A Woman Is Talking To Death: Judy Grahn and The Feminist Poetry Movement

Abstract

The “feminist poetry movement” of the 1970s constitutes a distinct current in American poetry and, like other movements such as the Beat poets of the 1950s and the antiwar poets of the 1960s, achieves a combination of art and politics. The groundbreaking long poem “A Woman Is Talking To Death” by working-class lesbian-feminist poet Judy Grahn, published in 1973 and enthusiastically received in the context of the women’s liberation movement, and at innumerable poetry readings, weaves together subjective and collective experience and denounces the intricate nexus of oppressions on the basis of gender, sexuality, race and class, long before the term “intersectionality” was coined.

Keywords

• feminist poetry
• grahn
• lesbian feminism
• women's liberation movement
• intersectionality