August 3, 2024
I woke up this morning worrying about sharing as much as I’m sharing on this website. I’ve spent most of my efforts over the years either behind the scenes or organizing/researching/writing. But NOT putting myself on display, except teaching or making presentations or the occasional speech.
But I need to understand better why I keep pushing. Which means understanding better why for so long I’ve thought I was seeing “things not there.” Ever since I was a child. But “things” have been there all along. The emperor is stark naked (and lately orange).
It’s no accident I was drawn in my 20s to both Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath, two poets with very different voices. Then I discovered Adrienne Rich and her “dream of a common language” that went off like firecrackers in my imagination: as girls, as young women, we really DIDN’T have words to describe our realities, to name what we were seeing. (The Library of Congress had no terms like “sexual harassment” or “domestic violence” in their search terms, for example, until we published A Women’s Thesaurus in 1987. And before the advent of full text searching—Google, etc.—we had no way of sharing widely what we were learning about our lives.
Fast forward to August 2024, where we live in the shadows of a dying patriarchy. But these shadows are all the more dangerous because they’re in their death throes: cabals steeped in rampant corruption—so visible since Trump—that threaten to destroy insight, creativity, kindness, and freedom so a small number of mostly white men can profit.