“There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.”

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 repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist’s relation to bread and blood. In this view.

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation.

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.

Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.

Or those who still believe that language is ‘only words’ and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

The pleasure of being bored ismooning about and doing nothing.

I don’t care if this is a great cultural event or a national symbol. It has nothing to do with me. It deals with the city.

For me, now, working and children is it. Theres nothing more to life.

The white foam knows nothing better than those sands which wait for it , rise to it and suck it in .but what do the waves know of the massed, hot, still sands of the desert just twenty , no , ten feet beyond the scalloped edge ?

If my art has nothing to do with people’s pain and sorrow, what is ‘art’ for?

Nothing is clear-cut. Perhaps I’ll find my way – or get totally lost.

As you peel it back, in the heart of nothing, that is love. You are what you are seeking. Life is a set up so that each of us can actually see in ourselves the truth for ourselves.

The question of being is everything. Nothing could be more important or consequential-n othing where the stakes run so high.