“I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.”

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.

the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.

I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.

Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother.

We have lived with violence far too long.

Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege

“What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?” Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?

When men – insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea – have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.

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.

One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.

Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one

We will find a way or we shall make one

I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate

Liberty is given by nature even to mute animals.

It is painful to relive things that have caused emotional crises or whatever and find ways to express that musically.

The blues are what I’ve turned to, what has given me inspiration and relief in all the trials of my life.

Stop postponing stress relief, and start prioritizing your wellbeing.

How disheartening and yet a kind of relief that you too turned out to be just like all the rest. How freeing it is to watch the sun rise and set without you.