love belongs to those who do the feeling: New and Selected Poems (1966–2006) (review)

Judy Grahn takes us back to the raw energy of early second-wave feminism. Today’s post-post-feminist poetics has radically downshifted to accommodate the failures (real and imagined) of the women’s movement, but Grahn returns us to the thrilling point of origin, as dreams were being hatched, patriarchy was being clubbed to death, and a new world seemed within grasp. In love belongs to those who do the feeling, Grahn’s poetry is rooted in the most essential old English rhythms. Hers is verse worthy of memorization; it is not prose masquerading as poetry set off by haphazard line breaks. Every rhyme, every break, every surge, every pause is earned. Grahn’s prosodical skill results in a high-energy verse fused with its political aims. This is a faithful marriage of high art with political purpose, a potent combination sorely missed today.

Grahn’s style, fortunately, has not shifted for the worse as the fortunes of the feminist movement have ebbed. She remains as hypercharged a bard at the end as at the beginning, giving nothing to cynicism and lassitude. In “Some Ways of Knowing This Is a ‘Judy Grahn’ Poem” we are told that “it has craft and musical sensibility, meant both to stand well on the page and to be satisfying to read out aloud or perform.” From the oral vitality of Edward the Dyke and Other Poems (1966–70) to that of the late poems “Forest, forest” and “News” there is no lapse.

“A History of Lesbianism,” an early poem, sets the Grahn pattern, a dialectic that works by composing the subterranean voice as the inveterate enemy of ideology. Thus,

How they lived in the world, the women-loving-women learned as much as they were allowed and walked and wore their clothes the way they liked whenever they could. They did whatever they knew to be happy or free and worked and worked and worked. The women-loving-women in America were called dykes and some liked it and some did not.

The gritty ordinariness—working-class lives persisting despite invisibility —is dynamited by the ending: “The subject of lesbianism / is very ordinary; it’s the question / of male domination that makes everybody / angry.” In “the big horse woman,” we read: “red was above the mountain / and red was in her eyes / and red the water running / on the big horse woman’s thighs,” but the poem concludes: “this poem is called / how Naomi gets her period,” again a disruption of the comforting rhythm by descriptive rationality, a pointer to one way we undermine spirituality by relentless classification. When the “Vietnamese woman speaking to an American soldier” says: “make children play / in my jungle hair / make rice flare into my sky like / whitest flak / the whitest flash,” we hear a voice that we’ve never heard before.

The Common Woman Poems (1969) are seven of the classics of American poetry. The common woman is common as “a nail,” “a thunderstorm,” “the reddest wine,” and in the most famous poem, “Vera, from my childhood,” she is common as “the best of bread / and will rise / and will become strong—I swear to you / . . . on my common / woman’s / head.” The second of these poems, “Ella, in a square apron, along Highway 80,” reads in its entirety:

She’s a copperheaded waitress, tired and sharp-worded, she hides her bad brown tooth behind a wicked smile, and flicks her ass out of habit, to fend off the pass that passes for affection. She keeps her mind the way men keep a knife—keen to strip the game down to her size. She has a thin spine, swallows her eggs cold, and tells lies. She slaps a wet rag at the truck drivers if they should complain. She understands the necessity for pain, turns away the smaller tips, out of pride, and keeps a flask under the counter. Once, she shot a lover who misused...