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For Lee Hart, Standing By

Selected Poems

Fear Strikes Out

A pen pal of mine in a nearby state recently published her first novel and was surprised when it was referred to under the heading of women’s fiction. She had never placed herself in any category, and wondered what the term meant.

Pornography Theme

More Than A Rumor

I watched a slide show prepared by a women-against-pornography group from New York. The bulk of the images were presumably the most startling pages from hard-core pornography magazines though they didn’t include the issue of Hustler which our narrator described as having drawn her into this fight.

Worth Fighting For

An Interview With Holly Near

I just got back from Nicaragua. I hadn’t known much at all about this country that the United States has been involved with for many years. The Marines were in Nicaragua as long ago as the Thirties. How can you live in a country and not know about a place where your Marines have been for that long?

In Favor Of Menstruation

The first time it happened, I was in Bible School in Weldon, North Carolina on the second floor of the Methodist Church educational building, listening to Dozen Pierce say that God knew how many hairs were on everybody’s head. I wondered if He knew why my stomach hurt.

Reclaiming The Dark

An Interview With Starhawk

When we’re striving for all light we get away from the dark. As a witch I see the world itself as sacred. If there were such a thing as heresy in the craft, which there isn’t, that would be it — saying that you want to get away from half of what’s in the world. It’s a denial of what sacredness is. That particular metaphor, the light/dark split, is really a fundamental basis of racism in western culture. It was used very deliberately in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the beginning of the slave trade. Part of the justification for taking the African slaves was that their color proved they were cursed by God. It has always been a metaphor used for genocide against people who were dark, against dark-haired Jews.

Making The Muse Real

Poetry And Spirituality

How can we continue to have poetry without a sense of spirit? Here we live in a time of the breakdown of traditional values and the questioning of traditional religions, yet where are the poets writing of the ecstatic and seeking new visions, or reanimating, from new perspectives, old ones?

Sunbeams

There’s nothing wrong with the world. What’s wrong is our way of looking at it.

Henry Miller, Big Sur, and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch