“To become a politics of asking women’s questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women–not a chosen few–shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.”

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

When someone, let’s say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it’s like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.

Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep.

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

A book of poems doesn’t just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.

Since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.

Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?

Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community.

Made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.

All music now is influenced by Hip Hop. It’s so deeply ingrained in the culture.

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.

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.

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

Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.

“Global culture” is of course not a culture: it’s the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.