RANDALL, Margaret

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Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 6 December 1936. Education: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1954–55. Family: Married 1) Sam Jacobs in 1955 (divorced 1958); 2) Sergio Mondragon in 1962 (marriage dissolved 1967); 3) lived with Robert Cohen, 1968–75; 4) lived with Antonio Castro, 1976–79; 5) married Floyce Alexander in 1984 (divorced), four children; 6) has lived with Barbara Byers since 1986. Career: Assistant to director, Spanish Refugee Aid, New York, 1960–61; founder and co-editor, El Corno Emplumado, Mexico City, 1962–69; editor, Cuban Book Institute, Havana, 1969–75; self-employed writer and photographer, Havana, 1976–80; publicist, Nicaraguan Ministry of Culture, Managua, 1981–82; staff member, Foreign Press Center, Managua, 1983; adjunct assistant professor, University of New Mexico, 1984–87; visiting professor of English, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, 1987–88, and spring 1990; visiting professor in Latin American studies, Oberlin College, Ohio, 1988; Hubert H. Humphrey Professor of international affairs, Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, spring 1989; visiting professor of women's studies, University of Delaware, Newark, spring 1991; visiting professor, English department, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, spring 1992, spring 1994. Managing editor, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, University of New Mexico, 1990–91. Photographer: individual shows—Consejo Mexicano de Fotografia, Mexico City, 1982; Pro-Venezuela, Caracas, 1983; Casa Fernando Gordillo, Managua, Nicaragua, 1983; Full Circle Books, Salt of the Earth Books, and Champagne Taste, all Albuquerque, 1983–87; Gallery 44, Toronto, 1984; Presentation House, Vancouver, 1984; Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, D.C., 1984; Woodland Pattern Gallery, Milwaukee, 1985; Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, 1986; Everhart Museum (retrospective), Scranton, Pennsylvania, 1988; House Works, Ottawa, 1989; University of New Mexico at Los Alamos Gallery, 1989. Member of board of directors, Inter-Hemispheric Education Research Center, Albuquerque, and Curbstone Press, Willimantic, Connecticut. Awards: American Academy grant, 1960; Carnegie Fund grant, 1960; Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett award, for writers who have been victims of political persecution, 1990. Address: 50 Cedar Hill Road NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87122, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Giant of Tears and Other Poems. New York, Tejon Press, 1959.

Ecstasy Is a Number. New York, Tejon Press, 1961.

Poems of the Glass. Cleveland, Renegade Press, 1964.

Small Sounds from the Bass Fiddle. Albuquerque, New Mexico, Duende Press, 1964.

October. Mexico City, El Corno Emplumado, 1965.

25 Stages of My Spine. New Rochelle, New York, Elizabeth Press, 1967.

Water I Slip Into at Night. Mexico City, El Corno Emplumado, 1967.

Getting Rid of Blue Plastic: Poems Old and New, edited by PritishNandy. Calcutta, Dialogue, 1967.

So Many Rooms Has a House But One Roof. Nyack, New York, New Rivers Press, 1968.

Part of the Solution. New York, New Directions, 1972.

Day's Coming! Privately printed, 1973.

With These Hands. Vancouver, New Star, 1974.

All My Used Parts, Shackles, Fuel, Tenderness, and Stars. Kansas City, Missouri, New Letters, 1977.

We. New York, Smyrna Press, 1978.

Carlota. Vancouver, New Star, 1978.

A Poetry of Resistance. Toronto, Participatory Research Group, 1983.

The Coming Home Poems. East Haven, Connecticut, Long River, 1986.

Albuquerque: Coming Back to the USA. Vancouver, New Star, 1986.

This Is about Incest. Ithaca, New York, Firebrand, 1987.

Memory Says Yes. Willimantic, Connecticut, Curbstone Press, 1988.

The Old Cedar Bar, with drawings by E.J. Gold. Nevada City, California, Gateways, 1992.

Dancing with the Doe. Albuquerque, New Mexico, West End Press, 1992.

Hunger's Table: Women, Food & Politics. Watsonville, California, Papier-Mache Press, 1997.

Other

Los Hippies. Mexico City, Siglo XXI, 1968.

Cuban Woman Now. Toronto, Canadian Women's Educational Press, 1974.

La Situación de la Mujer. Lima, Centro de Estudios de ParticipaciónPopular, 1974.

Spirit of the People: Vietnamese Women Two Years from the Geneva Accords. Vancouver, New Star, 1975.

Inside the Nicaraguan Revolution: The Story of Doris Tijerino. Vancouver, New Star, 1978.

No se Puede Hacer la Revolución sin Nosotras. Havana, Casa de las Américas, 1978.

El Pueblo no Sólo es Testigo. La Historia de Dominga. Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, Huracán 1978.

Sueños y Realidades de Guajiricantor. Mexico City, Siglo XXI, 1979.

Women in Cuba: Twenty Years Later. New York, Smyrna Press, 1981.

Sandino's Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle. Vancouver, New Star, and London, Zed, 1981; revised edition, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Testimonios. San José, Costa Rica, Alforja Centro de Estudios deParticipación Popular, 1983; edition in English, Toronto, participatory Research Group, 1985.

Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution. Vancouver, New Star, 1983.

Risking a Somersault in the Air: Conversations with Nicaraguan Writers. San Francisco, Solidarity, 1984.

Women Brave in the Face of Danger: Photographs of and Writings by Latin and North American Women (photographs). Trumansburg, New York, Crossing Press, 1985.

Nicaragua Libre! (photographs). Boston, Gritare!, 1985.

Photographs by Margaret Randall: Image and Content in Differing Cultural Contexts (exhibition catalogue). Scranton, Pennsylvania, Everhart Museum, 1988.

The Shape of Red: Insider/Outsider Reflections, with Ruth Hubbard. San Francisco, Cleis Press, 1988.

Coming Home: Peace Without Complacency. Albuquerque, West End Press, 1990.

Walking to the Edge: Essays of Resistance. Boston, South End Press, 1991.

Gathering Rage: The Failure of Twentieth Century Revolutions to Develop a Feminist Agenda. New York, Monthly Review Press, 1992.

Sandino's Daughters Revisited. New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Our Voices, Our Lives: Stories of Women from Central America and the Caribbean. Monroe, Maine, Common Courage Press, 1995.

The Price You Pay: The Hidden Cost of Women's Relationship to Money. New York, Routledge, 1996.

Editor, Las Mujeres. Mexico City, Siglo XXI, 1970.

Editor, Posíal Beat. Madrid, Visor, 1977.

Editor, with Elinor Randall, Clean Slate: New and Selected Poems. East Haven, Connecticut, Curbstone Press, 1993.

Translator, Let's Go!, by Otto-René Castillo. London, Cape Goliard Press, 1970; Willimantic, Connecticut, Curbstone Press, 1984.

Translator, This Great People Has Said "Enough!" and Has Begun to Move: Poems from the Struggle in Latin America. San Francisco, People's Press, 1972.

Translator, These Living Songs: Fifteen New Cuban Poets. Fort Collins, Colorado State Review Press, 1978.

Translator, Breaking the Silences (Cuban women poets). Vancouver, Pulp Press, 1982.

Translator, Carlos, Dawn Is No Longer beyond Our Reach, by RomasBorge. Vancouver, New Star, 1984.

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Manuscript Collection: New York University Library.

Critical Studies: "The Sense of the Risk in the Coming Together" by Alvin Greenberg, in Minnesota Review 6 (St. Paul), 2, 1966; Women of the Mosquito Press: Louise Bryant, Agnes Smedley, and Margaret Randall As Narrative Guerillas by Carolyn Nizzi Warmbold, Austin, University of Texas, n.d.; El Corno Emplumado by Alan Davidson, Salt Lake City, University of Utah, 1992; Toward a Poetics of Conscience: Contemporary U.S. Women Poets and Their Politics (dissertation), Bowling Green State University, 1993, and Writers of Conscience: Meridel LeSueur and Margaret Randall, Fort Wayne, University of Indiana, 1993, both by Gloria J. Still; "Sexual Trauma/Queer Memory: Incest, Lesbianism, and Therapeutic Culture" by Ann Cvetkovich, in GLQ (Langhorne, Pennsylvania), 2(4), 1995.

Margaret Randall comments:

The poem is vital to me as a life experience. In recent years I have become involved as well in photography. That, oral history, and the poem are linked to one another in my expression. Women's creativity is particularly important to me.

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The strength of Margaret Randall's poetry comes from its position on the immediate edges of experience—experience fresh and untempered whatever its quality (loving or violent) and brought forth directly as an offering of the poet's own self. She has been consistently a poet whose major concern is to confront whatever happens—however new and however great the risks—and she is prepared to grow, as an artist and a person, from that encounter, always seeking to "create a new language for this, a new place." The dangers of such an approach are great—that the experience will be too raw, too unformulated, to become meaningful or that, particularly in areas of political or social concern, failure to find the new words may cause one to fall back on sloganizing. But as she knows, the values are well worth the risk: giving a sense of the immediacy of the poet living through a significant encounter (with self, dreams, other people, events, new places), discovering herself in the midst of that encounter, and opening up to the reader the potential for a similar discovery.

Thus, for the most part Randall's poems deal with, as she says in "Everyone Comes to a Lighted House," "people moving together" and with her own emergence, as detailed in "Eyes," through such encounters to new vision: "The dream went on but I woke up. /The bus is full my stop's coming up everyone has new eyes." The brief prose pieces included in her 1972 book Part of the Solution present in greater detail encounters comparable to those that take place in the poems. They are not actually stories but rather meetings, generally bizarre and traumatic, in which the poet confronts, or has forced upon her, experiences that call her entire sense of self, society, or relationships into question. Again, as in all of her work—and in the movement of her life as well—what is preeminent is the sense of risk, particularly of risk as potential for the new, for learning and growth, as in "So Many Rooms Has a House but One Roof":

One side a surface where the hole forms, opens,
to persist means look through
or change
as water runs over the found object.

One changes, Randall indicates, not by becoming something different but by self-discovery, even in the act of writing. The encounters around which her writing centers become the potential for creativity in both her life and her poetry, and the odds she describes Fidel risking in the mountains become as well her own sense of challenge and possibility, as she concludes in "Both Dreams": "in forests we'll conquer because we have to."

—Alvin Greenberg