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RYE PROF WRITES POETRY BOOK ON PERIOD BLOOD

By Gwendolyn Muff

“Special” to The Dryersonian

When Ginnie Flow first heard the expression “if it’s old enough to bleed, it’s old enough to breed,” she knew what she had to do.

The sociology professor wrote a book of haikus challenging patriarchal, commonly-used limericks she heard while walking Ryerson’s halls.

“It was time men realized the power and pain of their poetry,” Flow said.

“It’s juvenile.”

Flow wrote “The Blood Beneath my Wings” while in Burritts Rapids, Ont., lobbying among music lovers in a campaign to “Bring Back Lillith Fair.”

She was inspired to express her poetic voice when Canadian singer Sarah McLachlan told her that the 1993 classic Fumbling Towards Ecstacy was really written about the menstural cycle.

“It was liberating to know other women were comfortable enough to write about their natural flow,” said Flow. But she wanted to be more overt than McLachlan.

And it’s starting to be absorbed into the critical community.

“Reading those haikus made me feel guilty about being a white man,” said Malorie Bay, a third-year theatre student and amateur poet.

Although some feel Flow’s poetry is worse than modern art, the collection really got Bay’s creative juices on the move.

“Now, every time my time comes, I sit down and write a haiku,” said Bay, who plans on releasing her own poetry collection, Promising Marmalade Sciptures. this fall.

“Once a month it comes.

I loathe every tampon, every pad.

Still better than kids.”

— “I Blame Men,” Ginnie Flow

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