January/February 1995
Utne Reader
Susan Griffin weaves webs of words that capture the complex
interrelationships among the body, history, language, memory, and
politics. In book-length prose meditations on the historical fate
of the female body (Woman and Nature), pornography
(Pornography and Silence), and war (A Chorus of
Stones), Griffin combines the personal and the political with a
poet's eye for illuminating and unexpected juxtapositions, and a
humanist's faith in the power of the word to heal.
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In her 32-year writing career Susan Griffin has embraced poetry,
drama, and nonfiction, but her earliest love was the movies. 'I
grew up right near Hollywood,' she says, 'and I wanted to be a
filmmaker. I loved Eisenstein and his montages, that juxtaposition
of images.'
Griffin, 52, has preserved that love in a series of books that
bring seemingly disparate images and ideas of sex, history,
violence, the human body, the family, and the self together into
montage fields that generate new ideas and freshen old ones. In
Woman and Nature (1978) she layered harrowing historical
documents into a meditation on Western culture's habit of
victimizing women and the natural world in parallel ways. In
Pornography and Silence (1981) she interpreted porn as a way
for men to deny in themselves the qualities they 'see' in
pornographic images of women--wantonness, passivity, sexual hunger.
And in A Chorus of Stones (1992) she used stories from her
family, the history of the American nuclear industry, and the
biography of Joseph Goebbels to reflect on the complicity of
silence and violence. (A book of essays and a meditation on illness
are in the works.)