[tanabe]

Despisals by Muriel Rukeyser DESPISALS In the human cities, never again to despise the backside of the city, the ghetto, or build it again as we build the despised backsides of houses. Look at your own building You are the city.' Among our secrecies, not to despise our Jews (that is, ourselves) or our darkness, our blacks, or in our sexuality wherever it takes us and we now know we are productive too productive, too reproductive for our present invention – never to despise the homosexual who goes building another with touch with touch (not to despise any touch) each like himself like herself each. You are this. In the body’s ghetto never to go despising the asshole nor the useful shit that is our clean clue to what we need. Never to despise the clitoris in her least speech. Never to despise in myself what I have been taught to despise. Nor to despise the other. Not to despise the it. To make this relation with the it : to know that I am it.

[Wen-Kai]

Thanks,April. I remember reading her work in the 70s and 80s. You may or may not know that one of her students at Sarah Lawrence in the 60s was Alice Walker. Walker considers Rukeyser and historian Howard Zinn,with whom she studied at Spelman College,to be her main mentors at critical times in her intellectual and artistic development.