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

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.

It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.

In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.

It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.

Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

Passion for survival is the great theme of women’s poetry.

Behind all art is an element of desire…Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art.

For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single “I” or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.

If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded – here I am speaking of the U.S. – while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school.

I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.

In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.

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.

The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.