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.
Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
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.
“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.
When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.
Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
And perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.
I don’t want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won’t deal with it.
Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
