The Poetry Center Presents, Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry

The Writers

Brenda Hillman

Brenda Hillman is the author of eleven books of poetry from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which is In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022). Her first collection of prose, Three Talks, was published in 2023 by the University of Virginia Press. Hillman has co-edited and co-translated over a dozen books, including At Your Feet by Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar, co-translated with her mother Helen Hillman. A former Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets, Hillman’s recent awards include the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for innovation in literature as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award from Pen (Oakland) in 2025.  Hillman is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California and currently directs the Poetry Program at Community of Writers; she lives in the Bay Area with her husband Robert Hass.

Near Jenner

I asked the mind for a shape and shape meant nothing;
I asked the soul for help, and some help came:

some wedding-band gold
came around the edges of a sunset,
and I knew that my bride could see forward, behind it; 

and all the women I had known
came back from their positions
where they had been hanging the sil
laundry of heaven
upside down by the elastic;

They'd help me find her

though they looked slightly faded from being dead,
as the first wildflowers here—
radish, and the ones they call 'milkmaids'—
look faded when they appear
on the shoulders of the Pacific—

 

Cynthia Parker-Ohene

Cynthia Parker-Ohene is a poet, therapist, and educator whose work braids together memory, history, and Black ecological thought. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California, where she was a Chester Aaron Scholar. Her debut collection, Daughters of Harriet (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2022), was a Finalist for the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, 2022 Best American Poeety, and has been recognized for its unflinching attention to lineage, resilience, and survival.

Her honors include the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Poetry Prize, as well as awards and fellowships supporting her ongoing literary and community work. She has been supported by the Virginia Center for the Arts, Juniper, Tin House, and Callaloo, among others. Parker-Ohene’s writing has appeared in leading journals and anthologies, and she continues to explore the intersections of oral history, land memory, and collective healing through poetry and interdisciplinary practice.

She is committed to building spaces of mutual generosity and transformation, where language serves as a site of resistance and reparations.

In Virginia  

In Virginia’s room 

Her own
Peruvian lilies light her desk 

With carefully placed pens

Bought with her own words
The groovings in the desk waxed by
Pearline who at noon serves Earl Grey
In a pink apron carrying pink teacups
Laced with lemon on its pungent lip 
Delicate woman-sized treats for swooning
Pearline moves to the door to bring in the Silk Road porcelain tub 

Camphor, salts, and tints-of-violet to balm Virginia’s tuckered feet unbend 

the curvature of Virginia’s back the enamored covetous prose in Virginia’s own

Pearlie she calls bring my notebooks and more tea
Pearline walks hard into the kitchen to draw the fires prepare domesticity
For the writer who needs a room of her own to subordinate her muse
Her maid who labors for Miss Virginia’s ownness, her roominess
Virginia says the room frees her from the tyranny of man  
Her men, planters and industrialists
Pearline is asked to stay late to prepare refreshments for her writer friends To collect 
their wet coats dry them by the hearth and pleasantly waitress their personalities  
Pearline agreeable prepares the table embosses it with fairies and musing mermaids tapered flickering

Nights when Pearline walks to her bus stop fresh from clanking silver goblets of drink 
She has never tasted goes to the butcher for the leftover shanks of meat closest to 
The guts of its porcine body for her own family’s stewed victuals  
At home she draws the fire for her children’s nightly bath 
Washes clothes for school on the morrow, braids their hair  
After all and sundry has been cared for she walks to the pallet she shares
 And thinks of Virginia’s ownness the ownness that she  
Pearline keeps pristine from the tyranny of mistress Virginia’s men

 

Jennifer Firestone 

Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry including her most recent collection Story by Ugly Duckling Presse.  Firestone is the co-editor of two anthologies, the recently published MIT collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-garde Poetry (co-edited with Marcella Durand) and Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax). Firestone co-authored the collection LITtle by LITtle with photographer and urban geographer, Laura Y. Liu. She is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies and Chair of Writing at the New School’s Eugene Lang College.

 

Light the first light of evening, as in a room       In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good

 

The candle

blown                    Merciless wind

              trying                    before snuffed Black crepe

                      Your father a postman,

 

Light the first              Follow an intuitive thread Swallow nascent spark    Decipher               what is droll

Release golden wheat                                                 Swing in sun             Or— Many a Yankee in 

town                    Many of     glee          Fried

             oysters & clams          Soft          serve

               Cesar salads                             I hear                   sounds

You hear them too               Winds shake Trumpet tree                       Hear me 

            talking to myself                  Hear me

The world imagined is the ultimate good          What flocks                   fire

 

Too old                          for                        indecision

You ask                too much                       Listen

 

Tonya M. Foster

Emeryville resident Tonya M. Foster is a poet and essayist. She is the eldest of four daughters born, and was raised in N’Awlins. Foster is a co-editor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art, and the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os, and the forthcoming Thingifications : : Mathematics of Chaos. A recipient of grants from several foundations and granting organization, she is an Associate Professor at SFSU, and holds George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry in the Creative Writing Department. She’s dancing despite what is.

Hood Hauntings:         (A Poem in Progress)

(40°48′16″N 73°56′37″W)

(for Walter Hood in Oakland)

 

At this hour, standing t/here, among you, 

on this bit of earth that is our momentary lot 

 

I want to say that the self 

is not to a single body bound

Earth is, after all, a planetary

constellation pressing past our 

              cautiously corralling calculations. 

 

I want to say that the self

is not to a single body bound

               The tender ways she holds her lover’s scarf tells

               us everything she won’t say 

               about his touch, about her quiet wanting

 

I want to say that the self

is not to a single body bound

 

                And the gentle way the bearded addict folds 

                his lanky arms across his torso, ashen, is a semaphore

                for what we cannot hold

 

I want to say that the self

is not to a single body bound

 

               The doubter, situated as s/he is 

               at road-forks and rivers, dreams in circuits 

               of certainty, that can only short-circuit one such as s/he.

 

I want to say that the self

is not to a single body bound

 

               And the optimist has never seen

               the schist for the moss. And the pessimist

               refuses to see the sky beyond the mine,

                             and refuses to see that was is not always,

                             and that is is not will be.

 

I want to say that the self

is not to a single body bound

                And the loner, who knows this, cries

               To her self wrought of words and worries.

               She hunkers down with her arms full of absences

                            more bearable than the gregariousness of neighbors

                            What is an “I” without you or them?

 

Say I want, therefore

 

To say that the self

is not to a singular body bound

 

               is to dream in real time, time, time, tock

               is a cosmic conjuring of past 

                            the metal fences, past 

                            the clipped and cultivated lawns, past

                            today’s neighborhood congregants, past

                            the omni-present past there’s no way of filtering out

 

To say that the self

is not to a singular body bound

 

               is to make space for the girl become lover become mother 

               who breathes, for a time, for another, 

               is to embrace that each I is 

               only in the company of We,

               even if only an idea of we

 

And myself?

 

My self is not a single body, is not a body singularly situated

               among the stars, among things, among thoughts, among words, 

               among syllables, among shopping carts, among breaths and boxes

 

My self is not by my body’s boundaries bound

In the thicket, we are

 

I am because we are

and We            we are mostly spirit—salve and machete