Crime Against Nature

By Minnie Bruce Pratt

Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Crime Against Nature was the 1989 Lamont Poetry Selection from the Academy of American Poets, which recognizes a poet’s second collection of poetry. Crime Against Nature has been long out of print, until now. This new edition includes an introduction by Julie R. Enszer, a new afterword by Pratt, a reprint of Pratt’s speech at the Lamont award ceremony, photographs of Pratt and her family, and a bibliography.

"In spare and forceful language Minnie Bruce Pratt tells a moving story of loss and recuperation, discovering linkages between her own disenfranchisement and the condition of other minorities. She makes it plain, in this masterful sequence of poems, that the real crime against nature is violence and oppression.--From the Judges' Statement, Lamont Poetry Prize 1989, CRIME AGAINST NATURE

"Minnie Bruce Pratt's CRIME AGAINST NATURE is, for a number of reasons, a work at the poetic crossroads. It extends the subject of love poetry; it extends the subject of feminist and lesbian poetry; it looks in several directions through the lens of a strong, sensuous poetics, through that fusion of experience with imagination that is the core of poetry, and through cadences founded in the music of speech, tightened and drawn to an individual pitch."--Adrienne Rich

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Jun 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781944981129

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946–2023), was a LGBTQ writer and activist originally from Alabama. Pratt was the author of ten books of poetry, creative nonfiction and political theory. She received a Lambda Award for Lesbian Poetry, the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry from The Publishing Triangle, and was appointed Ambassador for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Committee of the New York Public Library– among many honors.

Book preview

Crime Against Nature

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Sapphic Classics from

A Midsummer Night’s Press

& Sinister Wisdom

Crime Against Nature

by Minnie Bruce Pratt

Copyright © 1990, 2013 by Minnie Bruce Pratt.

All rights reserved.

A Midsummer Night’s Press

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New York, NY 10018

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www.amidsummernightspress.com

Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

P.O. Box 3252

Berkeley, CA 94703

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www.sinisterwisdom.org

Designed by SnoWar.

Cover photo © SnoWar. Used with permission.

Proofreader: Joanna Cattonar

First edition, April 2013

ISBN-13: 978-1-938334-04-7

ISBN-10: 1938334043

Simultaneously published as Sinister Wisdom 88, ISSN: 0196-1853.

For Ransom and for Ben

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks to:

Rachel Guido DeVries for her leadership of the Community Writer's Project of Syracuse, New York, sponsor of the residency during which I wrote many of the poems in this book.

Nancy K. Bereano, founding publisher of Firebrand Press, who made possible the original edition of Crime Against Nature.

Julie Enszer and Lawrence Schimel for their work and commitment in bringing the poems, and the still-relevant issues, to another generation of readers.

Bob Brown, my cousin, for being the first in my birth family to acknowledge these poems and to re-open a connection between us.

Ransom and Ben, and the other dear ones in the families they are making, for their steadfast love.

Leslie Feinberg, now my spouse, for our more than twenty years together writing, thinking, loving, working, and acting to bring a better world into birth.

Contents

Introduction: In Triumph and Struggle - Life Stories, Publishing Stories, Political Stories by Julie R. Enszer

CANFleurdeLis

Poem for My Sons

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Justice, Come Down

No Place

Declared Not Fit

Sounds from My Previous Life

Down the Little Cahaba

The Child Taken from the Mother

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All the Women Caught in Flaring Light

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The Place Lost and Gone, the Place Found

A Waving Hand

Seven Times Going, Seven Times Coming Back

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Shame

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Motionless on the Dark Side of the Light

The Mother Before Memory

Two Small-Sized Girls

The First Question

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My Life You Are Talking About

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I Am Ready to Tell All I Know

In the Waiting Room at the Draft Board

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While Reading Timerman's The Longest War

At the Vietnam Memorial

Talking to Charlie

Dreaming a Few Minutes in a Different Element

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Another Question

The Laughing Place

At FIfteen, the Oldest Son Comes to Visit

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Crime Against Nature

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Watching the Door: Minnie Bruce Pratt's Acceptance Speech at the Lamont Ceremony, May 16, 1989

Afterword: A Lesbian Mother Continues to Answer the Questions

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Books by Minnie Bruce Pratt

About the Author

Introduction

In Triumph and Struggle Life Stories, Publishing Stories, and Political Stories

Crime Against Nature is one of the most powerful collections of lyrical narrative poetry to emerge from the United States Women's Liberation Movement in the twentieth century. Crime Against Nature explores the experiences of poet Minnie Bruce Pratt when she lost custody of her children in the 1970s because she was open about her lesbian identity. First published in 1989 by Firebrand Books, Crime Against Nature won the Lamont prize from the Academy of American Poets—one of the most prestigious prizes in American poetry. This, then, is the triumphal narrative of the collection: Pratt the poet survived and rendered sublime poems that received national acclaim and recognition.

While Crime Against Nature is a triumph, few of the stories within and behind the poems are simply triumphant. They are stories that are deeply human: filled with difficult choices, untenable situations, and a range of emotions. With her poetic gift, Pratt captured this emotional landscape and rendered it artfully through the transformative power of poetry.

Pratt's story begins in 1966. At the age of 20, Pratt married Marvin Weaver, a teacher and poet. Within three years, Pratt had given birth to two sons, Ransom and Ben. Then, the energy of the radical social change movements of the 1960s and 1970s transformed her life. She came to identify as a lesbian and faced an unbearable choice: remain in her marriage and be a mother to her children or live openly as a lesbian and risk losing them forever. Forced to choose, Pratt chose her own life and a life of political struggle.

It took Pratt over a decade to write poems about this experience and its on-going effects on her life. The collection that resulted from these years of labor is Crime Against Nature.

The story of Crime Against Nature as a book begins in a traditional way: the labor of a poet, a publishing contract with a small, but prestigious, feminist publisher. In 1989, lesbian-feminist literature was not accepted, or celebrated, in mainstream literary circles; often it was barely noticed. Crime Against Nature changed that dynamic.

On May 1st, 1989, Nancy Bereano, the publisher of Firebrand Books, called Minnie Bruce Pratt at her home, 1350 Franklin St. In Northeast Washington, D.C. Pratt and her lover of nearly eight years, the photographer Joan E. Biren (JEB), lived in a big old house with rosebushes in the back yard and an apple tree and a crabapple. Pratt confided in a letter to Dorothy Allison, Miz Harris, next door, approves of me because I get down on my knees in the yard and 'work hard.'¹ On this Monday in May, Pratt wasn't on her knees working the earth, planting crops of okra, tomatoes, and squash; she spent most of the day on the telephone. Bereano called to tell Pratt that Crime Against Nature had been chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection of the American Academy of Poets. The Lamont, now renamed the James Laughlin Award, is awarded to a poet for her or his second book of poetry. While feminist poets had received the prize, including Ai in 1978, Carolyn Forché in 1981, and Sharon Olds in 1983, Pratt was the first out lesbian to win the Lamont.²

Pratt's selection by the Lamont panel of Alfred Corn, Marvin Bell, and Sandra McPherson was a significant event, not only because Pratt was out as a lesbian and was part of the lesbian-feminist print movement,³ but also because the poems of Crime Against Nature were about lesbian experience. The twenty-seven poems of Crime Against Nature explore how Pratt lost custody of her children when she came out as a lesbian and divorced her husband in the 1970s. The selection committee wrote about the poems, In spare and forceful language Minnie Bruce Pratt tells a moving story of loss and recuperation, discovering linkages between her own disenfranchisement and the condition of other minorities. She makes it plain, in this masterful sequence of poems, that the real crime against nature is violence and oppression.⁴ Pratt's selection was an affirmation of her power as a poet voicing an important political message.

The title of Pratt's prize-winning book was grounded in the political moment. In 1989, sodomy laws were legal and enforced in half of the states in the United States. People called sodomy laws colloquially crime against nature laws. In 1986 in the Bowers v. Hardwick decision, the U. S. Supreme Court re-affirmed the rights of states to criminalize sexual expression between two people of the same sex. As a result of this decision, lesbian and gay activists targeted sodomy laws as an important site for community