“I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.”

Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.

I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.

Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother.

We have lived with violence far too long.

Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege

“What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?” Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?

When men – insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea – have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.

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.

One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.

Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.

In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.

Collective wisdom is about our capacity to recognize interdependence and to make decisions demonstrating that we have a stake in each other, that we can indeed care for each other and the physical planet we share.

In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don’t really get freaked out.

We don’t work like the best basketball player and the best musician and so on. Science is a collective effort.

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.

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.

A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement, for instance, becoming “support-groups” or therapy groups.

On every shelf, we see ourselves, experience our collective conscious, describe our dreams and our great longing for times that have passed.

We must humble ourselves and commit to routine and collective actions.