ABSTRACT
Importantly, the very proliferation of feminist poetry, produced outside what James Sullivan calls the hierarchies of proper access that is the traditional paths toward recognition as a poet through universities, established poetry workshops, salons, retreats, and mainline publishers-mitigated against aesthetic or political uniformity. To address the growing demand, poetry workshops began appearing across the country, and their scattered traces provide another perspective for considering feminist poetry as a form of radical literacy. Feminist poetry thus was to be an enactment of real literacy, requiring writer and reader to brood over, argue about, hammer through the limits and possibilities of language in order to resist a culturally mandated passivity that allowed for the perpetuation of violence against the historically disenfranchised.
