Phyllis Willis was born in 1939 in and lived with her three sisters and her mother in a commune in Western Massachusetts until Phyllis was fifteen. "The men in the
commune seemed to think it was okay to rape the Willis girls," she writes in her autobiography ('Burn', Knopf, 1987). "They'd preach about organic this and organic
that, and attack us behind the chicken coops." Phyllis ran away, and by the time she was sixteen, she had gained acceptance to Smith College. "My transcripts were
sketchy but my board scores were nearly perfect. It was odd to receive a full scholarship because I knew the meanings of words like 'plethora', 'mercurial', and
'gravitas', but I did."
At Smith, Phyllis made a name for herself almost immediately, performing in everything from Moliere to the post-modern plays of Merkle. "Stephanie Merkle was
a shy girl from Kansas. The daughter of horse trainer, but she had her finger on the pulse of modern theater. We became lovers my second year at Smith when I
won the lead role of Carla in 'Probation'. Phyllis enjoyed many other lesbian lovers at Smith, until she met Richard Barbour, a student at Amherst. "Dick was great
for the first few years. He was the one who convinced me to leave Smith and really live life. We went to Atlantic City on my twentienth birthday and got married on
the boardwalk. It was romantic and all that, but I could tell Dick was nervous about leaving college. He went back to Amherst, and I moved out west."
PWB finished her undergraduate career at Occidental College in Los Angeles, again on full scholarship. "I sent a few of my poems to the English department, told
them my story, and they granted me another full scholarship. No one could believe it, least of all Dick, who was still freezing in Massachusetts." At Occidental, PWB
eschewed theater for poetry and worked briefly as a waitress in Hollywood at a hamburger joint next to the Paramount Lot on Melrose. She met many of the
biggest stars, including Ann B. Davis, who would become the maid on the sit-com "The Brady Bunch." When asked by Tomas Sanford in a Paris Review
interview if she and the butch Ms. Davis were lovers, PWB responded, "What does that have to do with anything? I've never written a poem about Ann, so why
should it concern you?" She did however write many poems about LA and Hollywood, culminating in her first book, "Sidewalker" (Acorn Press, 1960), which
enjoyed mild critical acclaim.
From the small tony campus of Occidental, PWB moved back to Massachusetts to live again with Richard Barbour, who was now in graduate school at MIT,
studying isotopes....
Life at MIT with Dick was short lived. Phyllis hit the road again, this time with a drama troupe known simply as "The Whores". PWB is secretive about this time,
only briefly mentioning it in Burn: "...dramatic experiment after dramatic experiment, all failures. It was in Tulsa after a completely dismal show, that I realized I
needed to throw in the dramatic towel and write some more poetry."
She did, and she wrote some of her best known and best loved poems: "entire", "ematation", and "enterprize" were all written at this time. Critics began to question
the use of the letter "e" at this time, some dismissing it as a gimmick. In the New York Review of Books, Peter Shaftsbury called it, "...sophomoric. Like a child who
wants attention..." The critics may have found it childish, but the editors of even the most traditional literary magazines bought several of PWB's poems. When the
Yale Review ran "ematation" the university threatened to stop funding the magazine. The New Yorker ran "enterprize" and subsequently received several hundred
letters of complaint, including the famous "lesbian quackery" letter from staunch conservative poetry critic Bernard Thimeux.
PWB responded true to herself by writing and publishing several more 'e' poems, including "entired", "elegal", "emuser", her famous backward resume poem.
She and Dick fought bitterly, and each ended up in the hospital
several times before Dick finally left in 1971. Once, Phyllis broke
his jaw with a lamp, and he once lit her hair on fire (an eerie
preview to PWB's demise in 1990). Dick moved to North Carolina and
was killed in a car accident in 1973, along with his new African
American wife, Betsy Johnson, and their mulatto baby, Jermaine.
When Phyllis heard about Dick's death, she wrote several poems that
were criticized for their perceived racism. "A Dark Bitch Stole
Dick" was published in The Kenyon Review along with a short
explanatory essay in which Phyllis wrote: "The poem is about a
racist woman whose husband left her for a black woman. I am not
that racist woman. I was happy when Dick Barbour married Betsy
Johnson. I flew down there for the wedding. The poem chronicles a
major part of American life: racism!" The essay did little to
assuage her critics, though, and the '70s were a dry time in terms
of publishing for Phyllis.
It's ironic that PWB and her "reclaiming the word" philosophy that
sprouted from her so-called "racist" poetry now occupies a space in
the annals African American and Queer Studies. Words like "nigger",
"cunt", "faggot", and "dyke" should be reclaimed, she said, and
turned into positive terms of endearment among the marginalized
peoples. In fact, she and her friends called each other "cunt" or
"dyke" constantly...
