As a lesbian poet, I have been contemplating Shelley's words. To be a poet who is a lesbian is to be a potential felon in half the states of this country and the District of Columbia, where I live. In some countries of the world, to be a lesbian poet is to be subject, by law, to imprisonment or even execution. How I love is outside the law. And when I write and speak of my life as a lesbian, my poems have also been seen as outside the bounds of poetry.

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The very word lesbian is intensely charged, evoking some of the nastiest responses to and assumptions made about any group. Lesbians are women without men, so are by the very fact of their existence threatening to patriarchal social arrangements. Not surprisingly, lesbians have been seen as dangerous and as sexually wild and out of control.

Grahn satirically caricatures the tradition-bound response of a aggressive doctor in "Edward the Dyke":

Your disease has gotten completely out of control. We scientists know of course that it's a highly pleasurable experience to take someone's penis or vagina into your mouth--it's pleasurable and enjoyable. Everyone knows that. But after you've taken a thousand pleasurable penises or vaginas into your mouth and had a thousand people take your pleasurable penis or vagina into their mouth, what have you accomplished? What have you got to show for it? . . . Do you see how you're missing the meaning of life? . . .

Yet this response to love misses the point, pornographically dismembering lesbians and gay men into sexually driven body parts.

Not only by decrying social injustices and institutionally reinforced prejudice, but also through graphically beautiful love poetry, lesbian poet/prophets expound the profundities of lesbian physical love. Perhaps the most famous example besides Rich's "Floating Poem" is Lorde's "Love Poem":

And I knew when I entered her I was
high wind in her forests hollow
fingers whispering sound
honey flowed
from the split cups
impaled on a lance of tongues
on the tips of her breast on her navel
and my breath
howling into her entrances
through lungs of pain.

Her lover's body is the promised land flowing with milk and honey, a sheltering forest and a wilderness in which lesbian lovers freely revel in one another and their mutual delight.

Conclusion

The genre "lesbian poetry" was recognized not first by scholars or booksellers but by women who needed to give voice to such experience, and by women who needed to be reassured of a lesbian literary history.

Politics, sexuality, lyric, epic, history, autobiography, biography, polemics, aesthetics, and gentle persuasion intersect in lesbian poetry and affect teaching (both formally in the academy and informally among general readers) and thus effect cultural change.

A sense of separation and disenfranchisement has characterized the work and reception of many a lesbian poet. But with the burgeoning of alternative curricula and the visibility and information proffered by the literary history you are presently reading, lesbian poetry will, let us hope, to borrow a phrase from Gertrude Stein, become everybody's poetry and proud heritage not just that of those who imaginatively inhabit the separate isle of Lesbos.

After all, lesbian poetry is, as that white patriarch Robert Frost remarked of poetry itself, "the stuff of life."

Post-modern theory has led to the problematizing of marginalized and "other" peoples and cultures and to viewing homosexuality as a social construction.

Of mixed Native American, Scottish, and Lebanese heritage, American poet and literary scholar Paula Gunn Allen reinterprets the historic and mythic beliefs of Native Americans from a twentieth-century lesbian-feminist perspective.

American Latina lesbian editor and writer Gloria Anzaldúa connected racism and homophobia to posit a political queerness that interconnects with all struggles against oppression.

Baudelaire was among the first French poets to include lesbians as subjects.

Widely acknowledged as one of the finest twentieth-century American poets, Elizabeth Bishop encoded a lesbian identity in her poems.

Greek-born lesbian poet and translator Olga Broumas writes openly erotic poems that combine ancient Greek echoes and late twentieth-century idiom.

Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff explores issues of race, class, and sexuality in her prose and poetry.

Emily Dickinson's poems and letters to her sister-in-law Susan are both passionate and elusive in their homoeroticism.

The bisexual poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle, who published under the initials H. D., wrote poems and autobiographical prose works that celebrate women's romantic relationships with each other.

Elsa Gidlow, known to many as the "poet-warrior," was unabashedly visible as an independent woman, a lesbian, a writer, and a bohemian-anarchist at a time when such visibility was both unusual and potentially dangerous.

Judy Grahn has been an effective leader the gay rights movement, and her identity as a lesbian and a feminist has infused all of her works, in both prose and poetry.

As bibliographer, reviewer, collector, editor, and co-founder of Naiad Press, Barbara Grier has been an important nurturer of lesbian literature.

A noted African-American writer from the 1900s through the 1920s, Angelina Weld Grimké fell into obscurity in the 1930s and was only rediscovered in the 1980s; her inability to act on her sexual desires inspired her writing and contributed to her ultimately abandoning it.

The work of African-American activist and writer Audre Lord was greatly influenced by her lesbianism.

Much of Amy Lowell's poetry is extremely frank, forthrightly sensual, and often overtly lesbian.

Charlotte Mew's poetry encodes the emotional pain of hiding her lesbian identity in a world of compulsory heterosexuality.

In her own works, Cherríe Moraga defines her experience as a Chicana lesbian; and in her capacity as editor/publisher, she provides a forum for traditionally silenced lesbians of color.

Although Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver has not been an outspoken lesbian activist, her poetry is deeply resonant with contemporary lesbian consciousness, and many lesbians claimed her as one of their own before she publicly came out.

The work of Australian lesbian poet Dorothy Porter presents a cheeky challenge to a literary establishment whose poetry has often been defined by pretension and obfuscation.

Award-winning author Minnie Bruce Pratt has written moving and erotic poems and stories that explore sex and gender issues, as well as powerful essays that decry bigotry in its many forms.

Adrienne Rich, who has aestheticized politics and politicized aesthetics, is America's most widely read lesbian poet.

Muriel Rukeyser's poetry, which breaks the silence of many aspects of female experience, has been enormously important to many feminist and lesbian readers.

Admired through the ages as one of the greatest lyric poets, the ancient Greek writer Sappho is today esteemed by lesbians around the world as the archetypal lesbian and their symbolic mother.

May Sarton, who gradually revealed her lesbianism in her writing, worked successfully in poetry, the novel, essays, and the journal.

Gifted with a powerful voice and sophisticated musical artistry, singer Bessie Smith conducted her life by her own set of rules and had affairs with both men and women.

In addition to becoming--with Alice B. Toklas--half of an iconic lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.

One of America's most inventive and incisive poets, May Swenson wrote many love poems celebrating lesbian sexuality.

The poetry of Paul Verlaine celebrates both heterosexual and homosexual activity, including lesbian relationships.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, poet, painter, and activist Fran Winant helped define the role and sensibility of lesbians in the contexts of gay liberation and radical feminism.

Throughout her varied career as a writer, editor, teacher, and performance artist, Terry Wolverton has consistently worked to document glbtq history and increase the visibility of the community.