“High Risk” who recorded Common Woman Poems.
About 1974- or 1975. Tickets were $2.
Helen Hye-Sook Hwang It is my honor to e-interview Dr. Judy Grahn. Sometimes life turns serendipitously. I did not think that I would be working with Judy Grahn even two years ago. Magnetically, Judy has become an important figure for Creatrix Studies graduate and continuing education programs that Mago Academy has just launched this spring. Also, we are doing a double-sided project, the Tri-annual Poetry Salons and the weekly publication of poems written by the poets in the Return to Mago E-Magazine. Further, Judy has been actively participating the S/HE Conference since last year’s inaugural meeting. I have invited her to speak at the plenary session of the Roundtable Conversation, apart from presenting her research paper. Her involvement with The Mago Work rose like a wildfire for the last two years. However, my first encounter with Judy goes back about two decades ago. When I first met Judy in person in the early 2000s, I was a doctoral student. I was invited to her class meeting and her gathering with students. Details are fading. But I remember how I felt. I could not forget the hospitality that I received from her and her colleagues. It felt surreally good to be invited in her class meetings. Not that I did not know what a likely minded women’s community was like (I had been a member of a women’s overseas missionary community in the late 1980s and the early 1990s) but I was leading a new life as an aspiring scholar in the field of feminist theological studies. I was already used to an academic environment but had no idea how others would find me as a scholar-to-be. As I write this introduction of our interview talks, I feel surrounded by the magical air of Sisterly Interconnectivity.
Helen What has your life work been? You have been recognized by many as a feminist poet of great respect and love. Tell us about your poems and how writing poetry has shaped your life and career.
Judy Grahn From studying poetry mostly on my own starting as a kid at ten years old, I have learned to use poetry and poetic ways of thinking as a guiding force for my own life and for my society. One of the poet’s tasks is to press new or newly re-empowered words into the culture, to help change its direction.
The first fifteen years of my activism, beginning when I was twenty-five in 1965, produced a satirical short fiction, using a then-unspeakable word, “The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke,” used as both feminist critique of mainline oppressive psychiatry and trans/nonbinary existence, and lesbian experience as distinguished from that of Gay men. This gave the underground term “dyke” a definition of, say, “lesbian warrior who fights in behalf of other women.”
In 1969 I wrote a set of seven poems, “The Common Woman Poems,” several of which became anthems of feminist movements; the sequence ends with lines “the common woman is as common / as the best of bread and will rise/” which landed in posters distributed widely, helping to invite working class and other “ordinary” women into feminist activism and the idea of female power “rising” as well as being “common.”
“The Common Woman Poems” end as “an oath I swear to you,” and my second set of poems, She Who (written in 1972) also end in a promise: “when She Who moves, the earth will turn over.” The She Who poems have a spiritual sense and are one reason I am considered, formally, a Foremother of Women’s Spirituality movement. My third major multi-part poem, “A Woman Is Talking to Death,” (written in 1973) is a self-and-society examination of forms of oppression, and ends with a third promise, after defining oppressed people as “lovers” (both mine and ours), and dedicating my life to doing everything I can to overturn the oppressions of sex, race, and class. My poetry teaches me and also holds me to moral principles I try to live up to. Researching and writing out my ideas and those of others, in prose, stimulates and expands my poetic voice.
After 1980, women’s spirituality and new origin stories became my focus in both prose and poetry, which inform each other. I began a series of book length poems (three are completed) chasing a goddess of Western culture, with The Queen of Wands (1982), The Queen of Swords (1987), and The Queen of Cups, currently in completion. My prose contributed origin stories of the presence of LGBT peoples throughout history and cultures around the world (Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds, 1983, 1984, 1990, 1999), and Lesbian presence in poetry from Sappho to me and my contemporaries (The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition, 1985, 2023). This work resulted in awards, life-time achievement, Grand Marshall in both Seattle and San Francisco Gay Pride parades, and an award called “The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction”, established in 1996 by Triangle Publishers.
Three of my long poems center on social and personal critiques of oppressive patterns in American society: racism, classism, sexism, and oppression of those deemed “mentally ill.” The poems are “A Woman Is Talking to Death” (1974), “Descent to the Roses of a Family,” (1985, with explanatory prose edition, (2020, 2023), and “Mental,” published in 2010 in The Judy Grahn Reader.
In the 1990s I launched my major origin story, which I call “Metaformic Theory” extending a poetic term “metaphor” to “metaform” as something real, having form, a cultural phenomenon that can be traced to menstrual ritual somewhere, sometime. So, hopefully contributing a new word and concept. This journey began as a reclamation of menstruation as a positive subject, in a 1970 poem, followed by my article on menstrual power published in Charlene Spretnak’s The Politics of Women’s Spirituality, (1982), then a novel, Mundane’s World, (1988) a female-centered fictional world, featuring shifting points of view, human and creature, as well as menstruation’s capacity to alter consciousness and thus reality (1987). The novel was followed by a carefully researched description of Metaformic Theory in my book, Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World (1993, 1994). I followed this by applying aspects of Metaformic Theory in a living goddess cultural context in South India for my dissertation (2000).
Menstruation’s role in culture creation and female bodies as central to our human existence and its peculiarities has been lost and suppressed under patriarchal stories that place male blood rituals as central and as the only “sacred blood.” Metaformic Theory replaces patriarchal views with menstrual and female roles in culture creation; serves as a cross-cultural bridge and inspiration for some indigenous scholars to reclaim their cultures post-colonially; and helps some religious and goddess scholars locate female presence in various traditions; and allows some healers to turn female body self-hatred into self-love and appreciation.
Since the turn into the 21st century my work has expanded to include interpretations of ancient Sumerian literature of goddess Inanna, in supporting Betty De Shong Meador’s powerful poetic transliteration of the writing of High Priestess of Ur, Enheduanna in her book, Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart (2000). Following up on Dr. Meador’s contributions with my own interpretations of some of Inanna’s lesser-known stories in my own book Eruptions of Inanna: Justice, Gender, and Erotic Power (2021) as well as weaving them into the poetry of The Queen of Cups.
And lastly, my book Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit: Living in a Sentient World (2021) enabled me to spin out some occurrences in my life of experiencing creature and spiritual consciousness, even from insects and from the sky.
Helen Can you tell us something about your early life as a grassroots activist in the Bay Area? You co-founded two vital projects?
Judy In my earlier life I co-founded a revolutionary group, Gay Women’s Liberation; some of us lived in women-only households and produced public space and services for women; this is chronicled in my memoir, A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet (2012). I co-founded a women-only press in 1969 that published radical work for eight years. Poetry readings that I and other feminist women poets did helped to direct the activism of groups we were affiliated with, and those we knew nothing about.
As a teacher, I independently held classes in both writing and spirituality through the eighties and nineties. This was all prior to the world wide web, so advertising was word of mouth, and because there was community, all our creative work was fed and then fed others in publics spaces women activists created and held, in bookstores, clinics, shelters, prisons, rented churches, theaters, people’s living rooms. Then radio programs, theatrical productions, concerts, music festivals. And the work gradually spread out across the country and then around the world. Amazing!
Helen You were the co-director of a MA program in Women’s Spirituality for two institutions. Could you tell us about them? How do you see yourself as a co-founder and professor contributing to the cause of feminist spirituality?
Judy In 2001 I became director of an MA program in Women’s Spirituality that was initially brought into the academy by Dr. Elinor Gadon (author of The Once and Future Goddess) and who was also director and primary faculty of the degree program that granted my doctorate. I was quickly joined by my colleague Dr. Dianne Jenett and later by Dr. D’vorah Grenn, as co-directors of our MA program, which lasted until 2015. Somewhere along the way I put out, together, with co-editor D’vorah Grenn, the online Metaformia Journal.
We celebrate about 150 graduates, many of whom went on the receive higher degrees, or established their own goddess studies programs. One example is Kahuna Leilani Birely, whose Daughters of the Goddess series of classes and seasonal rituals is thriving.
Our MA faculty included Yeye Luisah Teish with her Yoruba teachings, Vicki Noble with her Motherpeace tarot and feminist astrology, artists Shiloh McCloud, Tricia Grame, and Dr. Margaret Grove, as well as many notable guest speakers such as Dr. Lucia Birnbaum, Cosey Fabian, Dr. Betty De Shong Meador, Anne Bluethenthal, Max Dashu, and Z Budapest. At one point we counted thirty-two books we used as texts that had been written or edited by members of our extended faculty.
Helen Now you are supporting as a founding faculty member for Creatrix Studies graduate and continuous education programs offered by Mago Academy. What made you committed to the task and what is your hope?
Judy What is my interest in Creatrix Studies? Helen, you are doing that rare and precious thing–holding and creating space and mutual access for many goddess and thealogy scholars, artists healers, and poets, as well as researching, translating, writing, and teaching your complex Ceto-Magoist origin story. In addition, now, you are putting all your incredible efforts into an academic context that has a broad scope, broad enough to include other scholars and teachers, and broad enough, I believe, to include some of my own work. I believe that surfacing with new and recovered origin stories, practices, thealogies, and philosophies is crucial effort for this tumultuous, tortuous era we are living through. Our combined efforts for the past fifty or sixty years have revealed some truths about the richness of the matristic past as well as the turn into patriarchy, especially white and male supremacist patriarchy. Now is the time to surface with replacements, and a great way to accelerate this process is by allowing opportunities for the wide range of scholars and seekers to learn about each other and each other’s works, and your overarching Mago consciousness. This is what you and your committees are holding together, and it’s very exciting to witness as well as to participate.
Further, Ceto-Magoism places nature’s wisdom creatures at the center, where they belong, and helps us all connect more realistically with cosmic consciousness, through the medium of “goddesses” and creatrix mothers. I am eager to add my part as both teacher and learner, both scholar and poet. I see what you are doing as developing a matrix that will explode exponentially into a global flowering of woman-matristic-centered ideas and practices that will have great influence on human behavior and understandings going forward.
Helen Your talks have surfaced the depth and the richness of LIFE manifest in your life works and stories. I must tell you that I have begun to write poetry again more seriously and more often. And I look forward to what will be brought out into becoming in the near future especially through your commitment to The Mago Work. With my great honor and gratitude, I end our interview talks.
Read more about Judy Grahn here.