Creation

Creation Alexis Pauline Gumbs how does a creative writing editor, who has been with Feminist Studies only for about five issues, speak to fifty years of creative practice? Add to that the importance of the fact that the creative writing in Feminist Studies over the past fifty years has been a major part of creating the feminist literary movement where I live and breathe and have my own revelations. I still don't know what the best thing is to do, but I did what I always do. I looked to the wisdom of the people I admire, the former creative writing editors of Feminist Studies who are also the reason I said YES in the first place to taking on this role! Gratitude to Minnie Bruce Pratt, Evie Shockley, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim, who all said YES back and offered new poems that both reflect on and advance the project of creation still happening in these pages. And also gratitude to former editor Alicia Ostriker, who sent phenomenal poems from her work on Eleanor Roosevelt that we weren't able to include because her book is already published! Minnie Bruce Pratt's "Bog, South of Choctaw County" hails us—US. You and me, the people who think we can read our way through life and go through projecting what we read on to the world we encounter. This poem calls us, the ones who have found ourselves because of our faith in the dangerous, audacious feminist legacy on ground that seems like it can't even hold us. "Watch Where You Put Your Feet" continues with this question of "what can you save?" bringing us into the idea of the [End Page 880] archive and the practice of saving or preserving what we love through our writing. Evie Shockley's "matti lee" is about a freedom sojourner transgressing dress, sexuality, respectability in a way that offers guidance to those of us seeking a way to free ourselves right now. The tracks matti lee leaves become the poem, leading directly to the poet herself and therefore to all of us. In the same freedom energy, Shockley's "facing south" calls on Harriet Tubman to lead us in finding the freedom we need now that the whole planet is "the south," a place of enslavement we have to inhabit and move beyond at the same time. Deftly connecting climate catastrophe to every form of oppression, this poem offers one of deeply moving and effective uses of repetition. In "Prepositions," Shirley Geok-lin Lim offers us a meditation on the part of speech meant to describe relationships so deeply that we remember that our relationship to language is indescribable. And yet we try. "My Brain on Szymborska" reminds us why we continue to work with language by inviting us into the impact of the poet Wisława Szymborska. Rachel DuPlessis offers "Plexiglass," a meditation on the writing on the wall, or more literally, the scratches on the plexiglass offer disobedience as oracle. Like a prophet, she reminds us that the supposedly indestructible, supposedly transparent political system we live on one side of also demands our sharpest tools. And the poem "Several Cosmological Turns" takes us from the mundane to the cosmic, literally exploring quantum physics, our relationship to dark matter, and the possibility of flashes of existence beyond linear time, our presence unbound by time or by individuality. As a group these poems are an archive and a constellation. They are evidence and they are theory. They are home to guide us somewhere we cannot even describe. [End Page 881] Copyright © 2022 Feminist Studies, Inc

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• To strive for a different place than the one we have lived’

  Cristina M Dominguez, Meghan A Watts•Journal of Lesbian Studies•2025

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