Donna Haraway: ...worldwide consuming classes. Okay. If you're talking about the sustenance of daily life - so that women are going to be targeted in new and powerful ways in order to expand markets internationally. The role of multinationals and that is no mystery. In the workplace, if you consider where women work, clerical service, textiles and other production work, agribusiness, electronics, and consider structures of work for women which have never involved the so-called family wage, or the male semi-victory post World War II. Outwork, part-time, overtime, flex time - no time - [laughs] you know, a secondary labor market in the crisis of capitalism is an informatics, involves an informatics of domination. Consider the state. The crash of the welfare state in in the developed countries, the extreme combination of decentralization and centralization that the communications technologies make possible. The connection of telematics and citizenship, a sense of public life through interactive cable mechanisms where you can, in practice, send signals two-way but it's an asymmetric flow of signals, and a structuring of decisions comes from a center. Considere for the minute the state and the issue of satellite competition and standardization competition internationally. Who will set international standards for the global village? Well it's very clear is that wh will set it depends on the outcome of the competition between AT&T and IBM. And that will determine the international standard. We should remember that in the late 19th century, the standardization of the millimeter involved similar struggles of international capital, and that bureaus of standards and issues of architectures of technologies, issues of standardization are intimately involved in rearrangements of international power. And that's what the state is about. If we think of the school, think for a minute of the crash of education, especially for the poor, the construction of a bimodal society where masses of people are deliberately educated to be illiterate, so as to work a kind of film board at McDonald's. Think of the connctions, the new connections in biotechnology of university and industry. Think of the meaning of female illiteracy, worldwide, the disproportionate female illiteracy and female illiteracy, also worldwide, in math in particular. And think of then school, for women in the integrated circuit, and what that means. It's not just women, but it's what what I want to concentrate on for the moment. In short, I see an informatics of domination, women's lives in the integrated circuit, involving an intensification of woman's responsibility for money, consuming, raising kids, building some kinds of lives, in spaces of which we haven't developed the analytical and political tools in which to organize ourselves. Now, let me conclude, by looking at functions and spaces as a list., which I think a list that comes from thinking about the integrated circuit and its meanings for women, and a list, which I think suggests what a feminist technology policy might begin to look like. First, functions, work, sex, mind, work, robotics and word program - word processing. Think for a minute of the interactions of the intereffects of what happens to men's jobs, which largely have to do with the development of robotics, and the attack on the craft unions in the male, relatively privileged male working class, that the way that these technologies work as a tool, to undermine the power of the largely white male working-class, coupled with the crisis of capitalism in relation to women's jobs so that previously labor-intensive jobs in clerical work, hospital work, and other areas become major areas of capital intensification, of capital investment. Video display terminals are simply an example of the kind of capital intensification of woman's work, not to make it easier, or even to make it disappear, but an application to women's work of principles that have been worked out in men's work considerably earlier in this century, and the kind of interfacing and integration of race, sex, and class with an informatics of domination at work. Think of biotechnology, genetic engineering, reproductive technology. The mythic meanings have to do with sex, but here's where woman's control of our own bodies, the breakdown of boundaries between fetus, woman, and environment, in relation to the intimate technologies of reproductive life, the production of children, where the boundaries are broke down and the questions are who controls the boundaries, what will feminist role be in the control of reproductive technology? And biotechnology and agriculture, imagine for a moment that 50% of the world's food supply for subsistence is produced by women. Biotechnology and agriculture,agribusiness, means the increasing marginalization of women's land and women's tools, because it is not women's labor and it is not women's products that are being quote "improved" close quote by agribusiness and biotechnology. Instead, it's the world commodification of the food supply, so that along with the global factory is the global supermarket, and what that means for women who will still need to produce 50% of the world's food supply, particularly in the third world, is that they'll be working every more marginal lands, walking 4 and 5 hours a day to get household water, walking similar amounts of time to get wood, and having to have an extra baby, or two babies, or three babies to keep out of school, in order to do this kind of thing, because the land that's needed for sustaining daily life is involved in biotechnology and agribusiness. The technologies that women need worldwide in the integrated circuit are not the technologies that we're being given. That's obvious. Then think of mind, artificial intelligence. Some very interesting things going on in the area of mind right now. For the first time, you find liberal, white, male academic scholars identifying with animals, [laughs, laughter] and body and woman and blood. It's extraordinary. Hubert Drefuss at the University of California, Berkeley points out that mind, as decision procedure, as that which is formalized, as that which is abstract, doesn't have anything to do with need, that first you need a body to generate need. When you have a body generating need, then you can work out a decision procedure, and have mind. And that humans will never be replaced because they are like animals and women. [Laughs, laughter] Now let me list some spaces, I'm just going to list them, that I think that summarizes what we've all been saying. Electronic cottage, global village, that is, corporate village, global farm and supermarket, electronic battlefield, global factory, global assembly line, electronic church, electronic clinic, where stress is the disease, and communication is the therapy, [laughter] electronic pornography, um, and let's ask, what is the common language in these spaces that have to do with the functions of work, sex, and life? And the common language is the effort to turn all functions and spaces in the world into something that can be handled by a common code, a binary code, a control code, a common language, a C³I system, The ironic ending of that is the name of the language developed by the military for coordinating its command control communication functions. The name of the language is Ada, a high-level language named after Ada Lady Lovelace, Byron's daughter, collaborator of Charles Babbage, supposedly feminist hero, who wrote supposedly the first computer program in the early 19th century. The name of the military C-Cubed language is Ada. Now, I think that we need to develop as a major political priority, a feminist technology policy, and there's going to be a fragmentary, partial, rearranged, no one's going to have control over it, and it's going to involve intense controversy among ourselves. But at a minimum, what we need to have, is a feminist technology policy, for example, that is part of the alternative budgets proposed by the Women's or the Blacks Congressional Congresses. We need a feminist technology policy debated in the unions, at NOW [National Organization for Women], in Democratic Socialists of America, the alternative political parties that we are part of. We need to be developing this policy into some understanding of what the rudiments of technology literacy look like, what are they in terms of the social history of science and technology, in terms of an understanding of the integration of reproduction, military worlds, and industrial worlds. We need serious technology policies and we need literacy desperately. We've got to be involved with these machines at every level. We need activists and academic research. We need to - we need to know what's going on in high-tech workplaces, work that like that of Judith Gregory, or Ruth Cowan, and many other people. We need the kind of research that gives us ethnographies of life in the integrated circuit. We need feminist cultural productions that answer the techno-monsters. We need reimaginings of what it is to be a cyborg in feminist science fiction and feminist film. We need national science policy on the effects of ccience and technology on women. For this talk, I did a lot of reading of Office of Science and Technology assessment papers and they did not, at any point ever, mention the structure of the new technologies in relation to the structure of equality and inequality. they mentioned quote" worker displacement" close quote. They did not mention that the structure of science and technology is the structure of ignorance and skill. It is the structure of power. It is a tool of the structure of power and it wasn't even a one liner. I think that's utterly intolerable. There are groups working now that we as feminists can be part of. ASFC [American Friends Service Committee], the World Council of Churches, the feminist ISIS organization in Geneva, the Norwegian and Swedish Social Democratic governments and unions, who have developed co-determination technology, legislation, and processes. There are lots of places where we can work. There's the Feminist Technology Project, and what I want to conclude with, is that as a major feminist priority, we have to have a technology policy for cyborgs. Thank you. [Applause] Bettina Berch: I want to thank all three speakers and tell you a couple things. We have a mic on the floor. Some of you might just want to stretch and walk around. Others who have questions they want to address to any of the speakers, or myself, can sort of queue up at the mi,c if you like, and address anybody in particular, or the panel in general, to respond to your remarks. If you find that you've been sitting long enough and you really want to get up and walk around, lunch is probably at 12 in the student center. So you will be able to socialize there. Is there anybody who has any questions? Everybody's satisfied. Yes you just, just go up. Audience member 1: Yes, this is a question for the [interjection-the mic] -- yeah I'm trying to-- Is that alright? This is a question for the panel as a whole, and it deals with the intellectual integration of women's history, with the notion of technology. Judy McGaw was the only one who mentioned home economics as part of the history of American women and their relationship to technology, and you suggested at the end, that an ethnography of life in the integrated circuit is part of the demands placed upon us, as women and feminist scholars. I'd like to ask whether you think that perhaps the reintegration of home economics is a significant part of women's experience in this country, from the Victorian to the present, might not be a complementary part, of the type of integration of which you speak. Judith: Yes, I think that's true. I think that understanding that class and race differentiated and regional differentiated structure of women's work, and what still called the home, is a critical part of our understanding of the structure of knowledge and ignorance in the structure women's lives, and like, largely for men, we have to understand what goes on in say the Harvard Business School and labor process studies, we have to know what goes on in the programs of home economics, an idiological and material structure of woman's work. I think that its an essential component. There's a big gap in the literature, although there is probably a little more literature, thanks to people like Ruth Cowan, and some of her former students, --a little bit -- and other folks, a little bit more knowledge of the domestic technology history, but it's not enough. Audience member 2: I'd like to have the whole panel, or whichever of you wants to answer, for a little more emphasis. Part of the partial victory that men achieved, chief white working-class men, in terms of getting a higher wage, is now so -- I mean-- I used to always argue that if--if--women and white women and black women and,and black man got white male wages, we wouldn't have poverty, at least in this country. Now they've lost, right? They're all out of work and this is [laughs] --we're all being poor together, so class, race, gender, become, you know, equally important. But how can we avoid the sort of partial, a strategy of that, that the white male working-class organized for its own good, right, and did not -- and and -- can we work for for women, for third world people, for workers in this country abroad, something about strategy is what I'm, I'm interested in. Patricia Fernandez Kelly: I'll start by saying that I'm not sure that everybody would agree that some of the quote "achievements" of so-called white workers were achievements necessarily. They were to some extent --but not--I've never seen them really disassociated with other things that were happening to working-class people, both women and of other nationalities. There's a point that you brought up that I think is extremely interesting which is, and its part of what I'm trying to do with these papers, is--Perhaps I should have stress it a little bit more in my own presentation. I think it, it follows very nicely from the three presentations that there is an important difference between sex and gender. Now this does not come as news to you except that my argument has been in another paper that I'm writing right now, that we tend to look at sex, we argue at for gender as process. In other words, we argue for the differentiation between sex and gender, and we argue that gender is something that is socially constructed, that it is a social construction. But curiously enough and correct me if I'm wrong, I think this is interesting for the workshops too, my understanding of the literature is the we take a very grand stand in making that statement and then we go back to understand gender as if it were characteristics similar to sex, rather than indeed a social construction. So that, and this is fascinating to me right now. I don't want to extend it vary greatly. The only thing that I want to say is that gender is something that is occurring at this very moment, and that gender as it was occurring in the 19th century or the early 20th century bears only some resemblance to the way in which gender is occurring as a process at this very time. So in that itself, we in that-- that statement encapsulates a number of possibilities for reassessing what is occurring to women in these different spaces that Donna was talking about. Now more concretely coming down to the-- the-- the empirical, is people all over the world-- I mean-- the funny thing is that some people tend to believe that what comes out of some of these statements is a pessimistic view of the world and indeed, if one only focuses in upon the notion, for example, of women as cheap labor, or upon technology as a creature that has emanated from a particular dominating class in its constant lust for power, profits, productivity, then one is only looking at part of the picture. In fact, I've been privileged to work with grassroots organizations where working women employed in this world factories are also trying to look at the world from different perspectives, are seeking ways to organize with other workers in other parts of the world, and are educating themselves trying to find also some creative responses. Legislation in this country, and Maxine Waters, for example in California, just to give but one instance, pushing very hard for legislation that will force corporations to adopt more responsible attitudes toward their community centered the people that are being laid off as a result of a job exportation. I think that was happening is that this conference is interesting in that it is touching upon the subject which was already relevant 5 years ago, but which most people are still not appreciating, so that our task is to bring some of these issues to the awareness of both men and women. And certainly [since] history of the world is not static, it suggests that there are always responses against some of these pressures and some very constructive results as a result of or as a product of collective action. So we have some instances, we have cases of grassroots organizations along the US-Mexican border, educational centers in Korea and in Taiwan, we have attempts at passing legislation that will force corporations, for example, to leave, to give workers at least two years or so forewarning, something which only in the United States is extraordinary, because in Europe it has a [cut] or period of time. So on and so forth. So that the issue of strategy, as you're quite right is important and that's what we should do, we should look for strategies. Donna Haraway: There's a couple things that I find interesting. The Technological Bill of Rights that some of the unions have been starting to talk about in this country, where they are putting the issue of technological change on the table as something that has to be bargained about, that it isn't just something that you take a passive position, that you don't have a choice, but to adjust to. In fact, you want to discuss the terms on which you meet technology. And I think that's interesting. The second interesting thing that I have seen, is that in the process of doing this conference, I've discovered that around World there are similar discussions going on, especially within the feminist community, and getting the news to each other is very important, about the type and tenor and results of our discussions. So I think there are some interesting fertile grounds for strategy discussions, but I don't think there is any given strategy that we can just sort of put out on the table and say well that's what we came up with. Judith A. McGaw?: I have something brief to add. During the strike in the San Jose municipal workers, for comprable worth, when all of the media attention was going to the air traffic controllers. I think we had a picture of a union. AFSCME [American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees], in this case, where men and women were working together across, what could have been very divisive sex lines, in a very promising way, in a city that was integrated in the middle of the developments that we've been talking about, that had a female majority in the city council, and a female mayor, but whose interest were not necessarily those of the Union and yet who had initiated the studies that gave the data for the union strike in the first place. I think we had a perfect picture of contradictory identities, and contradictory loyalty, is where a union developed among both men and women and across race, a very progressive kind of strategy for a strike that they won, and that had the media attention been exploring what happened. It wasn't a full victory. The men at the air traffic controllers, [macho] folks lost. I'm sorry they lost for the range of the reasons, but I'm much more happy about the kind of exploration that the folks in San Jose made, and we didn't know enough about it, publicly. as a kind of model. is a shame. Audience member 3: My question is addressed to Maria Kelly. Patricia Fernandez Kelly: Patricia Audience member 3: What? Patricia Fernandez Kelly: Patricia. Audience member 3: Patricia, excuse me. You said that Peter Drucker had said that this kind of international capitalism which you've been describing is going to lead to increase prosperity. I gather that you don't share his opinion on that, and I wondered if you could comment on what you think the effects of this export processing business is going to have on our civilization, on our economy, etc in let's say the next fifty or a hundred years if it is allowed to progress in the way that it has been. Patricia Fernandez Kelly: I certainly don't share mr. Drucker self to miss him but as I said I think that he's not producing theory. What he's doing is articulating the beliefs of managers and corporate representatives. You're quite right in this presentation, short as it was, I was not able to look at some of the serious problems that are being generated in so-called third world countries as a result of the creation of export processing zones and the employment of women in these assembly plants. Let me, rather than describe them, as I have written about them and I was invited to attend hearings last week in Mexico City before the Mexican Senate, and I had an opportunity for the first time to discuss this with these very intelligent, well-informed members of the government community in Mexico, and all who ineed, asked some rather relevant questions, but the [work for] which I was very pleased, you know. But let me mention five concerns. Some of them are less important than others. For example, a lot of a writings came out in newspapers between the six--the late-60s and the mid-70s in Mexico about issues such as denationalization. Here we are being [dispoiled] of our nationality by these foreign corporations, consider the issue of revolutionary nationality, blah blah blah blah blah blah. That does not interest me greatly. Another one that has been much publicized is what export processing zones in maquiladoras do to families. And, indeed ,this is something that interests me a little bit more but not as much as it interests of the people. The argument was that these companies were coming into places like Cuidad Juarez, which is where I did my research, my field of work. They were not providing employment to men so that naturally, the women were being forced into the labor force, and what was this doing to the sense of masculinity and male identity, blah blah blah. In fact, one individual that was deeply concerned about this issue, is Professor Neil Smelser at University of California, Berkeley who I presumably offended gravely precisely by saying "Funny every time that I give this talk, somebody asked the question about male identity and what female employment is doing to male identity, and curiously enough, it's always a male" right, [laughter] So that's that's a second point. Now these are the issues that really interests me. One has to do with the nature of employment that is being provided by multinational corporations in these countries. That was the argument in favor of this kind of investment is, "Look at it, we have Mexico, a country where unemployment rates are now admittedly by government reaching 50%. So we need all the jobs that we can get." And it's hard to argue against that argument, especially when you hear from the women workers themselves that it is important for them to have a job. Why? Because in the circumstances in which I observed in Cuidad Juarez, women are main wage-earners. Why? Because the companies themselves seek out areas with high, the rates of mail unemployment and underemployment, because then they know that they will find large and abundant supply of female workers, so that on the one hand they provide large numbers of work--of jobs, but the nature of the job is never examined. What what is the nature of the of these jobs? Well, on the one hand, they do not last more than 3 years. According to our calculations, women employed in the maquiladoras sector in Mexico have an average of 3 years employment in these industries. Secondly,--they have--they combined a very high level of intensity of work with low wages. And this is a difficult thing to argue again, because in the case that I was studying, women workers were earning the highest minimum wages afforded by Mexico. I was working in one of those plants as a seamstress and we know, this is something that some of you have probably have heard me say before, but it's a good example, so let me repeat it. It is here I was working 48 hours a week from 3:45 to 9:30 at night every day of the week, and then Saturdays, working from 11 in the morning till--excuse me--in during weekdays it was 3:45 to 11 at night and Saturday, it was 11 in the morning to 9:30 at night, with half an hour break to eat meals, and I was earning the equivalent to $0.58 an hour. But I was also being given a production quota, and it's no wonder that managers are very proud of the fact that productivity rates have been increased up to 50, 80, 85% by using Mexican labor, because the production quotas that I had was a hundred and sixty two pairs of cuffs an hour. So that's about of, I don't know, one every second of every second, or one every second and a half, something like that. So if there is high intensity of work combined with low wages, temporality of employment, high degrees of stress. We're very concerned, especially in the electronics industry, as Donna I'm sure can tell you, with the problems of health. The electronics industry is a chemical industry, so there are a combination of lots of chemicals, including such things as trichlorethylene and the greasers are the kinds of a corrosives, etc, that produce a widespread, common diseases, right. And then, as if that were not enough, that the thing is that there is a high rate of turnover of workers in these industries, and the example that I provided you with, referring to Southern California, is actually an exponent of what happens once you have mobilized a large number of women into an industrial workforce. They become then main wage providers because the men are not being given jobs and then after a relatively short period of time, they are ejected from that industrial sector, but they have to seek other forms of employment. And incidentally, when I spoke about the the issue of the families, it's not that I'm not interested in an angle of it, which is the following. Here you come with all the ideological preconceptions about why this is women's work, and then you do not provide jobs for the men. So curiously enough and painfully, I assure you, I found that in a sample of 510 homes of women employed in the maquiladoras sector, about 75% of those men were also migrating as undocumented workers regularly to the United States. So you have a combination of male unemployment and underemployment with female factory employment, a different form of a labor market segmentation, which is the direct result of this intervention of multinationals in export manufacturing. I do not see this as a rational and integrated form for fostering development in my country or in other countries of the world. Of course, I'm being totally simplistic because there are different examples, but that in a nutshell, gives you some of the concerns. and there are, if you want to enter a dialogue with government officials, which I've always found probably because I'm fairly masochistic [laughter], it is worth doing. Then you have to talk to them about what is necessary to rationalize this stuff because clearly denunciation is not enough. This is an irreversible reality that is going to be with us for a long, long, long time. Betiina Berch: On that note, [applause] [Break] [Chatter] I'll leave you alone here. Yes. [Chatter] [Unknown organizer] I think there's a magic word somewhere that makes everybody sit down, but I don't know it's so, sit down. Do these mics sound as bad out there as they do here? Well they don't--how--is it you can't make them?--All right. No I don't think so. Before we officially begin this part of the days program, I would remind you that we have a reception after the reading in the same space as lunch time. We will have Marge Piercy's books on display down there as well. And we asked you, on her behalf, not to smoke in that area. Also if you are under 19 years old, don't drink alcohol [laughter] and if you've lost any property you might go into the Women's Center and see if it's been turned in. Now to introduce to you, Marge Piercy, I present to you author, poet Quandra Prettyman Stadler. You will find her poems in a wide range of anthologies. Her book, "Out of our Lives," is now available in paperback, from Howard University Press and without further ado, I give you Quandra. Quandra Prettyman Stadler: [...] I have to--I have to learn how to use this, so tell me if you can hear me or if you can't. Audience member: We can't! Quandra Prettyman Stadler: That will make--[laughs] This is a tall slender person I've always wanted to be. [Laughter, applause] It sometimes seems to me that the largest cortege for technological victim, gathers behind the coffin of the artist and writer. It is certainly a common place in our time to hear that new technologies of image and of word are harbingers of the death of literature. And we do have the capacity to destroy literature, for if we destroy a base, pollute our lives in laboratories, and with--and War games played for real, for sport, we will indeed destroy abuse, pollute poetry by killing the poet. In the mob action after the assassination of Julius Caesar, the poet Cinna, on route to Caesar's funeral, meets with the mob, with learning his name is Cinna as was one of the conspirators, prepares to tear him to pieces. Cinna shouts, "I Cinna the poet! I am Cinna the poet!" "Tear him for his bad verses then," is the response. [Laughter] He tries to separate himself once more. "I am not Cinna the conspirator." The response is, "It is no matter. His name's Cinna." It is apropros that the Scholar and Feminist Conference treating the question of technology should find conclusion in a poet, Marge Piercy, who knows that to fail to act, is to be a conspirator, that being a poet is not quite enough. Poet, novelist, playwright, political activist, and teacher, Marge Piercy, comes to us today from Detroit, Michigan where she was born and schooled, and from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where she makes her home now, and from scores of American towns and college campuses where she has conducted workshops, given readings, and testified. I believe that some of these testimonies, often in the form of benefits, should be noted. They have included a number of feminist magazines, Sojourner, Sister Coverage, The Second Wave, 13th Moon, a number of defense funds, including those for Inez García, for [Shoshona Pat Winston], for the White House lawn 11, a number of women's centers, health projects, rape crisis centers, the Prostitutes's Union of Massachusetts, the State Coalition to Ratify ERA, Mobilization for Survival, and these testimonies are along with her writing, her creative life work. She is the author of several volumes of poetry. You'll find many of them, they're "Breaking Camp," "Hard Loving," "4-Telling," "To Be of Use," "Living in the Open," "The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing," "The Moon is Always Female," and "Stone, Paper, Knife," from which she will read today, and almost as many novels, "Going Down Fast," "Dance the Eagle to Sleep," "Small Changes," "Woman on the Edge of Time," "The High Cost of Living," "Vida," and "Braided Lives." She is as well the author of a collection of essays, or a collection of her essays will appear, "Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt." her works speak to the interest of feminists and other concerned persons. Elizabeth Janeway has said of the novel, closest to our immediate concerns today, "Woman on the Edge of Time," that the visionary future described there is offered, not as an escape from the present, a fantasy into which we can retreat, but as an injunction to invent a future that will meet our needs better, both emotional needs and social urgencies, a way of living not guaranteed to drive us crazy. I am pleased to present Marge Piercy. [Applause] Marge Piercy: Noticed that all of it--there's a frequent instance in my life where I get off a plane and meet people and they say, but we expected you to be taller, or bigger. Noticed that all three of us have been standing on this little thing, and let us no more expect each other no more to be large in order to make large noises. We are a more economical size. [Laughter] I'm going to start with "To be of use." "The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. No, almost out of sight They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real." Is--How are the acoustics? Do they echo as much down there as up here, or are they okay? Okay? Oh good, but up here it sounds like I'm reading down a rain barrel or one of those subway tunnels where you get that echo going. Okay, but as long as it's good out there it doesn't matter. I've heard the poems before. This is especially for those of you who spent any time in a large cast. It's called "The Cast Off." "This is a day to celebrate can- openers, those lantern-jawed long-tailed humping tools that cut through what keeps us from what we need: a can of beans trapped in its armor taunts the nails and teeth of a hungry woman. Today let us hear hurrahs for zippers, those small shark teeth that part politely to let us at what we want; the tape on packages that unlock us birthday presents; envelopes we slit to thaw the frozen words on the tundra of paper. Today let us praise the small rebirths, the emerging groundhog from the sodden burrow; the nut picked from the broken fortress of walnut shell, itself pried from the oily fruit shaken from the high turreted city of the tree. Today let us honor the safe whose door hangs ajar; the champagne bottle with its cork bounced off the ceiling and into the soup tureen; the Victorian lady in love for has removed her hood, her cloak, her laced boots, her stockings, her overdress, her underdress, her silk petticoats, her linen petticoatsher chemise, her whalebone corsets, her drawers, and who still wants to! Today let us praise the cast that finally opens, slit neatly in two like a dinosaur egg, and out at last comes somewhat hairier, powdered in dead skin but still beautiful, the lost for months body of my love." This is a poem dedicated to a woman, who was named Wendy Theresa Simon, who was born September 25th, 1953 and died August 7th, 1979. It's called "The Long Death." "Radiation is like oppression the average daily kind of subliminal toothache you get almost used to, the stench of chlorine in the water, [tape cuts out and omits this part of the poem: of smog in the wind. We comprehend the disasters of the moment, the nursing home fire, the river in flood pouring over the sandbag levee, the airplane crash with fragments of burnt bodies scattered among the hunks of twisted metal, the grenade in the] marketplace; the sinking ship. But how to grasp a thing that does not kill you today or tomorrow but slowly from the inside in twenty years. How to feel that a corporate choice means we bear twisted genes and our grandchildren will be stillborn if our children are very lucky. Slow death can not be photographed for the six o'clock news. It's all statistical, the gross national product or the prime lending rate. Yet if our eyes saw in the right spectrum, how it would shine, lurid as magenta neon. If we could smell radiation like seeping gas, if we could sense it as heat, if we could hear it as a low ominous roar of the earth shifting, then we would not sit and be poisoned while industry spokesmen talk of acceptable millirems and cancer per population thousand. We acquiesce at murder so long as it is slow, murder from asbestos dust, from tobacco, from lead, from sulphur in water, and fourteen years later statistics are printed on the rise in leukemia among children. We never see their faces. They never stand, those poisoned children together in a courtyard, and are gunned down by men in three-piece suits. The shipyard workers who built nuclear submarines, the soldiers who were marched into the Nevada desert to be tested by the H-bomb, the people who work in power plants, they die quietly years after in hospital wards and not on the evening news. The soft spring rain floats down and the air is perfumed with pine and earth. Seedlings drink it in, robins sip it in puddles, you run in it and feel clean and strong, the spring rain blowing from the irradiated cloud over the power plant. Radiation is oppression, the daily average kind, the kind you're almost used to and live with as the years abrade you, high blood pressure, ulcers, cramps, migraine, a hacking cough; you take it inside and it becomes pain and you say, not They are killing me, but I am sick now." [Applause] If you--if you still want to do that at the end, I'd be real pleased, but in between if you'd respond emotionally the poems and just experienced them, sometimes the energy goes away when we beat the hands together. We learn sorta to do that and that energy tends to go away. So if you still want to do that at the end, it's fine with me, but I'll ask you not to, 'til then. [Mutters] This is a poem that I always read now. It's from "The Lunar Cycle," and it's called "Right to Life." It's a phrase I am reclaiming. "A woman is not a pear tree thrusting her fruit in mindless fecundity into the world. Even pear trees bear heavily one year and rest and grow the next. An orchard gone wild drops few warm rotting fruit in the grass but the trees stretch high and wiry gifting the birds forty feet up among inch long thorns broken atavistically from the smooth wood. A woman is not a basket you place your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood hen you can slip duck eggs under. Not a purse holding the coins of your descendants till you spend them in wars. [Not a bank where your genes gather interest and interesting mutations in the tainted rain.] You plant corn and you harvest it to eat or sell. You put the lamb in the pasture to fatten and haul it in to butcher for chops. You slice the mountains in two for a road and gouge the high plains for coal and the waters run muddy for miles and years. Fish die but you do not call them yours unless you planned to eat them. Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman. You lay claim to her pastures for grazing, fields for growing babies like iceberg lettuce. You value children so dearly that none ever go hungry, none weep with no one to tend them while mothers work, none lack fresh fruit, none chew lead or cough to death and your orphanages are empty. Every noon the best restaurants serve poor children steaks. At this moment at nine o'clock a partera is performing a table top abortion on an unwed mother in Texas who can't get Medicaid any longer. In five days she will die of tetanus and her little daughter will cry and be taken away. Next door a husband and wife are sticking pins in the son they did not want. They will explain for hours how wicked he is, how he wants discipline. We are all born of woman. In the rose of the womb we suckled our mother's blood and every baby born has a right to love like a seedling to sun. Every baby born unloved, unwanted is a bill that will come due in twenty years with interest, an anger that must find a target, a pain that will beget pain. A decade downstream a child screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched, a firing squad is summoned, a button is pushed and the world burns. I will choose what enters me, what becomes flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics, no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking. You may not use me as your factory. Priests and legislators do not hold shares in my womb or my mind. This is my body. If I give it to you I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand." This is called "What's that smell in the kitchen?" "All Over America women are burning dinners. It's lamb chops in Peoria; it's haddock in Providence; it's steak in Chicago; tofu Delight in Big Sur; [red rice and beans in Dallas.] All over America women are burning food they're supposed to bring with calico smile on platters glittering like wax. Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined but spewing out missiles of hot fat. Carbonized despair presses like a clinker from a barbeque against the back of her eyes . If she wants to grill anything, it's her husband spitted over a slow fire. [Laughter] If she wants to serve him anything it's a dead rat with a bomb in its belly ticking like the heart of an insomniac. [Laughter] Her life is cooked and digested, nothing but leftovers in Tupperware. Look, she says, once I was roast duck on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam. [Laughter] Burning dinner is not incompetance but war." [Laughter] This is called Absolute Zero in the Brain." This is, comes from a piece of research I uncovered in medical journals years ago when I was researching "Woman on the Edge of Time." "Penfield the great doctor did a lobotomy on his own sister and recorded pages of clinical observations on her lack of initiative afterward. Dullness, he wrote, is superseded by euphoria at times. Slight hemi- paresis with aphasia. The rebellious sister died from the head down into the pages of medical journals and Penfield founded a new specialty. Intellectuals sneer at moviegoers who confuse Dr. Frankenstein with his monster. The fans think Frankenstein is the monster, isn't he?" This is a found poem in the technical sense. Actually, somebody left it in a friend's summer house, rented summer house. It's called "Right Wing Mag," found poem. These are all phrases. "If you turn this page, You and Your Loved Ones may starve. Economic Dunkirk, it is coming! Reap spectacular profits while others are losing theirs. Congressman Larry McDonald identified 120 socialists in Congress. The Handgun has become the symbol of freedom. Fighting both death and taxes with a unique mix of economic and religious commentary. I have used my own personal distiller every day for ten years without service needed. Dedicated to the support of gold. Free catalog for Christian Patriots. Shyster zionist courts. You high rollers pay attention now. Imagine a contest to the death between two individuals who are in the same part of the forest. Three little known tax loopholes. This elite security force offers counterterrorist. Exciting body massage. Investment diamonds won't set off airport metal detectors. You can't eat gold. Store dehydrated and freeze-dried survival foods. The only safe that's really safe is one nobody can find." See that's their paranoia and I'll reach mine. This is called "Very Late July." "July in the afternoon, the sky rings, a crystal goblet without a crack. One gull passes over mewing for company. A tiger swallowtail hovers near magenta phlox, while a confetti cloud of fritillaries covers the goldenglow. The sun lowers a helmet of flame over my skull till my brain cooks yellow as chicken skin; beside me Half under the tent of my skirt, my cat blinks at the day allowing the swallowtail to light within paw, purring too softly to be heard, only the vibration from his brown chest buzzing into my palm Among the Scarlet blossoms of the runner beans wwining on their tripods the hummingbird Arts like a jet fighter. Today in think tanks, the data analysts not on vacation are playing war games. A worker is packing plutonium by remote control into new warheads. An advisor is telling the president as they golf, we could win it. July without a crack as we live inside the great world egg." Oops, what have I done? Oh I see what I've done. I'm in the wrong book. Right page, wrong book. This is the introductory poem for "The Lunar Cycle,"--called--is the name of the book, is "The Moon is Always Female." "The Moon is always female and so am I although often in this vale of razor blades I have wished I could put put on and take off my sex like a dress and why not? Do men wear their sex always? The priests, the healer, the teacher all tell us they come to their professions neuter as clams and the truth is when I work I am pure as an angel tiger and clear is my eye and hot my brain and silent all the whining grunting piglets of the appetites. For we were priests to the goddesses by whom were fashioned the first altars of clumsy stone on stone and leaping animals in the wombdark caves, long before men put on skirts and masks to scare babies. For we were healers with herbs and poultices with our milk and careful fingers long before they began learning to cut up the living by making jokes at corpses. For we were making sounds from our throats and lips to warn and encourage the helpless young long before schools were built to teach boys to obey and be bored and kill. I wake in a strange slack empty bed of a motel, shaking like dry leaves the wind rips loose, and in my head is bound the girl of twelve whose female organs all but the numb womb are being cut from her with a knife. Clitoridectomy, whatever Latin name you call it, in a quarter of the world girl children are so maimed and I think of her and I cannot stop. And I think of her and I cannot stop. If you are a woman you feel the knife in the words. If you are a man, than at age four or else at twelve you are seized and laid down and your penis is cut off. You are left your testicles but they are sewed to your crotch. When your spouse buys you, you are torn or cut open so that your precious semen can be siphoned out, but of course you feel nothing. But pain. But pain. For the uses of men we have been butchered and crippled and shut up and carved open under the moon that swells and shines and shrinks again into nothingness, pregnant and then waning toward its little monthly death. The Moon is always female but the sun is female only in lands where females are let into the sun to run and climb. A woman is screaming and I hear her. A woman is bleeding and I see her bleeding from the mouth, the womb, the breasts in the fountain of dark blood of dismal daily tedious sorrow quite palatable to the taste of the mighty and taken for granted that the bread of domesticity be baked of our flesh, that the hearth be built of our bones of animals kept for meat and milk that we open and lie under and weep. I want to say over the names of my mothers like the stones of a path I am climbing rock by slippery rock into the mists. Never even at knifepoint if I wanted or been willing to become a man. I want only to be myself and free. I am waiting for the moon to rise. Here I squat, the whole country with its steel mills and its coal mines and its prisons at my back and the continent tilting up into the mountains and torn by shining lakes all behind me on this scythe of straw, a sand bar cast on the waves, and I wait for the moon to rise red and heavy in my eyes. Chilled, cranky, heavy in the dark I wait and I am all of the time climbing slippery rocks in a mist while far below the waves crash in the sea caves; I am descending a stairway under the groaning sea while the black waters buffet me like rockweed to and fro. I have swam the upper waters leaping in dolphin's skin for joy equally into the nec- cessary air and the tumult of the powerful wave. I am entering the chambers I have visited. I have floated through them sleeping and sleep- walking and waking, drowning in passion festooned with green bladderwrack of misery. I have wandered these chambers in the rock where the moon freezes the air and all hair is black or silver. Now I will tell you what I have learned lying under the moon naked as women do: Now I will tell you the changes of the high and lower moon. Out of necessity's hard stones we suck what water we can and so we have survived, women born of women. There is knowing with the teeth as well as knowing with the tongue and knowing with a finger tips as well as knowing with words and all the fine flickering hungers of the brain." This poem came from a recent conversation with two friends. One of them is a therapist and one of them teaches in a school, in a perfectly ordinary grade school. This is called "The Disinherited." It starts with a quote from Gandhi. "We do not inherit the world, from our parents, we borrow it from our children. The dreams of the children reek of char and ashes. The fears of the children peer out through the brown eyes of a calf tethered away from its mother, a calf who bawls for the unknown bad thing about to happen as the butcher's truck arrives. The children finger their own sharp bones in their wrists. They knead their foreheads gingerly. Last night I dreamed my mummy was burning, the little girl said in class, father, my cat, Taffy, my brother, fire was eating them all. I wrote three postcards to the President. I won't be anything when I grow up, the boy said, I won't live till then. I don't like firecrackers anymore. I always draw houses burning. Blood drips from the roof of the cave of their minds In their dreams there is one great loud noise. Then weeping. Then silence." This is called "The Market Economy." Suppose some peddler offered you can have a color TV but your baby will be born with a crooked spine; you can have polyvinyl cups and wash and wear suits but it will cost you your left lung; suppose somebody offered you a frozen pre-cooked dinner every night for 10 years but at the end your colon dies and then you do, slowly and with much pain. You get a house in the suburbs but you're work in a new plastics factory and die at fifty-one when your kidneys turn off. But where else will you work? where else can you rent but Smog City? The only houses for sale are under the yellow sky. You've been out of work for a year and they're hiring at the plastics factory. Don't read the fine print, there isn't any." Okay, I think I better just do one more and quit cuz they're getting on. So I threw the last one in "Stone, Paper, Knife," which is long enough. [Mutters] And it's called "Stone, Paper, Knife." It's a children's game: stone, paper, knife. Paper covers stone, knife cuts paper, stone breaks knife. You lurch, guessing. You plot intentions but you learn each one's strengths and weakness are light and shadows thrown by the one source. I like plain pokers with luck subordinate, bowing its golden curly head, not games where every red odd card is wild. Grace shines in precisely doing what the structure makes difficult. When the team cheats, victory is boring as Sunday real estate. Games are the lighter rituals, rules gravel paths pleasure follows. Art is game only if you play at it, a mirror that reflects from the inside out. We like knowing what has to happen with small surprises. But sometimes we must endure or create gross shocks that stretch us till we grow or break. 3 The baby wants the same bottle at the same time. The cat complains when the easy chair is moved from the fire. The dog brings back the stick twenty times, wagging hard. Stubbing my toe on habit, a grave in the tall grass, a stone hidden by weeds, a metallic place in the mind, a callus on the nerves. Lush weeds overwhelm our frail beginnings, flowers set out in peat pots watered once, abandoned to choke in an overrun bed. How easily we turn off the fingertips like light bulbs to save energy, pull in from the nerve endings capped like gleaming teeth, then starve out impulse. We make resolutions, bending ourselves into daring new shapes, like strips of pliant wood. When we loosen our grip, we spring back as we were. In repetition, a sense of identity lulls, gathered into a tight ball like socks in a drawer, mingled, wooly. I am the one who puts honey in her morning coffee, who won't eat anchovies. Me, remember me, don't sit in my favorite chair, don't drink from my mug, This typewriter is just the right kind and these pens. Repetition numbs. How many men I have lain with who would only fit bodies together at one angle and who required exactly muttered obscene formulae, precise caresses until every woman they embraced was the same dolly of their will and all coupling mechanical, safe proceeding by strict taboos fabric no wild emotion could pierce. We cannot listen to every sound, open as a baby, as a microphone, to the furnace clanking on, the year's last hornet butting on the pane, the bare branch of locust rubbing, Focus is precise here and vague beyond, willful narrowing of a field of vision. We pay attention, spending now and saving then. What should we give over to habit like an old slipper flung to the dog to chew, and what should we save and strip? 4 The wheel turns from solstice to solstice when I light my candles and fires, old rituals that quicken me toward death. I keep birthdays for a week, I demand presents shamelessly, rents from all my properties of love. I met my dear on Passover, so each seder marks exit and entry, liberation and a chosen bond. The meal I cook gives me grandmother's face. That dance of hands in the kitchen conjures dead women who peek through me like a door. I observe the full moon and the dark, the cross quarters of the witches, the pagan and the Jewish holidays and my own three anniversaries: when we met, when we first made our love and when we made commitment. We shuffle round the circle dance through seasons revolving stately as planets from strong light slowly into the cold. 5 Where do you want to return to, where was it cozy, the hearth-fire-rose that bloomed just for you on the mauve twilight? What vast lap do you long to cuddle in and suck what drug-spiked tit? You can buy oblivion this year and fashion shadows of dream, ivory and silver. Is it power you recall entering fiery in your chest like a shot of whiskey? Was it love tolled you, a church bell bonging every quarter hour, played with rich reverberating changes drowning out all thought and question in that hammering peel of orchestrated want? Or remembering when the children were small, needs howled for you every minute and broke the skin that formed on the warm milk of your sleep, how the sunflower faces followed you, how the hands tugged at you hot as open mouths, empty as midnight airports. We can be addicted to the stone of submission, of security, addicted to the paper of mobility, blowing lighter than dust and thin as water. We can be addicted to the cleaver of our will and go hacking through. Security, power, freedom contradict. How can we open our hands and let go the old dangerous toys we clutch hard, the mama dolls, the Monopoly sets, the ray guns and rockets? How can we with only stone and paper and knife build with imagination a better game?" This is the last section. 6 "Where out of our wavering half tainted desires stained by the blood of mirrors, drugged shuffling with apathy like Thorazine, can we birth the hard clear image of hope? For the ice shadows lengthen and the glaciers begin their slow creeping dominion over the heart, stilling its fervors. For the wicked prance to public fanfares. For the mean flourish the thunders of righteous and religious rhetoric like stolen purple banners, as if they loved the earth and its children, calling those who do not hate as well as they hate, the fallen and low. When evil tears the sun into bombs that can burn the earth to its granite bones and melt the limbs of children unborn; when evil leaches subtle poisons into the bright waters, into the warm milk in the udder, so women find strange lumps in their breasts, as boys wither as their blood thins, as men still handsome as bronze chrysanthemums in October sunlight stoop as a wandering blight travels from organ to organ; when little girls are sold on the streets like newspapers and women torn open and left to bleed and the elderly freeze in hovels, then who shall bear hope back into the world? We give our government money to buy engines of murder, torture abroad and want at home while those who mined coal cough black blood, while those who spun cloth die of brown lung, while children sit hungry in crowded barren schools sucking their fingers. Can hope be born from us sulking in corners? Who shall bear hope, who else but us? After us is the long wind blowing off the ash pit of blasted genes, or after, the remarrying of the earth and the water. We must begin with the stone of mass resistance, and pile stone on stone on stone, begin cranking out whirlwinds of paper, the word that embodies before any body can rise to dance on the wind, and the sword of decision that cuts through. We must shine with hope, stained glass windows that shape light into icons, glow like lanterns borne before a procession. Who can bear hope back into the world but us, you, my other flesh, all of us who have seen the face of hope at least once in vision, in dream, in marching, who sang hope into rising like a conjured snake, who found its flower above timberline by a melting glacier. Hope sleeps in our bones like a bear waiting for spring to rise and walk. Thank you. [Applause]