How Lesbians Saved Poetry

Lisa L. Moore is Archibald A. Hill Professor of American and English Literature and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, which won the Lambda Literary Award, and the poetry chapbook 24 Hours of Men.

"Incorporating interviews, poetry, and literary analysis, How Lesbians Saved Poetry reveals the centrality of lesbian poetry and lesbian poets to the history of queer activism. Although its title claims that lesbians saved poetry, the book also suggests that poetry saved lesbians—or maybe even women!—by serving as an occasion to gather and speak across differences, as a mode of social analysis and as a tool for producing mantras, rallying cries, and songs of pleasure." — Sarah Dowling, author of Entering Sappho

• AcknowledgmentsPreface: How Lesbians Saved PoetryDO-IT-YOURSELFHow Poetry Saved a LesbianDo You Have to Be Gay to Take This Class?An Almost Unheard Low Note: An Interview with Minnie Bruce PrattThe Dream of a Common BookstoreMade Love to a Woman, Wrote a PoemA Woman-Only Reading Is a Drug I Still Long For: An Interview with ChrystosFor Anita OnãngARS EROTICALesbians Behaving Badly: Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death, and the Changing of the SeasonsOrigin of the SonnetA Lesbian History of the SonnetSeparately Occurring Rhymes in Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to AmphilanthusRhyme Scheme of Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, as a Whole PoemThe Sonnet Is Not a Luxury: Audre Lorde's First PoemLove ExceedsGive Up Fucking Sonnets!? An Interview with Cheryl ClarkeThe Heroic Sonnet Crown vs. Anti-Black ViolenceThe Heroic Sonnet Crown: A VisualizationA Church in BronzevilleVOICINGSIt Is an Apple: An Interview with Judy GrahnA Twenty-One Kind of Love: Adrienne Rich's "Twenty-One Love Poems"The Poems of This Bridge Called My BackThe Poems of the Austin ProjectThe Body RemembersIs It Rockin' You Out? An Interview with Samiya BashirEvery Kind of Girl: An Interview with Eileen MylesBegin AgainNotesBibliography