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.

• AcknowledgmentsPreface: How Lesbians Saved Poetry 1. How Poetry Saved a Lesbian — Do You Have To Be Gay to Take This Class?2. An Almost Unheard Low Note: An Interview with Minnie Bruce Pratt 3. The Dream of a Common Bookstore 4. Made Love to a Woman, Wrote a Poem 5. A Woman-Only Reading is a Drug I Still Long For: An Interview with Chrystos — For Anita Onãng 6. Lesbians Behaving Badly: Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons — Origin of the Sonnet 7. A Lesbian History of the Sonnet — Separately-Occurring Rhymes in Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus— Rhyme Scheme of Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, as a Whole Poem 8. The Sonnet is Not a Luxury: Audre Lorde's First Poem — Love Exceeds 9. Give Up Fucking Sonnets!? An Interview with Cheryl Clarke 10. The Heroic Sonnet Crown vs. Anti-Black Violence— Heroic Sonnet Crowns: A Visualization— A Church in Bronzeville 11. It is an Apple: An Interview with Judy Grahn12. A Twenty-One Kind of Love: Adrienne Rich's "Twenty-One Love Poems"— A Poem of This Bridge 13. The Poems of This Bridge Called My Back 14. The Poems of the Austin Project — The Body Remembers 15. Is It Rockin' You Out? An Interview with Samiya Bashir— Myles on Antone16. Every Kind of Girl: An Interview with Eileen Myles— Begin Again NotesBibliographyIndex

"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