Welcome to the TP Podcast!
Welcome to the TP Podcast!
Adrienne Rich wrote "On Secrets, Lies & Silence", a collection of essays of great interest from a feminist point of view. It's been translated into Spanish, too. But today we are going to learn about one of her poems, "Song", about a different kind of loneliness people can feel. Enjoy!
Listen to this poem!
Read it here!
Listen to the poem.
Comment the poem at the Dakota in Spain blog.
Read about its author on the TP webpage for Dian Million.
Read here the poem:
The Housing Poem
by Dian Million
Minnie had a house
which had trees in the yard
and lots of flowers
she especially liked the kitchen
because it had a large old cast iron stove
and that
the landlord said was the reason
the house was so cheap.
Pretty soon Minnie's brother Rupert came along
and his wife Onna
and they set up housekeeping in the living room
on the fold-out couch,
so the house warmed and rocked
and sang because Minnie and Rupert laughed a lot.
Pretty soon their mom Elsie came to live with them too
because she liked being with the laughing young people
and she knew how the stove worked the best.
Minnie gave up her bed and slept on a cot.
Well pretty soon
Dar and Shar their cousins came to town looking for work.
They were twins
the pride of Elsie's sister Jo
and boy could those girls sing. They pitched a tent under
the cedar patch in the yard
and could be heard singing around the house
mixtures of old Indian tunes and country western.
When it was winter
Elsie worried
about her mother Sarah
who was still living by herself in Moose Glen back home.
Elsie went in the car with Dar and Shar and Minnie and Rupert and got her.
They all missed her anyway and her funny stories.
She didn't have any teeth
so she dipped all chewable items in grease
which is how they're tasty she said.
She sat in a chair in front of the stove usually
or would cook up a big pot of something for the others.
By and by Rupert and Onna had a baby who they named Lester,
or nicknamed Bumper, and they were glad that Elsie and Sarah
were there to help.
One night the landlord came by
to fix the leak in the bathroom pipe
and was surprised to find Minnie, Rupert and Onna, Sarah and Elsie, Shar and Dar all singing around the drum next
to the big stove in the kitchen
and even a baby named Lester who smiled waving a big greasy piece of dried fish.
He was disturbed
he went to court to evict them
he said the house was designed for single-family occupancy
which surprised the family
because that's what they thought they were.
Welcome to the TP Podcast! Listen to this episode. Check out the podcast to see the pictures. Here is the text:
It’s taken over 20 centuries for us as societies to start questioning the gender system – those ideas, shaping feelings and attitudes, and ways to relate to each other and organize life within our society which establish that there is a difference in terms of rights and worth between men and women, this is, that there are two kinds of human beings, and that women are second-class people.
Traditions (always based on religious dogmas!) insist on that, cruelly, 
unfairly, irrationally, contradicting the most precious achievement of human understanding: human rights. They exert constant pressure on us so we won’t allow the system to change. But as a species, we’re beginning to realize it’s a system we don’t want, because it is unfair and we could do better designing our lives and our interaction. 
The gender system encourages violence against women because that is part of its foundation, and violence here should be taken in its complex sense, including more than physical violence and the violence society exerts when it ostracizes people just because their ideas or identity do not comply to the mentality prevailing in society. So it’s violent…
* to force people to be what they don’t want to be (e.g. a woman is…, a man is…),
* to force people to lead a lifestyle they don’t want to lead (e.g. being forced to have children or to die because reproductive rights are established by machista people
, who do not value women’s 
lives; or
having to fight for your own and other people’s survival, with no recognition ever, subject to rape and other forms of torture, all just because a bunch of 
immoral and cruel people are taking all the resources and consider other people are there just to be abused in every way), [Sorry, I'm thinking about Africa - heartbreaking] 
* to force people to relate in their private lives to whom they don’t want to relate (e.g. serving as sexual slaves or maids in the home, or being the punch bag for men who think they have the right to beat up women; or being subject to social pressure on their sexual life because machismo does not respect women’s choices in this matter),
* to force people to do what they don’t want to do (e.g. not be able to study, not to have actual 
access to certain paid work and be forced to take up certain other jobs),
t that last year a bill was passed on this – check this out -- some people refuse to use the feminine suffix when they address women. Their violent refusal 
points to the fact of how important language is for our conceptual system and for how we relate to people. Naming implies existence. And if women have started to exist, to be visible in society beyond the roles they were forced into by the gender system, language needs to make that visible).
e use of our intelligence, not through violence. But the world we live in bombs us with images of violence so that we never give intelligence a chance, so that we consider violence unavoidable. Women have fought, and some people in the world have fought, without using violence. Violence is not unavoidable. That’s a primitive idea, based on the conviction that violence is better than using our intelligence. Are we really so little intelligent? The 
human rights movement, including feminism, which is a human rights movement focused on overcoming gender discrimination, has been the most successful nonviolent social transformation so far, bu
t its work, its impact, though greater than ever, is far from being safe, understood by all.
s from their struggle, they get no recognition, and they don’t care, but it’s unfair they are never acknowledged as what they are: people 
contributing to building a truly civilized world. I’d also like to say thank you to all those people who, not considering themselves feminists, do support in their daily attitudes, words, ideas, and actions a world where discrimination for reasons of sex is rejected.
women thinkers, artists, activists... Women’s brains are human brains. It’s that they haven’t been welcome, and that they have been severely repressed, punished. Nothing has encouraged women to perform certain activities and everything has been traditionally against women performing certain activities. Human kind needs to listen to women, too. There’s lots to catch up in terms of listening to women! We people need to listen to men and women who are criticizing all the violence in our systems, because building a better world cannot be done through the use of violence (aren’t you absolutely saturated with all this violence?). It can 
only be done through the use of intelligence. Even if it’s a minority understanding this idea, it’s possible to get our message through, because even though we’ve been trained to see what we believe in, and not what is there, our mind is capable of seeing what is there.
transformative. Don’t let confusion lead your way. Communicate. Rational caring dialogue helps us think better. Let’s make the most 
of our lives by using intelligent freedom, and tender solidarity. All human beings should have the chance to be happy. Use it if you 
Her Kind
By Anne Sexton
Listen to this poem
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
The TP webpage on Anne Sexton
Hi everybody!
Welcome to the Talking People Podcast, an experimental project of talkingpeople.net. We're reaching the 50 subscriptions so thanks for that! We're happy to be of use!
Listen to the second poem we wanted to read, "Wild Geese", by Mary Oliver, from her book "Dreawork". Hope you enjoy it!
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
If you love literature, you are welcome to visit the Literature section at Talking People.If you have comments on the audio quality of the TP episodes, please post under each episode. Thanks so much!
Half of this audio is me talking about the writer Leonora Carrington first, and then comes her story "The Debutante," so you can listen to it in two 5-minute sessions!
Listen here.
A Litany for Survival
by Audre Lorde (from The Black Unicorn)
Listen here.
For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak
we are afraid our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive
More on Audre Lorde at our Talking People website, in the Literature section.
