Comments by Julie R. Enszer

AWP March 2023, pre-recorded panel event

Thank you all for joining us and what a pleasure to be here to celebrate Irena’s wonderful new book, Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems 1971-2021. Thank you especially to Stephanie from Wesleyan University Press for organizing us, to the distinguished panelists, and to Irena for her vision, her work, her poems, and this wonderful book.

My comments today trace a brief history of Irena’s publishing work situating her in a feminist publishing habitus that transformed literary spaces. These comments with embedded links for further information are available on my blog at JulieREnszer.com.

In an interview with Irena during the height of the pandemic, she said about her work on the feminist magazine Conditions:

Conditions made me fall in love with publishing. Conditions gave me the bug. If I could do my life over again, I would have my own publishing house. I wanted to have a Froyen farlag, “Women’s Press” in Yiddish. I didn’t intend it to be for Yiddish work only, but I wanted the press to have a Yiddish name. I love putting words and visuals on paper and sending them out into the world. A flyer, a newsletter, a memorial book, an anthology, proceedings of a conference—I love doing them all. I still love, more than anything, a physical book.

These sentiments—loving publishing and loving, more than anything, a physical book—first become manifest in Irena’s first book of poetry, Periods of Stress. Periods of Stress grew from a feminist writing group Seven Women Poets and carried the colophon Out & Out Books. Out & Out Books was an independent feminist press that offered an umbrella for a few members of the writing group to publish their first books, including Irena, Joan Larkin, and Jan Clausen. In 1975, Out & Out Books also published Amazon Poetry, edited by collective members Elly Bulkin and Joan Larkin, a collection of lesbian poems. Like many small presses, it was a labor of love, each book funded by the poet, printed at The Print Center in New York City, and promoted by the poet herself within the beloved and growing community of feminist readers.

These feminist readers embraced Irena. In 1982, another feminist press, Persephone Press, published Irena’s second collection Keeper of Accounts. In the seven years between the two books, the feminist print movement had grown. Keeper of Accounts reflects that a new sense of assuredness, even swagger among feminist presses. The book features a collage as the cover art with a typewriter, clock, monkeys, and Hebrew (or Yiddish) lettering. Designed and typeset to be like all the “random houses” publishing in New York, Keeper of Accounts was the last book that Persephone published. When the press imploded, the editor of Sinister Wisdom Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz acquired the remaining copies in print and distributed it through “Sinister Wisdom Books.”

Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena during this time collaborated on the special issue of Sinister Wisdom The Tribe of Dina which, after publication as a journal issue, became a trade book with Beacon Press during the late 1980s. Irena’s words and her editorial visions were traveling through the worlds of feminist and lesbian readers, enthralling them.

The Eighth Mountain Press, run by Ruth Gundle in Portland, Oregon, published Irena’s third book, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New in 1990 and her first prose collection: Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches, and Diatribes.

In the mid-1990s, Irena was one of the planners of a conference Di Froyen focusing on Yiddish women writers. Di Froyen published conference proceedings that include Irena’s keynote speech, another example of Irena’s impressive record of publishing activism. There are many other examples of Irena’s work and publishing; time prevents me from a complete recital. I hope the previous examples suffice.

While publishing in 2022 with Wesleyan University Press may seem like a departure—and more than once Irena said, I cannot believe this is happening with a university press, my work has always been with the feminist press—I’d like to argue that it is not. Rather the presence of Irena’s book on the Wesleyan list, alongside Minnie Bruce Pratt’s most recent book, Magnified, as well as other books by lesbian-feminist authors on university press lists, reflects a realization of lesbian-feminist visions. Recognition of lesbian-feminist voices in the academy in a range of disciplines—women’s studies, certainly, and also English, translation studies, Jewish Studies, and more—is an achievement of multiple forms of activism to transform knowledge canonization.

In addition to an academic presence, lesbian-feminist writers who first published with independent feminist and lesbian presses now find themselves on the New York Times best seller lists, in stages on broadway, on theater screens, and on television screens. Lesbian-feminism has traveled from the pages of niche and banned books to a whole range of public culture-making practices. These developments would, I think, thrill early lesbian-feminist writers and publishers who are no longer with us—June Arnold, Parke Bowman, Catherine Nicholson, Pat Parker, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jean Swallow—as they do the trailblazers who continue their work—Joan Pinkvoss, Cherríe Moraga, Cheryl Clarke, among others. And I would expect, in addition to their appreciation, all of them would have accompanying critiques, which is of course how our work continues to reach for new modes of understandings, new forms of expressions.

And now we have Irena’s wonderful collection, Her Birth and Later Years. The new poems amplify her earlier collected work. Irena’s poems remain urgent and important for us to read today. The book is a beautiful invitation to reengage with her poems. Behind all the poems is an invisible scaffolding of what brought them first into the world: a collection of hardy and hale feminist presses that published exciting new voices. If you look closely, you can see the outlines of their past work; if you look even more closely, you can see how the work continues today.