breathing out, exhaling, unwriting, so to speak. The huge fact of my body has all the momentum of literature. When I’m dead I’ll have shed a lot. I leave it to girls and boys.

We know what rewriting means, it occurs on something you’re not. The problem is that men don’t think they’re women. lf they came out of the sky they’d be rewriting that. Admittedly, it’s difficult to be here for all humans. That’s why we write at all. We’re shedding thinking. More men ought to start unwriting themselves. Soon.