love belongs to those who do the feeling

Judy Grahn takes her title from a poem commemorating the death of her first lover, but <i>love belongs to those who do the feeling</i> is far fromelegiac. It bursts with life energy. Grahn writes of the erotic as a force between artists an enfusion of energy fueling the desire for change. Belly dancers, she adds, express love and spiritual community this way as well. Another brilliant California poet, Jack Spicer, remarked that poems must echo and reecho against each other: they cannot live alone any more than we can. It is such echoing and reechoing that we find in this selected poems. The will to change Charles Olson s phrase animates everything. Grahn s mentor Gertrude Stein insisted that the poet had to work in the excitingness of pure being; she must get back that intensity into the language. Such intensity is always present in the work of this common woman who commonly achieves the miracle of accessibility without simplification. In our warmongering culture, the figure of the warrior is put forth by both men and women as the emblem of spiritual activity. (The woman warrior. ) No poems are more active than Judy Grahn s, but cultural change is already present in her choice of metaphor: <i>she chooses the dancer, not the warrior</i>. The poems in <i>love belongs to those who do the feeling </i>might be thought of as the longing for community, but if you read them carefully you will see that in fact they are themselves community. They cannot live alone any more than we can. </p>--Jack Foley</p>