Honor Moore | March/April 1990

NOTES

When I think of community in my life as a writer, I think first of the strong community of women writers and feminist scholars which continues to inspire and support me. Like other lesbian women, I have begun to feel a new kinship with gay men, a sense of community I see represented on this panel and elsewhere-in the publication this fall of Joan Larkin and Carl Morse's anthology, Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, and, most significantly, in the response of the women's community to AIDS. I am very happy to be here in this company and want to express particular gratitude to Richard Howard, who gave me my first major publication fifteen years ago, and who has remained a friend and colleague ever since.

When Peter Klappert invited me to be here today, I had just given a poetry reading in the small Connecticut town where I live. For a year, I had been looking forward to the publication of my first collection of poems, wondering how it would feel to have a book which includes love poems to women on the front table of the local bookstore. Though I had never experienced homophobia in my town, the two other lesbians who live there had been jeered at from a passing car and snubbed in the post office. I live alone. It seemed natural to have some fear. What would the woman in the bakery think? Hour would the man who runs the hardware store, who always flirts with me, now behave? Would the appliance man still come promptly? Would the obscene phone caller resume?

Memoir was published. The travel agent congratulated me. The lady in the gourmet store said she liked to read her husband poems in bed and that she had sent away for my book. I did not say, "Oh, ah, well, but, ah..." A local reviewer, after noting that I have eight brothers and sisters, fumbled to describe the life from which my poems come: "While she has no family of her own, the 43 year old poet's friendships, as seen through her poems, are passionate connections, sometimes giving her support-or sometimes failing her. In her poems she faces the sad consequences in her life bravely, and seems to gain strength in adversity...."

When the town bookstore asked me to give the first poetry reading in its history I said yes. It was a subzero night in December. Eighty people filled the old Mason meeting hall, twice the number hoped for. I read poems from Memoir. I included a long love poem. At the end of the reading, there was loud and sustained applause. The owner of the bookstore was thrilled. The town's ancient poetry appreciator, a widower, wrote me a fan letter. When Peter called that week, the subject of the lesbian writer and the general reader seemed a platform from which I could send forth very good news.

But in the cold light of February I am less sanguine: the lesbian writer and the general reader? I speak of the woman writer who loves women and who is open, in her writing, about that aspect of her life. On reflection, it seems to me that the general reader has made her acquaintance only in fits and starts. Gertrude Stein tours America as a sort of spectacle in the wake of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Rita Mae Brown, lesbian and proud, writes novels and rides to the hunt in Charlottesville. Adrienne Rich and Marilyn Hacker receive prizes for early books which do not include love poems to women; later books do not fare so well with the establishment. Rich's Your Native Land, Your Life is trivialized when it is reviewed in a Sunday Times triplet review. Hacker's Love and Death and the Changing of the Seasons, which narrates the story of a lesbian love affair with a groundbreaking fusion; of naked, anti-romantic honesty and formal virtuosity, receives no prize.

There is now, perhaps, a breakthrough for gay male literature in the general marketplace, but lesbian literature, which surged with the women's movement in the late seventies and early eighties, is in retreat.* Many books by lesbian writers, such as Muriel Rukeyser's great collected poems, are out of print. To find the memoirs of Audre Lorde, the autobiographies of Michelle Cliff and Judith McDaniel, the poetry of Gale Jackson, Eileen Myles, and Cheryl Clarke, all but one of Judy Grahn's books, one must be in touch with lesbian, feminist, and independent presses- Cleis, Firebrand. Kitchen Table. Hanuman Books. Crossing Press, Spinsters Inc./Aunt Lute, where a vital literature reaches an eager and growing readership. Though these presses are making inroads into the general marketplace, they fight a battle to get their books into mainstream bookstores. A recent Time magazine article on gay literature devotes one paragraph to lesbian writing making the point that it is of less interest since lesbians have little buying power.

My book of poems found a publisher after twenty-one attempts. I will not say the book was rejected because it includes some love poems to women. It is enough to say that it was rejected by twenty-one publishers and that it includes love poems to women, poems which might be called political, poems that are emotionally intense. During the five years it took to find a publisher, my confidence as a poet and the hard-won feeling of integration I had achieved as a woman and a lesbian came under siege. Eventually I forget Sappho, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Christina Rossetti, Muriel Rukeyser, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich: "I am the only woman ever to write love poems to women." a voice in my head repeats. Eventually, it is difficult to write a love poem to a woman. Eventually it is difficult to write a poem.

When my book is accepted by a new, small women's press, I reserve excitement. The publisher, a married woman, is very enthusiastic. She is committed to getting her books to the poetry reader, the woman reader, the lesbian reader, the general reader. She is convinced Memoir will find an audience. I proceed on faith. When poets lend their support with quotes, she says, "This is what you deserve." When the book gets a good review in a national publication, she says, "Maybe now you'll believe me."

When Richard Howard and I first talked about this panel, he said he had never felt oppressed and that he was aware he might be criticized for saying so. I can say that with my book in my hand, a publisher behind me, a first respectful review, I do not feel oppressed. But I must also, with both feet on the ground, say that lesbian and gay writers engage in a daunting struggle which we deny at our peril. It is for this reason that I sit on this panel.

A woman in a proper black dress came up to me once after a reading and said, "I just don't identify when a love poem is about two women." "Some heterosexual people do," I told her. But such readers are rare. Almost no non-lesbian I know reaches out for lesbian work or has an easy time with it, and the marketplace complies. Between the lesbian writer and the general reader, the homosexual writer of either sex and the general reader, is the fog of fear and confusion, hatred, anger, and violence, called homophobia. It is the general reader who is the loser, who, by denying him or herself this vital body of writing, refuses its offering of a deeper understanding of human life.

There are people in the university and in publishing beginning to break down these barriers. We are educated to attitudes of homophobia, and we are being educated out of them. Lesbian work is now integrated into women's literature classes; a few, editors actively seek writing by lesbians and gay men. Let us continue this work in our teaching so that our young lesbian, gay, and bisexual students are not afraid to write freely about their loving lives, so that the full diversity of human experience can reach and move the general reader, so that the lesbian and gay writer and the general reader can have more than a nodding acquaintance.

AWP

Honor Moore is the author of a book of poems, Memoir (Chicory Blue), and a play in verse, Mourning Pictures, which was produced on Broadway and anthologized in The New Women's Theater: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women (Vintage). She has been working on a biography of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent.

NOTES:

*Author's note: Since the AWP panel, Minnie Bruce Pratt has won the 1989 Lamont Prize for her collection, Crime Against Nature, (Firebrand, 1990), a long sequence of poems about her struggle for custody of her sons after she came out as a lesbian. Let us rejoice in her victory without growing complacent. Publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1977 of Olga Broumas's Beginning with O did not open the gates as widely as was hoped at the time, and the recent controversies at the National Endowment for the Arts place advances at risk.