Feminist Poetry & Editorial Labor at Amazon Quarterly,  Chrysalis, and Sinister Wisdom

Editorial labor was a crucial — but often overlooked — aspect of creating not only the body of work we now recognize as feminist poetry (and its varied lineages) but also the politics and composition of feminist movements more broadly. Attention to the feminist editorial work that took place during the 1970s and 80s illuminates its role in community formation. So many of the poets now considered emblematic of feminist movements also played critical roles as editors, particularly in the small feminist magazines and journals that were so crucial to emerging feminist communities. Considering their role as editors restores a sense of how these now iconic feminists were situated within networks and communities, helping us to avoid playing into the "exceptional woman" notions that they all worked against. As scholars including Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Julie Enszer, and SaraEllen Strongman have noted, it was often in their work as poetry editors that these feminists engaged in contentious debates on racism and homophobia in the feminist movement. Furthermore, it was through editorial labor that they engaged with questions about poetry's role in feminist movements. Editing poetry ultimately became a practice that created rich ground for working through questions of identity and exclusion.

Here, I will consider the editorial tenure of poets at three feminist magazines in the U.S.: Audre Lorde's role as poetry editor, first at Amazon Quarterly (1974-1975) and then Chrysalis (1977-1979) (with some attention to June Jordan's role as contributing editor at the same magazine), and Adrienne Rich and Michele Cliff's role as general editors of Sinister Wisdom (1981-1983). Coinciding with a 10-year boom in small-press and grassroots feminist publishing (often known as the women in print movement), these three examples allow us to explore the editorial practices of well-known feminist poets. These periodicals also had a lasting impact, despite their small circulations; they were (particularly Chrysalis and Sinister Wisdom) publications that cemented the status and reach of some of the feminist authors from the period who remain most widely known today.

To reconstruct the editorial politics of these feminist poets, I draw on research conducted in the archival collections of feminist writers, publications, and organizations, alongside paratextual material from these publications and archival research conducted by other scholars. 1 An archival methodology helps to make visible the afterlives of this editing and its impact on poets who would go on to have successful careers as poets, teachers, organizers, and activists, as such creating some of the links that would forge feminist communities. In addition to the magazines themselves, I draw on materials including the editors' correspondence, their nonfiction writing, and even their own poems to reconstruct the editorial ethos that characterized the editing of feminist poetry.2 The archival materials I've looked at don't generally provide records of developmental or line editing on the poems themselves, but rather of the editors' role in curating selections from the many submissions they received. Accordingly, I'm seeking here to both describe and theorize how their editorial practices shaped the emergent body of work that is now recognized as feminist poetry, as well as the role of poetry for feminist communities. Attention to these editorial practices also makes visible the conflicts within feminist communities that risk being obscured when we consider only the publications themselves.

As opposed to a more traditional gate-keeping model of editing, poetry editors in these venues took on a role more akin to community-building: they sought to connect readers with new approaches to language and new modes of thought and to connect poets with wider networks of support and readership.3 I draw attention here to how editors served as mentors and community-builders: connecting writers not only with publication opportunities (often beyond the journal), but also with teaching opportunities, grant and fellowship opportunities (and other means of material support), reading lists and suggestions, and connections that would lead to friendship or romance.

Poetry in particular became a site for challenging the centrality of white feminists' experiences and asking feminist organizations to rethink their own values and politics. It is therefore particularly important to look at how and when poetry — and editorial work on poetry — was valued and when it was sidelined or undercut. Like any editorial or curatorial practice, the role of poetry editors involved selecting some poems and rejecting others, and there were contentious exchanges over whose work was valued and prioritized. In the examples I'll consider here, dialogues regarding editorial practices highlighted racism within feminist periodicals and organizations, even when the exchanges were ostensibly about poetry and genre. I address this editorial labor in all its complexity, seeking to understand how the work of these poets-as-editors has continued to shape legacies of not only feminist poetry, but feminist thought more broadly.

Feminist Periodicals and the Affective Politics of Editing

In The Feminist Poetry Movement, Kim Whitehead claims that unlike other "schools" or movements of poetry, feminist poetry has

no identifiable birth date, no mythologized beginning . . . Instead, feminist poetry began in a hundred places at once, in writing workshops and at open readings, on the kitchen tables of self-publishing poet/activists, and in the work of already established women poets who began slowly to transform their ideas about formal strategies and thematic possibilities.4

While there was no one defining moment, in the 1970s there emerged a sense that just as poetry was valuable for the women who wrote and read it, it was also important for feminist movements: that it was an important "tool" in conveying and creating the kind of shifts in consciousness and culture that feminists desired.5 While many of the best-known feminist poets went on to publish in mainstream venues (and receive honors and accolades from the broader literary community), a number of their best-known works were first published in small feminist periodicals and chapbooks published by feminist presses.6 These poems debuted at feminist poetry readings and feminist bookstores, and were thus shaped by the ethos of community-formation that guided these spaces.7 Alongside these community spaces, feminist periodicals played a particularly important role in generating this poetry movement as well as emergent feminist communities.

Almost all of these journals, magazines, newsletters, and survival guides published poetry. Looking back through their tables of contents and lists of contributors, we find now-famous names (like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Robin Morgan) mixed in among more obscure poets — either those who went on to have quieter careers as writers or activists or those who published poems only for a short time. This wave of feminist poetry in small periodicals did not occur in a vacuum and coincided with a boom of poetry anthologies, which had much larger circulations.8 The periodicals, however, moreso than the anthologies, contributed to what Adrienne Rich, among others, would term an emerging "women's culture" that developed alongside and in support of feminist movement. In a December 1977 letter to Kirsten Grimstad, one of the editors Chrysalis, Rich, asked for fliers to advertise the magazine:

I'm doing, in conjunction with reading at various campuses, workshops on "female culture" in which I read aloud from feminist journals, discuss the kinds of new work appearing therein, and urge women to subscribe and use these resources — in particular women who want to write. I'm asking all the feminist journals to send me subscription blanks or fliers which I can take with me and distribute. I've found the response is intense to readings of work selected from magazines like Chrysalis, Sinister Wisdom, Heresies, Conditions, 13^th Moon, etc. Women hear the difference between these writings and what they are ordinarily exposed to. I also make a political pitch about the responsibility we all have to the survival of women's culture.9

Rich sees magazines as crucial for feminism and for what she terms "women's culture." Her papers housed at the Schlesinger Library reveal that she made numerous financial donations to the magazines and journals that were part of this "women's culture," and ordered multiple subscriptions to these magazines and journals to send to her friends and contacts.

Because of the centrality of these periodicals to this emergent "women's culture" and the political movements they reflected, inspired, and supported, it is crucial also to draw our attention to the often-invisible labor of editing (here, of poetry in particular) that shaped their content and circulation. In her book, In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism, Margaretta Jolly analyzes what she terms a "culture of relationship" as a driving ideal in "second-wave" feminism that was, at the time, "being theorized as special to women's values and communities."10 Jolly sees this culture at play in letters between feminists through "a powerful assumption of both identity and mutual care between women," and I would extend her thinking to argue that similar assumptions about identity and mutual care (sometimes well-founded, sometimes not) are at play in the editorial practices of movement-related publications and editors. Jolly also notes, however, the difficulties and perhaps impossibilities of living up to the ideals of this culture of relationship, something that is played out in feminist editorial practices in periodicals as well, through the multiple conflicts, frustrations, and difficulties of bringing visions into print.

The challenges faced by feminist periodicals demonstrate how this editorial labor both mirrors and reshapes larger debates and issues within feminist movements. Accordingly, analyzing these editorial practices allows us to better understand the complexity of feminist politics. Heather Milne and Kate Eichhorn argue for an understanding of "editing not as work that first and foremost leads to the production of texts but rather as work that produces social networks and forms of community" and advocate for understanding editing through the lens of "affective" rather than literal "economies."11 Furthermore, they claim that:

the affective labour of editing is instrumental to the formation of canons, counter-canons, and movements, as well as, perhaps most importantly, to the facilitation of social relations. Editorial labour creates proximities across space and time, including relationships across generations. It is frequently the catalyst for establishing new social networks, new communities, and sometimes simply what makes existing social networks and communities visible to people working beyond their borders.12

Thus, it is crucial to turn our attention to editorial labor to understand the role of poetry in shaping feminist movements and communities. While anthology editors are engaged in "keeping things in movement" as well as "breaking things apart," the poetry editors for the periodicals I discuss here were engaged putting things in movement — both in the sense of circulation and of feminist movement — often for the very first time, of creating entry points into circulation.13 Building on the work of Sianne Ngai, Milne and Eichhorn suggest that "acts of disidentification, of asserting generational, political, or aesthetic differences within feminism," play a central role in shaping feminist community.14 In examining both the literary and affective labor of feminist poetry editing in these periodicals, I emphasize how the work of these feminists as poetry editors produced not only a growing body of feminist literature, but also new conversations about emerging feminist politics and who was included and excluded from feminist definitions of community. In the case of these periodicals, feminist poetry editors shaped feminist community not only through constructive acts of network building, but also through acts of disidentification and critique.

Valuing Poetry as Feminist Thought: Audre Lorde as Amazon Quarterly Poetry Editor (1974-1975)

Amazon Quarterly published nine issues, including a special double issue, between Fall 1972 and March 1975. Its subtitle, "A lesbian feminist arts journal," gave a sense of the mission of its Oakland-based founders. Audre Lorde joined as poetry editor for the March 1974 issue (Volume 2, Issue 3) and continued until the final issue in 1975.15 While the journal began with only two general editors, one other poetry editor preceded Lorde: Jennie Orvino (Volume 1, Issue 3, May 1973 - Volume 2, Issue 2, also 1973). In her biography of Lorde, Alexis De Veaux notes that her role at Amazon Quarterly hinted to Barbara Smith that Lorde might be a lesbian; the two had not yet met, although Smith had encountered Lorde's work through her teaching. This anecdote gives us a sense of how these periodicals became a conduit for feminists seeking community; here, linking a newly out Smith with another Black lesbian writer. These connections through the circulation of print materials often preceded in-person connections.16

At this point in her career, Lorde had published multiple books of poetry with small presses; her next book, Coal (1976), would be her first with a larger press, W.W. Norton.17 She had also begun her teaching career with posts at Tougaloo College, Lehman College, and John Jay College. Her work was finding increasing circulation among feminist and lesbian readership, spurred both by her publications in feminist periodicals and her participation in feminist readings, workshops, and events.18 The AQ editors introduce her in the "From Us" section of the March 1974 issue, writing "As some of you may have noticed, we have a new poetry editor, Audre Lorde. She is a Black lesbian-feminist poet in NYC — read her review of Sula in this issue. We're happy to welcome her to AQ."

Lorde's correspondence makes clear that as an editor, she solicited poems from wide-ranging sources beyond her established or familiar network of feminist poets. In a letter to her close friend Pat Parker, an Oakland-based Black lesbian feminist poet who was preparing for a reading at a prison19, for example, Lorde writes,"Of course you can read my poems to the women. But do something for me: find out if any of them are writing themselves, and ask them to send their poems to me for consideration to publish in Amazon Quarterly. I want to do a POETRY FOR PRISON issue."20 In a response detailing the subsequent reading at the prison, Parker writes, "Spent most of the second reading listening to their poetry. Some of which was really good. Told them to send it off to you."21 Enszer notes that outreach to women in prison was a common practice for feminist magazines and journals, but Lorde imagined incarcerated women not simply as a potential audience for the journal, but as potential poetry contributors.22 This solicitation by proxy is but one example of her editorial practice of seeking out and encouraging writers she encountered in her activism and through her networks.

While the poets published in AQ during Lorde's short time as editor were mostly white lesbians, her correspondence makes clear that she solicited a more racially diverse range of poets. Furthermore, Lorde also actively sought out poems that explicitly engaged questions of race (while in AQ publishing poems of her own that did so, such as "The Same Death Over and Over Or Lullabies Are For Children") — a subject absent from the poems the magazine had previously published. She twice pushed Parker to send her poems for AQ in 1974, noting in her second request that "I particularly want the long poem and the poem to white women who want to be friendly (I can't remember the exact title) for AQ. AND FAST. We go to press on the 20^th. Can you make it?"23 While Parker eventually sent her the poems, which Lorde acknowledged in a subsequent undated letter, they were too late for the requested issue (and ultimately too late for the journal, which ended its run shortly thereafter).24

AQ'spoetry section under Lorde's editorship received a significant number of poems — a testament, though unacknowledged by the general editors, to her effectiveness in generating and soliciting submissions. In the general editors' "From Us" section of the final issue, they note that:

Many good poems have gone unpublished for lack of space. At this point, our poetry editor has asked that we declare a moratorium on poetry submissions until June 1 so that she can catch up with the backlog she has now. We are receiving about 500 poems a month. We hope this may be encouragement to some of you to try your hand at essays or fiction which we never receive enough of.25

While they do not seem ungrateful or dismissive of the outpouring of poetry, the editors fail to consider why they were receiving so much of it: the visibility of Lorde as poetry editor? Lorde's outreach and solicitations? For writers and editors like Lorde, who were encouraging women to write and share poetry, this outpouring of poetry submissions was itself a kind of success, albeit one that the general editors seemed to undervalue in relation to the other forms of writing they encouraged readers to submit.

However, Lorde's attempts to create this new network of variously-situated feminist poets were cut short after she decided to leave the journal out of frustration, a decision that corresponded with what she predicted might be the journal's final issue (it was). In a letter to Pat Parker on July 15, 1975, she alludes to the situation:

What's gone down in the past few months re AQ is too ugly to rehash — suffice it to say the next issue will probably be the last — at any rate it will certainly be my last. I've given your two poems to the women planning the Amazon Poets Anthology & you should be hearing directly from there. If this is not to your desire, tell me & I'll get them back — it's just that I wanted the women whose poems I'd intended to print in AQ (yours among them) to have some other option other than the gnashing of teeth . . . 26

Her attempts to place the work she had accepted for Amazon Quarterly points to her commitments to the poets themselves and to the importance of poetry for the movement. Rather than understanding this work as supporting a particular journal by finding poetry that would best aid its mission (although, of course, she did this as well), her primary commitment was to sharing the poetry that she found significant with a broader community, no matter the venue.

While Lorde's letter to Parker doesn't explicitly name the problems at AQ that led her to resign, the AQ' editors' skepticism over poetry's value in relation to other forms of feminist thought and writing gives us a clue as to where their disagreements lay. The end of the final issue includes a letter (addressed to "Dear Friends") on why they've ceased publication.27 While many other feminist periodicals closed for financial reasons, the editors here cite the kinds of submissions they've received as one of their primary reasons — they did not receive enough submissions for their proposed theme of "Energy" for their next issue and seemed frustrated by a lack of submission on topics not directly related to lesbianism or lesbian feminism — a shift they had asked for explicitly in previous issues. However, poetry was the exception to the rule of their trouble with submissions. They note parenthetically that "Poetry is another matter — Audre Lorde has enough poetry she has chosen to print in AQ to make up nearly a whole issue — but we don't feel it would be fair to AQ's readers, or make a good magazine, to publish only poetry."28 Knowing her frustrations with the magazine, it is hard not to read into this aside. Her values as an editor seem here to be at odds with those of the general editors. The final letter also suggests that the editors had come to view the role of art and poetry in opposition to readers' needs for material support and interpersonal connection. They ultimately felt the need for the latter was stronger and not what the magazine could adequately provide, despite its companion publication Connections, which facilitated connections between readers seeking and offering various types of assistance and connection. Lorde clearly never saw such an opposition; after all, as she would famously claim in her 1977 essay, "poetry is not a luxury."29

Lorde critiqued the dismissal of poetry as an integral part of the creation of "women's culture" in another one of her essays, "Age, Race, Gender, Class: Women Re-Defining Difference," where she wrote:

Recently a women's magazine collective made the decision for one issue to print only prose, saying poetry was a less "rigorous" or "serious" art form. Yet even the form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers? When we speak of a broadly based women's culture, we need to be aware of the effect of class and economic differences on the supplies available for producing art.30

While this essay was first delivered as a talk in April 1980, almost five years after she ended her work with AQ, the parallels are obvious. The editors' seeming dismissiveness of the poetry submissions at AQ speaks to one of Lorde's possible frustrations with the journal, one that would unfortunately recur in her next editorial role at Chrysalis. Lorde was upset with the lack of respect the Chrysalis editors demonstrated for poetry, a lack of respect that she and June Jordan saw as connected to the problems of racism that caused them both to leave the magazine. Through her editorial practices (including her resignation as a practice of refusal), Lorde was already in 1975 beginning to make the case that poetry is an important site for feminist discourse, one that must be taken seriously to recognize "the effect of class and economic differences" and, as will become more explicit in her correspondence with Chrysalis editors, the racism present within feminist organizations and the differences among women of different races.

Poetry as a Site for Challenging Racism within Feminism: Audre Lorde at Chrysalis (1977-1979)

In a postscript to her July 1975 letter to Parker about the end of her work with AQ, Lorde attempted to find a silver lining: "AQ shouldn't have been a total loss, at least I've learned something — if only to say no in the future!"31 Despite that frustrating experience, however, Lorde accepted the role of poetry editor for another feminist magazine, Chrysalis, just a year later, serving from the magazine's first issue in 1977 until her resignation in January 1979. During this period, her own renown and stature as both a poet and a Black lesbian feminist grew: from 1976 to 1979, she published three new books of poetry (two with W.W. Norton); drafted a number of the essays that would eventually comprise her foundational essay collection, Sister Outsider; and became an in-demand speaker at activist events and gatherings, universities, and academic conferences (including the Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference, the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Conference, and the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women).

Chrysalis, edited by Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie, published ten issues from 1977 to 1980 and was framed as "a new magazine of women's culture." In the letter that opened the first issue, the editorial collective described the mission of Chrysalis as a representation and manifestation of feminist activism:

Chrysalis . . . takes its form and content from the women's movement itself. Feminism is not a monolithic movement, but rather includes the experiences, values, priorities, agendas of women of all lifestyles, ages, and cultural and economic backgrounds. Women building practical alternatives to patriarchal institutions, women developing new theories and feminist perspectives on events and ideas, women expressing their visions in verbal or visual art forms — women's culture includes all of this, and Chrysalis exists to give expression to the spectrum of opinion and creativity that originates in that diversity.32

The first issue worked to enact this mission — to include "practical alternatives . . . new theories and perspectives . . . and women expressing their visions" — with pieces that spanned genres: poems, fiction, original art, resource catalogs (one on healing and one on menstruation), book reviews, and a number of pieces of nonfiction and criticism on topics ranging from childhood sexual abuse to redesigning the domestic workplace. From the outset, Chrysalis published the work of poets who were much more well-known than those in AQ (its first issue alone included poems by Rich, Lorde, and Honor Moore), suggesting that Lorde's challenge as editor was less about attracting submissions and more about shaping the kind of work the magazine was publishing and the function poetry served within in.33

In stepping into the role of poetry editor at Chrysalis, Lorde made even more explicit her understanding of poetry's role for feminists and how the relationship between poetry and feminism informed her editorial ethos. Two years after her resignation from AQ and about a year into her tenure at Chrysalis, Lorde published her now-classic essay, "Poetry is Not a Luxury," in Chrysalis #3 (March 1977) under the title "Poems are not Luxuries." The essay's title seems to have been inspired from a back-and-forth between Lorde and Grimstad on the amount of space set aside for poetry in Chrysalis: Lorde wrote to Grimstad in March 1977 that "Poems are not after-thoughts; they are not addenda; they are not luxuries."34 Grimstad would, two months later, ask that "For issue 3, I would like you to write on the subject of "Why Poems are Not Luxuries," to use your words."35 In the resulting essay (which did not change substantially from the version first published in Chrysalis to that included in Sister Outsider), Lorde argues that:

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.36

The essay goes on to position this view of poetry as opposed to the tradition of the "white fathers" and "living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization," as it values poetry and the exploration of everyday lives and experiences as potential sources of knowledge, particularly those of women and more specifically women of color.37 She writes about poetry as a mode of knowledge creation, of community-building, and of political action.

Considering the essay in light of Lorde's editorial practices, it seems probable that it was, at least in part, inspired by the devaluing of poetry that she experienced at AQ (and would go on to experience, in different forms, at Chrysalis). In perhaps an acknowledgment of this devaluing, her intervention in the pages of Chrysalis comes in the form of prose — closer to the "theory" that the general editors would later come to place in opposition to poetry. By publishing the essay in the magazine for which she was poetry editor, she was perhaps attempting to avoid the sidelining of poetry she witnessed at AQ. What is notable about this foundational essay in relation to Lorde's editorial practice is how it is addressed not to "poets" but to "women" — women who might write poetry. The essay is, at its heart, a call to action — a call for more women to write poetry. We might even think of it in contrast to a more typical "call for submissions" — Lorde here extends the problem of editing and curating feminist poetry to an earlier moment in the writing process. For there to be poems to edit and publish, women must first be encouraged to write and to write in ways that disregard those modes and ideas "the white fathers told us were precious."38

As with AQ, however, in order to fully understand the contributions of Lorde's editorial labor at Chrysalis, we must consider not only the poems and writers that she encouraged and published, but also her interventions and efforts with the magazine's general editors — a legacy most visible in archival materials surrounding the periodical. SaraEllen Strongman and Alexis Pauline Gumbs have written about Lorde's challenges to Chrysalis's editors over its white feminist perspective.39 Their scholarship makes clear that Black women's editorial practices played an integral role not only in shaping the kinds of poetry feminist periodicals published and the communities of poets they created, but also in forcing feminist publications (and their often white editors) to confront issues of racism within the women's movement. In a letter to the editors after the first issue of Chrysalis, the poet Patricia Jones complained about the whiteness of the issue's list of contributors (Lorde — who had a poem included — was the only woman of color): "Please think seriously of opening up this magazine to Black and Third World Women in this country and to women in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America. . . . You must remain aware of the fact that often without constant input racism becomes institutionalized."40 Beyond this letter, however, the record of this conflict is not evident in the magazine itself; the struggle to deal with racism becomes visible only in what Gumbs terms the magazine's "shadow archive" — in the papers of its contributors and editors.41 A subsequent letter from Jones, written in October 1979 and preserved in Lorde's papers, is a prime example of this shadow archive. It did not appear in the magazine, but incisively indicts the editors' failures to take up the concerns she raised after that first issue:

there is still a continuing refusal to allow black and other women of color a complete and integral participation in the philosophical, psychological and public elements of the women's movement...as an organ of the movement, Chrysalis reflects not only the limitations of the current movement, but also a limited vision of a women's culture. 42

Letters between members of the Chrysalis editorial collective and Lorde (and later with Rich and contributing editor June Jordan) illustrate that some of these more intense debates over the magazine's failure to support and take seriously the work of women of color never made it into its pages.43 Letters exchanged with Grimstad as early as February 1977 make clear that Lorde was concerned that the journal was "shortchanging poetry"44 and her October 30, 1977 letter about the "growing inattention to poetry at Chrysalis," which was copied to other contributing editors at the magazine, emphasizes that the concerns were not hers alone. She writes in this letter:

I ask that you be sensitive also to the way this insult appears to a community of First World [sic] women who watch and wait to see the ways in which Chrysalis makes real its verbal commitment to the culture of all women.45 The Chicana and Native American poets who I am even now encouraging to submit work to us are not unaffected by this [treatment of Jordan's poems].46

Lorde suggests in the same letter that the editors add Barbara Smith as a contributing editor to address the underrepresentation of women of color.

Lorde and Jordan's letters addressed the journal's failure to give poems adequate space (for example, squeezing two of Jordan's poems together on one page despite including blank pages as section breaks),47 the omission of Toi Derricote's poem from an issue (when she was the one Black poet slated for inclusion),48 and what Jordan termed its "flagrant disregard of the Black woman in America."49 In July 1979, after Lorde had already resigned, she wrote to reiterate her request that her name be taken off the masthead and wrote a detailed critique of the racism she saw in the magazine and its editorial processes.50 These critiques went unanswered by the Chrysalis editors and in fact, they continued corresponding with Rich — a white woman — while ignoring Lorde's and Jordan's letters.51 Both Lorde and Jordan resigned from their positions because of the racism they experienced and the treatment of poetry in the magazine (Rich also resigned in solidarity).

The "shadow archive" Gumbs and Strongman have investigated provides the missing context for the magazine's final opening letter, in which the editors include a few paragraphs on their failure to address racism (without actually mentioning Lorde and Jordan's departures) and ask readers to help them: "So we ask readers, Third World and white, to join us, to help us open the pages of Chrysalis to thinking about, exploring, and confronting the issues of racism and, specifically, racism in the feminist movement."52 These lines ironically prefigure what Lorde would write in "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference" (first presented later that year at Amherst College): "Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes."53 In this same letter, the editors downplay the poetry and essays that had been women of color's primary contributions to the magazine: "But where is the theory? Where is the hard-hitting, muck-raking investigative reporting?"54 The dismissal of poetry here echoes (perhaps even more explicitly) its seemingly second-tier status at Amazon Quarterly. In both cases, the only women of color in editorial roles were poetry or literary editors and, in both cases, the general editors expressed frustration with the inadequacy of poetry as feminist contributions.55

Gumbs argues that the editors' failure to deal with racism within the women's movement is inextricable not only from a politics of representation, but also from their failure to deal with poetry:

their supposed dedication to addressing the issue of racism could not deal with the issue of poetry which was the form of transformation the editors had resisted in the first place. In fact, Chrysalis's decision was to manage the critiques launched by the trouble making poets by excluding poetry from the magazine completely. They note that they have stopped accepting poetry in a manner that seems to prove that they have not learned to read the racism of their own narrative. Citing Jamaican poet Honor Moore's encouragement "write poems, women," they proceed to nullify it, explaining that they are overwhelmed by the amount of poetry they receive. . . . Conveniently, (speaking of muck to be raked) the editors do not relate their feeling of overwhelm at the amount of poetry to the fact that their poetry editor, Audre Lorde, has long since resigned.56

Gumbs's argument here bolsters my conviction that the editing of poetry became a crucial site for negotiating what it meant to be feminist and what a "women's movement" was meant to address and achieve. Through her work as poetry editor ­­— soliciting poets, corresponding with editors, and making and evaluating decisions about how poetry appeared in the magazine's pages — Lorde pushed the Chrysalis collective to grapple with the racism embedded in their editorial practices, a challenge whose effects extended beyond the bounds of the magazine and its print run.

Not Only Publishing, But Preserving: Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich at Sinister Wisdom (1981-1983)

During the period when Lorde was serving as editor at Amazon Quarterly and Chrysalis, her work was also appearing in Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian-feminist magazine founded in 1976 by Catherine Nicholson and Harriett Ellenberger (aka Desmoines). 57). Alongside Lorde's, Rich's poems were also published in four of the first six issues of SW.58 Enszer notes that "lesbians around the country hailed Sinister Wisdom as a vital continuation of the work of Amazon Quarterly."59 Sinister Wisdom did not have a dedicated poetry editor, but always featured poetry, and a number of its editors, including Rich, were poets. When Rich and her partner Michelle Cliff took over the editorship in 1981 for Issue 17 (having taken over distribution in the previous issue), they inherited a magazine that had already been publishing for five years (and continues to this day, under the editorship of poet and scholar Julie Enszer). By this point in 1981, Rich had gained considerable fame as both a poet and a feminist: she had published ten collections of poetry, including 1971's Diving Into the Wreck, which won the National Book Award,60 and she had published two books of non-fiction (Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) and On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (1979)). Cliff, too, was coming into her own as a writer after working as an editor for Norton. Her book Claiming an Identity They Taught Me To Despise had just been published by the feminist publisher Persephone Press the previous year, and the coming years would see her publish a number of novels as well as contributions to feminist anthologies including Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology and Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Writing. In her "Notes for a Magazine" entry in the first issue she and Rich edited (Rich also included one of her own), Cliff remarks on the challenge and necessity of fitting editorial labor into an existing writing practice: "​​I am a thirty-four-year-old woman. A lesbian. A woman of color. I have just begun to write, and I am selfish about my writing and my time. But I have made a lifetime commitment to a revolution of women. I want to serve this revolution. And I want this revolution to be for all women."61 Framing her editorial labor as serving a lesbian-feminist revolution of women, Cliff makes the case for editorial work as a challenge to a feminism that centered middle-class, white, straight women, much as Lorde had done with her push for both diversity and attention to racist dynamics within feminism at Amazon Quarterly and Chrysalis.

In articulating her vision for the magazine, Rich writes of how the founding editors described the creation of Sinister Wisdom as a political action:

We reaffirm that purpose here. We believe that no art, no writing, exists that is not ultimately political. That language and images have the capacity to bolster privilege and oppression, or to tear away at their foundations. We believe that what we read affects our lives. That the images we look at influence how we see. That there are pictures and words that numb us, dull us, keep us circling in one place, others which can challenge us to the quick, heal and empower us.62

In later describing the kind of work she and Cliff hope to publish, she writes:

We want interviews with women who don't usually get interviewed; diary extracts; exchanges of letters . . . We look for poetry which connects lesbian sexuality and passion with the ways lesbians are living in the world beyond the bedroom; we also want poems which examine freshly, from a lesbian and feminist perspective, anything in the universe.63

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as a poet herself, Rich's references to the role of poetry in the magazine — as well as in feminist movement more broadly — differ from those of the Chrysalis and Amazon Quarterly editors. Like Lorde, for example, she writes of the necessity for theory to move from individual experiences to more general principles, using a poem in the issue (Catherine Risingflame Moirai's "Taking Back My Night") as an example — a contrast to pleas for women to write theory instead of just poetry.

Unlike Chrysalis, where Lorde felt poems were used as filler (slotted into blank spaces at the ends of other pieces rather than presented on their own pages with appropriate spacing), Sinister Wisdom prominently featured poetry from Cliff and Rich's first issue as editors.64 Poems were interspersed throughout the magazine, suggesting that Cliff and Rich were concerned with the new thinking a work introduced, regardless of genre.65 Sinister Wisdom not only featured poetry prominently in its organization (and in the quantity of poems featured in each issue), but during this period published significantly more women of color than did Amazon Quarterly or Chrysalis, including work by now-prominent women of color feminists including Audre Lorde, Willyce Kim, Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Joy Harjo. A number of well-known writers (and more specifically, poets) were published multiple times over the course of Rich and Cliff's tenure; they clearly had an established network of contributors developed from their long histories in both feminist publishing and activism. However, the issues they edited also included new and emerging voices. Diana Bickston, for example, describes herself in her contributor biography as "​​a 27-year-old lesbian. She began writing in a prison workshop in Arizona. She has a chapbook published by COSMEP, and is working on a manuscript of poems and short stories."66

Under Rich and Cliff's tenure, there were two significant occasions when they drew upon the editorial labor women of color outside of the editorial staff efforts to diversify the voices featured: Issue 18 included a substantial amount of work (including numerous poems) initially published in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga,67and Issue 22/23 (a double issue), titled "A Gathering of Spirit" and focusing on writing by "Native American women writers," was guest edited by Beth Brandt, a Mohawk writer, essayist, and poet.68 While neither of these were moves to specifically bring in poetry editors, Brandt, Anzaldúa, and Moraga were all poets whose expertise as editors Rich and Cliff trusted, in a departure from both Chrysalis's and Amazon Quarterly's failures to incorporate the visionary change that Lorde's work as poetry editor promised.69

Cliff and Rich's editorial ethos is also reflected in some of the rejection letters to potential Sinister Wisdom contributors. Two such letters were published in an issue of Sinister Wisdom (87, Fall 2012) that paid tribute to Rich after her death. The fact that two of the tributes to Rich include rejection letters she sent indicates that writers and artists valued and saved their editorial correspondence from Rich and Cliff, even when they were rejected, suggesting that the care and attention the letters conveyed were meaningful to the recipients. A rejection letter to the now-famous cartoonist Alison Bechdel gives us a sense of how they both encouraged and challenged emerging writers.70 In a comic, Bechdel describes a rejection letter from Rich at SW as "one of my most prized possessions" and then redraws — in Bechdel's archivally-driven style of cartooning — a portion of the rejection letter in her own hand.71 While the panel reproduces only the beginning of the rejection letter from July 23, 1982, an interview with Bechdel in Hyperallergic includes a photo of the original letter in its entirety.72 The letter offers encouragement and thoughtful editorial suggestions for developing the work while making clear that Rich doesn't view it as publishable in its current form:

We're sorry to be returning this, but we feel that it's the kind of writing that may be important for the writer, but is not sufficiently dense or rich for us to consider publishing it. In a way, it reads as if you and the various girls or women to whom you've been attracted are the only people in the world. And even these people are not followed through — were you able to remain friends with Janet? What finally lets you know that it's alright to be a lesbian? What withheld that knowledge from you before you were nineteen? The series of episodes are not explored deeply enough to interest someone who didn't live through them — you keep the narration at a rather superficial level. Even for yourself, I think it would be useful to go back and ask yourself some real questions as to the meaning of each incident, and its context.

I hope this is helpful. Don't be put off, or discouraged. Writing is a very long, demanding training, more hard work than luck. Strength to you.

In sisterhood,

Adrienne Rich73

Rich here reiterates the value of lesbians' everyday lives and personal experiences, while simultaneously reminding Bechdel that individual experience itself is not sufficient — it requires sustained work, thought, and feeling to make it matter to others and (relatedly and perhaps implicitly) to connect it to broader social and political concerns. Rich's work as a teacher comes through here as well in her editorial persona as she poses questions that the young Bechdel might want to consider in a possible revision of the piece, guiding her through not simply how the submission might be improved, but how she might improve herself as a writer.74

Similarly, a "form letter" of rejection received by Merry Gangemi (included as a seemingly affectionate postscript to Gangemi's "Reflective Obituary" on Rich) gives us a sense of how Rich and Cliff responded to contributors by encouraging their projects without being afraid to indicate either that work was not right for the magazine or that it would benefit from further revision:

We regret sending you a form letter in response to your poems. We receive almost three times as much poetry as fiction, visual art, essays or other prose. Because we try to keep a balance of kinds of materials, forms, themes, voices in Sinister Wisdom, we are unable to publish all the poems we would like. We also return poems which are not clear enough, too abstract, or which feel unfinished. Some work we receive does not carry forward our concerns as a lesbian/feminist publication. We also realize that we may not be responsive to the particular quality of your work — where another editorial group would be.

We wish we could offer individual comments to every contributor. Since we can't, we urge you to form writing support groups with other women who will challenge you, encourage you to push further, and confirm you in your strengths. Lesbian/feminist publishing is a relatively new, stubborn, but endangered phenomenon, and we do not have enough outlets. Other ways of getting your work out might be: organizing group readings, reading at coffeehouses, printing and distributing your work yourself or with others, as many writers have done. We urge you also to send your work to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, P.O. Box 1258, New York, N.Y. 10001, or to write them for names of other, local lesbian archives.75

Thank you for sending us your poetry. Strength to your work, your life. 76

The rejection letter's concern that those submitting to the journal both continue to develop their own writing and find ways to get it out into the world is notable. As was the case with Chrysalis and Amazon Quarterly, they note the predominance of poetry submissions, but instead of viewing this as any sort of failure, encourage writers to take advantage of other venues — both those already existing and those they might create for themselves through various forms of community-building. The suggestion to form "writing support groups" and organize "group readings," rather than simply to send their work to another publication, emphasizes their focus on feminist editing as a necessarily collective endeavor. In line with the "culture of relationship" that Jolly has theorized, Cliff and Rich advocated for writers to find space for their work in conjunction with others and to create spaces for others rather than focusing on competing for a limited few spots in prestigious publications.

Outside of the pages of the magazine, Rich also wrote of the necessity of rigorous criticism and attention to craft, challenging a binary way of thinking in which literary or editorial standards are viewed as in opposition to political aims of social justice. In a letter to Polly Joan in response to a questionnaire for the Women Writing Network, Rich wrote:

I care very deeply for what I've come to think of as the "ecology" of women's writing — a varied, complex ground in which all kinds of work — good, bad, mediocre — needs to exist in order for us to create our own standards and struggle toward our own definitions of value. This ecology makes my own work possible; I lived for many years as one of those isolated women writers. The more women's writing groups, small presses, little magazines, abound, the more women's readings and discussions of new and old work, the stronger will be our arterial network, the more sources we will have access to.77

This emphasis on creating new opportunities to generate writing comes through in the letter Gangemi received, as does an emphasis on assembling and preserving "sources we will have access to" — a record of feminist lives and writing that Rich and others had often found lacking in their search for women's writing of the past.

Notable too in the letter that Gangemi received is Rich and Cliff's suggestion that the Lesbian Herstory Archives (or other local lesbian archives) would be suitable places for women to send their work — a suggestion demonstrating their conviction that this writing had not only literary, but also historical significance and should be preserved for future generations. That an unpublished poem might be worthy of being preserved in an archive suggests that Rich and Cliff saw this emerging body of poetry as not only an important literary contribution (albeit an "endangered phenomenon") but also an important record of everyday lesbian lives.

Conclusion

Rich and Cliff's focus on editorial practices that supported and nurtured a diverse community of lesbian poets and encouraged the preservation of that emergent community through writing extended and built upon Lorde's work in using the solicitation, curation, and publication of feminist poetry to challenge the whiteness of mainstream feminist movements. Looking at editorial labor recorded in archival and paratextual materials in addition to what found its way into publications, we recover not only important debates about racism in the women's movement, the role of poetry, and the standards used to determine which work was both published and preserved, but also a more complex sense of the networks and dialogues involved in shaping both these periodicals and their communities of readers. Attention to editorial labor recorded in archival materials highlights not only the debates, conflicts, and controversies, but also the networks that facilitated those controversies — their formation, break-down, and reconfiguration. We can also broaden our understanding of this editorial labor to think about how these editors were integral not only in publishing poetry, but also advocating its preservation more broadly: by encouraging authors to submit their work to archives, to share it in other venues and with other audiences, and to value their own writing process.

In a moment when contemporary feminists find themselves turning back to poets like Rich and Lorde78 for history, context, inspiration, and critique,79 we should not forget their work as editors. Biographies of both Rich and Lorde reference their various editorial activities, but don't devote a significant amount of space to them (Cliff, who died in 2016, has received less critical and biographical attention to date).80 This occlusion might have something to do with the genre of biography — which conventionally emphasizes the work and life of the individual over their collaborations — but also points to the often-unrecognized nature of editorial labor, even within feminist movements, which made more efforts than other literary communities to highlight the process and labor of publishing, as well as organizational and administrative work. It is through this editorial work that we understand these writers not as isolated figures, but as important shapers of community and feminist movement beyond the page — challenging other feminists and feminist organizations to rethink their foundational principles to account for differences among women as well as generating, encouraging, and modeling networks of support that were crucial to understanding poetry's purpose in the world and in the social and political change they sought to enact. In understanding their editorial labor as crucial to both creating the network of feminist poetry as well as grappling with issues of racism, we gain a new understanding not only of these writers themselves but also of the role of both poetry and editorial labor in feminist thought and movements.

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Meredith Benjamin is a Lecturer in First-Year Writing in the English Department at Barnard College. Her writing has appeared in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, American Periodicals, Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and The Edith Wharton Review. 

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Banner image by K. Kendall licensed under CC BY 2.0

References

Thank you to Tim Groenland and Evan Brier for the invitation to be a part of this collection of essays, as well as for their generous feedback, to Arthur Wang and Nia Judelson at Post45 for their thoughtful engagement during the editorial process, and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. I'd like to acknowledge Holly Smith and the staff at the Spelman College Archives as well as the librarians and archivists at the Schlesinger Library for their assistance in accessing various archival materials, Julie Enszer for sharing her extensive knowledge and helping to envision the scope of this article, and Margaret Galvan and Melina Moore, for their insights and support throughout the writing process.