Page 151 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

When I read feminist theory in graduate school in the 1980s, I was taught to

dismiss ecofeminists as essentialists who simplemindedly assume that women

are innately closer to nature and therefore uniquely qualified to address our

environmental crises. That was a reductive misrepresentation of ecofeminism

that still has currency today; it doesn’t do justice to the complexity of the field nor

the ways it has developed as any dynamic perspective does.

The poem addresses the blind-spots I still find in feminist thinking that assumes

human beings are in the struggle alone. Though the divide in the poem seems

generational, of course ecofeminists have been working since the beginning of

the contemporary women’s movement in the U.S. in the early 1970s. Perhaps

the “old and venerable” feminist represents the painful ways I have had to

acknowledge a breach with my own feminist teachers and mentors on this issue.

At a very visceral level, the poem names my refusal to marginalize a feminist

perspective that has the greatest explanatory and healing message I know.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick is a Professor of English

at Appalachian State University where she

teaches environmental literature, creative

writing, and Irish studies. She holds a Ph.D. in

Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University,

where she received an Academy of American

Poets poetry prize. Her poetry collections

include The Body’s Horizon (1996), selected by

Alicia Ostriker for the Brockman-Campbell

award; Beyond Reason (2004), awarded the

Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Prize by the North

Carolina Literary and Historical Association;

Out of the Garden (2007), a finalist for the Southern Independent Booksellers

Association poetry award; Unaccountable Weather (2011); Our Held Animal Breath

(2012) selected by Chard DeNiord for the Brockman-Campbell Award; and Her Small