Elly Bulkin

• It was easy, a few years ago, to think that lesbian poetry didn't exist. It had, of course, always been there-dusty in rare book libraries, lost in love poems with changed or ambiguous pronouns, absent from the published writing of otherwise acceptable women poets. Yet until fairly recently, we didn't know all this. Those of us who are lesbians seemed to have come from nowhere, from a great blankness with only a few shadowy figures to suggest a history. We could find Sappho's poetry, all right, but only when preceded by the (male) assurances that "Neither the gossip of scandalmongers nor the scrupulous research of scholars should cause us to forget that [her reputation as a lesbian] is nothing but speculation." We could surmise about Emily Dickinson's life, but until the fifties we were confronted only with a selected number of her published poems and letters. We could stubbornly claim Gertrude Stein and Amy Lowell and H.D. as lesbians-but they hardly constituted a lesbian literary tradition out of which to write or a history from which lesbians, especially lesbians of color or poor or working class lesbians, could draw strength.
  • "Introduction: A Look at Lesbian Poetry" in Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology (1981)

• Lesbian Poetry must be seen as a the tip of an iceberg. The presence in it, for example, of Jean Mollison, a 63-year-old woman from rural New York who has many poems that have previously been seen only by close friends, serves as a crucial reminder of the existence of those lesbians whose work we have not seen, but who might very well have been writing poetry for four decades or more. They too, no less than Sappho and Angelina Weld Grimké and Elsa Gidlow, are a part of the tradition of lesbian poetry. In reading the lesbian poetry in this anthology, we cannot afford to forget the background of silence and denial and oppression out of which a vital, visible lesbian poetry has stubbornly emerged. While this background is important because it is at the same time not very far behind us and still present, the appearance of Lesbian Poetry-like the appearance of other publications by women who clearly identify themselves as lesbians-affirms our diversity, our creativity, our strength, our determination to continue to struggle and survive in a hostile world.
  • "Introduction: A Look at Lesbian Poetry" (1981) in Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology (1981)

• ...I did what I had always done. I held tight to my rational side, going on with business as usual, seeking in reasoned argument some stability for my precariously rocking days. And I pulled myself together to write-to clarify; to argue for complexity; perhaps more than anything, to affirm my intention not to crawl under a rock and be heard from no more. (p16)

• Isolation. I had nobody to tell, and no language for it anyhow. (p28)

• The uneasy feeling (for me) of pieces falling into place, recollections demanding in some way to be dealt with. (p43)

• I'm beginning to understand how my sense of identification with other women is making possible my own writing and recovery. Writing now, I'm struck by the extent to which my risks are inseparable from theirs. For me, the movement out of depression, into some sort of slow healing, has much to do with other women's stories, with what women have told me when I said, "I never told you this, but..." Some have put their stories on paper for their own reasons. But others have been jarred into memory or into talking about what they've already remembered, or what they've yet to recall. (p48)

• My childhood had sealed off whole rooms where I couldn't look. I’d learned well to brick up how I felt... (p49)

with Minnie Bruce Pratt and Barbara Smith

• Writing pushes me, not to answers, but to questions, criticisms, problems, and possible strategies. It intersects with my activism, makes me look even more closely at the political work I do and why and how I do it. (II. EXTENSIONS)

• How much easier it is for someone to say simply that she is oppressed-as a woman, a Black, a lesbian, a low-income woman, a Native American, a Jew, an older woman, an Arab-American, a Latina-and not to examine the various forms of privilege which so often co-exist with an individual's oppression. Essential as it is for women to explore our particular oppression, I feel keenly the limitations of stopping there, of not filling in the less comfortable contours of a more complete picture in which we might exist as oppressor, as well as oppressed. (II. EXTENSIONS)

• Whatever our differences, efforts to address them directly should always be seen as attempts to break down divisions which are encouraged by-and which benefit-the rich white Christian men who run this country. (II. EXTENSIONS)

• The problem as I-and, I think, a great many other Jewish feminists-see it is to embrace the "We" of our Jewish identities without seeing "They" as totally Other. We strive to acknowledge Jewish identity and Jewish oppression as fundamental components of our lives and histories, individually and collectively, and, at the same time, to use what we know of being Jewish-as of our other identities and oppressions-to understand generations of experience that have some parallels, yet are different from our own. This process is complicated, and the history between non-Jewish people of color and white Jews has not made it less so. (III. THREADS)

• As Elly Bulkin indicates in a mind-stretching essay, "Hard Ground": "In terms of anti-Semitism and racism, a central problem is how to acknowledge their differences without contributing to the argument that one is important and the other is not, one is worthy of serious attention and the other is not."
  • Adrienne Rich "If Not with Others, How?" essay in Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986)