Rape Poems

From The Buffaloe Pen:

During my second year as an undergrad, someone very close to me was raped. It was a horrific experience, complete with guns, knives, and torture, like a scene from a Law & Order SVU episode. She was, needless to say, quite emotionally scarred.

A few years later, I wrote a poem about it and submitted it to a literary journal. I received an unbelievable response from the editor. He took the time to type a six page, single spaced letter in which he ranted about how he would never, ever publish a poem about rape, because he was so tired of hearing women cry and moan about the subject. In his opinion, women who get raped usually “have it coming,” because of the provocative way they dress or act around men. In his words, he was “sick of wenchy women poets who are always bashing men.”

He said that women who write poems about rape secretly desire to be raped, because they want to be dominated by men. He also said that rape was a bad subject, because it was “too baggy” and long, and no poem should be more than fifteen or twenty lines long. He wondered if I thought I was Alan Ginsberg, because he also hated Ginsberg, and he suggested that I pay more attention to commas and less attention to political issues du jour.  read more of this great post here where Julie also writes a poem about NOT writing a poem “about” rape