Picture this: You’re me. I’m you (sorry). You’re some sixth grade loser in a Missouri public school. You have a weird pixie cut. You haven’t quite put the pieces together that the poetry that you’re writing in your TARDIS notebook about seeing some pretty girl with hair of gold and eyes of caramel isn’t quite from the perspective of a boy, but you’re pretty darn close to it. You’ll put one and one together and get two in a matter of a few months. You know that you don’t want to be a wife and mother, but whenever you tell your mom, she assures you that you can feel that way now, but later on, you’ll change your mind. Or, rather - and she doesn’t tell you this - something will change your mind. You shake your head and tell yourself that you will not be committed to the same fate. You will go out there and become a prolific writer, curating worlds of fantasy and love and spreading your ideas from sea to shining sea.
Well, if I were suddenly granted the ability to go back in time and just put a book in your hands, it would be Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose. There are a handful of reasons for this: first of all, you need to read poetry that doesn’t only exist on a microblogging website and framed in #36465D blue. While that free-form lyricism sounds pretty, has a lot of reading level Z words, and does have its own value, it would honestly probably be a lot better for your intellectual development if you could name a poet or an author by their name rather than their handle. While you can put those free verse poems in your pocket, telling yourself you’ll look at them later, you’ll only remember them when you’re pulling waterlogged shreds of paper out of your freshly-washed jeans. Being able to have that art in a book rather than a digital void means that you have a literal object to return to whenever you need to remind yourself what’s important or how to put words to your feelings and ideas. Second of all, you have a lot of feminist beliefs rattling around in your head, and your heart belongs to the women in your life, so why not put those thoughts and feelings into words? Rich will take your hand and walk you through them, from your heart to your head. It will be a little longer before you take your eyes off of the present and look towards the past for your role models, women who felt as frustrated as you do now by the path that society has laid out before you. If you keep walking with Rich, she’ll introduce you to these women that feel the same way you do, an eternal flame burning in your chest when you feel the pressure to sit in your chair and be a “good student” while your male classmates make fools of themselves. Rich will sit you down and talk to you about the plights of trying to fit within the glass box that patriarchy builds around you, tell you that it’s good - and encourage you - to smash it to bits, even if you nick yourself in the process. She’ll point out Emily Dickinson, furiously writing poetry in Amherst, Massachusetts, and you’ll realize that you have plenty of things in common, least of which being your love for dashes. She’ll mention Boadicea and you’ll come to the realization that women have been waging war against oppressive forces long before Joan of Arc, that women didn’t just wake up one day in 1848 and decide to lash out against patriarchal institutions. She can teach you the power of looking into the past from the future, of placing yourself in the perspective of those who lived through them. There is power in this shared perspective, where you can see through the eyes of Elvira Shatayev or Ethel Rosenberg - she’ll tell you that it is “an act of survival”, a way of knowing that you are not alone nor have you ever been. Finally, Rich will help you discover your affection for the same “gender” (what is that, anyway? - we’ll talk later) isn’t a new phenomenon, isn’t rare, is as old as poetry itself. She can point out that this discovery isn’t just for the young, either - that you can find your truest self time and time again, that you aren’t born only once. She can tell you that you can publish your first collection of lesbian love poems at the age of forty-four after being married to a man for seventeen years. Even doors that seem closed are a little bit ajar, and if they don’t seem to have a knob, there’s always a window. You tell her about that one time in elementary school when you noticed all of your friends making up code names for the boys in your class and decided to choose who you had a crush on, picking out the nicest kid. She might laugh, reaching up to tap the sign, bearing the first half of the title of her 1980 essay: “Compulsory Heterosexuality”! Your brain would probably explode with the realization that most of those girls had probably learned about having crushes on boys from their older family members and had decided that that was the mature thing to do, so you had to make a concentrated effort to pick a nice boy from your class roster in order to feel like you fit in. As you go through middle school and high school, your interactions with Rich would change your preference for female friendships from a subconscious happening to a conscious choice. While the girls in your class would claim that they preferred to be friends with boys, that they were less “drama”, you would have words to explain the reasons that you felt differently. You could mention how your friendships with your girl friends are refreshing, that they provide you with the energy that you need to get through the day, and the idea that female friendships were rife with conflict was an idea posited by patriarchal society which wanted to prevent connections between women that would allow them to see the cracks in the dominant structures. You might not mention that your heartbeat sped a little faster whenever you could make one of your friends laugh and fill the room with the sound of windchimes.