love belongs to those who do the feeling

by Judy Grahn

Overview

love belongs to those who do the feeling—an exciting collection of new and selected poetry by Judy Grahn.  The book contains selections from Judy's entire body of poetic work from The Work of a Common Woman, The Queen of Wands and The Queen of Swords, to new poems written between 1997 and 2008. Judy's poetry is rangy and provocative.  It has been written at the heart of so many of the important social movements of the last forty years that the proper word is foundational—Judy Grahn's poetry is foundational to the spirit of movement.  People consistently report that Judy's poetry is also uplifting—an unexpected side effect of work that is aimed at the mind as well as the heart. Judy continues to insist that love goes beyond romance, to community, and that community goes beyond the everyday world, to the connective worlds of earth and spirit. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597091213
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	10/15/2008
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	728,857
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Judy Grahn is a poet, writer, and social theorist. She currently serves as Research Faculty for the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California. She is former director of Women’s Spirituality MA and Creative Inquiry MFA programs at New College of California. Her books include love belongs to those who do the feeling (Red Hen Press, 2008), Blood, Bread, and Roses (Beacon Press, 1994), and Edward the Dyke and Other Poems (The Women’s Press Collective, 1971).

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Dedication:

To the Mother of All Bowls (2004)

selections from Edward the Dyke and Other Poems (1966-1970)

Asking for Ruthie

the harvest spider

the centipede’s poem

in the place where

If you lose your lover

The Marilyn Monroe Poem

Vietnamese woman speaking to an American soldier

I’m not a girl

Elephant Poem

A History of Lesbianism

the big horse woman

The Common Woman Poems  (1969)      

 

I. Helen, at 9 am, at noon, at 5:15

II. Ella, in a square apron, along Highway 80

III. Nadine, resting on her neighbor’s stoop

IV. Carol in the park, chewing on straws

V. Detroit Annie, hitchhiking

VI. Margaret, seen through her picture window

VII. Vera, from my childhood

selections from She Who (1972-1974)

She Who 

She Who continues

Sheep

parting on the left

She Who increases/what can be done

the enemies of She Who call her various names

She who bears it

the many minnows

bowl of blood

A Geology Lesson

The woman in three pieces—one

The woman in three pieces—two

The woman in three pieces—three

the most blonde woman in the world

Carol and her crescent wrench

I am the wall at the lip of the water

Foam on the rim of the glass

a funeral/ plainsong from a younger woman to an older woman

Slowly: a plainsong from an older woman to a younger woman

the woman whose head is on fire

selections from Confrontations with the Devil in the Form of Love  (1975)

what do I have if not my 2 hands

Love came along    and saved me saved me

you are what is female

Love is a space which is attracted

Love came along and saved me

Venus, ever since they knocked

Love, you wicked dog

Look at my hands

Love came along and saved

Venus, dear, where are your arms

Ah Love, you smell of petroleum

Love rode 1500 miles on a grey

This is what is so odd

The poverty of Love is when

Young Love

I only have one reason for living

After the boss took over:

Love said:

My name is Judith, meaning

selections from The Queen of Wands  (1980-1982)

They say she is veiled

The land that I grew up on is a rock

A dream of Helen

The meanings in the pattern

Queen Helen

Paris and Helen

One for Helen

Helen’s lover

Old Helen

In the tower of the crone

Helen in Hollywood

The Inheritance

Frigga with Wuotan

Frigga with Hela

The Queen of Wands

The good weef is both

Knit the knot:  a riddle

But I mean any kind of thief

Spider Webster’s declaration:

     He is singing the end of the world again

Helen your beauty:  a chorus

Like a woman in childbirth wailing

Beauty, sleeping (Who shall wake us?)

Grand Grand Mother is returning

selections from The Queen of Swords (1986-1987)

Everyone wants Love to be his own

It isn’t easy being Nothing

Nature doesn’t give a damn

Crow Chorus with Helen

The sky is a sheet of crystal on a day like this

There is more to standing

Amazon chorus (As for what we do with horses)

Her shadow falls across me

I, Boudica

I am Ildreth remembering

A woman among motorcycles

Descent to the Butch of the Realm

Ever wish upon a star?

Thoughts are points of sound/light

The mother of trees is dirt

The Ice Queen

I fell through a hole/in the eye of death

We’ll laugh it off to burrow (in a lighter cloth of time)

Is this what dying is really like?

Dancing in Place

New Poems (1987-2006)

The Vampires of Empire (from women are tired of the ways men bleed)

Forest, forest

Gratitude to you for the food of our abundance

Think what a butterfly (from “Mental”)

Talkers in a Dream Doorway

Margedda’s hair (from Mundane’s World)

Inside Passage

Goddess of wind

Kira and Pete in the ninth month

News

Mothers, fathers, clasp the children (from women are tired of the ways men bleed)

Gloria, child of Yemanya

When you walk down this road

lunarchy

may we embrace

Editorial Reviews

I am thrilled that Judy Grahn's amazing poetry will once again become  available to a new generation.  She is a phenomenon—a fierce poet of witness and action, a visionary, with a tough and compassionate heart and a piercing intelligence, rooted in a spirituality that locates the sacred in the belly of the profane.   And what a writer!  Look at her wit, her compression, her ear for rhythms and sounds, her instinct for dialogic tension, her ability to compose large structures held together as in music by expected and unexpected recurrences, her  common woman's twentieth century vocabulary along with ancient and  archaic uses of language:  naming as ritual, cursing, keening, spell- casting.   Anyone who reads Grahn will be changed for life.  Repeat:  for life.

—Alicia Ostriker

Judy Grahn takes her title from a poem commemorating the death of her first lover, but love belongs to those who do the feeling is far from elegiac. It bursts with life energy. Grahn writes of the erotic as “a force between artists…an enfusion of energy fueling the desire for change.” “Belly dancers,” she adds, “express love and spiritual community this way as well.” Another brilliant California poet, Jack Spicer, remarked that poems must “echo and reecho against each other”: “they cannot live alone any more than we can.” It is such echoing and reechoing that we find in this selected poems. “The will to change”—Charles Olson’s phrase—animates everything. Grahn’s mentor Gertrude Stein insisted that the poet had to work “in the excitingness of pure being”; she must “get back that intensity into the language.” Such intensity is always present in the work of this “common woman” who commonly achieves the miracle of accessibility without simplification. In our warmongering culture, the figure of the “warrior” is put forth by both men and women as the emblem of spiritual activity. (The “woman warrior.”) No poems are more “active” than Judy Grahn’s, but cultural change is already present in her choice of metaphor: she chooses the dancer, not the warrior. The poems in love belongs to those who do the feeling might be thought of as the longing for community, but if you read them carefully you will see that in fact they are themselves community. “They cannot live alone any more than we can.” 

 —Jack Foley

From the Publisher

One of the first American poets to celebrate radical feminism and lesbian desire without apology or disguise, the California-based Grahn has been known for that work ever since: The Common Woman Poems(1972) earned grassroots admiration and subcultural cachet for such portraits as "Carol, in the park, chewing on straws," who "has taken a woman lover," who "goes as far/ as women can go without protection/ from men." Here are Grahn's famous poems again, both the direct Movement poetry of the 1970s and the 1980s verse derived from feminist rereadings of myth. Two sequences about Helen of Troy are, at their best, at once comic, demotic and sexy, not to mention sexually explicit. Grahn's prefaces (to the whole volume, then to each segment) strike oddly boastful notes: "I am conscientiously criss-crossing time and space barriers," she says of her Helen poems. "So I have intended to shatter the myth." Her poems can seem rough, raw, intentionally unfinished, meant less for the printed page than for the voice or for the stage. Young readers will have no trouble imagining how much of an inspiration these lines might have been. Just 21 pages hold work from the past 20 years. This is an energetic look at Grahn's eventful career. (Jan.)

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