One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women’s choices concerning childbirth.
To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously.
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day … the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.
There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice…In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.
The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.
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.
Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.
Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other.
I define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
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.
To become a token woman – whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters – is to become something less than a man.
Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
