In Judy Grahn’s memoir, A Simple Revolution, the poet recalls a question asked in the late 1960s by her then partner, the artist Wendy Cadden: “Just why is it that you write? What is it for?[1] The question provoked a moment of “pure consciousness” in which Grahn began to think deeply about her role as a working-class poet, political activist, lesbian, and feminist.[2] She formed a conviction that a “poet of the world is of use in the world.”[3] For Grahn and her peers, feminist poetry was intimately bound to revolutionary struggle, not merely an artistic craft but a political tactic.
Echoing a line from Muriel Rukeyser’s 1968 poem “Käthe Kollwitz,” “I am in the world / to change the world,” Grahn’s maxim expresses the political and literary outlook of the Women’s Press Collective (WPC), the Oakland-based lesbian feminist press founded by Grahn and Cadden in 1969.[4] Rukeyser’s poem, and its oft-quoted call-and-response, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open,” capture the spirit of what the feminist poet Jan Clausen describes as the “largely lesbian underground of insurgent small press poets” that emerged in the first half of the 1970s.[5] Grahn and the WPC stood at the vanguard of this movement-within-a-movement, shaping and expanding the political and aesthetic possibilities of a lesbian feminist poetics.
The press began in the living room of Grahn and Cadden’s crowded Oakland home, with a mimeograph bought cheaply from Diane di Prima and a few basic printing skills picked up from the women of the Boston-based New England Free Press. Of the ATF Chief offset press that the collective purchased in 1969, Grahn recalls, “We didn’t know anything. And no one was going to teach us.”[6] Teaching themselves began with taking the machinery apart, learning how it worked, and reassembling it. This deconstructive process resembled, in another form, the work undertaken in consciousness-raising (CR) discussion groups, where old narratives of a natural patriarchal social order were painfully disassembled and scrutinized. Martha Shelley, a member of the WPC and a cofounder of the Gay Liberation Front, gestures at the transformative power of this work in her poem “Installing a Fan at the Women’s Press Collective”:
Cutting a hole to
build in a fan to
move out the air of the pressroom.
Each task is the first time
and now, I told a friend
if men jail me I can break out.
They have and you did,
she said.[7]
1969 saw the founding of two other radical presses in the Bay Area: Paul Mariah and Richard Tagett’s San Francisco-based Manroot, which focused on gay men’s writing but occasionally published poetry by lesbians, including Grahn and Lynn Lonidier, and Alta Gerrey’s Shameless Hussy in Oakland, the first self-declared feminist press in the country. While Shameless Hussy published poetry by a diverse range of women and men—including work by Susan Griffin, Pat Parker, Ntozake Shange, Paul Mariah, and Dan Georgakas—the WPC was the first press to focus on writing by lesbians. Between 1969 and 1977, the collective published twenty-four books of predominantly poetry but also memoir, prose fiction, political essays, and a how-to manual on gun ownership for women. In the upswing of a lesbian movement, they forged a semi-separatist existence. The press did not publish work by men, but its relationship to separatism as a political ideology was contingent and fraught. This was due in part to the personal and political background of its members, whose connections to anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and gay liberation organizing made them generally less amenable to a radical feminist position that declared men the singular enemy of all women. Still, all the work of the press, from selecting and editing manuscripts to acquiring materials, repairing equipment, typesetting, printing, and distribution, was performed by queer women, many of whom lived together in a house on Oakland’s Terrace Street. In the early 1970s, they moved the press from their home to the back room of the feminist bookstore A Woman’s Place, where they remained until the press’s closure at the end of the decade.
The approach taken by Grahn and Cadden as they assembled the press’s first publication, an anthology called Woman to Woman, demonstrated their commitment to a communal, grassroots poetics. Grahn first compiled the work of dozens of poets, both canonical and unknown, and asked fifty or sixty women in her community to select their favorites for publication. She included a series of her own “Common Woman” poems, to which one reader responded, “Common as a telephone directory….this is not poetry.”[9] The complaint hit on an inadvertent but apt metaphor for Grahn’s early work. Her poems were built to communicate, and they traveled widely, passed around in bars and at protests. She recalled seeing mimeographed copies of her 1965 poem “The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke” on fridges in strangers’ kitchens. In this prose poem, the protagonist is asked by an overbearing doctor to explain “what the word ‘homosexuality’ means to you,” and responds, “It means I can do what I want.”[10]
Here, the poem’s protagonist seizes the power to define herself on her own terms. The project of self-definition is evident, too, in Grahn’s decision to publish “Edward the Dyke” with the subtitle “and other poems,” even though the text arguably conforms more closely to a short-story structure. Grahn suggests that by “insisting that ‘Edward’ was a poem, I was telling myself that women must define what our poetry is. I believe this about every other aspect of our lives also.”[11] This line ties together the twin projects of the WPC: to redefine poetic language and to draw out the political potential of a collective lesbian identity.
Grahn’s embrace of an expansive lesbian identity still resonates. The term “WLW,” for instance, now ubiquitous in queer corners of the internet, owes its origins to the opening lines of Grahn’s 1971 poem “A History of Lesbianism”:
How they came into the world,
the women-loving-women
came in three by three[12]
It was a term she settled on, in part, to draw her lesbianism and her partner’s bisexuality together into a community that could bear difference as well as sameness. For the press collective, which was made up of Black, Asian, and white queer women from working-and middle-class backgrounds, it was particularly urgent to forge such a community. “A History of Lesbianism” records the surging momentum of a queer community that expands “until there were more / than you could count.”[13] It moves the scale of Edward the Dyke’s declaration that homosexuality “means I can do what I want” from the individual to the collective. This sense of communal self-fashioning is at the heart of the WPC’s poetic project.
The WPC’s output reflected its members’ commitment to poetry as political tactic. Their catalog included an anthology of poetry by the women of the Weather Underground and a collection of poems and essays by and about Joan Little, a young Black woman facing the death penalty for killing a prison guard in self-defense. Their work was sustained by a network of activists’ households that fanned out across the Bay Area. In the absence of public venues where lesbian poets could safely read their work, crowded living rooms became movement hubs, artist studios, print rooms, bookstores, community centers, and performance spaces. Grahn describes one reading in a lesbian house on Addison Street in Berkeley in which she read shirtless by candlelight to a small audience of “militant dykes and friends,” ending with a ritual burning of her work in homage to the supposed destruction of Sappho’s poetry.[14] These readings, and the press itself, were bound to a broader feminist project of reimagining public and private spheres, an attempt to transform the home from a site of familial violence and drudgery to one of eroticism and creativity, where intimate bonds coexisted with the demands of political and artistic life.
Closely bound to these intimate performance spaces, the work that emerged from this scene constitutes a late twentieth-century dyke poetic vernacular: short lines threaded with lowercase i’s, a tone of urgent disclosure, frank accounts of waged work and romantic longing where scraps of sixties slang and movement jargon brush up against the names of friends and lovers. Following Woman to Woman, the WPC became the first press to publish a poetry collection by an Asian American lesbian, Eating Artichokes by Willyce Kim, in 1972. It was followed by a reprint of Pat Parker’s Child of Myself and, the next year, Martha Shelley’s Crossing the DMZ. The poems of these collections are wiry and direct, by turns defiant, work weary, lustful. They sketch imagined dialogues with comrades and hostile family members. They speak directly to each other, in poems like Kim’s “Some Thoughts for the Common Woman’s Poet,” which runs alongside a photo of Grahn in Kim’s Eating Artichokes, and in Parker’s “For Willyce,” from her 1973 collection, Pit Stop:
When i make love to you
i try
with each stroke of my tongue
to say i love you
to tease i love you
to hammer i love you
to melt i love you
& your sounds drift down
oh god!
oh jesus!
and I think
here it is, some dude’s
getting credit for what
a woman
has done,
again.[15]
These poems, which speak candidly and often joyfully of queer sexuality, fed a growing appetite for testimony of lesbian life. They also offer a brief glimpse of the ways that lesbian poets of color found space within the WPC to form and nurture tenderness and intimacy between one another.
Meeting the demand for accounts of queer life did not, however, mean printing anything and everything by lesbian poets; Willyce Kim recalls a selective editorial process at the press led by Grahn and Cadden, who went through a “weeding-out process” with each manuscript.[16] In theory WPC made decisions by consensus and without hierarchy, but Grahn and Cadden often held final sway. At times, Grahn balked at the press’s democracy. When Diane di Prima sent a manuscript of poems to be published with the press, members of the collective turned it down, to Grahn’s great frustration. It was widely felt that di Prima’s work was not, in the parlance of the era, sufficiently “women-identified”: she was too closely associated with the boys of the Beats and the New York School. On another occasion, members of the collective asked Grahn not to reprint Pat Parker’s Pit Stop on political grounds. Grahn interpreted this as an objection to Parker’s wry critique of feminist political meetings in poem “[I’m so tired]”:
I’m beginning to
wonder if
the tactics
of this revolution
is to
talk the enemy to death[17]
It’s also possible that they objected to an un-sisterly tone in a poem that begins,
Bitch!
i want to scream
I hate you[18]
Either way, Grahn was unmoved. She printed it.
Alongside political and aesthetic tensions, the women of the collective were approaching their financial limit. Most of the WPC’s publications sold somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand copies, and their profit margin was small; the group priced their work far below market rates and subsisted on small grants amid countless hours of unpaid labor. By the mid-1970s, burnout and economic precarity led some of its core members to drift away from the press. For some, this was a blow to their dream of a collective and self-sustaining feminist life. Kim recalls, “I needed more money so I left them to get a forty-hour-a-week job. It was hard.”[19] In August 1977, the collective announced that they were disbanding. Within their statement, which celebrated the press’s work and its influence within the sphere of lesbian feminist publishing, they critiqued an economically unsustainable structure of small press publishing that excluded the majority of working-class feminists.
Instead of closing, however, the press merged with the Baltimore-based Diana Press, which had the financial backing of a controversial network of credit unions, the Feminist Economic Network (FEN). Articles in Sojourner, Quest, Plexus, and other periodicals give a tumultuous account of FEN: secret meetings, mysterious loans, bullying, grueling working conditions, fistfights. Writing for Quest in 1976, Bat-Ami Bar On recalls FEN’s 1975 convention, in which the group declared their aim to “accept financial leadership of the feminist movement” and to do so within an explicitly hierarchical organization in which an (all-white) board of directors retained full decision-making power. The debate raised questions about who held economic and political power within the feminist movement and about whether cooperation among “un-equals” in a sisterhood stratified by race and class was truly possible.[20] On one side were feminists who had grown weary of what Jo Freeman called “the tyranny of structurelessness,” who felt that a for-profit venture was necessary in a movement bereft of financial resources.[21] On the other side were feminists who feared that FEN marked a capitalist and authoritarian turn within the women’s movement.
Martha Shelley was one of FEN’s most vocal opponents. In 1977 she wrote and circulated a pamphlet entitled “What is FEN?” denouncing what she described as racist and exploitative labor practices in the organization, in which women of color were underpaid, overworked, and had no decision-making power. The Black and Asian women interviewed for Shelley’s piece also describe a refusal to grapple with the politics of race and class within the organization. One interviewee who describes herself as “a Third World Woman” states that there was “no room” in FEN for class analysis. “By inference, men seemed the only enemy.” For those who opposed FEN, the stakes were the future of the feminist movement. In her own words, Shelley’s article was written “in the heat of battle.”[22] When her piece was reprinted in the feminist periodical Big Mama Rag, a scrappy illustration set the tone: the word “feminism” torqued into a whip, brandished by a woman on a chariot marked “shit jobs” on its side. Shelley viewed Grahn and Cadden’s decision to merge with Diana Press—one of FEN’s members—as a betrayal of the WPC’s politics of anti-racism and worker control. It caused both a personal and political rift; Shelley severed ties with the press and, for many years, with Grahn.
Diana Press had its own troubles, its archive thick with letters alleging financial mismanagement and unpaid royalties. In 1979, following a devastating break-in, Diana Press and the WPC closed for good. Like FEN, this break-in stirred controversy; some feminist commentators blamed the FBI, while others hinted at an inside job. But by the end of the 1970s, queer feminist presses like Diana and the WPC faced larger issues. The revolutionary promise of the late 1960s had been tempered by a decade of state-led counterinsurgency, and a new economic order was on the horizon. Under the Reagan administration, cuts to education, arts funding, and welfare provision made the always-precarious subsistence of artists and radicals significantly harder. Jan Clausen, writing in 1982, warned that the small press poet who came of age in the 1970s was “likely to be surprised at what a difference even small grants and occasional gigs made, once they are gone.”[23] External forces were not the only threat. Clausen felt that a once-radical and experimental feminist poetry scene had, by the 1980s, curdled into something more paranoid and dogmatic. The 1980s were the decade of the so-called sex wars—an ideological struggle that surfaced many of the feminist movement’s most bitter fault lines.
Given the scale of economic pressures and internecine discord, what is surprising is how much of the women’s liberation small press ecosystem did endure into the 1990s and beyond. Kitchen Table Press, founded in 1980 by Barbara Smith, continued to publish work by women of color into the early 1990s; Spinsters Ink, a lesbian feminist press founded in 1978 by Maureen Brady and Judith McDaniel, remained active until the mid-2000s. Of the small feminist poetry presses that emerged out of the homes of women in the Bay Area in the 1970s, at least one—Kelsey Street Press—is still in existence. Willyce Kim emphasizes this aspect of the WPC’s afterlife in a 1991 interview: “When I originally walked into A Woman’s Place bookstore, they had maybe one rack filled with women’s poetry, women’s prose, lesbian [writing]. Now there’s hundreds of books.”[24] The WPC expanded what was possible for lesbian poets, even if little remains of the feminist community spaces that once made the WPC itself possible.
The gains that Kim describes and the losses that Clausen predicts are both alive in the legacy of WPC and the lesbian feminist small press movement more broadly; neither eclipses the other. In the decades since the press collective disbanded, some strands of queer feminist poetry have gained a once-unimaginable foothold in mainstream and academic publishing spheres. In the process, however, this work has largely been decoupled from its origin in social movements. For a twenty-first-century reader, part of the pleasure of the WPC is in finding poetry that speaks forcefully of these origins. Its account of itself is heated—loving but unromanticized. Recording a moment in which, as the photographer Cathy Cade recalls, “poetry somehow united us as a community,” the WPC provides one answer to the question of what it meant and could mean for poets to be “of use in the world.”[25]
Notes:
[1] Judy Grahn, A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet (Berkeley:
Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 113.
[2] Grahn, A Simple Revolution, 113.
[3] Grahn, A Simple Revolution, 113.
[4] Muriel Rukeyser, Out of Silence: Selected Poems, ed. Kate Daniels (Evanston,
IL: TriQuarterly Books, 1992), 128.
[5] Rukeyser,Out of Silence, 132; Jan Clausen, A Movement of Poets (New
York: Long Haul Press, 1982), 15.
[6] Grahn, A Simple Revolution, 142.
[7] Martha Shelley, Lovers and Mothers (Oakland: Sefir, 1981), unpaginated.
[8] Clausen, A Movement of Poets, 12.
[9] Grahn, A Simple Revolution, 132.
[10] Judy Grahn, Edward the Dyke and Other Poems (Oakland: Women’s
Press Collective, 1971), unpaginated.
[11] Judy Grahn, The Work of a Common Woman (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing
Press, 1984), 24.
[12] Judy Grahn, The Judy Grahn Reader (Berkeley: Aunt Lute Books, 2009), 19.
[13] Grahn, The Judy Grahn Reader, 19.
[14] Grahn, A Simple Revolution, 134.
[15] Pat Parker, Pit Stop (Oakland: Women’s Press Collective, 1975),
unpaginated.
[16] Kate Brandt, “Willyce Kim: Reluctant Pioneer,” in Happy Endings: Lesbian
Writers Talk About Their Lives and Work (Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1993), 224.
[17] Parker, Pit Stop.
[18] Parker, Pit Stop.
[19] Brandt, Happy Endings, 218.
[20] Bat-Ami Bar On, “Notes on a Feminist Economics,” Quest: A Feminist
Quarterly 2, no. 4 (Spring 1976): 49.
[21] Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” a talk at the Southern
Female Rights Union, Beulah, Mississippi, May 1970. A version is available on Jo Freeman’s personal website, https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm.
[22] Martha Shelley, “Oakland FWHC Abuses Presage FEN,” Big Mama Rag 5,
no. 3 (1977): 14.
[23] Clausen, A Movement of Poets, 44.
[24] Brandt, “Willyce Kim: Reluctant Pioneer,” 219.
[25] Quoted in Grahn, A Simple Revolution, 123.