As A Woman & A Poet

she said/ as a woman & a poet/ i’ve decided to wear my ovaries on my sleeve/ raise my poems on my milk/ & count my days by the flow of my mensis/ the men who were poets were aghast/ they fled the scene in fear of becoming unclean/ they all knew those verses/ & she waz left with an arena of her own/ where words & notions/ imply ‘she’/ where havin lovers is quite common regardless of sex/ or profession/ where music & mensis/ are considered very personal/ & language a tool for exploring space/

the moral of the story:

#1: when words & manners leave you no space for yrself/ make a poem/ very personal/ very clear/ & yr obstructions will join you or disappear/

#2: if yr obstructions dont disappear/ repeat over & over again/ the new definitions/ til the ol ones have no more fight in them/ then cover them with syllables you’ve gathered from other dyin species/

#3: a few soft words have sent many a woman to her back with her thighs flung open & eager/ a few more/ will find us standing up & speakin in our own tongue to whomever we goddam please.

Shange writes of the experience of black woman artists who drew from both black and feminist movements in this passage of “wow . . . yr just like a man!” When the “woman and poet” decides to proclaim her womanhood on a stage in front of a partially male audience, her verses are seen as unclean and the men flee the scene. This is indicative of the ways in which women who actively drew from and shaped the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements, and the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements, experienced exclusion and a lack of support from a male-dominated art world in response to a refocusing of womanhood and women’s liberation.

Shange writes that once these men flee, however, the woman poet is standing “with an arena of her own” so that not only does she have more space to share her verses, but also the arena in which she stands becomes a place where language is “a tool for exploring space” rather than simply words, which Shange refers to as “a man’s thing” earlier in the text. The first “moral of the story” reveals what Shange is claiming about the connections between words and men, and how neither may leave you space. It plainly states that when words leave you no space, you should make a personal poem. When the woman poet does this, her “obstructions,” or male audience, disappear, rather than join her. In this way, when she performs her personal poem, she creates space that men’s words never could have provided her.