For background:

Heart's accusation that Little Light has appropriated the cultural property of radical feminism in her poem, the seam of skin and scales. Heart has posted Robin Morgan's in total at her site, but she might have to edit it since it is a violation of copywright.

I just posted this at Heart's place. I realize I made a lot of statements without explanation and I'll make an attempt to add those here, since I don't want to clutter Heart's blog with words that disagree with her.

Here's a part of my post #165 at Heart's:

Heart wrote: “What we are supposed to do, as females, is — still, in 2007 — be quiet about what pertains specifically to us as females, about what we believe violates us. I can frame my resistance to appropriation as carefully as possible– doesn’t matter. ”

For the record, I disagree with your original post because:

1. I disagree that Robin Morgan was the first to make the comparison between monsters and feminism. Shelley, Perkins Gilman and Angela Carter are all part of the same tradition. I believe Morgan recognizes and acknowledges that in her other writing.

2. I disagree that Little Light’s poem uses the monster metaphor in the same way Morgan did..

3. I disagree that Robin Morgan’s words are the property of a certain kind of feminism. While Morgan is a radical feminist, she and her writings are accepted and celebrated by all kinds of feminists. I think that’s a wonderful.

4. I disagree that feminist writers benefit from owning certain words, metaphors, etc.

5. I disagree that Little Light’s goal on her blog or in her poem was to colonize women.

I have not asked you to shutup. In fact, I’ve asked you to speak more and to clarify so I can understand your point of view. Disagreement with you on this issue does not spell hatred of women. I have read comments from many people in many places that disagree with you without “going over” to the side of your enemies. And I think it’s sad that you do not see us and do not support us.

OK. More to come. I need to look at the threads more closely and do that thing I was afraid I might: compare the two poems like the English major I used to be before I dropped out of college and joined the working class -- one of the best decisions of my life because I absolutely hated college and I pretty much love my craft.

10:42 pm -- Edited to add a comparison of the two poems

Comparing the poems:

Morgan speaks from a place of sheer exhaustion:

"Listen. I’m really slowly dying
inside myself tonight….

"Well, I am dying, suffocating from this hopelessness tonight,
from this dead weight of struggling….

"Do you understand? Dying. Going crazy.
Really. No poetic metaphor….

"Oh mother, I am tired and sick."

Morgan desperately wants to be in another place, but sees that reality as a far-off dream:

"I want a woman’s revolution like a lover.
I lust for it, I want so much this freedom,
this end to struggle and fear and lies
we all exhale, that I could die just
with the passionate uttering of that desire….

"Just once in this my only lifetime to dance
all alone and bare on a high cliff under cypress trees
with no fear of where I place my feet…."

"Sweet revolution,…"

Morgan believes the only way overcome her exhaustion and reach her desire is through pain:

"…to admit suffering is to begin
the creation of freedom….

"You’ve already taken me away from myself
with my only road back to go forward
into more madness, monsters, cobwebs, nausea…

"May my hives bloom bravely until my flesh is aflame
and burns through the cobwebs.
May we go mad together, my sisters …."


Little Light’s poem, on the other hand, rejoices in her struggle, in her refusal to give in to the pain:

There are a million and one ways out of this body, and I have clung to it, tooth and claw, despite an endless line of people and institutions who would rather I vacate the premises, and have sometimes been willing to make me bleed to convince me they're right…

"I have looked leaving my body in the eye and I have said, in the end, hell no….

"I will cling fast to this life no matter how far you drive me, how deep, with how many torches and pitchforks, biting back the whole way down. I will not give you my suicide. I will not give you my surrender…."

Little Light hangs on because the way forward is not pain, but solidarity:

"There is too much to do, too much to love, too many who need one more of us to say hell no and help them say the same…

"…because this is a monster's creed. It is for the cobbled-together, the sewn-up, the grafted-on. It is for the golden, the under-the-earth, the foreign, the travels-by-night; the filthy ship-sinking cave-dwelling bone-cracking gorgeousness that says hell no, I am not tidy. I am not easy. I am not what you suppose me to be…

"This is for the Gorgons and the vampires and the chimaeras, for Cybele and Baba Yaga, Hel and Ashtoreth, for Lamia and Scylla, for Kali and Kapo 'ula-kina'u. This is for all of them with teeth…."

"My monstrousness is not a place of shame. It is a strength…."

Little Light’s desire is not the dream Morgan lusts for, it is a reality she can create and demands to have acknowledged right here and right now:

" It is time. It is time to say that we are beautiful in our fierceness, and that we are our own. We are not the rejected of what we can never be. We are what we were meant to be. We are not pieces of wholes thrown together incorrectly. We are not mistakes….

"I am throwing my head back, here, and saying it: no more being afraid. Hell no.

"I am choosing to stay here, and it is mine to choose. And if that means changing shape, if that means putting together the unexpected, that is any monster's ancient right."

Therefore I see Morgan's poem as an expression of despair, pain and a stoic determination to go forward knowing the dream is a long way away.

I see Little Light as refusing to acknowledge the pain, to chose love and solidarity and to rejoice in our differences.

These are two very different viewpoints of life as we live it now and of what the future holds for all of us.