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

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Any woman’s death diminishes me.

That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

There’s been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I’m speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing.

There is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien – and very often they believe themselves superior.

I came to explore the wreck.

Language is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

“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.

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

And that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.

The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.

I’m used to people kind of knowing me in the community.

Less I. more We. For the good of the community.

I hope people become inspired to become active in their community. That’s the important thing.

We have a political culture of intimidation, of favoring, of patronage, and of fear, and that is no way for a community to be governed.

Community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another.

I’m smiling on the inside. I feel I have a responsibility to the fashion community.

The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you.

What an opportunity we have to be a community….A community where there are models.