Susan Griffin, an influential poet, playwright, and prolific feminist author "who pioneered a unique form of creative nonfiction, blending propulsive, poetic prose with history, memoir and myth in books like Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her," died September 30, the New York Times reported. She was 82. Griffin focused on the effects of a patriarchal Western belief system, exploring "how capitalism, science, religion and even the porn industry have subjugated the natural world to its detriment and ours, and how that subjugation is a gendered one."
Griffin was among those who contributed to the intellectual life of Berkeley, Calif., "through their writings, activism, bookstores (like Cody's Books, a hub for the counterculture and free-speech activists), and restaurants (Alice Waters's Chez Panisse, among others)," the Times noted.
She was one of the first poets published by Shameless Hussy Press. In 1975, Griffin won an Emmy Award for Voices, a play about the experiences of five women that was shown on public television and later staged around the world.
Griffin's book Woman and Nature (1978), however, "made her a feminist rock star," the Times wrote, adding that it focused on "the violence that men have perpetrated on the natural world, and on women, and how it would benefit the planet to rethink the more dangerous advances of modernity and technology."
She dedicated the book to her friend, the poet Adrienne Rich, who called it "perhaps the most extraordinary nonfiction work to have emerged from the matrix of contemporary female consciousness, a fusion of patriarchal science, ecology, female history and feminism, written by a poet who has created a new form for her vision."
Rebecca Solnit, the feminist author and activist, called Griffin "one of the senior public intellectuals of Berkeley.... I can't think of anyone else who brought that kind of poetics and visionary quality to writing about intensely political subjects."
Her other books include Rape: The Politics of Consciousness (1979), Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature (1981), Unremembered Country: Poems (1987), A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (1993), The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society (1995), Bending Home: Selected New Poems, 1967-1998 (1998), What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows (1999), The Book of the Courtesans: a Catalogue of Their Virtues (2001), and Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy: On Being an American Citizen (2008).
Poetry is "like music," Griffin told the Times in 2024. "It expresses things you haven't quite integrated into your rational mind. It's the cutting edge of social change. Things would come out in poetry that later could be articulated in policy or ideas."