9/3/23
I’m not going to go around and try to destroy your reputation, I don’t have the energy for petty bullshit. I am going to write about my life and this is inevitably bound up in it. I am writing about feminism and men but that is part of a larger project and isn’t going to be reduced to getting one up on you or whatever. My visions are so much greater than that. None of this is to say that you will be spared from criticism, but I am not out to hurt you in petty ways. You should know that.
I’m mostly just really hurt and feel betrayed and my heart breaks for ****** who is clearly getting the worst of all this.
On a political level, this all affirms my central belief that there is no way to legitimately pursue anti fascism or critique fascism without a robust, militant feminism at the foundation of our politics. Feminism is a lived in, embodied expression of life. It’s not theory on a shelf, it is a claim to change the entire fabric of humanity and it begins with ourselves. The minutiae of our every day lives. The way we walk and talk and breathe. We have to live feminism like our lives depend on it, because they do. Without feminism, without a true care for women, there is no movement and there is nothing to say. That sexualized violence and the mistreatment of women in varying degrees is the inescapable thread in all of our discoveries, even the discoveries of you and I on an intimate level, should give us pause. It is an earth shattering revelation.
I really am so hurt, mostly because this type of mistreatment feels inescapable. It is demoralizing and painful. I have such a love and care for you, I think you are brilliant in so many ways. I hope you learn, I hope you heal yourself and change. I hope you write truthfully about your own life, not for fame or money, but because living and seeing and bearing witness to this world with integrity is central to the project of poetry in this historical moment. We are constantly being stripped of our dignity and it is so important to not contribute to that and to not debase ourselves in the name of the status quo. That’s the easiest thing in the world to do and living a life of convenience is shameful at this time. Confronting our world right now is difficult, it demands so much of us. How silly to think that making art that rises to the occasion of our moment would be easy, that it would demand nothing of you on a personal level. That is so silly and beneath your intelligence.
We can’t redo Brecht, Brecht’s project failed to live up to its revolutionary aspirations because at the center of it was the very exploitation that he claimed to want to rid the world of. Women cannot remain invisible. We have to name the world and it is through feminism that we will do it.
I have so much love for you Mike, I really really do. I need space now but I have so much love for you. I wish you clarity of thought and courage right now.
Tai