“Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.”

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.

Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.

The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.

To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

There is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’–truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.

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?

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.

Some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand–a center of gravity.

We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

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

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

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.