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MY: And one of -- my first publisher was Alta who was a radical feminist, she founded the Shameless Hussy Press which published my first book, Camp Notes. She was, in the 1960s I discovered her poetry, I discovered Marge Piercy and the poets actually, the white women poets actually, awakened me to possibilities of the way to write. Up until then I was writing, the kind of writings I was doing at University of Chicago, nothing was in the first person. Everything was like the objective correlative of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the New Criticism period. And even when I got into linguistics, that was a period of when they were analyzing language as if it was a disembodied ob-, like an archaeological object. They were, they were analyzing the components of the language as if it were an archaeological object, and they used carbon 14, they dug up -- they tried to date carbon 14, date the civilization by carbon 14, they tried to apply that to language. And so the whole movement, the whole discipline was trying to, treating language as if it had nothing to do with the human being that was expressing those words, and so the poetry, the kind of poetry -- Shakespeare, we'd spend a couple of semesters counting the number of commas, and counting the number of prepositional phrases in Shakespeare to find out how dense the prose was, things like that. And applying, translating Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn" [Ed. note: Narrator is referring to "Ode on a Grecian Urn"] by algebra, you know. A + B = C and that kind of thing. And all of the mathematical symbols, all the pluses were ands and the buts were minus sign, ifs were minus sign -- well, you get the picture. And so it was kind of like studying literature as if it were a disembodied body of work, as if there was no human being behind it. And of course that whole thing had to be turned around, but the women -- and then Alta, you know, she has a poem about, that, "I'm not going to write any more metaphors, because if I don't say something's, if you don't call a trump a trump, the men misunderstand it." So it was quite a revelation for me because the way I was writing, I thought, "Who knows what you were talking about?" The seven levels of ambiguity -- it was just this very abstract ambiguity poetry.

So it took me some time, I think, to divest myself, you know, of this training. That very, very strict training that I got at University of Chicago, and for me to finally get my camp poems out of mothballs, out of the shoebox, and look at it and say, this is not bad. [Laughs] So I wrote it as a teenager but -- so I just thought, okay, and then Alta read it and she said, "This is tremendous, do you have any more?" We were kind of dredging up all the poems out of the shoebox to publish it, and so finally, in 1976, I published Camp Notes and Other Poems. But until then I just really didn't even value my own expression, my own writing, my personal writings. I just really didn't value it. And when I wrote all this stuff -- I thought, well, gosh, this is really melodramatic drivel, you know, the things that I was writing after I was diagnosed and I thought I'd better, you know, write then. And it just sounded like melodrama to me. And so I threw them out.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.