"The movement of second-wave feminism altered poetry by women in this country and all over the world. Women began to more self-consciously put themselves at the center of their poems and to write about female experience openly and to metaphorize it."
-Honor Moore
The Revolution
As the women’s movement began in the 1960s, a feminist literary movement accompanied it. Public readings by women poets were the catalyst for this movement, beginning in the late 60s and booming in the 70s. Honor Moore, renowned American writer and poet, details the radical readings with the following sentiment.
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"It was such fervent days, it’s hard to really communicate how outrageous that we ourselves felt we were being. We were crossing so many boundaries. We talked about sex, we talked about love between women, we complained about housework."
It was at these readings, often categorized as conscious raising groups for women, that women were able to discuss the many facets of their experiences. Sex, romance, intellect, housework, the female body, motherhood, all the experiences that had come to define women, were finally talked about. These conversations on the "woman experience" radically altered feminism and political discourse as it produced art and literature that depicted both the internal and external female life without equivocation or expurgation, as had been done prior. There was an unabashed out-poor that emerged in women’s literary works during this time, an out-poor that transferred the female experience that had always been relegated to the personal sphere to a public sphere, and subsequently, a political sphere. Adrienne Rich, a revolutionary intellect, writer, and advocate during the second wave, articulated this change as, "breaking down the barrier between private and public." Rich was no stranger to making women's experiences public, especially in the eyes of public scrutiny and disapproval. Upon winning the poetry award at the National Book Awards Ceremony in 1974, Adrienne Rich delivered a profound acceptance speech where she accepted the award on behalf of two other feminist, women poets, Audre Lorde and Alice Walker. Her speech commenced with the lines, "We accept this award together in the name of all the women who’s voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world, and in the names of those who like us have been tolerated as token women in this culture, often at great cost and great pain." It was this unity, bravery, and sacrifice from women poets and literary voices who refused to submit to the marginalization of their sex that bolstered the second-wave movement of feminism.
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Shift in Writing
In the 60s and 70s women began exploring forms of poetry previously deemed inaccessible to women writers. The epic poem was tackled by women writers with grace and tenacity. Female-authored poetry began to historically contextualize the female experience and struggle for equality and recognition, hence defining the political vision of the feminist movement. The visceral emotions that women’s writing began to display included outrage, despair, anger, a longing for freedom. These were all untouched or rarely touched reserves of emotional outrage that women had not dared to invoke in writings with such ferocity before. Take Judy Grahn’s 1974 epic poem “A Woman Is Talking To Death.” Not only did the poem personify the confining and restricting expectations of women as a form of lurking death, but it also explored narrative in poetry, philosophy, and the historical oppression of females. This excerpt embodies the shift in tone, skill, and content that audiences saw in second-wave feminist poetry.
Exploring Inner-Self and Possibility
Another literary shift that materialized in second-wave poetry was the exploration of a woman's inner-self and her inherent possibility. Women began depicting the intellectual capacity of their sex and actualizing it in writing. Audre Lorde's 1977 article "Poems are Not Luxuries" demonstrates this exploration of the realm of untapped potential within females in the lines, "These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us hold an incredible reserve of creativity and power, storehouse of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep." By imploring women to embrace their inherent inspiration and creativity, their capacity to transcend their domesticated role, Lorde furthered a sense of communal identity founded in oppression of the self. This poem also exemplifies how female poets began entering the space of the mind as a way to reach an understanding of a mental experience, giving the female mind a landscape.
Publication and Women's Press
In order to put their work at the forefront of literary culture, feminist poets had to publish. The majority of mainstream presses often declined. This led to the proliferation of women presses, created by women for women who did not want to wait to be recognized or verified by a male-dominated realm. One publisher in California named Alta ran the Shameless Hussy Press out of her garage with her mimeograph machine. Women were running discrete publication operations out of their kitchens and living rooms, enlisting the help of local bookstores to bind and staple their works.