Part of what I've done in this chapter is to argue that Judy Grahn's writing uses language in new ways to alter our possibilities for conceiving of the world. Her tools are part of a system of language that at present embodies detrimental social, cultural, and political relations; while recognizing language's complicity in oppression, she suggests that it can be used differently to provoke a rethinking and a reunderstanding of these social relations. For Grahn, as for other contemporary feminist and lesbian feminist poets, changing the language changes reality.

Judy Grahn's visionary "She Who" represents the position espoused by writers such as Mary Daly that the quest for an integrated female self is inseparable from linguistic revolution. Grahn's title evokes a goddess figure yet might also be the secret tribal name of everywoman, and is less a name than a grammatical configuration pointing toward a potentially unlimited array of possible states and acts, which the sequence begins to exemplify.

In the shorter poems, Grahn often explores love and romance in relation to perceptions of women's beauty. As in all else, Grahn has the capacity to be humorous, if "macabre" (Martinez 49), when approaching "the problem for a lesbian feminist of writing about women's beauty without fetishizing it" (Montefiore 83).

Her "I have come to claim Marilyn Monroe's body," also a satire, would emphasize angry. The Queen of Wands (1982) is dedicated "To Marilyn Monroe / who tried, I believe / to help us see / that beauty has a mind / of its own" (iv). The Queen of Wands is Grahn's revision of the story of Inanna, as mentioned, who is also the Greek beauty Helen in the Iliad (The Queen of Swords 1).

In the later poem "Carol and," Grahn portrays the butch, working-class lesbian—either at home (as her Common Woman poem implies), or after she has come out. Outside the context of the intertextual reading, "Carol and" stands as an openly lesbian poem, presumably about a woman living an openly lesbian life:

[. . . ]

Closeted in the 1969 poem, Carol does not appear to be "shy" about her sexuality in She Who, published once lesbian feminism and gay liberation were gathering steam in the early 1970s.

In the life and work of Etheridge Knight, the theme of prisons imposed from without (slavery, racism, poverty, incarceration) and prisons from within (addiction, repetition of painful patterns) are countered with the theme of freedom. His poems of suffering and survival, trial and tribute, loss and love testify to the fact that we are never completely imprisoned. Knight's poetry expresses our freedom of consciousness and attests to our capacity for connection to others.

Levine was born in Detroit, Michigan, and educated in local schools and at Wayne State University. He is now Professor of English at California State University in Fresno. Levine has periodically lived in Spain, a country whose people, landscape, and history remain a strong presence in his poems.

L. began to write poetry while he was going to night school at Wayne State University in Detroit and working days at one of that city's automobile manufacturing plants. The intersection of brutal factory work with an impulse to poetry formed the imaginative nexus out of which emanated not only L.'s first poems but also to a considerable degree his entire poetic output.

[. . .]

Levine says that his poems "mostly record my discovery of the people, places, and animals I am not, the ones who live at all cost and come back for more, and who if they bore tattoos—a gesture they don't need—would have them say, 'Don't tread on me' or 'Once more with feeling' or 'No pasaran' or 'Not this pig.'" It is not simply that he discovers these figures, but that he assumes their stubborn roles; his poems never really provide moderating or intermediary voices between the reader and the survivors they describe.

On a gloomy, greyly monochromatic night in a time and place deliberately left unspecified, the speaker is driving his car from "West Virginia to Kiss My Ass"—through the Appalachian wastelands of tin-roofed huts, junked autos, "black bean and wet slate bread." As he drives, his thoughts become a catalogue of both what he sees and what, through inference, he knows is outside the car window: "wooden dollies," "industrial barns," "Mothers hardening like pounded stumps," slaughtered hogs gone into at length in strophes 3 and 4.