Alta - you're kind of really freaking awesome

penus envy, they call it
think how handy to have a thing
that poked out; you could just shove
it in any body, whang whang & come,
wouldn’t have to give a shit.
you know you’d come!
wouldn’t have to love that person,
trust that person.
whang, whang & come.
if you couldn’t get relief for free,
pay a little $, whang whang & come.
you wouldn’t have to keep, or abort,
wouldn’t have to care about the kid.
wouldn’t fear sexual violation.
penus envy, they call it.
the man is sick in his heart.
that’s what I call it.

I find it curious that this type of intensity, a type of intensity that just burns off the page
I also wonder why penus and not penis
And Urban Dictionary defines penus as, “The abbreviated term for gay male intercourse (Penis+Anus= Penus), when the male genitalia penetrates into the anal sphincter, massaging the male prostate gland.” Interesting, yes, relevant, maybe, naturally this definition was created well after Alta’s poem Penus Envy would have first appeared

And now Alta is writing sporadic articles the for the Berkeley Daily Planet in California about girl’s basketball

So I wonder what happened, or maybe nothing at all.

Born 1942
Moved to California
Two marriages
Two divorces
Started a commune for women leaving abusive relationships

Started Shameless Hussy Press from her house
Published Remember Our Fire – a collection of the only female poetry she could get her hands on

“I opened Pandora’s box. There were lots of things that women had never talked about. I just started writing about them.” – Alta

“She doesn’t say more—or less—than she means. Her poems drop into your mind like stones and set up vibrations.” – Marge Piercy

Alta worked the printing press with a woman who was unaware of the safety issues. Her was too long and got caught in the press.

Not even the poets featured in the first printing of Remember Our Fire were willing to show up. They wrote Alta off, expressed very differing views on feminism.

“To say there was a supportive women’s writing community in 1969 is not
quite accurate.” – Alta

I have a list of interviews with Alta, taken in 2000 and 2001. She’s very calm, grateful, pleasant and in no way like the voice her poems express. So was that voice just a voice? Was it her? Has she cooled over the years or is she just reserved in interviews?

“For the next one I found thirty poems, because women had started writing.” – Alta

Reti:
She was very important to me by the time I came out in the late 1970s.
Alta:
That’s nice to hear. I’m proud of that.

The more I read of her and from her and about her the more I like her. She seems not just caught up in the moment. She wasn’t throwing stones because it was what everyone else was doing. In fact, not many women, from what I can tell, were throwing many stones at all at this time. But she speaks with no hatred or anger. She speaks honestly but intelligently, considerately. Like she really, really cared. She speaks like someone who was really passionate about something at one point in time that they had to stand up and shout. And now others have come to stand up and shout and maybe she’s taken a bit of a backseat. But would they be shouting if she hadn’t shouted first? She speaks like she really believes what she believed. Like it was important to her. Not for the shock value, not for the pure sake of rebellion, but for the sake of what was right.

“Well I was dodging the bullets, getting kicked out of everything, getting death threats and getting kicked out of groups. I was kicked out of women’s groups. I started a halfway house for women and they kicked me out. I said you can’t kick me out. I started this thing! I kick you out! I came home one day and my phone had been disconnected. I went in the fridge to get food and they’d stuck pennies in my mayonnaise. I was trying to
raise kids in that house.” – Alta

[in response to the above statement] “I never liked that house. They put all the kids in one room.” – Lorelei Gerrey (Alta’s daughter)

Not only do I respect her greatly as a poet. But through the course of reading the interviews I have of her, I respect her even more as a person.