Heroes: Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Shirley Chisholm — what a generation! - Irena Klepfisz

I sort of liked the kind of Yiddish poetry of like, Morris Rosenfeld. I liked somebody telling a story -- narrative. I liked narrative in poetry.

When I published my first book, I had lesbian poems in there. Some people got it, and some people didn’t. There were people who only wanted to look at my Holocaust poetry. They pretended like there was nothing else. On the other hand, there were lots of lesbians who were just interested in my lesbian poems and could care less about the Holocaust ones. It was very difficult for me to give readings because I never had an integrated audience. It was only many years later, in the ‘90s, when I became better known and would be invited to campuses, for example, that my readings would be co-sponsored by an English department, a women’s center, and an LGBT committee or group. When I did these things, people would always say, ‘Gee, we’ve never had such a mixed audience before.’ In the ‘70s… this was still too raw. Some of it was quite ugly, and it was very disappointing for me to see the community that I had come out of be so bigoted.

I write as much out of a Jewish consciousness as I do out of a lesbian/feminist consciousness. They are both always there, no matter what topic I might be working on. They are embedded in my writing, embedded and enmeshed to the point that they are not necessarily distinguishable as discrete elements. They merge and blend and blur, for in many ways they are the same.