“In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.”

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.

Even where love has run thin the child’s soul musters strength… the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.

I’d call it love if love didn’t take so many years but lust too is a jewel.

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion.

It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.

Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.

I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class.

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.

So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.

I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

In communal society, where there are virtually no class divisions, man’s productive activities on outlook and culture is less discernible. Account must be taken of the psychology of conflicting classes.

Because of the Chinese culture of obedience, you don’t ask questions… You follow and obey.

We remake the world through our technologies, and these in turn remake and extend us, in ever spiraling lattices of complexity. McLuhan uncannily foresaw the future, where electronic technology would shape and expand cultures and societies into a global membrane of communications.

We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

I spent most of my time thinking, because I didn’t have enough energy to do anything else.

Cultures are virtual realities made of language.