The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs..

in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides: Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel on one….

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news..

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life ….

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone..

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is r….

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination..

In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from….

If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end..

It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple.

What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it..

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it..

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 archaeologis….

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordin….

You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn….

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know..

You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have wri….

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble br….

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation betwe….

... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry..

That's why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There mu….