Reading Judy Grahn as Generous With Power

Y'all: If you didn't hear how stunning the recent Bay Area Judy Grahn reading was, then you most certainly reside beneath a rock unshaped by poetry (ours is very cozy, thank you).

Last week, the Grahn love continued with Julie R. Enszer writing at length at Lambda Literary about the new collection, Hanging on Our Own Bones (Arktoi Books, 2017), which "gathers Grahn’s long poems, seven of them, into a single book. The poems are presented chronologically beginning with A Woman Is Talking to Death from 1973 and ending with the 2016 long poem Crossing." More:

Grahn frames this collection of poems as lamentations. She writes, “Lamentation in song and poem, especially by women mourning death in public ways, has widespread history, from Africa to Eurasia, at least, if not over the globe.” She notes that a lamentation “pours out of a poet’s heart not only from a deep sense of loss, but also of outrage and justice needed or denied.” Can you imagine a moment when we need lamentations more?

Lamentations is the name of a book in the Hebrew Bible. In the Hebrew Bible, in Lamentations, people are mourning the destruction of Jerusalem and the desertion of the city and the people by G-d. Grahn, of course, is aware of these facts, of this story, but she is not writing only to the Judeo-Christian tradition. She is interested in a long human history in which lamentations are songs and poems of suffering. In the introduction, Grahn situates lamentations in a broad context. Like lamentations, Grahn’s poems are concerned with desolation and abandonment, but she turns these feelings and experiences on themselves to reveal a broader concern with humanity. In “A Woman is Talking to Death,” Grahn explores the nature of indecency. She writes:

Have you ever committed any indecent acts with women?

Yes, many. I am guilty of allowing suicidal women to die
before my eyes or in my ears or under my hands because I
thought I could do nothing, I am guilty of leaving a
prostitute who held a knife to my friend’s throat to keep us from
leaving, because we would not sleep with her, we thought
she was old and fat and ugly; I am guilty of not loving her
who needed me; I regret all the women I have not slept with
or comforted, who pulled themselves away from me for lack
of something I had not the courage to fight for, for us, our
life, our planet, our city, our meat and potatoes, our love.
These are indecent acts, lacking courage, lacking a certain
fire behind the eyes, which is the symbol, the raised fist, the
sharing of resources, the resistance that tells death he will
starve for lack of the fat of us, our extra. Yes I have com-
mitted acts of indecency with women and most of them were
acts of omission. I regret them bitterly.

If books contributed to my enchantment with Judy Grahn, what she did with words within those books sealed my love for her. Consider how she turns the word indecent on itself. Begin with the conventional usage of indecent: the gesture of the patriarch asking for an indictment of a woman’s life, a woman’s desire. Grahn knows we readers hear indecent with the sneer of derision. She knows the patriarch asking the question, “Have you ever committed any indecent acts with women?” seeks shame through denial or admission. Yet, she responds with power. The speaker in the poem affirms the indecent acts and regret, but not in the matter anticipated. She admits to disappointing women, to letting them down, to not helping them find the full meaning of their power. Through this turn, Grahn elevates the question from an accuser and an accused to a question that implicates the whole world. Through Grahn’s pen, we are all guilty of indecent acts with women—and we are all capable, through our own voice, our own words, our own strength, of ameliorating the indecent acts committed against women.

Read more at Lambda Literary.