"Great poetry says what we need to hear but don't know how to express, and gives us the strength to move forward."
One of the most welcome surprises of the post-election apocalypse has been the explosion of women’s voices raised in resistance. From the gloom of November sprang a glorious January, pink hats blossoming in the streets as women across generations sang and celebrated a new national anthem: “Hands Off My Pussy.”
Who could have predicted that despite, or perhaps because, of the Testicular Menace in our midst, we would find ourselves experiencing an Ovarian Renaissance? From Sally Q. Yates to Linda Sarsour to @YourDailyAction, an intersectional Pantsuit Nation of females has emerged to hold power accountable to truth.
Through hashtags and tweets, postcards and phone calls, Melissa McCarthy’s Spicer and Kate McKinnon’s Kellyanne, and protest signs galore, women have crafted a potent new language to galvanize and inspire, console and support. We’re silenced; nevertheless we persist. We’re age-, body-, religion-, even hair- and head-shaking shamed; nevertheless we clap back. It’s been exhilarating. And exhausting.
"Confronting the political requires addressing the personal."
So how do we keep up the energy, the wit, the fight and the bite, when we’re up against injustice at large and misogyny in particular?
We pull ourselves together and keep on #resisting—with the help of great poets who have been where we are and lived to fight (and write) another day. When the world around us feels chaotic, when we half-believe the lies our culture tells about our worth as women, great poetry offers clarity, what Robert Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion.” It says what we need to hear but don’t know how to express, and gives us the strength to move forward.
So, here we present “the pussy poetry survival kit” for when you’re fresh out of Women’s March mojo. Portable and multipurpose, a CC cream for the soul, it can help us stop, reflect, restore—and reclaim our authority as fully awake, eloquent, dangerous women.
Step One: Find Yourself (on the inside)
The fight may be global (as Beyonce's Lemonade poet, Warsan Shire, tells us in what they did yesterday afternoon, “the whole world” hurts “everywhere/everywhere/everywhere”), but confronting the political requires addressing the personal.
Trying to be “everywhere” at once (hello, social media) only leaves us in pieces. Turn off the phone and hold in your hands a poem like Derek Walcott’s Love After Love, which invites you to “Give back your heart/to itself.” Feel the solace of hearing that though we’re “All of us broken, in some way,” as Barbara Crooker’s Strewn tells us, we’re also “All of us dazzling in the brilliant slanting light.” Your battered inner activist shines bright not despite but because of your war wounds. Recognize and greet yourself in Lucille Clifton’s triumphant there is a girl inside:
she is a green tree in a forest of kindling.
she is a green girl in a used poet.
Step Two: Know Yourself (and claim your worth)
Freshly reacquainted with your heart, don’t let the culture mess with your head. Love your green, broken, dazzling self, and take a hammer to sexist social mirrors, like the woke princess in Anne Sheldon’s Snow White Turns 39:
I’m planning how to break a talking mirror:
hammer and earplugs. Seven years of bad luck?
Own your body, age, and experience so that when you’re out in the world doing good work, and the culture, in the form of, say, Katie Couric asks you, in the form of, say, Frances McDormand if you ever look at your aging self on screen and think, GAH!, your response will be so badass someone will turn it into a poem, as we did with Laugh Lines:
Twenty years of going hi!, wow!, or oh my g—
You know, this is the map.
This is the map.
Even that stuff,
this is the road map.
Step Three: Get Back to Work
Once you’re your own pride and joy again, grounded, grown up, and fortified against patriarchal douchebaggery, head back out “to be of use,” as in Marge Piercy’s poem of that title.
Dig in to good work, with measured urgency, and carry with you (memorize!) these pussy poems, and others you discover. They’ll help you remember that whether you’re in the margins or the main plot of the Resistance on any given day, you’re still helping write what Margaret Atwood calls “the literature of witness,” which she deems “an act of hope.”
Let poetry motivate you to keep bearing witness. Maybe poems can’t impeach a president. But as poet Jane Hirshfield says, “The imagination is limitless, so even when a person is confronted with an unchangeable outer circumstance, one thing poems give you is the sense that there’s always, still, a changeability, a malleability, of inner circumstance. That’s the beginning of freedom.”
Mary D. Esselman is a freelance writer and teacher currently working for the University of Virginia's Women's Center. Elizabeth Ash Velez is the academic coordinator of the Community Scholars Program and professor of feminist theory at Georgetown University. Their latest collection, HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?: Poems for the Not So Young Anymore was released on April 4.
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