SOURCE: Damon, Maria. “Kozmic Reappraisals: Revising California Insularity.” In Women Poets of the Americas: Toward a Pan-American Gathering, edited by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan and Cordelia Chavez Candelaria, pp. 254-71. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Damon offers a critical reading of Hagedorn and Ntozake Shange's poetic works within the cultural and historical context of the 1970s San Francisco Bay Area arts communities from which both poets emerged.

I. Islands

… the culture of the Peoples of the Sea is a flux interrupted by rhythms which attempt to silence the noises with which their own social formation interrupts the discourse of Nature. … the cultural discourse of the Peoples of the Sea attempts … to neutralize violence and to refer society to the transhistorical codes of Nature. Of course as the codes of Nature are neither fixed nor even intelligible, the culture of the Peoples of...