“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.”

I’d call it love if love didn’t take so many years but lust too is a jewel.

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion.

It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.

Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.

I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class.

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.

So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.

I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

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.

If, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens.

If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.

Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins,

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

For those [observations] that I made in Leipzig in my youth and up to my 21st year, I usually call childish and of doubtful value. Those that I took later until my 28th year [i.e., until 1574] I call juvenile and fairly serviceable.

He means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow.

We are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd.

It’s obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life – for 8 billion or more people – without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.