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I keep many poetry anthologies on my bookshelf, and I am always disappointed when these collections don’t give lady poets their due. Some of my favorite poetry is written by queer women, but most people don’t know about our contributions to the rich traditions of poetry. Here are five queer women whose poems you should go read today.
1. Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651 – 1695)
Juana Inés de la Cruz was the illegitimate child of a Spanish captain and a mixed-race Mexican woman. She is a great example of an early feminist. She fought for her own education, becoming a nun so she could continue her study, and advocated for the education of all women. She even wrote poetry against the patriarchy (translation from Spanish is mine):
Foolish men, who accuse
women, for no good reason,
without seeing that they are the cause
of all which they blame us for;
if you with your overeagerness
earn their disdain
then why do you want them to do good
when you spur them on to evil?
She also had an intense relationship with María Luisa, the vicereine of Mexico. Few historical details are known about the nature of this relationship, but the poems Sister de la Cruz wrote to María Elena speak for themselves.
Recommended Reading:
2. Wu Tsao (early 1800s)
Wu Tsao was born to the merchant class in the late Qing Dynasty. She had an unhappy arranged marriage to a silk merchant, and sought love outside her marriage with a courtesan named Ch’ien Lin. The poems she wrote for Ch’ien Lin are powerfully erotic and lovely.
Recommended Reading:
3. Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
Emily Dickinson was a reclusive woman whose thousands of poems were only discovered after her death. During her life, though, she kept up her friendships by mail. One of her most notable correspondences was with Susan Gilbert, to whom she wrote 300 letters, and who eventually became Dickinson’s sister-in-law. The exact nature of their relationship is not known, but Dickinson’s letters to Gilbert are passionate.
Oh Susie, I would nestle close to your warm heart, and never hear the wind blow, or the storm beat, again. Is there any room there for me, darling, and will you “love me more if ever you come home”?–it is enough, dear Susie, I know I shall be satisfied. But what can I do towards you?–dearer you cannot be, for I love you so already, that it almost breaks my heart–perhaps I can love you anew, every day of my life, every morning and evening–Oh if you will let me, how happy I shall be!
Emily Dickinson wrote her poems with unusual capitalization and punctuation. Many renderings of her poetry get rid of these unique characteristics. My advice is to read her poems as close to the original as you can find, because it adds a rhythm and texture to her poems that’s lost if you make them look “normal.”
Recommended Reading:
There is no Frigate like a Book
4. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950)
I have often described Edna St. Vincent Millay to my friends as “a bisexual super-lover of the 1920s.” I could just as well call her a super-poet, because she earned a scholarship to Vassar by excelling in a poetry contest. Both in college at Vassar and in her bohemian life in Greenwich Village, New York, she was openly bisexual and nonmonogamous, taking lovers of both sexes. One of my favorite anecdotes about Millay (from the book Great Companions, pp. 90 – 91), is that she had a bad headache at a party and a psychoanalyst asked if he could try to help. He interviewed her for a while, and finally said, “I wonder if it has ever occurred to you that you might perhaps, although you are hardly conscious of it, have an occasional erotic impulse toward a person of your own sex?” She replied:
Oh, you mean I’m homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual too, but what’s that got to do with my headache?
Her nonmonogamy continued into her marriage, and her attitudes toward sexuality and fidelity are evident in her poems.
Recommended Reading:
5. Andrea Gibson (1975 – )
Andrea Gibson is a contemporary lesbian poet who not only explores her sexuality and gender expression in her poetry, but all kinds of social justice causes, like school bullying and anti-racism. She performs her poems as a spoken-word artist, so her poetry is best experienced in video or audio form instead of written form.
Recommended Viewing:
Privilege Is Never Having to Think About It
This is AWESOME. Thank you. I would like to add some excellent poems by three less famous spoken word poets.
Katiuska, a young, black New Yorker, “Saints Have Their Past”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQrJrQW47dw
Lauren Zuniga, “Submissive”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_gEtpmpYqY
Julia Serano, a transgender biologist and author of Whipping Girl, “Cocky”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a95JP8i8GuE
Thank you for these! I’ve heard the Julia Serano poem but not the others. I’ll have to go check them out.
Julia Serano’s is the best! Here’s a list I found of popular poets on Sappho.com:
http://www.sappho.com/poetry/index_contemporary.html
Also, apparently Carol Ann Duffy is the first lesbian poet laureate of the UK. And I just remembered Sophia Walker, another Scottish poet I met at the national queer poetry summit, Capturing Fire. Here she is performing at the slam (if I remember correctly, she won the first round): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLW3ZPwgQIE
I’ve just been discovering the work of Anne Sexton. I haven’t found any of her work that’s queer, but apparently she had an affair with a woman. I like her writing and her performance style.
I’m so glad I’m discovering these poets! Previously if you’d asked me to name my favorite poets, I would’ve thought first of famous male poets like Rumi, Ikkyu, Dogen, Keats. I tend to think first of the poets on paper – I think that spoken word is still a very small tradition within modern poetry, and it also has a very different emphasis in some ways. Also, have you noticed that the spoken word poems that have gone massively viral lately have been of white men who fit the straight narrative?
I adore Millay, and used to want to grow up to be her, until I discovered I had no heterosexual impulses whatsoever. A Kinsey 6, that’s me, or at best a 5.
I hadn’t realized you were queer, darling! Okay, I only found your blog probably two months ago, and was too lazy to explore the archives, and what with the holidays – not that it matters. I just love it when I already adore someone (in this case because of their writing) and feel that secretly we belong to the same tribe, and then another piece of the puzzle will drop and also lead me to believe that yes, we are in the same tribe.
I’m doing this project over the next year, where I’m doing 150 things that I’ve never done before, and/or that it wasn’t like me to do – one of the items was to read 15 classics that I’d never read before. After I’d gotten past the Fitzgeralds and Evelyn Waugh, I was hunting primarily for works by queer folk through history – you’d be surprised how difficult the search can be, without specific reference points. Thank you for this list.