#american female poets

[dreamy-conceit]

I asked my friend the translator, What was the first known act of translation in the history of mankind? His answer was, Probably something into or out of Egyptian. I thought about this for a while and ventured a certainty: No, I said, it was when a mother heard her baby babble or cry, and had to decide in an instant what it meant.

— Mary Ruefle, 'Short Lecture on Translation (Bat City Review, 2012)

[madeinheaven2008]

[purebbyfawn]

[yourdailyqueer]

Angelina Weld Grimké (deceased)

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 27 February 1880  

RIP: 10 June 1958

Ethnicity: African American, white

Nationality: American

Occupation: Journalist, writer, teacher, playwright, poet

Note: First African-American women to have a play publicly performed.

[persephones-carnations]

[literarylumin]

Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.

- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

[thegentleintellectual]

Text ID: “Falling in love felt fluid. It snowed when we fell in love. Everything reminded me of warm milk. Everything seemed less real. I thought my cup was overflowing. I found myself caressing my own face”

Excerpt From: Terese Marie Mailhot. “Heart Berries.”

[iamktb206]

“People often say with pride, ‘I’m not interested in politics.’ They might as well say, ‘I’m not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.’ … If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.”

– Martha Gellhorn

[life-imitates-art-far-more]

Erastus Dow Palmer (1817-1904) "Sappho" (c.1858)

[highwayragdoll]

I hate this book and movie but the edgy tumblr girls might like this pic. My pic don’t repost

[goodbye-alchemy]

I do the art because I love it all.

Things, people, the space in between them.

You.

I do the art because I love you. You occupy my mind so completely that I’m gripping my hair and pulling at my scalp, and it runs over onto everything I hold in my hands. I love the steps you take, the way the sun touches you, the way you touch me. I visit you in the museums and watch your colors for a while, until my eyes hurt. I ponder what you mean as I sip my lukewarm coffee. Until the security guard tells me it’s closing time and he’s locking up. I beg him for five more minutes and he shakes his head apologetically.

I take a final look behind me, burning the vision of you into my crowded, crowded brain, and I make the art so I can see you again.

[thisiwilldecidelater]

Could dying really be worse than being nothing?

[leyllethecreator]

Writing Tip #2: Sometimes you've just gotta be like Nike

The best cure for writers' block I've found is to keep writing even when you have no inspiration. Push through the garbage, and you'll often find that ideas start coming to you, but if you insist you're uninspired, you will be. This is part of the reason why it's so great to write to prompts. Game-fying the struggle gets you out of your head a bit.

Go for a walk and tell yourself you have to pick one random thing to write about. Open the dictionary, select a word off the page you opened to and try to do something with that. As Isaac Asimov said, sometimes doing something mindless like watching a movie helps.

Basically the more stimuli you surround yourself with, the more likely you are to find inspiration. You can generate that stimuli yourself just by yeeting words onto a page - you 100% can inspire yourself.

And remember that nobody ever said you have to keep the draft. If it's garbage, it's not like you suddenly destroyed your story idea for good - it's been poisoned by one bad draft and is dying of failure-itis.

I'm creating new prompts every week you can check out every Saturday if you're looking for inspo. I also highly suggest watching a show you like or a new show, listening to music or "the dictionary method" if you're ever feeling stumped.

[chlorophyllcrimescene]

Tuesday night, stirring through wax-cloth sleep, waking up from antebellum blue nothingness with blood smeared on my chin. Chain-link fence and a cigarette before we leave. Box of reds or blue shorts? Remember when I was still a quitter, dreaming big about the belly of a pirate ship? Some of my philosophies are better not lived by, only watched through silver screens or book pages like leather-skin. Next is a sun-eaten face counting out cash on the counter. Oh, to be straddling the Smokies with one foot on Tybee shores.

[yourdailyqueer]

Alice Dunbar Nelson (deceased)

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Bisexual

DOB: 19 July 1875

RIP: 18 September 1935

Ethnicity: African American

Occupation: Poet, journalist, activist

[haggishlyhagging]

Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672), an Englishwoman who with her family arrived in Massachusetts in 1630 and combined a traditional life of Puritan domesticity with the inner life of a poet, the first American poet in fact, offers a good example of adaptation to gender constraints. She wrote:

To sing of Wars, of Captaines, and of Kings, Of Cities founded, Common-wealths begun, For my mean Pen, are too superior things, And, how they all, or each, their dates have run: Let Poets, and Historians, set these forth, My obscure Verse, shal not so dim their worth. . . .

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits A Poet’s Pen all scorn I should thus wrong; For such despight they cast on female wits: If what I doe prove well, it wont advance, They'l say it's stolne, or else, it was by chance. . . .

Let Greeks be Greeks, and Women what they are, Men have precendency, and still excel, It is but vaine unjustly to wage war; Men can doe best, and Women know it well; Preheminence in each and all is yours, Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.

Bradstreet's sweet-tempered moderation can be read as ironic or conformist, but the significant fact is that she persisted all her life in working and publishing as a poet. At what cost to herself and her art can only be surmised. As Adrienne Rich observed: "To have written poems, the first good poems in America, while rearing eight children, lying frequently sick, keeping house at the edge of wilderness, was to have managed a poet's range and extension within confines as severe as any American poet has confronted."

Anne Bradstreet ignored the "carping tongues" and assured herself and the world that she was writing mostly to her children and to praise God. Yet, in every generation, everywhere women were struggling for intellectual expression, some "carping tongue" reminded them of their female limitation, their female duty. Over and over again, we find women directed toward the loom, the shuttle, the distaff, the embroidery frame rather than the pen. Many of them heeded these calls: the artful textiles, the glorious quilts, the richly varied embroideries, the fancywork that decorated churches and homes, all testify to the flourishing creativity of women. And, as Alice Walker reminded us, the creation of gardens was, for many women, a form of art. But the contested ground for men was that of literary creation, of definition. It was here they asserted their so-called prerogatives, claimed superiority of training and intellect, defined exclusionary standards, and used every form of psychological pressure possible to discourage women from claiming any of that terrain. Against such pressure only the strongest in character and motivation could hold their ground.

-Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness