“When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder”

There is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’–truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.

Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

To become a token woman – whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters – is to become something less than a man.

Some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand–a center of gravity.

We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day … the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.

I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.

The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.

I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones.

In a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

See people for who they’re becoming. Not who they were.

Instead, we must migrate rapidly to becoming a global ‘team of teams’ that comes together in whatever combination necessary to add the greatest value to the changes underway.

That, to me, is what I feel like is the future. If I have a daughter, if you have a daughter, becoming that ideal where it’s not about your gender; it’s about us being human, being in this together.

We’re not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it’s too late for that. We’re trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity

And no again: My studio is not a first or any step toward becoming any type of businessman on my part.

Becoming critical in the face of criticism, only inspires more criticism.

I became a welder. I was actually becoming an Engineer and I joined the wrong queue. And so I became a welder, without knowing what a welder was.

Life is supposed to be a series of peaks and valleys. The secret is to keep the valleys from becoming Grand Canyons.