Pat Parker (1944 - 1989): "Poet laureate of the Black and Lesbian peoples

b. January 20, 1944 
d. June 19, 1989

I'm waiting for the revolution that will let me take all my parts.

"This loud and rich-mouthed poet," Lyndie Brimstone writes of Pat Parker in Feminist Review, "who planted her feet firmly on platforms all over America and demanded that her audiences, whoever they may be, pay attention, was not only working class, she was black and lesbian: the very first to refuse to compromise and speak openly from all her undiluted experience." Parker was a contemporary of such writers as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and LeRoi Jones/Amira Baraka. Until her early death from cancer in 1989, she was not only a highly visible black Lesbian poet - Adrian Oktenberg, writing in the Women's Review of Books, called her "the poet laureate of the Black and Lesbian peoples" - but a committed activist in radical politics and community issues. In addition to urgent, angry poems against racism, sexism, and homophobia, Parker wrote "exquisitely sensual love poems," Brimstone reported.

Angelina Weld Grimké (1880 -1958), African-American poet, writer and teacher

b. February 27, 1880
d. June 10, 1958

Angelina Weld Grimke was a lesbian African American poet, writer, critic, biographer, and teacher. She was an important forerunner of the Harlem Renaissance.

Katherine Philips (1631 - 1664) U.K. Poet

b.  1 January 1631
d. 22 June 1664

Neé Fowler, known as the "Matchless Orinda", she was born into a successful London cloth merchant's family and attended Mrs Salmon's Presbyterian boarding school for girls. In 1648 Katherine married her stepfather's 54-year-old relative, Colonel and Welsh Parliamentarian James Philips, and took residence at her husband's house, in Cardigan Priory, Wales.

Her home at the Priory, Cardigan, Wales became the centre of a literary coterie, a "society of friendship", the members of which were known to one another by pastoral names: Katerine was "Orinda", her husband "Antenor", and Sir Charles Cotterel "Poliarchus". "The Matchless Orinda", as her admirers called her, was regarded as the apostle of female friendship, and inspired great respect. Other members were Mrs Anne Owen, "Lucasia", to whom she addressed almost half her verses and passionate epistles, and Mary Aubrey, "Rosania".

It seems that she may have had a ten-year relationship with "Lucasia", from 1651 to 1661. At their more ecstatic, Philips' poems celebrate the sublime "mysteries" of love between women. Philips died suddenly of smallpox in London.

In 1662 she went to Dublin to pursue her husband's claim to certain Irish estates; there she completed a translation of Pierre Corneille's Pompe, produced with great success in 1663 in the Smock Alley Theatre, and printed in the same year both in Dublin and London. She went to London in March 1664 with a nearly completed translation of Corneille's Horace, but died of smallpox.

There is speculation about whether, and in what way, her work could be described as "lesbian." Certainly her representations of female friendship are intense, even passionate. She herself always insisted on their platonic nature and characterizes her relationships as the "meeting of souls," as in these lines from "To my Excellent Lucasia, on our Friendship":

For as a watch by art is wound
To motion, such was mine;
But never had Orinda found
A soul till she found thine;
Which now inspires, cures, and supplies,
And guides my darkened breast;
For thou art all that I can prize,
My joy, my life, my rest. (9-16)

Moreover, it has been argued that 'her manipulations of the conventions of male poetic discourse constitute a form of lesbian writing.


Source:

excerpted from  Aldrich R. and Wotherspoon G:Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History Vol.1: From Antiquity to the Mid-Twentieth Century , Routledge, London, 2001

Muriel Rukeyser (1913 - 1980) Poet

b. December 15,1913
d. February 12,1980

Never to despise in myself what I have been taught to despise. Nor to despise the other. 

Not to despise the it. To make this relation with the it: to know that I am it.

Muriel Rukeyser's poetry, which breaks the silence of many aspects of female experience, has been enormously important to many feminist and lesbian readers.

Christina Rossetti (1830 - 1894) , Poet

b. December 5, 1830
d. December 29, 1894

Her sexuality repressed by religion, Christina Rosetti wrote poetry that included highly-charged erotic female-to-female affection.

Christina Rossetti was the youngest of four children of Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian patriot who moved to London in 1824. She had one sister, Maria, and two brothers, Dante Gabriel and William. Christina and her sister were mainly educated at home by their mother, and brought up as devout Anglo-Catholics. Christina's elder sister Maria eventually became an Anglican nun.

Christina's brothers, Dante Gabriel and William Michael, went to Kings College School in London, and were founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group of artists, poets and critics approached art by studying nature in close detail and by choosing subjects that they thought were morally uplifting.

They chose the name of their group to indicate that they thought all art since Raphael (an Italian painter who lived from 1483 to 1520) was degenerate. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a painter and poet. William later acted as Christina's editor.

Although some of Christina's earliest verse was published in The Germ, a magazine produced for a short time by the Pre-Raphaelites, and she sat as a model for several of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings, she was not a member of the movement. By modern standards, their poetry seems rich and cloying; hers is more sensitive.

 In 1848 she became engaged to James Collinson, a member of her brother's Pre-Raphaelite circle. However, she broke it off when he became a Roman Catholic. Later, in her early thirties, she fell in love with Charles Cayley. Again she broke it off because of religious differences.

Like many unmarried middle-class women of that period, Christina did not have any paid employment, except for about a year when she and her mother tried to run a day school after failing health and eyesight forced her father to retire in 1853.

From 1860 to 1870 Rossetti worked at Highgate Penitentiary (not a prison, but a place for repentance) for the reclamation of "Fallen Women." She continued to write poetry throughout her life, and in the 1870s she worked on a voluntary basis for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Christina never married or broke away from home. Her brothers and sister were central to her emotions and she was deeply upset by Dante Gabriel's nervous breakdown in 1872. After he died in 1882, she lived as a recluse at home, concentrating on her religious life. In 1871 she fell seriously ill with Graves' disease, a rare form of disfiguring goiter ailment which caused darkened skin, protruding eyes, vomiting, faintness and heart attacks, and for the rest of her life she suffered pain which required narcotics. After a period of suffering Christina died of cancer.

Many people consider that her best work is Goblin Market (1862), the longest of her poems. Because goblins sound as if they belong in a fairy story, it is often put in collections for young children. However, it is really a short epic poem for adults. The most obvious quality of the writing is the exactness and sensuousness of her descriptions of the fruit sold by the goblins.

Although she was only peripherally involved with her brother's Pre-Raphaelites, and claimed to be "content in my shady crevice," Rossetti was not quite the "recluse, saint and renunciatory spinster" commonly portrayed. To those familiar only with her devotional or children's verse, her classic "Goblin Market" will raise eyebrows. Some of her verse hints at her personal ambiguity:

 "...Cheek to cheek and breast to breast
Locked together in one nest...
...Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me,
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices,
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Golden pulp and goblin dew
Eat me, drink me, love me
Laura, make much of me."

Charlotte Mary Mew (1869 - 1928) U.K. Poet

b. 15 November 1869
d. 24 March 1928

Charlotte Mew's poetry encodes the emotional pain of hiding her lesbian identity in a world of compulsory heterosexuality.

Charlotte Mary Mew was born in London on November 15, 1869. Her father, Frederick Mew, was an architect. Her mother, Anna Maria Kendall Mew, was the daughter of the head of her husband's firm. Mew was strictly brought up by her nurse, Elizabeth Goodman, whom she was later to describe in the memoir "An Old Servant." The family was often struck by hardship; three of Mew's siblings died in childhood, and two others went insane in their twenties.

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Mew wrote stories and verses in her teens. Her first published work was the story "Passed," accepted by Henry Harland for the 1894 number of The Yellow Book. Harland praised but rejected her next offering, "The China Bowl," and for the next decade and a half Mew published only the occasional story or essay, mostly in order to supplement the family's dwindling income.

Mew wrote most of her poems between 1909 and 1916. In 1912, she gained notice when Henry Massingham's radical paper The Nation published her poem "The Farmer's Bride." Mew was soon taken up by the hostess Catherine Scott, at whose teas she read and thereby gained some literary attention.

Introduced to Alida Klementaski and Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, she published a chapbook, "The Farmer's Bride," under its imprint in 1916. The volume did not sell well, but Sidney Cockerell, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, noticed it and sent copies to his literary friends, including Siegfried Sassoon and Thomas Hardy. Hardy was particularly impressed by her work. A second edition of "The Farmer's Bride" with additional poems was published in 1921. Cockerell's patronage enabled Mew to receive a small Civil list pension in 1923.

Mew's personal life was a series of setbacks. Two serious love affairs, with the writer Ella D'Arcy in 1898 and with the popular novelist May Sinclair nine years later, came to nothing when the women did not return her affection. Sinclair cruelly publicized Mew's attraction to her and Mew became the butt of ridicule.

Mew's poetry does not explicitly mention her lesbianism but encodes the emotional pain of hiding her sexuality in complex dramatic monologues on themes of loss and isolation.

In "The Farmer's Bride," a young farmer recounts the story of his wife, who was so frightened by him that she fled from the marriage and into the woods. Quickly recaptured by a posse of men, she quietly does her housework: "Happy enough to chat and play . . . / So long as men-folk keep away." Though the poem ends by concentrating on the farmer's thwarted erotic longing for his bride, it also exhibits a strong subtext of compulsory heterosexuality.

"Saturday Market" instructs the reader: "Bury your heart in some deep hollow." The poem might be read as an allegory of Mew's denied desires since it places desire in the context of shame.

Mew's last years were difficult. She was no longer writing verse, and a series of deaths affected her greatly. Her beloved mother died in 1923. Her sister Anne, with whom she had lived all of her life, died in 1927 after a painful battle with liver cancer.

In February 1928, Mew was beginning to show evidence of mental strain and was put in a nursing home. On March 29 of that year, she committed suicide by drinking a bottle of disinfectant. A posthumous volume, The Rambling Sailor, edited by Alida Klementaski Monro, was published in 1929.

Monsieur Qui Passe

A purple blot against the dead white door
In my friend's rooms, bathed in their vile pink light,
I had not noticed her before
She snatched my eyes and threw them back to me:
She did not speak till we came out into the night,
Paused at this bench beside the klosk on the quay.

God knows precisely what she said--
I left to her the twisted skein,
Though here and there I caught a thread,--
Something, at first, about "the lamps along the Seine,

And Paris, with that witching card of Spring
Kept up her sleeve,--why you could see
The trick done on these freezing winter nights!
While half the kisses of the Quay--
Youth, hope,-the whole enchanted string
Of dreams hung on the Seine's long line of lights."

Then suddenly she stripped, the very skin

Came off her soul,-a mere girl clings
Longer to some last rag, however thin,
When she has shown you-well-all sorts of things:
"If it were daylight-oh! one keeps one's head--
But fourteen years!--No one has ever guessed--
The whole thing starts when one gets to bed--
Death?-If the dead would tell us they had rest!
But your eyes held it as I stood there by the door--
One speaks to Christ-one tries to catch His garment's hem--
One hardly says as much to Him--no more:
It was not you, it was your eyes--I spoke to them."


She stopped like a shot bird that flutters still,

And drops, and tries to run again, and swerves.
The tale should end in some walled house upon a hill.
My eyes, at least, won't play such havoc there,--
Or hers--But she had hair!--blood dipped in gold;
And there she left me throwing back the first odd stare.
Some sort of beauty once, but turning yellow, getting old.
Pouah! These women and their nerves!
God! but the night is cold!

Elizabeth Bishop (1911 - 1979), Poet

b. 8 February 1911 
d. 6 October 1979

During her lifetime, poet Elizabeth Bishop was a respected yet somewhat obscure figure in the world of American literature. Since her death in 1979, however, her reputation has grown to the point that many critics, like Larry Rohter in the New York Times, have referred to her as "one of the most important American poets" of the twentieth century. Bishop was a perfectionist who did not write prolifically, preferring instead to spend long periods of time polishing her work. She published only 101 poems during her lifetime. Her verse is marked by precise descriptions of the physical world and an air of poetic serenity, but her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging, and the human experiences of grief and longing.

-Poetry Foundation

Katharine Lee Bates (1859 - 1929), Poet and songwriter

b. August 12, 1859
d. March 28, 1929

Bates was educated at Wellesley College where she subsequently taught until her retirement in 1925, by which time she was chair of the English Department. While on the staff at Wellesley she met Katharine Coman, who was the Dean of Wellesley College, for 25 years. The two women enjoyed a romantic friendship of an intense nature, and Bates lived with her lover. When Coman was diagnosized as suffering from cancer, Bates nursed her until the former's death in 1915. In the years following Coman's death, Bates wrote Yellow clover;: A book of remembrance. Almost all the poems there contained refer to the relationship between Bates and Coman.

Bates popularized "Mrs. Santa Claus" through her poem "Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride" (1889), and also wrote the famous poem, for which she is best remembered, sung in the song "America the Beautiful":

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America!
America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Aphra Behn (1640 – 1689), Writer and poet

b. 10 July 1640
d. 16 April 1689

All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

-Virginia Woolf

Aphra Behn, by Mary Beale

Aphra Johnson, second daughter of Bartholomew Johnson and Elizabeth Denham, baptized December 14 at Harbledown outside of Canterbury, is one of the earliest women writers to attempt to earn her living by writing. Behn challenged patriarchal ideology not just as a woman writer unambiguously on the market, but one expressly associated with sexual critique and the sophisticated genres of the theatre, scandal fiction and amatory poetry.

Novelist, poet, playwright, and spy during the Anglo-Dutch war, she became known as the "English Sappho" for her poems. Contemporary gossip most commonly linked her to John Hoyle, a lawyer, rake and "known bisexual" who was unsuccessfully tried for sodomy, and much salacious speculation on the nature of her "friendship" with Oroonoko, the "slave prince" of Surina, in the West Indies, followed by the pubblication of Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688). She is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Source:


Aldrich R. and Wotherspoon G.- et alii : Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History Vol.1: From Antiquity to the Mid-Twentieth Century , Routledge, London, 2001

May Swenson ( 1919 - 1989) U.S.A. Poet

b.  May 28, 1919
d.  December 4, 1989)

Born and reared in Utah of Swedish parents who were Mormons. Her poems are oracular, imagistic, and marked by experimentalism in technique and typography of shaped forms. She also wrote riddles for children and translated Sweedish poetry. May was a co-winner of the Bollingen Prize (1979-80).

She continually questions existence and writes much on the topic of love. Her love poems concerned "human nature, the natural world, geography, and invention. They are poems of intense love between women, written at a time when that genre was rare in poetry" (Schulman). Although she did not go out of her way to make known her lesbian sexual identity, she also did not hide it. In her career she has turned down publication offers to use her poetry in a compilation of lesbian writing, yet she did agree in one case, which she explained as a tasteful collection she did not mind contributing to. Her poetry collection "The Complete Love Poems of May Swenson" focused mostly on poems in which sexual imagery is especially abundant.

Nature and sexuality are not separate categories in her work; to be a part of Nature, as we all are, joins us to a common sexual energy. Her strongest love poems, such as "Fireflies," "Dark Wild Honey," and "Wednesday at The Waldorf," rely on Nature imagery for much of their vitality and beauty.

The couple in "Wednesday at The Waldorf," for example, sits in the hotel restaurant under whales that cavort overhead. When the couple goes to their hotel room, the whales are still playing. The poem ends with a hush, a descending peace. The erotic transforms even a busy and anonymous place into one of joy and desire.

Windows and Stones, her translations of Transtromer's poetry, helped introduce English-speaking audiences to his work. Transtromer is a psychologist as well as a poet; his interest in human perception and in our relationship with the landscape and place suggests Swenson's own interest in these areas.

glbtq.com

Work:

Another Animal (1954)
A Cage of Spines (1958)
To Mix with Time (1963)
Poems to Solve (1966)
Half Sun Half Sleep (1967)
Iconographs (1970)
More Poems to Solve (1971)
Windows and Stones (1972)
New and Selecte Things Taking Place (1979)