Innovation, Salvage, and the Second Wave: An Interview with Ruth Lepson

Here's our recent interview which appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of RAIN TAXI. Hope you enjoy it...this was an interesting piece to write, and I learned a lot. While working on it I remember getting hung up on some of the conflicts between second and third wave feminism as some kind of tragic paradox or dilemma, but not Ruth: she busts through that restraint and keeps on going...

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Innovation, Salvage, and the Second Wave:
an interview with Ruth Lepson

by Tim Peterson

Boston-area writer and editor Ruth Lepson’s first book of poems, Dreaming in Color, was published in 1980 by Alice James Books, a cooperative begun with an emphasis on publishing women poets. Lepson’s interests in feminism and politically-engaged innovative poetry have continued throughout her career, including her participation hosting readings for Oxfam America and her role as poetry editor for the feminist magazine Sojourner She recently edited, with Lynne Yamaguchi, Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology (University of Illinois Press, 2004). A virtual history of women's poetry from the second wave of feminism, the book compiles 25 years of writing by women who appeared in the magazine, gathering under one roof traditional narrative poets with activists such as Adrienne Rich and innovative poets from Leslie Scalapino to Fanny Howe. The anthology also offers a glimpse into issues central to the poetry of second-wave feminism, rescuing for us a record of challenging and worthwhile struggle, and reminding us that this struggle is far from over.

Tim Peterson: How did you first come up with the idea for this anthology?

Ruth Lepson: When I'd been editor at the magazine for a couple of years it occurred to me that Sojourner might be the appropriate house to rummage through to find the best poetry by women not only in New England but also in the U.S. during this wave of feminism.

It took two decades for the idea of an anthology to be translated into a real book. Lynne Yamaguchi (my co-poetry editor back then) and I read all 1200 or so poems that had appeared in the magazine. From those we picked 90% of what's in the anthology; she then moved to Arizona, and I took over the responsibilities for the book. We simply tried to include the best poems, the poems in which the form came out of the content, in which the technique was used skillfully, poems that were powerful, poems that had a convincing tone, and so on. We surfaced with something like 125 poems.

TP: In the introduction, you say that "some of this anthology's poems differ in subject matter from those found in literary magazines. Although the poems are collocated by subject, subjects and attitudes recur that were nearly invisible in literary periodicals during this wave of feminism." What were some of the subjects and attitudes that Sojourner helped give voice to in poetry?

RL: Quite a variety, actually. Emotional struggle—from Deborah Boe's "Jigsaw Puzzle" to Carol Arbor's "Sketching in Barnstable," Nancy Means Wright's "Acrophobia,” Lynne Cohen's "Body Doubled," Ruth Maassen's "Confessions of a Pisciphobe,." How women's bodies are used or abused, as in Leslie Burgess's "The Prostitute's Notebook." Children, of course, were on their minds, for instance in Ros Zimmermann's “Anemia” and Kathi Aguero's "Working Mother.” Lack of time was an issue, so that women sometimes felt depressed as mothers, yet with a deep love for the children, as in Linda McCarriston's "Kitchen Terrarium" on the subject of custody. And early sexual experiences were sources of happiness, as in Sonia Sanchez' "Rebirth," and also of anger in other poems.

This second wave of feminism went hand-in-hand with a humanist belief in the perfectibility of, or at least real improvement in, relationships, institutions, and societal structures. Left wing politics were in evidence, for example in Ellen Rosen's "Out in the Cold," about the Rosenbergs. In retrospect I noticed complex kinds of love of a daughter for a mother that weren't expressed so fully in the wider culture, and that may be one reason those women sent poems to Sojourner. I'd say that might even be a central subject of the book, as in Molly Peacock's poems to her mother, or Carol Potter's poem to her grandmother. Also in some poems you can read a kind of ambivalence toward the parent or another relative that might not be expressed in another sort of magazine. Lesbian relationships one naturally finds in these pages, as in Olga Broumas and T Begley's collaboration from their long work Prayerfields, which is of course also about other things, not the least of which is language. Poems about language itself and the gendering of language pepper the pages. Martha Collins' "Re:composition" is one, and others by innovative poets, such as the pages from Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian's book-length collaborative poem Sight, really liberate our thinking. Friendship, as in Martha Ramsey's poem about leaving a roommate, is vital, and there are many in which a relationship that isn't really sanctioned as a central one by society but turns out to be a critical one is written about. Re-visioning myth was new, as in Celia Gilbert's "Questions about the Sphinx," and Persephone is a mythological character who appears frequently. Women were conscious of naming elders—Connie Veenendaal’s homage to Emily Dickinson, Rita Dove’s poem to Frida Kahlo—and even the elders were conscious of calling forth their elders, for example, Adrienne Rich giving tribute to Muriel Rukeyser. A number of the poems in Sojourner couldn't have been published anywhere else, because they came from an angle or a stance that was not acceptable to the mainstream presses.

TP: The title of the journal was a reference to Sojourner Truth. Was concern with elders something particular to second-wave feminism as a movement—being aware of earlier struggles for things like the right to vote, or basic rights—and do you think that's still relevant to people in the third wave of feminism, or to poets today?

RL: I think women are less conscious now of who has gone before them, who has labored. That's because the sense in the larger culture now of what a liberated woman is, and it's something that I find repellent, has been handed down from the culture of advertising; young women now are supposed to be as assertive or aggressive as men, and at the same time they're sex objects. If women were trapped by the image of the perfect housewife in the 50s, if anything now they're trapped by the notion that they should have a certain kind of appearance. My students, I often find, refuse to call themselves feminists, and will tell me privately that they don't because they're afraid that they won't get a husband, they'll be rejected, they'll be made fun of. I find that discouraging. But what I find encouraging is that postmodernist feminists recognize that the divide between liberal modern feminism and radical postmodernist feminism is an artificially-constructed debate. Postmodernism challenges identity itself as an artificial construction, so the old idea of liberating women from their identity and the new idea of constructing a new woman outside of traditional gender notions makes the two types of feminism go hand in hand.

TP: Is the ambivalence of your students an example of taking for granted the achievements of the second-wavers—do they believe that embattling themselves anew would make them lose ground in some way?

RL: Yeah, they feel that they have to be tough. I saw the movie remake of Charlie's Angels a few summers ago and came out of that movie thinking, well, the women are physically powerful and take themselves seriously in some areas, but they're certainly sex objects. I often have internal dialogues with Adrienne Rich—wondering what she would think, for example, when I got my hair tinted—so I emailed her and asked if she was feeling that women in our time had made such real strides that she was optimistic, or was she pessimistic given what's happening to women around the world, the aggressiveness of our culture and its lack of consideration of kindness? She wrote back and said something like, given the militaristic administration which we're now living with, it's impossible to be optimistic.

TP: It seems that what makes many of these poems more relevant than ever would be their sense of struggle, a sense of working toward something.

RL: This book is a document, a kind of historical document actually, as well as an anthology of poetry. We want to salvage these poems. Fanny Howe wrote: “The existential terror and broken (open) forms of today's poems must have emerged from these conditions. To read them now is finally to read their meaning.”

I was struck by the variety of tone and style in the book. People have told me that its great strength is that the book is not polemical: it contains narrative, lyric, and innovative poetry, and there are younger and older voices in it; some of the voices are quiet, while others really pack a punch. There's a sense of yearning in many of the poems, sometimes for someone who's died, sometimes a desire for love, sometimes an attempt to accept what's been lost, sometimes simply a yearning for someone who's absent, the wish for a world that doesn't yet exist. Solitude is another subject, and I differentiate that from loneliness. Rich's poem "Yom Kippur 1984," which to me is a central poem of the book, is filled with questions of solitude and about fitting in. It's a personal poem but though she uses first person, she's always inclusive, it's a "we," and this is another aspect of the anthology that I think is inviting—you feel the voices complementing rather than excluding one another. Rich's poem is about imagining what it could be like to be a Jew and a woman and a lesbian traveling in the world without having to worry about how she would be treated. She wants to believe that she could go anywhere and not be a stranger but create some kind of intimacy with others unlike herself—although she realizes the compelling need for home, given the hostility or knee-jerk reactions of some strangers.

TP: You talk about inclusiveness as an important value here, and you made a special effort as poetry editor of this journal to include what you call "innovative women poets," which was a pretty open stance at the time. Tell me more about this category "innovative," and how you see it as a feminist poetic strategy.

RL: Innovative to me means treating words as material: word as sound, letters as sound, lines as sound, also the visual aspects of a poem sometimes—as well as the breaking-down of the hierarchies of what Gertrude Stein called "patriarchal poetry." A sense of a hierarchy that keeps us thinking in traditional ways, as a result of syntax, for example. Innovative poetry is an attempt to break all that open or apart while still bringing feeling to meaning. At least that's how I feel when I read good innovative poetry by, say, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, Kathleen Fraser, Rosmarie Waldrop—usual modes of thinking fall away, seem irrelevant, over-general, silly. I find myself in a playful mode/mood. That's one important aspect of innovative poetry, that it's playful—it doesn't necessarily begin with a feeling or even an image, but a buzz, an interest in language itself and where it's going to take you. You can be spiritual and thoughtful but you're not locked in. You're free to forget, erase, delete, rewind, unwind.