In een uitvoerig essay op de website van de Poetry Foundation gaat dichteres en activiste Minnie Bruce Pratt (samen met Julie R. Enszer) de verbindingen na tussen haar activisme, haar dichterschap, de vrouwenbeweging waar ze uit voortkomt en andere bevrijdings- en emancipatiebewegingen in de wereld. Ze doet uit de doeken hoe de vervreemding van haar lichaam een vervreemding van haar dichterschap betekende, en hoe ze de verbinding met beiden uiteindelijk weer hervond:

And then I began to write poetry again in 1975, when I fell in love with another woman. I returned to poetry not because I had “become a lesbian”—but because I had returned to my own body after years of alienation. The sensual details of life are the raw materials of a poet—and with that falling-in-love I was able to return to living fully in my own fleshly self.

In een even persoonlijk als wijdvertakt verhaal beschrijft Bruce Pratt haar gangen langs de Women In Print-beweging, self-publishing en het feministische tijdschrift Feminary, onderwijl worstelend met de conservatieve en discriminerende wetgeving rondom homoseksualiteit in de Verenigde Staten en haar thuisstaat North Carolina in het bijzonder, en vechtend voor het in stand houden van het contact met haar kinderen nadat ze het voogdijschap over hen verloor.

The lightning bolt of that loss etched into me an indelible understanding of the economic and political system I lived inside. I was living in Fayetteville, North Carolina, at the time—where de facto segregation was enforced by the white majority, where the country-club set still excluded people who were Jewish, and where the state sodomy laws declared any lover of her (or his) own sex to not only be committing a “crime against nature” but also a potential felon.

In 1981 publiceert ze haar eerste dichtbundel ‘The sound of one fork’. De bundel, zegt Bruce Pratt, komt voort uit de vrouwenbeweging van de jaren ’70, maar haar activisme is noch beperkt tot die beweging, noch speelt het zich alleen af in taal of theorie:

I became a poet because I became a revolutionary, and I have always felt that my writing was only one part of my work, no more or less important than starting a C-R [consciousness-raising] group on racism and feminism, or marching by the Washington Monument for lesbian rights, or any one of the actions that I do….

In so far as theory about revolutionary poetics, the only person that I’ve read that has said anything that helps or confirms my ideas [is] Frantz Fanon—a Black revolutionary [who was part of the anti-colonial Algerian struggle against France]…. He says that as a people becomes less colonized, their writers produce a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature. The writer becomes an “awakener of the people.” He says, “During this phase a great many men and women who up till then would never have thought of producing a literary work, now that they find themselves in exceptional circumstances—in prison, with the Maquis, or on the eve of their execution—feel the need to speak… to compose the sentence which expresses the heart of the people….” In speaking of poetic form Fanon says, “The present is no longer turned on itself but spread out for all to see.”

My heart resonated to the hope and resistance in Fanon’s words as I struggled to survive the loss of my children, the criminalization of my sexuality, and the rejection by my family. I wrote in 1980 that Fanon’s words were “very true of my feeling of urgency and immediacy in beginning to write again.” As a white Southern-born woman working to become an anti-racist, I grasped in my deepest self the necessity to act in conscious solidarity with liberation struggles other than my own.
[…]
These and other struggles have shaped my path and my poetry. I have expanded the understanding of the link between my life, my poetry, and my body—my woman’s body, my lesbian body—and the bodies and lives of other people, other peoples.

Lees het essay van  Minnie Bruce Pratt op de website van de Poetry Foundation. Haar laatste bundel heet ‘Inside the money machine’ en verscheen bij Carolina Wren Press.