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

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.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Only where there is language is there world.

Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling.

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence– words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.