Poems from the Women's Movement (American Poets Project)
*Starred Review* In 1965, Sylvia Plath’s posthumous Ariel took the literary world by storm with its fierce and undeniably female voice. For the next 15 years, America saw a historic outpouring of women’s poetry supported by and supporting the women’s movement. As editor Moore points out, poetry was vital to the movement, articulating previously unexpressed lives, empowering others as the poets found their own power. The young women then—their fervent beauty is well captured in the cover image—are grandmothers now; their feminism was declared unfashionable years ago, though abuses they sought to correct continue. Women poets are still read, reviewed, and taught less often than their male counterparts, and young women writers avoid seeming “strident,” a literary crime apparently worse than throttling the muse in the service of worldly ambition. Into such circumstances these direct, vibrant, potent, passionate, wild, strong, free, and freeing poems come less like a breath of fresh air than a strong wind. Women of that era will remember Marge Piercy’s “Rape Poem,” (“Rape fattens on the fantasies of the normal male / like a maggot in garbage”), Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” (“I come to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps”), and Rita Mae Brown’s “Sappho’s Reply” (“An army of lovers shall not fail”). And all who missed these missiles and epistles then will find them still demanding and invigorating. --Patricia Monaghan