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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Poets We Lost in 2023

(MUISC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I'm Helena de Groot. Today, "Poets We Lost in 2023." Minnie Bruce Pratt was not exactly raised with a taste for conflict. As an only child, born in Alabama in the 1940s, she was taught to be polite, demure, just like her mother, who never challenged her father when he'd go on one of his John Birch-inspired dinner table rants about the Catholic, Communist, Jewish, Black conspiracy. And Minnie Bruce, for a while at least, played the part. She married young, she had two children, and by her own accounts, she looked "quite stereotypically American, like a woman in a toothpaste ad." Then—and I realize I myself am sounding a little like a right-wing talking point—she went to college, discovered feminism, fell in love with a woman, and left her husband. She dedicated the rest of her life to writing and to the struggle, which for her included not just feminism, but the fight against homophobia, racism, poverty, imperialism, and every other system of oppression she observed in the U.S. or across the world. Her intersectional approach, at a time when nobody used that word, wasn't always welcomed by other white feminists. She wrote in an essay: "Sometimes they say they are glad I spoke since these problems are important, but they really don't see how any of this affects them personally." In the early 90s, Minnie Bruce Pratt met the love of her life, the artist and writer Leslie Feinberg, author of the iconic trans memoir Stone Butch Blues. After more than two decades of living deeply intertwined lives, and after a long illness, Leslie Feinberg died. Nine years later, on July 2nd, 2023, Minnie Bruce died too, of a fast-growing brain tumor that had been diagnosed only weeks before. She was 76 years old. [In] early December, I went to see a friend of Minnie Bruce at her home in Brooklyn, New York. Irena Klepfisz, like Minnie Bruce, spent years taking care of her long-term partner. Her partner, Judy Waterman, died a few months before Minnie Bruce's partner Leslie Feinberg did, both in 2014. Irena and Minnie Bruce found each other in this loss, and would spend hours every week on the phone. Minnie Bruce Pratt's death came as a shock to Irena, who was still reeling when I came to see her. And the atrocities in Palestine, a cause all four lifelong activists have fought for, added more shock. And I didn't help when I asked what I thought would be an innocent question. I wanted to get her talking about really anything so I could check the levels on my recorder.

Helena de Groot: OK, can you tell me, what is your earliest memory?

Irena Klepfisz: My earliest memory, period? I guess I wasn't born here. I was born in Europe during the war, and my earliest memory is . . . well, I have sort of vague things before that, but it was really in 1945 in Lodz, which was right after Poland had been liberated. And we were living in this apartment on Osiemnaście Żeromskiego, that was the address. I thought some of the survivors were wandering in and out. And my job was—I was four. I had a birthday party in April, and my job was to put newspapers down on the floor for all the people that Bolek met on the street that didn't have any place to go. They would come to the apartment and sleep on the floor, on the bed that I made. So I remember that. Well, it wasn't a bed, but it was newspapers. That was my first job in life, which I enjoyed tremendously.

Helena de Groot: Irena's father had been killed in 1943 as one of the organizers of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. So, after the war, her mother took Irena and left their home country, first for Sweden, then the United States. Irena was showing me a few black-and-white pictures of people she knew during that time.

Irena Klepfisz: Anyway, she survived with this little boy. That's him actually in Sweden. Yeah, that's me and him.

Helena de Groot: Kids are incredible. You both look like nothing bad ever happened to you.

Irena Klepfisz: I know. Isn't that incredible? Yeah. And this is like the two of us. Yeah, it looks like, I mean, we could be stepping out of a Hollywood movie.

Helena de Groot: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Big smiles.

Irena Klepfisz: It's amazing. I mean, when I was a kid, I used to wonder why they wanted to kill us since we looked so pretty. I don't know. Everything seems very unreal at the moment, given everything that's going on. It's so horrendous. It's a horror and Israel is crazy. They just . . . they're nuts. And there are people that I try to correspond with, but there are people that I just can't talk to. I mean, they just, I don't know. I'm constantly posting on these groups that are working together, just as a symbol, you know, that people are still despite everything. You know, there are a lot of groups like that in Israel. They're small, but they exist and they survived October 7th. And a couple of them, there was a couple here that was coming from, there was a Palestinian woman and a Jewish, they're both Israeli citizens. They're both from Haifa, but they're in this thing called standing together and they survived October 7th. And I keep posting and then people don't even like it. Like what's wrong with peace? I mean, even if you hold a different position, like what's wrong with peace? I was looking at Minnie Bruce, there's a wonderful passage that she has about poetry in the time of war, but she was just talking about her becoming a poet. And she said: "When I began living as a lesbian, I had no place in that world of legislators and poets except as a criminal. I had to create a new reality, find in hidden lives the bittersweet kernel of possibility and bring that in my hands, on my tongue, to being. I was able to emerge as a poet and a lesbian only because the place had been open to me through creative organizing and acts of individual courage by lesbian and gay people, as well as through the largest civil rights and liberation movements in this country. In those movements, there has been a vision and a dream of a place without domination, without injustice authorized by law. I can say because of that dream, I have become a poet, not one who offers alternative legislation, but one who offers possibility, threatening to some, desired by others, but possibility." I think it's a great passage. I think a lot about her now and how she would be responding to what's going on. I mean, we checked in with each other like once a week and had these marathon conversations for that. I mean, it was interesting. We weren't friends. I mean, I know like when I was teaching at Wake Forest, I brought her down to do a reading or something. So, we would do that kind of thing, but we weren't really. But in the last few years, we just somehow, we only saw each other once, but we would have these weekly marathon conversations. I mean, we had a lot in common in very different ways. And one of the things that was really important was us becoming widows. I mean, Leslie died the same year that Judy died. We were widows for like nine years. And she sent a bunch of us the memoir that she'd been writing about Leslie that she finished just six weeks before she was diagnosed, literally. I hadn't even read it yet at that time. And it's a memoir about her. It's called Marrying Leslie. And it was about her relationship with Leslie. And to me, what was extraordinary also about it was the lack of romance. I mean, it's very, very romantic, she was incredibly in love. But at the same time, it's very unromantic about, for example, caretaking. Leslie was sick for years. And I experienced the same thing with Judy. And what that does to you, it means like your partner is sick, you are not sick, but you suddenly have all the same limitations that your partner has.

Helena de Groot: Right. Like you can't go see friends on a whim.

Irena Klepfisz: Exactly. And the realization of that. And there's all kinds of multiple feelings. I mean, I know people do that with me. Judy and I moved in here in '79. She died here in 2014. And people romanticized that in a way, long relationships and all. But it's not such a romance. There's a lot of pain and difficulties in trying to . . . It's not so easy in the sense of, well, you love someone, so of course you're going to take care of them. Especially if you have your own stuff that you wanna do. And I think at some point she says she loses track of herself because there's so much to do with helping Leslie and dealing. And after a while, they can't really deal for themselves. So you have to make all the arrangements for the appointments. I mean, I experienced that. So it was really kind of . . . It was interesting, because she was really the first person that I really talked to. And I think Minnie Bruce's memoir, whenever that's gonna come out, it's really important to sort of understand. She didn't shy away from difficult subjects.

Helena de Groot: Since Minnie Bruce Pratt's memoir is not yet in a place where it can be shared, I'll play you a few clips from the last book she published while she was alive titled Magnified. In Magnified, Minnie Bruce writes small poems about the enormous job of caring for Leslie as he was dying. As Irena already said, Minnie Bruce did not shy away from difficult subjects.

Minnie Bruce Pratt:

"The Great Swamp."

That spring you and I leaned over the edge,

staring into the swamp. What was in there?

Amphibian eyes glinting like treasure in the water,

gold dots of pollen flecking a sodden carpet.

That spring we saw you were beginning to die.

The arrowhead leaves flew slowly up green

out of the murky water. You got sick and sicker.

We leaned. Our shadows reached into the water.

We looked down into the mud, past where we’d seen,

to where what-could-be lived, waiting to come.

(BREAK)

Irena Klepfisz: One of the problems at the end, in the last few months, was trying to finish this memoir. And she didn't know she was sick. So she didn't think that she had a deadline, but she was wanting to finish it. And she was also working for Workers World, and she was seriously into it. And we talked about it, and then [I] finally said, "Just take a leave of absence. It's not gonna fall apart. Just take a leave of absence." And it was hard. I think it's very difficult. What I think is remarkable about Minnie Bruce is that to her, both her poetry and her writing were almost equally important with her activism. And yet despite that—you would think that she would have written less, but she was incredibly prolific. And I'm always amazed at that, 'cause when I get involved with something, I just stop everything else. And she was very, I mean . . . I was really amazed that she was able to do this. And she finally did. I mean, that was a moment where she did prioritize and she did take a leave of absence. Because every week, she was going through her journals, the way she was doing it, it was to remind herself. So I would get, every week I'd get a, "I'm up to this-and-this year," that kind of thing. And she eventually finished it. And she finished it, like I say, I think it was maybe six or seven weeks before she was diagnosed. And it was just . . . it's still very hard. I mean, it happened so fast.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, because she had an aggressive brain tumor, right? So something that moved really fast.

Irena Klepfisz: Very. And within three weeks of the diagnosis, she had died. When I saw her, I went to see her the last time she was in Syracuse. She couldn't speak already. And that was—it was no time. I mean, it was no time.

Helena de Groot: How did she react when she found out that she had an . . .

Irena Klepfisz: I don't know, because we, I mean, we only found out about it because Julia and I started worrying that [we] hadn't heard from her, she'd missed an appointment with Julie. And I called Julie and I said, you know, "Something's weird going on with Minnie Bruce." And finally, what happened was I called—I didn't know them—I called the family, her son in Williamstown, and I left a message on the machine saying, "We're worried about her. Is everything OK?" And it took a while for them to answer because I think they were in the middle of it. And her daughter-in-law called me that night and said, "We just found out that she has this invasive brain tumor. And that's why I didn't call you earlier, 'cause we wanted to make sure." And then after that, I mean, it was like, I don't know, it was like ten days later, I went to see her. She couldn't talk.

Helena de Groot: So in a way she sort of disappeared from your life. Like there was no time to say goodbye.

Irena Klepfisz: No, I saw her, but I mean, we couldn't really talk or anything. No. Other people came, I mean, she's very beloved. And of course Magnified, it [had] very recently just came out, which is another basically Leslie book. That is just, it's a real wow, I think. I just think it's very difficult to do what she did in this book. I mean, to sustain it for an entire book, to maintain that. And it's so carefully—she's so careful. She's done that in her previous works, but this one was really, I think almost, you know, she's much more expansive in her earlier work. Her lines are longer, the poems are longer, it's a different kind of—almost—but in this last one, it was very refined, and very minimalist in a certain way. Don't you agree?

Helena de Groot: I agree. And what I found so remarkable was how much silence that was in the poems. Just her going for a walk and looking at a leaf or at a little insect and just that becomes the whole world, that becomes, like, enough.

Minnie Bruce Pratt: So, there's a lot of walking in my work. You know, one of my books is called Walking Back Up Depot Street, right? I think I'm a country person. I did a lot of walking in my life. With these poems, they literally were walking poems, 'cause they started in 2007. Leslie was getting much sicker. She was still up and about and working, but not out in the world very much. I would be with her when I wasn't at my job, but I would take walking breaks in the morning often. I would go out and I would walk. And I just, I don't remember making a conscious decision about this, but I decided somehow that when I went out to walk, I would just try to find a piece of a poem. And that might be an image or it might be a line, but it was something to connect me to the world. And then sometimes, I would just sit somewhere or stand. I had a notebook with me all the time and just write down what I had so I didn't lose it. Or maybe I'd come back into the building and sit in the foyer and write it down.

Helena de Groot: And I just, yeah, knowing the backdrop, knowing that at the same time she's taking care of her like terminally ill partner and dealing with all that, I thought the way that she managed to create these pockets of silence and space was really powerful.

Irena Klepfisz: She has this one poem that I really love where she talks about, "time is trying to get in through the window."

Helena de Groot: Oh yes.

Irena Klepfisz: It's beautiful.

Helena de Groot: Do you wanna read that?

Irena Klepfisz: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Let me pull up the collection.

Irena Klepfisz: I have it here. "Hourglass," it's called "Hourglass."

All night the wind throws sleet against the glass

like the sand stinging our faces and hands, the day

the hurricane’s tail-end lashed us at the beach.

Time tumbles us back and forth in its giant hourglass.

One night at the beginning you stood naked in the hall,

it was storming outside the window, lightning, hail.

You flicker into light, arriving before me, once, again.

Time rattles at our window, time trying to get in.

It's just beautiful. It's just beautiful. I mean, in this I think she was lucky, because Leslie talked about dying and what would happen. Like my experience with Judy was Judy refused to talk about what was happening and so we didn't talk. And Minnie Bruce writes about it. I mean she has this wonderful poem about who they are. I don't know if you remember this. Where is it? I have this about who we are. Let me see if I can see it. Yeah, here. The last four poems are really quite remarkable. It's "In the End."

What is left to say? In the end, you died.

And with your last mouthful of breath

you carried away the person you had been,

you took away the person I was with you.

At the end, you said, This time I know I

am going, and you are staying. But someone

unknown to me was the one who survived,

saying, If only, if only we were still alive.

Yeah, that's just beautiful.

Helena de Groot: It's beautiful, and there's something so scary about it, you know, to imagine that she feels like she has to go on living as someone she doesn't even know.

Irena Klepfisz: Yeah, 'cause she's a different person. She'd become a different person. Yeah, it's remarkable.

Helena de Groot: And, so, you said, you know, that you really developed this friendship after you became widows. So, did you actually see a lot of her with Leslie? Like what were they like together?

Irena Klepfisz: No, and she didn't know Judy. I think she might have met Judy. I don't know. We just didn't socialize. We would bump each other. I remember when there was a gay pride march in Washington and DC and I bumped into her and she was so pissed because that was the year or the years when they were doing a lot of stuff on gays in the military. And the gays were furious that particular year in Washington. You know, she was just furious. Why is the military taking over our marches? And she was incredibly generous, I thought, and very kind. And she was always engaged. I mean, she has two poems where she kind of puts down poetry. Like, what is poetry? It's like the Auden thing. Poetry makes nothing happen. And it was interesting, because she's writing a poem about her poem. She's writing poems. So I think, you know, you do sometimes get that feeling like, "What am I doing?" I mean, the world's falling apart and I'm worried about the phrasing of this line.

Helena de Groot: Yes, yes, yes.

Irena Klepfisz: The other thing was that she was, with all of her engagement, she was incredibly engaged with her family and her sons and her grandchildren, which I always found—I mean, thinking of Minnie Bruce as a grandmother was sort of a stretch for me. It was really, but she was. And she sent me videos and photographs and she wanted me to see and listen and she was very proud. And she was very conscious of the next generation in a way that very few people I know, I mean, people have known . . . but she went out of her way always to kind of make sure that she was in touch with a younger generation, that she was talking to them and seeing where they're at and what she could contribute and so on. And it was like a mission with her, and it was always automatic. And she was very much, you know, she was kind of, I suppose, in a certain way, stereotypical Southern. I mean, she was always very polite. And I'm sure when she got mad, I never heard it, but I'm sure she knew how to get mad. But she was persistent, she was very persistent. And I think that was very, very special about her. I grew to really trust her. I don't like people commenting on my poetry. I don't like to take their advice. You like it, you don't like it. I don't care. That kind of thing. But when I was finishing the manuscript for Her Birth [and Later Years], I showed it to her, to ask her for advice. And I listened to a couple of the things that she said—not everything, but some of the things. And she's like the only person I've ever done that with. There was a kind of equality there that I haven't experienced with a lot of people. I wanna put it that way.

Helena de Groot: There's a part of Minnie Bruce Pratt's story I haven't told yet because it tends to overshadow everything else. So here goes. When Minnie Bruce Pratt came out as a lesbian in the late 1970s, her husband sued for full custody of their two small children and got it. In her collection, Crime Against Nature, Minnie Bruce writes, "Women ask, 'why didn't you,' like they do of women who've been raped. And I ask myself, 'Why didn't I?' Why didn't I run away with them, or face him in court, or. Ten years ago, I answered myself, 'no way for children to live,' or 'the chance of absolute loss,' or 'I did the best I could.' It was not enough. It was about terror and power." But before you take these lines as an admission of guilt, she also writes in that same poem, "This is not the voice of the guilty mother." She knew that what was wrong was not her love, but laws written by men with no interest in women's liberation.

Minnie Bruce Pratt: You know, when the right wingers say, 'Oh, we can't let these lesbians and these women's libbers, we can't let them have access to our children. We can't let these ideas get out.' Of course, they're right. They're correct. Once you know that there are other ways to live, sometimes you will choose to live these other ways. I mean, I could have repressed myself. I could have chosen differently. It would have been spiritual suicide. I said to myself at the time, if I don't do this, I don't act on this emotion and this erotic feeling, I will be committing spiritual suicide. But I could have chosen that. I knew I was gonna lose my children. I knew it was gonna happen.

Helena de Groot: Did she ever talk to you about that decision that she made, that she talks about in this clip?

Irena Klepfisz: Oh, yeah. I mean, she talked about it. I mean, you know, the marriage, as I understand it, she didn't talk that much about it, but she did talk about it. I mean, the fact that he was always considered the poet, and she didn't come and become a poet. I mean, it was before even the children. And that was . . . you know, something was wrong. In the memoir, she talked about [how] it affected how she related to people because of this fear that she had done this terrible thing and that she had abandoned them. And no matter how justified you are in something like that, especially with children, the effects, you know, their problems.

Helena de Groot: But what I thought was so beautiful in that interview that I listened to, she talks about Ransom, her eldest, and how they kind of connected, you know, or reconnected after these long years where they weren't allowed to be together for more than like a week a year, or something horrible like that. She also, there's this really funny moment where—can I just play you another clip?

Irena Klepfisz: Sure.

Minnie Bruce Pratt: Then when I moved to Durham, I had this conversation with Ransom. We were washing dishes. He was older, he was in his early, you know, he was, he was like getting hormones and we're washing silverware. And he says to me, "Mum, I think I'm heterosexual." And to me, this is the beauty of what we've done as a movement. We made it possible to talk about sexuality openly, and we gave that to everybody. Everybody, whether they understand that or not, we gave it to everybody. And I saw it with my own child, who's standing there at 13, consciously claiming his sexuality at 13, in a way that I couldn't do until I was 28 years old, 28, 29, 30, you know? It's a big deal, big deal.

(BREAK)

Helena de Groot: I wanna talk to you about her activism. Can I play one last clip?

Irena Klepfisz: Yeah, sure.

Helena de Groot: OK.

Minnie Bruce Pratt: I've thought about the interplay between some personal patterns and the larger social change, and also just the fundamental material conditions of someone's life. So like yesterday, when we were talking about my father and the impact of my father's racism on me, the impact of my family's history when I found that out, and the civil rights movement. But none of those things really propelled me into action until I was in the concrete circumstances of a woman trying to figure out how I was gonna earn a living, how, being turned down for jobs, not being able to figure out how I was gonna hold my life together. That is really what did it. That's what did it. And then the sort of flowing out of that process of change, losing custody of my children and having that just concretely physical blow can hardly get more—and I know you know this as a mother—can hardly get more concretely physical than having your four-year-old taken from you and not being able to hold them, period. Hold them one week a year. I mean, that was just devastating to me. So those things which affected me in this direct fundamental kind of material way were the things that propelled me into the movement.

Irena Klepfisz: Yeah. I mean it's a very—it doesn't surprise me at all, this thing, 'cause you know it's interesting, sometimes people say to me, oh sort of with some admiration or something, "Oh, you were an activist," like this is a big deal or something. And I say to them, in those days if you were gonna come out, you had no choice but to be an activist. I mean, you couldn't just come out and go about your life at your job, with your family, or whatever. I mean, people don't realize it. I think when I came out, I was older than many of us. I was 33 when I came out. And I think within a year and a half, I lost every heterosexual friend, not for any overt reason, but nobody was interested in me anymore, or something like that.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Irena Klepfisz: Yeah. So people don't realize—I mean, that's nothing compared to what she went through. I mean I knew a number of lesbian mothers who were terrified in that time, during that time, and there was a whole question about children being brought into the struggle. I mean, like, because if you wanted to talk for, in other words, promote that's OK to be a lesbian mother, you wanted to also have the kid maybe on the show, on the radio show or someone. There was a lot of argument about you know discussion about is this damaging to the child, is this something you should put the child through? When you have laws like this, that becomes a problem. I mean on the one hand, yes, it's good to do it, on the other hand, is it damaging to the kid. So, I mean that was always the fear. The fear was about coming out for women that had children. That was always the fear, that it could be used against them. And so I understand that process when it becomes really personal and immediate and it threatens you. And in this case, it threatened her children. I mean, you do become active. And it's partly a defense for her children that she started the activism. I mean, there's nothing like an immediate withdrawal of something or insult or whatever that suddenly wakes you up and says you know what, you have to really fight this. And then if you're smart, you link it up with other things. And you develop a kind of an attitude of looking at society in a certain way and seeing where you can poke it a little bit and change it. I mean she rightly linked it up with all kinds of other things. I'm sure she was aware of racism or whatever, but this was very particularly immediate and personal. And I think that's always when it's theoretical, it's one thing. When it's personal, it's different.

Helena de Groot: And over the course of these phone calls, did you feel like you were better able to . . .

Irena Klepfisz: Well, I certainly think I was able to deal with . . . Do you mean in our relationship?

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I'm just wondering, like you know, the thing that you both had in common was something that was very hard. And I'm just wondering, like, five years of having each other's . . . five years of being able to confide in someone who really understands. What did that do for you?

Irena Klepfisz: For me, certainly, you don't find new friends when you're 78. It's very hard. It's one of the things people always say. It's very hard to make new relationships at that age. And for me, it was wonderful, and for two reasons I think. One is that she was very familiar with the world that we had both shared, even though we hadn't been in contact. So she knew. She understood what the backdrop of some of that was, of what was going on in the movement with various individuals and so on. So that was really important, 'cause most people I know have never heard of even the Second Wave. I mean, no, really. So there was that, and that was really important, because she knew all I could refer to, things that happened and people that happened, and she knew exactly what I was talking about. So that was very good. That was also good about being able to talk about what happened, for me to talk about Judy and for her to talk about Leslie, was really good I think for both of us, in terms of—it was a reassurance, and a validation, sort of what we had experienced. Which is not that common, or at least people don't talk about it. And the other thing was also just about the commitment to writing, to our own work. I think we reinforced each other. I think I was helpful in pushing her to finish the memoir. And for me, it was also kind of forcing me to look at my own stuff, because I was flipped out after Judy died for a number of years. I was doing the bare minimum of living, kind of surviving. And so in that way, it was very, very—for me, it was one of the things that got me back into the world. I mean, I was really groping—I mean my mother died two years after Judy died, and that was the end of my, I had no more family. So it was having Minnie Bruce was really a gift to me. To me, getting to know her was a gift. Also, I don't know if you realize, she had these, I think it's either Tuesday or Thursday, it was one day with a T—that's all I remember—She would put out a poem on Facebook. She wanted me to do it too. She said, "It's really good, Irena. Sometimes it does inspire people." And she said you should think about doing it. And she was adamant about it, and she did it. I mean, I used to see—she would publish something that would be maybe relevant with a little, something that's already been published, and maybe a little bit relevant to whatever was going on at the moment. She did that every week, despite the fact that poetry doesn't make anything happen. But she was right. People read her work and they respond, they respond.

Minnie Bruce Pratt: I have to say putting my poetry up on Facebook has really helped me, because people write and say things like, "I had trouble getting up this morning, and then I read the poem, and I could get up and keep going." And that, to me, poetry isn't political action, it isn't. It's not the kind of structural work that has to be done. But what I do know is poetry helps us stay alive. It helps us stay alive. I think it helps people remember why we're trying to make a better world, especially when you know, so many of us are the people who are targeted. The people of color, the disabled people, the queer people, the trans people, the poor people. These poems to me are really about that. That's helping keeping us alive. Not for some abstract political position, no, because the world is beautiful and we are precious and we have so much creativity and possibility that is being trampled on every day. What might our world be if we could bring our dreams into reality? What might it be?

Helena de Groot: Minnie Bruce Pratt is the author of more than ten collections of poetry and essays, including her debut collection The Sound of One Fork from 1981; We Say We Love Each Other from 1985; Crime Against Nature, winner of the 1989 Lamont Poetry Award and a Gay and Lesbian Book Award from the American Library Association; Walking Back Up Depot Street from 2000; The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems from 2003, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and her last collection, Magnified, which came out in 2021. Minnie Bruce Pratt was the recipient of many awards and grants, including a 1990 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, which infamously drew criticism from Jesse Helms, the ultra-conservative Republican Senator from North Carolina who tried to have the NEA rescind the award. They did not. Until she retired in 2015, Minnie Bruce Pratt was a professor at Syracuse University, where she helped develop its LGBT studies program.

Irena Klepfisz is the author of several collections of poetry and prose, including her essay collection Dreams of an Insomniac from 1990; A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New, which has an introduction by Adrienne Rich and was nominated for a Lambda Prize in Poetry in 1990; and Her Birth and Later: Years Poems New and Collected, which won the 2023 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2022 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. You also heard clips from the Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Special Collections, Northampton, Massachusetts, and from a conversation about her collection Magnified Minnie Bruce had with Julie Ensor in late 2021 for Sinister Wisdom and Cherished Books. And I would be remiss if I did not mention some of the other poets who died last year. Naomi Replansky, Charles Simic, and Linda Pastan in January; Royston Ellis in February; Saskia Hamilton in June; Mary Ann Hoberman and Keith Waldrop in July; Ed Ochester, Maureen Seaton and Gboyega Odubanjo in August; Louise Gluck and Jack Anderson in October; David Ferry in November; and then in December, the 44-year-old Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike, along with his brother and his son, his sister, and three of his sister's children. In 2021, he wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times about the Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip then. The piece ends with a question his eight-year-old daughter Lina asked. He writes, "On Tuesday, Lina asked her question again after my wife and I didn't answer it the first time. 'Can they destroy our building if the power is out?' I wanted to say, 'Yes, little Linah. Israel can still destroy the beautiful Al-Jawharah building, or any of our buildings, even in the darkness. Each of our homes is full of tales and stories that must be told. Our homes ignore the Israeli war machine, mock it, haunt it even in the darkness. It can't abide their existence, and with American tax dollars and international immunity, Israel presumably will go on destroying our buildings until there's nothing left.' But I can't tell Linah any of this, so I lie. 'No, sweetie they can't see us in the dark.'"

In October of 2023, Refaat Alareer told CNN what it means to be a parent in Gaza.

Refaat Alareer: The toughest thing for parents [is the] feeling of helplessness and despair, your inability to provide the protection, the safety, even the love and the hugs. You want to hug your kids like you usually do, but you don't want to do it, because you don't want to feel or make them feel that this is, like, a farewell hug. My parents and my brothers and sisters all had to evacuate, but there's this thing about us moving and scattering the family members across different places. It's an archetypal Palestinian debate on should we stay in one room so if we die, we die together, or should we stay in separate rooms so at least somebody can live, can survive.

Helena de Groot: During the interview, Alareer was still debating if he should stay in Gaza City or go south with his family. He ended up staying. He is survived by his wife and their six children. Friends describe him as a man who "Always championed others ahead of himself. His mission was to platform and support other writers." Alareer was a scholar who taught English literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza. For him, English was not just the language of some of his favorite writers, such as Shakespeare or John Donne, but a way to break through the walls of the open-air prison he was living in. A way to speak to the world and be heard. In 2015, he co-founded the non-profit,We Are Not Numbers, which gave young Palestinians living in Gaza and refugee camps the chance to write their story. To find out more about any or all of these poets, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.