What Kind of Times are These?
April 13, 2012, 4:26 pm
By Claire Potter
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2012/04/what-kind-of-times-are-these/ (http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2012/04/what-kind-of-times-are-these/)
Today's guest blogger, Jennifer Finney Boylan, is professor of English at Colby College. She is the author of 13 books, including Stuck in the Middle With You: Parenthood in Three Genders, which will be published by Random House/Crown in 2013, along with the revised 10th-year anniversary edition of her memoir, She's Not There. Boylan's blog, There from Here is at www.jenniferboylan.net.
Last week, as prelude to an evening of poetry, my colleague Peter Harris– a writer and a professor here at Colby College–gave a short reading from Adrienne Rich's "What Kind of Times Are These." "She burned through the fog that I lived in like an acetylene torch," he said. "I had never seen anyone so intensely Alive with a capital A. I felt my life change in an instant."
[...]
We all nodded, sharing a sense of love for the poet who had died the previous week, at the age of 82.
As Peter headed back to his seat, however, one of my students suddenly catcalled from the back of the room. "She may have been a great poet," he said, "but she also hurt transgender people! She helped Janice Raymond write The Transsexual Empire (Teachers College Press, 1994. Originally 1979), a book that is still oppressing trans men and women everywhere."