Female history is always destabilized by whatever guy is now watching the line of women parading by. It's maddening but those guys will never change. We have to think differently. ....I think females need to write new fictions to hold their truths..... We have to set each other up better all the time and the terms of the world are always inadequate to women's true accomplishments.....The feminine line means that above all women mustn't be contemptuous of themselves. Just when the last thing going on is one's purported femininity, it erupts like a big bow. We're just so many things. I distrust my own jargon, my abandoning of the feminine for the female. I guess I was preferring sex over gender, but later thinking how arrogant to pretend not to be feminine. For anyone really. Why is the feminine the thing to hate. Something men, or mothers made to control girls. Surely it can free us too, then in some homeopathic way. I often forget words, that's why I like holes. All this quiet diving through the dictionary and a bird comes up tweeting.
-- Eileen Myles, to Jennifer Firestone, in Letters to Poets