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.

Of the good poems in Poems from Prison , the one which has been most lauded and most frequently anthologized is "The Idea of Ancestry," sometimes called one of the best poems that has been written about the Afro-American conception of family history and human interconnection. In this poem, Knight used what came to be his trademark in punctuation, the slash mark, along with commas, colons, occasional unusual spellings, and spacing of words to indicate how the voice should sound saying the lines.

The modernist challenge to radical poetry was posed most directly by the verse and literary criticism of T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), to judge by the number of direct responses to Eliot's poetry and the centrality of his name in literary debates on the Left.|1|  Despite the elitism and arcane quality of many of Eliot's literary allusions, young poets found it unfeasible to ignore the profoundly novel approach to poetic form and sensibility that his verse represented.

Six poets at the Six Gallery. Kenneth Rexroth, M.C. Remarkable collection of angels all gathered at once in the same spot. Wine, music, dancing girls, serious poetry, free satori. Small collection for wine and postcards. Charming event.

--- from postcard printed by Allen Ginsberg to publicize 1955 Six Gallery Reading

The Evening as told by Michael Schumacher in Dharma Lion

Photographs and other images of Allen Ginsberg distributed in various media have spread and shaped his reputation as much as--perhaps more than--his poetry has.  Like his literary forebear Walt Whitman, he has represented himself as not only a writer, but also, in a variety of poses and costumes, as a photographic image.  Ever since the obscenity trial for Howl made him a public figure, he has used the notoriety that proceeds from his poetry to make public statements on political and social issues.  By the mid-sixties, Allen Ginsberg, as a public figure, . . .