In a University of Minnesota profile, Ilene Alexander observed that “Parker’s poetry generally escapes didacticism because of her deft use of humor, insistence on frank language, presentations of events and images long silent, and sharp analysis of injustices. The goal, Parker said in an interview with [fellow poet] Kate Rushin, is to ‘try to put the poetry in the language that we speak, to use that language, take those simple works and make out of them something that is moving, that is powerful, that is there.’”
Indeed, throughout her career, the structure or apparent simplicity of Pat’s poetry was criticized. Missing from the reading of them is that they were often meant to be heard spoken aloud, and recordings of Pat herself performing them reveal their full dimension. “Her work is simple. Anyone can read it, in a bar, if necessary. The poet herself has done so. That’s the point. It’s simple, but deceptively so,” wrote critic Adrian Oktenberg in a review of Pat’s 1985 collection “Jonestown & other madness” for The Women’s Review of Books. “It is easy for sophisticated literary types to take it for granted, and they have. That’s their loss. In Parker’s work, not a word is wasted.”
Within larger society, Pat experienced oppression and marginalization as a Black queer woman. Within lesbian spaces, she experienced alienation as a Black woman. Within Black spaces, she experienced judgement for dating a white woman. Nowhere, it seemed, could contain all that Pat was.
And when we go to a gay bar
& my people shun me because I crossed
the line
& her people look to see what’s
wrong with her – what defect
drove her to me –
And when we walk the streets
of this city – forget and touch
or hold hands and the people
stare, glare, frown, & taunt
at those queers –
I remember
Every word taught me
Every word said to me
Every word done to me
& then I hate –
i look at my lover
& for an instance – doubt –
Then/ i hold her hand tighter
And i can hear my mother cry
Lord, what kind of child is this.
—My Lover is a Woman, 1973
Throughout the 1970s, Pat traveled with other poets and musicians on the “Varied Voices of Black Women” tour. Wendy Stevens, a writer for Off Our Backs, profiled one of Pat’s readings in the May-June 1975 issue. “It takes guts to start out in California and make your way cross country, having made all your contacts by mail, to read your poetry,” she observed. “When Pat Parker, a black lesbian writer, sat and read her poetry to about sixty women at E. Lois ‘Sharon’ Gomillion’s [a D.C.-based Black poet] home—I heard a woman who had taken her message into her own arms and sought to spread it finely to each woman along the way.”
In 1978, Pat began working at the Oakland Feminist’s Women’s Health Center as the medical coordinator and executive director where she advocated for abortion rights and reproductive health, especially for the poor and working class. She would hold this position until 1988.
each week I go to my group
see women
Black women
Beautiful Black Women
& I am in love
with each of them
& this is important
in the loving
in the act of loving
each woman
I have learned a new lesson
I have learned
to love myself.
—Group, 1978
In 1980, Pat began a relationship with Martha “Marty” Dunham. Together, the two co-parented daughters Cassidy Brown and Anastasia Jean. Even with a “day job” at the health center and an active family life, Pat’s poetry remained a vibrant outlet for her most complex thoughts and intense feelings. In 1976, Pat’s older sister Shirley was murdered by her husband. Pat recorded the events and her emotions in the powerful poem titled “Womanslaughter,” from learning the news—
I used to be fearful
of phone calls in the night –
never in the day.
Death, like the vampire
fears the sun
never in the day –
“Hello Patty”
“Hey big sister
what’s happening?
How’s the kids?”
“Patty, Jonesy shot Shirley.
She didn’t make it.”
—to reflecting on the brother-in-law she’d known—
There was a quiet man
He married a quiet wife
Together, they lived
a quiet life.
Not so, not so
her sisters said,
the truth comes out
as she lies dead.
—to burying her sister—“the four strong daughters of Buster Cooks” becoming three—
We came, the three sisters
of Shirley Jones
& took care of her mother.
We picked the right flowers,
contacted insurance companies,
arranged social security payments,
and cremated her.
We came, the three sisters
of Shirley Jones.
We were not strong.
“It is good, they said,
that Buster is dead.
He would surely kill
the quiet man.”
—and through the trial and “justice” in the courtroom.
What was his crime?
He only killed his wife.
But a divorce I say.
Not final, they say:
Her things were his
including her life.
Men cannot rape their wives.
Men cannot kill their wives.
They passion them to death.
On Nov. 18, 1978, 918 people died at the People’s Temple in Guyana on the northern coast of South America. This event would come to be called the Jonestown massacre, after founder and cult leader Jim Jones. Of those who died by apparent suicide at the compound, the majority were Black. Their leader Jim Jones, however, was white. This haunted and enraged Pat.
“I must ask the question,” she wrote in her introduction to “Jonestown & other madness” in 1984. “If 900 white people had gone to a country with a Black minister and ‘committed suicide,’ would we have accepted the answers we were given so easily?” She explored these thoughts more extensively in a poem titled “jonestown.”
Newscasters’ words
slap me in my face
peoples’ tears and grief
emanate from my set
and I remember the lessons
rehear a childhood message
Black folks do not commit suicide
I thought of my uncle Dave
he died in prison
suicide
the authorities said
“Boy just up and hung hisself”
and I remember my mother
her disbelief, her grief
“Them white folks kilt my brother
Dave didn’t commit no suicide”
and the funeral
a bitter quiet funeral
his coffin sealed from sighters
and we all knew
Dave died not by his hands
and some guard decided
that n____r should die
Through the lens of Jonestown, Pat interrogated a system that left Black people vulnerable to myriad abuses and then blamed them for being abused.
An interview with a live one
“You were a member of People’s Temple?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Why did you join?”
“Well, I went there a few times
and then I stopped going, but
the Rev. Jones came by my house
and asked me why I quit coming.
I was really surprised.
No one had ever cared
that much about me before.”
No one had ever cared
that much about me before
and it came home
the messages of my youth
came clear
the Black people
in Jonestown
did not commit suicide
they were murdered
they were murdered in
small southern towns
they were murdered in
big northern cities
they were murdered
as school children
by teachers
who didn’t care
they were murdered
by policemen
who didn’t care
they were murdered
by welfare workers
who didn’t care
they were murdered
by shopkeepers
who didn’t care
they were murdered
by church people
who didn’t care
they were murdered
by politicians
who didn’t care
they didn’t die at Jonestown
they went to Jonestown dead
convinced that America
and Americans
didn’t care
they died
in the schoolrooms
they died
in the streets
they died
in the bars
they died
in the jails
they died
in the churches
they died
in the welfare lines
Jim Jones was not the cause
he was the result
of 400 years
of not caring
Black folks do not
Black folks do not
Black folks do not commit suicide.
Some of the “other madnesses” Pat’s poetry frequently explored were the cultural fears about the queer population of the United States, fears that Pat pokes at with incisive wit.
There are those who think
or perhaps don’t think
that children and lesbians
together can’t make a family
that we create an extension
of perversion.
They think
or perhaps don’t think
that we have different relationships
with our children
that instead of getting up
in the middle of the night
for a 2 AM and 6 AM feeding
we rise up and chant
“you’re gonna be a dyke
you’re gonna be a dyke.”
—legacy, for Anastasia Jean, 1985
you know some people
got a lot of nerve.
sometimes, i don’t believe
the things i see and hear.
Have you met the woman
who’s shocked by 2 women kissing
& in the same breath,
tells you that she’s pregnant?
BUT GAYS SHOULDN’T BE BLATANT.
— For the Straight Folks
Who Don’t Mind Gays
But Wish They Weren’t So BLATANT, 1985
In 1985, Pat wrote to her friend Audre, debating the idea of leaving her job to write full time. “Beware the terror of not producing. Beware the urge to justify your decision. Watch out for the kitchen sink and the plumbing and the painting that always needed being done. But remember the body needs to create too,” Audre wrote back. Pat would leave her position at the Oakland Feminist’s Women’s Health Center in 1988.
She died the following year in Oakland, Calif. on June 19 of breast cancer. She was only 45 years old. She left behind partner Marty and daughters Cassidy and 6-year-old Anastasia. Her work would go on to inspire future artists and poets. New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center founded their library in 1991 and named it—The Pat Parker/Vito Russo Center Library—in honor of Pat and film historian and author Vito Russo.
“Sometimes I wonder whether just writing is enough–I mean as far as creating the revolution,” Pat mused in 1975. Off Our Backs reviewer Wendy went on to say, “I wanted to tell Pat Parker that living and writing was enough. I wanted to tell her that living, writing, and getting up off your chair and reading it to strangers/women alike was plenty.”
“I asked her once about her personal idea of a revolution,” friend Judy said in her “Movement in Black” introduction. “What would she want to see happen. She said, ‘If I could take all my parts with me when I go somewhere, and not have to say to one of them, “No, you stay home tonight, you won’t be welcome,” because I’m going to an all-white party where I can be gay, but not Black. Or I’m going to a Black poetry reading, and half of the poets are antihomosexual, or thousands of situations where something of what I am cannot come with me. The day all the different parts of me can come along, we would have what I would call a revolution.’ It is, as she says in one of her poems, a ‘simple’ dream.”
Writer Lyndie Brimstone acknowledged this simple dream in a “Feminist Review” tribute to Pat in 1990. “A simple dream, perhaps,” she noted, “but who will work for it now Pat Parker has gone? Is it safe, with us?”