Status Updates From My Life, My Body

It’s always far easier to fight someone with whom you share 85 percent of your politics than someone who shares 50 percent or less.

Women lived with a fear hard for us to understand now, when the possibility of pregnancy meant that desire or even true love might kill. To become pregnant when you did not want to be was to enter a world of illegality and danger, of uncertainty and pain.

Well, it’s a lot easier to understand now.

I was told repeatedly that I could not write what I cared about. Political poetry was uncouth and not real poetry. Also uncouth and unreal was anything having to do with the body as it existed in reality and my experiences as a woman or a Jew. Everything was to be tidy, male, "universal." The most admired pieces seemed to be sonnets about paintings viewed in the Uffizi while abroad on Guggenheims.

'Nice words for ugly acts' - poem mixing death and loss of jobs, and executives deliberate ignorance.
'Why Speculate on the future?' - essay. starts gently, then heads straight in to discussion of feminist futures and utopias. Not all the way through this one at present.

'Touched by Ginsberg at a (relatively) tender age" - essay on escaping the safety of poetry as taught at university, and becoming a better poet.
'Tabula Rasa with Boobs" - essay on Marilyn Monroe, and the complexities of having one's body desired but one's self neither desired nor respected.

'Housewives without houses' - essay on the invisible homeless, and the way that society is failing them.
"The hows, there is no why" - poem about finding food while homeless.
"Living off the grid" - interview (interviewer, Terry Bisson).

'Statement on censorship for the Pennsylvania Review" - what it says in the title. Artists who censor themselves; those who only look at 'comfortable' works or works by the Establishment lessen art.
"Fame, Fortune, and other Tawdry Illusions" - essay on being recognised; on being famous in public and the kinds of attention it gets from people who don't like it.