poem six / Nellie Wong at Ninety
NELLIE WONG celebrates her ninetieth birthday with the publication of Nothing Like Freedom, her fifth collection, after Dreams of Harrison Railroad Park (1977), Death of Long Steam Lady (1986), Stolen Moments (1997), and Breakfast Lunch Dinner (2012). “Nellie Wong at Ninety” is a digital companion project centered around nine poems, chosen by Nellie to represent each decade of her storied life.
Nellie’s poem, Oh Worrywort, published in IKON #5/6 WINTER /SUMMER 1986, Art Against Apartheid: Works for Freedom, a special double issue with an introduction by Alice Walker.
IKON: Creativity and Change, was a journal of Second Wave feminist art and activism. A small, independently published journal, IKON’s editing and publishing was U.S.-based, but the journal’s content was international, focusing on the status of women worldwide. A driving concern for IKON was to reveal various forms of girls’ and women’s social and economic subordination globally. The aim was to inspire readers to work with others across generational, racial, and sexual divides—to support persons like IKON’s contributing photojournalists, poets, essayists, and authors creatively responding to, resisting, and working to eliminate local and global forms of gender discrimination and oppression. In advancing these goals, IKON’s mission was largely educative.
Nationally and internationally renowned Second-Wave feminist activists, artists, and academics (and those who later would be leading figures) collaborated with and contributed original work to IKON, including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Margaret Randall, Hettie Jones, Jewelle Gomez, Cherríe Moraga, Lois Elaine Griffith, Patricia Jones, Blanche Wiesen Cook, (feminist historian of Eleanor Roosevelt) Michelle Cliff , Irene Klepfisz, Jan Clausen, Fay Chiang, Cheryl Clark, June Jordan, Martha King, Susan Saxe, and Rosario Murillo, and many others.
IKON was published in the mid to late twentieth century in two series, 1967-69 (seven volumes), and 1982-1994 (twelve volumes).
https://www.lesbianpoetryarchive.org/IKON
Lesbian Poetry Archive by Julie R. Enszer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.LesbianPoetryArchive.org.