Compiled in one book for the first time, featuring both new and out of print pieces, the contents of The Judy Grahn Reader span four decades of work by the prominent writer and activist. This volume contains writing from every phase of Judy Grahn’s career, including poems from all of her major poetry collections, such as “The Common Woman,” “A Woman is Talking to Death,” and the previously unpublished “Mental”; a number of her groundbreaking essays (“Writing from a House of Women” and the newly revised “Ground Zero: The Rise of Lesbian Feminism,” among others); as well as selected fiction and the full-length play The Queen of Swords. As Judy Grahn's writing continues to be relevant in today’s social, political and cultural climate, this comprehensive volume gathers the varying strands of her writing and makes visible the tremendous scope of her ongoing contribution as a feminist thinker, activist, and literary artist.
Judy Grahn is the direct inheritor of that passion for life in the woman poet, that instinct for true power, not domination, which poets like Barrett Browning, Dickinson, H.D., were asserting in their own very different ways and voices.
—Adrienne Rich, from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence
People always ask me about my favorite musicians but no one ever asks about my favorite poets. When I was nineteen I discovered the poetry of Judy Grahn, and I was so moved by "A Woman Is Talking to Death", it’s still one of my favorite poems ever, in the world.
—Ani DiFranco
Judy Grahn has done more to create a women’s literature than any other writer in the past half century.
—Ron Silliman
love belongs to those who do the feeling This is Judy’s collection of new and classic poems from 1965 to the present.
Red Hen Press. Cover painting: “Snake and bird singing to the stars” by Irene Vincent.
Available
MUNDANE’S WORLDAN ECOTOPIAN NOVEL
Ron Erickson, professor of environmental studies and environmental ethicist, wrote a review of Mundane’s World, published in
For the past two years I have taught a graduate seminar entitled "Environmental Utopias." . this year one of the novels, Mundane's World by Judy Grahn, was so delightful and so universally praised by seminar participants that it deserves commentary... The novel doesn't fit into the normal utopian genre at all. There is no unconvinced visitor asking questions, nor is the setting on some other planet, in some foreseeable future, or on some undiscovered island. In fact the jacket cover tells us that it's set in "a mythic and fabulous pre-historic world." Perhaps. Perhaps it's the old Europe studied by Marija Gimbutas and described recently by Eisler.. Or maybe it really is a "not yet" place, a model for a distant future . I contend that this is so, that Grahn has given us the first ecofeminist utopian vision.
I’m glad he sees that it is an ecotopia, and as much future as past. I know I had more fun writing this than anything, ever. Mundane means, at root, “world” and this novel is one of my first attempts to sacralize the everyday. Professor Erickson picks up on this exactly:
What about the title? Why Mundane? There are at least three reasons. At the most literal level Grahn explain s that the city was founded by Grandmother Mundane and we discover that there is still a grandmother with that name who plays an important role in the story. So, we simply have a city named for its founder and with the original family still present. Second there is the dictionary sense of the word "characterized by human affairs, concerns, and activities that are often practical, immediate, transitory and ordinary." Mundane is indeed ordinary - there is a marvellous section in which Ernesta considers onions and how to peel them and Grahn titles four separate chapters "How Cooking Took A Long Time To Learn". Life in its immediacy is filled with gossip and concerns about when it might rain or whether it's too hot to do the tile murals. One might even say that time goes by in a hum drum way - a point Grahn describes in a passage that shows her love of playing with words "Thus it was that many of the city's people spent much of their work day humming and drumming for the purpose of the keeping of different kinds of time and for the physical expression of rhythmic emotions, and they were known for having an extremely hum drum society." . A third reason for the title is inherent in its root . "Mundane" comes from the Latin word for world and the novel is literally about the "World's World". I believe that the novel does what Heidegger tried to do in his essay The Thing.. In that piece he made the case for the deobjectification of the world, claiming that certain things could thing (he plays with language - the noun "thing" loses its object status in our mind as we think of things, thinging). Heidegger believed that the number of things that could thing was limited ("the jug and the bench, the footbridge and the plow . But tree and pond, too, brook and hill, are things, each in its own way"; a belief not shared by Grahn, whose whole world is alive. In the essay Heidegger also speaks of the world worlding and until Grahn's novel I had never imagined what that might mean. But I fear this commentary does the book a disservice by making it sound like a philosophical tract and it isn't. It's a marvellous novel by a person in love with her characters, in love with words, and in love with the mundane world, worlding. The students in the seminar paid it the ultimate compliment - not only the favourite book , but the answer to the question" in which utopia would you like to live?" Mundane's World.
Thanks Ron Erickson, for your understanding of this novel. I had been educated in science and practical medicine (I was a laboratory technician) and had lost connection with the life of the earth, and the earth as a being. Writing this novel--ecopsychology-- restored that sensibility for me. –Judy Grahn
Classics:
The Common Woman Poems (chapbook)
A Woman Is Talking to Death (chapbook)
Edward the Dyke and Other Poems
She Who
The Work of a Common Woman
The Queen of Wands The Queen of Swords
(available)
Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds
Really
Reading
Gertrude
Stein
The Highest Apple
Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World
All material on this site is copyright 2007 Judy Grahn. All rights reserved.
